From John ''Everyone Under The Age Of 50 Is Scum'' Derbyshire:
Looking back on the Cigarette Age—the middle two quarters of the twentieth century—from this point in time, a lot of young people must wonder: Why did everyone smoke so much? Well, here's a part of the answer.
Pubs are planning to pump air fresheners into their bars to mask the smell of stale beer, sweat and drains that used to be disguised by cigarettes before the smoking ban. ... Oliver Devine, senior marketing manager at the Sizzling Pub Company, part of M&B [a big British brewery company], told the [London] Sunday Times: "Appetising food smells have increased but others are less attractive, such as stale food and beer, damp, sweat and body odour, drains and—how do you put this nicely?—flatulence."
M&B has already tried out fragrances at four pubs in Edinburgh and Glasgow. "We are considering trialling [sic] the smell of leather, which suggests luxury and indulgence, and cut grass, which is clean and domestic," he added.
Before the advent of modern standards of hygiene and ventilation, there were even more nasty smells around than there are today. Tobacco smoke helped block out those smells, and was welcomed on that account, even by nonsmokers. To this day, the Chinese word for "cigarette" is xiangyan—"fragrant smoke."
In novels of the cigarette age—I am reading one at the moment—a smoking character will ask a nonsmoker if it's OK to light up, and the nonsmoker will say: "Go ahead—I don't myself, but I like the smell of the smoke." As opposed to the smell of you, is the unspoken following thought.
Refined from oils in sheep's wool, that's what lanolin is (but you knew that, right?). Made on a real working farm in Cambridge, New York. Less than 10 bucks. A great Winter Solstice gift for that New Age sister-in-law of yours who lives out in Oregon.
John Stossel in Our Crazy Health-Insurance System:
The average American doctor now spends 14 percent of his income on insurance paperwork. A North Carolina doctor we interviewed had to hire four people just to fill out forms. He wishes he could spend that money on caring for patients. The paperwork is part of insurance companies' attempt to protect themselves against fraud. That's understandable. Many people do cheat. They lie about their history or demand money for unnecessary care or care that never even happened. So there is a lot of waste in insurance -- lost money and time.
Imagine if your car insurance covered oil changes and gasoline. You wouldn't care how much gas you used, and you wouldn't care what it cost. Mechanics would sell you $100 oil changes. Prices would skyrocket.
That's how it works in health care. Patients don't ask how much a test or treatment will cost. They ask if their insurance covers it. They don't compare prices from different doctors and hospitals. (Prices do vary.) Why should they? They're not paying. (Although they do in hidden, indirect ways.)
In the end, we all pay more because no one seems to pay anything. It's why health insurance is not a good idea for anything but serious illnesses and accidents that could bankrupt you. For the rest, we should pay out of our savings.
From Find The Boots:
I lived in a small town in Canada for several years. We didn't have a doctor. The nearest doctor was 40 miles away, and he was only in his office every other Wednesday. You needed to get an appointment several weeks in advance. So if you were going to get sick with something, say pneumonia, you needed to plan well ahead. Of course, we could always drive 300 miles to the "Big City" and wait in an emergency room for a few days.
Yes, it was "free" (we won't talk about the crushing taxation), but what good is "free" if you can't get in to see a doctor?
Compare that to the US. I had a sports injury last fall. The day after I went to the doctor I had an MRI. I could have had it that afternoon, but I had a business meeting in my schedule I couldn't get out of. A week later I was at a top specialist, who suggested surgery the next Tuesday. Yes, I pay a lot for health insurance. It's a benefit I've had to work hard for.
It's funny how the same people who want us to have socialized medicine in the US are up in arms about the conditions at Walter Reed. I'll make this real simple: Walter Reed = Socialized Medicine. When the government runs health care you get the same level of service as you do at the DMV, the IRS, and the Social Security Administration. Why is this so surprising?
Is there anything Winnie Cooper can't do? Probably not . . .
