The way to a man's heart? Through his left ear
New research suggests that declarations of love, jokes, or words of anger are best remembered when they are heard through the left ear, while instructions, directions and non-emotional messages have more impact on the right side.
It is all to do with how our brains process information. Although the left and right hemispheres, or sides, of the brain are similar structures, they have specialised functions. The left side, it is suggested, is more logic-based and dominant, while the right is the more imaginative side, more visual, intuitive, emotional and spatially aware. Because the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, the left ear has been shown in some research to be the route to the emotional side of the brain, and the right ear to the non-emotional, logical side.
The news that left and right ears process sound differently is not so new. A 2004 article in Science found that the left ear of a baby was more attuned to music and the right better at picking up speech-like sounds.
Speak to my right ear, sing to my left
Danielle Crittenden has fine advice on how to age without pressure.
In sum: Add on 5 years to your real age and people will say how great you look.
If this is true, it's astonishing.
Menstrual Blood: A Valuable Source of Multipotential Stem Cells
Researchers seeking new and more abundant sources of stem cells for use in regenerative medicine have identified a potentially unlimited, noncontroversial, easily collectable, and inexpensive source -- menstrual blood.
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Stromal stem cells derived from menstrual blood exhibit stem cell properties, such as the capacity for self-renewal and multipotency," said Amit N. Patel, MD, MS, Director of Cardiac Cell Therapy at the University of Pittsburgh's McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine. "Uterine stromal cells have similar multipotent markers found in bone marrow stem cells and originate in part from bone marrow."
A day later, a Japanese study shows that cells from menstrual blood may be useful in repairing heart damage.
The success rate is 100 times higher than the 0.2 to 0.3 percent for stem cells taken from human bone marrow, researcher Shunichiro Miyoshi, a cardiologist at Keio University's school of medicine, told French news agency AFP.
There's even a company that's begun menstrual blood banking!
It wasn't so long ago that the public and scientific consensus was that stem cells could only be harvested from human embryos.
I'm not the only one who remembers the hysteria that surrounded President Bush's decision not to allow federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
Charles Krauthammer does in Technology Vindicates Morality. So does the Anchoress who reminds us that embryonic stem cells have produced nightmarish results in the lab and never had a successful application.
So far there have been 73 successful treatments using adult stem cells and none for embryonic stem cells.
Doing good by doing no harm works.
From the London Times comes an article on The drug abuse of John F. Kennedy.
Basically a review of a new book "In Sickness and in Power: Illnesses in Heads of Government during the Last 100 Years" (David Owen), former Foreign Secretary and medic David Owen reviews the health and medication of world leaders in the past century.
The chapter on Kennedy is jaw-dropping.
Owen starts by convincingly asserting that Kennedy was much sicker than is commonly appreciated and certainly much sicker than was appreciated at the time. His Addison's disease was very debilitating and needed constant attention.
And there were other health troubles. During the Bay of Pigs fiasco Owen writes that Kennedy had:
Constant and acute diarrhoea and a recurrence of his urinary tract infection.
Central to Owen's account is the idea that the administration of drugs to Kennedy for these various ailments was out of control.
In particular, without the knowledge of his other doctors and at the same time as they were giving him other drugs, he was being tended to by Max Jacobson, a doctor known as "Dr Feelgood" because of his reputation as a provider of amphetamines and pep pills. In time Jacobson's drug treatment became almost a recreational drug for Kennedy.
Dr. Hans Kaus took control of Kennedy's medication and ended his drug abuse later that year .
He demanded total control and began using massage rather than injections to treat the President. He also got rid of Jacobson, telling Kennedy:
If I ever heard he took another shot, I'd make sure it was known. No President with his finger on the red button has any business taking stuff like that.
By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was back on an even keel.
Clever people 'are easier to con' says a report carried out by Ultrascan, an IT fraud agency based in the Netherlands.
Other people who are particularly vulnerable are those who have suffered a bereavement or a recent or life-changing trauma.
The agency said that poorly educated or financially inexperienced people were not so desirable to scammers because they did not trust their own judgment and soon realised that they had been duped.
Frank Engelsman, Ultrascan’s specialist in advance-fee fraud, said that doctors were especially vulnerable to scams that encouraged them to do good. “They very often fall for a scam that starts with a request to help the less fortunate in the world through good causes,” he said. “To do the bigger scams you need the victims to trust their own capabilities and experience.”
Lest we forget the greatness of George Washington, Richard Brookheiser reminds us in First in Politics wherein we learn how Washington learned how to back out of a bad situation and how to flip an enemy.
And Gleaves Whitney reminds us how often Washington put service above self.
Lest we forget the greatness of George Washington, Richard Brookheiser reminds us in First in Politics wherein we learn how Washington learned how to back out of a bad situation and how to flip an enemy.
If you are hiking in the woods and come back to your car only to find that your keys are locked inside, pick up a stone and break the window so you can drive away alive.
Sandra Order didn't. She locked her keys in her SUV and died next to it in the cold and the rain of hypothermia.
Best colleges, best doctors, best places to live, I love all these lists even if I sometimes wonder at the presumption and bias of the writer.
This list seems to include more objective factors.
