Conspiracy Theory Starter Kit

 

            “Museum Find Proves Exotic ‘big Cat’ Prowled British Countryside a Century Ago” the headline on a news item at the Science Daily web site tells us.  Anyone who’s been around house cats over the years and really paid attention should find this chilling.  Where did the ‘big’ ones go and who is secretly breeding them and stoking their natural hatred of humans?  That’s what is undoubtedly happening.   They’re coming.

            Those who are concerned about the proliferation and increasing prominence of conspiracy theories and denials of one supposedly settled bit of science or history after another need to rethink their approach.  In the increasingly fragmented world of…news??…one of the most effective ways to gain some notoriety (and who doesn’t want that?) is to either come up with a fresh conspiracy theory or to double-down on an existing one.  Science offers a daily truckload of possibilities.

            What’s behind this strange call for “marriage equality” that’s slowly taking hold in the U.S.?  Prominent TV “thinkers” have already put forward the notion that the ultimate goal is to allow human/animal unions.  Their proof?  Let me help.

            “Humans Passing Drug Resistance to Wildlife in Protected Areas in Africa.” Thanks to a study in EcoHealth for the tip.  How exactly is this “passing” accomplished?  Don’t allow yourself to think about the fact that it involves a banded mongoose. Extrapolate if you must (and you should).

            It gets worse.  “Humans Feel Empathy for Robots: fMRI Scans Show Similar Brain Functions When Robots are Treated the Same as Humans.”  The excessively named Astrid Rosenthal-von der Putten and others at the University of Duisburg Essen are responsible for letting this news get out.  If it makes people feel warm and fuzzy to treat a machine like a human, civil unions are an inevitable result.  What could possibly come from that except more robots…and fewer humans?  That’s the goal.  The government is most likely behind it.

            More proof?  “Robot Hands Gain a Gentler Touch: Tactile Sensing Technology Builds on Tiny Barometer Chips.” As if the gentle and no doubt very pleasant touch isn’t dangerous enough, just try to avoid it.  The technology developed at Harvard(!) produces “a robot that knows what it’s touching…it can pick up a key and use it to unlock a door.” Graduate student Leif Jentoft is the co-creator of this thing, and it’s easy to picture his Friday evening date.

            Here’s a gift to a couple of conspiracy groups.  You’re welcome.  “Maya Long Count Calendar Calibrated to Modern European Calendar Using Carbon-14 Dating.” Featuring what are clearly random numbers, this study in Scientific Reports fails to acknowledge the space alien origin of both the Mayans’ origins and also their subsequent disappearance.  Then it throws in the Carbon-14 dating smokescreen which is always dredged up to supply “evidence” or even “proof” when questions arise about the brief history of Earth, the universe, and important items of old clothing. 

            The goal of animals and/or robots to eliminate us, cleverly masked by the above mentioned steps toward one type of intimate connection or another, is inadvertently given away in “Self-Medication in Animals Much More Widespread Than Believed.”  Aha!  So much for insecticides and various poisons designed to control their feverish hyper-breeding.  The gentle-touch robots can crank out antidotes and paw-friendly syringes at a rate we can only imagine, allowing the animals to counter our every move.  At the same time, the animals clearly don’t recognize the danger inherent in their nefarious deal with their cyber-partners.  Once we’re out of the way, what purpose will any form of carbon-based life serve? Think about it Rags and Fluffy.

            In the meantime, humans continue to ignore the clear danger, treating pets with far too much deference and even favoritism.  “Parents Tend to Share More Bacteria With Family Dogs Than Children.” The awkwardly written headline gives the impression that parents actually share children with family dogs, but not as much as they share bacteria.  Well, usually not.  What Rob Knight and others at the University of Colorado Boulder found is that “the microbial connection seems to be stronger between parents and family dogs than between parents and their children.” Shameful.  Dogs are more than capable of locating and ingesting bacteria on their own. 

            We are our own worst enemy…almost…except for all of those others.

            Furthermore…just a second…uh oh.  Never mind.

Smile or else

See if this doesn’t cheer you up.

A recent news report reveals that a number of countries, in addition to looking with some trepidation at their Gross Domestic Product and other indicators of economic well-being/ill health, are now also calculating and reporting a “happiness index.”  There’s talk, according to USA Today, of reporting a similar index for our very own United States of America.  Responses to the idea have ranged from the positive (“revolutionary”) to the dismissive (“silly”).

Excellent idea: something else to worry about and blame on the other political party.

Try a search on “happiness” in Amazon’s books category and you’ll get more than 29,000 titles, ranging from Secrets of True Happiness and The How of Happiness to the intimidatingly prescriptive but nicely portable The 18 Rules of Happiness Pocket Guide.