The story from Alexander Zakharov at his fine new blog A Soviet Poster A Day:
In Russia tobacco and alcohol has always been quite popular, being one of the main sources for state treasury income. Tobacco was brought to Russia in the 16th century during the reign of Russian tsar Ivan the Terrible. Later smoking was strictly prohibited, as it supposedly caused a vicious fire which burned down Moscow in 1634. Infringers were subject to chopping of their noses. During the next 50 years Russian rulers were prohibiting and legalizing tobacco, until realizing that monopolization of the tobacco market could result in fantastical profits.
After the WW1 the Bolshevics were in financial trouble, as the country economy struggled to survive the nationalizing and planned economy measures. Tobacco and alcohol were the most significant financial drivers for the young soviet government, so massive advertising campaigns started – promoting tobacco and smoking. Although nationalized some factories were still operating under old brands.
This poster says: “Everyone smokes! Donskaya State Tobacco Factory (fomer Asmolov and Co)”. And this was sad but true – more than 90% of the adult population were smoking tobacco in the twenties. Later, this figure went down, albeit slowly, resulting in 70% of smokers among the adult male population nowadays.
(via PCL Linkdump )
Excerpts from the Daily Mail:
A drug which could cut diabetics' chances of having heart attacks and strokes is being tested by scientists. The breakthrough follows a study which found diabetics suffer from a lack of vitamin B1, which is important in keeping the body's circulatory system healthy. This deficiency could increase the chance of heart attacks and strokes, which account for around 80 per cent of diabetes deaths.
Researchers at the Warwick Medical School found the kidneys of diabetics are getting rid of vitamin B1 - also known as thiamine - 15 times more quickly than in healthy people.
They hope high-dose vitamin B1 supplements could therefore reduce the risk of patients developing heart problems. Another option would be to develop drugs to stop the kidneys getting rid of so much of the vitamin. ... Thiamine concentration in the blood was 76 per cent lower in Type 1 diabetics and 75 per cent lower in Type 2 diabetics.
Lack of thiamine is believed to increase the risk of heart problems because it affects the working of special cells which line the body's circulatory system.
Professor Paul Thornalley, who led the study, is now running a trial to test whether patients given extra doses of the vitamin have healthier hearts. He is giving patients a tablet containing 300milligrams of vitamin B1 a day. The average daily nutritional intake of vitamin-B1 is 1mg - meaning changes to diet would not be enough to have an effect.
Matt Hunt, science information manager at the charity Diabetes UK, which funded the study, said it could lead to 'very exciting outcomes'.
Kyle Smith reminds us about Michael Moore:
The silliness of Moore’s oeuvre is so self-evident that being able to spot it is not liberal or conservative either; it’s a basic intelligence test, like the ability to match square peg with square hole. ... Even Moore does not believe what he says, and his films don’t bring about change-—union membership did not skyrocket nor corporate downsizing trickle off after "Roger and Me," there was no movement towards banning guns after "Bowling for Columbine," and John Kerry did not have to fill out any change of address forms in 2004. Moore's documentaries are mere political slapstick that could have been made by a third Farrelly brother or an eighth Stooge. I will pay him the honor of treating him with his own meds. How else can I deal with a film that calls Hillary Clinton "sexy"?
Then he proceeds to demolish Moore's latest effort:
Moore glosses over wait times, hoping his audience is too stupid to notice. He asks a handful of Canadian patients how long they had to wait to see the doctor. Oh, 20 minutes, 45 minutes, everyone says. So if Moore finds five people who didn’t have to wait, there’s no waiting for anybody! “To any Canadian who has ever been forced to go to emergency, this would seem unbelievable,” writes Thomas Malkom, a vehemently pro-Moore columnist for Canada’s paper The Star. The Canadian Supreme Court struck down a law forbidding private insurance in a 2005 decision, ruling that "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care" The decision resulted from a Canadian case in which a man waited a year for hip-replacement surgery, and Canada has started down the road of privatization. Check out the Canadian movie "The Barbarian Invasions" (which is, like "Sicko," a fiction film) for a view of how Canadians view their system: agonizing waits; trips across the border to Vermont to get access to modern technology; fetid facilities modeled, seemingly, on an American one—the Confederate field hospital in "Gone with the Wind."
