The 'Destruction" of Wealth

OK, economics is not my thing. I am pretty good at seeing the big picture, the concrete, the forest that all the tree are in, whatever, but economics largely escapes me.

NPR was talking about the "great destruction of wealth" that is going on.

I don't understand the concrete reality of this. Wealth usually has to do with money, yes? So you have money or you don't. If you have money and put it in the bank, the bank presumably will give it back to you when you withdraw it. If you have money and you put it under your mattress it will stay there, but also serve no useful purpose in the meantime. If you put your money under your mattress, smoke in bed, catch your mattress on fire and burn up your money, you have destroyed it.

Now, if you put your money on a bet on a horse, you no longer have that money, you spent it. It is not destroyed, it has been spent. If you were clever and lucky, the horse wins and the track awards you money based on how much total money was bet on the horse out of the total money spent on that race, and taking their profit margin into account. Overall, all the people betting on that race put more money in than they get back with winnings, and the best horses win some money, and the track makes a profit off the bets, the horses entered, and the people who paid admission to watch as well as what they ate and drank. All together no wealth was destroyed, though it got moved around.

Now if you are a bank you have people pay money into a variety of banking services, the bank in turn pays money out in various ways that they hope to make money on. In recent years the banks foolishly sent money out to people who were buying houses that they couldn't really afford, and spent money on other things that were essentially bets. The banks were not clever or lucky and they lost a lot of bets. the money is not GONE it just got moved around.

Similarly, people bought houses by taking out loans and then bet on the idea that their houses were increasing in "value" and took out more loans etc.

Turns out that the housing market was overinflated. Real Americans just can't afford to pay that much for houses, so the bets were not good ones. Any perceived wealth that these people thought they had was just not there. Nothing was destroyed. The houses still exist. Unfortunately for the mortgage holders, they can't make their payments, the loans default and all the money that they HAD paid to the bank stays with the bank and the people are tossed out of the house. So the people spent a chunk of money and only got the time they lived in the house from it, kind of like paying rent. The bank got some but not all the money they loaned back, only the original seller should be still happy. nonetheless, the money used was not destroyed, rather it is all in the hands of the bank and the original seller.

I would chalk it all up to foolish betting. Investors were imagining big wins that they just didn't get.

Unfortunately, that left these bank's money spread in places where they couldn't get it back, so they are short on cash and won't lend money easily and we are way to used to doing too much on credit so the whole economy skids. But, no wealth was DESTROYED.

So, what am I missing?

Educate or leave it be?

I am an educator. I also have a standard academic/intellectual approach to things. I am happy to debate, I like to find out what the truth is, I take a bit of odd egotistical pride in admitting I am wrong when I am.

Now, what if someone else is wrong, or says I am wrong when I'm not? My native tendency is to correct them, and supply direct evidence showing what I am saying is true (or as true as we poor human creatures normally get to).

Now add on another hitch suppose the misinformation that the other person has is common misinformation? I run into this problem frequently, as there is a lot of common misinformation out there.

And finally what if the misinformation is propaganda? This is where I get the most conflicted. 1) Wow is that WRONG and it is used to support what I think of as bad ideology on top of that! 2) If I give this person the information that will show the errors they will think it is an attack on their ideology, which in truth it will be and they may take it very personally. 3) They may be so successfully propaganda brainwashed that they will assume that I am the one who is, and disregard all evidence to the contrary.

But still, there I go, bringing out information, showing data, all with a sinking heart.

Tonight I was doing it about stem cells. I was so pleased to see the removal of Bush's strict limits on human embryonic stem cell research. There has been so much promising work done with mouse ES cells that it is a real shame that similar work has lagged so with human ES cells. Obama's removal of Presidential limits will not open the field wide of course, congress and States need to deal with it now. But, I was pleased and Obama's statements about separating science from ideology were nice to hear.

Of course I found myself accused of being blatantly political in my approach to science. I was told that "All of the promising research is in adult or umbilical cord stem cells. This is nakedly political." In truth the person doesn't think that the federal government should support ANY scientific research, or education for that matter. The free market should handle everything. Personally I would not want to live in that entirely free market world. I think the government provides societal roles that the free market really can't, but that is besides the point.

There is some very exciting embryonic stem cell work being done. Most of it is done with Mouse ES cells, and a good chunk of it not in the U.S. So, I supplied lists of articles and titles and authors for a handful of cool new ES studies published in the last few months. Most of them were done with mouse cells, most of them were not dne in this country. A couple of them checked non-embryonic stem cells to see how they might work. Answer? Not so well.

I completely expect to be lambasted for this, or to be met with hurt. Oh well. It seems that I can't not do it. I want to set the facts straight.

The Truth, and Falsehoods, are Out There

“Why” Noelle said to me on the phone ”do people get angry when you tell them the truth?”

My immediate thought were of people asking for an opinion on how they looked, or the taste of a newly tried recipe, or a student asking “is this ok?” about some idea for a paper. That was not what it was about.

Noelle’s son is in a parochial school. It was a little before Christmas. His teacher had told his class a story about the meaning of candy canes. The teacher said that the hook shape is the letter J for Jesus, that the red stripes were for the blood of Christ shed on the cross. She had a Christian meaning for everything. (you can find this kind of interpretation with minimal Google searching on the internet). Even the pepperment flavor has been linked to a biblical herb.

Noelle had thought that this sounded bogus, so she looked up the origins of candy canes. All even semi-scholarly accounts had them starting as simple sugar sticks as a treat for kids that were initially bent (according to legend) in shepherd’s crook shape by a Choirmaster at a cathedral who would give them to the children there in the 17th century. They hung nicely on Christmas trees and caught on. People made them at home, simple white bent sugar sticks hanging on Christmas trees. Some played with flavors and colorings.

The “traditional” flavor and striping are 20th century additions. The red stripes were pretty on the trees, the peppermint flavor cheap and popular, and were incorporated by commercial manufacturers. They sold well.

Noelle told this to her son, and then, out of curiosity asked her husband what he knew about candy canes. Even though he is an atheist, he repeated the blood of Christ story, which he had heard when he was young. When Noelle told him that that was modern myth-making, he was angry.

So, the phone call: I said that I found the attached meaning to be pretty harmless. If it had been my kid, I would probably have looked it, found it not to be true, and told the kid that that wasn’t the origin, but that adding the meaning to the modern red striped canes helps remind us of the origins of Christmas. If I had been the Catholic school teacher (and more religious than I currently am) I would have said that the red stripes can remind us of the blood of Christ who died on a cross for our sins, and if you turn the cane upside down it is a J, and if we do that, even this simple candy treat can take on Christmas meaning for us.

