This is why I get nothing done at work, even when I don't spend the day in meetings.

I show up at work this morning and immediately attend a meditation session (yes, I work for one of those kinds of companies).

Then I get back to my desk and I sit down to finish listening to the Excel training I started yesterday (by Jeff Lenning--he's crazy enthusiastic about excel. I'm crazy enthusiastic about anything that automates my job and therefore makes my life easier. Or at least allows me to spend less time at work. Unlike writing this blog post.)

Except, I have a friend who's looking for a Conservation Biologist to talk to a high-schooler with leukemia about what her job is like. And I know a Conservation Biologist. So then I spend some time connecting the two of them. The C.B. is currently driving across the country, and may or may not be headed through Spokane, WA, where Cody makes Disney-themed drinks. (I can't make this stuff up. As far as I'm concerned, this might be the only reason to go to Spokane, and I haven't even had one of his drinks.) So, of course, it is basically my civic duty to inform the C.B. of this.

But my new manager wants me to look into getting a company-issued phone, so I start to research that, and I reach out to the woman I'll be shadowing to see if she actually has a company-issued phone, and we get into a whole conversation on when I'll be moving to my new location so I can actually be of some use to my new team.

At the same time, I coordinated a women's group lunch to make sure all of the attendees understand that we have two lunches this week--one with our group and one with another group. Then I had to remove an attendee who TOLD ME LAST MONTH that she wanted to be part of the group, so I added her to everything, and then TOLD ME TODAY that she is too busy. She's an administrative assistant. You'd think she'd have a better understanding of scheduling.

Meanwhile, I'm also taking a Facebook class or something on becoming a Beach Body Coach--which I am killing, by the way--today we are supposed to 1) Make a healthy choice. Meditation it is; 2) Reach out to a friend--nailed it! I've reached out to, and connected, two of them FOR PHILANTHROPIC REASONS, and it's not even lunch; and 3) do something to grow yourself. I guess I could count mediation for this one and then do something else healthy, like not eat out of the snack drawer. If only I could get paid to be this awesome! But, tragically, this isn't really my day job. It's only what I've been doing at my day job.

Lessons from crossfit: the way to prevent a zombie invasion is to properly stretch your shoulders

Today I took my first full-length real crossfit class at a real crossfit gym, CrossFit 858. (When I was in Hawaii, I noticed that there were all sorts of places called things like Bikes 808 or Burgers 808. Apparently no one could get more creative than their area code. And apparently the owners of my crossfit gym think that's very original. It actually seems like the kind of name you'd come up with when you couldn't think of a name, and you were all, well, we have to call it something, we can always change it later, and then everyone started calling it your silly fake name and that's what stuck.)

Anyway.

We did a lot of shoulder work today. The instructor was walking us through how to properly stretch our shoulders and he commented to the girl who was clearly a chemist (I say clearly because she had a chemical tattooed on her rib cage. I'm pretty sure this is the sort of thing only a chemist would want permanently etched on their body). The instructor, who's name, I think, was Reggie, said we needed to properly stretch our shoulders. He said he didn't want Ashley, the chemist, to be reaching for something and accidentally knock over a bottle of chemicals and create some bizarre new disease.

"Zombies" said Ashley.

"Zombies," said Reggie, "we do NOT want that. Folks, the way to prevent a zombie invasion is to properly stretch your shoulders."

I think I'm going to fit right in.

The man who lives with wolves

Remember how I was saying for a long time that the HTML box was gone from my reviews in goodreads and I couldn't figure out what the problem was? Well, I'm still maintaining that I'm not crazy, but today the HTML box thing showed up again, so here's the review as it was published in goodreads.

The Man Who Lives with Wolves by Shaun Ellis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is really, really interesting.  It's a suggested reading at the end of Jodi Picoult's Lone Wolf (which I also enjoyed), except this is the true story of a guy who actually went and lived with a wild pack of wolves for a while.

It's late, so this is likely to be a disorganized review, so bear with me.

First, I'd like to say that Shaun Ellis does not seem as weird as one would think of someone from the British Isles who came to Idaho to learn about wolves, who thinks one of his brothers is a Native American, and then spent over a year living in the wild with a pack of wolves.