We looked at annual death rates due to alcoholic liver disease, as well as who's headed there by regularly downing five or more drinks in a sitting (CDC). Next, we factored in drunk-driving arrests (FBI) and the percentage of fatal accidents involving intoxicated motorists (U.S. Department of Transportation). Then, after tallying the MADD report card of state efforts to cut down on excessive drinking, we had our ranking and, for the state of Colorado, an invitation to AA.
The Drunkest Cities
The drunkest is Denver, CO. The least dangerously drunk is Durham, NC with Miami in second place. Go figure.
I never knew Leslie Harpold who died about just about a year ago, but her friends do. In a sign of the digital age, where she was one of the first adventurers on the web at Usenet community and by all accounts, a kind and generous soul, when she died, a number of her friends published reminiscenses on del.icio.us.
The shame is her blog is no longer online. A year is not long enough. When you leave directions about what should be done with your blog when you die, leave it online for more than 1 year. Five years would be good.
Merlin Mann at 43 folders asked Lance Arthur What Would Leslie Do? WWLD then became an exercise in extracting her life lessons from her opinions voiced and advice given over the years to her many friends
Living Your Life
1. Enjoy your vices.
2. Treat yourself to flowers
3. Art is important
4. Take a break, often.
Clothing Optionals
1. When trying anything new, always ask yourself "Is this going to make me more or less likely to get laid?"
2. Everyone looks good in boots
3. When you find the perfect bag, buy it.
Keeping Connected
1. When you come across something you know wold be perfect for someone else, buy it for them.
2. Send Thank You notes.
(Her post on How to write a thank you note for anyone who doesn't know the six points by heart).
3. Don't rely on your cell phone to keep track of your phone numbers.
4. An instant message is not a phone call.
Organizing your environment
1. A place for everything
2. Make your bed
3. Schedule the simple tasks.
4. Empty the kitchen sink.
Another brilliant article by Atul Gawande called The Checklist in the New Yorker's Annals of Medicine.
Intensive-care medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered.
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On any given day in the United States, some ninety thousand people are in intensive care. Over a year, an estimated five million Americans will be, and over a normal lifetime nearly all of us will come to know the glassed bay of an I.C.U. from the inside.
Wide swaths of medicine now depend on the lifesupport systems that I.C.U.s provide: care for premature infants; victims of trauma, strokes, and heart attacks; patients who have had surgery on their brain, heart, lungs, or major blood vessels.
Critical care has become an increasingly large portion of what hospitals do. Fifty years ago, I.C.U.s barely existed. ...The average stay of an I.C.U. patient is four days, and the survival rate is eighty-six per cent. Going into an I.C.U., being put on a mechanical ventilator, having tubes and wires run into and out of you, is not a sentence of death. But the days will be the most precarious of your life.
They are precarious because the average patient requires 178 individual actions per day and every one involves risks. One of the biggest risks is that of a line infection, infections that are so common they are considered a routine complication. 80,000 people get line infections each year and of those between 5 and 28% die.
The I.C.U., with its spectacular successes and frequent failures, therefore poses a distinctive challenge: what do you do when expertise is not enough?
Intensive care is now too complex for clinicians to carry out reliably fro memory alone. Taking a page from the pilot checklists, designed to help pilots fly planes too complicated to fly from memory alone, Peter Pronovost, a critical care specialist at John Hopkins, designed a checklist to take care of the problem of line infections.
Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.
Checklists help people with memory recall and make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes.
As the tagline on the New Yorker article says, If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?
Why didn't someone think of this before? Lights on walkers may cut falls
Forget driving in the dark — sometimes it's dangerous just walking in the dark.
As the population ages, medical teams are responding to more calls from people who have fallen in the night. Many are from older adults who toppled over their walkers while reaching for a light switch on the way to the kitchen or bathroom.
Credit Ron Olshwanger, director of the Creve Coeur Fire Protection District, whose own experience with his own mother ultimately led to his inspiration.
The lights (which are a lot like bicycle lights) cost $34 at Medical West, a medical supply firm that can install them on new or existing walkers.
Olshwanger emphasizes that he and the fire department won't make any profit off the headlights. His inspiration is his mother, Bernice Bormaster, who died five years ago. After breaking her hip, she called her son three times in the middle of the night for help getting back to bed.
"It's a perfect example of what can happen. A lot of these people, their minds are fine, their bodies are just a little weak." Olshwanger said. "These people want to live a normal life, and I think this will help."
HT bookofjoe
If you travel with a company computer that carries a lot of personal data of other people, you would be well advised to listen to Internet security expert Bruce Schneier who recommends a whole disk encryption program that runs in the background.
No one wants to be the schmuck who lost a disk filled with the personal data on 25 million British citizens or one who lost personal data of 26 million American veterans.
How Does Bruce Schneier Protect His Laptop Data? With His Fists ---and PGP
Dr. Helen gives some good advice for those for whom going home for the holidays is a bit of hell what with heated political discussions and what all.
May I add that you might argue over the Greatest moments in food history instead for a lot less heat and a lot more fun.
Hat tip Althouse.
Ronni Bennett over at Time Goes By has posted a two-part interview with Dr. William Thomas, a young geriatrician and author of What are Old People For?
"What Are Old People For?: How Elders Will Save the World" (William H. Thomas)
Here is one excerpt.
