UnSpace

Potholes have long been a problem in Pennsylvania, but thanks to new research on army ants, that problem may be coming to an end:

Remarkably, some ants use their bodies to plug potholes in the trail leading back to the nest, making a flatter surface so that prey can be delivered to the developing young at maximum speed.

One would hope that PennDot would realize this means patching potholes should be a higher priority. Unfortunately, there is the possibility that PennDot might take the study more literally, using passengers, drivers, and even entire vehicles to plug potholes. Pennsylvania motorists are eagerly awaiting PennDot's decision in this matter.

I used to support PA state Supreme Court candidate Debra Todd. But recently, she showed to me that she is lacking the courage and/or judgment necessary for that position.

Jason Phillips worked for Debra Todd's campaign. He noticed some City of Pittsburgh workers wearing t-shirts for a candidate while on the job. He reported it. Phillips was fired for reporting this wrongdoing. Todd is a Democrat, the candidate the workers were supporting was a Democrat, and so Phillips lost his job.

I don't know if this means Debra Todd supports illegal behavior on behalf of Democrats, or if she caved in to the Democratic political machine, or if it was both, or if she isn't in control of her own campaign. I don't think it matters. There is no excuse for what she did.

I do not believe Debra Todd should, under any circumstance, be elected to the state Supreme Court. I am sorry that I ever supported her, and I am ashamed that she is from my state.

Sitting at the computer is difficult, so I've been doing a lot of web surfing on my phone. This blog looks nice in mobile form thanks to the plug-in, BTW.

Anyone else surf a lot on their Pocket PC or Phone/PC? Any web sites you'd suggest?

I'd especially appreciate something that gave TV schedules.

Now to see how to blog using the phone…

Did I say anything yesterday about feeling better?

Bzzz. Wrong. Still in pain. Sitting at the computer makes it FAR worse. This chair is normally amazingly comfortable. The absolute best place is the front seat of the car. Saturn Auras have great front seats.

Time for NSAIDS once again! When the high points of your day is NSAIDS and the History Channel review of Millard Filmore… Yeah, I'm rotting my brain, parked in front of the TV watching the History channel special on the Presidents. TR should have run for a consecutive third term.

My back started bothering me Saturday before we went out to eat. I didn't do anything particular that would make it hurt. Sunday, I skipped church so that I might get better. I should have skipped a family event at the church that night, but I promised to take photos. Monday, I could barely move.

The pain was so bad, I rationed my food. Getting up to go to the bathroom was agony, but I knew I had to keep drinking water to help my back heal. I couldn't even sit at the desk. I've been here about 15 minutes, and I think that was 5 too long.

Prayers appreciated. I'll be back eventually. I hope Blogfest 10 was fun. I wish I could have gone.

The calibration of my Huey for my monitor hadn't been done in a while. Apparently you do have to recalibrate every once in a while. Why Adobe Photoshop Elements, Corel Paint Shop Pro, and Firefox all respond differently to the monitor calibration being off, I don't know. But I recalibrated and now the picture of the bonsai no longer has blotches, but the pot the plant is in is totally whacked.

Maybe I'm not cut out for this artsy stuff.

MSNBC/Newsweek has an interview with the reclusive Berkley Breathed, creator of the comic strips Bloom County, Outland, and Opus. The interview itself is a great read, but I simply had to post this one little answer. Yes, it's a bit beyond the "2 sentences" of fair use, but it's such genius, I believe this is an understandable exception. Breathed is commenting on what he believes politically. Breathed is asked if he is without political affiliation:

No, me and a few other desperately cold pragmatists are the founders of The Meadow Party. Remember that one? That's one where you don't support silly things not because they conflict with political ideology, religion or philosophy, but because they sound silly. Invading a Muslim country, blowing it up and assuming we could leave in a few months with it looking like Vermont was silly. Cartoon silly. Opus silly. Worse, Bill the Cat silly.

Yeah. Bill-the-Cat silly. Says it all, doesn't it?

Here's Nancy's bonsai azalea.

I don't know why, but in the photo, there are several blotches which aren't seen when you look at the image in the photo editing program. The printed version looks different from both. This is driving me nuts.

Oxygen kills. And maybe it doesn't have to. Right now, Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) is still the thing to do when someone's heart stops. But in the future, that might not be the case.

Imagine a person who stops breathing. The heart, out of oxygen to burn fuel to create energy to pump, stops. Four to six minutes after the heart stops, brain cells begin to die.

That last part isn't correct. If the person is left to lie there, with no medical treatment, the brain cells are still alive an hour or more after the heart stops. Once the heart stops, the brain cells will die, but it takes far, far longer than anyone thought.

But let's assume a paramedic shows up after, say, ten minutes. She pulls out the defibrillator, shocks the heart from fine v-fib into a normal rhythm, and starts pumping oxygen into the lungs with the Bag-Valve-Mask (aka BVM). Oxygen enters the blood and makes it's way to the brain. The oxygen enters the brain cell and diffuses toward the mitochondria. Mitochondria are the power plants of the cell. They combine oxygen and glucose and turn it into energy to run everything. But the mitochondria have been without oxygen for too long. How isn't exactly known, but for some reason, the mitochondria respond to the oxygen as if the cell it belongs to has turned cancerous. To protect the rest of the body, the mitochondria cause the cell to destroy itself. Mitochondria throughout the brain and the rest of the body send signals out to destroy the cells of the person, and only then does the person begin to die.

Without oxygen, the cell will eventually die. With oxygen, the cell dies faster.