That having been said, while I respect his work a lot, I don't think I like him very much.  Mostly because he has 5 kids with two different women, and he's never really around any of them.  I'm really not the sort of person who thinks you have to be married to have kids, but I sort of feel like, after so many, you should be able to make a commitment to one of the mothers, and you really ought to spend some time with your kids because their mothers are exhausted! So it's a little hard for me to like him after he shows all of this care towards raising wolves, and very little to taking care of his own kids.

I also learned a lot about the different roles wolves play within the pack and how that translates into dog ownership.

Wow, and it's really late, so I've just run out of things to say.  Seriously, though, you really should read this book.

Oh wait, I've remembered something else I want to say (and this isn't in the goodreads review).  Ellis talks a lot about how he doesn't use a scientific method--how he just climbs in with the wolves and learns rather than observing from a distance. So he's basically interfering with all of his experiments, but he also basically says that that's the point. He's trying to learn about wolves so he can improve human's relationships with them by better understanding them.  He's also like to get to a point where scientists don't disregard the work he's doing--as far as Ellis is concerned both he and scientists are doing valuable work and rather that debate the merits of each method, they should just get on with their work. He makes an interesting point.

View all my reviews

New green bent update

So I'm sure you all know about how BPAs in plastic can leech into your food when you microwave them, and how there's a Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and how some plastics are linked to cancer, blah blah blah. So I thought I'd do the super-diligent thing and weed out the beauty products I use that are made with petroleum bi-products.  Because I'm pretty sure petrolatum doesn't need to be on my face or down the drain. 

You know why more people don't do this? Because it's a giant pain in the ass!  If you google all of the chemicals in your facial soap, as an example, you'll find all sorts of information on how the chemical molecule is structured.  You'll find beauty websites that describe what the chemical does.  You'll even find beauty websites that rank the chemical on various types of toxicity.  But I can't figure out if it's made from petroleum or not! 

Good grief!  I'm trying to do my part to save the planet here, people!

Tap water and my mixed feelings about being green

I know I periodically go on green benders, where I vow to only eat organic veggies, or use both sides of the paper, or whatever, and then real life smacks me upside the head and it all goes out the window.  One thing I always wonder about as I read green blogs, is, how much of a difference does it really make?

I don't mean this in a, oh, it doesn't matter if I recycle or not, sort of way.  I mean, given all of the chemicals and carcinogens we're all exposed to, is whether or not I microwave my food in a plastic container really going to change my chances of getting cancer? 

The March issue of Good Housekeeping has an article called Is Your Tap Water Safe? The article talks about all of the unregulated chemicals found in tap water.  Among them are sucralose (an artificial sweetener) and atrazine (an herbicide).  I don't drink sucralose because artificial sweeteners give me headaches.  There's not actually enough sucralose in tap water to cause me problems, but the bigger problem is what does sucralose + atrazine + chlorine (or whatever cleaner my waste water treatment plant is using) + any medications I may actually be taking do in combination?

In a similar vein, I just read an article about a whole bunch of other reasons soda is bad for you.  One of them: soda cans are lined with plastic because otherwise the acids in soda would eat through the aluminium can.  Not only is the knowledge that soda is THAT acidic disturbing, but what sort of funky chemical compounds are being created when those acids are reacting with the plastic lining the cans?  I have no idea, but I'm pretty sure it can't be good for us.

The thing is, even though I'm trying to eat better, and give up soda, and use less plastic in general, all of this stuff comes out in our pee and eventually makes its way to the waste water treatment plants which treat the water that we then drink.  A prime example of this is birth control.  Female hormones in birth control are actually found in our tap water because of the process I just outlined.  I'm not sure I need extra hormones--the ones I have are enough to contend with as is. 

So eve though I'm not on the pill, I'm consuming a small amount of extra hormones by drinking the tap water.  And not only is bottled water not necessarily any better, but drinking bottled water compounds the issue of the amount of plastics and plastic-related chemicals in our waterways. 

