Never mix...(part 1)

I stumbled upon "Strange Days" on AMC. Since my DVD copy was a bust, I haven't watched it, but I think it'll show up on my wish list. The problem is that there is so much profanity, airing it on a cable channel defeats the purpose of such a movie (I won't even go into the frontal nudity scene).

So never mix a movie with lots of strong language and airing on cable TV.

Something we can't buy

*ugh* One of these years, I'm going to start finding lunch alternatives besides the hospital cafeteria. Today was meatloaf (but I seriously doubt that was meat they started with).

Okay, now onto bigger issues. Apparently, we are still trying to understand the Iraq insurgency. Well killing them in large numbers wasn't working, so now we'll try and understand their reason for fighting.

How about the fact that foreign troops invaded their holy land?

Most people in this country would stand and fight if someone stormed their property. I would if I carried a firearm. Religious conservatives wouldn't stand by and let someone destroy their church either. Think about that for a while....

It's entirely possible that if the troops do leave, they'll seize power. That isn't the main reason Osama and his followers fight (but I'm sure they'd be happy having their own country to continue their practices without persecution because they own it). I might be a naive idiot, but continuous troop presence in their sacred grounds is NOT the way I would go about dismantling the insurgency.

What's the best solution? Sorry, only get one philosophical answer a day - suffering years of pain does not make you smarter or wiser (just more appreciative of life).

Going crazy (or perhaps it's just the celiac)

This is something I can't easily make up. A couple weeks ago, I began my walks in Sabino Canyon (around 4-5 miles). After my first trip, boy were my legs sore the next day, but that was the end of it. Since then, I have begun to notice that the backs of my lower legs have a weird numbness to them. I don't know if I should call it numbness or decreased sensation. Honestly, I didn't notice it until I became a bug buffet, and when I scratched the bites, the backs of my legs didn't feel right.

Yeah, eventually I can feel pain, but I practially have to scratch the skin raw to get there. Then Tuesday, I noticed that the back of my right foot had a burst water blister, and a scabbed over blister area. I assume that it's from wearing walking shoes that didn't fit right (since returned and exchanged for better ones), but that was a week a half ago. In the past, I always knew when I had blisters on the backs of my feet.

I guess I'm going to have to check my legs more carefully and make sure cuts are treated quickly. Magnum got his claws into my big toe (again didn't really hurt, but I felt his weight on my foot), so that's been treated.

This just sucks! And I thought walking was supposed to be good for you. I can't even blame it on my motor cortex stimulator for two reasons. One is that it's BOTH limbs, and the MCS would only affect the right one, and I haven't made any changes to the pulse width for a long time.

I've read articles about possible neurological complications with celiac. I suppose I need to find out more....

Let's play the blame game

I haven't said anything about what happened a month ago in New Orleans. I thought there were enough talking heads to many any want to throw up. Who's to blame for what happened following Katrina - and I don't think it's one single person. Dragging Mike Brown before Congress isn't going to get to the bottom of it. And I'm very much against political cronism (even though it's been part of our political history since 1776), so that's saying a lot.

I just read a very thought provoking article about the various things that went wrong. It really made it clear that not one person can be blamed for everything that went wrong. If you get a chance, please read 25 Questions About the Murder of New Orleans.

Intelligent? design

Studying science for many years, I always had trouble with the leap from primitive micro-organisms to small creatures to bigger creatures to man. Yet if I had been taught intelligent design, I don't think I could have bought that either. I suppose that's my biggest problem with being Catholic:

"Do you believe in God, the all-mighty createor of heaven and earth?" My sister had to answer "yes" to complete her RICA.

The more I understand about how the immune system works, I am even further amazed by its complexity and effectiveness. And this is one small system of the human being. Let's just focus on the ability to develop a functional immune system - if it was a Darwin type event and the one creature with the functional immune system spontaneously formed, how would breeding with others "dilute" out that function? And how could one "perfect mutation" affect all subsquent creatures?

Yet, I'm expected to believe that hundreds of millions of years ago, someone understood all these intricate biological processes and used their knowledge to encode a functional immune system into a human and other creatures?

I came across two interesting articles today. The first from the BBC reports the possibility that today's HIV strains reproduce at a less effective rate than HIV from the late 80's The second counter arguments to intelligent design.

Due to the high rate of mutation of HIV, it does make for a good model to study genetic drift over a period of a few years (instead of a couple thousand). It does provide the hope that perhaps in the next few decades, HIV will cause its own extinction. I'm sure the same thing happened to many other species over the millions of years that we can prove life existed on this planet.

So, what do I think? I think that there's the ability to adapt within our genetic structure. Possibly related to introns, I don't know. I think that there's a complex balance of molecular interactions that keep everything in biochemical balance and set the "ground rules" for basic life functions. But there is an amazing ability to alter other non-essential life functions that continue to this day. Evolution is not dead - it happens so slowly that it's difficult to observe. Studying DNA from fossil records is a way to study evolutions in a time lapse sort of way.

Okay Ms. Smarty-Pants, so how did life begin? I think that the basic "building blocks" of living organisms travel the universe and "seed" themselves on all kinds of planets. This fortunately happens to be a fertile ground for such seeds and help align in a functional manner to begin life. I don't think we'll ever find a fossilized record of the first micro-organisms to prove this theory.

Yet, it's possible that micro-organisms may eventually be found on Mars - perhaps the same seeds also ended up on Mars. But the planet Mars was not a fertile ground for sustaining early life, and the micro-organisms died out. Am I supposed to believe that an intelligent desided to create life on this planet and let it flourish, but give up on Mars? Why go to all the trouble to create life, but let it become extinct? It's more of a convincing argument (to me) that Mars was an evolutionary dead end.

Wouldn't it be incredible to possibly extract DNA from the fossilized micro-ogranisms and see how much of a similarity there is to ancient DNA from this planet?

This is assuming of course that we do find proof that these micro-organisms did exist on Mars someday. Don't know if they still do or not....