Don't Be a Dinosaur

You all know who Walter Mossberg is, right? He's only THE most respected techie guru in the country. He writes the technology column for the Wall Street Journal. I've been telling everyone I know for years not to use Internet Explorer - maybe they'll listen to Walt!

http://ptech.wsj.com/report.html

It's the Border, Stupid!

I read Tony Blankley's post this morning and am relieved to find someone who pretty much sums up my stance on the whole immigration business. Living here in Arizona, we have been to Mexico several times, but it would never occur to me to stay there illegally. I'm pretty sure I'd be thrown in a Mexican jail as soon as they found out I wasn't legal. What do you think?

http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20060502-093648-3192r.htm

Recent Site-ings

Blogs I enjoyed today.

http://time.blogs.com/eye_on_science/

http://base10blog.blogspot.com/

Who Thinks Like You?
Do you ever lose it with someone - family, friend, co-worker - because they do or say something you would never do or say in a million years? Ever find yourself thinking, "Why would someone do that?" Well, it's simple. They don't think like you. Did you really believe that God made everyone the same? Of course not - at least not on the outside. We learn early that some people are tall, some are short, some are athletic, some are clumsy, blah, blah. BUT somebody forgot to tell us that the same applies on the inside. Leaving physical differences aside, each person's brain is as different from another's as their faces are. The way each person processes information is unique.

So, the next time you're tempted to scream at your kids or your spouse, or your co-workers, try to remember that we think differently. You may have to communicate better, explain in another way, or just shut up.

Are You a Whiner?

I have to admit that I've never been a fan of Mark Cuban. He strikes me as a big baby and a poor example of franchise owners. I might have to rethink that position after reading his blog.

http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000210073685/

Be Healthy - Move to England

This is a link to Malcolm Gladwell's post for this week. Very interesting article on a study done comparing the health of people in the U.S. and the people in Great Britain. I have thought for a long time that stress is more of a culprit than doctors want to think it is. This study bears that out.

http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/

You Gotta Have Heart!

I'll freely admit it. I'm a wild and crazy basketball fan. I am a Tar Heels fan and I HATE DUKE. But just as much as I hate Duke and JJ Redick, I thoroughly detest the Lakers and that spoiled, nasty brat Kobe Bryant. Just because he can shoot the basketball like a laser beam doesn't make him a man. If I were Raja Bell, I would have gone for Kobe's knees. If life were just, assholes like Kobe would be the one not playing because of knee surgery. His career would be hanging in the balance instead of Amare's.

I am so proud to be living in Phoenix and be able to claim the Phoenix Suns as my team. They play with heart, courage, and class. Steve Nash deserves the MVP award for the second consecutive year, but even more appropriate is his inclusion in Time's 100 Most Influential People IN THE WORLD! Top that, Kobe! No championship ring can equal Steve's legacy to the game and to his fans. And Steve will get a championship ring - I have no doubt about that. It may not be this year, but I have faith.

Are You My Mother?

Yesterday, April 24, 2006, a woman named Gertrude Johnston Day died in Lafayette, Louisiana. Two months shy of her 97th birthday, she had spent the past 15 years in an assisted living facility. She was physically healthy, but Alzheimer's disease made it impossible for her to take care of herself.

This woman gave birth to my brother and me, but there were only rare occasions that I remember when I could call her my "mother." She was a Jehovah's Witness and for my entire life I never knew what she - that woman named Gertrude - thought about anything. What I had instead of a parent was the Watchtower society. We never discussed politics in my house. We never discussed science, we never talked about society and culture, we never talked about current events. I entered my adult years crippled by the lack of knowledge about how the world works and how to navigate my way to happiness. It's no wonder that I am so omnivorous about knowledge still. To read about someone else's similar experience go to this link: http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/04_13_2005.html To further complicate matters, my brother and I are adult children of an alcoholic father. So between them I never had any fun growing up. Not like Heather http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/02_08_2005.html and Heather grew up MORMON!

I can name the things I remember that were things a mother would do. I wanted to go to school so badly, but my birthday was in late December, so I had missed the deadline. My mother enrolled me in "dancing school" so that I could still say I was in school. Ballet has been a passion since I was 5. She also was the person that I saw reading Pearl Buck, Jane Austen, Dostoyevski; all the classics. She was the one who took me to the library to get my cherished library card. She enrolled me in a program offered by the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and they sent a little booklet every month with stickers that I had to place in the right spots. I learned about the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's David, the Winged Victory of Samrothrace, Picasso, Monet, so many wonderful works of art. My favorite was the now-famous-for-the-Bud-Lite-commercial Winged Victory and many, many years later when I stood in the Louvre and saw her, I cried. And when I moved with my husband to Montana to the sheep ranch, for a while she wrote to me every single day. Not much, just something, so that I would get mail - like you would for a child at summer camp.

She always loved my brother best and made no bones about it. He was the good son, I was the stubborn, recalcitrant, wicked daughter. Even though she had to grant that I was smart, she made sure that I knew that I was not good at math and I didn't know that she was wrong until I took a math class in Billings when I was 30-something and got an A. Somehow, my parents helped my brother graduate from medical school. They provided me with one year of college with the stipulation that I take shorthand and typing. Apparently they believed that only boys could make a living being doctors.

