Swearing at work.

I’m glad I rediscovered the Annals of Improbable Research.

Eric?

You win.

Just so you know.

(Confused? Ask Tania!)

ADDENDUM the First:

I listen to the news when I walk after work. I just like knowing what’s going on in the world, and the news gives me something to focus on other than how tired I am of walking in circles.

There was a horrifying segment on mass graves in Iraq. Over 7000 missing persons reports were filed in Baghdad between 2005 and 2007.

Seven thousand civilians have disappeared.

What struck me the hardest was a comment by a man who’s brother is still missing.

“He is not a dead person, yet he is not a living person, either.”

It struck me that this is Schrödinger’s cat at it’s most horrible, and I wonder whether these situations were what Schrödinger had in mind at some point.

Schrödinger lived through both World War I and World War II–and in fact left German because of Hitler. When he created his example of Schrödinger’s Cat, I wonder whether it was the situations of the families after WWI and during WWII that brought this to mind.

How horrible for these families to have no closure. To be living Schrödinger’s dilemma, not knowing whether their loved ones are alive or dead.

And this situation has been repeated since WWII, and throughout history.

So in college my friends and I had a running joke that we were going to invent Shetland Cows. These cows would live in the window boxes of Eat ‘N’ park, and we would never have to wait for a waitress to bring us cream for our coffee ever again.

Well, the future is here.

Miniature Cows.

That’s right, someone has gone and made our dream of Shetland Cows come true.

This means it is only a matter of time before our next crazy idea comes true: talking cows.

Imagine driving down the highway, yelling “MOO!” out the window at passing cows, and having the cow respond to you, “Moo, mother fucker, moo.”

I can hardly wait!

I just wanted to say that the weather has been gorgeous this weekend.

Right now it’s 70 F and sunny.

Yesterday, when my aunt, uncle, and cousins came by, we got to have dinner on the deck. Temperatures were in the lower 80s initially, but half the deck is in the shade, and there was a lovely breeze.

We had turkey burgers and chicken dogs and blueberry cobbler (HA! Now I know what I’m posting on Tuesday!)

All in all it was an awesome afternoon.

I didn’t get 18k steps today because I was running all over creation at work.

Nope, today I got the upper body workout, as I took the break before classes start to organize and rearrange our stock room. (My boss has been promising to do this for three weeks, but hasn’t had the time. I decided to take a GA and get it done before break is over.)

We moved cases of paper (around 20) from one room to another and stacked them about six high against the wall, moved about 20 boxes of toner (much lighter!) from one room to another, moved metal cabinets around, piled (insanely heavy and awkward to move) keyboard trays atop an empty cabinet, and hauled about 15 computers and monitors from one room to another.

If nothing else, my job has plenty of variety to keep my healthy. (Tomorrow’s goal? Sitting at my desk with my feet up.)

Five or six years ago Michael and I changed the wiring in the basement, and one result was that two separate switches were combined into a single switch box. Now because this is the basement, it’s just screwed into the cinder blocks, and is not inset into the wall.

This morning when I was putting on my coat I sliced my thumb on the metal light switch cover badly enough it required a band-aid.

This evening after I came back from the grocery store, while taking my jacket off I managed to slice my pointer finger badly enough that Michael had to come in from mowing the lawn and help me put a pressure bandage on it.

I think maybe I’ll just go to bed now.

Harnessing the power of breast movement:

(B)reasts move on three different axes: from side to side, front to back, and up and down. The most motion is generated on the vertical axis. Naturally, the bigger the breast, the more momentum it generates. “Let’s face it—if you’re a double-A marathoner, you’re probably not going to get that iPod up and running,”

There was an articles in my CNN Health News that I initially thought was going to be a rant, but was actually thoughtful and interesting.

Vaccinations are a subject that have been a hot button issue for me for awhile.

More and more parents are refusing to vaccinate their children, seeing it as a personal choice.

Unfortunately, it isn’t.

Vaccines are central to public health. Yes, they provide immunity to the individuals who are vaccinated, but they also provide herd immunity, which protects the community at large, including individuals who are incapable of being vaccinated, or for whom vaccines don’t work: individuals with immune disorders or with suppressed immune systems.

Herd immunity is actually an interesting thing. If you have 100 people, and none of them are vaccinated, when an illness hits, the illness will spread through the populations affecting everyone except with individuals with some sort of natural immunity.

However, if those 98 of those individuals are immunized, the remaining two individuals are also protected, because those around them will not get sick.

But if fewer individuals are immunized, say, 75%, then the disease may be able to get a foothold in the community, and those two individuals who cannot be immunized are now at serious risk for getting ill. And it is those individuals who can’t be immunized or for whom immunization isn’t effect, those are the individuals who are most likely to be severely affected by the disease.

So when 23 of those 100 individuals refuse to be vaccinated, they may actually cause the death of the two individuals who were unable to be immunized. Of course they may cause their own serious illness or death as well.

But that’s the point of public health.