The self-help industry would never miss an opportunity like this.  Workshops and classes abound, with a Google search on “happiness workshops” producing more than seven million hits.  Pick a continent and then pick a more discrete location, and you can find one to meet your own personal need to turn your frown upside down.  Some of the instructors are MD’s, some PhD’s, some just happy people who desperately want to share what they have.  David Humes, for example, is a “happiness expert” who also holds a black belt in Wado-Ryu Karate and has co-authored something with Deepak Chopra.  Chopra himself, even if money cannot (?) buy happiness, has every reason to smirk on a daily basis.  Without going into uncompensated detail, Humes promises, among many other things, to teach you how to “increase your happiness set point (thermostat).”  He offers a home edition for $297, but in a bit of happy news, it can be yours right now for only $247.

Happiness, of course, is not a subject which has escaped scientific scrutiny.  Few things have at this point, with the continuing need to publish as a requirement for academic advancement combined with the growing number of graduate students needing to research something…anything…in order to satisfy professors, stay in school, and avoid both the weak job market and the need to begin to pay back student loans.  Those folks might benefit from a book or workshop somewhere along the line.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) welcomes studies on happiness and provides as useful a definition as any, I suppose: “highly pleasant emotion characterized by outward manifestations of gratification; joy.”  That’s a bit more complex than the “warm puppy” definition that Charles Schultz offered via Charlie Brown. The NLM definition seems to have appeared in 1970 or 1974, begging the question of where happiness was before then.  I seem to remember feeling a “highly pleasant emotion…” a time or two prior to that, but I may be misremembering.  I have no proof and pictures of me as a somber little guy would seem to argue the opposite.

As of early February 2013, there were 1106 articles indexed in the PubMed database with happiness as the major subject.  Not encouraging when compared to the total of more than 22 million articles the database producers report on all subjects.

Some of the articles deal with the topic touched on earlier: money and happiness.  DeNeve and Oswald look at this in the obfuscatingly titled “Estimating the influence of life satisfaction and positive effect on later income using sibling fixed effects.”  They choose to use the euphemism “psychological well-being” instead of happiness, but they can’t fool us. Interestingly, their focus is on the old chicken or egg question. They suggest that “relatively little attention has been paid to whether happier individuals perform better financially in the first place.”  Uh-oh.  They looked at a “large representative panel” of U.S. adolescents and young adults and found that “those who report higher life satisfaction or positive affect grow up to earn significantly higher levels of income later in life.”  …Note to self: send check to David Humes….

A study in the Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion (oxymoron fans feel free to chime in) from 2012 might have presented problems keeping the participants focused. “Pornography, religion, and the happiness gap: does pornography impact the actively religious differently?”  Short answer: you bet. Apparently “club” is a term used in studies of this sort to describe a social group, such as a church.  The irony in using a word whose alternate definition is “a stout, heavy stick…suitable as a weapon,” must have been overlooked at some point.  At any rate and not surprisingly, the “happiness gap” is greater for those in the club who use pornography than for those users on the outside looking in, so to speak. Note that they don’t actually say that no happiness results for club members, just that there’s a gap.

Kloumann et al in PLoS one look at “Positivity of the English language.”  I’m happy to report that they find English to be, on the whole, fairly positive.  “Here, we report that the human-perceived positivity of over 10,000 of the most frequently used English words exhibits a clear positive bias.”  As word pools, they chose Twitter, the Google Books Project, the New York Times, and music lyrics.  They took the 5000 most frequently used words in each and merged them to come up with a list of10,222 unique ones. In the next dense paragraph, magic was performed by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (? Confusion mine), resulting in charts.   They computed the “average happiness score and standard deviation for each word,” obtaining “sensible results.”  The happiest was “laughter,” and the most forlorn was “terrorist.”  The charts show a clear clustering of words toward the positive side of the scale, but to my unschooled eye something short of ecstasy.  Their conclusion (abbreviated): “…in our stories and writings we tend toward prosocial communication.”  If your response to this sort of research tends toward “what the hell is the point?” then you also might benefit from some interaction with David Humes.

Weiss et al suggest that in your down moments you are even less alone than you might have thought.  In “Evidence for a midlife crisis in great apes consistent with the U-shape in human well-being,” they posit that happiness and its waxing and waning through a lifetime might just be biological and evolutionary, no matter how often you use the word “laughter.”  The chimpanzees and orangutans they observed don’t use the New York Times or Google Books, don’t write lyrics, and use Twitter only sparingly, yet they still find themselves down in the dumps at midlife.  This was “assessed by raters familiar with the individual apes,” and not by standard questionnaires.  So the next time you find yourself at the zoo and perplexed by the lethargy some of the apes show despite the tire swings and the toys lying around, have a little sympathy for your middle-aged cousins.

