Farben Says

Know or Grow

2010-05-04T10:24:00.000-07:00

Penny Says: We should all know where and when to go if we can't grow our own garden.

It is planting time around most of the Canada and for the many who have decided to plant a garden and grow their own veggies this summer I say! GOOD JOB!

For those of us without a plot of our own (or a sunny patio box) there is always the farmers market. I think we all know we should be buying locally grown fresh produce straight from the farmer. But with supermarkets that lack seasons we conveniently reach for those out of season shipped in fruits and veggies even in the summer. I though I was being so savvy a couple of years ago because I was buying local produce when it was available at the grocery store. Well it turns out that buying from the farmer is a better way. Did you know that last season (09) local apple growers in BC sold their apples to the distributor for 12 cents per pound. I bet you paid around a dollar a pound at the grocery store for that same apple. I drove up to the apple orchard and bought my apples fresh picked for 20 cents per pound and skipped the grocery store all together. The grower made more money and I saved money (seems like crazy math but cutting out the middle man = profits for farmers and savings for people like you).

There are thousands of good reasons to buy local food for a ton of them you can go to Food Routes and check out their well put together website about the importance of buying local.

My personal reasons are simple, it tastes amazing, it is fun to meet the people who grew your squash, and it is CHEAPER than the grocery store. Plus a lot of the food at farmers markets has not been sprayed with pesticides or waxes just ask them if they sprayed it and they will tell you.

Living in BC I am fortunate to have access to some pretty decent farms and farmers markets. To find a farmers market close to your house you can use google maps just search farmers market, your city name here .

Knowing where to buy is only half the battle. Locally grown food is only available when it is in season. The produce is always the best price when it is most plentiful so if you are planning to make roasted Roma tomatoes and freeze enough for the winter (and you should they are awesome) you should buy them when the farmer has way to many coming ripe at the same time (best bet around here is late July - ask your local growers for your best bet).

Why not take the time this year to can, freeze, and preserve the taste of summer and keep more of your money in your pocket all winter long! Here are some websites that can give you a refresher or get you started. 4 ways to preserve Canning freezing vegetables Salsa, Chutney, Pickles, and Relish

If you are making baby food and buying organic produce your bills will be just as high as buying it in a jar! But if you go to you local farmers market and ask your favorite vender about their farming practices you will probably find they are a no spray environmentally friendly and non-toxic farm - although they may not have filled the miles of paperwork to become certified organic. Tell them you are making baby food and buy your veggies in bulk for an even bigger discount. Most veggies (squash, potatoes, carrots, peas, spinach, lentils, beets) can be roasted or steamed, pureed (in blender or food processor) , and frozen in icecube trays and stored in freezer bags for 6 - 12 months. You just have to heat and serve. check out these page for helpful baby food recipes. Wholesome Baby Homemade baby food This way you know your baby is getting healthy food without added salt, sugar or preservatives! Plus you are cutting back on waste buy not buying all those plastic or glass jars of food (3 a day for a year really adds up).

Here is a quick list of the harvest seasons for some of the yummy local produce in BC.

BC Locally Grown Foods and Approximate Harvest Dates

Asparagus April - June (mid)
Herbs April - October

Greenhouse tomatoes May - July
Peas May (late) -July
Lettuce May (late) - September
Rhubarb May (late) - July

Strawberries June - July
Radishes June - September
Tomatoes June - October
Broccoli June - September

Cherries July
Blackberries July - August
Blueberries July - August
Apricots July (mid) - August (early)
Raspberries July - October
Summer Squashes July - September
Cucumbers July - September
Garlic July - October
Beans July - October
Beets July - September
Peppers July (late) - September (late)
Peaches July (late)- August (late)
Figs July (late) - September

Hot Peppers August (early) - September (late)
Cantaloupe August (early) - October
Sweet Corn August - September
Watermelon August - September
Prunes/Plums August (mid)- September (early)
Pears August (mid)– October (early)
Apples August (mid) - October (late)
Winter Squash August (late) - October

Pumpkins September -October
Grapes September - October

Corn Corn everywhere but not a drop of nutrition to eat!

2010-01-25T08:47:00.000-08:00

Penny Says: Now I know why there is corn in my everything!!!

Previously I questioned the corn in my coffee cup but at that point in time the whole picture was not yet clear... It is all clear now thanks to Douglas Coupland's hilarious book Generation A, a couple of documentaries (see below) and a few good Google searches (High Fructose Corn Syrup).

Documentaries you must endeavor to find.
King Corn. This aired on PBS so you can probably watch it on their site PBS

Food Inc.

Warning Food inc is not for the squeamish in fact start with King Corn and then if you still want to know more move on to Food inc.

I am not anti corn, I love a nice cob done on the BBQ at the end of summer and the peek of freshness. But the stuff that they grow in Taber AB and Chilliwack BC that we buy off the back of a farmers truck or at farmers market in August each year is edible corn that needs time and space to grow.
However, most of the corn grown in the United States (and unfortunately in Canada too) is not edible fresh off the cob. It needs to be shipped, stored, and processed before it can become food stuffs.... WHAT THE HELL.... Ask a Corn farmer in Ohio if they eat what they grow - Good Gawd No - is the reply...
REALLY!!! REALLY! THEN WHY THE HELL ARE YOU GROWING OVER 1000 ACRES OF THE SHIT????
Easy answer - Government subsidies and demand.
Who on earth would buy this shit you ask... well lets start with what contains these modified corn products?

North American food products are loaded in modified corn products from starch to dextrin to high fructose corn syrup, get up and read the labels of any of the processed foods in your house you will be shaking your head right after...
Got chocolate milk? Its got corn.
fruit juices - seriously some of these have no fruit at all just natural flavors (what are those?) and you guessed it - Corn syrup.
Bread - well how else could they get that pretty Carmel color with our using high fructose corn syrup (umm gee maybe using honey- duh)....
Every chip, cracker and crisp on the market is loaded in boiled down corn called high fructose corn syrup.
Beef - please it is basically made of fat generated by corn fed feed lot protocols
And the biggest use of High fructose corn syrup - Soda Pop -YUP thats why it is oh so sweet.

In fact, I think this whole phenomenon of using a sugar alternative (we would not want to be reliant on importing sugar cane from Cuba etc) is to meet the demands of Coke and Pepsi for a super cheep sweetening agent for soda. I am not blaming them - just a little confused about why the American Government farm subsidy program would be using tax payers dollars for the last 30 years to give a major corporation like Coke or Pepsi a break... Do they want food products that are full of harmful empty calories fed to the people of their great nation? Do they want 1 out of 8 Americans to have diabetes induced by pure overload of the pancreas? REALLY??????

As far as the fairly newly created Beef industry problem - Once a rancher sells cattle to the feed lot (like Cargil feeding the world at what cost) the Cattle are fed corn for 100 - 160 days in a feed lot where they have little room to move around (exercise burn those precious calories) ensuring they fatten up fast and cheep.
Everyone seems to agree that Grass fed beef tastes better, is 65% lower in saturated fats (the bad ones) and is so much kinder to the animals stomachs (and my moral conscience). But it is more economical to feeding Cattle corn not grass which they have evolved eating but this cost cutting measure leads to many problems including ulcers and acidosis in the cattle and a huge problem for the people eating them massive potential for out breaks of resistant E coli bacteria).

Okay so I am ranting and panicking that everything I buy is not what it seems. (Damn those fast and easy Chinese food sauces I love are full of corn because they are made in USA). The solution vote with your wallet - buy products that are what they are... Milk that is milk (add your own coco if need be), beef that is beef (an not an antibiotic filled corn fat factory), and just don't drink sweetened beverages (this includes all those fruit drinks we let our kids drink for breakfast). If you find a brand that is not using sweeteners to mock flavor reward them buy purchasing them exclusively or even write them a letter if you have the time to tell them how much you appreciate there quality! ALSO TELL YOUR GROCERY MARKET YOU ONLY BUY THIS BRAND BECAUSE.....

Support the grass fed beef in your community. There will be more of it for a better price if we as consumers encourage our supermarkets and local meat shops to provide it. Check out your local farmers market and ask the vendors if they have free range meats. Ask for details and they will tell you exactly what the animals ate, where, and for how long before they were your steak.

I am afraid if you want to avoid hidden high fructose corn syrup (and other sugars) you can't eat processed food from fast food restaurants like Mc D's or DQ and the like. Read the labels watch for corn starch, corn dextrin, and Corn syrup. Decide if you want those extra calories and look for alternatives I bet they will taste better!

Corporations bottom lines, and government farm subsidy programs should not dictate your health - you are in charge of what you put in your mouth. It may mean expanding your food budget or just putting in more time making food from scratch but in the end you will be healthier and I bet you will take pleasure in feeding your family.

PS did you know that most Yogurts contain gelatin (not news for carnivores but for the vegetarians and peoples who do not eat pork you did just eat pork gelatin in your activia, silhouette, danonne, and pc brand yogurts). If you want gelatin free with no added weirdness (and no corn) Astro is the way to go their plain, and vanilla Balkan styles are still good for you... They are what they say they are - that is all I ask.

Just when you think you might have a talent

2009-12-17T13:24:00.000-08:00

Penny says - holy crap that is swish - so glad I found HipBip

Peter Callesen is obviously amazing.

It was just printer paper but now it is incredible, awe inspiring and very well done ART and also sometimes a little creepy.

Also I don't think I have ever received a love note or even a real note at all now that I have seen how this deity speaks her mind. Julene has a talent that I truly hope pays her way through life because it is wonderful. Small things like hand stitched notes in clothing also amaze me but that is another story. If you want to leave a note or say something to someone I think it should be this pretty.

Penny Says : Mirror Mirror on the wall who is the most awesome of all

2009-10-19T15:03:00.000-07:00

A Little Narcissism could go a long way to getting what you want in life. In order to think you deserve that raise, that promotion or even that new job, you really need to feel that you are the best person and this is the time for you to get the opportunity.

To feel so strongly that no one else could possibly be as good scratch that - as great as you will be at this particular thing. Truly narcissistic people feel that they put on their socks better than anyone ever has before, they do their best to be modest (hey I guess they have the be the best at everything even being modest), but ultimately they think that they deserve the accolades never giving a thought to the others who did not receive them- all without any undermining or intentional negativity towards anyone.

They have a way about them a smirk with a glimmer in their eye and a caviler jaunt in their step. To be envious of no one but a younger stronger version of themselves surely is not a burden that needs to be concurred.