We human beings live a long time after our reproductive peak. This is no accident. Our species took the necessity of aging and, from that, refined the virtues of elderhood. Elders are an integral, biologically determined element of the human cultural fabric and it is time they understood this role and begin to play their part.
And another on the two most important things he's learned from elders.
1. Wisdom lies in knowing what to overlook. 2. In the end, no one gets out alive and so, for the time we are here, it is all about relationships. Nothing else really matters.
Part One
Part Two
David Warren quit school at 16 and hit the road.
In retrospect, it was the best personal decision I ever made, and I recommend it wholeheartedly to the young of today; at least, to those whose minds are not already imprisoned. Get out of that education “system” while you still can, and before it has made you into a spiritual corpse, mouthing politically-correct clichés along with all the other zombies. Get yourself a real education, in what you can find of the world, and see what you can accomplish without participating in the credentials racket. Make your “core relationship” with God, rather than with some Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Discover a vocation in which you can advance the cause of the good, the true, and the beautiful. And raise children -- in poverty, if necessary -- who will also defy the zombism of our post-modern age.
Education reform
UPDATE: Gaghdad Bob points out that Joseph Campbell did the same thing.
".... So I said to hell with it. I went up into the woods and spent five years reading.... It was from 1929 to 1934, five years. I went up to a little shack in Woodstock, New York, and just dug in. All I did was read, read, read, and take notes. It was during the Great Depression. I didn't have any money...."
Importantly, this wasn't just aimless reading, but what someone else once called the "mystery school of individuation." Perhaps you're familiar with the concept. You find one book that speaks directly to your soul, which tips you to another one that does the same. Pretty soon you're embarked on a wild nous chase, not for any "exterior" purpose, but for the purpose of trying to articulate the idiom of your own soul. The end result -- among other things -- is that 1) you know you have a soul, 2) you are aware that your soul is very specifically yours (i.e., it has its own language, so to speak), and 3) you don't want to do anything in life that would interfere with the intrinsic joy of living from your soul.
So did he. Wandering, Wondering and Blundering into the Mystery
I can relate to Campbell's story, because in my case I quit college in my junior year (before they could expel me), and spent the next five or six years wandering, but not idly. Rather, it was a period of intense non-doodling, as if my soul were on fire and I was looking for water. By the time I entered graduate school in 1982, I was an utterly different person than I would have been had I spent all those years in the idiot factory. In short, I never would have become me. Whether it was luck or destiny, I cannot say.
Jeffrey Zaslow writes A Beloved Professor Delivers The Lecture of a Lifetime in the Wall St. Journal. Watch this short video of Randy Pausch, a vibrant, handsome man who has only weeks or months to live, but can do one-handed pushups.
They had come to see him give what was billed as his "last lecture." This is a common title for talks on college campuses today. Schools such as Stanford and the University of Alabama have mounted "Last Lecture Series," in which top professors are asked to think deeply about what matters to them and to give hypothetical final talks. For the audience, the question to be mulled is this: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance?
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At Carnegie Mellon, however, Dr. Pausch's speech was more than just an academic exercise. The 46-year-old father of three has pancreatic cancer and expects to live for just a few months. His lecture, using images on a giant screen, turned out to be a rollicking and riveting journey through the lessons of his life.
He began by showing his CT scans, revealing 10 tumors on his liver. But after that, he talked about living. If anyone expected him to be morose, he said, "I'm sorry to disappoint you." He then dropped to the floor and did one-handed pushups.
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He paid tribute to his techie background. "I've experienced a deathbed conversion," he said, smiling. "I just bought a Macintosh." Flashing his rejection letters on the screen, he talked about setbacks in his career, repeating: "Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things." He encouraged us to be patient with others. "Wait long enough, and people will surprise and impress you." After showing photos of his childhood bedroom, decorated with mathematical notations he'd drawn on the walls, he said: "If your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let 'em do it."
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He then spoke about his legacy. Considered one of the nation's foremost teachers of videogame and virtual-reality technology, he helped develop "Alice," a Carnegie Mellon software project that allows people to easily create 3-D animations. It had one million downloads in the past year, and usage is expected to soar.
"Like Moses, I get to see the Promised Land, but I don't get to step foot in it," Dr. Pausch said. "That's OK. I will live on in Alice."
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Dr. Pausch's speech was taped so his children, ages 5, 2 and 1, can watch it when they're older. His last words in his last lecture were simple: "This was for my kids." Then those of us in the audience rose for one last standing ovation.
I love to collect people's life lessons and some are better than others.
When the veteran who blogs anonymously at walterreed.blogspot posted his Ten Life Lessons the Army Taught him, he didn't expect them to be so popular that Tim Rick, military correspondent for the Washington Post would reprint them all, but that's how I found them.
1. Always have a notepad, pen, watch, knife, and flashlight on hand.
2. Have a copy of everything. If its important have two copies.
If it has your name on it, then you need a copy. If it affects your health, paycheck, or other element of well-being, then you need two copies. Records get lost, computers crash, and sometimes people just need to see a piece of 80 bond under their noses to get anything done.
3. Make friends wherever you go.
It doesn't matter if you are there for 20 minutes or 20 months, make friends. Inevitably, you will see them again. You will go to where they are. They will go to where you will be. And at the end of the day friends are the only ones covering the front of your position.