Noelle was not impressed.


Since then I have been thinking about this often. More and more I am seeing in it an underlying flaw in human nature. People tend to make up or hear stories that they like. They invest in them emotionally. They go through all kinds of avoidance and denial of any facts that might show the story to be false. On occasion this can be helpful, or harmless, but more often it is counterproductive or even harmful.

People take hypotheses or even cobbled together bits of poorly sorted observations and treat them as if they were true facts and explanations, not unsupported ideas. Then they willfully adhere to them in the face of contradictory information, or simple refuse to look and see if they might be false.

Our student newspaper had a headline “Parents say MMR vaccine linked to autism” when the article was about a court decision to not allow people with autistic kids to get monetary compensation from a vaccine-related damages fund. The article went on to correctly report that huge studies have found no link between autism and vaccines and that author of a founding study that led to the idea of the connection had been found to have manipulated and falsified records to support his hypothesis. Yet, the headline implied the well-refuted hypothesis.

For ten years individuals advocacy groups have been raising money wasting time and energy on a incorrect hypothesis. There is no problem with that initially, as hypotheses need to be tested, but once it is clear that they are wrong, work on others! Years of time and money that could REALLY have made a difference wasted. Children were put at risk, and some died due to fears about vaccinations.

Interestingly, the student newspaper also reported a story about Beer Pong and infectious diseases such as herpes, supposedly reported by the CDC. Um, no. That study has not in fact been done. Once one newspaper reported it, large numbers of others picked it up. It was an the kind of story the student newspaper wanted. The editor published a well thought out apology for jumping on the bandwagon without checking the facts.

Needless deaths, our history is full of them, and often they are due to willfull belief in falsehoods. What about the Bush administration’s belief, or if one is more cynical, the Bush administration’s success at getting many Americans to unquestionably believe, that there were WMDs in Iraq. How many lives did that cost? How many trillions of dollars? If only people had paid attention to the quality of the evidence. Certainly, one can argue that Saddam unchecked would have cost many many lives as well, and that would be true, but that was not the argument that took us to Iraq. I suspect that there would have been MANY better possible solutions that what happened, many that would have not cost so very much in money and destruction and lives.

I talked to a bunch of people in Colorado in 2004 who had allowed themselves to be convinced that Saddam had orchestrated the bombing of the World Trade Center. When I tried to say no, all the evidence points elsewhere, I was accused of having been brainwashed by the "liberal media". I wonder if there are still people who believe that. Alternatively, a couple of Middle-eastern students on campus told me that it was an Israeli plot and that all of the Jews had been warned in advance and so didn't go to work in the towers that day. All the information about Jewish people who died in the towers was ignored, or said to be misleading lies. Craziness.

What about the long denial by smokers that smoking was harmful? What about the conspiracy theories that perpetuate hatred?

Why do people want to believe things that aren’t true? These days it is so easy to go online and sift through information from a variety of sources and often quickly determine what is likely to be valid, and want is just rant, and opinion, and uncontrolled observation. Why is that so hard to do?

A Narcissistic Post

My last entry was number 100. I suppose that I should have paid attention and maybe done this there.

Sometimes I wonder how many people are out there who are like me. Only two or three people look at my blog so it is hardly the place to find out. Nonetheless,it makes me think about what I think are my defining characteristics. Katie occasionally puts up a list of assorted things about herself. Is it useful? Is it an exercise in narcissism? I don’t know. It is why people design and repeat memes. So, with those useless ruminations I am going to embark on a list of what I think are defining characteristics about me, numbered but in no particular order:

1. I’m smart. My IQ was measured at about 160 when I was a child. I assume that it hasn’t changed. Though one never knows.

2. I’m dyslexic. I attribute to that my poor spelling, inability to tell left from right, inability to memorize, and poor organizational skills.

3. I’m creative. I’m a creative cook, have an arty side, like to doodle and draw and create things from beads, clay, whatever. Unfortunately I have little time for that.

4. I’m devoted to and like my job, and it was what I wanted to do since childhood, a Genetics Professor and researcher and a teaching oriented University. I like science in general, biology more specifically. I view the whole world through my scientist eyes.

5. Unfortunately I am a procrastinator and a slow grader.

6. I’m unusually strong. I do not need to work out to keep my unusual muscles, though I like to work out.

7. I’m fat. I have fought with my weight since puberty. Before puberty I was scrawny.

8. I love music, a lot of music, though I tend to dislike pop and country and the classical impressionists like Ravel. I like Beethoven, Bach, Poulanc, Shostakovich, Dvorak, Schubert, Beatles, Led Zeppelen, Stones, REM, Radiohead, the Talking Heads, the Ramones, Reggae, blues, jazz, some rap and reggaeton…. you get the idea. I like my music darker and harder, less sweet and fluffy.

9. I like fantasy and science fiction in book and film.

10. I am interested in politics.

11. I like my steaks very very rare.

12. I am handy with tools and equipment.

13. I have never been in a lasting romantic relationship. In fact, my longest relationship was almost 30 years ago and it lasted 3 months. I find the opposite sex quite attractive in general, and I liked sex in the distant past when I actually had some, but I guess trying to find someone is way low on my priority list.

14. I painted my office a deep winy purple. I like it.

15. I think greed is one of the greatest evils of our age.

16. I like to garden.

17. I’m pretty lazy at times.

18. I dislike heat.

19. I don’t wear pastel colors.

20. I think valuing things based on the label and the price is very silly. As a result I really don’t pay attention to labels. I see women exclaiming over a purse or shoes. I look, they rarely look practical or aesthetically pleasing, so I don’t understand the fuss. Turns out, they are expensive, have a name attached that informs people of their expensiveness. Those people who judge by shoes and clothes… well, they won’t think highly of me.

21. And yet. I am picky about clothes, shoes etc. I have to LIKE them, they need to please me in cut and color and comfort. They gain desirability to me if they are inexpensive as well.

22. I really, really wish I were a better housekeeper.

23. I have too many cats. Anybody want one?

24. I have a healthy ego.

25. I have no phobias.

26. I rarely get sick.

27. I dislike the vast majority of junk food and fast food.

28. I have little interest in sports. Curling kind of fascinated me a couple of Winter Olympics ago though.

29. I think snow is beautiful.

30. I like having four seasons.

31. I was born in California but have something of a distaste for the state now.

32. I think that more people, ideally almost all people, should be able to think critically and have the ability to tell what is substantiated from what isn’t.