You don't drink, don't smoke, what do ya do? How about gobbling up Austria? Annexing the Sudetenland? Invading Poland? Forget all that geopolitical stuff you were taught in school, the real cause of WWII was Adolf giving up cigarettes. Too bad they didn't have Nicorette back then . . .
From James Jay Carafano:
Tuberculosis, including strains increasingly drug resistant, is one of the world's fastest-growing diseases. This is partly due to the spread of HIV/AIDS, which reduces the human immune system, leaving individuals more susceptible to TB.
The World Health Organization says more than 8 million people a year get TB, and about 98 percent live in the developing world. Most illegal migration comes from the developing world to Europe and the U.S. Many of these persons never pass through a point of entry, which is the most likely source of a human-carried pandemic. That's where the real problem is. In fact, today when the Department of Homeland Security detains an individual for removal from the United States, virtually the first step taken is to test him for TB.
That said, as the Senate considers a bill to immediately grant legal status, including the right to pass back and forth across the U.S. border, to about 12 million individuals living unlawfully in the United States -- with no health check required -- the advice to think before acting should hold special significance.
From Lorence Sing:
"33.3% of the mice used in this experiment were cured by the test drug; 33.3% of the test population were unaffected by the drug and remained in a moribund condition; the third mouse got away".
-- Robert Day
Excerpts from Danny Miller:
Did you know that Hitler was the first world leader who campaigned against the evils of tobacco? Of course, he did it in a hideous way and drew connections between tobacco distributors and his ever-popular international conspiracy of Jews and communists, but he also had teams of doctors publishing research studies about the effects of cigarettes on the human body, including its link to lung cancer, long before anyone in our free society was making this information known. ...
What a shame that the German anti-smoking research had to be abandoned wholesale after the war. Talk about throwing the baby away with the bathwater! If anything, at the end of the war cigarettes were seen as a potent symbol of American freedom—remember all those newsreels of American GIs tossing packs of cigarettes to the grateful crowds?
It would take decades before the medical community would be able to muster up enough support to make people acknowledge the links between cigarettes and disease. Hitler’s anti-smoking policies probably set the movement back at least twenty years. So now I can add my mother’s death from lung cancer to the Nazis endless list of crimes against humanity.
From NFL Former Players blog:
It was January 1994, and Troy Aikman had suffered a concussion during the NFC championship game. While the rest of the Dallas Cowboys were celebrating their victory over the San Francisco 49ers, Aikman was undergoing tests to determine the severity of the head injury he'd suffered while being sacked during the game. Steinberg, the well-known agent who represented Aikman, drove to the hospital to visit his marquee client. Thus began their exchange.
Aikman: "Did we play a football game today?''
Steinberg: "Yes.''
Aikman: "How did we do?''
Steinberg: "You did well.''
Aikman: "What does that mean?''
Steinberg: "You're going to the Super Bowl.''
Five minutes later, Aikman had a few more questions.
"Did we play a football game today?''
"How did we do?''
"What does that mean?''
Five minutes later, Aikman repeated the same questions yet again. It was clear the concussion, which published reports described as "mild," had at least temporarily robbed Aikman of his memory. The moment shook Steinberg. It also spurred him to act. A crusade began.
Mark Belling on the lady who made Milwaukee's Summerfest what it is today:
At some point, I’m going to write the column that really needs to be written about Bo Black but it isn’t going to be today. I’m going to write about how she was abused by certain powerful Milwaukee people furious she wouldn’t play their repulsive money games. But that story will be told later.
More important at the moment is her tragic medical situation. Whether it’s ironic or simply unfair, Bo is the last person you’d expect to be hooked up to respirators because of heart and lung problems. She’s a fitness nut. Everything she’s ever eaten has been healthy. She was always working out. When she wasn’t, she was walking her dog all over the east side. She doesn’t smoke and was never a single pound overweight.
Yet, there she lies after suffering a stroke only five years after undergoing massive heart surgery for aneurysms that were all over her body.