4. Make an SOP. Know the SOP. Work the SOP.
Civilian. Military. It doesn't matter. There should be a Standard Operating Procedure for daily life. .... Routine accomplishes this, and we accomplish more when we have a routine.
5. Sleep.
Sleep is one of the things in life we don't appreciate until we aren't getting it.... If it was bad when you went to sleep and its still bad when you wake up, well then I guess you weren't missing anything. If by chance its better when you wake up, then apparently the world doesn't rest upon your shoulders. So take a nap Atlas.
6. Don't go cheap.
7. Find humor everywhere.
8. Don't tolerate oppression.
Stand up for what you think is right. In the end if you were wrong, so be it.
9. Tell your Story.
Battles are not merely lost by the Soldiers on the field, the armament, or the weather. They are one and lost by the lessons learned of prior battles. We learn these lessons because someone told their story.... Older Soldiers told their stories in hopes that a single silver strand of wisdom would be gleamed and be passed on. It is part of what we contribute to society. When one can gleam wisdom from the lessons others have learned we have possible prevented the hardship by which the another person gained that knowledge. And by sharing our lessons we are helping someone else. That is one of our greatest contributions to humanity.
10. Never forget.
Never forget who you are. Never forget what you have done. Never forget where you are. Never forget what it is you want from this one life we have. Never forget the people that stood behind you in support, beside you in camaraderie, or in front of you in adversity. Never forget to write home. Never forget that someone is missing you. Never forget what you have learned. Never forget to share what you have learned. Never forget anything; lest you forget everything.
After reading What's So Friggin' Funny by Steven Johnson, a fascinating article, I think I want one of those Tickle Me Elmo dolls. I've never seen them and they sound hilarious.
Sometimes you need to "laugh and let go" of mental or emotional tensions. Laughter feels great and does a body good.
Saturday-Review editor Norman Cousins wrote his best-selling "ANATOMY OF AN ILLNESS AS PEREIVED BY THE PATIENT" in 1979 about how he recovered from an incurable, terminal condition with laughter, rest and vitamin C and brought to the country's attention to the reality of the mind-body connection in what he called the "biology of hope."
The revelation that your mental attitude could affect your physical recovery, that laughter really was the best medicine, affected millions. When Cousins "made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anaesthetic effect that would give me at least two-hours of pain-free sleep," sales of videotapes of Groucho Marx and The Three Stooges soared.
Now neuro-scientist Robert Provine is teaching us even more about laughter as he investigates its source and purpose.
As his research progressed, Provine began to suspect that laughter was in fact about something else—not humor or gags or incongruity but our social interactions. He found support for this assumption in a study that had already been conducted, one analyzing people’s laughing patterns in social and solitary contexts. “You’re 30 times more likely to laugh when you’re with other people than you are when you’re alone—if you don’t count simulated social environments like laugh tracks on television,” Provine says. Think how rarely you’ll laugh out loud at a funny passage in a book but how quick you’ll be to give a friendly laugh when greeting an old acquaintance. Laughing is not an instinctive physical response to humor, the way a flinch is a response to pain or a shiver to cold. Humor is crafted to exploit a form of instinctive. social bonding.
Laughter is simply how we connect in good cheer.
"The human race has only one really effective weapon, and that's laughter. The moment it arises, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place,"
Mark Twain.
I find this very disturbing, another example of a fraying social contract among citizens.
Around 1 in 6 Americans Do Not Pay Their Taxes.
This is evading taxes, not paying your fair share, not carrying your load. And every single one of those evaders will have an excuse as to why the law does not apply to them.
It's simple. Pay no more than what you owe. Even be aggressive in taking tax deductions,
but pay your taxes.
I found the story of the 'Living Corpse' who woke up after a 19-year Coma, an inspiring one, a Rip Van Winkle tale of our time.
Hats off to the wife who cared for him for 19 years at home with great love and devotion, changing his position every hour to prevent bedsores.
"I would fly into a rage every time someone would say that people like him should be euthanized, so they don't suffer," she told the local daily paper. "I believed Janek would recover," she said, using an affectionate version of his name.
"This is my great reward for all the care, faith and love," she told the AP, weeping.
"He remembers everything that was going on around him," she said. "He talks about it and remembers the wedding of our children. He had fever around the time of the weddings, so he knew something big was taking place."
Jan Grzebska fell into a coma following in communist Poland and awoke to find democracy and a market economy.
"The world is prettier now" than it was under communism he told his wife.
Jan spoke to Polish television
When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere. What amazes me today is all these people who walk around with their mobile phones and never stop moaning. I've got nothing to complain about.
Apart from the miracle of his reawakening, we should take note that comatose often can hear and remember what's said around them.
An extraordinary story of Jack Downey and Richard Fecteau, lured by a double agent and jailed secretly, The lost 20 years of CIA spies caught in a China trap
The capture, imprisonment and eventual release of these two CIA agents is one of the most extraordinary and poignant tales in the history of espionage. Some of the material relating to their captivity remains classified but 34 years after Downey stumbled to freedom the CIA has finally allowed an official agency historian access to its most secret files.
The Downey-Fecteau case, revealed last week in the CIA’s Journal of the American Intelligence Professional, is a story of suffering, endurance and ordinary individuals trapped and manipulated by geopolitics. With the recent Iranian hostage drama, the story has remarkable contemporary resonance, but with one signal difference. The British soldiers were held in Iran for 13 days, and some made a small fortune by selling their stories after their release. Downey and Fecteau — both of whom are still living —never told their story to the media, and never made a penny out of it.