You might think that this could only be a good thing, you would be happy if you thought you were the best. The problem becomes that they are always looking for the ideal partner, ideal moment, more success, a better job, a more powerful position.

The line between a healthy dose of self-importance and an actual personality disorder that could ruin your life is thin and easily crossed. To be constantly obsessed with obtaining your rightful place as the richest, most powerful and truly brilliant person would be an exhausting and ultimately only disappointing quest. Don't forget all the time you need to devote to getting all the applause you crave. Although having half a million followers on twitter could be a fast way to feel important, it may not be enough for our narcissistic personalities. Is a narcissist able to enjoy the moment, to stop for a second and appreciate the amazing things they have achieved, to breath in the love they have shared with an amazing partner, to really appreciate the heights they have climbed? Or are they always haunted by the higher mountain peek, the younger more attractive partner, the king of the world position that has eluded them, or the fictional power of God they can never truly have.

Maybe realistic perspective is not such a bad thing to have – opportunities may come slower but at least you can be fairly certain they are real when they do arrive.

Penny Says it takes a village so quit trying to do it by yourself

2009-09-18T10:23:00.000-07:00

People have been have been living successful lives for centuries. Yet there is no methodology to follow to succeed. Everyone is unique and requires a subtly different lifestyle to be happy. But the basics are the same, physical safety, financial security, a handful of people who love them, and a place that you can always to come back to called home.

Whether you are nomadic or a homebody needing people to love support and guide you are essential. This is commonly referred to as your network. Networking has been coined as one of the most important tools in a successful person’s repertoire.

Yet the essential social interactions that lead to a diverse and supportive network are not taught in school, or passed on from parent to child. Every individual is left to fend for themselves and strive for their best with out a net or a network to catch them if they fall.

In many cultures children belong to the neighborhood, rooming in packs from house to house, being cared for and looked after by the whole village. North Americans teach there children to fear non-familial adults and are shameful of their children being seen as latchkey kids. There is nothing wrong with a child having their own space, independence, and learning to be a good judge of character. But telling them to lock the door and stay inside until you get home from work is probably not the best solution to your scheduling difficulties.

In Canada and the USA it is expected that once you leave your parents house, you get a job, partner up, buy some type of home, have babies and raise them with all that knowledge your working parents imparted to you! How are two working parents and a daycare supposed to single handedly raise a child or three? Simple don’t go back to work. Wrong answer according to most women even though daycare is expensive and you no longer get to spend the day with your baby it remains the most popular childcare choice. The cost of childcare is way out of whack with the standard income and we have not even touched on the standard of care that children are getting. Yet it is still financially necessary to get back to work to have the money coming in even though more than half of it ends up going to daycare. With so many couples desperately trying to get pregnant and have babies, it makes me wonder why those couples are not more active in raising the children and bringing reform to childcare in our culture. Perhaps it is more about the status of having kids than the journey of raising future contributing members of our society.

Kids are adorable and the most magnetic they will ever be – yet we shy away from letting strangers coo and awe over them, and we actively train them to avoid talking to strangers (ie. networking). Is it that parents want to keep these precocious little beings to themselves? Or perhaps we are just so afraid of strangers imprinting their ways on our progeny. People will say it is all about Stranger Danger but statistically speaking you will never encounter a person who will want to steal or hurt your child. Sociopaths exist and it is terrible when one of them gets their hands on a victim but chances are slim to none that they live, work, or play in your upper middle class neighborhood. See Penn & Tellers Bullsh!t episode 609: Stranger Danger for more details.

My point I guess is that there may not be a right way to raise kids but it takes a village to do it no matter which method you choose. Use your network and teach them to build one of their own!

This New Year already needs a new outlook

2009-02-08T01:45:00.000-08:00

Penny Can't Stop Complaining

I have realized that all of the bummer news about the stock market tanking, the wars, the job loses, and the tiny little fact that I have not achieved all that I thought I would at this stage in my life has lead me to turn into a Negative Nancy. And to top it all off I have been beating myself up for complaining and thinking negatively constantly.
So to bounce back to my Positive Penny self I was reading some blogs on being positive and how to stop complaining all the time. Steve Pavlina is a used to be slacker GenXer never-do-well, turned super productive entrepreneur, author, motivational speaker, and generally upbeat rich guy. He has a blog focused on personal development that seems to be relatively free of the creepy hippy garbage that keeps me out of the self help section of bookstores. He also has articles on the top 10 reasons you should never have a religion, and reasons to never get a job. Think they are worth a read just for fun.

I have also found a site called The Happiness Project that documents every which way under the sun, moon, and stars to get happy and stay that way. Who knew you could turn your own misery into a book project.....

I am betting that many of you are sick of hearing the fear, negativity, and economic doom and gloom - Read some blogs, turn the other cheek and try to look at things with a fresh positive take.
I will if you will.....

Meowy Catmuss

2008-12-21T22:58:00.000-08:00

Penny and Pacey think the cats said it best this year!

Money, Money, Money,

2008-11-22T16:00:00.000-08:00

Penny Says:

My favorite virtual gal-pal, Gail Vaz-Oxlade, just released a a product that can help everyone! a budget binder / day planner - If you are still using paper day planners this needs to be the one you get because it keeps you focused on money / savings / and your budget.

I recommend reading Gail's blog - lately she has been writing almost daily - providing lots of topics for everyone to enjoy.

Also I think many people can benefit from checking out her plentiful website - budget worksheets, helpful hints, and stories! Talking about money does not have to be stressful or socially unacceptable!

http://www.gailvazoxlade.com/

Her Reality TV show, Till Debt to Us Part, is usually funny, eye-opening, and allows a little voyeurism into other Canadians lives. It airs on TV on Slice network, Or if you don't subscribe to cable TV - you can go online and watch her shows in 4 part segments (quick loading streaming) at SLICE

Gail is a kind, no-nonsense, practical lady who has revealed every trick people use to fool themselves into spending more money than they make.

I hope you enjoy her as much as we do!

Goin' to the Cup

2008-11-15T17:45:00.000-08:00

On CFL week 7, Rider fans were elated at their 6-0 record welcoming the 'lowley' 3-3 Stampeders to do battle in Saskatchewan, laughing up a possible Grey Cup repeat victory in '08 and (maybe) a perfect season. Give me a break. That .500 Stampeders team not only beat you all at home, but went 10 - 2 the rest of the regular season ('Riders went 6-7), hosted the West Final (where were the 'Riders?), and went on to the Grey Cup . Saskatchewan was a terrible team this year, and yet none of their "most intelligent fans in the CFL" realized their team was terrible losing to a factually superior 3-3 team at home.

Fittingly, the 'Stamps go to the Finals the year I earn my Ph. D. Lovely stuff.

Quick props to the Vancouver Canucks, who finally came up with a good logo, albeit one that is regulated to their shoulder:

Happy Pumpkin Day

2008-10-31T08:48:00.000-07:00

Penny Says: Boo!

From Ghouls to princesses my favorite thing about Halloween by far is Bright Orange Pumpkins.

According to Wiki 1.5 billion pounds of Pumpkin is grown in the United States (alone) and Pumpkin is a successfully grown crop on all continents but Antarctica.

They are most likely to be jack-o-lanterns today but most days they should really be food. But for today check out You-tube pumpkin carving and I am sure you will find a few great how-to-guides on Carving the best Pumpkin.

What a waste it would be to let the giant buckets of half price Holiday pumpkins turn to mush!
Buy them and eat them! YUM! For recipes Ideas visit sites like http://allrecipes.com/HowTo/Pumpkin-Recipes/Detail.aspx

Its a big orange squash - roast it, boil it, mash it, cube it, spice it, sweeten it, or even BBQ it!

Like all Big orange veggies, Pumpkin is loaded in Beta-carotene, and Vits' E, C, A, B's. All the good stuff with tons of flavor. Plus the seeds are loaded in only the Greatest of fats ! To diabetic to eat a tonne of pumpkin - roast up the seeds with your favorite low sodium seasoning and enjoy!

Check out this great looking dish and try it yourself! Roasted Quail and Pumpkin

Gobble Gobble Zzzzzz Zzzzz

2008-10-09T18:16:00.001-07:00

Penny Says:
Happy Thanksgiving and Turkey Day !!!!

After all the hard work of gardening and keeping up with the weeds its nice to think that even the busiest of growers get to sit and enjoy a fall feast. The sweetest squash, the freshest veggies and the juiciest turkey are a reward for most! (all but the bird)
For some a cooking a ham sweet and succulent is the best way to encourage the family to drive to Grandma's to visit, chat, laugh and of course eat.

I think the best part of thanksgiving turkey preparation is the giggles that come from the ol' turkey on the head gag!

No people that are not being paid as actors ever do this but if they did I would laugh for days and days.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The perfection of Autumn

2008-09-15T20:53:00.000-07:00

Penny Says:
Sometimes with all the stress and bustle that comes with September we forget to look up and watch the perfect colors and shapes. Take a break play in the leaves you just raked!

Pacey recently noted that the months are numbered wrong. The prefixes are not appropriate for their numerical monthly match - you would expect that Sept-ember would be the 7th month, Oct-ober (8th), Nov-ember (9th), Dec-ember the 10th. But most of us use the Gregorian calendar a reformed version of the Julian calendar which is a reformed version of the Roman calender all of which seem to be lunar shifts. The reforms were necessary to keep Easter and celebrations in tune with the actual celestial event they reflected Spring Equinox. It turns out that several days of the year fell under an unnamed months, this was corrected and leap days were added and now we have to remember that September is the 9th month of the year not the Seventh as its name suggests! To read all about it go to Wiki and get your fill.

These days I care less about what its called and more about the pleasure of bonus summer like days with cool evenings and all of those beautiful crispy leaves!

But in our neck of the woods we have to watch where we step as the creatures of fall are often right beneath your feet!!

The other colors of September are pretty great too - but I don't suggest jumping in the river with these Salmon no matter how pretty they are!

Get out there and enjoy the perfection of Autumn!

Stupid people are rational

2008-06-15T16:19:00.000-07:00

Pacey says:

I’m beginning to think that stupid people are indeed rational, but what they do is deceive themselves by asking themselves questions so that they can arrive at the answers they want rationally. It is a way of framing the discussion.

