Showing posts with label brain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brain. Show all posts

Friday, September 18, 2015

5010 More rambles.

Friday, September 18, 2015

"Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth."
-- Lillian Hellman --

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A township truck came through last night spraying for mosquitoes.  I haven't seen that since the '50s.  There have been a lot of dead crows, evidence that some nasty disease (I forget) is getting spread.  They've found it in captured mosquitoes.

I forgot to cover my tomato plant, so I'll have to remember to wash the tomatoes well before eating them.  I don't know what they sprayed with, but the crickets don't seem to be affected, they were still singing loudly two hours later.  I also doubt that the spray penetrated as far as back yards.  It looked like it just came straight out of the spray pipe and fell on the road.  I'm sure it got nowhere near the pond out back, and I'm absolutely positive it didn't hit the marshy/swampy area two streets over.  Well, at least the township can claim they tried.


I personally won't notice any difference, because mosquitoes don't bite me.  They hover around me like they're looking for skin, then they give up and leave.  Those tiny black bitey bugs that form clouds around your head don't like me, either.  Pretty much nothing does except ticks.


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 I don't have an ad-blocker, so I get a lot of pop-up junk on the screen,  Even with an ad-blocker, I visit a lot of sites that would like me to subscribe or register, and they put up pop-up requests.  I used to not mind them, just closed them without reading them.


Remember when the "X" to close those little windows was always in the upper right corner?  Not any more.  Now you have to search for the darn things.  Some of the "X"s don't show up until you pass over them with the cursor, so it's a physical search.  Piss me off!  And there's one ad company out there that covers the text on the screen and doesn't even provide the "X".  The ad sits there covering text until it decides to leave.  Snopes.com uses that ad company, and I go to Snopes several times a day.


Even worse are the videos that start up with no encouragement.  I'll have five tabs open when suddenly sound starts up, and I have to scroll up and down through five tabs to find out where it's coming from.


I give up.  I guess I'm going to have to install an ad-blocker.  Any recommendations?


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A study has found that the higher your education level, the better your chances of recovering from brain injury with no disability.  (http://www.indianalawyerblog.com/2014/05/education_helps_protect_the_br.html)  Interesting article.

One theory is that the more mental exercise you get, the stronger your brain is.  The other, of course, is that the higher your educational level, the better able you will be to afford top-notch care.  Heh.


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Speaking of brains, back when Jay was getting all those MRIs, I always asked to look at them with the doctors, and they were always happy to accommodate me.  One day we were looking at one, and I observed, "You know, it's no wonder people think about sex so much.  There's a naked woman climbing right into the center of the brain."    The doctor looked at me, "What?  Where?"  I pointed to the structure in the middle, the thalamus is her head, the midbrain is her upper back, the pons is her rear end, and the medulla olongata is her right leg.  Her left leg is bent high up, stepping into the brain and raising and rounding her left haunch, her left arm reaches out to the left side.  He suddenly saw it clearly --- and here's the surprising part, he'd never noticed that before.  Turns out none of Jay's doctors had.  


This is a random scan from the internet, not Jay's.  See if you also see the lady.

Thursday, August 02, 2012

3586 Strange brains

August 2, 2012

When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children,
endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority,
for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
-- Bertrand Russell --

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The following is a 10-minute video about a guy with Tourette's, Luke, who just wants a girlfriend.  Unfortunately, he's one of the 10% who has the problem with uncontrollable swearing.

[http://youtu.be/qZRgmFvYPrA]

The brain is a mysterious thing.   The Tourette's part of Luke's brain knows exactly which words are forbidden and will get the worst reaction and that's what it generates.  So I can't help wondering - if Luke had been raised in a society of anorexic, diabetic, truck drivers, would he be shouting "Cheesecake!", and "Sugar!" instead of "F--k you!" and "Bitch!"?

It reminds me a bit of Jay, when his brain decided to throw away the left side of the world, to the point where he was blind to the first half of double words.

I knew a guy with Tourette's once.  He didn't have the swearing thing, though.  He just twitched a lot and yipped and barked.  He and his wife were in Mensa.  We all liked him.  He was sweet.  We all strongly disliked his wife.  They'd got married just before they moved to the Poughkeepsie area and became active in the local group.  She was more than a bit of a slut, wandering off all the time with guys, and she'd yell at him, "You're barking again!  Stop it!" like she had no understanding of the syndrome or didn't care about how difficult it was for him to control it.  She eventually wandered off, within the first year, I think.  After she left, since he couldn't drive because of the twitching, one of us would pick him up for the dinners and games nights.

One evening I gave him a ride home after a dinner, and he started talking.  I'd never heard anything like it.  Words poured out of him.  What he was saying made sense in and of itself, but it just poured out so fast and had nothing to do with anything and segued into different topics at warp speed.  In spates between the deluge, he said that when he starts talking uncontrollably it means a seizure is coming on and if it did while he was in the car I shouldn't panic but just let it go, wait it out, and he's sorry if it scares me.  I responded that my late husband had seizures, and they don't bother me a bit.  When we arrived outside his apartment, I offered to sit with him until whatever happened had passed, but he said no, he was used to it and would be ok.

I never saw him again.  I often wondered what happened to him.
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Wednesday, November 30, 2011

3409 Propaganda

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Insurance of whatever kind is supposed to be there in case something goes wrong.
It has been my experience that having insurance seems to prevent anything going wrong.
Let it lapse, and you'll find out....
-- Silk --

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Latest Nugget (yesterday):

We have one tooth breaking through on the bottom, and one on the top. And she's now crawling properly on hands and knees, and she's FAST! The cats are no longer safe.

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This article is short and interesting: http://health.yahoo.net/news/s/afp/healthpoliticsusbritain

To quote from the intro:
"Everyone knows that liberals and conservatives butt heads when it comes to world views, but scientists have now shown that their brains are actually built differently.

Liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear, said the study on Thursday in Current Biology."
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At http://www.purewatergazette.net/propagandainamerica.htm, there's a good article entitled Propaganda: Nobody Does It Better Than America, by Paul Weber. It's a bit longer, but it's very good. I highly recommend a skim.

We all know that sex sells products. Fear and repetition sells ideas. Appeals to logic and fact sells nothing.

It's sometimes difficult to recognize propaganda - attempts to control your mind and how you think - especially when the propaganda is all you are given to consider, it's repeated over and over as if it's an accepted fact, and you are not given the real facts. Fear-based propaganda works especially well on the conservative brain.

Think about how our freedoms have been eroded over the past ten years, and how so many of us have been convinced that it's for our own good. And it's all based on fear.
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