33. I am not good with handling money. Some of that may come from the fact that I don’t truly care if I have money or not. I have survived on very little (10K a year living in Manhattan) and it’s quite doable, and not terribly oppressive. 5 years ago I lived in Cambridge England for 5 months on almost nothing. I rented a room in a house by the week. I rode an old bike to get around. I had possessions to fill two suitcases. I was very happy.

34. I am not frightened by the future.

35. I will take off by myself on 9 hour drives, or travel overseas without concern.

36. I like to drive.

37. I can drive through the entire night without a problem.

38. I have some trouble driving entirely through the day, particularly if it is sunny and warm, I get sleepy.

39. As I have little interest in sports, never had kids or a long term relationship I can be very uncomfortable in social situations with adults my age. Everyone talks a lot about sports, their kids, and spouses. I find it difficult to project the appearance of interest and involvement in these conversations.

40. I like to wear black.

41. I like rich spicy scents, sandalwood, patchouli, roses, peonies, nicotiana, cinnamon, wood fires.

42. I seem to be able to get older babies and toddlers to stop crying by catching their eyes and holding hard to their gaze. Stare hard, they shut up. I don’t know why.

43. Generally I don’t like gold or diamonds, except for ornamentation as in gold leaf, and giant diamonds in museums. Huge diamonds hold the light in an interesting way, mesmerizing.

44. I am almost always wide awake at midnight.

45. I like red wine. I know a glass a day is probably good for you, but I often am busy or forget. Once in a while I will have two or three glasses. That is not probably what the studies showed benefits from.

46. I wish I could figure out a way to easily stop doing one thing and start another. I tend to do whatever I’m doing for long periods of time. Other things don’t happen.

47. I think about everything.

48. I love to debate or take a contrary stance just to think about all sides of something. My family as a whole does that all the time. There is no emotional weight attached to it.

49. I am not a very emotional person, I am rarely sad, anxious, blissful, giddy, angry, furious, or depressed.

50. I like to dance, even all by myself.

Fifty is good.

So, you want to be a Doctor?

Some days I just don’t understand people.

I find myself asking good friends odd, rather basic questions, to see if the way I approach and think about things is way outside the norm. The answer is often yes. Often enough, the norm is simply incomprehensible to me.

I recently was interviewing prospective students for a very advanced, accelerated program that ideally takes kids who just graduated from high school and pops them out as newly minted MDs in 6 years. I teach Genetics, which is required for the program.

(Yes, yes, I know many people say “graduate high school” but as no student I know finishes their education by measuring and marking the institution that was conferring a degree upon them.)

In any case, these were high school kids who have been very successful students, with high GPAs, high test scores, and great recommendations. They claim that they want to be doctors. They claim to ready to dive into year-round classes with high workloads and potentially go 200,000 in debt over 10 years (you have to add on internship and residency in the timeline) to end up licensed to practice medicine. Even in the accelerated program this is a long time and a lot of money. No one should go into it unless this is what they really, really want. I know several people who left the program, already in debt, either realizing that medical school or being a practicing physician was not for them. I have interacted with even more who I would never want to be my doctor because they have little interest in the well-being of people, and even less in truly finding out how to be a good doctor. There are many outstanding students, of course, who will end up fine physicians, but not as high of a percentage as I would like.

Our Medical School’s goal, which is stated frequently, is to produce general practitioners, ideally for rural and urban under-served areas.

I was tired of the same old questions and the typical pat answers.

"Why do you want to be a doctor?"
"Because my (mom, favorite uncle, best friend's dad, or beloved grandparent) got sick (and maybe died) when I was (5, 7, 11, 14). I spent lots of time in the hospital and saw that doctors really help people so I want to be one"
or "My father is my role-model and he is a doctor and I want to be just like him"

"What would you do if your best friend in college was cheating?"
"I would tell her that she shouldn't, it's wrong, and turn her in"

"What are your strengths and weaknesses?"
"I'm caring and smart but I can be impatient, or I need more confidence, or I can be too serious"

"Why did you apply to this accelerated progeram?"
"Because I really want to get done and be a doctor and help people as soon as possible" or "Because this is the main way to get into you wonderful high -ranking med school!" (which is bull, we do not rank high)


So, what did I do? I made the mistake of thinking about how I was as a high school student. I wanted to end up a professor of Genetics before I even entered high school. There was no life-changing event, or great teacher, or geneticist parent to inspire me to do this. Rather, I read a lot, I read the newspaper, the information that I ran across about genetics fascinated me. I looked up more things. I read “The Double Helix” by James Watson when I was a Sophomore in high school if I remember right.. I followed news on the topic, I looked up all kinds of things in the library. I knew how political candidates stood on issues of Biology, and the Environment, and Education, and yes, even health care.

I never had a great Biology class. In fact I think I had ONE biology class total in Jr. High and high school combined. It was experimental. It didn’t work well. It didn’t matter. My heart was already in it. I also played in orchestras, drew and painted, swam on a swim team,and had fun writing in AP English, but Biology degrees and Genetics was where I was going.

So I asked these candidates questions to determine whether they were devoted to their area or not, such as:

1. What do you think of the various health care plans that the Presidential Candidates presented before the last election?

2. What problems face health care in the U.S. now?

3. Do you know what the rough rank U.S. health care holds in terms of cost and infant mortality among developed countries?

4. Why do you think the U.S. has the most expensive per capita health care and yet the highest infant mortality rate amongst “advanced” countries? (this one added when clearly no student had a clue about the last one)

5. What do you think general practitioners could do to help the health care status of individuals in their communities?

Answers?
1. “I don’t follow politics”
2. “Ummmmm”
3. “I don’t know… we are pretty good, right?”
4. “Ummmmm”. Finally, after being pressed two of the batch that we interviewed (two interviewers and one student at a time) said “Welll, I guess Americans eat too much junk food, and some people really don’t take care of themselves.”
5. “Ummmmm.” One finally said “Maybe doctors could spend more time with their patients.


After this debacle we started asking whether everyone in the U.S. had good access to health care. The answer “Yes!” and then on seeing our faces said, “Well I guess some people might live a long way from hospitals”

Of the eight, six had fathers who were doctors. How can they know NOTHING about issues in area in which they want to work?

I also asked questions about medical news to no avail.

*sighs*

What are we doing? What are THEY doing?

I asked several people if I was being unreasonable. Some said that high school kids don't read newspapers and should not really be expected to know much about the area in which they plan to eventually work.

But I did!

Another Meme

I found this one here, and had a hard time finishing what I needed to do earlier today and not procrastinating to do this first.