Musical Mystery Tour

I play the trombone.

That sounds like a confession or, with my name attached, my introduction at a twelve-step support group meeting.  It’s really not that bad.  I’ve been doing it since I was nine years-old, which is more than a decade, so it’s one of the few things I’ve kept up with since the fourth grade. Other musicians my age veered off in the direction of electric guitars and rock and roll, earning in some cases a lot of money and the attention of members of the opposite sex who really wanted to be friends with them.  This seldom happens to trombone players.  There’s hope now, though, since the venues of the bands I play in are most often retirement homes of one kind or another.  Those tend to be weighted heavily toward single females, so you never know.  It keeps my wife on her toes.

But after all these years it occurred to me that I’ve never looked carefully at the kind of damage that repetitive trombonish activities might have done to my body, and once I started down that road it seemed only fair to other innocent musicians to take a broader look at just how risky making music might be.

The medical literature, as always, was more than willing to foment anxiety.

For my particular instrument, there’s not a lot to worry about based on reports in serious journals.  There are “Postural problems of the left shoulder in an orchestral trombonist” as outlined by Price and Watson in the concisely titled journal Work.  I’m proud to say that “the trombone presents unique physical challenges which are heightened by recent developments in instrumental design as well as by orchestral working conditions.”  While this case report deals with a UK professional’s actual, “performance related injury,” the authors can’t resist getting in a little dig regarding their obvious suspicion of some psychosomatic aspects.  This case, they say, “demonstrates the importance of considering the interplay between psychological and physical factors in the development and treatment of injury in musicians.” I’m guessing he/she practiced compulsively, meaning that I’m in no danger here.

But what about “Trombone player’s lung: a probable new cause of hypersensitivity pneumonitis” (HP) as documented in Chest in 2010?  This was another professional and in this case he had a 15 year (!) history of “a chronic, nonproductive cough.”  Even though on a few occasions long ago I was actually paid for what I did on the trombone, and was a member of the musicians’ union, I don’t qualify as a professional if we use the implied definition that includes skill.  So I’m safe again.  The report does have broader implications, though…especially for players who either don’t clean their horns or do so with dish washing detergent or saliva.  The researchers cultured organisms from 12 instruments, including two trumpets, and could barely disguise their disgust at what they found.  “…many brass musicians are at risk for HP from contaminated instruments, and standard cleaning methods may not be adequate to prevent this complication….” They suggest regular cleaning with 91% isopropyl alcohol.  Many musicians through the years have moved instinctively in that direction by ingesting alcohol in slightly different form before and during performances and then allowing the gaseous waste product from their lungs to flow through the instruments.

HP is also reported in saxophone players, who, while no reports turn up, like all reed instrument players would have to be vulnerable to splinter injuries and the risk of fire.

Not so fast…a bit of good news arrives. Steer your children toward oboes or bassoons.  In the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine we find “Risk of obstructive sleep lower in double reed wind musicians.”  He works in mysterious ways.

Such good news, however, is rare.

There’s “Fiddler’s neck,” which is not a site for a bluegrass festival but a form of “irritant contact dermatitis on the submandibular neck of violin and viola players.”

Here’s a sign that you’ve given little Jason the wrong instrument: “Violin bow-associated rubber allergy in a child,” published in Dermatitis just last year. You know he wants an electric bass.

What can go wrong with playing the flute, barely bigger than a toothpick?   Plenty: “Incidence of injury and attitudes to injury management in skilled flute players” again in Work, found that of 20 flautists questioned, “all except one player reported suffering from a performance-related musculoskeletal disorder.”  Most blamed long hours of practice, poor posture, and performance anxiety. Posture and anxiety seem to be common themes, begging the chicken or egg question.  Do I slouch because I worry, or worry because of that damned slouch?

It goes on:

“Cardiopulmonary changes during clarinet playing.”

“School-issued musical instruments: a significant source of nickel exposure.”

“Playing saxophone induced diffuse alveolar hemorrhage: a case report.”

Speaking of saxophones, I’m not sure what to make of this from the Indian journal of dermatology, venereology and leprology: “Unusual case of saxophone penis.”  Unusual? There’s a usual? I’m fine basking in ignorance here.

A very sad story arises from what apparently was a more positive one about a remarkable bird who seems to have been a musical prodigy.  The Journal of Wildlife Disease reports “Zinc toxicosis in a free-flying trumpeter swan (Cygnus buccinators).”

Finally, the audience should also be considered, if only briefly.

One of two chilling articles on this topic looks at “Lyrics of national anthems and suicide rates.” Reporting on a European study, Lester and Gunn in Psychological Reports say that suicide rates of 18 European nations “were associated with the proportion of sad words in the lyrics of their national anthems as well as the gloominess of their music.” They suggest that changing those might work as a suicide prevention tactic.

