Posts Tagged ‘Terry Pratchett’

A group of fans have organized a system for donating to Alzheimer’s research called matchitforpratchett.org . Terry Pratchett donated ?500k* after finding that only ?11 per patient was being spent on research for Alzheimers vs ?289 per cancer patient.

The aim is to get the donation up to a round 1mil and they’ve got Cafe Press Diskworld tees and suchlike.

The Sun has a great interview with him as well.

I also learned about http://folding.stanford.edu/ , a project run by Stanford University that asks this question:

What happens if proteins don’t fold correctly?

Diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis, BSE (Mad Cow disease), an inherited form of emphysema, and even many cancers are believed to result from protein misfolding. When proteins misfold, they can clump together (“aggregate”). These clumps can often gather in the brain, where they are believed to cause the symptoms of Mad Cow or Alzheimer’s disease.

So the program uses your computer’s CPU power when you’re not. You just choose a username and download a tiny program and off it goes, manipulating protein molecules in the background.

Bonus: it’s kind of hypnotizing to watch it at work.

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*which currently equals aprox. a million billion US dollars

That was by far my favorite comment and my sentiments exactly as posted on a report that Terry Pratchett has early onset Alzheimer’s. The great author himself is, as is his nature, very upbeat and wry about it all.

His fans are trying to do likewise, with varying degrees of success. Go make a year end research donation, wouldya? They have a donor matching program going on right now so it does twice as much good.

Plus, I’d appreciate it, personally- Alzheimer’s is a subject near and dear to our hearts here in the house- it runs throughout Charlie’s family.

In the meantime, I’ve decided that I’m going to move the random Pratchett quote sidebar widget over here- now that all non-NOLA info is here, it makes more sense. I’ll add to it hopefully every few days.

This isn’t a new one, but it is one of my all time favorites, from “The Truth”:

There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty.

The world *belongs*, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse *me*? This is my glass? I don’t *think* so. My glass was full! *And* it was a bigger glass! “