Gostar de alguém é função do coração, mas esquecer, não. É tarefa da nossa cabecinha, que aliás é nossa em termos: tem alguma coisa lá dentro que age por conta própria, sem dar satisfação. Quem dera um esforço de conscientização resolvesse o assunto (…). 

Martha Medeiros

Herbs Are Not Your Friends

Rather than nasty artificial drugs, wouldn't it be nice if we could just take some herbs and get better? A lot of people think so. Indeed, a large proportion of our drugs and medicines come from plants, or are closely related to plant chemicals. There's aspirin, morphine, caffeine, cocaine, quinine, and many more. It's as if plants were going out of their way to help us.

In fact, it's more like the opposite. Most of these drugs are poisons, produced by the plant to stop animals (that means you) from eating them. As a plant, you don't want to get eaten, but being, well, rooted to the spot, you can't exactly run away. All you can do is to make animals not want to eat you. So you fill yourself with noxious, or at least nasty-tasting, chemicals.

By contrast, many plants do want their seeds to get swallowed (but not chewed) by animals and birds, because this ensures that they are spread over a wide area. So they wrap them in delicious, colourful packages. This is why, with only a few exceptions, fruit are sweet and safe while while plant leaves, roots and stems are unpleasant, and often toxic.

In fact, this is quite possibly why the taste of bitter is so unpleasant. Plant toxins are usually alkaloids. Animals must have evolved to find alkaloids nasty, because many of them are poisonous and you survive longer if you don't enjoy eating poison.

Caffeine, for example, is found in the seeds ("beans") of the coffee plant, and it makes them taste bitter, to deter herbivores. But those seeds are themselves wrapped in a fruit called the coffee cherry, which is apparently sweet and tasty, although most of them get thrown away in the production of coffee. Coffee wants you to eat the fruit, but swallow the seeds whole, and thereby help spread its DNA. Quinine is one of the bitterest substances on earth, and it's there to protect the bark of the tree. Nicotine is a bitter insecticide. And so on.

There are some plant chemicals which have medicinal effects which are entirely coincidental: St John's Wort for example contains some molecules with interesting effects on animals, which are probably quite unrelated to its role in the plant (it absorbs light). It's also true that plants contain lots of nutrients and the non-toxic ones are, by and large, "healthy" foods, compared to animal products. I say this as a vegetarian. But that doesn't mean that they cure anything.

So the idea that herbal medicines are "natural", and thereby safe, is completely backwards. They are natural; that doesn't make them safe; nature is red in tooth and claw and even the plants are out to get you.

Herbs Are Not Your Friends

Rather than nasty artificial drugs, wouldn't it be nice if we could just take some herbs and get better? A lot of people think so. Indeed, a large proportion of our drugs and medicines come from plants, or are closely related to plant chemicals. There's aspirin, morphine, caffeine, cocaine, quinine, and many more. It's as if plants were going out of their way to help us.

In fact, it's more like the opposite. Most of these drugs are poisons, produced by the plant to stop animals (that means you) from eating them. As a plant, you don't want to get eaten, but being, well, rooted to the spot, you can't exactly run away. All you can do is to make animals not want to eat you. So you fill yourself with noxious, or at least nasty-tasting, chemicals.

By contrast, many plants do want their seeds to get swallowed (but not chewed) by animals and birds, because this ensures that they are spread over a wide area. So they wrap them in delicious, colourful packages. This is why, with only a few exceptions, fruit are sweet and safe while while plant leaves, roots and stems are unpleasant, and often toxic.

In fact, this is quite possibly why the taste of bitter is so unpleasant. Plant toxins are usually alkaloids. Animals must have evolved to find alkaloids nasty, because many of them are poisonous and you survive longer if you don't enjoy eating poison.

Caffeine, for example, is found in the seeds ("beans") of the coffee plant, and it makes them taste bitter, to deter herbivores. But those seeds are themselves wrapped in a fruit called the coffee cherry, which is apparently sweet and tasty, although most of them get thrown away in the production of coffee. Coffee wants you to eat the fruit, but swallow the seeds whole, and thereby help spread its DNA. Quinine is one of the bitterest substances on earth, and it's there to protect the bark of the tree. Nicotine is a bitter insecticide. And so on.