They were 22 and 24 when they were caught.
The men lived in draughty cells, on a diet of maggoty rice and vegetables. Sometimes they were allowed books and magazines. Then, with refined psychological cruelty, these would be arbitrarily removed.
The Americans developed survival strategies: daily exercise, writing, learning Chinese, and training their minds to explore the world they had once known.
Fecteau became an “expert daydreamer”, Dujmovic reports, and made an imaginary world by recalling every child in his school classes, and the sights in the Massachusetts town where he grew up.
Their prison experience has become a case study in surviving captivity.
Awarding Downey and Fecteau belated medals in 1998, George Tenet, then CIA director, observed: “Your story, simply put, is one of the most remarkable in the history of the CIA.”
Victor Davis Hanson had a crazy, volatile roommate his first year of college, so he has real empathy for students who might find themselves in a similar, scary situation. His advice
I don’t believe that the university can protect any of them. Its mentality is therapeutic. And in the age of law-suits, and fourth-chances officials always err in the direction of the accused’s rights. I say that not in hindsight or criticism, but in sadness that the best advice one could give a child going to the university would be something like: “You will meet very eccentric people there, with all sorts of problems and strong passions, most of them antithetical to your own. Don’t expect moral guidance necessarily from your professors, or physical protection from your colleagues or the administration. Ask for such help, but don’t count on it. Instead keep you eyes open and at all times expect the worse.”
I am sorry if that sounds pessimistic, but I find it better advice than something like the college brochures’ promises of four years of intellectual and lifestyle stimulation in a cordial tolerant environment.
In a lovely piece, Jane Plitt writes about her mother in The Lessons of Alzheimer's, the unexpected gifts of a terrible disease.
Among them
1. Be in the Moment
2. Touch Connects
3. Choose your Memories
4. Meet and Greet
5. Use things Up
I have three rules of life that have stood me in good stead.
1. Always wear a seatbelt.
2. Put the milk back in the refrigerator.
3. Be kind.
I became convinced of the first as a student in law school when a guest lecturer, a medical examiner, showed us photographs of people killed because of the forward motion of a body when a car hits theirs, even if it was going only 5 miles an hour, propelled them through a window or impaled them on a steering column. Most car accidents take place within a few miles of home when people 'just running to the store to get a few things' don't think they need a seatbelt. Then and there I vowed to always wear a seatbelt even if I was just going the block.
To be killed because of not wearing a seatbelt seems to me to be an especially stupid way to die.
So when N.J. Governor Corzine, is gravely injured because he was "thrown within the vehicle during the impact" because didn't buckle-up in his car GOING 91 MILES AN HOUR IN A 65 MPH ZONE, I just have to think he's stupid or arrogant and thinking the rules don't apply to him. Everyone else in the car was buckled up.
Now I'm sorry he's so seriously injured, I don't wish any ill to happen to him, but what stupid behavior from a public official, and especially hypocritical since he proposed a mandatory seat belt law while a U.S. senator.
"Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful"
William Morris in an 1880 lecture on The Beauty of LIfe.
A serious heart attack is as much of an emergency as being shot.
“We deal with it as if it is a gunshot wound to the heart,” Dr. Antman said.
Cardiologists call it the golden hour, that window of time when they have a chance to save most of the heart muscle when an artery is blocked.
Don't think of a clutching your heart pain like you see in the movies. Consider pressure, a feeling of heaviness, shortness of breath.
Most patients describe something like Mr. Orr’s symptoms — discomfort in the chest that may, or may not, radiate into the arms or neck, the back, the jaw, or the stomach. Many also have nausea or shortness of breath. Or they break out in a cold sweat, or have a feeling of anxiety or impending doom, or have blue lips or hands or feet, or feel a sudden exhaustion.
But symptoms often are less distinctive in elderly patients, especially women. Their only sign may be a sudden feeling of exhaustion just walking across a room. Some say they broke out in a sweat. Afterward, they may recall a feeling of pressure in their chest or pain radiating from their chest but at the time, they say, they paid little attention.
The time in getting to an emergency room in time for treatment hasn't changed in 10 years - it's still 110 minutes, one hour and 50 minutes.
People drive themselves to the ER or get a friend to do so. And then they wait to get triaged. They don't come in with sirens blazing, treatment already started, and jump to the head of the line.
They don't call 911 because of embarrassment. Said Dr. Skopp
“But it is better to be checked out and find out it’s not a problem than to have a problem and not have the therapy,” he said.
The ideal treatment you want is angioplasty, the ideal treatment.
Second best is a clot-dissolving drug like tPA even though it opens up only 60-70% of blocked arteries and kills 1 out of 200 patients with a stroke to the brain.
Dr. Antman has a message for patients: With a disease as serious as heart disease, those who take responsibility are often the ones who survive.
Having a heart attack, even if it turns out well, as his did, is a life-altering experience, Mr. Orr said.
The New York Times follows Keith Orr, 44, who thought he was doing great, what with his improved diet and exercise and all, so he stopped taking his medications. Luckily, he was in Boston. Lessons of Heart Disease, Learned and Ignored.
