The First Steps

Our first steps are always the same. Slow, halting steps taken at home - or in this case, near home - that end with a bump to the backside. But before we get to that story, a goal, like any military campaign, must have a plan. Being a former Army man, I used the "Backwards Planning Procedure". This may sound goofy (perfect for Planet Thanet), but all it means is that before you can achieve success you must visualize it, take it apart into the required pieces, and put them in some sort of order.

Visualizing this success is easy, because Geocaching.com is linked into Google maps, allowing people to get a map that displays up to 500 geocaches. There were, at that time, only about 45 geocaches in Thanet, so it was relatively easy to get into Google maps through Geocaching.com and get a visual representation of Thanet with all the geocaches depicted. This is the picture today:

Geocaching.com does a neat thing: after you have logged a geocache as "found", it turns the icon on the map from the symbols you see above, to a smiley face. So visualize all the symbols on the map above (at least those north of the Stour and east of Reculver) as a smiley face and you are visualizing success.
The next part of the Backwards Planning Procedure is to figure out how to get to success from here. You don't need to be a genius, you just need a spreadsheet. So I looked up the names of all the caches and put together a spreadsheet with each cache's name, a "count" column and a "found" column and I was ready to go! Of course, I should have put a time boundary on the goal (OK, how about before we leave the UK?) and a road map of which caches to do in which order (I'm not that anal!), but what the heck - why not just get started ?
We had moved into our "new" house (N 51 deg 20.478min E 001deg 25.769min), which is reasonably near Ramsgate town center, the beach, and King George VI Park, a short time before. The King's Cache, a small traditional cache that is now archived, was supposed to be at N51 20.564 E001 26.040, just inside King George VI Park. The hint said "under the bench by the ivy covered stump". So I convinced my wife to come along for a walk and we set out to find it. Unfortunately, there was a significant amount of tree cover in the area, so the GPS receiver was having issues seeing the satellites. We got reasonably close, and started looking around. We found benches, but no cache. It is a beautiful park, with a nice children's play area and large grassy open areas and a refreshment stand that is open in the summer, but we just did not see which bench was the right one (there are many benches, quite a few stumps, and ivy all over). So we went home and I gave the spreadsheet a new column: "not found".
Faced with this first failure, I considered ... Do I (1) change the goal to a number of caches and ignore this cache (2) contact the cache owner and ask him for more clues or (3) go back by myself and figure out what I did wrong? Changing the goal is by far the easiest thing to do, since there are huge numbers of caches out there and SOME of them have to be easy. But persistence won the argument, so before e-mailing the owner I went back for a second look. Albert Einstein would probably tell you (if he were alive today) that in taking a second look, you should probably do something different. Approaching the cache from a different direction, I noticed a small bit of wood that may at one time have been a small bench attached to a wooden fence that was now overgrown with ivy. Nearby was a large (3 feet tall) stump, also covered with ivy. Sitting on the "bench" I reached down into the ivy and found the cache. The first step had not been pretty, but the journey had begun. Luckily the bench held while I filled out the log:
"Finally, four months since buying a semi-detached only a third of a mile away, I found time to visit this cache. Nice spot. Took nothing, added a generic US quarter. TFTC"
TFTC = Thanks For The Cache

The Isle of Thanet

The first thing a modern explorer notices about Thanet is that it is not, in fact, an island. It sits on the northeast corner of the very southeast of England, sticking out as though a toe on a giant foot. This was not always the case. When the Romans made their first encampments in England, in about 43AD, there was a body of water later called the Wantsum Channel that separated the Isle of Thanet from the rest of what is now called Kent. It was quite wide at that time (a mile or more in some places), and ships sailed through the channel on the way to Canterbury, or around to London.

The Wantsum channel filled in slowly, such that the lsle of Thanet has the river Stour (about 30 yards wide in most places) to its south, but no significant water border to its east. The river Wantsum is just a collection of ditches at this point, and one can walk from Birchington-on-sea to Reculver. (Map taken from Google Maps). Thanet has a reputation that is not entirely enviable. Many of its residents are on the older side of the curve. In addition, many of the residents have, shall we say, a unique view of reality? Whatever the case, the area is occasionally (affectionately) referred to as "Planet Thanet". It took a while for the area to catch my fancy, but now it seems like the perfect place to set a geocaching goal: Find all the Geocaches in Thanet!

All the geocaches in Thanet

Geocaching is a great pastime. I've given a bit of description of the idea behind geocaching and some of the mechanics on the page "geocaching", which you can access at the link just below this blog's header. You can also get a great deal of information of this type from the official website or the official blog.

The greatness of geocaching lies in the fact that it combines some of the essential elements of life in a way that removes much of the clutter.