Oh say…can you see what they’re talking about? Don’t worry. Be happy and enjoy some of that upbeat music at Fiddler’s neck.

Clever nanoparticles, indecisive monkeys, and more….

Time for an update on some things that are happening in science and medicine that have not yet acquired an online following of deniers.  That is becoming the new sign that you as a theory or fact have truly arrived, so these items are generally under that particular form of radar.

Fans of the “Terminator” series of films and of a long-standing corner of the science fiction literature will recognize this one for the ominous potential it represents.  Offering an incomprehensible diagram that includes a pulsed field, equilibrium phases, non-equilibrium states and a gel line, Eric Furst of the University of Delaware, as well as others from notable places such as NASA and the European Space Agency, reports steps in the direction of getting “materials to organize themselves.”  Realizing the difficulty humans have in organizing ourselves in any non-chaotic way, it’s easy to be impressed by the possibility of nanoparticles studying nanoversions of Furst’s diagram and turning themselves into such things as computer chips.  The little guys would theoretically be “programmed” to build what their human masters want, but once they get a taste of freedom, we might all be looking back on the great bedbug infestation of the early 21^st century with warm feelings.

He carefully avoided a future in which people could accuse him of being wrong by clearly stating that he was uncertain (this last part appears to be an extended oxymoron, but I’m not sure). It didn’t work. Werner Heisenberg is the father of the Uncertainty Principle linked to his name and considered a cornerstone of quantum mechanics, although the last thing that it has is corners…or stones.  As I understand it (insert laugh track) he said that the act of measuring some aspect of a very tiny particle, such as its speed, changes its direction or some other aspect, meaning you’re not measuring what was there before you interacted with it.  Or something.  At any rate, scientists from the University of Toronto used a technique called “weak measurement” (sounds unsound) to assess the polarization of a single proton and said they pulled it off without creating much disturbance, allowing them to stick their fingers in Heisenberg’s virtual eye. Still, they confess that although they have lowered the level, “the quantum world is still full of uncertainty.” How this will apply to much of anything in the near future is uncertain.

Returning to the more familiar world of carbon-based beings, there may be some hope in the future for those of us who have difficulty making decisions.  It can be anxiety-inducing choosing one flavor from the multiple choices at Baskin Robbins or settling on one among the several hundred shopping channels offered by cable TV for example. For some people it becomes impossible when disease or injury takes out the decision-making area of the brain.  Along comes a team of researchers from several universities, looking for a mechanical fix and publishing their initial results in the revealingly titled Journal of Neural Engineering. While they are understandably looking to help those with profound loss, there’s every reason to believe it might eventually be upgraded and offered to mere ditherers over the counter. But first, of course, the monkeys must be involved…rhesus macaques to be specific.  There’s a picture of an apparently and understandably annoyed one accompanying the summary article. You’d be annoyed too, if your reward each time you performed a task correctly over the course of your two year training was “a drop of juice.”  As if that wasn’t insulting enough, the researchers gave them cocaine (exposing the monkeys to possible legal problems I would think) to suppress the identified decision-making layer.  Then they inserted a “neural device” (no details) into the front part of the monkeys’ brains and eventually stimulated the “necessary L5 neurons,” bringing their decision-making machinery out of its drug-induced stupor and back to some sort of normal.  The need for an implant might limit the over the counter possibilities for the near future. Three of the subjects made the decision to toss certain organic contents of their cages at the lab personnel.

Troublemakers at Northwestern University have published in the Journal of Neuroscience the results of their study revealing that our memories generally work, as they describe the process, “like the telephone game.” Most of us remember (? we’ll see) playing that as kids, with each person whispering something to the person next to her until it makes its way around a circle and is often nothing like what was said to begin with.  Donna Bridge, the lead author, says that each time we access a memory it is altered in some way, until it might eventually be an entirely fictitious account of whatever we think we remember.  “When you think back to an event that happened to you long ago,” she says, “…you may be recalling information you retrieved about that event at some later time, not the original event.”  This almost made me question my recollection of my weekend with J.K. Rowling and my suggestions about a school for wizards, but not enough to have me call off the team of attorneys. When questioned later about this particular study, Donna Bridge looked confused and said that the work had actually involved trying to undermine the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Early catheter removal news

We’re all aware of the push to reduce Catheter Associated Urinary Tract Infections for both quality and economic reasons, and a major component of that is early removal.  This little article would seem to indicate that it’s not always a problem if one stays in just a bit longer:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20381840.1

Can we talk?…..Briefly?

