Gout

Gout is a kind of arthritis that has been known since ancient times. Hippocrates called it “the disease of kings” because of its association with a rich diet. In reality, there are a number of factors that can lead to gout, and diet is part of this larger picture. [Gout.com]

Why am I telling you this? Because I spent yesterday not being very royal with a toe so sore I didn't get out of bed. I'll spare you the photo, but my left big toe is much bigger and redder than my right big toe.

So, how did this happen? Well, it did happen once about five and a half years ago when we were in Portland for six months. That time I suffered much longer (I'm assuming the meds will kick in by tomorrow and now it only hurts when I walk on it or bump it) because first I had to find a doctor, get an appointment, etc. This time I knew what it was and I have a great doctor who is extremely responsive and helpful. But why did I get this? From foods to avoid on gout.com

• Meat items that are particularly high in purines include beef, pork, lamb, and “organ meats” (such as liver, kidney, and brain), as well as meat extracts and gravies.

These foods are almost never on my plate, so they're not the problem.

• Reduce or eliminate alcohol consumption, especially beer.

Again, very rarely. This is not it.

• Reduce your use of oatmeal, dried beans, peas, lentils, spinach, asparagus, cauliflower, and mushrooms.

Hmmmm, I eat oatmeal almost every day. And last week I had more than usual amounts of spinach and mushrooms.

Another 2004 study did find meat and seafood to increase the chance of gout in men. But

In this specific study, though, not all purine-rich foods were associated with an increased risk of gout. There was no increased risk associated with a diet which included:

* peas
* beans
* mushrooms
* cauliflower
* spinach

Even though these foods are considered high in purines. Choi's team also found that low-fat dairy products decrease the risk of gout and overall protein intake had no effect. Ultimately, diets shown to be connected to gout are the same kinds of diet linked to cardiovascular disease.

Gout.com goes on to suggest:

Dietary and lifestyle changes may also help:

* Maintain a healthy body weight and a well-balanced diet.
* Avoid alcohol, especially beer.
* Exercise regularly.

Well, I already do all these things. I recall, but can't find, an old Mark Twain quote. He was recommending various vices like smoking and drinking because, he said, when you get sick and the doctor tells you to give them up, you'll have something to give up.

Ongoing Mac Problems

[Update Oct. 3 - see this later post for what the Snow Leopard problem was for me. Doesn't mean it will work for you, but it seems to have solved my problem.]

My relationship with Stephen at the Apple Help Desk is growing much closer. It's all due to installing Snow Leopard. I have his direct line and his email. My black screen continues to show up. When it was at the MacHaus, they never saw the problem and their hardware diagnostic was negative. After a day at home, it came back.

So, what could it be? I've been trying to isolate factors.
1. It happened after I installed Snow Leopard. It seemed to go fine after Stephen walked me through resetting the parameter ram and the SMC.
2. But after I added Rosetta (I'd left it off when I installed Snow Leopard) it started again.
There's one other factor that I'm pretty sure of:
3. It only seems to go black when I'm plugged into my Mac adapter. I don't think it has gone black when I've worked on battery only. And at the MacHaus, they didn't have my adapter and they never had the problem.
4. It doesn't happen while I'm working on the computer, it happens when I stop for a while - go to get a phone call or do some other errand away from the computer. A few minutes away is enough.

It went black a couple of times yesterday and after I rebooted twice, I decided to leave the cord unplugged except when I needed to recharge the battery, but if I was going to get up I unplugged the cord. Stephen had me reset the SMC and parallel ram again yesterday afternoon, but it went black again. I left a message. (He's in Dallas and it was after he left work.) But I didn't plug it in again and it was good overnight and today. When Stephen called today about 1pm, we reloaded Snow Leopard, but he had me plug into another outlet to see if the outlet was a problem. I went to pick up J and when I got back it was finished installing, and the screen was black and unresponsive.

So I'm battery again now and we'll see. He said if it went down again, he'd send a new power adapter.

Meanwhile I did find out my friend does NOT have lung cancer. Now, that is very good news. And J's back. Also good news.

Making salads for Rosh Hashona dinner with friends.

The Hills Are Alive . . .

Seeing the Chugach Mountains from town is one of the perks of living here in Anchorage. The changing light and seasons mean that the familiar always has a different look and while waiting at a traffic light you can look up into the wilderness and now it's close by.
This was Tuesday on the way to a meeting, waiting at the Glenn Highway and Bragaw. (Yes, sometimes I drive if the places I'm going are too far apart to get to on a bike, or if I have to carry something that doesn't fit in my backpack. Or the weather or roads are dicey...)

This was after lunch today at the Thai Kitchen.
The golds and reds are starting to show.

Dennis Zaki took his video camera up to Powerline Pass (about 20 minute drive from downtown Anchorage) the other night and got these great shots of bull moose hanging around, waiting for the mating season to officially open.

