A Near Death Experience

I had an, ah, interesting experience last weekend.

Last week I realized I was nearly out of my insulin. I was so used to getting it regularly from the mail-order pharmacy my health insurance uses that I forgot it had changed. Everyone's prescriptions were supposed to seamlessly transition over. Clearly something had not gone seamlessly. I called them up and they said, "Oh, uhm, yeah. It looks like there has been a mix up. We'll get this fixed as soon as we can."

Except that it wasn't fast enough. Saturday morning I ran out of insulin. That means my body could not process carbohydrates and my blood glucose level was going to go up. I thought I would be okay for a couple of days if I stuck to a diet of nuts, non-starchy veggies, and water as none of those things have much in the way of carbs. Yes, my insulin would go up, but it shouldn't go up high enough that I wouldn't be okay for a couple of days until my order came in.

The only problem with that clever plan is that I forgot about other medication I take.

Every week I take an injection of Avonex. This nasty drug is for my multiple sclerosis. It has the pleasant side effect of flu-like symptoms for approximately 24 hours after injection. The first couple of times I took it, it knocked me on my ass and I could barely get out of bed. Since then I have gotten somewhat used to it so that now my body aches from head to toe all day, I feel more exhausted than usual, and I just feel rather blah. I take it every Saturday night so I can spend my Sunday feeling like crap instead of trying to deal with it during the work week. Without even thinking about how it might affect my insulin-deprived body, I took it as normal Saturday night and set myself on a nasty course.

Sunday morning I woke up feeling worse than I usually do on Sundays. My stomach was a tight knot and I felt on the verge of vomiting. My mouth was extremely dry and full of cotton. I tried to sip some water because that's all I felt I could stomach. Unfortunately, even that was too much as I started vomiting. Anything in my gut from the previous day was quickly sent back up. Anything heavier than water or 7-Up sounded sickening, but even those had me puking and dry-heaving. I felt like I had no water in me and, in fact, the one pleasant side-effect of my vomiting was that it put just enough moisture in my mouth that I could talk.

I continued to feel worse throughout the day. By early evening I knew the only way I was getting better was if I went to the Emergency Department. I also knew that I was going to be admitted to the hospital. As dehydrated as I was I knew my bg was sky-high and the only way to get it down was insulin. This was not a decision I made lightly, but I needed to if I was going to get better. My mother called my brother who picked me up and carted me off.

Since I work there, most of the staff know me and were clearly concerned about me just seeing me before I even started telling them what was going on. They got me a room, started pumping me full of fluids and gave me Zofran so I would stop vomiting. They drew blood and took a urine sample. As the tests started coming back the doctor came in, gave me a look, and said, "You're sick." Thanks, doc. I actually felt like I was being tickled by thousands of butterflies, but now you've gone and set me straight.

The diagnosis was diabetic ketoacidosis. This is a potentially life-threatening condition caused by very high blood glucose which begins to cascade through a whole series of other wonderful things. Sure enough I was admitted and not just to any floor but the Intensive Care Unit. This was so they could closely monitor me and allow me to rest.

Rest? Ha! For anyone never having the opportunity to stay in an ICU (this was my first), rest is about the last thing that happens. I was lucky to have a 30-minute period of being uninterrupted by someone coming in and drawing blood or checking my vitals or something. Despite not getting much in the way of sleep I started feeling better rather rapidly. With insulin and fluids pouring into me, I was getting somewhat back to normal. With the Zofran on board, I was able to drink some actual water, too. The ice water the nurses gave me was about the best thing my arid tongue had ever tasted.

Later in the morning with my numbers stabilizing, I got transferred to a medical floor. I ate a normal meal. Well, I tried to eat it. I ordered a fruit bowl and a piece of toast, but the roof of my mouth was so raw from the vomiting that the natural acids in the fruit burned too bad to eat much. Even the crunch of the toast made it difficult to swallow.

By 6:00 pm, I was much closer to normal if not quite there, yet. My doctor sort of wanted to keep me another night, but I told him I would rest much better at home (which is very true) and he let me go. I went home, ate a bit and before too long I was in bed. The next morning I was up and going to work. It's not 'cause I'm sort of tough guy. I was just feeling better and I've got a ton of stuff on my plate.

