Ironic physiology

I enjoy finding aspects of the human body that either don't make sense our are counter-intuitive or counter-productive. Well, I don't always enjoy this, since a lot of it directly impacts upon me. The design of knees, for instance. Or the massive susceptibility to error of the eye (how the hell can Intelligent Design apologists claim that the eye "must have been designed". They're denigrating the whole idea of an omnipotent designer!)

And now this:

Chronic sleep deprivation is increasingly damaging the male libido. (Courier Mail)

Umm... What's one of the most effective methods of getting to sleep???

Quotes of the times.

As an insight into my mental state recently, these are my two favourite quotes at the moment:

"I'm sorry sir, I appear to have bypassed my good-taste chip" - Kryten, Red Dwarf, just after saying "We could go back to Dallas in 1963, stand on the grassy knoll and shout 'Duck!'"

"I've always been of the opinion that people who never see any justification for the death penalty are showing a lack of imagination." - my colleague.

Horse flu demonstrates how extraordinarily lucky we have been with bird flu.

It's amazing how simple things can bring an entire house of cards tumbling down.

I have just been on the phone to a dog breeder we are about to collect another hound from, and the conversation turned to the equine influenza which has just struck a fairly startled Australia and cancelled a couple of early season horse races.

Here's what the media hasn't really reported so far, mixed in with what little it has:

The infection rate is 100% upon exposure, and the mortality rate is 40%. It's air-borne, so fences alone will not contain it. It can survive for up to 24 hours on humans, but up to 36 hours upon clothing, so just separating horses and not people will not contain it.

Consider the impact of cancelling some races: TAB employees have not worked. Caterers, security guards, carpark attendants, bookies and their runners etc. have not worked at the races. Horses can't be exercised while they're in lock-down quarantine, and after 10 days a race horse starts losing condition. Expect Melbourne Cup to not happen this year. At all. If a horse gets the flu and is in the lucky 60% that survives, it can have heart or lung damage, which means that it will never race again. People have spent $2million on a foal, kept it and trained it for 2 years, at several thousand dollars a week, and may never have it race.

Now consider rural communities: Everyone has horses. They can't visit each other. Real-estate agents can't work because they can't visit properties. Vets can't visit properties. Without phones everyone would be isolated. People have to set aside clothes just for feeding their horses and just for leaving the property, and then strip off, put the clothes in plastic bags, shower, sterilise wherever they've walked, put on different (clean) clothes to do the shopping, spray disinfectant (industrial peroxide is good) on their car underbodies and tyres before leaving the property, and just to be on the safe side after returning as well.

It's out in Queensland, thanks to horse movements. Police have already stopped people violating quarantine and fined them large amounts of money, and you can bet that it will continue to happen.

Human beings are not, by nature, sensible when it comes to diseases. Remember the American who was thought (incorrectly, luckily) to have a rare and virulent form of TB and evaded detention to fly home, putting the entire plane and his entire country at risk?

If H5N1 ever does take off, or anything else for that matter, we are doomed.

Where were you on the night of 2000 years ago?

It appears to be ten days since anything has interested me enough to share, which says far more about how stressed and zonked-out I've been over the last few weeks than it does about the state of the world in general (although I do not wish Equine Influenza upon any horse, I did get a chuckle about hearing that police horses in Sydney would have to pull a sicky from APEC).

But this cannot be passed up:

A christian group in Kenya wants the Kenyan High Court to declare Jesus' crucifixion illegal and his conviction null and void. (Link to Curious Snail).

Stop me if I'm wrong, but... Isn't the crucifixion a fairly major and, indeed, central part of the christian mythos? I am not now and have never been christian, but I seem to remember hearing something about "died for our sins." Something like that, anyway. It's really going to cock up the back story if they manage to convince people that it was really never supposed to happen.

And for once, I like a piece of writing in the Courier Mail:

"...may redefine the quest for closure."

I should use what instead?

I'd just like to say that this picture illustrates one very good reason why building a web browser that can truly take it's place among IE, the Mozilla offspring and Opera, is really fucking hard. Konqueror (Debian testing) can't yet:


Oh yes, and Google? It would be really clever if you recognised that somebody was connecting from Linux and didn't recommend Internet Explorer.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

P.S.: What this says about my chance of finding a mobile that can cope with docs.google.com doesn't bear thinking about.

Health Conditions You Never Knew You Had Until You Were Told

Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome

Saw a reference, googled it, laughed quite hard, desperately tried to find something authoritative on adrenal glands that wasn't trying to sell herbal supplements....

To be honest, I love Internet quizzes that attempt to diagnose things. Yes, even the ones that say "This is not intended to replace a diagnosis by your doctor" at the top, as though it's going to make a difference to how people use it.

I found one on About.com, in the (cue warning sirens) Alternative Medicine section. Some choice questions follow:

"I often feel tired after exercise, rather than energized." - Exercise how hard?

"I crave sweet or salty foods" - Does chocolate count?

"I am frequently irritable, negative or pessimistic" - Can I count enduring personality traits here?

"I often have trouble getting up in the morning, even after going to bed at a reasonable hour." - Define "reasonable".

"My body temperature feels off balance or I get hot flushes." - Should middle-aged women be excused from answering this one?

"I drink more than one 8oz cup of coffee every day" - I have mitigating circumstances!

"In my free time, I'm often too tired to do anything that involves going out of the house." - Does low care factor count here?

And my result?

"You answered 11 items out of 16 correctly.

Your score is 69%. Your adrenal glands may be in overdrive."

Give me a break. "Correctly"? Were they paying attention when they put that together? And 16 questions is enough for a 2/3 response to result in the diagnosis of "overdrive"?

I can, however, now confirm that according to the Internet I have Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome, Adult ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, and I'm a woman, a fact which would greatly surprise my girlfriend if she found out about it.

This is your brain after using drugs for a long time

"Brain Dysfunction blamed for Addiction" (Courier Mail)

Okay, avoiding for a moment that "blamed" in the headline, with all its nice little connotations, the gist is that "researchers" (doesn't even say which department they're from) at the University of Melbourne have found an under performing frontal cortex in people with long-term addictions, resulting in a reduced ability to control impulses, reduced self-control overall, therefore reduced ability to counteract addictive behaviours or substances.

Now, there have been many arguments over the years about "addictive personalities", many of them with a physiological component, that all seem to boil down to an individual finding a behaviour or substance that balances the negative effects of a slightly off-kilter physiology or a crap life. And for various reasons, including people grabbing the wrong end of the stick and accusing such theorists of wanting to excuse behaviours that they're just trying to explain, many of them are decidedly controversial and non-PC.

So this is a study I like - it finds something that correlates with known behavioural or cognitive issues which can all be seen to have a bearing on the behaviour in question - i.e. addiction. My immediate question, however, is: Is this a predisposition or a consequence of neurological injury caused by long-term intake of toxic psychotropic substances? The study was looking at drug users not, e.g. sex addicts or compulsive gamblers, and we know all too well the ways in which long-term usage of licit or illicit drugs can mess with your grey (and white) matter.

Well, apparently that's the next line of research, and about time too I say, although I'm not sure how they plan to tell if it's injury or a bad roll of the genetic dice (maybe looking for more global damage?)

I am, however, overjoyed to see that perhaps there will be meaningful behavioural strategies used for addiction, instead of strategies based upon untested theories or ideologies.

And if anybody does think that I'm trying to find excuses for people: grow up.

The big question is not whether somebody has a mitigating factor for behaviour, it's their reaction - to seek (or accept) help or to continue with behaviour which is destructive to their physiology, finances and relationships and which may, by the time they're offered help, have got them in serious trouble with the law.