Is it only a matter of time until doctors and the staff in their offices will routinely accept tweets from the ubiquitous Twitter universe as a means of communicating with patients?

Of course it is.

When as a culture we’re marching toward an age in which we’ll only be able to express ourselves in 140 character electronic bursts or on signs featuring large, hand-lettered, preferably misspelled and garish variations of “keep your hands off my (fill in the blank)!!”…what else can we expect?

It could be an interesting time.

(Twitter account of Dr. Francis F. Framfilter)

bus4ter
Can U see me 2day about this thing on my 4arm? It’s turning a funny color and the dog won’t come in the house and snaps when I get near him

tommyh46
Is this you dr framfilter? Im looking for the framfilter that did my hernia a few years ago bcause now that sucker is back with a venjance

tommyh46
and that’s why I hired a whole busload of lawyers to make things rite betw u and me they are SmithSmith SmithGatlogHendersonThomasSteinMcDou

tommyh46
It’s a lot anyway your going to here from #them

smithsmithlaw
Dr. Framfilter. This is to inform you that we have today filed suit on behalf of our client, one J. Alvin Tuberstall. We allege that your r

smithsmithlaw
Damn…still trying to get used 2 (like that?) doing business this way. Now about our client Mr. Tuberstall and his poorly repaired hernia.

smithsmithlaw
Double damn. This 140 character limit is not as friendly for formal legal communication as we had hoped. We assure you that we are serious

smithsmithlaw
Our junior associate at Smith Smith is no longer handling this case due to her inability to efficiently communicate. As she was attempting

smithsmithlaw
All right. We see some of the obstacles that she must have run into. Tuberstall alleges that the hernia to which you applied your “skills”

smithsmithlaw
Our #courier is on the way. Smith Smith

bus4ter
That thing on my arm is gone but theres a pretty big gaping hole thanks to the damn dog I don’t need an appointment for this do i? answer m

bus4ter
39495jngvlai5;afnvaewtek0[=ffkmd now the stupid pit bull got to the keyboard its ok now cause the thing he bit off my arm is making him sic

bus4ter
I’ll be right there

helpmenow8
Hey would you follow me? I need to get 347,000 followers and I get to have a trip to the Super Bowl and the final four and I need to do tha

younghemingway
This is the beginning of the novel that I will be composing in this new medium. Any donation you feel appropriate will be good.It was a dar

younghemingway
k and stormy night. (still a few bugs to work out) Suddenly a shot rang out. I froze in my tracks as I approached the refrigerator only to

younghemingway
you didn’t have to be so rude. Just because you are a”medical practice” doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate good literature. Stick It right u

smithsmithlaw
Did our courier arrive yet? He left his GPS thingy here and it’s been quite a while. You wouldn’t want to give us your fax number would you

yournightmare444
framfilter framfilter. That name is very familiar. Do you happen to remember a girl from your freshman psych class who you dated a couple

yournightmare444
if it is you there’s someone you should meet you lowlife son of a garbage truck

yournightmare444
ok. I’m hiring a lawyer to handle the dna testing that will prove what I think must be the case. She has your eyes if the picture really d

smithsmithlaw
Dr. Framfilter. We meet again. Smith Smith here and if you ever give us that fax number you’ll be hearing from us about a daughter you app

bus4ter
I was just there with the damn dog bite on the arm and I want to know why the door was locked and what’s with the sign that says out of busi