I'd like to say I learned some deep truth from my near-death experience or that I had some nugget of wisdom to offer. In the future I intend to watch my insulin supply more closely especially when changes are made to my health coverage to try to prevent this from happening again, but that's rather banal for any sort of grand statement. I got very, very sick. I pulled through thanks to modern medicine. I'm back to normal.

Really, what more could one ask for?

An American Being Tortured...By Americans

This makes me sick. I don't understand why Americans aren't more upset about this.

To follow-up on yesterday's observations about the prolonged forced nudity to which Bradley Manning has been subjected the last two days: brig officials now confirm to The New York Times that Manning will be forced to be nude every night from now on for the indefinite future -- not only when he sleeps, but also when he stands outside his cell for morning inspection along with the other brig detainees. They claim that it is being done "as a 'precautionary measure' to prevent him from injuring himself."

Has anyone before successfully committed suicide using a pair of briefs -- especially when under constant video and in-person monitoring? There's no underwear that can be issued that is useless for killing oneself? And if this is truly such a threat, why isn't he on "suicide watch" (the NYT article confirms he's not)? And why is this restriction confined to the night; can't he also off himself using his briefs during the day?

This is America. Fucking America! We are torturing a soldier, an American, who has been convicted of no crimes. Whatever you think of what he did, how can you think this is the proper course of action? We prosecuted Germans who tortured people in World War II. We convicted Japanese of the same thing. Charles Taylor Jr. was convicted in a federal court for torture committed in Liberia. This, of course, is just the start of it. We have charged many people in criminal courts for torturing people.

So, why do we seem to be okay with letting Bradley Manning be tortured by the military?

People should be marching in the streets for this sort of thing. Unfortunately, in this day and age people don't seem to get fired up about a problem until it affects them directly. Bush and Cheney opened up a Pandora's Box when they started permitting torture and we are seeing now the fruits of their labor. I will be sending strongly worded emails to both of my Senators. I wish there was more I could do, but I feel rather helpless. I hope other people speak up, too.

State of Affairs

How about a funny?

A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across, takes 11 cookies, looks at the Tea Partier, and says, "Look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie."

From A Tiny Revolution.

A Dance With Dragons

The long-awaited (five-and-a-half years!) fifth book of the A Song of Ice and Fire series finally has a publication date! Hallelujah! I'm glad Martin took the time to get it right, but I sure hope the next one doesn't take as long. I'm sure HBO feels the same way considering the TV adaptation is beginning in April.

Blade Runner Prequels and Sequels Coming

Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies of all time - of all time! - which is why I'm not really excited to see that prequels and sequels are coming. The odds of these being any good are slim. How can anyone come close to matching the movies's dark, moody cinematography, the sparse but dense script (watch the director's cut, not the original with the shoddy voice-over), and the beautiful final words of Roy Batty.



Leave well enough alone, I say. Not that Hollywood is any good at that.

"A great person"

Words you don't use to describe someone who just stabbed their own infant child to death.

The Right to Be a Supreme Asshole

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church today, saying they had a right to picket funerals. As much as it pains me to say it, this is the right decision. Fred Phelps and his followers are amongst the worst sort of scum. Their hate-filled rants against homosexuals, Jews, Catholics deserve all the scorn that can be mustered. The First Amendment gives them the right to spread their filth, however, and restrictions of that right need to be done very, very carefully. We don't let people falsely shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater because it could lead to harm. Members of the WBC were far enough away from the funeral from which this (most recent) lawsuit ensued that their actions were not considered stalking or harassment. They should be allowed to do what they do because restricting their speech is a slippery slope that we should not start down.

The best thing to be done about things like this is to exercise one's own free speech and counter-protest. Excellent examples of this can be found here.

Quote of the Day

"[I]t's one of the weirder aspects of our political circumstances that being a hypocrite is a much greater moral failing than being deeply cruel." -Adam Serwer

Laws Should Make Sense

Radley Balko writes about a cop who had consensual sexual relations with two girls, one 16 and the other 17. Now he's been convicted of having child pornography because he had nude pictures of both of the girls.