The Magnificent Moose from Dennis Zaki on Vimeo.

After I watched the video, I emailed him to say I thought the video was great, but that the music was kind of cheesy.

"As many times as I've been up there," I wrote, "I've never heard any music."

He wrote back:

"Yes it was weird, the music just started playing as soon as I got there!"

So, yes, Rogers and Hammerstein were right.

Where's Political Music of the Bush and Obama Eras?

After posting the video on Mary Travers in the previous post, I realized that while there was a reason I posted it, lots of people would have no idea of the significance of Peter, Paul, and Mary and the many other musicians of the sixties. Just posting it without saying anything would mean little. I realized I needed to supply a little context. So here it is.

In the early sixties we had the civil rights movement which overlapped with the anti-war movement which came a bit later. Both these movements were accompanied by an incredible musical score. I almost said background music, but while it was ALWAYS in the background, there were times when it was front and center stage.

Peter, Paul and Mary (Travers of the previous post) were part of this musical rhetoric that kept people inspired through difficult times. They were just a part of a whole army of musicians supplying strong, melodic, and uplifting anthems. So I supplemented my memories of those days with a Google search. Ask.com says:

Civil rights would have been won without the participation of blues, gospel, and folk singers and songwriters, but the participation of musicians and the effectiveness of sing-alongs certainly helped an incredible amount.

The songs on this list don't even begin to capture the hundreds of tunes that have been written about civil rights in America (and around the world), but if you're looking to learn more about music during the civil rights movement, this is a good primer for your journey. [Go to the ask.com link for their list of most important songs.]

PBS had a fund-raiser documentary on Freedom Songs of the Civil Rights Movement with a three CD box set. It looks like it will be on at 10:30 this Saturday night (Sept. 19) in Washington, DC at WETA and again Monday night.

The point though, is that there was an incredible musical back up to the movements. Folk songs were big in the mid-60's and there was something called the 'hootenany' which was folk song singalongs. There was even a hootenany television show.

"MTV Unplugged?" Nope, it's Hootenanny, the ABC-TV series that capitalized on the popularity of folk music during the early 1960's. If it's remembered at all today, it's as the show that blacklisted Pete Seeger, a last gasp of McCarthyism that led to a boycott by Bob Dylan; Joan Baez; Peter, Paul & Mary; The Kingston Trio - practically every folk act that meant anything to the masses.

But when Hootenanny appeared in March 1963, it held a lot of promise. Each segment was taped at a different college campus, the audience consisting of students. Shows ran for a half-hour on Saturday night, and featured four acts. The music was literally non-stop. Host Jack Linkletter (eldest son of Art) would quickly introduce each artist or group, and they all took turns after doing a song. During the thirty minutes a "headliner" act did three or four songs, two supporting acts did two songs apiece, a third act (usually a soloist) did one song, and everybody joined in for the closing number - usually something simple like Goodnight Irene or "Little Liza Jane."[Michael J. Hayde writes More at tvparty.com about many of the acts that appeared - he says his dad audio taped all the shows. ]

As the Vietnam War began to heat up in the sixties, some of these artists crossed over to the anti-war movement and their music, along with the addition of rock and roll protest songs, were important inspiration.

Which raises the point - where are the stirring anti-war anthems of today? Where are the folk songs that call the health care victims to the streets, arm-in-arm? I'm the first to admit being out of touch with today's pop music, so I'm sure others might be able to jump in and tell me where to find it. Clearly rap taps into the kind of urban frustrations that Pete Seeger tapped into, but too often rather than pointing toward ways to overcome, it turns into violent, misogynist rants. It's not that there aren't rappers who have a more positive message, but in the sixties, there was no one in the US who didn't know Blowing in the Wind and We Shall Overcome.

If that kind of music, with that kind of reach and power, exists today, I don't know about it. And we need it. To lift our souls through the nastiness of today's politics, just as the music lifted us above the nastiness of racism and the politics of the Vietnam War. Racism and war? Hmmm, We're still embroiled in those fights today. Where's the inspirational music of today?

Good Bye Mary Travers

YouTube from adelfred.
[Update: I've added some context to this in the next post. And if you follow the link to Blowin in the Wind, you can see Peter, Paul, and Mary 30 or 40 years earlier, singing one of the most important anthems of the civil rights movements.]

What happens to your trash?

I was getting ready to go to bed but first I had to take out the trash that's collected tomorrow. But then there was the NY Times in my email. You know how going to bed at ten ends up going to bed at 2am.

According to the NY Times:

Through the project, overseen by M.I.T.’s Senseable City Laboratory, 3,000 common pieces of garbage, mostly from Seattle, are to be tracked through the waste disposal system over the next three months. The researchers will display the routes in real time online and in exhibitions opening at the Architectural League of New York on Thursday and the Seattle Public Library on Saturday.