And interestingly, parents refusing to vaccinated their children was not what the article was primarily about.

What the article was promoting was for parents who had concerns to talk to their pediatricians about alternate vaccination schedules.

Right now infants and children tend to multiple vaccinations in a short period of time, including single vaccines for multiple illnesses (like DTaP and MMR) I received the DTaP vaccine last year, and I have to say it was pretty miserable. I had no problems the last time I received a Tetanus vaccine, but the combination vaccine was harsh and made me pretty miserable.

I think physicians are in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t position here. When the vaccines are spread out, children are more likely to miss vaccines. But giving children multiple vaccines at once makes the children miserable, and may cause problems in limited individuals.

It seems like pediatricians should be able to offer parents a choice. Because vaccination is something that is mandatory for a reason. And doctors should be willing to work with parents to allay fears for their children, and if that is using an alternate vaccine schedule, then lets make it as easy as possible for those parents.

Of course

Here are some interesting news items that have come in under the radar in recent weeks.

First, something I have complained repeatedly about, which is “anti-bacterial” products. Research in the UK has found that using anti-bacterial wipes in hospitals does not, in fact kill bacteria, and if a wipe is used on more than one surface, may instead spread those bacteria.

…the wipes tested were unable to kill the bacteria that they removed. As a result, they transferred high numbers of bacteria to other surfaces.

On a more controversial note, a study conducted at the Medical College of Wisconsin found that states that conduct local background checks, as opposed to relying upon only federal, or federal and state data, have lower rates of homicide and suicide. This was a retrospective study, and the article didn’t list the states used in the study, which is information I would like to know before drawing further conclusions from the article. (i.e. did the study account for population density and size?)

An article that was simply fascinating was the the following:

A new report shows that a non-ambulatory (unable to walk or stand) child with a cervical spinal cord injury was able to restore basic walking function after intensive locomotor training. The case study, published in Physical Therapy (May 2008), the scientific journal of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA), evaluated the effects of locomotor training in a 4 ½ year-old-boy, who had no ability to walk following a gunshot wound sixteen months earlier.

The articles doesn’t state at what age plasticity stops, although it does limit these ability to children. It would be interesting to know what biological mechanisms affected this child’s miraculous recovery, and whether those conditions can eventually be reproduced in adults.

A study performed at Ohio State University has found that in the workplace instant messaging can actually improve productivity. I’ve noticed this myself. I’d much rather have the GAs IM me easy questions than call me. And it would be much easier to IM my boss questions that require little more than yes or no answers than call him or get up and walk over to his office.

Although it’s probably better for my physically to walk over to his office with my questions.

And last but not least, something that won’t surprise women in the least, heterosexual men’s decision making is more suspect after they’ve seen scantily clad women, or items in which women would be scantily clad.

Authors … found that the desire for immediate rewards increased in men who touched bras, looked at pictures of beautiful women, or watched video clips of young women in bikinis running through a park.

Um… duh? Isn’t that the point of all those horrible TV commercials?

Of course this could also work in the favor of women. Drag one’s guy through Victoria’s secret, and maybe they’ll more readily agree to any purchases immediately after.

Elephant cam! This is the best thing I’ve seen all day. Elephants are the coolest animals ever.

Users rebel against Windows Vista. Well, duh. Vista sucks, that’s why. Here’s the petition.

Think Geek office products. I particularly like the paper e-mail, mostly because I think there’s a memo pad floating around here somewhere.

And not fun but interesting just the same: “Mental illnesses once thought to be the result of neurological or psychological defects may be caused by viral or microbial infections.” As someone who suffers from depression, OCD, and anxiety, I’m not sure if this makes me feel better or worse.

Other good news on the WV front.

WVU School of Medicine was ranked in the top ten schools for Rural Health. But I think the most important part of the Rural Medicine program is that it has significantly increased the number of medical practitioners who go into primary care, and more importantly who go on to practice in rural areas.

There was an interesting article on memory I read a last week, and I meant to make note of it, but… errr… forgot. So after the subject came up elsewhere, I’m going to mention it now… before I forget again.

…memory is of two minds–that is, memories are captured and recorded separately and differently in two distinct parts of the mind.

They say children depend more heavily on a part of the mind that records, “what actually happened,” while adults depend more on another part of the mind that records, “the meaning of what happened.” As a result, they say, adults are more susceptible to false memories…

The two types of memory are called “gist trace” and “verbatim trace.”

Now the article focuses upon court cases and witness reliability, but I think this information is interesting on a broader level.

First, it may help to explain why people remember the same incident in very different ways.

Secondly, it may further explain why memories from childhood are so vivid, while later memories are less so. And why when one starts to lose their memory, those vivid memories of childhood are the ones that stick around the longest.

This is the kind of stuff that fascinates me and made me want to study public health: Hepatitis outbreak leads to discovery of dangerous practices at medical clinic.

People want to know why I don’t like large corporations and businesses? This is a prime example. Administrators who don’t know squat about medicine make rules that put the lives and health of patients at risk.