Here's the catch, though. In Indiana, where this occurred, the age of consent is 16. So, the cop could legally have sex with the girls. He could also have legally married the girls without their parents' permission. But, he could not have pictures of them in the nude because according to federal law, pictures like this are child pornography.

Whatever you think about what he did, this seems rather ludicrous. Laws need to line up together and work in tandem. What's the point in having a law saying it's okay to have sex with someone of a certain age, but not being permitted to have nude pictures of them? Either the age of consent needs to go up or the child porn laws need to have exceptions for people of consenting age. This guy presents no danger at all to society, but he's now stuck in prison for fifteen years. Was what he did smart? Probably not. But locking him up for a long period of time accomplishes nothing except costing taxpayers a good chunk of change.


**I couldn't resist the opportunity to post a picture of Matthew McConaughey from Dazed and Confused. "That's what I love about these High School girls man. I get older, they stay the same age. Yes they do."

Game of Thrones Trailer

Another trailer for this series.



There are not words to describe how excited I am for this.

Using Tech to Beat the System

This is a beautiful use of technology.

The cop cited him for going over 40 mph in a 25 zone, which he was too frazzled to contest at the time. After he had cooled down and parked his car later, he remembered that he had been running the My Tracks app by Google which records your GPS info and speed. Pulling up the data, he found that he hadn't been speeding. When his court date arrived, he plead not guilty, presented his GPS data, and successfully got out of the ticket.

Words Matter

A woman who wrote an article who wrote an article about helping the poor back in the 1960s is getting death threats now after Glenn Beck blamed her paper for leading to the current economic crisis.

Piven is a professor at the City College of New York. Back in 1966, she and her late husband, Richard Cloward, wrote an article for The Nation outlining a plan to help the poor of New York and other big cities to get on welfare.

In their research, they found that not all the poor who were eligible to receive welfare actually did. They advocated that all the nation's eligible poor should apply. They felt such a strain to city budgets would force Washington to address the poverty problem.

Forty-five years later, Beck took to the airwaves of Fox News and his own radio program, warning the public about the obscure article.

"Let me introduce you to the people who you would say are fundamentally responsible for the unsustainability and possible collapse of our economic system. They're really two people," he said, "Cloward and Piven."

For about the last three months, week after week, Beck's been hammering away at Piven and her husband. From their 45-year-old article, he sees a vast conspiracy to overthrow the American financial system.

...

Soon after Beck made her infamous, Piven says hundreds of death threats poured into her e-mail account and conservative blogs. Things like, "'May cancer overtake you soon!'" Piven says. She ended up asking the FBI and state police for help.

While Piven acknowledges that Glenn Beck has never advocated violence against her, she still feels Beck's screeds led directly to the threats against her life.

Words matter. Words have an impact. If they didn't we wouldn't be reading Homer, the Bible, and Shakespeare hundreds or thousands of years after they were written. Of course Glenn Beck isn't responsible for the crazy actions his listeners take, but he is responsible for creating a toxic atmosphere that can lead to things like sending old ladies death threats. Anyone who has any sort of audience has a responsibility to speak in such a way as to create a respectful atmosphere. There is nothing wrong with vehement disagreement, but it shouldn't cross the boundary into over the top denunciations of your opponent ("Ground Zero mosque supporters are Nazis!") That doesn't move the debate forward at all not to mention if you make connections like this, mentally unbalanced people are going to think, "Gee, shouldn't we be taking drastic action to stop this person if they are a Nazi/Communist/unAmerican?"

Again, Beck (or Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Dinesh D'Souza) is not responsible for the actions taken by some nutjob who listens to them. That doesn't mean, though, that they should just say whatever they want and then after something happens, shrug, saying "It's not my fault."

No More Reincarnating Without Permission

China cracks down on the growing reincarnation problem.

In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation." But beyond the irony lies China's true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region's Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country. By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.

I can't say that I'm really a supporter of the Chinese government, but I think this is an excellent step in the right direction for them. I hope the next step is preventing people from getting to heaven without their permission.