Before she moved to Arizona, she was always trying to get me to go on one of her infernal death march walks. If I had a sore throat, she’d carry on about how I didn’t drink enough orange juice. She wasn’t just obsessed with living healthily but in converting the rest of us. So she’s the one that gets terribly sick?
It’s perverse. And so very sad. Her husband, kids and mom must be going through hell right now. They may be down in Arizona, but a lot of Wisconsin thoughts are with them.
I could make this a longer story, but I'm not. Seven years ago I started getting exhausted walking up the stairs from the basement. That's after a year of working out at the YMCA on the treadmill and elliptical machines for 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week. I was diagnosed with a heart condition. Atrial fibrillation. The top chamber of my heart was quivering uselessly instead of pumping. About a 30 percent loss of heart function. Tired/exhausted all the time. All. The. Time. Over the next 16 months, they tried everything. Drugs. Cardioversion, i.e. those paddles where they shock you, like in the movies. Nothing worked for long.
I ended up having open-heart surgery at Froedtert Hospital. The Maze Procedure. It's called that because the surgeon actually cuts into the heart muscle to make a little maze. The scar tissue acts like an insulator to make those pesky electrical impulses travel the right way so the heart pumps correctly. A rather tricky operation. A lot more common operation now. But not in 2001. Not in Milwaukee.
My surgeon was an experienced heart surgeon. But this was a new type of procedure. So he practiced on the dogs at the dog lab over at the medical college. As it was, I was only his second (!) human patient for the Maze Procedure. Everything went fine, the operation was a success, the atrial fibrillation was cured, and I wasn't exhausted any more. I was able to go back to work and take care of my family, and my handicapped son.
Now some people want to shut down the dog lab. They say it's not needed. I've already had my second chance, so in a way it's not my fight. The dog lab at the medical college, it was there when I needed it. But will it be there when you need it?
If Americans who see this chart become resentful toward gays, would that be wrong? Discuss.
Via Carpe Diem, an excerpt from Jacob Sullum:
Most Americans get medical coverage through their employers, which is a strange situation when you think about it. People do not expect their employers to pay for their car insurance, their life insurance or their homeowner's insurance. Why should employers pay for their health insurance?
This strange situation was created more or less by accident. During World War II, businesses competing to attract scarce workers got around wage and price controls by offering health insurance instead of higher pay. In 1943 the Internal Revenue Service decided not to count this increasingly popular fringe benefit as taxable income, a policy codified by Congress in 1954.
The seemingly free coverage makes health care more expensive for everyone. Not only are you unlikely to know or care how much your employer spends on health insurance, but the coverage may be more generous than you would choose on your own, which means you are unlikely to know or care how much particular services cost.
So it all started in World War II. Well, who started World War II? Why, Adolf Hitler, of course. Every bad thing always works its way back to Hitler.
Nutri-Fruit™ products are made by taking advantage of the proven attributes of berries. While it is best to eat fresh fruit, that is not always convenient nor practical because of seasonal variability or ease of handling. In order to ‘capture’ the full nutritional value of fresh fruit, it is best to allow natural maturity to take place, and then promptly freeze the berries at the peak of ripeness. Freezing virtually stops natural degradation and preserves the beneficial nutrients and nutraceutical compounds present in ripe fruit.
These fresh frozen berries can then be ‘freeze dried’ – a process that removes ONLY the water from the fruit by using low temperatures and pressure. This process concentrates the full nutritional value of fresh berries into a small volume that does not require refrigeration, while preserving nature’s premium flavor without additives.
An excerpt from a fascinating article at DamnInteresting.com:
In 1922, a bank teller named Grace Fryer became concerned when her teeth began to loosen and fall out for no discernible reason. Her troubles were compounded when her jaw became swollen and inflamed, so she sought the assistance of a doctor in diagnosing the inexplicable symptoms. Using a primitive X-ray machine, the physician discovered serious bone decay, the likes of which he had never seen. Her jawbone was honeycombed with small holes, in a random pattern reminiscent of moth-eaten fabric.