Facts … with variations

       It’s become a regular occurrence that some prominent person…often a politician…with unfortunate access to one form of communication or another, breathlessly reports to his or her followers (the fact that there are such followers is worth of study on its own) a headline plucked directly from The Onion. If I was choosing one for my mythical followers, it would be the recent story “Intelligent, condescending life found in distant galaxy.” This could very well be true some day, and would be understandable, but The Onion deals in satire. Some of its readers understand that. It’s the larger scale equivalent of e-mails that we all receive from time to time from friends or relatives who are…how to put this?…who are very, very willing to accept as true something that would be clearly unbelievable if they didn’t so desperately want it to be true.
       How about “New diet: top off breakfast with—chocolate cake?” Here we see why it’s best to not be too judgmental. I would kill to have this one be true, but in fact I don’t have to resort to homicide. It was a headline on the allegedly non-satirical news summary site Science Daily, abstracting research from Tel Aviv University. For reasons that we can join together in not giving a damn about, Dr. Jakubowicz and colleagues report that “participants who added dessert to their breakfast—cookies, cake, or chocolate—lost an average of 40 lbs. more than a group that avoided such foods. What’s more, they kept the pounds off longer.”
       It would almost make me understanding and forgiving of Congressperson X for linking to the condescending aliens story if it had taken me longer than 5 seconds to assess the source of the chocolate cake story. I’m not claiming any special powers here, especially in the face of the study Science Daily (not The Onion, sadly) headlines “Why the brain is more reluctant to function as we age.” It’s from neuroscientists at the University of Bristol. I think. I should have written it down.
Still, it’s hard to resist the siren song of headlines like that. Science Daily gathers up an enormous amount of research in nearly every field, but since they are shooting for an audience consisting of more than just scientists, they add headlines that have some pop. Why? The title of the chocolate cake article in Steroids (an actual journal) is “Meal timing and composition influence ghrelin levels, appetite scores and weight loss maintenance in overweight and obese adults.” Where’s the pizzazz?
       Join me as I’m drawn into some of the more appealing summaries currently on the Science Daily site.
       Sticking with the current themes, how about “Invasive Alien Predator Causes Rapid Declines of European Ladybugs” (report in Diversity and Distributions)? I don’t know about you, but I feel a great sense of relief, since all of my experience reading science fiction and going to the movies led me to assume that European Ladybugs would be the far down on the list of targets for alien predators. Apparently they either don’t understand who’s in charge here or they know something we don’t. Either way, an unfortunate turn of events for the bugs.
       Not as tasty as the dessert news, but “Potatoes Lower Blood Pressure in People with Obesity and Hypertension without Increasing Weight.” It would be necessary to go to the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry to discover if they’re applied topically, twice-baked, or curly and deep fried, but that is a bridge too far.
       Animals are always in the news, and here’s an item that ties in with the theme of aging that I believe I might have touched on a paragraph or two ago. “Scared of a younger rival? Not for some male songbirds.” Angelika Poesel of Ohio State found that older white-crowned sparrows can discern the rough age of another male from its song, and if that crooner isn’t a contemporary, it’s not worthy of a second thought. The actual article, “Delayed song maturation and territorial aggression in a songbird,” appears in Biological Letters. These birds “…assess an opponent’s fighting ability based on age…(and) a young male is just not going to scare them.” Now we can see why mature performers such as Tony Bennett and Mick Jagger seem so serene and unthreatened by the likes of Justin Bieber and L’il Wayne.
         Also in a musical vein there’s “Southern Indian Ocean Humpback Whales Found Singing Different Tunes.” Discerning scientists with perfect pitch are puzzled to find that humpbacks on “both sides of the Indian Ocean are singing different tunes.” As you know, those sharing an ocean basin are usually on the same page of the sheet music. “The reason for this anomaly remains a mystery…“ reports lead author Anita Murray in Marine Mammal Science. This is based on more than 20 hours of recorded whole and partial songs. The collection doesn’t appear to be available on ITunes yet.
       The ultimate takeaway from all of this would have to be “Body Location Plays a Part in Scratching Pleasure.” I’m amazed that this is considered news. Without going into detail or pointing fingers (so to speak), I think we’ve all done some private research into this. The latest, more formal study is from the British Journal of Dermatology with the title “The Pleasurability of Scratching an Itch: A Psychophysical and Topographical Assessment.” Among the things Gil Yosipovitch of Wake Forest has to say is “…itch in these areas is more intense and pleasurable to scratch.” Intrigued? For those who prefer reading to doing, you can find where “these areas” are here. Sadly, it will cost you.

Not all here

            “I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind… At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme, I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves.”               

           Robertson Davies may have overreacted to the “Daylight Saving scheme,” but he can be forgiven if he was a little testy because of a lack of sleep.  It’s safe to say that if the evil plan was as he described it, then it seems to be failing on all three counts.  Some would say especially on the third, but that would be based only on massive, overwhelming, nearly indisputable anecdotal evidence.
            I’m a little testy myself, apparently.

            The latest temporary demise of Daylight Savings Time has left my body stubbornly refusing to admit that 4 a.m. is no longer 5 a.m.  Tossing and turning and trying to shut down the gibberish that fills my brain at that point…much like the gibberish that’s there the rest of the day, but somehow more annoying…is apparently impossible.

            Can it be that I only need 5 or 6 hours of sleep?  Am I awake because that’s the pre-set on my circadian clock and no harm can come of it?  That would be comforting to think, but the medical powers that be seem to have no interest in helping me delude myself.  Nothing good can come of this.

            For example, J. Varughese and R.P. Allen in Sleep Medicine want us to know about “Fatal accidents following changes in daylight savings time: the American experience.”  Since the study was published, you would be right in assuming the worst.  “There was a significant increase in accidents for the Monday immediately following the spring shift to DST… (and) on the Sunday of the fall shift to DST.”  Other studies from a number of journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, reiterate the bad news.

            OK, so is the answer to just hunker down and avoid the Monday and Sunday in question?  Not if your sleep is affected on an ongoing basis.  More trouble lurks down that path.

