JOKE - Drawing on medical humor

I was reflecting the other day. I hate to generalize, but most of the phlebotomists I've encountered seem to be all take, take, take. Sometimes, it feels like they'll bleed you dry.

MISC - Don't bother to try this at home.

Out of idle curiosity, I decided to try mixing orange soda and black cherry soda. (Roughly equal parts of both and, in both cases, we're talking Publix generic.) Hey--oranges and cherries go together in fruit salad, so why not?

The result is a mixture that looks almost like cherry soda, but tastes pretty much like orange soda. I guess I now know which has the more powerful coloring, and which has the more powerful natural and artificial flavors.

RR - Slanted perspective.

In the late '60s and early '70s, San Francisco's BART and the New York City's subway both experimented with cars with slanted fronts. They looked cool, however, the benefits of such streamlining are dubious when you consider the relatively slow speeds and extensive tunnel operation of subway trains, and the loss of passenger space because the full length of the car can't be used. Worse, such a design makes it especially dangerous (as in NY's design) or impossible (as with SF's) to walk from car to car if the cab cars are run mid-train. The problem was bad enough that New York modified the original design to get rid of the slant before they even received all the cars.

Despite these problems, however, Toronto is now--based on the picture in an online CTV article--considering a slanted-front subway car design. Once again, we have an example of Santayana's quote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

LIFE - My dad's stroke

If my blog has been "off" for the past few entries, I have had a major distraction in my life; June 3, 2006 was probably one of the worst days of my life--and it wasn't even for something that happened directly to me.

Before I woke up that day, my father left the house per his routine to get the newspapers and have lunch.

While he was out, he had three separate car crashes. I still don't know all the details of what happened--his memories of the car accidents are fuzzy, no one was with him, and the police reports are confusing and contain errors. The first accident happened around 1 in the afternoon in the parking lot or coming out from the lot of the supermarket where he gets his newspapers. The second was in the parking lot of Grumpy's (a restaurant he frequents). The third was elsewhere in the town of Orange Park.

I spoke with the owner of the car he hit at Grumpy's--she is an employee of the restaurant--so I have more details of that crash, despite not having a police report for that accident. While the police report for the first accident claims it happened at 2 PM, Grumpy's closes at 2, so the time on that report must be wrong. I am furious at the cop who responded to that second accident--that cop knew my dad had been in the earlier accident (he mentioned the ticket from earlier as the reason why he didn't issue another ticket), and he should have seen that my dad was exhibiting some symptoms of a stroke at the time--including fuzzy memories of the crash that had just happened and inability at the time to remember his own phone number of 15 years; however despite all this, he did not call the paramedics, though he did call the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to start proceedings to take away my dad's license. (I am not a big booster of the local police lately--and consider the "to protect and serve" slogan to be a lie.) The lady from Grumpy's also told me (informed by the officer, who is another regular at the restaurant) that the third accident happened on U.S. 17; though the police report for that one says it happened in a residential neighborhood three blocks to the west. (Since we don't know anyone in that area, either the report was mistaken or my dad was lost and disoriented from his condition.) The car was not drivable after the third accident, but is reparable--the total damage was $3700.

When the tow-truck driver brought him home (you read that right--the police didn't even take him to the hospital after the third accident--they sent him home in the tow truck), he was obviously shaken, but there was nothing that pointed to anything beyond a fender bender by that time. I asked him if he wanted to see a doctor, and he didn't. However, about an hour later, he said he felt dizzy. That turned "do you want to go to the hospital?" into "We're going to the hospital, now!" The hospital kept him for observation until Monday the 12th. Much of that time was because they placed him back on Coumadin, so they had to wait until the INR was in the correct range. They also did a battery of tests, which confirmed he'd had a stroke.

My dad is probably giving up driving; however, we need to talk with an elder law attorney to tend to other matters, and have decided to ask the lawyer how to proceed with the state's demand that he retest for or surrender his license. One bright spot in the whole affair is that my dad was the first to suggest the idea--even if he ultimately returns to the road (the big question in that regard being how great is the risk for another stroke), I'm proud of him for considering the possibility--so many older drivers don't have the intellectual honesty to consider giving up driving when they should, thereby endangering themselves and others. My dad was and is able to take an honest look at his ability.

Considering his and our family's cardiac history, his age, and that he didn't get prompt treatment when he first had the stroke, the prognosis for him is very good. However, he needs to be on Coumadin now, and he had problems with that blood thinner in the past. He also continues to have some trouble finding the right words when he's speaking--a question when he sees the doctor next week will be whether he'd benefit from a speech therapist. I'm hoping and beginning to think he's out of the woods at this point, but I'm still worried for him and would appreciate it if you kept him in your thoughts, hopes, and prayers.

NEWS - Eat this!

I know some laws that are proposed can be a little hard to swallow, but Taiwanese Democratic Progressive Party deputy Wang Shu-hui tried to in one case--literally.