As a series of doctors attempted to solve Grace's mysterious ailment, similar cases began to appear throughout her hometown of New Jersey. One dentist in particular took notice of the unusually high number of deteriorated jawbones among local women, and it took very little investigation to discover a common thread; all of the women had been employed by the same watch-painting factory at one time or another.
(via Look At This... , who we send our Best Wishes to while recovering from back surgery.)
From The Vermont Country Store:
Do you suffer from cold hands and feet? Rub this Vermont-made cream into your hands or feet and in minutes you'll feel a precious warmth coursing through your fingers and toes that will last for hours. Made with the amino acid L-arginine, which stimulates circulation by naturally relaxing blood vessels.
Anybody out there tried this?
Just to let you know I'm trying to take care of my health after being diagnosed with diabetes, I thought I'd list the nutritional supplements I take every day:
Of course, I also take my prescriptions and eat right. And starting to get more exercise, too.
Pumpkin Pie made with Splenda contains eggs, milk, and pumpkin, one of the world's healthiest foods. Easy to make, bakes in one hour. Just don't tell them that pumpkin is a vegetable!
From the American Diabetes Association:
- Frequent urination
- Excessive thirst
- Extreme hunger
- Unusual weight loss
- Increased fatigue
- Irritability
- Blurry vision
Drink, pee, drink, pee, drink, pee is a classic sign of diabetes. And you don't have to have all of these symptoms to have diabetes. For example, I had a decreased appetite rather than extreme hunger. And of course, I was never irritable ;-).
Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer severe brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke. Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:
S: Ask the individual to SMILE.T: Ask the person to TALK to SPEAK A SIMPLE COHERENT SENTENCE (e.g. It is sunny out today)R: Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.
Yeah, I realize that a 4-year-old isn't exactly a toddler, but still it's pretty neat that they've figured out how to quantify this.
Burt Prelutsky sums it up:
So, why is it that leftists are so enamored with Canada’s system? Just because they are. It’s for the same reason they’re against capital punishment for serial killers, but for abortions on demand for 13-year-olds. It’s why they’re vehemently opposed to having “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, but they’re for handing out sex questionnaires to eight-year-old kids, and condoms to their slightly older brothers. It’s why they’re against locking up the borders to illegal aliens, but they’re for denying law- abiding citizens the right to own guns. Why? Why? Why? Because they’re nuts. Because they read from the playbook that’s been assembled by the likes of James Carville and Ted Kennedy, Chris Matthews and Barbara Boxer, George Soros and Jimmy Carter, John Kerry and Michael Moore.
I can no more get into the head of a liberal than that proverbial camel can stroll through the eye of a needle.
This happened back in 1973, and from what I remember, the only thing that saved him is that they held the pole in place which kept the blood loss to a minimum. Even with that, Clint was still pronounced dead at one point. But as they say, that pronouncement was greatly exaggerated and he's still with us to-day at age 79. If you're a Cheyenne fan or a Dirty Dozen fan you can click on the link and get yourself and autographed photo, direct from The Big Guy himself.
I thought about this due to the Steve Irwin stingray-barb-through-the-heart story. I've remembered this little bit of trivia for 33 years, just so that I could retrieve it now for your education and enlightenment.
An excerpt from Hilary White:
Huge profits for pharmaceutical and condom manufacturers, bottomless grants for researchers and NGO’s, publicity and money for research foundations, six-digit salaries for advertising executives and increasing fame for big name celebrities are creating a disincentive to actually stop the disease say some AIDS activists.
The “AIDS industry,” is a multi-billion dollar international enterprise now, and those who gather to enjoy lavish meals and hotels in Toronto this week, are more interested in “managing the disease” than in curing it or stopping its spread, says Martin Sempa, a leading AIDS fighter from Uganda.
Sempa, who has struggled against HIV/AIDS in his home country for 16 years – through radio, college “edutainment” rallies, research and advocacy and government policy formulation – told LifeSiteNews.com that the roving publicity circus that the annual International AIDS Conferences have become is a distraction from what is really happening in Africa and other countries blighted with the disease.