For instance, when it comes to belief in deities, a believer will not ask themselves critically what is the best evidence. Moreover, they will ask themselves questions that will land them into a cognitive loophole where there the existence can be rationally believed. Such people may throw the onus onto others to come up with a non-deity universe and play gotcha with any gaps in the presented theory, falsely believing that the deity-filled universe is a default condition. Others will invoke Pascal’s Wager, a risk aversion method contingent on the possibility of a vengeful deity actually existing. Many point to the popular belief in deities as evidence they are onto something, or that belief in deities is persistent over time as a good reason to believe. The commonalities between these is that they stop asking questions once they’ve rationally reached the answer they wanted to get to all along, in this case that their favourite deity exists, but then resist to rationally analyze and criticize their conclusions.

Using reason to support poor decisions is quite pervasive among intelligent people. People who are depressed will explain their depression as a result of a series of equations that all rationally support, say, personal failure, and ignore or discount all personal triumphs because they would rationally detract from the conclusion of the depressed mind.

Commonly, global warming proponents will employ the highest levels of reason, not to criticize, examine, and strengthen their own position, but to weaken vigorous skeptics. Too often, environmentalists will use the very logical fallacies and exploit the same deceptive rhetorical devices that they would reflexively point out in their opponents. In many cases, environmentalists closely resemble rational theists in the argumentative tactics.

One of the most perplexing, yet common, situations where intelligent people deceive themselves is use of their credit card. Sadly, these practices are well known to creditors who allow and encourage their customers to lead themselves to financial destruction. Most people understand how interest works, and that debts accelerate rapidly, and they do so coolly and rationally. However, at the point of purchase, these same rational thinking people will employ self-deceptive techniques to rationalize frivolous spending (“…but, I deserve this”, “so what? I’m already in debt”, “I’ll make up the difference later”, “the kids are worth it”, “the Jones’ need to know that I can do it too”). In fact, many financial planners and accountants (who calculate debits and credits professionally) cannot apply what they do to escape their own financial ruin. Creditors love to know that their customers are fooling themselves (albeit rationally, and often with the best of intentions) into forking over lifetimes of cash, but it is so sad, really. Rarely is the debt actually worth the reward.

In posting this, I asked myself “was this the best way I could make my point in this blog?” So, I looked in the mirror, asked, and the mirror responded “Yes, yes it is, and you look fabulous”. I then rationally deduced that I had satisfied all criteria in posting.

*click*

Random Thoughts from American Idol:

2008-05-22T23:11:00.000-07:00

Pacey Says:

Random Thoughts from American Idol:

-Overall, this season showed out of touch AI producers are out of touch with contestants, where the majority of contestants were born in the late-80s / early 90s. Theme nights included 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, (not 1990s or 2000s), two Beatles weeks, Dolly Parton, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Neil Diamond. If you were born in, say, 1990, and your parents were born in 1970, only your great grandparents would have even been alive when the Beatles wrote Sgt. Pepper. Only two weeks were explicitly contemporary (Songs from birth year and …. Mariah Carey), and the kids’ song choices routinely bewildered the judges.

-I believe this season was Simon Cowell’s first exposure to a Mormon. When David A. picked a seemingly obscure song (“You’re The Voice”), he seemed to accuse David of having been coached to pick such an odd song. That song is actually used prominently in Mormon dances, and I’m certain David A. knows all the words by heart.

-Mormons again learned another hard lesson in the finale: prayer doesn’t work.

-David C. thinks he has the best taste in music that the show has ever seen, and you know he believes it when you see the smug smirk he puts on when he unveils a Whitesnake cover song or a song by Switchfoot. The veil that covers his insufferable snobbishness is a thin one.

-People seem pleased that Cook won as a sign that American Idol can approach ‘artistic integrity’. I’m not going to lie to you: I listen to a lot of modern music. That said, I have found the genre Post-Grunge to be the one with the least redeeming qualities. If someone thinks artistic integrity is found in someone who sings Collective Soul and Switchfoot (who?) songs competitively and sincerely thinks Our Lady Peace is their favourite band of all time, they need to give their head a shake.

-The addition of Andrew Lloyd Webber this season was fantastic.

-There was definitely something wrong this season when Jason’s phoned-in performances saw him outlasting Carly or Michael Johns.

-Amanda wants to get as far away from Idol as possible, and her performance last night proved that she didn’t want to be there.

-Maybe I’m being too hard on the winner, but I can’t get past the irksome smugness, the post-grunge (awful music), and the fact that he was the inferior singer of the final two.

Deep Thoughts

2008-04-16T18:55:00.000-07:00

Pacey and Penny list our favourite Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy:

Consider the daffodil. And while you're doing that, I'll be over here, looking through your stuff.

If you ever drop your keys in a river of molten lava, let them go because man they're gone.

If you ever fall off the Sears Tower, just go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will try to catch you because, hey, free dummy.

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

I wish a robot would get elected president. That way, when he came to town, we could all take a shot at him and not feel too bad.

When I was a kid my favorite relative was Uncle Caveman. After school we'd all go play in his cave, and every once in a while he would eat one of us. It wasn't until later that I found out that Uncle Caveman was a bear.

If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is, "God is crying." And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is, "Probably because of something you did."

Sometimes when I feel like killing someone, I do a little trick to calm myself down. I'll go over to the persons house and ring the doorbell. When the person comes to the door, I'm gone, but you know what I've left on the porch? A jack-o-lantern with a knife stuck in the side of it's head with a note that says "You." After that I usually feel a lot better, and no harm done.

It takes a big man to cry, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man.

Children need encouragement. If a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lucky guess. That way he develops a good, lucky feeling.

If you're in the war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at some guys, throw one of those little baby-type pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think of how crazy war is, and while they're thinking, you can throw a real grenade.

When you go in for a job interview, I think a good thing to ask is if they ever press charges.

If God dwells inside us, like some people say, I sure hope he likes enchiladas, because that's what he's getting.

I remember as a boy watching my grandfather get up early every Saturday morning, put on his fishing gear and go down to the river to fish. He'd come home in the afternoon and we'd all laugh at him. However we weren't laughing when he came back one day with a hooker he picked up in town.

I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it.

One good thing about hell, at least, is that you can probably pee wherever you want to.

As the light changed from red to green to yellow and back to red again, I sat there thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way.

If I ever get real rich, I hope I'm not real mean to poor people, like I am now.

The memories of my family outings are still a source of strength to me. I remember we'd all pile into the car - I forget what kind it was - and drive and drive. I'm not sure where we'd go, but I think there were some trees there. The smell of something was strong in the air as we played whatever sport we played. I remember a bigger, older guy we called "Dad." We'd eat some stuff, or not, and then I think we went home. I guess some things never leave you.

Fantasy Sports

2008-04-04T20:03:00.000-07:00

Pacey Says:

Managing a Fantasy Sports team is a great time-killer. It just so happens that I am actually quite good at these things, particularly hockey and baseball. Currently, my hockey team is in the Championship Bracket of a league of 14 teams. With two days to go, I am leading my opponent 6 categories to 5, and looking for my 4th championship in 6 seasons. While my opponent has completely structured his team around waiver acquisitions, my team largely resembles the team I drafted in September.

I have a knack for drafting well. I know that scoring would be at a premium and that regular (not necessarily spectacular) goaltending would keep me near the top of the league. I also know that guys like Modano would be outscored by guys like Ribeiro, and that Prospal would play most of the season between two scoring champions in Tampa Bay. While an outstanding season by Ovechkin has no doubt made my team a consistent threat to win, I think late round selections like Ribeiro and Prospal (both nearly a-point-a-game players) have actually put me over the top with scoring depth. Also, the consistent starts by goalies on mediocre teams (Khabibulin and Ward) proved to have better fantasy value than good goalies on good teams (like Gerber/Emery). With these players, and others, I maintained 1st place every single week of the season and now find myself with a chance to take the Championship.

I also draft well in baseball, but this season was weird for me because I didn't play last year, so I didn't have a particularly good feel about who to draft and what positions would be crucial. I took an hour (that's all I need) before the draft to essentially figure out what happened in baseball last season. My first pick was a player I'd never heard of before draft day (Hanley Ramirez) because he was the consensus 'best player' after A-Rod. One thing I made clear was that drafting the only good catcher in baseball was going to be key. So, after the first two rounds, where I would simply draft the best player available, I reached for Victor Martinez with my third pick (27th overall). I appears that 30th was the average draft position for V-Mart, so it was reassuring that I didn't reach too far to land the only impact player at the shallowest position in the game, catcher. In previous leagues, I've always put a priority on catcher because I hated seeing that position waste away in my fantasy lineup, and now that I have the guy I want it affords me a tremendous advantage over other fantasy teams.

It's still early in baseball, and my team isn't off to the greatest start (and V-Mart got a minor injury keeping him out of my lineup for a few days), but I think I will win my first head-to-head matchup. I'm confident I drafted well enough to be competitive this year, and I'm sure I'll have a ton of fun playing fantasy baseball all summer.

Oh hey, the Canucks are going to have a new logo! Check it out, I think it suits them:

Equinox

2008-03-20T20:37:00.000-07:00

Penny Says: YIPPEE SPRING IS HERE !!!!

No time to blog must go out and smell the flowers!!

I just wanted to congratulate all of you brave folks on surviving another Canadian winter!

Now get outside and soak up some vitamin D! Oh and enjoy some Easter Candy -

I think the purple peeps are umm loaded in anti-oxidants - they must be good for you they are purple - what purple food is not good for you!

Documentary Obsessions

2008-03-16T14:53:00.001-07:00

Pacey says:

It doesn't take much energy to find some of the most acclaimed documentaries in the history of film by simply Googling. Between Google and the library, I am able to track down nearly everything my curiosity craves. Over the past number of weeks I have watched a number of these great films. Below is a sample of what is out there:

Grizzly Man - A young man thinks he can live with and 'protect' grizzly bears in the wild, until things turn tragic. Using his own camera, the man films some of the most surreal (non-CGI) of a man interacting with bears ever captured, as he offers his insights and philosophies. A movie worthy of Herzog.

Little Deiter Needs to Fly* - Another harrowing Herzog doc about a POW who escapes and lives in the jungles of SE Asia until his rescue.

Fog Of War - Perhaps the best documentary I've ever seen. A movie about a former US Secretary of Defense may not sound fascinating, but Robert McNamara insights are completely compelling as he outlines his 11 lessons of war. Issues covering WWII, Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam are covered extensively. Skillfully directed by Errol Morris.