From a remarkable essay by Brian Mockenhaupt,
I miss Iraq. I miss my gun. I miss my war
Yet even at its lowest points, war is like nothing else. Our culture craves experience, and that is war's strong suit. War peels back the skin, and you live with a layer of nerves exposed, overdosing on your surroundings, when everything seems all wrong and just right, in a way that makes perfect sense. And then you almost die but don't, and are born again, stoned on life and mocking death. The explosions and gunfire fry your nerves, but you want to hear them all the same. Something's going down.
For those who know, this is the open secret: War is exciting. Sometimes I was in awe of this, and sometimes I felt low and mean for loving it, but I loved it still. Even in its quiet moments, war is brighter, louder, brasher, more fun, more tragic, more wasteful. More. More of everything.
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Mortal danger heightens the senses. That is simple animal instinct. We're more aware of how our world smells and sounds and tastes. This distorts and enriches experiences. Now I can have everything, but it's not as good as when I could have none of it.
Antonio Pierro is 110. This is some of what he's learned.
If you're going to make wine by stepping on grapes, make sure to wash your feet.
Steal with your eyes, not with your hands.
It's good to have a garden.
There's too much to remember. Sometimes you gotta forget about the past.
You see people you like, you go there.
We were married 47 years. Kindness in giving creates love.
She calls them My Secrets of Adulthood. I call them practical tips and life lessons.
Gretchen Rubin says each one changed her life, once she figured them out.
She also has her own 12 commandments.
1. Be Gretchen.
2. Let it go.
3. Act as I would feel.
4. Do it now.
5. Be polite and be fair.
6. Enjoy the process.
7. Spend out.
8. Identify the problem.
9. Lighten up.
10. Do what ought to be done.
11. No calculation.
12. There is only love.
The Happiness Project is a site to bookmark.
Last week the Pope said the saints have not 'fallen from heaven'.
"They are men like us, with complicated problems. Holiness does not consist in not making mistakes or never sinning," Benedict XVI continued. "Holiness grows with the capacity for conversion, repentance, willingness to begin again, and above all with the capacity for reconciliation and forgiveness.
Saints Weren't Perfect, Pope Says
Today in the Wall St Journal, Jeff Zaslow tells the stories of three people and the lessons they learned from the losses they've endured.
Former Army Staff Sgt. Robbie Doughty lost his legs to a roadside bomb in Iraq. Thomas Sullivan lost 96 colleagues in the Sept. 11 attacks. Laurie Johnson lost her husband and young son in a small plane crash that left her seriously injured.
And yet today, all three of them remain positive about life. They even seem upbeat.
Mr. Doughty, 32, will host a grand opening today of his new Little Caesars pizza franchise in Paducah, Ky. Since his 2004 injury, "I've done so many things, even skiing," he says. "If there's something I can't do, there's always a way to work around it."
Plane-crash survivor Laurie Johnson sells stylish crutches.
Mr. Sullivan, 35, is now an Army Reserve captain in Iraq. In 2001, as a Fiduciary Trust employee, he worked on the 95th floor of the World Trade Center's South Tower, and escaped minutes before it collapsed. Yes, he feels survivor's guilt, but serving as a wartime officer helps to ease that.
Ms. Johnson, 46, is now an entrepreneur. That 2002 plane crash left her on crutches for two years. Since then, she has created LemonAid Crutches, which sells "designer crutches" with comfortable fabrics. It was her way of "turning lemons into lemonade," she says.
Are there lessons for us in these people's experiences? Researchers say yes, because the root of resilience is an ability to keep adversities in perspective, while making peace with things that can't be changed.
Being creative with what life deals you is key.
Dr. Zausner says that her own greatest achievements came after surviving ovarian cancer. "We don't know how strong we are until we have the occasion to find out. Our strengths are like icebergs, mostly hidden." Her new book, "When Walls Become Doorways," details her research into artists "who turned setbacks into launching pads."
Key too is pressing on, helping others and finding purpose.
Sounds something like saints-in-the-making doesn't it.
Putting it all together, What I learned from 9-11 Conspiracy Theories.
Hat tip Kathy Shaidle
Robert Paterson on Nature's Big Idea - Trusted Space.
Get the initial conditions right .
Mother Nature does not micromanage an entity throughout its life cycle. She uses leverage.
She allows for the best beginning to set the best course for the best potential. An entity that has enjoyed the best Initial Conditions will, all on its own, have a high probability of fulfilling its ideal potential.
Conversely, if an entity has suffered from poor Initial Conditions, there is little chance of getting back on track let alone meeting the full potential. Nature is neutral. She just sets the rules.
You have to read the whole thing to see how he applies this theory to families and organizations.
Michael Pollan, author of the Omnivore's Dilemma, wrote Unhappy Meals in the New York Times Magazine that begins with the shortest, pithiest and best advice on eating you will ever get.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
He expands on this advice for 3000 words
More tidbits:
And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. ....Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
Nuturionism is not nutrition, it's a religion.
No one likes to admit that his or her best efforts at understanding and solving a problem have actually made the problem worse, but that’s exactly what has happened in the case of nutritionism. Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health.
What I've Learned, Peter O'Toole
Six years: 1939 to 1945. It was life. One's literacy was newspapers, bombs, Germans. We didn't have a childhood. We had the war.