Summer or winter? Winter
Hugs or kisses? Hugs
Favourite desserts? Mmmmm Deep dark chocolate Mousse, hot apple pie with vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce, creme brulee but only in Paris. The secret recipe Cheesecake...
I’m most likely to... stay up late
I’m least likely to...watch sit-coms
What book are you reading now? “Storm Front” by Jim Butcher
What is on your mouse pad? I have a track pad, it is the same color white as the iBook it is in.
What did you watch on television last night? X-files
Favourite sounds? Wind-chimes, rain, nightingale
Least favourite sounds? Babies crying, cat fights, car alarms
Rolling Stones or The Beatles? I have very high regard for the Beatles, but, The Rolling Stones!
What is the furtherest you’ve been from home? Latvia, or maybe Rome, which is farther?
Do you have a special talent? I am told “procrastination, and inducing it in others” by one and “finding male kitten testicles” by another, in truth, I think Turning Out Streetlights, a talent that I had though left me a couple of years ago, but which seems to be back with a vengeance.
Where were you born? Northern California
Who do you miss the most? Real Mountains, Thai food, fresh fish
What colour shoes are you wearing? I am barefoot
What was the last thing you ate? Singapore My Fun
What are you listening to right now? Law and Order on the TV, sorry to say. Not a common thing.
Favourite smells? Sandalwood, Nag Champa, Patchouli, sautéing mushrooms, wood fire in the fireplace, fresh baking bread, garlic in almost anything
Who was the last person you spoke to on the phone? Noelle
Hair colour? dark brown with silver wings
Eye colour? green gray blue
Do you wear contacts? no
Favourite food? Sesame noodles, rare grilled steak, Caesar salad as I make it, Green curry, fatty tuna sashimi, Uni, Salmon raw, cooked... whatever. Lobster, Dungeness crab fresh caught then cooked fast....
Scary movies or happy endings? Scary
Last movie you watched? Blade Runner Final Cut
What colour shirt are you wearing? turquoise
Were you named after anyone? no
When was the last time you cried? Today, reading a story about a cancer patient’s thoughtful and orderly suicide.
What is your favourite lunch meat? Good roast beef, hard to find, my own roast turkey, from the store... maple ham
If you were another person would you be friends with you? probably
Do you use sarcasm a lot? no
Do you still have your tonsils? no
Would you bungee jump? yes
What is your favourite cereal? Lucky Charms
Do you untie your shoes when you take them off? No
Do you think you are strong? YES
What is your favourite ice cream? Dve Caramel Toffee Moment, and Breyer's Mint Chocolate Chip (not together)
What is the first thing you notice about people? Their eyes, their appearance of fitness
Red or pink? Red
What is the least favourite thing about yourself? Fatness, disorganization

The Inauguration

It is a beautiful, cold and snowy day here in Ohio. I stayed late at home to watch the inauguration.

High points for me:

Aretha Franklin singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” I was wiping my eyes.

A quartet consisting of Itzhak Perlman on violin, Yo Yo Ma on cello, Garbriela Montero on piano and Anthony McGill on clarinet playing a piece by John Williams that refered to other American classical music, most notably Aaron Copeland. How wonderful to bring classical music back into a spotlight.

Poet Elizabeth Alexander on being asked about why Obama chose to have a poem for the ceremony “He has said the precise and distilled and mindful language of poetry is perhaps something that can create a moment of meditation for us”. Again, we have evidence of the restoration of thought, scholarship, and the arts to our leadership.

Her poem:

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.”

Exerpts from Obama’s address that particularly impressed me:

“We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.”

“For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act - not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions - who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.”

“Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.”

“What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.”

Yes

Yes

Yes

I hope that we turn from sloth, selfishness, greed, and thoughtlessness to a future in which we move forward, improving the world and ourselves together.

Achievement, Responsibility, Compassion, Sustainability, Freedom, Peace

“In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.”

Today is a good day.

New Year's Musings 2009

I could have been a pretty good scientist. I am smart enough, and I have a good concept of scientific method and experimental design. I can work very hard when the occasion arises, I have done 36 hour experiments with pleasure. I love finding out new things. My teaching load and lack of resources makes being an outstanding scientist nearly impossible.

I can be a very good teacher. When I have motivated students, I am good at advising and presenting material in new ways. Those students that I have interacted with who have gone on to become very good scientists in their own rights I am very proud of. That means you, Diana, and Anna, and Rob, amongst others, though only one of you may ever read this. You have done well, you are smart, you will contribute to the body of human knowledge. I wish I reached more students with potential.

I might have been a good mother, that possibility is gone by the wayside naturally, and I am not inclined to ever adopt. I appear to be missing some essential social skills or attributes or opportunities to have achieved that. I like men. The feeling does not seem to be mutual.

I might have been a good lover/wife/companion to someone. I seriously doubt that I ever will be. I have rarely even dated in my life. I have had what, a half a dozen sex partners? Only one did I love, and all of that is in the very distant past. I have had the pleasure of any number of love interests, but only one or two reciprocated in any way, and those were not truly possible.

I could look great (for my age). I have good bones, decent genes and I really like to work out. I have often thought that one could spend much of one’s life at the gym, perfecting the body, leaving to read or party. Unfortunately, I really like to eat. I’m a good cook. I am terribly subject to continuing doing whatever I’m doing. I can sleep and eat and read books for days and days. I can work out and watch my diet too, but I have to get started. My schedule for the last year has interfered withy my normal gym habits. My schedule this term is finally light. Yay! Maybe I can get back into good habits.

I could have been an artist perhaps, or even a poet, but my heart is truly in science, and you know, you can make a living with science.

I am an overworked professor. Most of my students hate me, I neglect my grad students. I WANT to teach well, I WANT to be a perfect mentor. Unfortunately I have trouble with prioritizing, am a slow grader, and have a workload unimaginable to my scientific colleagues. And, you know, I am just not a type A person. I am not terribly competitive, I like my personal time, I am watching Star Wars and drinking a light margarita as I write this. I have a lap full of cats. I should be cleaning, or working on revising lectures for the classes that start in 2 days. But there is lovely snow out, Star Wars is on, the cats are warm, and I am comfortable.

I am tenured, my job is secure. My cats love me. I reach the occasional student. Already I have perhaps effected more people in a positive may than the vast majority of people ever do. Hopefully I have not discouraged more people who would otherwise not have been discouraged and who had potential. I like teaching, particularly early in the term when I still believe that ALL the students can succeed and do well. Being single, my life is my own, I can pretty much do what I want.