Burden of Dreams * - BoD documents the making of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, revealing the hardships of a near-Herculean effort to pull a steamship over a mountain on location in the Amazon and film it. Herzog's monologue about the obscenity of the jungle is captivating stuff.

Jesus Camp - An unflinching view if indoctrination of children to be soldiers for ~~The Great~~ ~~Ceiling Cat~~ Baby Jesus in Colorado. This one could also be classified as a horror movie, as the events shown could possibly be categorized as child abuse.

Crumb - Robert Crumb is a counterculture cartoonist that rose to near-prominence in 60's San Fransisco. The documentary unveils Crumb's somewhat disturbing psychology and the psychology of his comparatively more disturbed family. Crumb is a true talent and a compelling figure.

Dark Days - Underground film making in it's most literal sense, Dark Days documents the lives and philosophies of people who live in the subway tunnels of New York. They're not homeless in the traditional sense because they've developed an actual community with electricity, water, and infrastructure, but this is truly a bizarre way of life among the rats.

Atomic Cafe - A great non-narrated compilation of propaganda produced and distributed in the USA during the Cold War 50's. Head scratching at times, but more often than not this movie is hilarious. "Dad Knows Best", "bomb them before they bomb us" rhetoric, and Duck and Cover scenes can induce belly-laughs, but can be shocking if you imagine yourself a 50's Russian watching this and thinking that their enemy is obviously crazy.

Baadassss!* - Great flick about the making of what is arguably the first blaxploitation movie Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in a cultural and business climate that resists images of black power. Insightful and funny dramatizations of the events surrounding the events are portrayed by the original film's director's son.

Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. - This is not a movie about Holocaust denial as much as it is to the examination of the psyche of outsider, and general weirdo, Fred A. Leuchter Jr, a self-made execution expert. The protagonist misinterprets the results of a study and finds himself an extremely polarizing figure.

Sicko - Like him or not, Michael Moore seems incapable of making a picture that isn't interesting to watch all the way through. In this movie, though his cherry-picking and stunting tactics are in full-effect, I must admit he won me over to a large degree in making his case for universal health care. Moore's visual style are always great to watch, as well as highly influential if one compares his documentaries to those of previous decades.

* - library only.
All of these movies are available online except for those marked by a '*'.

Good book spree

2008-02-23T22:51:00.000-08:00

Penny Says: Sharing is the best way to celebrate a good book spree

--Fiction that has been eating up all my time as of late--

Douglas Coupland - his latest - The Gum Thief - was a great before-Christmas-break book that reminded me of how a complex life is actually simple and that everyone needs to share their creative fantasy with someone. All of his books are great and worth at least 2 full read-throughs (best read 3 years apart). Miss Wyoming is the one I have to yet read (but I was kindly given it this Christmas) I have been saving it like a precious jewel to provide cheer on a rainy day. My favorite to date is Coupland's Life after God - an tale of how semi-regular people get by in our secular society.

For those in your life that are hard-to-buy-for or have everything consider, coffee table books like Coupland's Souvenir from Canada (1 and 2) or The life of a Canadian Terry Fox. Coupland and Fox were children together in North Vancouver and Coupland is currently working on a tribute park in Toronto in Terry's honor. Of course, the tv Series JPod is a must see on my list. The book JPod was stimulating tech-y and leaves you with a slight case of Attention Deficit Disorder, but truly a entertaining experience for all readers. The series JPod is true to its roots in plot and character development and yet I am always wondering what will happen next (again the book is so fast paced that another read-through or watching the series will reveal plot twists you mist the first time). If you want to watch the series on the internet and you are currently in Canada - go to JPod on CBC and wait patiently as the page loads then click watch full episodes start from the beginning or just click on the ones you have missed, sit back and enjoy commercial free viewing.

A while back I stumbled on to a couple of authors that seem to really understand what it is like to be a 20-something in the 2000's. Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus have teamed up to write 3 novels that are a must read for all born in the late seventies or early eighties (ok the rest of you can read them too). These girls take life by the horns but remember to smell the flowers along the way. The Nanny Diaries (2002), Citizen Girl (2004), and Dedication(2007) are all fast paced, life experiences that provide a little insight and perspective to the unkind world of the adult. These writers are truly great examples of how a chance meeting in university can create a successful duo that makes a living doing what they love. I'm kinda jealous that I have not yet found such success - but as these girls would tell you - there is still time!

Here is a clip from Citizen Girl to stimulate the appetite.
on the front cover there is a news-clipping type image reading as follows.
" *Seeking* Qualified applicants looking to build their careers on sand. Requirements: a bachelor's degree worth a fraction of the debt you incurred. One to two years of clerical experience working for a deranged harridan who has sucked your very life force. Fluency in at least two major jargons. Must be resourceful, flexible, action oriented, stress tolerant, enthusiastic, and desperate. Primary responsibilities include: figuring out just what we've hired you to do; working closely with no one for clients we'll never identify, and a practice we'll never commit to. All interested email your integrity to www.mycompany.com"
From Citizen Girl 2004

Perhaps you can now see why this book gave me a giggle.
After a full year of job hunting I have finally found something that might lead to a position that I will enjoy..... Who knew being a grown-up would be so hard!!! It doesn't surprise me that no one talks about when they were getting started - they have blocked out the dreadful parts of their life history.

Spring has sprung its bulbs from the ground here on the west coast and we are all enjoying the splash of color in all the gardens.... A few hours of sunshine does wonders for a bad day, month, or year. A walk on the beach might even be able to prevent a future bad day - especially when coupled with a good book!

Who are your favorite authors - leave a comment and let me know I am always on the look for another great book!

Art Film: Bergman and Herzog

2008-02-14T15:10:00.000-08:00

Pacey says:

I haven't seen all of the movies by these two directors, but I've seen a good selection of their reputable classic films. These two artists appear to approach film from two very different angles, and it may in some way reflect each one's ability to dream. Ingmar Bergman, reportedly, gets many of the ideas for filmography from his rich dreaming habits, whereas Werner Herzog self reports that he is incapable of dreaming. An insight can be reached in each directors state of mind while understanding their films.

Bergman movies -- (I've seen include Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona, Passion of Anna, and Cries and Whispers). In some of these movies, the protagonist often drift into dreams where they sort out internal conflicts, where characters have blurred roles in the film's reality and the scenery becomes oddly structured. Flashbacks are often used in the plots, and some movies even create scenes of seemingly uncorrelated nonsense. One who dreams can somewhat appreciate the episodic impressionism of the dreamlike movies of Bergman.

Herzog movies -- (I've seen Aguirre, The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, Stroszek and have Heart of Glass and Fitzcarraldo signed out from the library). Herzog movies tend to be extraordinarily realistic, where the actors themselves become characters in the movie in a personal way. Consider Aguirre, where the movie was shot in chronological order while the actors actually built and carried boats on location in Peru and sailed the Amazon. And consider Kasper Hauser, where Herzog actually located someone who can (in some ways) be considered a feral child (Bruno S.) to play a feral child Kasper Hauser. In Heart of Glass, in order to have the actors appear disoriented, Herzog had the cast hypnotized before acting each scene. In perhaps the most daring movie ever made, the actors of Fitzarraldo physically carried a 320 ton steamboat over a mountain from one river to another. In these movies, acting and reality are often one in the same.

Perhaps one can consider that Bergman uses his dreamstate as a crutch, although he does use that crutch with impeccable skill. Conversely, the lack of dream perhaps drives Herzog to create an ultra-reality. In both cases, however, these movies are not for your average Hollywood moviegoer, and I think these directors have made these movies as self-conscious personal artistic documents without much regard for profitability (although many of these films have become part of the canon of classic cinema).

Take your Valentine to experience the movie aesthetic, Hollywood or otherwise.

Trust the DJ

2008-02-03T21:18:00.000-08:00

Pacey says:

Increasingly, I have become enamored by mix albums over complete albums by a singular artists/groups. To this end, I have been listening more and more to DJ compilation albums, such as Gilles Peterson's releases, Carl Cox, and King Britt, in addition to mix album series such as the Back to Mine, Latenighttales, DJ Kicks, and Fabric series. I think this is a result of my being a dabbler by nature, and since most music is terrible, I enjoy having the cream of the crop compiled into easy to access units by respectable ears.

Being one who is fond of making mixes myself, I fully realize how much time and effort is required to wading through albums and artist catalogs to discover and extract prime cuts for assembly. Also, being somewhat removed from the music taste-making community, I am not aware of the totality of releases from overlooked or otherwise obscure sources. DJs have access to scores of music I've never heard of, and it is their job to sift through them to discover crucial music. So, when I discover a DJ whose taste I trust, I make an effort to track down their compilations because they are vastly rewarding.

Another source of found sound come from the artists whom I respect. With regard to this, a relatively new trend emerging is that artists are now releasing compilation mixes of songs they enjoy or that otherwise inspire them. Such compilations are goldmines of tasteful music. The first such compilation mix series of this kind I came across is the Back to Mine series when I found contributers included such respectable artists like Orbital, Underworld, and New Order. Since then, I've been a devotee of such releases, and taken together with DJ mixes, has expanded my musical pallet considerably.

Also, for entertaining house-guests, these compilation mixes make for splendid casual listening much more than a regular album by one artist/group. Not only is the diversity often better, but the albums are also better regarding track-for-track comparisons. Good compilation albums are what the radio should be, ideally.

A taste of summer during a blast of winter

2008-01-28T20:51:00.000-08:00

Penny Says: What would our beaches be like without seagulls?

Like them or not there are thousands of seagulls on Canadian beaches. These squabbling birds seem to spend all of their time befouling the sea, sand, docks, children and every possible surface you might try to eat on or sit upon. Most people tolerated them as pests much like rodent’s shooing them away and steering clear of their contaminated fecal matter. But when a seagull proudly displays a starfish as its catch of the day crowds of people will stand and watch in awe as this mighty hunter stuffs the ridged, calcified, five armed starfish into its narrow bird beak.

What is the trick the gull is using to get the starfish down its throat? Digestive juices! The gulls will put one arm of the star into the back of their throats and the digestive enzymes in the gut are brought up into contact with the starfish’s arm, theses acidic juices act to slowly but surely soften the hard exterior. Once soft the gull maneuvers the next arm to its throat to soften. The bad news for the starfish is that is not necessarily dead while all this digesting is taking place. Once all 5 arms are nice and limp the gull will fold the starfish in half exposing the centre of the star to its digestive juices!