From both my mother and father I learned endurance. Things were pretty tough. But things could be tougher.
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Everything you hear about the true American spirit -- the matriarchy and the femininity and the toughness -- you find in Kate Hepburn. She was funny as hell and brave and dotty. Kate! I gave my daughter her name.
Years later, in Ireland, daughter Kate, then nine or ten, said, "Daddy, there's an old Gypsy woman at the door!" We had a Gypsy nearby who would pinch our flowers. I went to the door and said, "No, thank you, we don't -- oh, hello, Kate." She had four jackets on. One belonged to Barrymore, one to Spencer Tracy, one to me, and one to Humphrey Bogart. Khaki trousers and boots -- this was her uniform.
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Blogging as the Dawn Patrol, Dawn Eden, author of The Thrill of the Chaste, writes in the London Sunday Times, Casual Sex is a con: women just aren't like men.
Whatever Greer and her ilk might say I’ve tried their philosophy — that a woman can shag like a man — and it doesn’t work. We’re not built like that. Women are built for bonding. We are vessels and we seek to be filled. For that reason, however much we try and convince ourselves that it isn’t so, sex will always leave us feeling empty unless we are certain that we are loved, that the act is part of a bigger picture that we are loved for our whole selves not just our bodies.
It took me a long time to realise this.
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It left me with a brittle facade incapable of real intimacy.
Hugh MacLeod at The Gaping Void is encouraging readers to send in their brief manifestos. He has his down to four words.
This one on Work by Pamela Slim who posts at Escape from Cubicle Nation is so good, I'm going to post it in its entirety.
1. Work is your real life
. It is the way you translate your feelings, your thoughts, your hopes and your desires into something valuable, tangible and useful every day. You can choose to make work into a dreaded, necessary evil that you can't wait to finish so that you can get busy with your "real life." Why not just do work you love?
2. Good work will improve your sex life. Frustrated employees desperately long for excitement and release in the form of fantasy football, internet surfing, porn, and the affections of their stressed and overworked spouses. No superhero could fill the gigantic void of a passionless man or woman in a 15-minute tryst in bed. Express your passion through your work every day, all day, and find that you will be less needy, more attentive, open, giving and loving to your partner. Which makes for better sex.
3. Your secret desire holds the clue to your best work. You say that you would love to do meaningful work, but don't know how to find it. What is your secret desire? What idea are you a little embarrassed to share with someone because it is so delicate or bold or crazy or exciting? You often claim to not know what you want to do, but in fact censor yourself from what you know you want for fear of appearing ridiculous.
4. You can't fool your kids. Many of you claim passionless, dull and frustrating careers with the excuse that you must provide for your family. Providing for your family is noble; using it as an excuse to hide from your own greatness is a bad example for your kids. If you want them to grow up motivated, creative, free and enterprising, be that yourself. They are watching and emulating your every move.
5. Fear is the great inhibitor. All of the excuses that you find for not doing work you love have solutions. You do not enact them because you are afraid: of showing up too big in the world; of failing; of appearing as an imposter; of living in poverty. There is nothing wrong with fear. Feel it, talk to it, examine it and walk with it. Then step out and let yourself show up, warts and all. It will liberate you.
6. Owning is better than renting. While you may feel "safer" renting out your skills for a paycheck and benefits, you often sell all your energy this way and have nothing left at the end of the day. If you don't get what you need in this employment arrangement in terms of money, recognition, power or responsibility, you feel angry and frustrated. Own the means of production and the factory, and at least your glorious disasters will be your disasters. Accountability breeds passion and desire.
If you think about writing a thank you note and don't or if you write a note and don't send it or if you think that if you write a thank you note to someone you've never met, you have to read
From Eight Letters, A Life-Afirming Note
via Book of Joe
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."
Thanksgiving Turkey Drop from WKRP.
Thanks Hugh Hewitt for a great laugh.
A living tragedy of an insane idea of racial purity, Secret Nazi 'baby farm' children meet.
Children born on Nazi baby farms who were intended to be the germseed for Hitler's Ayran master race are meeting in public to break a taboo that has lasted more than 60 years.
They are the product of the Lebensborn programme of the S.S., the 'Fountain of Life' scheme that turned racially and idealogically pure S.S. men into studs and blonde, blue-eyed single girls into child-rearing machines for the Fuehrer.
Thousands of such children were born in Lebensborn camps across Europe. They were immediately seperated from their mothers to be brought up in homes where the only religion was Nazism and qualities like mercy and kindness were frowned upon.
Hitler and his S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler believed they were creating a superrace: instead the lack of affection and poor education besides Nazi indoctrination led many to be educationally backward and emotionally crippled.
Just in time for Halloween.
Here are ten life lessons, illustrated by coffins.
We spend so much time avoiding the hard facts in our lives. It's much more productive to invest the energy you would spend avoiding unpleasant things to preparing for them. If you stop denying that bad things happen and just start facing their inevitability, you may be able to find a clever way to take advantage of the things that are going to happen in your life.
For example, if you buy a coffin window seat, then you can use it throughout your life to take off your shoes. At the same time, you will have a handy place to store a dead body if you ever kill anyone. Now you're really thinking ahead! Think of all the ways your life would be better if you just planned ahead.