I really have a good life.

I am not one who makes New Year’s resolutions, but, with the light schedual I have finagled this term, I hope to do more research, get back into shape, and work more with my research students.

Here’s to the New Year! (and we have a President I have hopes for, and lovely lovely snow)

All is well.

All will be well.

Hmmmm..... a list

Hmmmm, A list that apparently wanders around blogs, Courtesy of Katie. Bah, almost impossible to tell what's bold here! I need a better way..... aha HTML to the rescue the things I haven't done are now in tan.
1. Started my own blog
2. Slept under the stars (The best way to sleep, always did as a teenager in the summer)
3. Played in a band (I am presuming that Orchestras, and String Quartets count)
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than I can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland/world
8. Climbed a mountain (small ones)
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sung a solo (I have played solos on viola in competition, I think that counts)
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched lightning at sea
14. Taught myself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown my own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitchhiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort ( I think so, built many snow things, I remember a snow throne)
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping (I think being naked in a hot tub with strangers counts)
27. Run a Marathon (not built for running)
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise (No, but stayed overnight on the inland passage Ferry in Alaska, far better than a cruise, spent the day chatting with local native Americans and watching Orcas and eagles, and was on a boat with 20 others tooling around in the sounds in BC, catching and eating fish, hopping off to go hiking so I am counting this)
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of my ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught myself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied (not terribly material for an American)
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke (No! No! Help!)
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant (Bought panhandlers hot knishes and hot coffee on cold winter days in NYC but that doesn’t count)
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had my portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie (film student variety)
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies ( sold Campfire girl candy, that counts)
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book (Like Katie, Chapters)
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had my picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury (it settled out of court though, and now that I am a PhD I will never be picked again. Lawyers do not want thinking people, they want maneuverable people)
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby (never going to happen, though I have had many kittens and have God Children)
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee
100. Ridden an elephant

Zombiehood

It is finals week. I am writing exams and grading. Grading and writing exams. Finishing spreadsheets for hundreds of students. I have spreadsheets with thousands of entries.

I am a monotasker. When I get into a groove the task at hand fills me up. The task at hand displaces all else.

When I drive for hundreds of miles I reach my destination as a road zombie, only focusing on the distance, my head full of trucks, tail-lights, and music.

When I am a zombie I can barely speak. My eyes are glassy. My wild hair is wilder.

Right now I can only focus a few feet in front of my face. My head is full of numbers. I have posted carefully diagrammed keys to the last few quizzes and test on the walls outside of my office. I have been here almost 12 hours. I should go home.

I have two more exams to write, some more grading, and I need to finish writing equations in Excel to automatically drop some lowest scores.

I need to go home.

I am pulling zeros down a column so that my equations will work.

I need to go home

=(SUM(C2:P2)-MIN(D2,E2,G2,M2)-MIN(I2,J2,K2:L2))/4

I really should go home


I should


home



go

Update

My father's twin passed yesterday at noon. I have not yet spoken to my father. he left a message on my machine, and I did not hear it until this morning.

Deaths

My mother called me at work on Thursday, her voice shaky. “Your uncle Bill is in the hospital. He has had a stroke, or a hemorrhage, Nina said he was in great pain. He may not live the next few hours. Your dad is at the Symphony office. I am afraid to tell him, he’ll want to drive right down, but we won’t make it”

My parents live in Oregon, my uncle Bill a ways outside of Sacramento, California. It is about an 8 hour drive. My father will be 82 in a couple of weeks, as would his twin brother Bill.

I talked to my mom a bit. I told her to be ready to pack, but not to start until my father was home. Nina said she would call back when she knew more. She had told her daughter, but not her son, as he is dealing with his wife’s health problems at the moment.

I have seen Bill and Nina only a few times in the last 30 years. When I was a child we saw more of them and their two children, close in age to my brother and I. There was an unpleasant rivalry between our families then. The twins were not fond of each other, neither were their wives. We children, cousins, got along fine. As the years passed, my parents and Bill and Nina mellowed, becoming rather fond of each other, rivalries faded into distant past.

We had a big joint birthday party at my cousin’s house in California for the twin’s 80th birthday. A picture of them and their older sisters is in an earlier blog.

My mother calmed down on the phone. She said she knew I would be the right person to call, being always rational and calm. I think that indeed that is usually true.

I wonder. So far I not really been upset at a relative’s death. People die, life goes on. It is sad for those who are close to them. Is it that no one truly close to me has died? I have cried long over dead pets. Long ago I figured out that that was because they are my responsibility. Their death, or loss of quality of life quite dependent on my choices, my care. I have also been lucky. No one very close to me has died. What will happen when it is a good friend, or my parents? I adore them, and they are not young. Most of my adult life I have lived thousands of miles away from them, so I see them typically once in a year, on occasion twice.

My friend Lisa was dismayed when her brother died recently. He was in his early 40’s. It was an ugly situation. The situation angered her, but what dismayed her was that she did not mourn her brother the way she mourned the loss of her cat some months before.

Another friend has lost both parents to cancer in the space of three years and it hit her hard. My sister-in law lost her mother right before she married my brother a few years ago, and her father a couple of days ago. I spent some time with him last Christmas, the beautiful white Christmas in the mountains. He had good taste in wine and food and conversation. I liked him.

Yet another friend’s mother has been battling cancer for many years. The battle is not going well these days. She is having a hard time.

My uncle Bill did not want to resuscitated, did not want to be on life support, did not want a funeral or memorial. He was a man of strong opinions. As of last night he was in a coma on life-support, waiting notification of the rest of the family, and their decision. I’m not sure what I think about that. In some senses, when you are gone, or effectively gone, I suppose what is done is for the benefit of any remaining friends or relatives. On the other hand, I think it wrong to be kept physically alive for a long time, costing lots of money, only because no one has the nerve to pull the plug.

Many years ago, when I was in my 20s I worked in a medical research laboratory. I was pretty much a lab rat, doing assays to measure vasoactive mediators. I lived very close to the hospital and laboratory in New York City though, and was single with no real demands on my time (and how nice that was!) so I was the choice to be brought in, sometimes on a moments notice, to get samples from interesting cases and process them for analysis. Some of the doctors in our group were working on a disease that had been lethal, idiopathic pulmonary hypertension. We were a pediatric research lab, so our patients were primarily children. We had good luck with toddlers, staving off the disease until the child’s lungs and cardiovascular system grew and recovered. Our first patient was 2 when we started, she lived, and last I heard was doing fine.