Other than their clearly entertaining value it is not obvious what seagulls provide as far as helping to maintain balance in the ecosystem. After some digging I found a few reports that suggest the parasites are spread by the gulls act to control snail populations. http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Aug06/ShoalsResearch.kr.html this group is spending hard earned research dollars to determine how gulls impact snails among other things. Eating the things that eat vegetation helps protect against loss of vegetation. But Gulls go one step further, by limiting the reproductive capacity of the critters they were too full to eat protecting the vegetation in their habitat.

These territorial birds are opportunistic eaters that will eat anything they get their beaks on - but once they find a reliable food source in their territory and establish a way to get it down they eat it almost exclusively. Apparently once they become a starfish eater they are always a starfish eater. They will of course still be open to an easy meal of unfinished fries or even a ketchup package!

Spring is just around the corner!

Curtis Joseph is still overrated

2008-01-17T11:09:00.000-08:00

Pacey says:

After a decade-or-so of my personal campaign against the merits of Joseph as a goaltender, I am now faced with the fact that he is now on my team. It was much easier to highlight his talent for avoiding pucks when he was a member of the Oilers, Leafs, and Red Wings, but now I have to come to terms with actually cheering for him as a member of the Calgary Flames.

However, this kind of dilemma is not something I'm unfamiliar with. I cheered for Joseph when he lost Canada the World Cup in '96 to the Americans, and I cheered for him as he failed to stop a puck in his only game at the Salt Lake Olympics (sensibly, Martin Brodeur played the rest of the tournament to secure the gold).

Another thing to consider is that I also believe that Raymond Bourque is the most overrated defenseman to ever play hockey. After declaring that he would never win the Cup because he was an instinctive, habitual loser, Bourque did win a championship as a Colorado Avalanche. I still believe it took a superhuman effort by Sakic, Roy, Blake, Tanguay (current Flame), etc. to overcome Bourque's natural gift for failure, but the fact remains that even players such as Bourque can still win in the right situation.

Thus, I must suck it up and support this loser. History has shown that it is not fatal to your Cup aspirations to carry losers in your lineup, so I remain optimistic.

Joseph, just don't screw this one up, okay?

A Perfect Comic Stip

2008-01-02T21:28:00.000-08:00

Pacey says:

Hands down, the best comic strip of all time is Calvin and Hobbes.

On December 31, 1995, comic writer Bill Watterson retired this fantastic comic strip. Of course, all good things come to an end, but this world is just a little less wonderful with the passing of Spaceman Spiff et al.

What I think truly separates Calvin and Hobbes from the pack is the seamless interweaving of high concepts of high academic/philosophic culture through the gleefully visceral imagination of Calvin in a manner that is not only hilarious, but also immediate, and with a good heart. It is also universal; boundless in time. Reading these comics over again, I am left in awe of the explosive imagination of Calvin, who not only sets the plot, but is also the very source of his superego, Hobbes.

The real source of this comic is the mind of Bill Watterson, who's satire attacks both sides of commercialism. Sometimes, I've found the comic to insightful to the mind of its creator on this subject. In one comic, Calvin states:

"The hard part for us avant-garde post-modern artists is deciding whether or not to embrace commercialism. Do we allow our work to be hyped and exploited by a market that's simply hungry for the next new thing? Do we participate in a system that turns high art into low art so it's better suited for mass consumption? Of course, when an artist goes commercial, he makes a mockery of his status as an outsider and free thinker. He buys into the crass and shallow values art should transcend. He trades the integrity of his art for riches and fame."

In real life, Watterson was staunch in his defense of the comic's integrity, and refused to allow his creations to be made part of the merchandising meat-grinder that would compromise the spirit of his creations. Watterson should be commended for not diluting the impact of Calvin and Hobbes in the face of, likely substantial, financial reward. Some things are great for merchandising, and merchandising has its place, but every time I see an sticker of Calvin urinating on a Ford symbol on the back of a truck, it turns my stomach (Watterson did not draw nor endorse the image). Watterson, to me, is the real deal when it comes to integrity.

There are great sources online to get your fill of Calvin and Hobbes, but allow me to indulge in a few of my favourite episodes (click to enlarge):

Happy New Year

2007-12-31T22:20:00.001-08:00

Pacey and Penny Say:
All the best to you and yours in 2008.

News review of 2007

2007-12-27T23:13:00.000-08:00

Penny Says: 2007 a year in review from me to you!

An astronaut in diapers, celebrities and socialites in prison, finally the cell phone that does everything (once you hack it), wars, famine, drought, and Mattel asks parents everywhere “would you like your toys with our without lead?”

Astronaut is crazy in love and wears diapers to avoid bathroom breaks on the way to murder the object of her affections new lover! NASA sure knows how to pick them - cream of the crop - Way to think it through NASA. Way to check those references!

Anna Nicole Smith died, leaving behind her rich baby and suddenly her baby has two daddies and then they went to court and we learned through the magic of DNA testing that babies only have one daddy. Now that Daddy has dead Mommy’s money and has to take care of a baby.

This year a pop star made millions of dollars, so she shaved her head, went to rehab at least twice, and despite having a personal stylist suffered multiple fashion mishaps that result in everyone seeing her gnarly bits. Oh yeah, and to top it off, Britney Spears had her kids taken from her due to parental incompetence! Soon after her sweet 16 year old sister Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, all the while Momma Spears is writing a parenting book – yeah this is all going to end well.

Darfur – the search for water continues while the 2 million (give or take a million) people who have survived the genocidal slaughter are currently starving and living in refugee camps – in spite of the attempts made by Bono, who sang several songs on their behalf and some websites offer Do-It-Yourself Save Darfur kits.

Pakistan a military dictatorship began the year as a American ally helping the US fight terrorism. President Pervez Musharraf took a severe departure from the route to democracy and declared a state of emergency suspending human rights putting off democratic elections. Soon after their progressive Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was brutally assassinated days before the elections were to be held. She had a shown promise as a winner of the soon to come democratic and free elections. Benazir has fought her whole life to lead Pakistan to democracy alas extremist with guns win. Comforting to know they are a member of the nuclear club!!!!

North Korea (officially Democratic People's Republic of Korea) currently being run by Kim Jong-il is still showing us all how you can be a dictator and still use the word democratic to describe the people you are enslaving and starving. Yup you guessed it – nuclear club members!

Al Gore wins peace prize for raising awareness about the global warming (sorry now we call it climate change) movement that has little or no merit or science to back it up. But at least he made some sweet coin off of his scary movie. Meanwhile George Bush has been directing the money guzzling, life consuming War on Terror, a real life scary movie with no end in sight!

iPhone is hyped for months and when finally released people line up for days to buy the wondrous device that leads to 300 page phone bills. Then one day one smart kid hacks the phone allowing iphone users to change networks to one with out exorbitant fees. Suck it AT&T!

Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie both get drunk and decide to drive home – both get caught, both spend some time in the slammer, one finds God the other gets pregnant. Both swear to someone they are sober. Grand Pappy Hilton decides to will his fortune to charity.

2007 Writers Guild of America strike is still going strong. Most prime time shows have simply run out of taped episodes and switched to re-runs. But up in Canada home-made programming is going strong. The writers strike in the US may actually give Canadian writer Douglas Coupland’s JPOD a chance at making it past the pilot episode. Coupland is a fantastic author and JPOD is a great book - I am sure the show will be entertaining and insightful, but Canadian productions are just that – Canadian. Coupland’s 2007 release The Gum Thief is excellent book and a must read if you have ever doubted that love and life can be found in the most unlikely places.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephan Harper sets aside millions for research to take place in Canada’s arctic – just after the Russians noticed Canadians were not using it and planted a flag there! Polar bears suddenly feeling like somebody’s watching and counting them.

Happy December 25th Day!

2007-12-23T21:50:00.000-08:00

Pacey says:

One of the most common features in human mythology is the rising of the sun on December 25^th. Ancient societies have mythologised the ‘birth’ of the sun on December 25^th for centuries.

The sun, of course, brings light, warm temperatures, and life to the planet, and worshiping the sun is the most common form of worship in humans. Humans have also tracked the stars in the night sky in order to anticipate the sun’s rise and fall over the seasons. One of the earliest maps of the night sky is detailed in the Zodiac (pre-2000 B.C.), where star constellations were given earthly qualities by humans. The signs of the Zodiac map the sun’s travels throughout celestial sky.

One of the earliest sun gods was Horus of ancient Egypt (~3000 B.C.) He was born on December 25^th of the virgin Isis. His birth was accompanied by a star in the east, and at the time of his birth he was adorned by 3 Kings. He was crucified and was resurrected after three days.

In ancient Greece, the god of light Attis (1200 B.C.) was born on December 25^th, crucified, dead for three days, and resurrected. In 900 B.C., the god Krishna was born on December 25^th accompanied by a star in the east. Another Greek god, Dionysus, was born of a virgin on December 25^th in ~500 B.C. and was crucified. The Persian god Mithra was born December 25^th 1200 B.C., was dead for three days and was resurrected. In Israel, Jesus Christ, too, was born on December 25^th of a virgin, adorned by three kings, was crucified, and resurrected after three days.

The commonalities among these sun gods are compelling. The prevailing theory is that what these ancient societies were doing was mapping the lowering of the sun in the daytime sky in the winter which was resulting in shorter days. On December 22^nd, the sun was at its lowest point in the daytime sky, where it remained (perceivably) for three days. On December 25^th, the sun moved higher in the daytime sky, signaling the end of short, colder days, and the return of warmth, longer days, and the rebirth of plant life. Thus, the birth of the sun takes place on December 25^th after three of the darkest days.

The links between the sun gods and the constellations are also highlighted in other common details. When the sun god is ‘born’ on December 25^th, it rises into the Zodiac constellation of Virgo, thus the sun god was born of a virgin. On this day, the sun rises into the Southern Cross (Crux) constellation, and thus the sun god was crucified. This probably explains why Christians, Pagans, and followers of the Zodiac share the cross as their symbol, with the sun in the middle. A cute metaphor in Christianity is that their sun god had a “Crown Of Thorns”, which resembles sun rays.

Another interesting link between the sun gods is the trend of having being adorned by three kings under a bright star in the east. The stars of the belt of Orion was termed in the ancient world “The Three Kings”, and if you follow the three kings from right to left the next star in the sky happens to be the brightest star in the eastern sky, Sirius. If one follows the trajectory from the three kings through Sirius, they align with the spot on the horizon where the sun breaks dawn on December 25^th.