On the one hand, even if you're super-conscientious of what you put into your body, you may still be exposed to carcinogens in your water.  On the other hand, if you just give up and figure there's no way to win, you're definitely making the problem worse.  I'm not really a fan of, well, I guess we should just all do the best we can and hope things work out sort of approach, but it seems like that's what really needs to happen here.  We all need to actively be healthier and use fewer chemicals, from medicines to pesticides to harsh cleaning products, so that we all have less exposure to this junk. 

I wish high school chemistry was as interesting as these articles...it might have made me reconsider my course of study in college.

Pie+wine+coke+hot chocolate=dinner

And then I had pie, hot chocolate, and orange juice for breakfast.  I'm sure my insulin is going, would you please give us a break so we can get organized? But by the time I got around to dinner last night, I had simply given up, and it made no sense to un-give up this morning. 

Rather than telling you what happened in chronological order, which might make some sense, I'm going to tell you in the order that happens in my head, because that better explains why I had to give up.  And be forewarned, this is not for the feint of heart.

At about 3:30 yesterday, Captain America calls me in a fit of hysteria to tell me he's been stung by a stingray.  Which is apparently just about the most painful thing that can happen to you, aside from maybe having your face chewed off by a rabid squirrel.  I don't know.  Maybe we'll try that next.  So I ask where he is, and he says he's driving home, but that he's having a hard time concentrating.  I say, okay, pull over, I'll come get you, and he says he's in a ton of pain.  We continue this rather useless conversation for about five minutes (it was probably  more like 30 seconds, but whatever), and finally he says, I need you to look up what to do for them.  Aha!  We come to the reason he's calling.  So I do a quick google search and learn that you're supposed the soak the appendage in water as hot as you can stand, which we already knew.  So I call him back to find out if I need to cancel my facial appointment this evening, and I can hear from the frantic way he goes about explaining that he'll call me in 10 minutes that he's on the brink of making Very Bad Decisions.

I'm not sure if you know what I'm talking about, and maybe this sort of thing doesn't happen in less dramatic marriages, but my husband gets this tone where I know that panic/frenzy/endorphins/something takes over, and he's about to start making Very Bad Decisions.  So I take matters into my own hands, cancel my appointment, and come home from work...

To find my husband moaning in agony on the couch.  At least he took a bath/shower first.  And two percocets.  There's water heating on the stove and I pour it into a tub. To soak his foot.  Which looks like this:

But he said that the water was too hot, so I brought him a cup of ice, but in his impatience, he dumped all of it in, so I filled a tea pot with hot water for him, but by this time the bin was full, so we started this process all over again.  I informed Voracious T that at least we were making good use of the tea cozy she gave us.

I didn't actually take that picture, but it's the same tea cozy I have.  I'm not sure if I should be delighted or disturbed that there's more than one.
So after an hour or so of the water being too hot...no, too cold...no, too hot, I informed Captain America that he was to leave me alone for an hour so I could log back into work and any emergencies he came up with he was going to have to sort out himself.  This worked out pretty well for about 45 minutes until he decided that he couldn't handle the amount of blood in the water anymore.  I have to admit, it was totally gross.  And it smelled. 

So I bandaged up his foot, made him elevate it, dumped out the bloody water, washed the rest of the blood off of his foot, and lit a candle.  All was moving along in relative success until Captain America got up to pee.  He looked down at the bathroom floor and noticed he was bleeding all over it.  I had him sit on the toilet lid, I rebandaged his foot, I checked the carpet for blood (fortunately all of the bleeding was done in the bathroom), and sent him back to the sofa.  We decided at this point that his wound might be beyond my nursing capabilities, and while I didn't think the blood loss was going to kill him, it was a little disturbing that it was still bleeding steadily.  And it was making me truly nauseous. 

So we decided to go to the urgent care clinic.  Captain America hobbled out to the garage (I have no idea why he decided that this was the logical exit point).  He asked me to grab his sandals from the top shelf, so I picked a pair of tevas.  Those were the wrong ones.  So I dropped them on the floor and pulled down his brown flip-flops.  And probably some other shoes as well.  The top shelf is just about the limit of my arm-stretch, so there wasn't a lot I could do about the mess I was making.  And I was at the point where I didn't care anymore.  (When I'm trying to do something useful, like get you to a doctor, and you're doing something annoying, like being picky about your shoes, well, this really does nothing to improve my attitude about the situation).