The MIT site tells us:

TrashTrack uses hundreds of small, smart, location aware tags: a first step towards the deployment of smart-dust - networks of tiny locatable and addressable microeletromechanical systems.These tags are attached to different types of trash so that these items can be followed through the city’s waste management system, revealing the final journey of our everyday objects in a series of real time visualizations.

I couldn't find where online the garbage is being tracked. At least I can track most of our summer, raw, kitchen vegetable scraps. They go about 50 feet to the compost heap and then get scattered onto our various flower beds after the worms and other bugs take care of them and the leaves and our neighbor's grass clippings.

But it would be interesting to find out where some of the other stuff goes. I hope not out to the trash island floating in the North Pacific.

The Seattle Public Library, which is one of the partners in this, will have an event Saturday, Sep. 19, 2009, 11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.:



But I have to take the trash out now.

Krestia on Goldberg

I cringed when I heard that Jonah Goldberg was coming to talk to UAA students. It's not that he's a Conservative columnist, it's his style. My sense is that he's Rush with an academic veneer. His columns seem meant to anger, to distract us from real issues. Bring up Conservative columnists and Liberal columnists, but ones who bring their biases to what they study to illuminate and raise questions that cause us to rethink something we think we already know, or to start to grasp something we're scratching our heads about.

But I did think I should at least go and hear what he had to say, but I completely missed it by not keeping track of when it was supposed to be.

Fortunately, the Press went, and Krestia at the Anchorage Press wrote an interesting review of Goldberg's talk. (I say 'interesting' because I don't know how accurately he reported the talk, but what he wrote was interesting.) The basic point he says Goldberg made was that these are great times to be a journalist. I don't want to say much more since I wasn't there and you can read Krestia's column yourself at the link above.

Alaska Blogger's House Burns Down

[UPDATE 9-16-09 10:30am: Tea said I could post this picture from her blog. She also added a comment below. When I pressed her she said gift certificates to Sears would help - she's got 9 kids to clothe. Also looking into setting up a pay pal account for her.]

Tea N Crumpet's house burned down. Here blog Stress Management was one of the early ones and she writes about living in Wasilla with nine kids. There's not much I can say, but I did want to note it here. You can read about it at the link above and a follow up post from today.

The Red Cross was there along with the Firefighters with vouchers for a hotel. She did save her laptop as she mentions on my post below about mine being in the shop. No one got hurt, but Tea seems to have gulped some smoke retrieving her laptop and purse. (I have it back. The diagnostic on the hardware showed nothing wrong and the problem didn't appear while it was in the shop. I'm just using it now for the first time. My fingers are crossed it's ok.)

Tea, my heart goes out to you and your family. We do want to know how we can help out as you work your way back to some form of normal.

Do lasers work by focusing sound waves?

Take out a piece a paper and write the numbers 1-10, then mark the answers to the following questions:

True or False? (you've got a 50/50 chance)

1. Lasers work by focusing sound waves.

2. It is the father's gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl.

3. All radioactivity is man-made.

4. The center of the Earth is very hot.

5. The universe began with a huge explosion.

6. Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria.

7. Electrons are smaller than atoms.

8. Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth? (I know this isn't a true or false question, I didn't write this quiz)

9. Human beings are developed from earlier species of animals.

10. The continents have been moving their locations for millions of years and will continue to move.

These are some of the questions on an international survey reported in Science and Engineering Indicators 2006.

I found this in my ongoing attempts to understand why so many people believe in government death panels, believe that medicare works well and they don't want the government taking it over, and other such silliness. (We get distorted ideas about the world.  On television ten thousand people seems important, but one million people is less than one-half of one percent of the adult US population.)

The best that Americans did on the questions above (the data for United States was 2004) was about 78% of people got the correct answer on questions #4 and #10. That means that about 22% of the folks got these two questions wrong. (Of course this was a sample of the US adult population - you have to understand some statistics and probability to understand the counter-intuitive notion that you can sample a small portion of the population and predict accurately what the whole population 'knows.' But assuming good statisticians were in charge, that means about 42 million people don't know the answers to #4 and #10.) (Remember, if people guessed on all the questions, the odds are they would have gotten half of them right.)

38% got question #2 (the father's gene) WRONG.

More than 40% got question #6 (antibiotics) WRONG.

I guess the most shocking was that 40% got question #8 (earth around the sun?) WRONG. For me this is more shocking because it is the most tangible concept and one that we can actually see and don't need too much coaching from grade school teachers to get. Maybe they should have asked about whether the earth was round or flat too.