A deeper look into the commonalities between these ancient sun gods is the number 12. Many of these gods had 12 disciples, 12 virgins, 12 shepherds traveling with them. These 12 disciples can be traced to the 12 signs of the Zodiac, where the sun travels over the course of a year, or 12 months.

It appears that these ancient mythologies were mapping the sun (the son of god, the light, the risen savior, defender against darkness) in the sky and assigning elaborate mythologies to them, personifying the sun.

Thus, December 25^th day signals to us that summer is on its way. Whether you are celebrating the birth of Horus, Krishna, Jesus, Attis, Dionysus, Mithra, the Great Pumpkin, the sun itself, or Santa on December 25^th , we should all hold our loved ones close and feel happy about the longer days and warmer temperatures that are to come.

Pacey would like thank Penny for providing visual aids and conceptual consultation on this post.

Too bored to work?

2007-12-14T08:22:00.000-08:00

Penny Says: why not go from drab to fab this holiday season

As budgets get slashed and companies economize the days of private decorated offices are long gone. But do you have to suffer the mind dulling gray of a cubical wall that as of yet has only inspired a coma.
According to this article you do not have to suffer any longer Wired cubical fixes .

There are great ideas ranging from grad student chic to sophisticated smoking jacket worthy cubical! I am guessing that not all offices will be happy with the new cubical look - but if you could find a few items to brighten your day like a faux window city scape, or a little coffee maker you might find your cubical can inspire you to do a good job and be a little happy about going there too!

I think this Zen cubical would make an office enticing even on a sunny day!

A home office could easily be casino themed! although for me it might be a bit over stimulating to have a slot machine where my printer used to be!!

If you are not into adding bling to your cubical why not add a pet? A little betta-fish would make good company and would not be too upset about being left alone on weekends. For a great quick guide to caring for your work pet follow this link to betta care by Mary Brennecke.

Ranging from a simple mason jar to fancy hanging aquariums betta fish can brighten up any workplace with hardly any fuss. But the pay off is you can watch your betta swim around and add colour to your day.

Why is there corn in my coffee

2007-12-02T01:45:00.001-08:00

Penny says – Oh no! Is my coffee drinking habit destroying the planet?

According to several sources it might be…

To-go-coffee cups are often made from some recycled paper material but are lined with a plastic coating ensuring that hot coffee stays in the cup and not on your lap. This lining makes these cups non-biodegradable. To make things worse, plastic is traditionally made from petroleum (polyethylene) arguably a non-sustainable resource. Although this plastic is not biodegradable it is often used in single use products like cups, plates, and disposable cutlery. We use it once and through it into the trash, it ends up in landfills taking us space potentially forever.

I do not know if the landfills are filling up, nor do I understand what happens to thousands of kilograms of garbage in plastic bags over time as it sits in landfills (I imagine there are some seriously nasty smelling oozing processes underway but I can also imagine a child’s plastic toy still looking remarkably like its original form 40 years after being put in a landfill).

I am really in need of a cup of coffee so I will try to get to my point. If coffee cups and the like are going to be tossed out after one use – they should be made from materials from a sustainable source that is can biodegrade in a landfill or in a compost facility.

According to some sources – plant based plastics are the perfect solution. Corn based plastics are safe for cup lining and apparently biodegrade (http://www.greenhome.com/).

However it may not be as simple as that – in order to get these bio-plastics to breakdown they need to be in the “right” environment. A compost facility that has the specific heat and moisture requirements. These cups will not break down in your composter at home. But if every coffee cup was shipped to a compost facility they could be broken down. See this article for more info - http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/plastic.html

An alternative that takes some getting used too – Baggase is the biomass pulp like material remaining after sugarcane has been processed to extract its sweet juice. Baggase is most recognizable to consumers as those brown trays that hold four to-go coffees.

Baggase is a sustainable, biodegradable re-purposed material. PERFECT – if only it could hold coffee? Well it can but the cups made out of it loose a bit of their rigidity when hot liquids are poured into them they will not leak just become a little more dynamic and potentially difficult to hang on to. My solution is to use a baggase coffee cup sleeve over the baggase cup to maintain rigidity when hot.

( http://dgs.greenhome.com/products/kitchen/compostableware/ ) To buy baggase products follow this link. Of course my perfect to-go coffee cup is not yet on the market but there are some close seconds and other compostable plastic products. But there is governmental support for those of you inclined to come-up with a solution to our to-go coffee cup quandary (http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/highlights/2007/0709bio_e.html )

Eco- conscience coffee shops are using the pricey Corn-lined cups - but are these really any better than the polyethylene alternative if they end up in the landfill? Maybe just slightly but they are also more expensive than traditional cups.

OK so plastic that is made from a sustainable resource is a good thing especially when it is bio-degradable. The problem is that we usually through out our to-go coffee cups in the garbage bins on the street or in the office or even at home. These bins are lined with petroleum product – Polyethylene - plastic bags that are not biodegradable and yet super cheep and practical barrier between us and the gooey garbage. So even when you pay the extra money for the eco-plastics if you do not ensure they are going to the compost centre to biodegrade and be turned into fertilizer – are you really doing the environment any favors?

I am all for saving money and bringing your own mug offers discounted coffee prices (10 to 20 cents per beverage) but you are stuck carrying the mug long after the decadent coffee is gone. I say put the extra effort into buying a good reusable coffee mug that fits in your purse or briefcase or backpack when it is not in use. Why not buy a bio-plastic mug and be sure to return to appropriate composting facility when finished with it. For green products including the ladybug mug go to greenhome For an example of a composting facility

Bulk orders of corn-plastic mugs with low price points for you folks that own businesses that require branding see Fairware a Vancouver based company with lots of eco-friendly products.

If you have 10 minutes why not stop and have your coffee to stay - using one of the ceramic cups provided by the coffee shop. I know there are still detergents needed to wash these cups but hopefully the business you get your coffee from are using eco-friendly cost efficient detergents. Taking a break and actually resting for a few minutes while you enjoy a cup-a-joe will likely decrease your stress levels, increase your mental alertness and help you be more efficient at accomplishing tasks for the remainder of your day. That’s right I am telling you that taking a break and sitting still will help the environment and probably save you time.

For all of you gardeners out there – Starbucks has a bucket of coffee grounds that are for your garden – you just stop by your local Starbucks and pickup a bucket of grounds free of charge of course and I recommend you bring your own re-usable bucket!!! http://www.starbucks.com/aboutus/compost.asp

For a quick article on corn plastics see http://www.grist.org/advice/ask/2007/07/11/corn-plastic/

For those of you who might have Corn allergies!! - http://cornfree.ca/index.htm I guess PLA coffee cups are too corny for some.

Revealed: Mascots for the 2010 Olympics held in Vancouver, Japan

2007-11-28T00:43:00.000-08:00

Pacey Says:

Coming up with decent mascots must be a near-impossible task if this is the best of the bunch. Can you tell which one is the Sasquatch? The "sea-bear"? The "animal guardian spirit"? An outsider might be thinking that Vancouver, Canada must have no natural or cultural icons if committee members had to invent mascots to promote their entry to the world stage.

Bigfoot is a long-running unfunny hoax that has nothing to do with welcoming anyone to Vancouver and/or promote good sportsmanship. Bigfoot is named "Quatchi" apparently after Quatchi Plateau (aka Terre de Barre) near Togo, on the continent of Africa. You may remember Togo as the tiny republic that experiences daily earthquakes as reported by SCTV news.

There is no such thing as a "sea-bear", but it apparently it is a mythical First Nations creature. This is a good start, because First Nations contribute greatly to Canadian culture. However, I assume there must be no actual First Nations names, because this sea-bear is apparently named "Miga" after a Japanese and Korean BBQ restaurant in Mississauga, Ontario.

Even though "animal spirits" don't exist, "Sumi" has potential because it (?) wears an orca whale hat. Why this creature would be named after a type of Japanese calligraphy ink is beyond me.

All together, Vancouver came up with three creatures, yet not one of them are actually real. And these creatures are named with words that have nothing to do with the region of Vancouver, First Nations, or Canada, from what I can tell. And they're weird looking, except for the one with the orca hat.

Perhaps the best mascot the committee came up is not an official mascot, but a "sidekick" mascot. Named "Mukmuk", this creature is a rare marmot that lives on Vancouver Island and is named after a similar Squamish word for "food". Mukmuk has advantages over every other mascot in that a) it is a 'real' creature (a marmot), b) it lives in British Columbia, c) indicates the hospitality of sharing a meal, and d) and it has a name inspired by a First Nations language. Somehow, this creature did not make the cut as one of the official mascots.

Beauty of Biology

2007-11-24T20:49:00.000-08:00

Penny Says:
Aww isn't that cute

This little fella would probably make a fantastic appetizer. But the Dumbo Octopus is much too cute for me to eat! The color and artistry in biology always impresses me. The Book The Deep -The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss by Claire Nouvian - is full of jaw-droppingly amazing images of previously hidden biological treasures. The folks at Chapters may ask if you are alright if you take the time to flip through before you purchase! The inevitable reflexive gasps, oohs, and aahhs are definitely attention getting.

I can only imagine the delight of an interior designer who spots these tubes worms and instantly imagine a room designed around their intense color and structure.

Imagine a child's delight to find a great glossy print of this green globe sponge on their bedroom wall.

This astonishing undefined species - has yet to be identified taxonomically. A fashion designers muse or simply a undersea delight. I am happy to have had the pleasure of seeing it!

The Deep offers 220 color images, some of which could go straight into a frame and onto your walls, but others might go straight to your nightmares.

This nasty looking entity reminds us that there is virtually no light and definitely no mirrors in the depths of the ocean.

I am left wondering what they eat? Do they play? Are they social? How do they communicate with their friends and foes? And how on earth can we study them without ripping them out of their secret world and flopping them onto the laboratory bench?

FYI - for those of you who are worried about conserving precious ocean species, while still creating fantastic recipes and eating delicious entrees, check out the Smithsonian's Guide to Ocean Friendly eating.

.

In a Skeptical World ....

