I’ve been visiting Seattle nearly everyday, recently. I sit at my computer desk chair with legs bent 90 degrees at the knee for about as long as it takes to fly to Washington. The effectiveness of the voluminous void underneath the desk drawer, which is supposed to provide plenty of legroom, has been compromised by…
“…and finally, we’d like to remind you to turn off your cell phones if you haven’t already.” Right. But coughing and sneezing are potentially equally distracting to the performers on stage and to the rest of the audience, yet you wouldn’t expect to hear the person introducing the concert to ask that you refrain from…
Something that hasn’t happened for awhile has happened recently. I’ve caught myself using the same word, or variations of the word, too often, i.e. some others, some people, sometimes. Maybe it’s still happening, just look at the 1st word in this post. I need to consult with a group of neurologists and figure out what…
I’ve been getting interested in parasites lately. I watched a couple vids of some remarkable behavioral changes that occur in the host. For instance, whipworms, after having matured inside a grasshopper, will influence the grasshopper’s brain chemistry to the extent that the grasshopper will make a suicide plunge into water. Then the whipworms burst out…
Over the course of 4 months everyone in a household of 6 gets sick. The first 5 to get sick fall ill with the common cold. The 6th inhabitant to get sick contracts “sickness 1a”, which has initial symptoms identical to those experienced by the other members of the household but which is actually a…
Anne Wojcicki, wife of google co-founder Sergey Brin, has been getting some publicity recently for her work as co-founder of 23andMe, a silicon valley startup that will sequence 500,000 of the 3 billion single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that make up the human genome for the price of $1000 and your spit. The idea is to…
I have a problem with bullets in animals that will be eaten, and it’s not the anti-hunter argument you might expect. It’s a selfish problem. I imagine the bullet introducing toxins into the body upon piercing the skin. Hot metal shards, oil residues, powders from the gun barrel etc. and my fear applies to more…
I wonder if people who regularly donate blood are less likely to die from massive blood loss in an accident because their bodies are accustomed to 1. fabricating blood in response pint sized blood loss and 2. functioning with a lower than desirable volume of blood for brief periods. Of course, no one can survive…
I wonder if during typical child-parent communication the parent thinks to themselves “Wow, that makes perfect sense” or “That’s exactly the same kind of thinking process I use.” Might not the child’s brain be wired in a way similar to that of its parents? Yes, so much of brain development depends on upbringing, but I’d…
If someone spoke non-stop for hours on end about multiple subjects that unfolded, I wonder if neurologists could map the neuron structures in their brain just by reading the monologue.