(via my brother)

“I’d like to be Chlamydia”
–Jeri

Because I know you were dying to know, I ended up getting 16 hours of sleep between Friday evening and Saturday evening. And 9 hours of sleep last night.

Now I feel like I’ll be wound up for the rest of my natural life.

But on the bright side, I don’t have the cold Michael came down with. I have, however, washed my hands seemingly continually since he started to get sick.

Also, I hadn’t mentioned in awhile that I’ve read quite a few books recently, so there are that many reviews up. Read both good mysteries and good supernatural fantasy. Which means that I’m trying to figure out what I want to read next, while the sequels to the books I read ship from Amazon. (Damn Amazon for it’s 4-for-3 sales!)

Another bonus of my job?

I’m sitting at the front desk, and right in front of me one of the students is doing her on-line course work and looking at closeups of cadavers. Some pictures are body shots, others are close-ups of muscles and tendons and such.

Pretty neat, actually. And far more interesting than the drunken friends on Facebook the girl next to her is viewing.

John Scalzi finally went to the Creation Museum. Essay AND a photo set with snarky comments!

My favorite part is “vegetarian dinosaurs.”

According to this fun and exciting quiz, I don’t have asperger’s or autism. Yippee!

(more…)

I read a fascinating article this morning on the Amish and forgiveness.

Really, it’s interesting. Go read it.

Back? Good.

First of all, I find it astounding that they are able to forgive so quickly and seemingly easily. That has to be very, very hard. But it also gives me great hope, to know that human beings are actually capable of forgiveness, even under such terrible circumstances. Maybe the human race isn’t completely doomed after all.

I also note that they separate forgiveness from grief. Because you have forgive someone, it doesn’t seem to mean that you don’t still feel grief for the loss. That’s kinda important. You can still feel pain about a situation, but it doesn’t necessarily help to feel anger as well as pain.

But forgiveness is a very hard thing. It’s something that comes up sometimes when you’re dealing with depression. Even if your depression isn’t caused by something that someone did to you, it may be caused by an inability to forgive yourself.

My depression falls into the later category. For the most part, I can get beyond things that people do to me (I do tech support. If I took everything personally my head would have exploded years ago.) but I find it far harder to forgive similar lapses in myself. After all, I did some pretty stupid stuff when I was younger, so it’s easy for me to see where other people are coming from. It’s far harder to accept stupidity from myself, after all, I should have known better, right?

Not really. But that doesn’t always stop me.

So maybe I need to take a lesson from the Amish and forgive. Forgive those who have hurt me, but also forgive myself, because I am just as deserving of my own forgiveness as anyone else.

You may have seen this already, but if you haven’t, there’s an amusing article on the British Daily Mail of a small dog that discovered a part of a mammoth bone on the beach.

The picture of the dog in front of the bone is worth clicking over.

For the past three or four years, I’ve been trying to go to the gym five days a week to walk and do weight training. Since my depression kicked in this summer, it’s been far more off than on, and for the past three weeks, I haven’t gone to the gym at all. Now I’m still trying to walk at least 20 minutes at lunch, and I do walk around a lot during the day, but this is a pretty serious decrease in exercise.

Yesterday, the nurse came by to give us physicals so we can get life insurance.

I’ve lost 3 1/2 pounds since the last time I was at the gym (which puts me 1.2 pounds away from my goal weight), my blood pressure was 98 over 60, and my pulse rate was relatively (for me) low.

This is ridiculous. I don’t need reinforcement for NOT going to the gym.

However, I’m still going to get my butt in gear and start going back, because exercise twice a day helps a good deal in fighting my depression.

But still. Although I’m glad that I’m so healthy, that wasn’t the kind of reinforcement I needed.

(I tried to figure out how to put more “e” sounds in that title, but that was as good as I could come up with on short notice.)

Went to check the weather, and noticed a strange weather pattern around Pittsburgh. When I went to look at the animated regional radar, it looked even more creepy.

(more…)

I’m not saying there isn’t something to it, I’m just saying that my first reaction to this:

WVU researchers studying nutritional benefits of krill
Mention krill, and whales might come to mind. The tiny shrimp-like
crustaceans are the food of choice for whales – nutritionally dense,
easily harvested and abundant. It’s those same qualities that make krill
seem like a short-list candidate for the next big protein source to a
pair of WVU researchers. Drs. Janet Tou and Jacek Jaczynski, assistant
professors in WVU’s Davis College of Agriculture, Forestry and Consumer
Sciences, have been collaborating with Taiwanese scholar Yi-Chen Chen on
a study of the nutritional benefits of krill for human consumption. The
research was featured in a recent issue of Nutrition Reviews.

…was to giggle.

I have to say that reading about Elyn Saks made me feel as if my own mental struggles are nothing.

She’s a lawyer and educator who just published The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness that talks about her struggle with schizophrenia.

You can read an article on her as well.