But worse than this, he says, they have become a vehicle for an inhuman leftist ideology under the guise of multi-million dollar philanthropy, a vehicle for a Hollywood-style celebrity cult and brazen anti-American political machine.
(via Relapsed Catholic)
From Phillip Greenspun:
The other article was the cover story of Saturday’s Washington Post: “D.C. Wants HIV Testing for All Residents 14 to 84″. The article points out that “D.C. has the highest rate of new AIDS cases in the country” and that the federal Center for Disease Control is encouraging routine HIV testing. This seems strange to those of us who were around in the 1980s. When HIV was first identified as the cause of AIDS, quite a few Americans put forward the idea of widespread testing and then various sorts of steps to quarantine those who were infected. These advocates for testing were attacked as hardhearted and the politically correct public health official approach to the problem was to behave as though everyone were infected and not test anyone, even those in high-risk groups. For some reason, the public health bureaucracy seems to have come full circle and now advocates the testing that they once opposed.
An excerpt from William Tucker:
Yet if someone were to invent a device with a wide, preventive usefulness--say, a nanotech implant that would spot the proteins that indicate the first minute presence of cancer--it would have to go through the same process of billion-dollar testing. Since the government and insurance companies are reluctant to add anything to their repertoire of coverage--and since such a device would be targeted at the much broader pool of people who are not sick--research might well stall in its earliest phases for lack of reimbursement-funding.
Yes, it is possible to object that doctors and insurance companies do engage in preventive medicine. Don't they urge annual checkups? Don't insurers even pay for them? But that's not the kind of preventive medicine Mr. Kessler is talking about. He means devices that bypass doctors completely. There are diagnostic tools that work as easily as a home pregnancy test. They're just hard to access.
In one hilarious sequence, Mr. Kessler recounts trying to draw his own blood sample, in the hope of checking his cholesterol. But clinics won't draw blood without a doctor's orders. Drugstores think you want the syringe to shoot heroin. Unless you want to just gouge your own finger, you're in the clutches of organized medicine. Imagine how tightly it grips something a bit more sophisticated.
Cable Positive, the cable and telecommunications industry's AIDS action organization, has been running Public Service Announcements asking all of us to use our heart, mind, and voice to help combat this disease. Great Idea: I've stood silent on the sidelines for far too long. Here then, without further delay, is my own small yet heartfelt contribution to the fight against HIV and AIDS:
I can't wait for all those comments and emails.
Via Clayton Cramer, an excerpt from Bloomberg:
All seven people infected with bird flu in a cluster of Indonesian cases can be linked to other patients, according to disease trackers investigating possible human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 virus.
A team of international experts has been unable to find animals that might have infected the people, the World Health Organization said in a statement today. In one case, a 10-year- old boy who caught the virus from his aunt may have passed it to his father, the first time officials have seen evidence of a three-person chain of infection, an agency spokeswoman said. Six of the seven people have died.
Almost all of the 218 cases of H5N1 infections confirmed by the WHO since late 2003 can be traced to direct contact with sick or dead birds. Strong evidence of human-to-human transmission may prompt the global health agency to convene a panel of experts and consider raising the pandemic alert level, said Maria Cheng, an agency spokeswoman.
As a kid, this used to bother me a lot . . .
Nathaniel Branden in his Self-Esteem Every Day:
Many years ago, early in our relationship, my wife, Devers, said something that impressed me profoundly. "You are very kind, generous, and caring -- when you stop long enough in what you are doing for it to occur to you. What you have never learned is the discipline of kindness. This means kindness that is not a matter of mood or convenience. It means kindness as a basic way of functioning. It is in you as a potential, but it doesn't happen without consciousness and discipline." "The discipline of kindness" -- I have learned to love that phrase. When I mention it in lectures, everyone seems instantly to know what it means -- just as, I suspect, you do now.
From the article Bioethicist William Hurlbut On The Dangers Of Radical Lifespan Extension :
Next News: So what's wrong with doubling - or more–the human life span?