It's a shame some of our own congressmen and senators don't try this with some of the proposals that come their way. Just think--Senator So-and-so's digestive tract could turn a figurative piece of crap into the real thing, and the bad legislation is flushed for good. Just something to chew on.

CAT - Are my cats underfed, or do Purina's numbers not add up?

Not really a cute cat moment, but that seemed the best category anyway.
I have five cats. One has been thin since we got him, one is maybe a little overweight, though I tend to think he's a healthy weight, and the other three are chubby to fat. Every day, they get a large bowl of dry food, a can of human tuna, and two cans of cat food (or a can and a pouch). None of them are very energetic, but they aren't very lethargic either--they seem perfectly normal to me. Also, no one has ever said "is that all you feed them?" or anything to make me think there was anything wrong with their diet. The vet has said nothing. The cats eat almost all their food, but not quite all--which seems to back up my impression that they get the right amount of food.
So, imagine my surprise when, while opening the can of catfood tonight, I happen to read the fine print, and it says, "Daily ration for an average adult cat is 1 can per 3 pounds of body weight." If that's true, one can per three pounds of body weight means the cats get only a third to a quarter of the food they need. That begs the question--if they are so badly underfed, why don't they even finish what they do get? Further, I would think that none of them would have very much energy, and all of them would be thin.
I'm mystified--the numbers don't seem right to me. The dry food offers more volume--so maybe it's not as little food as it seems to be. I can't imagine the cats would eat that much even if I offered it to them. So why does the can suggest so much?

NEWS - Stemming criticism

I consider stem cell research to be of vital importance. I believe that an embryo is a potential human being, but not a human being in its own right. Starting from that premise, I have few qualms about abortion, let alone stem cell research--which uses cells at a much earlier stage than a typical abortion, and destroys cells that would never be allowed to develop in any event.
However, I recognize that some people have serious moral qualms about destroying embryos--even in the face of the benefits that stem cell research seems likely to bring. While I strongly disagree with that position, I also believe it's reprehensible to compel people to pay for that which they consider immoral. That's why, while I consider stem cell research to be of the utmost importance, I also agree with President Bush's ban on using government money for said science.
Now for the good news: Harvard University is doing what I and like-minded libertarians hoped for--conducting this important research with private funds.

NEWS - Is Google leaving China?

In previous blog entries, I commented that I thought Google was getting treated unfairly for their compliance with the Chinese government regarding Google.cn, and subsequently elaborated that the ethical implications were more complex than a lot of people made them out to be and further that I tended to think, while Google may have been within their rights, I did think they chose the wrong course.
Well, according to an article in The Australian and another in The Telegraph, Google is considering pulling out of China. I think the best thing to say at this point is "stay tuned."

NEWS - Hanging out in Arctic circles?

OK. Apparently, the scientific community is mulling over new data that suggests the Arctic once had a climate more like present day Florida. I'm not surprised that two major points about global warming were neglected here; everyone seems to ignore them. What really surprised me is that one important point about the data itself, seem to have been neglected in what I've read.

That article, on LiveScience.com, states, "Unlike today's warming, however, the ancient rise in temperature was not associated with human activity, of course." Since only people who get their natural history from "The Flintstones" believe people were on the Earth 55 million years ago, that's belaboring the obvious. However, assuming global warming is happening today, why assume it is caused by human activity? After all, in this earlier instance, it wasn't--so isn't it at least possible that it isn't this time either?

An article in the Houston Chronicle also accepts the traditional, environmentalist global warming hypothesis. One paragraph from that article states,

"What's troubling is that this suggests that the current projections that say the Earth will grow warmer by several degrees over the next century may be on the low end, said the study's lead author, Appy Sluijs of the Institute of Environmental Biology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands."

I will grant that if global warming is happening according to the common hypothesis, then this data suggests things may get a lot hotter. The flipside, though, is that the Earth--even in this extreme example, was still habitable. The doomsayers will be quick to point out that much of the world would become inhospitably hot; it's easy to forget that while some of the world is already too hot for us, much of the world is also inhospitably cold, and those parts will become suitable for agriculture and habitation. The bottom line is that I've not yet seen anything to make me believe that global warming would be the end of the world.

I must admit, however, my skepticism about the data is a point made only by one letter to the editor in the Bucks County Courier Times (and then, at that, the letter writer uses the point to as proof that modern global warming is caused by pollution). The continents move. The Arctic Ocean seafloor wasn't always near the north pole. I don't believe I could have completely missed hearing about a major breakthrough in geology that a refutation of plate tectonics theory would be. No one seems to be addressing the important question: were the warmer temperatures simply a consequence of that place on the plate being at a lower latitude? I suppose it's possible the core sample came from someplace that was near the north pole 55 million years ago; however, the articles didn't explicitly state that--they simply seem to assume it. I would note that both articles' authors felt the need to clarify that the ancient global warming was not caused human activity. Accounting for continental drift is as basic a point, but a less obvious one than noting that people weren't around.