Bleh. I’m not pleased by this. But an afternoon appointment looms.
When I get back, I hope to do the blog post for Leverage episode 3.
Meanwhile, the hell with global warming. Did you know our magnetic field is dying and we might turn into the next Mars?
This is so important, I’m ripping off the entire news report.
Swiss watch found in 400-year-old tomb
Archeologists in China are baffled after finding a tiny Swiss watch in a 400-year-old tomb.
The watch ring was discovered as archeologists were making a documentary with two journalists from Shangsi town.
“When we tried to remove the soil wrapped around the coffin, a piece of rock suddenly dropped off and hit the ground with a metallic sound,? said Jiang Yanyu, former curator of the Guangxi Autonomous Region Museum.
“We picked up the object, and found it was a ring. After removing the covering soil and examining it further, we were shocked to see it was a watch.”
The time was stopped at 10:06am, and on the back was engraved the word “Swiss”, reports the People’s Daily.
Local experts say they are confused as they believe the tomb had been undisturbed since it was created during the Ming dynasty 400 years ago.
They have suspended the dig and are waiting for experts to arrive from Beijing and help them unravel the mystery.
Emphasis added by me.
There it is.
Proof time travel exists!
Now give me my goddammed machine so I can go back to 1960!!!
WHEN WOMAN IS BOSS: An interview with Nikola Tesla by John B. Kennedy
When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.
We shall be able to witness and hear events — the inauguration of a President, the playing of a world series game, the havoc of an earthquake or the terror of a battle — just as though we were present.
Emphasis added by me.
What would he have thought of the iPhone!?
And get this:
It is more than probable that the household’s daily newspaper will be printed ‘wirelessly’ in the home during the night.
He saw this in 1926!
That’s eighty-two years ago.
Can you see eighty-two years ahead?
Acorn Watchers Wonder What Happened to Crop
The idea seemed too crazy to Rod Simmons, a measured, careful field botanist. Naturalists in Arlington County couldn’t find any acorns. None. No hickory nuts, either. Then he went out to look for himself. He came up with nothing. Nothing crunched underfoot. Nothing hit him on the head.
Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins. Squirrels boldly scampering into the road. And a lot more calls about squirrel roadkill.
But Simmons really got spooked when he was teaching a class on identifying oak and hickory trees late last month. For 2 1/2 miles, Simmons and other naturalists hiked through Northern Virginia oak and hickory forests. They sifted through leaves on the ground, dug in the dirt and peered into the tree canopies. Nothing.
Too early to tell what this means.
Have the frogs gotten better?
Have the bees returned?
A Beautiful Mind (Adam Smith was wrong)
The blonde is all outstanding global debt: National, Corporate, and Consumer.
If everyone wants repayment, no one is going to get it.
Nations, societies, and the world we have known all fall.
If everyone ignores the blonde — all debt is forgiven — everyone prospers.
All Sink or All Swim in a nutshell.
The medical miracle
Mother-of-two becomes first transplant patient to receive an organ grown to order in a laboratory
Claudia Castillo, who lives in Barcelona, underwent the operation to replace her windpipe after tuberculosis had left her with a collapsed lung and unable to breathe.
The bioengineered organ was transplanted into her chest last June at the Hospital Clinic in Barcelona.
Four months later she was able to climb two flights of stairs, go dancing and look after her children – activities that had been impossible before the surgery. Ms Castillo has also crossed a second medical frontier by becoming the first person to receive a whole organ transplant without the need for powerful immunosuppressant drugs.
Doctors overcame the problem of rejection by taking her own stem cells to grow the replacement organ, using a donor trachea (lower windpipe) to provide the mechanical framework. Blood tests have shown no sign of rejection months after the surgery was complete.
Emphasis added by me.
We’ve eight years of an ass in the White House. An ass who has no problem wiping out unarmed civilians in Iraq but gets all moral when the subject of stem cell research popped up.
How many people that you knew, how many people that you loved, have died these past eight years who might have been saved had stem cell research been allowed to proceed as it should have?
“In 20 years’ time the commonest surgical operations will be regenerative procedures to replace organs and tissues damaged by disease with autologous [self-grown] tissues and organs from the laboratory. We are on the verge of a new age in surgical care.”
Professor Birchall said the technique could initially be extended to growing other hollow organs such as the bowel, bladder and reproductive tract but could later be extended to solid organs including the heart, liver and kidneys. “They have all got scaffolds [natural frameworks] on which new cells can be grown,” he said. “We will need units next to hospitals to generate the cells. The trick is turning it into a therapy for thousands of patients – [the process] will have to be automated.”
Emphasis added by me.
The worst irony is, that lame duck bastard will probably have his life saved years from now — thanks to stem cell therapies.
Professor Anthony Hollander, of the University of Bristol, said the advance had been achieved as a result of developments in stem-cell technology. “For stem-cell science, this is really exciting,” he said. “Without stem cells this procedure would not have been possible.”
Emphasis added by me.