Hurlbut: It's like stretching out a symphony, playing it at half speed so it goes on longer -it wouldn't have the same beauty or meaning. We get a taste of each relational category–being a child, a parent, and a grandparent. And our direct family lineage is connected by both genetics and personal experience, not so attenuated by time that relatives feel unrelated. If people lived to be 140, as some scientists suggest we will through technological intervention, a child could have 64 great-great-great-great-grandparents whose names he or she could never remember. In our natural lifespan, there is a harmony of proportion between the cycles of birth, ascendancy, and decline–phases of generation, nurture, and dependency that give a sense of meaningful connection within the journey of our lives.
Next News: And what about tinkering with the human genome to create a "posthuman" species with specifically engineered brains and bodies?
Hurlbut: Genes are not Legos; you can't just plug them in and get a better baby. Genetics is very complicated; most genes affect many traits and most traits are affected by many genes. It's not like Mr. Potato Head - you can't just stick on new ears or a better nose or a bigger brain. These schemes amount to a massive human experiment, an imposition of our imagination and ideology onto the next generation–without consulting them and without a deeply considered appreciation for the fragile balance of our natural being–or our natural body. We are the product of nearly 4 billion years of evolutionary refinement. Our minds and the sense of meaning in our lives are wrapped into our very embodied form–our natural body is the fragile frame of our freedom and comprehending consciousness. If we're not careful, we could write ourselves right out of our own story.
Next News: So playing with your kid's genes to better her chances at become an Olympic-caliber figure skater would be a bad idea, assuming it became possible to do so?
Hurlbut: The idea of designing people for specific aptitudes or superior performance capacities goes against the very strength of our species. We are a "general purpose organism"; we have adapted for adaptability, not for a narrow specialization. Our very strength is in creative flexibility, freedom, and open indeterminacy. These are what give us our extraordinary capabilities, our comprehending consciousness, and controlling powers. Our species may already be the optimal design for fullest overall functioning and flourishing of life. Indeed, it is our very strength that is now threatening us. Liberated from the immediacies of mere survival, we are open to imagination, to the ambition of technological self-transformation that could shatter the fragile balance of our physical and psychological functioning.
From the CaringBridge web site:
A place to heal, celebrate and share.
CaringBridge™ is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization offering free personalized Web sites to those wishing to stay in touch with family and friends during significant life events. Our mission is to bring together a global community of care powered by the love of family and friends in an easy, accessible and private way.
CaringBridge authors quickly and easily create personalized Web sites that display journal entries and photographs. Well-wishers visit the page to read updates and leave messages in the Guestbook.
The CaringBridge experience is unique for both authors and visitors in its immediacy, intimacy and wide-reaching impact. We make profound human connections, using technology to serve a higher purpose in a powerful way.
The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. Known as "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe" the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster.
In the fall of 1918 the Great War in Europe was winding down and peace was on the horizon. The Americans had joined in the fight, bringing the Allies closer to victory against the Germans. Deep within the trenches these men lived through some of the most brutal conditions of life, which it seemed could not be any worse. Then, in pockets across the globe, something erupted that seemed as benign as the common cold. The influenza of that season, however, was far more than a cold. In the two years that this scourge ravaged the earth, a fifth of the world's population was infected. The flu was most deadly for people ages 20 to 40. This pattern of morbidity was unusual for influenza which is usually a killer of the elderly and young children. It infected 28% of all Americans (Tice). An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the world war. Of the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half of them fell to the influenza virus and not to the enemy.
(via plep)
From Fox News cancer survivor Tony Snow:
It's on the mind of Jonathan David Morris:
What drives a grown man to become a proctologist? Is that something you spend your whole life dreaming about, or is it more of a last-minute career decision? I used to think being a podiatrist was weird, but at least with podiatry you can say you have a foot fetish. You can’t really do that with proctology. Something about “I’ve always had a passion for rectums” just doesn’t sound right. How do you go about telling your father you’ve chosen this field anyway? Do you ask him to sit down? Bend over? Or what?