I liked the gold leaf ecopod the best. It looks like Paloma Picasso's bean jewelry though she preferred silver.
Playing the Odds on True Love
TRUE LOVE is like a kick in the head. No, really. It's not just that it comes out of nowhere, knocks you sideways and changes your life forever. It's statistically like a kick in the head.
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Love, here as everywhere, is different. True love is rare; we can only hope to find it once in a lifetime, and maybe not even then. The curve that charts love is very narrow — more like a steeple than a bell. It's called a Poisson curve, and its classic exemplar was the chance of being kicked to death by a horse while serving in the Prussian cavalry.
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While the bell curve describes things we can expect; Poisson's formula predicts things we fear or hope for — things that, though rare, could happen at any time.
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True love is such an event. It could be today; it could be never. All we know is that it happens to some people, sometimes. This makes me believe that the hope of meeting the love of your life is also governed by the Poisson curve. If so, it suggests some interesting conclusions.
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This implies that your best chances come from seeking out and sustaining friendships with the people you already like most, rather than devoting too much time to the exotic alternatives. Rare things become near-impossible once you compound their rarity — say, by buying a lottery ticket only on your birthday.
“One of the secrets of a long and fruitful life is to forgive everybody everything every night before going to bed.”
– Bernard Baruch, financier
John Maeda is called the Master of Simplicity. A computer scientist, a graphic designer, and a professor at the MIT Media Lab, he's begun a blog called, what else, Simplicity.
His philosophy of life is an example.
When you're younger: Do More. Think Less.
When you're older: Do Less. Think More.
Hat tip to 37 signals who excerpts segments from Maeda's new book, The Laws of Simplicity.
Complexity implies the feeling of being lost; simplicity implies the feeling of being found.
Nobody wants to have only simplicity. Without the counterpoint of complexity, we could not recognize simplicity when we see it…Simplicity and complexity need each other.
The Old Professor gives this advice to college freshmen at Tom McMahon's, who is better known as the creator of the s "damaged and brilliant" 4 square world.
On the first day of class he asks them a question. "What would you be doing if you were not in College?" They reply that they would be working in a retail store, construction, or at the paper mill in their hometown. "So you would be working 40 hours a week? Is that correct?" he says. They answer in the affirmative. He then goes on to guarantee that if they will work a 40-hour week in college, they will be successful. He asks them to "work" in their academic pursuits 8 hours a day, five days a week, with evenings and weekends off. The 40 hours must be spent either in class or in study time. He explains that if they would get up at 7 a.m., eat breakfast, and either attend class or study from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with an hour off for lunch, they would have every evening off to socialize. They would also have their weekends free. He knows that this will work. He also knows that they won't take his advice.
As a breast cancer survivor, Katie Paine knows what it's like. With that and what she learned from two friends who succumbed, Katie's learned more than a few life lessons. So when she lays down some rules for life, you want to pay attention
She calls them the The Paine Manifesto.
Here are just the first ten.
1. Staying Alive comes first – run, exercise, do something to keep yourself healthy
2. Relationships are next. Without friends, you are nothing. A friend, or a connection extends your lifespan by a decade. Put your friends first. The pain of losing a friend is the worst you’ll ever experience. Spend time with the friends you have while you have them. They might be gone tomorrow or next week, you never know.
3. No one ever lay on their death bed and wished they’d spent more time vacuuming, or at work, or asleep
4. Make a difference. There are millions of people on the planet that just take up oxygen. Do you want to be one of them, or do you want to make a difference.?
5. Be who you are and see who is pleased, stop trying to make everyone happy. You can’t.
6. If you decide that who you are is someone who wants to make a difference, your life will never be the same. You will experience more joy, more exhilaration, every single day.
7. You don’t have to make a difference on the whole while world. Make a difference in your community, in your family, in your neighborhood. It’s just as important.
8. After breathing, the most important thing in life is caring.
9. If you don’t build a values based business, your business has no true value
10. Be true to your values, your beliefs, your vision, your soul. Nothing else matters.
HT Shel Israel at Naked Conversations
Granddaughter Tracy Templeton said Bob Irwin will be especially missed in part because of the life lessons he imparted to her family.
“My grandpa taught us things in life that are really worth something there’s no need to rush through them, whether it be a book, a meal, a life. That to me is his legacy.”
Debbie Brownfield said the Grays Harbor Raceway is a lasting tribute to her husband, Fred Brownfield's dreams and vision.
"It shows he was dedicated to getting things done," she said. "He cared about the racers and the fans. He wanted them all to have a good experience. He took things he liked at other tracks and worked to make (Elma) a place to be proud to race at or attend. He was diligent. He was definitely a go-getter. When something needed to get done, he would go through all kinds of obstacles. He was like a little bulldog.
From an interview of Nora Ephron in the Wall St Journal (subscribers only I think)
I was just with someone complaining about his mother. He's 70 and his mother is dead. I sat there thinking, 'This is unbelievable.' He was complaining about things she did to him when he was a kid. There are also a lot of divorced people who five years later are still walking around angry when they should be grateful. They love being victims. You get to a certain point in life where if you were younger you'd say, 'Think about getting a shrink.' Then you get older and want to say, 'Pull up your socks. Get over it.'
Art critic Robert Hughes reveals how his life was deeply scarred by the Sixties.