The benefits of the statin were so striking that a monitoring board stopped the trial in midcourse so that the placebo group could get the medicine, too. Those who got the statin had 54 percent fewer heart attacks, 48 percent fewer strokes and 20 percent fewer deaths from all causes. The participants included men 50 and older and women 60 and older with no history of heart disease or high cholesterol. But they all had high levels of CRP, and many had such other risk factors as high blood pressure, obesity and smoking. Whether the statin helped because it reduced normal cholesterol to even lower levels or because it reduced CRP levels is not clear.
The rah-rah blind cheerleading of this New York Times Editorial(!) is very disturbing.
It ignores the accounts of many people whose lives have been devastated by the side-effects of statin drugs.
I was on my way to being one of those people.
The human body is the most complex system we have ever encountered. Apparently some people are able to escape the worst possible side-effects of these drugs. Others, like me, cannot.
It’s vital to know what these possible side-effects are and to be extremely vigilant in determining if they are creeping up on you. For that’s how they happen: in very, very small steps that are invisible until they impact in a very, very big way.
See my prior posts here for how Simvastatin nearly ate my mind. I’m still not convinced that I’ve been able to reverse all of its effects. We don’t have the scientific tools to measure that. And in my own case, I lack the pre-statin brain scans, etc, that could show any Before & After differences.
There is one thing I’m thoroughly convinced of: All cases of Alzheimer’s disease should first be treated by removing statins from a victim’s daily routine. Re-cholesterolize the brain and see if that makes a difference. I think we’d see many cases of Alzheimer’s disappear — or at least dramatically improve — when statins are withdrawn.
Previously here:
Iron Lady Thatcher: Dementia
Writer Terry Pratchett Has Alzheimer’s
Statin Drugs: Brain Changes?
Statin Drugs: What You Must Know
Was My Brain Screaming To Itself?
Statin Drugs And Ersatz Alzheimer’s
Statin Drugs: More Fraud
James Kendrick Describes His Stroke
Statin Drugs: Two Notes
Statin Drugs: No Blood
Statin Drugs: Does V.P. Dick Cheney Take One?
Statin Drugs: Jarvik Ads Withdrawn
Statin Drugs: More Better!
Statin Drugs: Pain For Nothing
Statin Drugs: Survey
Simvastatin Made Me Insane
Simvastatin: This Happened To Me Too!
Simvastatin Vs. My Mind
Stopping My Statin
Give Me Back My Mind!
Everybody knows that oil and gas drilled out of the earth comes from the remains of plants and animals trapped underground millions of years ago. This received wisdom so dominates our thinking that it is enshrined in the very language we use–fossil fuels. They took eons to form, and we are using them up far faster than they can be replenished.
What if the whole theory is wrong?
That’s the premise of a small but passionate band of Russian and Ukrainian contrarians. They argue that oil and gas don’t come from fossils; they’re synthesized deep within the earth’s mantle by heat, pressure and other purely chemical means, before gradually rising to the surface. Under the so-called abiotic theory of oil, finding all the energy we need is just a matter of looking beyond the traditional basins where fossils might have accumulated.
The idea that oil comes from fossils “is a myth. … We need to change this myth,” says petroleum engineer Vladimir Kutcherov, at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. “All kinds of rocks could have oil and gas deposits.”
Alexander Kitchka of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences brashly estimates that 60% of the content of all oil is abiotic in origin, and not from fossil fuels. He says companies should drill deeper to find it.
This article appears in Forbes.
This is a hypothesis already embraced by the conspiracy theorists.
I mentioned this once before, way back in February: Oil: The Other Blood
What if it turned out to be true?
There’d be no reason to be fuel-efficient. Air pollution would be prevalent globally. The greenhouse effect would amp up.
Always a catch.
Peter DiBattiste spent years as an interventional cardiologist clearing out heart patients’ arteries. The depressing reality: All too often the patients would be back in the hospital just a few months later with another heart attack or stroke.
Now DiBattiste finally has a chance to do something about it. As head of cardiovascular drugs at Johnson & Johnson, he is helping lead the testing of a powerful new blood thinner in late-stage tests in heart patients at J&J and Bayer. J&J hopes the drug will one day be a huge best seller, reviving its slumping drug unit.
Getting there will be tricky. Results from a mid-stage study presented at a meeting of cardiologists showed the drug, rivaroxaban, slashed heart attacks and strokes by 31% when taken with aspirin and also, in some patients, Plavix, an anti-clotting drug from Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis. But the results also showed significantly higher rates of bleeding in patients who took the drug. Very dangerous bleeding episodes took place in 1.2% of the patients studied.
Interesting. But then we are all given a glimpse into the complexity of our bodies:
There are two different ways the blood clots. Cell fragments called platelets clump together; Plavix and prasugrel block these. But there are also fibers in the blood called thrombin and fibrin that stitch the clot together. Rivaroxaban and apixiban block the formation of these by inhibiting an enzyme called factor Xa. Schering’s drug, called a thrombin receptor antagonist (TRA), blocks communication between the two systems — potentially working late in the clotting cascade and not thinning the blood as much.
Of course the, ahem, holy grail of healing is to answer this question: How did Jesus heal?
Mike Cane 2008 
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