2007-11-11T20:02:00.000-08:00

Pacey Says:

A recent event involving one of my good friends has lead me to once again figure out why people (who I consider intelligent) do such stupid things. Repeatedly. I realize that this world contains all kinds of people, and not everyone is going to do things the smartest and most pragmatic way, but there are some cases of abject nonsensical behavior which are easily avoidable for anyone possessing a basic intellect. In particular, this friend of mine got involved in a pyramid scheme costing $1000s that issues some kind of magic juice (it ‘reverses menopause, stabilizes blood glucose levels!1!!’). It is obvious to me that getting involved in this kind of thing is a bad play, but my pal got involved against my best reasonable logic.

He’s smart. He successfully completed high school, earned a college diploma, and now runs a profitable business. Yet, periodically, he gets swept up in near-cults and the above mentioned schemes. So, how did (does) this happen?

I have now come to believe that the educational system failed him, as it has failed me and most others. The educational system does not get people to think critically. The fallout of this is the myriad of scams, schemes, and BS that is ripe in nearly every sector of society, and good, intelligent people end up endorsing all of this baloney to a great drain on resources that could be used to make this world a better place.

I, of course, understand this solution will not fix everything, but I do think it will severely curb the BS in the world. The solution I propose is to add a mandatory class tentatively titled “Skepticism”. Hopefully, it can start as early as Grade 1 and will need to be passed by everyone earning a HS Diploma. At the very least this needs to be done at the University level, where everyone needs to not only satisfy the conditions of their major to graduate, but also pass a course in “Skepticism” in every year of their program.

This course would outline the most common pitfalls of logic and reasonable thinking, and how to identify them. Topics in Skepticism would include:

- Charities

- Lawyer Speak

- Politics

- ESP

- What Science Is and What Science Is Not

- Religion

- Credentials

- Pyramid Schemes

- Spam

- Environmentalism

- Infomercials

- News

- Etc.

Not that I think every topic included above means that it is BS, but to point out where/when/how these topics use BS to get you to stop thinking critically. They are listed above because these topics have a tendency to issue a lot of BS. Note that this class would not teach people what to think, but how to think: how to evaluate evidence reasonably, and notice what tools people use to manipulate you.

Along with core topics, classes will include the memorization of logical fallacies. Kids would hopefully know logical fallacies at the end of high school like they know their times tables. Common logical fallacies everyone should be aware of include:

· Faulty generalization Inductive fallacies such as

· Questionable cause Informal causal fallacies

Begging the question, circular logic "petitio principii"
Correlation implies causation "Cum hoc ergo propter hoc"
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
Appeal to probability & Slippery slope

· Informal Relevance fallacies

Irrelevant conclusion "Ignoratio elenchi" like Red herring
Straw man
Association fallacy
Ad hoc
"Ad hominem" — Attacking the person rather than the argument

· Informal Verbal fallacies

Equivocation & Loki's Wager
Undistributed middle & No true Scotsman
Special pleading

Where a proponent of a position attempts to cite something as an exemption to a generally accepted rule or principle without justifying the exemption.

Red herring

An argument, given in reply, that does not address the original issue.

Gambler's fallacy

The incorrect belief that the likelihood of a random event can be affected by or predicted from other, independent events.

Inverse gambler's fallacy

Where it is concluded, on the basis of an unlikely outcome of a random process, that the process is likely to have occurred many times before.

Fallacy of distribution

Where an argument assumes there is no difference between a term in the distributive (referring to every member of a class) and collective (referring to the class itself as a whole) sense.

Fallacy of composition

Where one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some (or even every) part of the whole.

Fallacy of division

Where one reasons logically that something true of a thing must also be true of all or some of its parts.

Begging the question

Where the conclusion of an argument is implicitly or explicitly assumed in one of the premises.

Fallacy of many questions (Also: "loaded question")

Where someone asks a question that presupposes something that has not been proven or accepted by all the people involved.

Perfect solution fallacy

Where an argument assumes that a perfect solution exists and/or that a solution should be rejected because some part of the problem would still exist after it was implemented.

Denying the correlative

Where attempts are made at introducing alternatives where there are none.

Suppressed correlative

An argument which tries to redefine a correlative (two mutually exclusive options) so that one alternative encompasses the other, thus making one alternative impossible.

Accident (fallacy)

When an exception to the generalization is ignored.

Converse accident

When an exception to a generalization is wrongly called for.

Appeal to tradition

Where a thesis is deemed correct on the basis that it has a long standing tradition behind it.

Appeal to authority

Where an assertion is deemed true because of the position or authority of the person asserting it.

Argument from ignorance (Also: "appeal to ignorance")

Where a premise is claimed to be true only because it hasn't been proven false, and vice versa.

Argumentum ad populum (Also: "appeal to belief", "appeal to the majority", "appeal to the people")

Where a proposition is claimed to be true solely because many people believe it to be true.

Appeal to novelty

Where a proposal is claimed to be superior or better solely because it is new or modern.

Appeal to emotion

Where an argument is won due to the manipulation of emotions, rather than the use of valid reasoning.

Appeal to flattery

A specific type of appeal to emotion where an argument is won due to the use of flattery to gather support.

Appeal to fear

A specific type of appeal to emotion where an argument is won by increasing fear and prejudice towards the opposing side.

Appeal to consequences

A specific type of appeal to emotion where an argument concludes a premise is either true or false based on whether the premise leads to desirable or undesirable consequences for a particular party.

Appeal to pity

A specific type of appeal to emotion where an argument is won by exploiting an opponent's feelings of pity or guilt.

Appeal to ridicule

A specific type of appeal to emotion where an argument is won by presenting the opponent's argument in a way that makes it appear ridiculous.

Appeal to spite

A specific type of appeal to emotion where an argument is won through exploiting people's bitterness or spite towards an opposing party.

Wishful thinking

A specific type of appeal to emotion where a decision is made according to what might be pleasing to imagine, rather than according to evidence or reason.

Argumentum ad baculum (Also: "appeal to force", "appeal to the stick")

Where an argument is won through coercion or threats of force towards an opposing party.

Appeal to motive

Where a premise is dismissed, by calling into question the motives of its proposer.

This above list of fallacies and much more were found following this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

It would also be key to note that people who use such fallacies are not necessarily bad people, and that we often use fallacies on ourselves, such as in cases of self-deception. Simply, I think it would be great if everyone were aware of these cognitive pitfalls so they can act accordingly.

I wonder how the culture would be affected if people were generally made aware of how they are being manipulated. As it stands, people are left to themselves and good luck to sidestep these cognitive pitfalls, and any knowledge of how these manipulations occur is passed word-of-mouth by family and friends. And, as we all know, this isn’t good enough, because of the all the BS that, as I mentioned before, permeates every sector of society. People are graduating from educational institutions with an incomplete framework to interact with the world. I think there is much to be gained by a formal institution that teaches Skepticism, just as they teach History, Social Studies, and Science.

All I would need to do is convince the school board that teaching kids to be skeptical would be beneficial. That doesn’t sound difficult, does it?

What do you love to do?

2007-11-06T07:57:00.000-08:00

Penny Says: for those you trying to find what it is that you love to do here is a little infrastructure for you to build on.

http://briankim.n et/blog/2006/07/how-to-find-what-you-love-to-do/

In this article Steve Jobs recommends that we ask the Question:

What would I love to do on a daily basis utilizing both my skills and interests that will add significant value to people? And he gives us a simple plan to accomplish this often daunting task.

Quotes from the article -

Steve Jobs :

“Be honest. Have you actually sat down by yourself with no distractions, with your sole focus on asking yourself what you love to do without picking up your cell phone, surfing the net, watching TV, chatting on AIM, listening to your favorite song, playing solitaire or minesweeper, checking your email, returning a call, getting a drink of water, going to the bathroom, looking at the clock, reading a magazine article, I could go on and on but you get the point. I’m going to go out on a limb and say you haven’t for the sole purpose of you reading this article. Why is that?

Fear of what the answer will be if you ask yourself what you love to do.

The answer is:”I don’t know.”

“Step 2: Make a list of your skills and interests in two columns and WRITE THEM DOWN”

I was tempted to not follow these instructions. But I did for a simple reason. It’s the same reason busy people use appointment books or day planners or personal assistants – to make room in your head for actual thinking and marinating of ideas and concepts that allow for mental creativity.

I suggest that you make a list and then have 3 of your closest people make a list for you as well (friends, family, spouse, who ever they are they must know you and have seen you in action, happy, sad, good bad, unemployed, working, and so on.).

I know that I am more critical of myself than anyone else is of me; I suspect I am not alone in this. Other people’s perspective will help you to see your strengths, skills and maybe even point out an interest that you may have not noticed because for you it may be an obligation - but if it makes you happy and you like to do it – it is an interest and belongs on the list.

Steve Jobs uses the example of listing blowing bubbles in your spit as a skill to remind us that we are not limited to marketable skills – this was the hardest part for me. Skills that are relevant to the work place or to helping other people is what I wrote down first but others flowed out as I allowed myself to be more relaxed with the exercise.

Do I know what I love and how I can make money doing it?

No. But to be fair I just found this article this morning I want to make some cross comparisons with my people’s lists of my skills and interests, mull it over and integrate the trends on the lists with real-life.

Reality maybe the downfall to this process for some people, knowing what is and is not marketable, or even the kinds of jobs that are out there might be a stretch for academics or young people. In those cases I would suggests taking your list to an outside source like a career counselor or even your parents, your friends, and your friends parents.

What most of my adult life has taught me (usually through hard lessons) is to use your network. Your people are yours’, they want to help, and they are all different offering a rich tapestry of experiences that you can draw upon when faced with life’s little and big questions.

Happy Halloween

2007-10-31T20:30:00.000-07:00

Pacey and Penny Say:

Happy Halloween

Enjoy the candy and the spooks!

Life after Science

2007-10-29T18:12:00.000-07:00

Penny asks - How to get a life?

After a decade of academia re-entering (or entering) the real world of dollars, jobs, and mortgages seems harder than the feat of earning all those degrees.

Perhaps the crowd that went to a 2 year college or even those that took a McJob straight out of high school are better off than us academics. They have been earning a wage for the past decade where as those that chose to challenge grad school have been paying tuition for 10 years on a stipend that barely covers the rent in a shared accommodation. Sure, Sure in the end university graduates make more money per year with higher salary and more job security. But how after all those years locked up in the ivory tower do you gain the confidence, know how, and connections, to march down the stairs and over the hill that has sheltered you from the rest of society.