We get to urgent care, which is, thankfully, not busy.  However a couple of people did manage to come in who were determined more urgent than we were, so we actually had to wait a while to see the doctor.  I suggested to Captain America that I could rip off his bandage so he'd bleed all over the place.  He seemed to think waiting was a better choice. 

Our concerns were primarily that there was still part of the barb in the wound, which we couldn't see because it wouldn't stop bleeding, that it might cause an infection, and that the bleeding wouldn't stop.  In that order.  The doctor admitted that he had never actually see a stingray barb before (I don't fault him for this), so I googled it on my phone, and this is what I found:

Last night I managed to find a cool picture with a dime as scale, but that must have dropped lower in the google rankings today. 

The doctor injected Captain America with some local anaesthetics, then washed off the foot with iodine.  Then he took a water syringe and injected iodine into the wound.  Then he injected sterile water into the wound.  Captain America was not enjoying this procedure at all, although he claimed all he could feel was the pressure. 

The doctor then stuck a metal instrument in the wound to feel around and try to determine if there was anything stuck in there.  He determined that there was not, although Captain America insisted that all of the stuff injected into the wound caused a bubble to form.  Nobody knows what he was talking about, so we all ignored him.

The doctor decided that it would be best to allow the wound to continue to flush itself, so he cut up a latex glove and created a drain that he sewed into the wound.

He told Captain America to keep taking the percocet as needed, he wrote a prescription for some antibiotics, he wrote a note for Captain America's work, he told me to change the bandage today and to bring my husband back tomorrow, and then he sent us on our way.

So then we had to go to RiteAid to fill the prescription.  Yes, Captain America had prescriptions filled there before.  No, this was not part of the worker's comp claim (when he twisted the same ankle about a month ago.  Ironically, he had been cleared by that doctor to go back to work yesterday morning, and then he decided to go kayaking and swimming (because of some stupid rule at his work that you have to take sick time to see a doctor, even if you're seeing a doctor because of a workman's comp claim, so Captain America decided to just use a whole sick day) and managed to mess up his foot again).  No, I'm not going to wait; I'm going to Taco Bell (Captain America's choice, not mine), and then I'll come back.

(Yes, I know that last paragraph is a bit of a mess.  Too bad.  I told you at the very beginning that I was giving up.)

Taco Bell does not sell milk shakes or fries.  I'm not sure how they manage to qualify as fast food without those two staples, other than the fact that they are dirt-ass cheap.  Captain America ordered two tacos and some sort of bacon-ranch-chicken-flatbread-sandwich, which I took two bites of when we got home and decided was wonderful, which really only goes to show my state of mind by the time we got home. 

Conveniently, as I walked back into RiteAid they announced that my prescription was ready.  There was no fee (because of our magically strange insurance, which I didn't have the mental capacity to tell the guy at Urgent Care, so I just paid the $23 he said we owed, and I'll deal with our insurance on that one later), but he did ask me if I wanted to join the RiteAid whatever loyalty program.  I thought: no, I want to go home and eat something, preferably chocolate or alcoholic or both, and sit on my sofa, and not have anyone ask me to do anything for a while, but what I said was no, thank you.

Around this time, I realized that I was probably PMS-ing, and that I was really hungry, and I was still a bit emotional from having just finished Catching Fire, and I was trying to hang on the the deliciousness of anticipation for a few more days before reading Mockingjay, and I must say, I'm pretty impressed with myself to have the wherewithal to realize this was probably why I was disproportionately irritated compared with what the situation actually called for.  And then I gave up.  Captain America asked if he should take just one, or two more percocets, and I said, I don't care.  Take as many as you want.  I'm done for tonight.

When we got home, we discovered two little angels left us LARGE pieces of Julian pies (thanks, P & J!), and that's when I decided that pie+wine+coke+hot chocolate=dinner.  I did run 7 miles that morning.

It's not gross; it's science!

The other day, some friends brought over half a loaf of Amish Friendship Bread and a bag of starter.  The starter takes 10 days to ferment and then I make my own loaves, and give my extra starter to my friends.  It's like those chain letters from the 80s, except it's not annoying and you end up with tasty bread.