There are some plant chemicals which have medicinal effects which are entirely coincidental: St John's Wort for example contains some molecules with interesting effects on animals, which are probably quite unrelated to its role in the plant (it absorbs light). It's also true that plants contain lots of nutrients and the non-toxic ones are, by and large, "healthy" foods, compared to animal products. I say this as a vegetarian. But that doesn't mean that they cure anything.

So the idea that herbal medicines are "natural", and thereby safe, is completely backwards. They are natural; that doesn't make them safe; nature is red in tooth and claw and even the plants are out to get you.

The Best Hobby Ever

I have no idea why but I recently remembered this cottage cheese cake with raisins that I loved when I was a child. So I made my own cottage cheese and then baked the cake. It's really light because it only has three tablespoons of flour. And it's really delicious.

Weekends are great because I have the time and energy to make interesting recipes.

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Appreciation of Literature

"Out of all the texts that we have read in our Survey of Spanish literature course, which one did you like the most?" I ask my students.

"The short story by Unamuno," they respond unanimously.

"Why?" I ask.

"Because it has a happy ending!" they say completely seriously.

Now I'm wondering what I have done wrong in this course to get such a result.

Sales Training for Academics

At least once a day, somebody visits my blog to read my posts on how to deal with rejection in academia (you can find them here, here and here.) Failed job searches, rejected articles, book proposals or conference presentations - all that traumatizes academics to the point where many decide to stop trying altogether. One of the most recent searches that led a reader to one of these posts was "heartbroken over article rejection academia." 

All of this made me think that we, the academics, might benefit from the kind of training that people in sales get that helps them immunize themselves against being emotionally ravaged by rejection. These brave people (especially those in telemarketing) get rejected - and often in a very rude form - dozens or even hundreds of times a day. So if they can do it, the we most definitely can find a way to deal with a rejection every couple of months that is more often than not couched in fairly polite terms.

Seriously, if anybody has had any such training, or alternatively, has developed strategies of your own, please share. Many people are in need of this kind of advice.

Where Do Such People Come From?

In my language class there is such a thing as an oral exam. Students go to the lab, record their responses to the activities, save them in an audio-file, and send the file to me by email. For those who don't know how to attach a file to an email (yep, such people do exist), I provide a flash drive where they can record their audio files. 

Last Monday was the last day when students could do the exam. On Tuesday, I went to the lab to collect the flash drive with the exam and discovered that it had mysteriously disappeared together with the midterm oral exams of five students that were recorded on it. 

Of course, when the class started, I asked the students if one of them had taken the flash drive by mistake. Nobody had any idea where the flash drive was. I interrogated people who worked at the lab, they looked everywhere, the flash drive was not to be found. You can imagine how it made me feel to find myself in a situation where five midterms disappeared. Exams are always my responsibility whether they are done in the classroom or in the lab. The five students whose exams were lost also were not enjoying the situation. The lab workers felt horrible. The person supervising the lab workers (and a good friend of mine) felt even more horrible. 

So on Thursday I come back to class and tell the students that, unfortunately, the flash drive hasn't been recovered and their exams are lost. At which point, a student gets up, saunters lazily to my desk, throws the missing flash drive on it and says, "Oh, here it is. I took it home last week." The five students whose exams she dragged home in such a cavalier manner looked at her in angry and mute astonishment. 

I was livid, people. I immediately assigned an activity to the class and left the classroom. I knew that I had to take a walk, have a drink of water, do some breathing exercises before I could return to the classroom and be sure that I would not inflict any harm on this horribly inconsiderate student.

I mean, where do such people even come from? She takes the flash drive home (something which I expressly told students not to do), fails to show up for class next week, and doesn't even write an email to inform me that MY flash drive that contains exams belonging to five OTHER people is in her possession. It later turned out that she recorded an empty file instead of her own exam, so all this was for nothing. 

In the seven minutes that I was away from the classroom trying to get myself together, the students whose exams were on the flash drive must have had a talk with the student who took it home. When I came back, her cavalier attitude was gone, and she was weepy and apologetic. If this doesn't teach her a lesson, then I don't know what will. 

It is mind-boggling how rude and inconsiderate some people are. 

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