Nature - while there are many caches paced in urban settings, the most memorable are often in less traveled places. I've found many after a long walk through the forest or fields (or both). Some you will want to visit again, perhaps with friends and a picnic, while others are just points of passing interest, but many are in places of natural beauty.

Curiosity - many of the geocaches out there have been placed in order to point out a particular relic of history, freak of geology, or curiosity of nature. In my current neck of the woods (SE England) many describe the history of the local area, frequently focusing on a church, or a monument, or an artifact.

The Hunt - Someone has put out a challenge and given you the key to finding the cache - some coordinates and hints. Can you find it? If you don't find it right away, is it because it is no longer there, because you were not quite clever enough to decipher the clues, or because the person who hid it made some sort of error ? After a few dozen caches, you begin to get a sense of whether or not you are on the right track, but there still will be those caches that are frustrating - until you find them. Then they're ingenious!

The Gadgets - Geocaching requires at least one gadget: the GPS receiver. When the pastime began (with Dave Ulmer on May 3d, 2000) personal GPS receivers were a rarity because until this time the satellite signal had been intentionally degraded by the US Government. Current GPS receivers can estimate your position to within 10 feet or so, although the accuracy of any given reading is likely to be poorer, particularly in poor weather, or when under trees or near buildings. Most handheld GPS units can average several readings, so standing still for a minute or so can increase accuracy dramatically. Of course, then there are the cache containers themselves - they can be ingenious too.

The Camaraderie - While solitary geocaching is common (I often "hunt" alone), most people geocache in family groups or with friends. Geocaching is quite popular with older couples whose children have left the house. It gives them a great excuse to get out together, get some exercise and share an experience.

The Competition - While not intrinsically a competitive sport, there are more than a million caches out there; how many have you found? How many different countries have you geocached in? Are you a well-rounded geocacher (i.e. have you found caches that have varying degrees of difficulty and terrain ratings?) How many times were you the first to find a new cache? All these things (and more) can be used as items of competition or pride.

Most of the time, however, its not about the numbers, or keeping up with the Joneses, but rather about setting and achieving personal goals, which can be quite satisfying. This is how I came to the goal of Finding all the Geocaches in Thanet.

Welcome

Dear all,

Welcome to my new blog. I'm setting this up as a result of two different workshops I've attended at DBM, the world's leading provider of strategic human resource solutions (http://www.dbm.com). In each of these workshops a blog was recommended as a way of networking with a larger audience than is easy to manage in person, and a way to promote my services to people who might want to engage them.

What do I do? As the title of the blog suggests, my last few positions have required my scientific expertise in the field of enzymology - the science of enzymes. I have worked for 19 years in the pharmaceutical industry, searching for enzyme-inhibiting drugs. While engaged in this pursuit I have also been teaching students and colleagues about enzymology and the drug discovery process - something I could do for others. I have also taken this opportunity to develop my communications skills - writing scientific manuscripts, preparing and delivering presentations, and putting together meetings. For this first post, I'll describe a bit about enzymes and how enzymology relates to drug discovery - for the beginner.


Enzymes are the proteins in your body that catalyze the chemical reactions that keep you alive. For example, enzymes in your digestive system break down the food you eat into the simple building blocks that your cells use to grow and reproduce. They are also present in your cells and are key participants in those building and reproductive processes.

The amount of each enzyme, its location, and its activity level are all controlled as a part of the intricate dance that is life. Sometimes these control mechanisms fail to work properly, and the enzyme's over-activity (or under-activity) leads to a disease, or a symptom of disease. Some of the most well-known drugs available are enzyme inhibitors.

• Aspirin and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) inhibit the activity of the enzymes cyclooxygenase I and/or cyclooxygenase II (COX I and II). Inhibition of COX I and II relieves the warmth and swelling known collectively as inflammation - but since COX I is also present in platelets, the tiny cells important for clotting, COX inhibitors also can cause bleeding in the digestive tract, particularly if used often and in high dose.
• Lipitor and other well known cholesterol lowering drugs, known as statins, inhibit cholesterol biosynthesis in the liver by targeting the enzyme HGMCoA reductase. In response to this, your body removes LDL (bad cholesterol) from the blood. This leads to a reduction in both heart attack and stroke.
• Viagra, famed for its ability to relieve erectile dysfunction, is an inhibitor of phosphodiesterase V, an enzyme involved in maintaining an appropriate level of cyclic GMP, a key signalling molecule important for regulating blood pressure. The same key ingredient in Viagra is also present in Revatio, a drug used to control pulmonary arterial hypertension (elevated blood pressure in the arteries of the lung), which leads to shortness of breath, dizziness and fainting, particularly during exercise.

So enzymologists in the pharmaceutical industry are studying the enzymes important in disease, trying to find new drugs to inhibit (or increase) their activity.