They say that parents love their children unconditionally. Not my mother.

What Marriage is About

This morning my husband was flipping through the pages of a little book a friend gave me, "The Quotable Woman." Many of you have probably seen it in your local bookstore. He read one quote to me and we laughed together. Then he said, "Funny, there aren't any quotes from that one woman . . ." and paused, not able to come up with her name right then. I looked up and said, "Dorothy Parker?" "Yes!" he said.

Now, how did my brain suddenly just know, out of all the millions of women alive, the one his brain was thinking of? In Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, he discusses how the brain processes information, sifts through all sorts of facts you've come across in your life, and somehow picks out the exact thing it needs. If you haven't read it, you should.

Then I asked my husband, "Do you love that, or hate that? I mean that I knew exactly what you were thinking?"

"I love that - I love that!"
And, that, my dears, is one of the things marriage is about.

Golda's Balcony

Never Again
Those are the words inscribed on the nuclear warheads in Israel. I didn't know that until yesterday when I went to see Golda's Balcony, a one-woman play starring Valerie Harper. This is the story of a woman who grew up in Milwaukee, only finished the 8th grade, left home when she was only two years older than my grandson to go to Denver and live with her sister, and eventually came close to ending life on this planet. Hearing about her decision to go to Palestine in 1921 and work for a state for the Jews, I could not imagine myself doing such a thing. But maybe for her it was the same as when I threw as much as I could into 3 hefty bags and loaded my kids in the car and left home and eventually made a life unlike the one I thought I would have.

It was amazing to realize that when Golda was agonizing over whether to strike first at the countries aligned against Israel during the Yom Kippur War in October of 1973, I was agonizing over whether or not I had cancer, not knowing that this growing tumor in my belly would turn out to be my darling daughter, Nancy. I had no idea that across the world, a fearless and tough woman was the one who truly held my fate in her hands.

This play revealed a truth that I had not seen quite so clearly before: that history is made by ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Great Sand Dunes National Park

We're planning a trip in May with our best friends. They're flying here to Phoenix and we'll drive to Gallup, New Mexico, then head north into Colorado. We'll go first to Durango and meet another couple there whom we haven't seen for many years. Together we'll ride the Silverton Railroad which is a 9-hour round trip. We'll stay another night in Durango before heading east to Alamosa. On the way, we hope to sample the hot springs at Pagosa Springs. Maybe even a bit of white-water rafting if that's available. We'll stay in Alamosa so that we can visit the Great Sand Dunes National Park, something I've wanted to do for a long time. Visit their web site for some spectacular photographs of the dunes. I might have to even get up early to get some good shots. After we explore the park, we'll return west to Mesa Verde and enjoy the magnificent views and architecture of the pueblos. Then back home to Phoenix. It should be a very enjoyable and informative trip.

Boot Camp

Yeah, baby! Now there is no reason for you not to buy a Mac. For all of you out there who thought that you'd like to have a Mac because, after all, they are so cool, so reliable, so upscale, but all you've ever worked on is Windows and you think you'd have to learn a whole new operating system (which you wouldn't) - run, run, run to your closest Apple store and hand over your credit card. Because now you can own a beautiful computer and still run your old clunky Windows program that you're used to. With Boot Camp, you have the choice of running Windows XP or Mac OS X. Is it a perfect world now, or what?

Big News out of the ACC!

No credit is given in this short blurb, but I think this breakthrough is probably the work of the scientists at Wake Forest. Anthony Atala left Harvard's ivy halls to come to a new institute of regenerative medicine at Wake Forest. The word is that he's been able to make cell suspensions that form uteruses, vaginas, and large blood vessels. Atala's group has even constructed a fully functioning rabbit penis! Now they're working on solid organs.

URINE LUCK
We can grow you a new bladder. Can we conquer death?
By William SaletanUpdated Tuesday, April 4, 2006, at 9:15 AM ET
(For the latest Human Nature columns on birth control, polygamy, and old people, click here.)

Scientists have grown and implanted the first custom-made human organs. They made bladders and put them in patients who donated the source tissue. Recipe: Take a tiny tissue sample from each patient, grow it in a dish, wrap it around a scaffold to shape it, grow it for seven weeks in an incubator, then put it in the patient, where the new bladder keeps growing. The bladders have been functioning in seven patients for about four years. Next, scientists plan to grow kidneys, livers, and hearts. Interpretations: 1) Tissue engineering has arrived. 2) We did it without embryonic stem cells. 3) Death, RIP. (For Human Nature's take on growing organs from embryos, click here.)

Toward a More Holistic Approach

One of the major obstacles, I believe, to solving our planet's problems is that there is such a disconnect between the way we need to look at a problem and the "political" solutions that are considered. Imagine it this way: the earth is one organism, but we treat it as if the boundaries we have drawn actually mean something. That's like saying you have a fever, but only in one leg.