We did not have good luck with young adults. One handsome blond track star steadily declined, became increasingly uncooperative and obstreperous during our treatments, not unexpected as our treatments weren’t working on him, and quit the experimental procedures. A beautiful, soft-spoken woman from a Carribean island was a model patient, only an occasional tear leaking from her large dark eyes over her pain and fate. They died, hearts failing from their disease. I would ask at some point and hear of their passing.

Then we had a patient who was neither a toddler nor a young adult. His name was Jose. he was our first patient who was actually local, from the neighborhood. He was about 7. He loved baseball and was a cheerful child. The doctors tried this and that and the next thing. He would hold steady for a little while, not improving but not worsening, then he would get worse. The disease was killing him. One day we had him in the cardiac cath lab yet again. I was there in a lead apron with buckets of ice and tubes for samples. I talked to Jose while yet another treatment was tried and pressures monitered. Then all the doctors left the room for a bit for a huddle over the treatment.

They came back in with grim determination. More medicines were given. They watched the monitors. Jose’s systemic blood pressure began to fall. I was given some more samples. The pressures fell further. In hushed voices the doctors fretted about possible negative results that they knew were a risk. Suddenly the medical personnel in the room went into a rush. I stood their watching, not being part of the medical team as they tried this then that to keep his systemic blood pressure from falling. The stress level in the room shot up.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

“Keep him awake!” snapped a doctor.

So I talked to Jose, asked him about baseball, told him some silly jokes. Jose smiled, and talked for a bit, then in spite of my best efforts, he fell asleep. I was sent away with my samples.

An hour or two later the doctors came back to the lab, away in the research wing. I was just finishing processing the samples for later analysis.

“How’s Jose?” I asked.
The doctor looked at me with disbelief.
“He’s dead” she said, and walked out. I was left standing there, shocked.

Another doctor walked in. “I didn’t know he was dead” I said.

The second doctor looked at me, eyes hard. “Yes, he’s dead, and it was because of what we did. We knew the treatment might, if it didn’t help. I’m surprised you didn’t know. Why do you think we asked you to keep him awake? The treatment to lower his pulmonary pressure stood the risk of bottoming out his systemic pressure, and because of what we used, we would not be able to reverse it.” He did not have long to live, so we took the risk.

I went home that evening, ate, watched TV, went to bed and curled into a ball, miserable. If I had known would I have worked harder to keep him awake? Consciousness helps keep the blood pressure up a smidge. It would probably have been impossible to keep him awake, I was told. That death hurt. The others didn’t much. That one hurt because I had a small responsibility, and because I did not know.

So. Uncle Bill. He will probably be the first of his four siblings to pass. He and my father are the youngest. One of my older cousins has died after many decades of drug abuse. I was never close to him. I do wonder how my father feels. He was joking with me last night when I called. He was serious about his brother of course. I am unsure if he bottles things up, or whether he too is not feeling a lot, though surely more than I do.

I wonder about levels of feeling. What will I feel when my parents go? I wish I talked to them more. I REALLY wish that I saw them more.

I wish I knew more family history... but in a sense, why? I am single, no children, there will be no passing down. When I am gone there will not be any need to for me to have had that information. Is there truly a need to know any of the family personal past? For instructional purposes perhaps.

My mother must be thinking of my father, and of mortality, what if it was my father instead of his twin?

What if when I lose someone dear to me I am not devastated? What if my usual calmness reigns? Should I be grieving for every lost relative, grandparents, cousin, uncle? I am not an entirely unemotional person. Why are some so very shaken, and others less so?

Ike

Hurricane watching in Ohio is typically a "spectator sport" as Noelle says. One watches the incoming fury heading towards distant places with bated breath. Will it intensify? Will it weaken before landfall? Will those crazy people staying put in its path get hurt or will they in fact be OK?

I like the Weather Underground site. I read Jeff Masters' Blog. I read comments on his blog sometimes. There is a weather nut posting a gorgeous satellite picture of Ike in the gulf at night, clouds coiled like beautiful ghostly shell against the darkness. The coastline patched with lights from the cities. Another poster sends a link that allows one to watch four Houston News broadcasts at once.

"Houston, we have a problem..."

One of the features at the WU hurricane site is a projection of the Hurrocane's path. There, Ike was to strike Galveston, move in through Houston, weaken to a category 1, then turns more north, becoming a tropical storm, then a tropical depression as the winds diminished. Then Ike was projected to arc east... and pick up wind speed? Head into the Great Lakes as a Tropical storm then a category 1 as it skids off into Canada?

I was puzzled. Surely not. Some hurricanes do come to die over the great lakes. I remember Katrina sitting on us for days, nothing left of her horrible fury, just fine soaking warm rain.

I asked. Surely the model is in error? No response.

So. Ike tore through Galveston and Houston and Beaumont wrecking havoc, though fortunately with much less loss of life than he could have caused. Then Ike weakened, curled north, then northeast swallowing the rainy warm front that had drenched us... and picked up wind speed, wrapped all that rain into a tighter, heavier block and roared up Ohio tore over Michigan, lake Erie and into Canada.

Here in Youngstown the wind was ferocious and it lasted for hours. It was picking up strongly near sunset on Sunday. It was sunny, hot, humid, and very windy. The trees were bending.



The wind just got worse and worse until midnight, then it howled away for a couple of hours. We are far from the tropics so calling Ike a tropical storm or hurricane up here would be inaccurate. Nonetheless, though the remains of Ike were actually many miles north of my house, the winds here were gusting over 70 mph.

My trees managed to hold on, though branches and leaves were lost.

My neighbors big black Cherry lost hold and crashed into my yard, tearing part of a red maple with it, and crunching my compost fence. The cherry was a lovely healthy tree. The roots were torn right out of the ground.




We got no rain, only the wind of Ike's remnants in the distance. Undoubtably, if we weren't so far north, Ike would have been back to being a category 1. No rain. Only wind.

Long time, no post

I have thought of hundreds of things to post about over recent months, but have not posted. This will be not much of an exception, rather a series of questions and observations.


Why is being a war hero supposed to qualify one to run the country?

Why are people such hypocrites?

Why is the air in Arlington Texas so horrible?

Why do "animal rights" bills that will actually harm animals appear with such frequency?

A note on that question. Michigan has a pet seller bill up, HB 6395 would make it nearly impossible to sell a home raised kitten in Michigan, or to place rescued cats. Only shelters and pet stores would be able to. To home raise and sell you'd have to have a $200 liscense for EVERY county where a buyer might reside along with being fingerprinted and have a police background check done, and it would not be legal to let your kittens sleep in bed with you or get on the couch or run around on carpet. Crazy.