Excerpts for a 2002 Slate article by Eric Klinenberg:
But heat waves kill more people in the United States than all of the other so-called natural disasters combined. More than 400 Americans die from heat-related illnesses in a typical year. Annual mortality from tornadoes, earthquakes, and floods together is under 200. Since heat waves inflict damage on the nation's major cities, well within the range of most media organizations, the lack of visibility or panic is all the more mysterious. ...
In the past three decades, New York City (1972, 1984), St. Louis (1980), Philadelphia (1993), Dallas (1998), and Milwaukee (1995) have experienced massively deadly heat waves. But in recent years, Chicago has become the national epicenter of heat mortality. This summer, Chicago had recorded 27 heat-related deaths by July 22. That's small by current standards. In one week of July 1995, 739 Chicago residents—the majority of them home alone—died in one of the greatest and least-known American disasters in modern history.
To place the 1995 heat wave in context, think of the great Chicago fire of 1871. It killed less than half as many people. Other recent catastrophes, such as the Northridge, Calif. earthquake of 1994 or Hurricane Andrew of 1992, killed one-tenth and one-twentieth the number of people, respectively. Yet several lists of the most fatal American weather events of the 1990s fail to include the heat wave. In the words of the New England Journal of Medicine, the Chicago disaster "was forgotten as soon as the temperatures fell."
An excerpt from radiologist Paul Hsieh:
There's nothing I enjoy more than solving a diagnostic mystery by taking a set of subtle and apparently disconnected findings from a patient's x-rays, CAT scans, and MRI's, and integrating them in order to arrive at a correct diagnosis.
Similarly, I enjoy performing invasive radiology procedures (so-called "interventional radiology") where I use real-time x-ray imaging to guide a needle to a target within a patient's body (avoiding all the critical nerves and blood vessels), in order to either perform a biopsy or deliver a dose of medication to exactly the right spot in as pain-free and safe a fashion as humanly possible.
Advances in imaging technology allow radiologists to perform procedures in the x-ray suite that 20 years ago would have required much riskier open surgery. Interventional radiology is like playing a video game, but where the stakes are much higher (as are the rewards).
Colorado is a very outdoors-oriented state, and hence a lot of people enjoy activities like skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, rock-climing, etc. Hence, if you were to take a bad fall on the ski slopes at Aspen or Vail and hurt your knee, it would be me who would interpret your MRI scan and tell your orthopedic surgeon which structures were torn and which were ok.
Or if you were to get into a bad car accident in the middle of the night and were helicoptered to our Level 1 trauma hospital, it would be me who would read your emergency CAT scans and tell the trauma surgeons which organs were critically injured and needed immediate repair, which were less critically injured (and still needed attention, but not immediately), and which structures were ok.
I think I have one of the coolest jobs in the world. It was a long road to get to the point of being able to practice independently as full-fledged board-certified physician, but it was well worth it in the end.
Once a superconducting magnet is ramped up and fully magnetized, it literally takes no additional current or power to keep the magnet going. There's zero resistance -- that's the "superconducting" part -- so the current flowing in the magnet coils will run forever. That is, forever if the liquid helium cooling the magnet is kept cold enough, which is quite close to Absolute Zero. If the cooling system goes on the fritz, the magnet starts to develop resistance, which cause heat, which causes more resistance, and more heat, and so on until all the liquid helium gets hot enough to become a gas, which then erupts in a jet-engine-sounding event known as a quench. That's thousands of dollars worth of helium you see in the photo sequence above, going bye-bye.
The photo is of the GE MRI manufacturing plant where I used to work, and I myself saw a magnet quench much like this one. Unforgettable, much better than inhaling those balloons and talking like Donald Duck for 15 seconds. In a wide-open space like a manufacturing plant, there's really not much cause for alarm. But in a smaller space, the inert helium can displace all the oxygen and kill you. Several years ago a GE field engineer was killed by a slower, less spectacular helium leak at a customer's site. In a small, enclosed space it can sneak up on you pretty quick.
I found this photo here. You can go there for more information, but it was all Greek to me.