Blame It On Top Gun

A case is made that Top Gun was the film that started Hollywood's downward spiral.

Then came Top Gun. The man calling the shots may have been Tony Scott, but the film's real auteurs were producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, two men who pioneered the "high-concept" blockbuster—films for which the trailer or even the tagline told the story instantly. At their most basic, their movies weren't movies; they were pure product—stitched-together amalgams of amphetamine action beats, star casting, music videos, and a diamond-hard laminate of technological adrenaline all designed to distract you from their lack of internal coherence, narrative credibility, or recognizable human qualities. They were rails of celluloid cocaine with only one goal: the transient heightening of sensation.

Top Gun landed directly in the cortexes of a generation of young moviegoers whose attention spans and narrative tastes were already being recalibrated by MTV and video games. That generation of 16-to-24-year-olds—the guys who felt the rush of Top Gun because it was custom-built to excite them—is now in its forties, exactly the age of many mid- and upper-midrange studio executives. And increasingly, it is their taste, their appetite, and the aesthetic of their late-'80s postadolescence that is shaping moviemaking. Which may be a brutally unfair generalization, but also leads to a legitimate question: Who would you rather have in charge—someone whose definition of a classic is Jaws or someone whose definition of a classic is Top Gun?

The Top Gun era sent the ambitions of those who wanted to break into the biz spiraling in a new direction. Fifteen years earlier, scores of young people headed to film schools to become directors. With the advent of the Reagan years, a more bottom-line-oriented cadre of would-be studio players was born, with an MBA as the new Hollywood calling card. The Top Gun era shifted that paradigm again—this time toward marketing. Which was only natural: If movies were now seen as packages, then the new kings of the business would be marketers, who could make the wrapping on that package look spectacular even if the contents were deficient.

The whole piece is worth reading. Hollywood is in a sad state these days, but even though the author blames Top Gun for the start of it he ultimately blames us for continuing to pay to see the shallow crap put out these days.

Bill Gates Publicly Supports Vaccinations

This is important.

So I had to take a look, because I wanted to see what Gates had really said, and about whom. It turns out he didn’t actually use the phrase “child killers,” but he did say that anti-vaccine groups “kill children,” which does pretty much amount to the same thing. I can see why people would be outraged by that — I’m outraged, too, but not in the way the people who issued the press release would like me to be. Because I’m outraged that there most likely are 50,000 people who are willing to protest, when what Bill Gates said is absolutely, 100% correct.

We need more big name people to talk about the importance of vaccinations and how the anti-vax movement is dangerous. Jenny McCarthy gets a ton of press for her statements and admittedly sad story. But the people making the (correct) argument against her rarely get as much focus. The results the anti-vaxxers' antics are not inconsequential. People have died. This point needs to be hammered home again and again. Not vaccinating your kids leads to death. It's not every kid that doesn't get vaccinated, but it is enough of them that every American should be up in arms against the anti-vax crusaders. These deaths are a very preventable tragedy.

So, tell everyone you know how important vaccines are and how dangerous it is to not get them. You could save a life.

Star Trek: The Animated Series is Now Online for Free!

The best news of the day.

Star Trek: The Animated Series has been unjustly neglected by all but the most devoted Trekkies for most of the 36-plus years since it originally aired. The animation may — does — look cheesy by today’s standards, but some of the stories are truly excellent, and they did get all but one of the original cast members to do their characters’ voices.

Well, StarTrek.com has now put every episode of the series online for free viewing (though not, alas, downloading). If you’ve not seen any of the 22 episodes of the series, but are a fan of ST:The Original Series, you’re in for a treat. Some of them are just so-so, but even the worst of them is better (to my mind, anyway) than 70% of the episodes of ST: Enterprise.

I all ready play original series episodes in the background at work. These will have to join the queue.

Ant Death Circles

I had never heard of this. Apparently sometimes ants can get caught up in a circle following the ant in front of them and then keep going in a circle until they starve to death.

This is a species of army ant, Labidus praedator. These ants are completely blind so they get about by sniffing trails left by the ants in front of them. They, in turn, leave chemical trails of their own. The system works smoothly when everybody's going in a straight line in one direction...