Now, imagine we find out what causes the mitochondria to "commit suicide." What if we could stop that signal? Things get weird. Bystanders would no longer perform CPR. Paramedics would pump a new drug into the patient, without giving the patient oxygen. At the hospital, after the drug has spread throughout the body and into the cells and into the mitochondria, only then would the patient be given oxygen.

In fact, imagine instead, someone with a spurting arterial wound in a car accident. The paramedics can only slow the bleeding, and the Rescue truck will take at least 15 minutes with the Jaws of Life to get the patient out of the car. A paramedic crawls inside with the dying man, and with reassuring words, administers the new drug and then stops the patient's heart. About 45 minutes later at the hospital, after the surgeons have fixed the wound,  the patient's heart is restarted, oxygen administered, and a patient that would have died instead lives to thank the paramedic who killed him.

Most disturbing, imagine a patient with a terminal disease. Breathing stops, and the heart trembles and finally quits. Family gathers around and says goodbye. Then the nurses come in, clean the body and place the body in the plastic bag and zipper it up, ready for the funeral home. But strangely, the brain is not dead. The brain is not active, but neither is the brain dead.

Unfortunately, we don't have that "mitochondrial suicide-stopping" drug yet. Perhaps it's not even possible. For now, CPR by bystanders, calling 911, paramedics providing Advanced Cardiac Life Support, and emergency rooms equipped to save "hearts too good to die" will be the way to go. But in the years from now, emergency medicine might get really weird.

I've been on a new anti-depressant for two weeks.

Depression comes in two forms: typical and atypical. Typical, in addition to the other symptoms, is associated with weight loss. Atypical, in addition to other symptoms, is associated with weight gain. In one of "those" occurrences in science, atypical depression is far more common than typical. Alas, I've got atypical.

Most anti-depressants make you want to eat too much. The problem is severe enough that doctors are supposed to watch  patients on antidepressants to make sure they don't become diabetic. Just to make things even happier, even after weight, exercise levels, and everything else is accounted for, a new study shows that depression is a risk factor for diabetes in and of itself. Nice little vicious circle, huh? I'm a diabetic, for those of you who haven't been following along playing the home game.

Well, the anti-depressants would work on me for a while and then stop. So, all the anti-depressants were doing was resulting in mighty expensive urine and causing me to gain weight — a bad thing for diabetics, since weight gain makes diabetes worse. The last time I went into the doctor I told him "Look, nothing is working. Why don't we try Bupropion?" This isn't an anti-depressant that should work on me, but it causes weight loss. It also has "fewer sexual side effects." I'm sure you've seen the commercial. Even if Bupropion did nothing for my depression, I'd take the weight loss and probably be happier overall. Not dying tends to make me happier. I'm weird that way. The psychiatrist shrugged and wrote the script. It was one of those cynical "risk benefit" trade-off times medicine and "House, MD" are so fond of.

Fast forward two weeks. Yesterday was the first day I took two pills of Bupropion. After the first pill, my mouth went dry and my eyes went…wrong. Why the doctor had to ramp up the dosage seemed apparent. Then I tried to get to sleep at 11 o'clock. Usually, I climb into bed, read about a page of a book and have trouble putting the book down before I fall asleep. The book wasn't that interesting, so I put it down after a chapter and tried to force sleep. Bzzzz! Wrong answer. Finally around 3:30 a.m., I fell asleep — and then woke up at 6:30 a.m. so I could go to the church and finish printing the church newsletter so the volunteers could fold and label it. The printer broke yesterday, so we didn't finish printing it in time.

By noon, the newsletter was printed, folded, labeled, sorted into the bulk mail groups, taken to the North Side and mailed at the bulk mail facility. I skipped coffee, because I didn't need it. Let me take that back. I didn't dare drink coffee.

Well, the newsletter was done a day early, despite my setting an ambitious time schedule for myself. It was done well enough, although I can tell you about 300 things that are wrong with it. But I don't look at the newsletter and start mumbling how "All I can do is crank out crap." There was no drama, no major crisis. I got the newsletter finished early. Changing the saddle staple cartridges was about as dangerous as it got. Granted, if I were to break the new Cannon networked copier, there would be some excitement, but the copier walks you through changing the cartridges! Don't tell anyone the copier explains how to fix itself. They think I'm some sort of genius. It's all P.R.!

I'm down a pound, with no effort. Not much, but it's a start.

I don't feel depressed, but that happens with every anti-depressant at the start. Ask me mid- to late August how I'm feeling and we'll see how well Bupropion is working. That's one of the three "crashes" of the year, up there with Christmas and taxes. I wish I'd started the Bupropion before taxes. Now there was some drama!

For right now, I'll take it. I do hope I get more than three hours of sleep tonight. I don't feel sleepy, but I do feel something that feels like an all-nighter, only without the lack of sleep.

So tell me. If obesity is a moral problem, then why does diabetes cause weight gain? If it's a question of will, how could I run three marathons and not lose any weight? Do most anti-depressants make me less of a moral person? Does Bupropion make me more moral?

Well, that last one is a hope. One pound lost does not a weight loss program make; it's only a start.

Here's a quick post with pictures from our back yard. Click on the pictures to see bigger versions!

This is bellwort. It always looks dehydrated. Even the flowers look like they're wilting.

This horsetail is in the "dry" region of the yard, where the cactus is.

This lilac volunteered in the yard!

This is some wild geranium that's blooming.

This is wild phlox. It's quite a bit different from the cultivated stuff.