There are a couple of rules, though.  You can't refrigerate the starter, and you can't use any metal bowls or utensils.  I'm not a scientist, but I'm pretty sure both of those things kill the fermentation.  This is sort of like sourdough.  Good sourdough starter is actually really old.  I asked my friend, who is a scientist about this.  Okay, not actually about this.  I asked her about making yogurt.  But you do the same thing.  You use some of your last batch of yogurt to make your next batch.  I asked why it doesn't go bad, and she said that basically it becomes more yogurty, and then you dilute it when you make your next batch.

(On a similar note, my freshman year of college I conducted a very non-scientific experiment.  My roommate and I were up late studying for finals, and I was starving.  Somehow, the only thing we had to eat in the dorm room was a container of yogurt, but it had expired.  We theorized that unless there was visible mold growing on it, it was safe for me to eat.  Our thesis: yogurt just gets more yogurty.  Obviously I survived, and I have no fear of eating expired foods.)

Captain America was a bit appalled that we were to leave this bag of mushy dough on the counter for 10 days at room temperature (it IS July in San Diego, but don't worry, it's not in direct sunlight), and then cook it and eat it.  But I informed him, it's not gross; it's science!

He's still not so sure, but that means more bread for me!  Yum!

Animal husbandry?

A study on the correlation and causation of nausea in pregnant women.

Thesis: exposure to disturbing ideas, smells, and sights increases the duration of "morning sickness" in pregnant women.

Assumptions:

1. While the term "disturbing" is subjective, a preliminary study determined that certain ideas, smells, and sights are generally disturbing and upsetting to the population at large, including both pregnant and non-pregnant humans (see footnote a).
2. "Morning sickness" is a general term used to describe the state of malaise some female humans experience in the hours before noon and attributed to the fertilization of a human egg by a human sperm; however, nausea and vomiting are universal symptoms of morning sickness that have both plagued and baffled mankind through the ages.  While no one fully understands the purpose of morning sickness, it is commonly understood to be a metabolic derangement evolved from early hominids as a way to prevent pregnant females from consuming toxic food products. 

Method of Study:

A double-blind study was conducted using control groups containing both human males and non-pregnant human females, and test groups of pregnant females.  The groups were both divided in half, where one half of each group were exposed to benign images, while the other half of each group were exposed to both benign images and images intended to invoke an emotional response.  


The groups were divided a such: control group exposed to benign images, N=15; control group exposed to both benign and emotion-evoking images, N=26; test group assigned to benign images, N=12; test group assigned to both benign and emotion-invoking images, N=16.  

The benign images, deemed neutral, included clouds, apples, picket fences, and overalls, while the pictures designed to invoke an emotional response included babies, ugly babies, baby cats, baby dogs, baby poop, spiders, vomit, crabs, genital crabs, crab cakes, and crabby babies.  

It was determined (with a standard deviation of s=1.2 (see footnote b)), that the pictures invoked the following emotional responses: clouds, none; apples, mildly happy; picket fences, calm; overalls, none; babies, happiness; ugly babies, horror; baby cats, affection; baby dogs, affection; baby poop, disgust; spiders, fear; vomit, a sense of overall grodieness; crabs, happiness; genital crabs, disgust; crab cakes, hunger; crabby babies, annoyance. 

Conclusion:

Animal husbandry, when taken to the extreme, not only increases the risk of sexually based diseases, but also increases the likelihood of penile cancers in lab rats, and induces both pregnant and non-pregnant humans and non-humans to vomit, thus furthering the condition of morning sickness in pregnant humans exposed to such scientific studies. 

Footnotes:
a.  It was determined that horror, disgust, a sense of overall grodieness, and annoyance could be classified as "disturbing" and were therefore used as benchmarks.

b.  It was determined that Blogger does not have the capacity for mathematical symbols, so "s" was used in place of the right-side-up-tonge-sticking-out-of-mouth-emoticon that is used to represent the Greek letter of sigma.

