Bow down to Richard Dawkins

First thing I did after founding out I’ll have to spend significant amount of time in bed was to get myself a good book to read. I picked up an old book that I’ve been wanting to read for a long time – "The Selfish Gene" (30th Anniversary edition) by now famous Oxford professor Richard Dawkins.

It turned out I was being naive and hugely overestimated my ability to read during my sickness and recovery (it was an eye problem, doh!) and I only made it through about half of the book so far. So I will postpone the book review till later date.

The book is very fascinating in every way, being one of the major works of evolutionary biology, inventing the term "meme" and amazingly interesting to read. But one of the most fascinating things about it is the author’s attitude.

Mr. Dawkins wrote this book when he was still rather young, and his arrogance comes through very strongly. He doesn’t hesitate for a second to call other theories "completely wrong" or worse. But even better – he also allows some personal opinions to come through in the book. Here is one fantastic quote from chapter on family planning, in this particular case discussing the example of Latin America:

…uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death-rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for ‘natural’ methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.

Wow, just wow! Mr. Dawkins – I bow down to you!

Is that a bubble in your eye, or are you just happy to see me?

[Edited on 3/27 to point links to Wikipedia articles which are far better than WebMD. I have no idea why I didn’t look at Wiki first…]

Recently I’ve been diagnosed with retinal tear and detachment in my right eye, and had to undergo a number of procedures involving lasers and gas bubbles (no, I’m not joking).

Major problem is that liquid from the eye starts going through the tear, essentially peeling retina off the wall of the eye, causing further tearing and destroying the vision. This is what happened to me – I ended up with a dark shadow covering about one third of my right eye’s field of vision.

The simplest way to treat retinal detachment is funky, though somewhat primitive. A gas bubble is inserted into the eye and patient has to position head in a very particular way to ensure this bubble presses against the tear and pushes the retina back into place. No moving is allowed! After a couple of days of this, assuming the retina goes into place, laser is used to "stitch" the retina to the wall (really it causes burning/scarring of tissue which makes the tissue hold). This has to be followed by a few more days of head positioning until the stitch stabilizes.

I am calling it "primitive" because the whole positioning and bubble approach relies on pure elementary school mechanics, and there are really no guarantees that this will work. I mean, it depends on exact head positioning to push the retina using a gas bubble – what are the chances?!?

I’ll give my doctors credit for attempting this but it failed. It turned out, after this attempt and some check ups, that my tear is way too big for this type of fix to work. The worst part was that by that point I already had to spend days lying down on my right side to position the bubble. No, wait, think! I was lying on my right side, no moving, for days. And let me tell you – it is HELL!

Getting the bubble into the eye was "fun". They numbed my eye, made me look upwards and then injected gas into my eye through the white part of the eye. After this doctor explained that gas bubble will dramatically increase in size over the next 36 hours or so, so he needs to let out some liquid out of my eye… I could feel it flowing down my cheek!!!

There are some interesting consequences of having a gas bubble inside the eye. Well, read for yourself!

The laser treatment is not painful or gross but it requires significant power of will. My head was positioned, but not secured, in a holder of sorts and bright laser shot directly into eye (for the curious: it is green). Now the laser burning causes only a slight uncomfortable feeling in the head, as far as one shot is concerned. But when you have to endure both bright light and that slight pain for a while… well, it was a pure triumph of mind over body and the wish to pull away.

Anyway, I ended up having to do a full surgery. The real thing, all with full anesthesia. My first. I ended up getting a Vitrectomy, during which small instruments are inserted into the eye, then the eye gel is sucked out. Following that they slowly poured liquid into my eye until it straightened out my retina and pressed it in place. Laser was again used to stitch the retina.

This in itself was all fine since I was asleep but the anesthesia totally screwed up my stomach. I was vomiting like crazy after I woke up and I still have some remaining problems with digestion. And of course, the recovery is somewhat lengthy. I am still wearing sunglasses whole day to hide my "red zombie eye".

During the surgery another bubble was inserted into my eye, this time a really big one, again to hold the retina until the stitching catches on. This meant I again have to lie on my right side. Arghhh!

Since I wouldn’t have a sissy retina that just gives up without a fight, it did try to slip off one more time so I got another laser treatment. Check out all the tags I ended up with!

It all seems to be going well now but I’ll be having frequent check ups for the next couple of months, to see if my crazy retina has any backup plans.

OK, not one of my usual posts but I wanted to document how it all went while it is all still fresh in my mind…

Changing the world with IE8

Nine years ago when I received a job offer from Microsoft, I really didn’t want to move to the USA. But the attraction of working for the one company that can enable me to change the world through software was too strong, and so I accepted.

I never regretted, and I did end up changing the world with every team and release that I worked on. But none of them so far can compare with my latest work on Internet Explorer 8 – Activities and WebSlices!

I’ll give my explanation of these two features some other time, for now just jump to IE8’s welcome page and see what we have there. Here are two images as a little teaser:

Last week at Mix08 conference we announced the release of IE8 beta 1. Go download it, and give Activities and WebSlices a try – once you use them I guarantee you won’t be able to turn back!