But when the lead ants start to loop, bad things can happen (and remember we humans loop too, we can't hold a straight course over long distances without external points of reference). If the ant-in-front loops and intersects with its old trail, the whole crowd then turns in on itself and everybody gets caught in the endless circle.

Check out this fascinating video of this in action.



The article mentions that this is something that never happens to humans which is true in a literal fashion. You've never (at least I never have) seen a group of humans stuck endlessly circling about until they die. I have seen people, though, blindly following the lead of someone else. Most people are sheep and don't want to stand out or be the first to do something for fear of looking foolish. They will willingly go along with a crowd even if they have some reservations inside. It's a hard thing to overcome because no one likes to be embarrassed.

The Observer Effect and Police Dogs

Most people know that our pets, especially dogs, like to please us. Well, it goes for police dogs, too.

My confusion about what was going on in Harper's head reflects a common misconception that is also apparent in the ways dogs are used in criminal investigations. When we think dogs are using their well-honed noses to sniff out drugs or criminal suspects, they may actually be displaying a more recently evolved trait: an urgent desire to please their masters, coupled with the ability to read their cues.

Several studies and tests have shown that drug-sniffing dogs, scent hounds, and even explosive-detecting dogs are not nearly as accurate as they have been portrayed in court. A recent Chicago Tribune survey of traffic stops by suburban police departments from 2007 to 2009, for example, found that searches turned up contraband in just 44 percent of the cases where police dogs alerted to the presence of narcotics. (An alert is a signal, such as barking or sitting, that dogs are trained to display when they detect the target scent.) In stops involving Hispanic drivers, the dogs' success rate was just 27 percent. The two largest departments the Tribune surveyed—the Chicago Police Department and the Illinois State Police—said they don't even keep track of such information.

But don't blame the dogs; their noses work fine. In fact, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency recently conceded, after 12 years and millions of dollars of research, that the canine snout, fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution, is still far more sensitive and reliable than any technology man has been able to muster when it comes to detecting explosives in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

The problem is our confusion about when dogs are picking up a scent and when they are responding to cues from their handlers.

This is similar to a well-known problem in physics - the observer effect - where a person observing an event has an impact on the event and skews it. Obviously this is slightly different in that the dog's handler can safely observe the dog in action; they just have to be careful not to give the dog false clues so that the dog ends up simply trying to please its master rather than do its job.

It seems like this could have a bearing on parenting, as well. When raising children we must be careful that they do not end up doing something just to gain our approval. They must learn to do the right thing even when it is harder or they worry it might mean our disapproval somehow (if, for example, they try to accomplish a task but fail).

Tracing Lines and Chaos Theory

Watch this very cool video where 500 people attempt to trace the line the previous person drew. What starts off as a straight line quickly becomes a mess.

A Sequence of Lines Traced by Five Hundred Individuals from clement valla on Vimeo.

Others have commented on how this resembles evolution or the human condition. That sounds about right.

But what I like about it is how it beautifully represents chaos theory. This is a branch of mathematics that has applications in a number of science fields. More people have probably heard of the butterfly effect. This comes out of chaos theory and it in effect states that small changes in initial conditions can lead to wildly different outcomes. In this video notice how that at first the lines change only slightly, but by the end it looks completely different from its original state. If you ran this experiment again and started with the same first line as this one, you would have a completely different outcome. That's chaos theory.

It really is a fascinating subject and has led to all sorts of discoveries in meteorology, physics, and other sciences.

Paying State Worker Less is a Bad Way to Balance the Budget

Ezra Klein brings us a chart showing what Wisconsin's state and local government workers make compared to their private sector counterparts.


So, why would these people take less money? Presumably they like their work. Maybe they like being public servants. Maybe both. Either way, it seems ludicrous to want to pay them less money. You will just get fewer qualified people wanting to take these jobs. Maybe that's what Republicans want. However, the GOP is often quick to decry government incompetence. You're not going to get the best workers if you're not paying them enough to make it worth their while. I'd rather have someone choose to go work for a state government as, say, a regulator than go work on Wall Street and contribute nothing to society other than pushing for lower taxes on rich people in order to only benefit themselves.