In response to some expected criticisms of this post, for those of you who haven't caught on, this was supposed to be both my attempt at writing a fictitious scientific paper, and a mockery of an actual scientific paper.  Additionally, I realize that the thesis talks about ideas, smells, and sights, while the study only deals with sights.  The limitations of the study when compared to the original thesis are due to a lack of funding.  Finally, I apologize for the lack of supporting graphs, tables, and charts related to this study.  I blame the laziness of the the lab staff, who simply "didn't feel like" making them.

The scariest thing I've ever read!

I was totally going to post about something else today, and then, during breakfast I read a horrifying article in the newspaper called "Expect a wider load ahead." I'd post a link to the article, but the spectacular San Diego Union Tribune rarely has the articles from their print version online, or at least not the articles for which I'm looking, and I don't want to waste my time (haha, and I just realized I unintentionally made a pun here!).

Anyway, the article basically says that we stop growing taller, but not wider, and apparently it's not all fat.  Our hips continue to widen as we age.  CT scans were conducted on 246 randomly selected patients of varying ages and it was found that the pelvic width of the oldest patients was, on average an inch larger than the younger patients, which, "by itself, could lead to an approximately three-inch increase in waist size from age 20 to 79." 

What the article doesn't state is why our pelvis continues to widen.  Do the hips widen to make us more stable as we age (if we're wider, we're less likely to fall, right?), or are women who've had kids throwing off the average?  And I totally don't understand why an inch of pelvic width equals three inches in the waist.  The article points out that this widening might "account for a significant portion" of the roughly one-pound-per-year increase in body weight people experience "during the same period."  Is it possible that our hips are widening to support the extra weight, and if we didn't gain it, we would stay thinner?  And the article doesn't talk about whether or not this roughly 50-pound weight gain is concerning from a health standpoint. 

So many unanswered questions! 

Science is...

This is another one of those posts I started a million years ago before my job hijacked my life.  Sigh.

Fun?  Funny?  Amusing?  More interesting than you'd think if you only had a public school education.

I just finished reading The Science of Harry Potter by Roger Highfield.  I know I've blogged about this book in the past, but I still have more to say.  Growing up with a librarian for a mom, I always forget that I'm actually allowed to write in my own books if I want to.  Which proves to be helpful if I want to take notes. (Somehow, I had no issue writing in my college textbooks, but this was after I was prompted by my English professor, who pointed out that I bought the books to succeed in his class, and if highlighting or whatever helped, what was the problem.  They were my books.)

Anyway, there's a chapter called The Greatest Wizard, and it's all about the Muggle brain.  A subsection called ...and Stop the Movement That Shows the Passing of Time discusses how sometimes when you look at a clock you think that the second hand has stopped moving.  This section discusses how the brain can stretch time because of "the way it edits reality."  What happens is that when you move your eyes to focus on something (in this case, a clock), what should happen is that the new object appears blurry (duh, we've just moved our eyes, so we haven't been looking at it), but then everything would appear blurry every time we moved our eyes, and that's generally not the case.  What happens is that our brains actually cut off our vision while our eyes are moving.  But then, to prevent us from being totally confused by this, it adds back on the time taken to move our eyes.  This actually makes "the image appear earlier than it actually did."  The section goes on to discuss various experiments that prove this, but I was just fascinated by what our brains do so that every time we shift our gaze everything doesn't appear blurry. 

OMG.  In another chapter, There Be Dragons. Really, a subsection, The Basilisk, talks about how evidence of an ancestor of the basilisk was found in the Faiyum Depression in Egypt.  Fossils of Gigantophis were found in areas of what are now Egypt and Libya.  This snake had vertebra that are larger than an anaconda's vertebra.  Unfortunately, (or I suppose fortunately), it seems that this snake did not have the venomous bite of the snake in the Chamber of Secrets, based on they types of venom snakes have today.

In the same chapter, this one sentence amused me: Celts believed that the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, an amazing structure consisting of around 40,000 geometrically shaped basalt columns, was the work of one of Hagrid's relatives.

Chapter 13: The Philosopher's Stone

I'm just going to quote this paragraph.