This administration has refused to sign on to Kyoto for various reasons, among them the fact that Kyoto excluded India and China (and with so many people, maybe it would be a good idea for them to be included), and that millions ofjobs will be lost if the strictures of Kyoto have to be followed in the U.S. Maybe nobody projected how many millions of lives will be lost if the sea level rises 20 feet. Jobs or lives, ummmm, let's see.The following link is a quick overview of the issues. There is a remark in this article that suggests the holistic approach that I think is necessary in thinking about almost any problem we face. The author posits that if the U.S. and other industrialized nations cut their consumption of coal, oil and gas, the cost of those fuels will go down and make them more affordable to developing nations. So, while we're cutting, they're increasing emissions. Hmm, not much of a solution for the planet, is it?

http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/kpeng.html

In terms of stem cell research, this holistic approach is also necessary. Is it a good idea to develop therapies that will regenerate a smoker's lungs so that the tobacco companies can continue to profit from tobacco addiction? Should we offer an alcoholic a new liver when his old one disintegrates from cirrhosis? Of course, no one is talking about that much yet, because the field is so new that the focus is naturally on curing disease - Parkinson's, spinal injuries, cancer, heart failure, etc. There are many other "moral" issues besides whether or not to use embryonic stem cells for research. With the coming election cycle approaching, I suggest asking candidates whether they think it's a good idea for our most eminent scientists to be forced to leave the U.S. because another country offers them money, a state-of-the-art lab, and the support of the government? This link is very informative.
http://bedfordresearch.org/stemcell/stemcell.php

Have a great weekend! We're expecting 80 degree weather here in Phoenix.

Put Science on the Agenda

DO YOU REMEMBER THE SPACE RACE?

I remember when the Russians put Sputnik in space. Talk about a panic! All of a sudden, science and math became more important than anything else. Our students were losing the race and we had to do something quick to catch up. And here we are again. It is becoming clearer every week that we need a new way to think about problems that confront us now, and will confront future generations even more. Katrina was a big "I told you so" to those who don't want to think about climate change because it might disturb their cushy lifestyle. Christopher Reeve died waiting for research and drug developments that would treat spinal injuries. His wife, Dana, died because there was no treatment that would stop the cancer from destroying her. It seems that it is time to put some scientists in the legislature, so that our leaders, our government, can actually lead the way in finding solutions to the problems of this century.

I have been reading Stem Cell Now by Christopher Thomas Scott and this is a quote from page 95:

By 2010, over 2 million Americans are projected to contract end-stage renal disease, at an aggregate cost of $1 trillion. In 2001, nearly 80,000 people needed organ transplants, fewer than 24,000 got them, and 6,000 died waiting. Of those receiving organs, 40 percent die within the first three years after surgery. One in five of our elders 65 years old or older will require temporary or permanent organ repair or replacement during their remaining years. In 2002, the prevalence of diabetes in the United States exceeded 18 million people - 6.3 percent of the population. That year, total healthcare costs of diabetes surpassed$130 billion. Cancer kills one out of four of us, more than 1,500 people a day. Even though we are living longer, many octogenarians are unable to appreciate their lengthy lives: nearly half of the people over age 85 have Alzheimer's disease. American lifestyles promote physical inactivity and overeating, causing morbid obesity, hypertension, and diabetes. Add to this list crippling conditions such as spinal injury, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, AIDS, and a host of genetic and metabolic disorders.
Heart disease is the biggest health crisis of all. In 2004, more than a million Americans died from cardiac failure and stroke, and heart disease leads death by all causes, outpacing cancer by 40 percent. No longer does it afflict only the old. More than 64 million Americans suffer from it, but only 25 million are 65 years or older. The total cost of treating cardiovascular diseases and stroke in the United States in 2004 was estimated to reach $368 billion.
Given an ever-widening chasm between treatment and morbidity, it is no wonder the stem cell has become a common denominator of hope. Behind the sobering facts, patients and their families ask, "Will there be a cure? And will it be in time for us?" (p. 96)

I have no doubt there will be a cure, but it may not be available in the U.S. until long after the rich have been availing themselves of treatments in foreign countries because the research needed to develop those cures was not supported by our government. It is time to cast votes for people who understand that actions we take (or, in this case, do not take) will have consequences for Americans living after these politicians are out of office. I'm not sure what it would take for an elected official to take an unpopular stand for something that may not happen for 20 years.

Life can be confusing sometimes. Here in Arizona, we're trying to keep Mexicans from crossing the border while busloads of senior citizens travel to Nogales every weekend to buy cheaper prescription drugs. We pass legislation to promote trade between the U.S. and other countries, but won't let our citizens buy their medications in Canada, something you would think the Republican administration, with its love of "free trade" would applaud. And because of the moral stance of people who believe that a blastocyst is somehow the equivalent of an implanted embryo, when the baby boomers need cell therapies, they will have to spend their money in Korea, Israel, England, or perhaps India or China; countries who will move ahead as the science progresses, leaving the U.S. as a "third-world" country in terms of emerging technologies in medicine.

Let's vote for the Nerds next time!

This is our new Golden Retriever puppy. Her name is Jodie and she is 8 weeks old!