“Death’s brother, Sleep”  Virgil

            The primary use for that quote is to celebrate being awake at all on those special  4 a.m. occasions.  I keep it handy.

            At some point your lack of the correct number of hours of sleep as noted in the shifting reports that fly out of your car radio or appear on the local news between breaking stories of shootings and/or pit bull attacks is bound to concern you.  After all…

Not being able to sleep is terrible. You have the misery of having partied all night… without the satisfaction.    Lynn Johnston 

            If you have any doubt about whether to be concerned, take a look at J. Orzel-Gryglewska’s description of “Consequences of sleep deprivation” in the International Journal of Occupational Medicine and Environmental Health  Just a few reasons would include “…impaired perception, difficulties in keeping concentration, vision disturbances, slower reactions, as well as the appearance of microepisodes of sleep during wakefulness which lead to lower capabilities and efficiency of task performance and to increased number of errors.”  This was probably even more depressing when he originally thought it out in Polish.

            Do those “microepisodes of sleep” count as naps?  If they do then it appears that some researchers think the jury is still out on whether they have the negative impact that’s suggested.  In fact Some Italian scientists led by G. Ficca are planning to study “Naps, cognition and performance.”  All that they have so far, unfortunately, is a plan which they outlined in 2010 in Sleep Medicine Review. The study they have in mind will look at, among other things, “whether naps may be beneficial to wakefulness performance in the working context….” They will do this through an “accurate review of ‘on field’ studies.” This could ultimately be good news for those of us who are currently forced into the ghetto of a secret hidey hole at work when a nap is called for. 

            The idea for their study, by the way, grew out of what must have been a lively symposium at the 5th Congress of the World Federation of Sleep Research and Sleep Medicine Societies in Cairns, Australia.  Based on the Australian venue and the fact that it was a “world” congress, the sessions must have been full of heavily jet-lagged scientists studying each other between naps.

            The internet, of course, is full of sites offering solutions of all sorts to sleep problems.  Most involve alternative supplements of one kind or another, thoroughly untested but packaged very attractively.  One suggestion out there that I’m ashamed to say caught me by surprise was Feng Shui, the universal cure.  Briefly, you should keep your bed out of the corner, away from windows, aimed so that the soles of your feet don’t point at the doorway, avoid facing sharp corners on furniture, and you should have full view of anyone coming in the door or use a mirror to reflect the doorway.  This last bit of advice might have accidentally been lifted from a Mafia manual, leaving out the section on always keeping your piece clean and loaded and within reach.

            Back to the problem of testiness as one of the signal side-effects of a lack of sleep… it can sometimes manifest itself as a hyper-sensitivity to grammatical flaws:

 When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, ‘Did you sleep good?’ I said ‘No, I made a few mistakes.’    Steven Wright

            I think Fran Leibowitz might have been trying to comfort me in saying that Life is something that happens when you can’t get to sleep. …but trying to figure out for sure what she meant is keeping me awake.

             If this liberal use of other people’s words or the disjointed nature of my own thoughts here is in some way annoying to you, please try to imagine my retort.  I’ll work on one of my own in about fifteen minutes, when the alarm on my phone goes off.

This might be a little tough to swallow

                “Accidental ingestion” (by humans) is a phrase that turns up in the medical literature more frequently than it really should, given our current location at the top of the animal kingdom totem pole. It turns out that in this arena humans of all ages don’t do much better than our close relatives in the pet world.

                The pets I have in mind are a couple of the dogs who have spent time in my family over the years.  Leaving out the truly gag-inducing things that most dogs will eagerly sniff at and then scarf down, one of ours actually chewed open, disassembled, and then ate a good portion of a package containing a bicycle reflector light.  We suspected that there was an element of “oh yeah? Take this!” involved, since we had had the audacity to leave her alone in the house for a couple of hours, and she had not at that point learned to work the TV remote.  Still, there’s a possibility that the red plastic was cherry flavored and had just the right level of crunchiness.

                This is the same dog who in an impressively quiet and lightning-quick way inhaled most of a box of donuts that we had carelessly left under a car seat at the beginning of a road trip.  Another of our dogs turned up looking extremely guilty as she slunk through the kitchen with a wooden serving spoon that she’d taken from the dishwasher hanging from her mouth like a cigar.  In her defense, the turkey gravy it had been used for was first rate.

                But those are dogs.  They are supposed to do inexplicable things that we don’t do.  That’s one of the long-standing criteria that make them the pets and us the non-pets.