Thanks to the intervention of Harry and his school chums, however, the Dark Lord does not succeed, joining a long line of individuals, from Chinese rulers to Holy Roman emperors, and many more besides, who have tried,and failed, in the age-old quest to find the elusive stone.  The "philosopher" in question was a natural philosopher, the designation used for a scientist before the latter term was coined in the 1840s by William Whewell, a polymath who was a fellow of the Royal Society in London. (Because the term "philosopher" sounds somewhat dull and worthy, the publisher of the American edition of the first Harry Potter book changed its title to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, when in fact, it should have been Harry Potter and the Scientist's Stone.

There's a big long section in this chapter on Hermetism that I'm going to try to sum up, but what was interesting to me was that Nicolas Flamel was a real person, and I quote "'Among the many effects of the Harry Potter phenomenon has been the introduction of a fabled character from the history of chemistry to millions of readers who otherwise would probably have never heard of him,' comments Lawrence Primcipe of Johns Hopkins University, and expert on alchemy."  I had no idea that there even were fabled characters in chemistry.  Back to Hermetism and Nicolas Flamel, Hermetiscism is some sort of semi-religious and quasi-magical set of ideas that forms the basis of alchemy.  Flamel had this book that instructed him on how to turn elements into silver or gold using red or white philosopher's stones.  He traveled around a bit and wrote a couple of books on the subject.  However, his story does not seem to check out.  (Go figure)  Flamel and his wife did exist, but it's unlikely that they actually performed any alchemy.  However, their work influenced other alchemists like Robert Boyle and sir Isaac Newton.  That's still a legacy to me.

However the chapter does state: "Thanks to the transmutations of cosmic alchemy we are all, in effect, made of stardust.  Now that is magic."

And did you know that there's a rare disease called Werner's Syndrome in which people appear to age in adolescence, and usually die before the age of 50?  That's interesting and disturbing.

The next chapter, Belief, Superstition and Magic, was also very interesting to me.  Apparently, our "common sense" that is hard-wired into our brains is actually "common sense for living on the African savanna," and not so much common-sense-for-modern-urban-life.  Somehow, though, I think I'll survive a lot longer in modern life than on the African savanna.  For one thing, I don't like being dirty. 

However, this helps explain our tendency to anthropomorphize.  "In the face of persuasive (if mostly unconscious) uncertainty about what we perceive, we bet on the most meaningful interpretation we can."  Basically, this is why we get spooked at night.  If we're out somewhere and something in the dark might be a mugger or an overflowing garbage bin, it's in our best interest to assume it's a mugger because if we're right, our flight-or-fight instincts will help, and if we're wrong, we just have a little laugh about how silly we are. 

Does anybody else remember imaginary numbers?  I loved imaginary numbers.  I loved that the same group of people who came up with something as tedious and mundane as geometric proofs could also come up with something as strange as the square root of a non-positive real number.  (I realize I'm probably mixing mathematical fields, but whatever.  It all counted the same way on your transcripts.)  And was anybody else ever bothered by pi?  I always thought, why would you divide the circumference of a circle by the diameter and come up with something as random as 3.14159... and think that it's the right answer, even though it works every time?  I mean, why wouldn't you have tried that seven or eight times, and thought, this is a random number, and tried something else?  And then, it really pissed me off that because of this stupid pi, there was no such thing as a "perfect" circle.  You can totally draw a perfect circle with a compass.  I don't see why it's not perfect simply because when you divide it's circumference by it's diameter it comes up to some number that has a never-ending decimal. 

But I have been validated! 

A century ago, it was thought that the power of mathematics was limitless.  Mathematicians, notably David Hilbert, had believed that every question could be resolved and shown to be true or false.  That dream died on November 17, 1930 when a journal called the Monatshefte fur Mathematik und Physik  received a twenty-five page paper written by Kurt Godel, a logician working in Vienna who was the first to demonstrate that certain mathematical statements can neither be proved or disproved.  In effect, Godel showed the inevitability of finding in arithmetic logical paradoxes that are the equivalent of the statement "This statement is unprovable." In other words, if it is provable, it is false, and mathematics is therefore inconsistent.  And if it's unprovable,then it is true and mathematics is incomplete.

I realize that this doesn't specifically say, pi might be wrong, but it also doesn't say, pi is absolutely right. 