Perhaps less surprising, but more disturbing were questions #5 (universe began) and #9 (human development from earlier species.) I say less surprising because it's a lot easier, conceptually, to understand that some giant bearded God, who leans from the clouds on the Vatican ceiling, created the universe and human beings than it is to understand the big bang theory or evolution. But over 65% got #5  and 58% got #8 wrong! I would add another caveat though. Reading beyond just the headline statistics, I found that when the question was phrased, "Scientific theory holds that ..." the correct/incorrect ratio flips. So, 20% know about the big bang and evolution, but just don't believe it. The other 40+% . . . who knows?

So how'd you do on the test? You can see the answers and the stats for the US, China, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, EU-25, and Russia on this page from the National Science Foundation. This particular test is a few years old - the US and EU data are 2005. How many know what EU-25 means? Some must because I do get hits from people in Europe.

What does this have to do with anything? Do people really need to know any of this stuff? Not to lead their daily lives, but they do if they expect to have a clue about global warming, nuclear energy, stem cell research, and whether the earth is more than 6,000 years old. Or what various public policies are about. I suspect that a lot of people have knowledge in some areas, but not others.

I also don't think that there's a correlation between political parties and knowing the answers, but I suspect that the people who believe what Sarah Palin says, on the whole, do less well on this than the average person. But that's simply a guess, but it would be interesting to find out.

So what happens when someone doesn't know something? I'd say there are a couple of key options. They can

1. Pretend like they do know.

2. Keep quiet and hope nobody asks them a question that will reveal their ignorance

3. Acknowledge they don't know and feel stupid and helpless.

4. Acknowledge they don't know and decide to find out the answers.

The scary thing is people who are confronted with their ignorance - get asked questions like those above or those right below - see they don't know the answers, but then go on to believe that their opinion on any of a number of public policy issues is just as good as someone who knows all the answers. Ignorance really means not knowing how much you don't know.

If the questions above seem a little distant from our daily lives (in a sense we can use modern technology and generally live our lives without understanding how it works, but since we are voters, our ignorance imperils all). Here are some questions relevant to terms we hear and/or are expected to make decisions about in the course of our daily lives.

1. An acre equals how many square miles? (When you hear that a fire burned 2,000 acres, do you have any idea how much that is?)

2. How much is the Anchorage [replace with your own city] Municipal budget? (If we don't even know how much the budget is, how can we say it is too high?  How do we know that our taxes are too high? Compared to what? How much would we pay for what our local government does if we had to pay private companies?  )

3. How many milligrams of salt are recommended for an adult per day?(This apparently varies from country to country.)

4. What are the five most populous countries in the world?

5. Write one word in a language that doesn't use the Roman alphabet.

The first three questions cover concepts that are in the news every single day, yet most people can't answer them, though I'd guess number 3 will get the most right answers.

The last two we may not face every day, but wouldn't it be nice to know something about the countries of visitors and immigrants we meet?  Shouldn't we all be able to point out on a map where those five countries are? How about when we have a strong opinion about one of those countries? Those five countries make up 46 percent of the world's population. I'd say that we should know them before knowing the names of five deodorants or how many times Lindsay Lohan was arrested.

And the last one. You can survive without reading any Chinese characters, or not being able to read sushi in Japanese. But I promise you a lot of Japanese can read Starbucks in English.  I think non-Roman alphabets act like curtains to most people born in the US. They seem completely impenetrable. But they aren't really. Billions of people read Chinese, Russian, Arabic, or Hindi. 

In ten hours almost anyone could learn to read 20-50 words in a language with a different alphabet.  If you had a good teacher or a good book and the discipline to apply yourself. (Ten of the 20 most populous countries use non-Roman writing.)

Sorry.  I'm getting a little carried away here. I just want people to remember that few of us use a very large percent of our brains.  We have a lot of excess capacity.   Nevertheless, even people who use very little of that capacity are able to deceive themselves into thinking that their opinion is as good as anyone else's. Somehow, "the right to one's opinion" has morphed into "my opinion is as good as yours."

Until we each face our relative ignorance and gain a little more humility (if you aren't humbled looking at all the books in a library, what does that suggest?) we have little hope of getting along and taking care of the planet in a way that will sustain life.

Acres.

Anchorage Municipal budget.

Salt.

Populous Countries.

Black Screen Back so Back to MacHaus

The evil black screen came back last night after almost two days with no problem. As long as I don't leave my computer for more than a couple of minutes, I have no problem, but then it goes black and I have to reboot. Stephen at Apple thinks it might be a hardware malfunction and since it's still under warranty I can take it in to MacHaus and have them do a diagnostic. I did learn that the first call to Apple got me to the first level people and the second call on the same case number got me to a higher level expert who gave me a direct number back to him.

I hope this doesn't take long. Computer stores don't give loaner computers like some car places do when the car's being repaired. Besides, my computer is much more personalized than my car ever was. While I can blog from my wife's computer, all my stuff is on this one. But I do have everything backed up on the external hard drive.