How can people who try to pass themselves off as conservative fundamental Christians be so un-Christian, being pro-war and anti helping the poor?

When republicans talk about "winning" the war in Iraq, what exactly are they referring to? Didn't GW Bush declare the war to be OVER years ago? And what exactly are we trying to "win"?

Why don't the Human resource people and legal people and payroll people and administration actually research the laws that they quote when they change things around supposedly due to those laws?

As a corollary: Why is it that I, who am pretty dreadful when it comes to legal documents, finances, laws, and tax documents, am able to unearth and understand the actual interpretation and exemptions to said tax law in about 20 minutes, when the professionals at my Uni could not find said law or explain it to me in over an hour and a half of office hopping.

If human life begins at conception.. does that mean that most women trying to get pregnant are committing manslaughter everytime the pregnancy fails, or they fail to get measurably pregnant?

Eggs do get fertilized, but fail to develop most of the time.

If a fertilized egg splits and becomes two identical twins, do they have only one life, one soul between them?

If two fertilized eggs fuse and become one baby (it happens) does that individual have two lives/two souls?

Since when do we make religious belief (like when you personally or your church thinks "life" begins) law?

Finally

Why did the hot water hose break off the back of my washing machine?

What I Want in a President

After a long, and to me, odd discussion on Presidential candidates with Rian this evening I have decided that I want to list in some way the characteristics that are most important to me in a President. None of this deals with how to tell if a person has these characteristics, or how to get such a person elected.

I am going to try to number them in the order of importance. I expect that I will forget things or re-order later. Since I feel free to modify what I have already written, be warned.

Oh, and I have had blog posts in my head for ages and haven’t been writing them. Shame on me.

OK, my President

1) Should have as a fundamental goal, the improvement of the health and welfare of all Americans, people in other countries and the earth as a whole.

2) Should be intelligent, able to think quickly and under pressure, be able to absorb new information quickly.

3) Should have long term vision, to be able to foresee as best as possible what the impact of what we do now will be on people and the planet in the future.

4) Should be able to convince, and to wheel and deal with others in power if necessary to get things done. There is no point in being a wonderful idealist if you can’t accomplish anything.

5) Needs to be able to make the hard choices, risking lives to save more, not risking lives over things that aren’t truly worth it. Sometimes a lesser of two evils must be chosen, or one good lost to gain a greater good. So a sense of balance and all the shades of gray.

6) Should have a sense for the People in this country, and what the people as a whole need. Our government is supposed to be “By the people, for the people” not by and for businesses, or the rich above others.

7) Should understand foreign countries, foreign governments and how to help keep our relationships with them good, productive, and for the benefit of people everywhere.

8) Should have the wisdom to be able to change direction when new information arrives that makes such direction changes appropriate.

9) Should be able to choose advisors well, and to be able to keep information flowing amongst them.

10) Should have a keen sense for the importance of knowledge and information, and for their corollaries, education and research to make it available to all.

11) Should have a strong sense of fairness and justice.

12) Needs to be able to rise above attempts to bog them down with small irrelevant stuff, stay focused on the job!

13) Should speak well, be able to transmit important information well, help convince the clueless and the mean-spirited the importance of things that may not superficially seem to immediately benefit an individual.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Things that do NOT matter to me in a President (in no particular order).

Who they have slept with.
Whether they go to church and/or what church they go to.
Whether they have ever lied about personal things, unrelated to the job at hand.
What color clothes they wear.
What color skin they have.
Whether they have ever done illegal drugs.
Whether they have ever told a bad joke.
Whether they have ever changed their minds (though I might expect a nice rational
discussion of why the mind was changed)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Things I do NOT want in a President (in no particular order)

One who sticks to their course even after it is clear it was a bad idea
One who regularly chooses gut feelings or such (horoscopes, messages from God) over rational examinations of information.
One who gives businesses way more priority than people
One who makes sure the rich get richer, even when the poor are getting poorer
One who ignores impact on the environment
One who sifts through data rejecting all that don’t support their plans and accepting only
that that does, in other words ignoring reality to support their agendas
One who silences people based on ideology
One who never bothers to think things through
One whose decisions are based largely on personal (or friends and family) monetary gain
One who ignores the cost in lives and/or human welfare of their policies
One who ignores our constitution forgetting people and their rights, forgetting separation of church and state, etc.

Fatness I

A few days ago Dick Cavett wrote a column in the New York Times about how disturbed he was that fat people were showing up in commercials. After all, we know it is not ok to be fat.

Now, Dick Cavett is a slender fined boned little man who I doubt has ever had to think twice about how many calories he was eating. He thinks that fatness is primarily due to failure on the part of the fat person.

Undoubtably SOME of that is true. I know fat people who consistantly choose fattening foods. I know many more who read every label and do their best to cut out "bad" foods and to try to exercise. Some of the problem is probably genetic, another good chunk environmental, as we get fatter as a society over time. A prevailing theory at the moment is that we each have a natural weight range, and the environment factors push us one way or another within that range, but that gaining to be above your normal range or losing to be below it is incredibly difficult. There is data to support this.

All in all I was quite annoyed by the Cavett column because it showed the predjudices of the never-fat (or only fat breifly ever) against those that have a weight problem. And, as everyone who HAS a weight problem knows, fat people are NOT ok with their fatness.

So, I wrote a response, along with hundreds of others. Most of the others boiled down to 1) Thankyou for saying that! Those fat people are just pigs and need to learn to get up and walk and stop lifting only their forks, or 2) How dare you say that! Fat people have enough problems without that kind of nastiness.

This was my response:

There is a huge problem with advertising. Advertising is often aimed at making people want what they don’t need, and pushing psychological buttons to convince the viewer that they will be more cool, more sexy if they have some product or another. Part of the message is to tell us what we should want to be like. So we tell people, women in particular I think, that they need to look a certain way, leading to unnecessary self-loathing because we don’t look “perfect” enough and even worse, we damage our planet through rapacious consumerism.

Yes obesity is a problem, and can lead to specific health problems. Anorexia is also a problem. Cosmetic surgery can cause health problems or even death as well. I knew a women who was not terribly overweight, had lap band surgery and died from complications. Yes Americans are getting fatter. Fortunately we are also smoking less and cancer rates have been going down. It seems to me that over the decades more and more of us are becoming conscious of what may or may not be healthy.