Finally, the book concludes that while science is really cool, even if history were to rerun differently, we'd still eventually develop the same scientific models and theories. 

If Newton had not, as Wordsworth put it, voyaged through strange seas of thought alone, someone else would have.  If Marie Curie had not lived, we still would have discovered the radioactive elements polonium and radium.  But if J. K. Rowling had not been born, we would never have known about Harry Potter.  That is why Master Potter means so much to me.  Science may be special but Harry, as a work of art, is more so.  Harry Potter is unique. 

Doesn't that just make your eyes well up that you are not the only one who is so moved by art?  As a mild digression, there was a contest to win the Beedle the Bard book way back when there were only 6...it was put on by Amazon, and the winner was a girl who wrote a poem about what she was doing in school each year a Harry Potter book came out, and she ended by saying what a great adventure it was and how she had learned all of these things about growing up and friendships and dragons and such, but the best part was, and I'm paraphrasing, growing up with Harry, mostly I learned to read. Yup, I'll confess, I cried.  Okay.  I just found the poem.  Here it is:

Rhiannon D., age 16, Australia

When I was six, he was eleven
I learnt how to be brave.

When I was seven, he was twelve
I learnt to misbehave.

When I was eight, he was thirteen
He taught me how to cry.

When I was nine, he was fourteen
He showed me how to try.

When I was twelve, and he fifteen
He taught me to forgive.

When we were fourteen and sixteen
I learnt what it was to live.

When we were fifteen and seventeen
He showed me he could bleed.

But growing up with Harry taught me, mostly, how to read.

Anyway, for those readers of mine who are still with me in this long post, and who aren't looking for their hanky right now, I've got more!  You can read Rhiannon's blog about the experience here.

So back to the book about which I'm actually supposed to be blogging.  If you skip past the references section, you come to the glossary, which in itself is amusing.

For instance, it explains the spell, densaugeo, which Malfoy uses to make Hermione's teeth grow very fast.  There is a gene that controls tooth growth, and Stanley Cohen administered an extract of this gene to newborn mice and caused their teeth to grow prematurely, but the best part is that in his lecture he called it "precocious tooth eruption."  Somewhat surprisingly to me, when you google that, you get around 200 results.  That's not a whole lot considering it's google, but still, 200 instances of that phrasing!

I am a little confused about the entry on entropy.  I always thought, in a nutshell, entropy stated that in the end, everything will be at rest.  As in, when the sun goes out and we no longer have that to power the earth, eventually, all molecules will stop moving and everything will come to rest.  Of course, we'll be dead by then so it won't matter to us.  However, this book describes entropy as "a quantity which determines a system's capacity to evolve irreversibly in time...loosely speaking, we may also think of entropy as measuring the degree of randomness or disorder in a system."

Moving on to things that are less confusing and way more interesting, there's a field of biology called evolutionary developmental biology that is apparently nicknamed evo devo.  How silly is that?

In discussing dreamless sleep, Shakespeare is quoted, sort of: "To sleep, perchance to experience amygdalocortical activation and prefrontal deactivation?"

And the last thing I'm going to say about this book is regarding Harry's scar.  I think as a kid, you learn that if you pick at that scab on your knee or elbow, it will leave a scar, but I never thought to wonder why.  Why doesn't your skin just grow back normally?  After all, you shed tons of skin cells everyday and they seem to grow back normally.  And apparently, scarring doesn't occur in tissue damage before birth.  I'm not entirely sure how tissue gets damaged before birth, but I think they've discovered ways to do surgeries on fetuses, so that would be one possibility.  I'm going to see if I can translate this long paragraph into something shorter without destroying the science behind it.  When you have a wound proteins migrate into the wound site in an abnormal patterns, which cause disorganized fiber growth, which causes the valleys and ridges that make scarring less smooth than regular skin. 

In conclusion, I'd say this book is very interesting, but because it's about science in general and not a particular field, some parts are going to be more or less interesting than others, depending on your predilections.  However, I clearly enjoyed this book, and because I'm a kind and generous person, I'll send you my copy if you'd like to read it.  The deal is, though, that when you're done you have to pass it on to someone else.