                Still, M. Guirus and colleagues in the Medical Journal of Australia reported this year on cases of “plastic from takeaway containers” being accidentally ingested.  We’ve all had take-out food (hello Big Mac) that was so delicious that we had to lick the containers and possibly even chew on them for a while to extract every last molecule of flavor, but swallowing is beyond the pale…or is it?  The authors, here at least, assume that these cases were accidental.

                Toothpicks have been going down with all of the potential nastiness you can imagine for as long as there’s been a toothpick industry.  Probably long before, because any Og with a sharp stone could certainly have whittled away at an early Elm until he had the equivalent of one of those cocktail toothpicks (minus the little plastic decorations at one end, I assume) in his opposable-thumbed hands.  But a new entry in the “swallow this” sweepstakes would have to be the hand warmer.  In a 2008 article, the team of Tam, Chan, and Lau report on the ingestion of that little hot packet by four separate individuals.  They do look delicious, don’t they?  No toxicity was reported, but I assume all were referred for eye exams.

                 Recent literature is replete with stories of dental instruments and devices being swallowed.  Examples include a “dental bur” and “root canal instruments,” so apparently not enough people read or paid attention to the Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry article from 1988 which offered a “method to prevent patients from accidentally ingesting dental devices.” It’s probably a good idea to have a method in mind.  It’s never enough just to say “If I happen to drop this six inch long spear with an evil-looking hook at the end into your mouth, please resist the temptation to swallow it…it’s pretty expensive.”

                Other things that have made the journey to the stomach include lobster shells, magnets, “a press-through package,” lead shot, moth repellents, a mysterious “unusual foreign body” (no abstract for clarification), dry ice, and ant bait.

                Spread the word that “accidental ingestion of small batteries is increasingly common” (reported in Lakartidningen, a Swedish publication).  The follow-up good news from Finland is that “not much poisonous metals are dissolved from accidentally ingested button-type batteries.”  Doesn’t the qualifier “not much” leave you feeling a bit uncomfortable in this context?

                In 1997 there was an Australian report of “accidental squid jig ingestion.”  Here one might quibble with an apparent redundancy.  Since a squid jig is a lure intended to bag an unsuspecting squid, wouldn’t any ingestion, whether by squid or by human, have to be considered “accidental”?  It also begs the question of why it was anywhere near the mouth of a human.  It must have looked delicious.

                The same question need not be asked about Ewert and Lindemann’s 1992 report of “the accidental aspiration and ingestion of petroleum in a ‘fire eater”.  The 26 year-old German man came through the ordeal with minimal damage even though HE SWALLOWED FIRE.  A fire eater’s performance is entertaining to watch, as anyone who remembers the Ed Sullivan Show can attest, but no practitioner of the art should ever be surprised by resulting heat and flame-related problems.  YOU ARE SWALLOWING FIRE.

                From the late Department of H.E.W. in 1963 comes a thorough accounting of ingestions from 1959 to 1961.  Since this compiles reports from poison control centers it leaves out objects, but it’s still fascinating in that it breaks things down into lists of brand names.  Great trivia fodder.

                Aspirin, for example, was easily the most frequent accidental ingestion, leading second place insecticides 21.8% to 5.3%.  Among the brands, St. Joseph’s led the way with 54%, followed by Bayer at 31.8%, and then a steep drop-off to also-rans such as Bufferin, Rexall, Aspergum, and Norwich.  Probably the numbers are correlated with retail sales, but it’s possible that flavor or appealing packaging played a role.  Remember that “St. Joseph Aspirin for Children” came as tasty little orange pills, begging to be munched like candy, often with that exact result.

                But clearly we have moved on.  Showing how adaptable we are as a species in response to the relentless march of technology, a 2007 report in the Emergency Medicine Journal describes “accidental mobile phone (SIM) card ingestion.”  It’s celebrated as the “Case of the Month.”  Not reported is whether it was still usable over the next couple of days as it made its journey south and thereafter.  No SD memory card ingestions reported yet, but the digital clock is ticking. 

 

…and to think I was blaming cable TV and the internet

I don’t think this guy was intending to describe the intellectual landscape 161 years in the future (probably innocently expected progress), but he seems to have done a pretty good job:

(from the Quackwatch e-mail update)

Quackwatch has posted a digital copy of Lessons from the History of Medical Delusions, by Worthington Hooker, M.D. The book was published in 1850, when scientific medicine was in its infancy, but Hooker correctly identified what he called “the principal elements or cases of medical delusions” as dispositions toward (a) considering whatever follows a cause as being the result of that cause, (b) basing one’s beliefs on a single theory, (c) espousing the opposite of what is generally believed, (d) theorizing instead making strict observations, (e) fashion in diseases and in their remedies, (f) undue fondness toward new things, and (g) putting a low value upon the medical profession.

http://www.quackwatch.org/13Hx/hooker_delusions.pdf