In my family, most of the women are overweight. We also tend to live long lives. For whatever reason we are not plagued by type II diabetes or much heart disease. I have seen pictures of great-great grand mothers who were stout little women. Me? I am a bit of a gym addict, I spend roughly 10 hours a week at the gym. I take spinning classes, lift weights, and do Pilates. I am stronger and have more endurance than the majority of kids at my gym, and they are less than half my age. I eat no fried food, and avoid simple sugars. Currently I am keeping my calorie intake under 1,000 calories a day and I am losing a little, just a little bit of weight. I am almost 50, female, 5’5” and weigh 180 lbs. I am fat. And yes, not all of us who are fat won’t exercise, or only eat greasy, or sugar laden junk food. Fat people do not like being fat. A few chunky people in a commercial are not going to make us feel better about how we look. Do not worry. We are full of loathing for our fatness. At least I feel good about being fit.

I am a University professor. I see students who are thin as rails, never exercise, smoke, and down huge quantities of stimulants. I see obese students who always eat fried food and the 800+ calorie ice cream desserts they can get on their meal plan from our campus dining service. I see students who don’t sleep enough and push themselves too hard all the time. Type A people have been shown to stand a higher risk of death from a number of stress related disorders. I have seen students at the gym who I suspect are taking steroids to help them look more muscular and ripped.

So, should we be careful to not have overly muscled people in ads? What about type A’s who are doing everything? What about overly thin teenagers? Wouldn’t it be nice if ads were only allowed to present the facts about the product? If I had to pick something wrong with ads, the appearance of a few high BMI individuals would not even make my list.

No Surprise

"Your score is 97 out of a possible 100



Usually a Procrastinator


You rank in the top 10% in terms of procrastination. That is, when it comes to putting things off, you often do so even though you know you shouldn’t. Likely, you are much more free-spirited, adventurous, and spontaneous than most. Probably, your work doesn’t engage you as much as you would like or perhaps you are surrounded by many easily available and much more pleasant temptations. These temptations may initially seem rewarding, but in the longer-term, you see many of them as time-wasters. Though you are likely incredibly productive just before a deadline, you might not get all your work done and there is a lot of unwanted stress. You may want to reduce what procrastination you do commit. If so, here are three tips that have been shown to work:

Goal Setting
This is one of the most established ways of moving forward on your plans. Take any project you are presently procrastinating and break it down into individual steps. Each of these steps should have the following three aspects. First, they should be somewhat challenging though achievable for you. It is more satisfying to accomplish a challenge. Second, they should be proximal, that is you can achieve them fairly soon, preferable today or over the next few days. Third, they should be specific, that is you know exactly when you have accomplished them. If you can visualize in your mind what you should do, even better.

Stimulus Control
This method has also been well tested and is very successful. What you need is a single place that you do your work and nothing else. Essentially, you need an office, though many students have a favorite desk at a library. For stimulus control to work best, the office or desk should be free of any signs of temptation or easily available distractions that might pull you away (e.g., no games, no chit-chat, no web-surfing). If you need a break, that is fine, but make sure you have it someplace at least a few minutes distant, preferably outside of the building itself. If you are unwilling to take the time to get there, acknowledge that you likely don’t need the break.

Routines
Routines are difficult to get into but in the end, this is often our aim. Things are much easier to do when we get into a habit of them, whether it is work, exercise, or errands. If you schedule some of those tasks you are presently procrastinating upon so that they occur on a regular schedule, they become easier. Start your routine slowly, something to which you can easily commit. Eventually, like brushing your teeth, it will likely become something you just do, not taking much effort at all. At this point, you might add to your routine, again always keeping your overall level of effort at a moderate to low level. Importantly, when you fall off your routine, inevitable with sickness or the unexpected, get back on it as soon as possible. Your routine gets stronger every time your follow it. It also gets weaker every time you don’t."

http://webapps2.ucalgary.ca/~steel//Procrastinus/measure.php

What Harry Potter character am I?

Harry Potter character quiz. I did not come out as I expected, though apparently I am not a close fit to anyone.

You scored as Luna Lovegood, You are Luna Lovegood. You daydream and often seem to be drifting off into your own world. You have very strong opinions that many agree are not logical. You place a lot of faith in these beliefs. Possibly, you see more than what meets the eye. You are very accepting of others. You may have only a few close friends because you refuse to sacrifice your opinions and true self for social graces. Luna Lovegood 66% Neville Longbottom 59% Albus Dumbledore 59% Hermione Granger 59% Bellatrix Lestrange 59% Severus Snape 56% Remus Lupin 53% Oliver Wood 53% Harry Potter 53% Percy Weasley 50% Sirius Black 50% Lord Voldemort 44% Ron Weasley 38% Draco Malfoy 34% Harry Potter Character Combatibility Test created with QuizFarm.com

I always enjoyed Luna, though.

Ask and you shall...

Here is what I have and what I am working on in my spare time, which means not at all at the moment....

I use semi-precious stones, Japanese glass, and Czech glass primarily.

Things to Do

It has been a looong time since I posted. I get very very busy in the end of Spring term, many high workload classes, many students, not enough sleep. When I do have or make a little downtime, I want to do something mindless.

But.... after seeing a list, originally from a Visa ad of things to do before you die, I started thinking of a things to do list. I found that it was easy to think of places I would like to go. I often get very wanderlusty at the end of Spring term, let me go! This term I have skipped the end of the season cat shows due to infectious agents in my household (a pity as I was showing a very hot show-cat) so I haven’t even had my usual long drives off to the shows recently. So I immediately thought of revisiting wonderful places I’ve been, such as Alaska, Paris, the Orkney Islands, as well as places I have never been that appeal to me such as Prague, Moscow, Tokyo, in fact whole countries such as Japan, India, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, and Thailand.

But in truth when I think of actual goals it shakes out quite differently. So here is a list of things I would like to do in a time frame of perhaps many years in some cases, but doable things that are important to me (in no particular order):

• Have my entire house clean enough, organized enough, decorated and fixed up enough that I would be happy showing it off to people.

• Get a grant funded by the NIH or NSF or other funding agency, sufficient to support a technician and/or PhD and/or Post-Doc student and truly get my research moving better.

• Publish my pombe data

• Lose 30 or 40 lbs

• Get the S. c. data finished enough and together enough to publish, and have it published.

• Sell my beaded jewelry at a craft fair.

• Publish a poem.

• Have a cat of my own breeding earn an International Win.

• Get back into ceramics again

• Get the Cell Disruptor that I want.

• Throw myself a big party on my next birthday, which might require the first thing on the list.



Hmmm... I'd better get to work