For those who bravely jump into the shark invested waters of investment banking or some other daring entrepreneurial game, I say Kudos and I must mention that it was not their academic training that bolstered that just do it spirit! These brave folks would have done well with or without University. In my humble opinion it is their personality or their preciously existing relationships / connections that encouraged their effort to succeed in the business world.

All parents want their children to be happy and lead successful lives. Of course the measure of successful and happy are determined by the individuals in the situation, but all parents want the best for their child whatever that might be for them as individuals. For the rare few that happen to share their fathers or Mothers passion for the industry they have made their mark in, the path is clear, follow father or mothers footsteps. Utilizing the connections that have taken a lifetime to make and get ahead quickly with respect and encouragement. Alas each generation is different from the previous, making it a rare and special moment that the career of the senior is a good fit for junior.

So what does that leave for those with a passion for information and a dwindling drive to be among the few who know the secrets of mitochondria or chloroplasts? Science of course, research in academia to be specific. Well it seems a perfect fit, but there are too many researchers and not enough stable well paying positions. In fact scientist get paid far less than roofers or brick layers or secretaries. There is little job security for those employed in a academic lab. Research staff salary is dependent on federal grant money for which the principle investigator (the professor that runs the lab) has to apply for every 2 or so years. The competition for the shrinking pot of money is stiff making it tough to guarantee salaries for more than a few years at a time. Coupled with the lifestyle of working 12-14 hour shifts potentially 7 days a week (experiments take the time they take there is no changing that) and the exposure to carcinogens, neurotoxins, and cranky people who have not seen the light of day in weeks – academic research seems to be a poor choice of career for anyone.

But what then do you do with your head full of knowledge and enormous vocabulary of scientific jargon? You have learned (often the hard way) to be humble and cautious with your words, choices, and planning decisions but at the same time you have been taught to be swift with your sword of critique, finding fatal errors and design flaws in everything around you and even within yourself.

How do you get into the business world when you do not speak their language, understand their culture or what makes the faceless suit people tick?

I can however spot an academic in any crowd, the tattered non-trendy clothing (purchased half a decade ago intended as conference wear but always ends up in the lab resulting in a bit of acid erosion on the cuff), their hair is often simply un-kept, makeup is scantily applied if at all, chapped lips and hands and the real clincher is the pale skin for working long hours in florescent lighting.

Unfortunately we still look more like them then not – change is our case a slow and arduous. Why is it that when you know what you definitely do not want that you still don’t know what you do definitely want?

I read a great novel this week that had an unexpected passage which I think is amazingly insightful.

One day, after almost a semester of equations, calculations, and structural studies, she announced that she was going to leave the university.

“But you’ve never said anything to me about it!” I said.

“I was even afraid of talking to myself, but this morning I went to see my hairdresser. She worked day and night so that her daughter could finish her sociology degree. The daughter finally graduated and, after knocking on many doors, found work as a secretary at the cement works. Yet even today, my hairdresser said very proudly: ‘My daughter’s got a degree.’ Most of my parents’ friends and most of my parents’ children also have degrees. This doesn’t mean they have found the work they wanted. Not at all; they went to university because someone, at a time when universities seemed important, said that in order to rise in the world, you had to have a degree. And thus the world was deprived of some excellent gardeners, bakers, antique dealers, sculptors and writers.”

Pages 27, 28 The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho

To be fair, the woman in the story discovered after much trial that she had some mystical enchantments, and eventually ended up hiding from the world that she so bravely chose to enter. I know everyone has their struggles and there are no free rides.

I simply wanted to share my newly found opinion that societal pressures to get a life through hard work in academia are not the best way, the right way and certainly not the easy way to find happiness or success.

Each degree costs a lot of money, time and spirit. I am not sure that more is better, and I am not convinced that any are necessary. Undergraduate was an adventure to adulthood but Grad school was more of a journey to nowhere.

Terrence Malik has one good movie

2007-10-24T16:16:00.000-07:00

And that movie is Badlands.

Just prior to it's release, the Thin Red Line caused an enormous stir in that it was to be the first movie released by a reclusive 'legendary' director Terrence Malik. So, I got to check out the work of a 'master' moviemaker in a war flick. Sounded good to me. Today, if someone were to ask me what was the movie I hated the most, it would be The Thin Red Line, even though it gained much praise from critics.

Recently, I was browsing through the library's movie section and came across the two movies that Malik built his reputation on, Badlands and Days of Heaven. I just had to know what made people so excited by the director of Thin Red Line. Well, I'll tell you this, Badlands is a near perfect movie. The focused use of voiceover (a Malik trademark), exciting story, great performances, and an effectively captured rural setting made Badlands a riveting watch. It is a pocket-epic, of sorts, as a dynamic story is delivered in a lean 95 minutes. Days of Heaven, on the other hand, suffered as it plodded through a not-so-interesting story, while retaining some great shots of open skies and nature and respectful use of voiceover. The thing is, I really don't care for widescreen nature shots. They're fine and all, but I grew up on the prairies and such images have been the backdrop to so many of my mundane and banal life episodes that it simply doesn't do anything for me. Further, I don't think movies are an effective media to deliver such visions. In Badlands, these shots worked with the story and were part of the story, but in Days of Heaven, they interrupted and distracted from the story.

The Thin Red Line, then, follows the trajectory of Days of Heaven with an exponential downturn of quality. The visions of nature make the audience actively frustrated, as they interrupted scenes with long nonsense images. The voiceover was TERRIBLE: open-ended, wussy, omnipresent, etc. Listening to some guy, in some innocently naive and detached yet smug manner, repeat 'profound' and 'deep' garbage like "Who is killing me ..... Who am I killing ..... Why am I here ...." over the entire movie was simply ridiculous. The story was directionless (not 'dreamlike'), the distracting subplots imploded (like the girlfriend at home we are never introduced to, staring out the window for extended parts of the movie, ends up leaving the soldier for another man and is never heard from again), the naked black babies swimming got too much camera time, and nothing about the movie held attention. And it's LONG, too. Over 180 minutes! Before looking at your watch at the end of the movie, you'd swear four precious hours of your only life on earth had been wasted, but alas, you find you are only three hours closer to death. It was the closest I've ever come to walking out of a movie. I thought that The Thin Red Line fell into my prejudice about pacifist directors not knowing how to make a war movie, but after watching Days of Heaven, I realized that it was just Malik being Malik at his most self indulgent extreme, which is not a good thing.

Badlands is great though.

Oh honey why are you so yummy?

2007-10-13T17:59:00.000-07:00

Penny Say: Oh honey wonderful honey

The Good – It is so very yummy

- Honey is loaded with carbohydrates (good unless you are diabetic I suppose) and also contains anti-oxidants, B vitamins, and other yummy minerals.

- If you have a sore throat nothing else in my cupboard sooths it faster than a spoon of honey in my tea. Solid honey tablets are also available for those that prefer the non sticky variety. Plus when you are sick you are likely not getting a lot to eat, honey provides around 60 calories per Tablespoon giving you a little boost just when you need it.

- Dark honey (like buckwheat honey) is a source of antioxidants (thought to decrease risk of cancer, decreases relative amount of free radicals in the body, and diminish the less pretty effects of aging like wrinkles).

- Honey has been shown to improve calcium absorption so add some to your next smoothie and help ward off osteoporosis.

- Honey also provides food for the good bacteria in your GI tract (bifidobacteria , you know the ones you get from yogurt that help keep you regular and ward off yeast infections). SO Honey is a prebiotic (makes bifidobacteria, Honey helps bifidobacteria be happy and grow, which helps you be regular and that makes everyone a little more comfortable.

The Bad - Baby Botulism

Not good for Babies under one year old. Honey often contain small amounts of the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, this is a hard to kill bacterium found in soil. Microorganisms do not grow in honey because of its low water content (this is why we can store it at room temperature for a long time with out mold and nasties building micro-apartments in our good honey). BUT dormant spores of the Clostridium botulinum bacterium are often in the honey. These dormant spores of bacteria can be dangerous to infants as the can transform into toxin-producing bacteria in the infant's immature intestinal tract, leading to illness and even death.

See link for a paper discussing botulism - link

The Nitty Gritty Details

All honey facts can be found at the national honey board’s web site

http://www.honey.com/consumers/

Here is a quick summary of honey facts that can help you out when choosing the right honey for you.

· Comb Honey - Comb honey is honey that comes as it was produced — in the honey bees' wax comb. The comb, as well as the honey, is edible!

· Cut Comb - Cut comb honey is liquid honey that has added chunks of the honey comb in the jar. Also known as liquid-cut comb combination.

· Liquid Honey - Free of visible crystals, liquid honey is extracted from the honey comb by centrifugal force, gravity or straining. Because liquid honey mixes easily into a variety of foods, it's especially convenient for cooking and baking. Most of the honey produced in the United States is sold in the liquid form.

· Naturally Crystallized Honey - Naturally crystallized honey is honey that part of the natural glucose content has spontaneously crystallized from solution as the monohydrate.

· Whipped (or Cremed) Honey - While all honey will crystallize in time, whipped honey (also known as cremed honey or sugared honey) is brought to market in a crystallized state. The crystallization is controlled so that, at room temperature, the honey can be spread like butter. In many countries around the world, whipped honey is preferred to the liquid form.

Honey products do not meet the compositional criteria for honey, but are products consisting in whole or in part of honey.

· Dried Honey - Dried honey is honey that has been dehydrated and mixed with other ingredients to keep it free-flowing.

· Flavored/Fruited Honey - Flavored/Fruited honey is honey that has either fruit, coloring or flavoring added.

· Honey stix - Honey stix consist of liquid honey in a straw. Sometimes flavors are added.

· Infused Honey - Infused honey is honey that has had flavors of herbs, spices, peels, etc. added to it by steeping

A note on the bee’s themselves – honey bees are scary to me, and I admit to running screaming from them on several occasions. However, they do make really good honey for me to eat so I forgive them for having a stinger.

Bees are really great pollinators - Pollination is important in horticulture because most plant fruits will not develop if the ovules are not fertilized.

A single bee colony can produce more than 100 pounds of honey.

It takes one colony of honey bees (around 30,000 bees) to pollinate an acre of fruit trees.

Also it is the young females that seem to do all the important work – (gathering nectar) It takes 556 worker girlie bees to gather a pound of honey.

Mites are a big threat to the honey bee population and may be responsible for the recent down turn in bee populations.

There is a friendly solution that may work out increase the pollination by increasing the The Blue Orchard Bee Population. Give them somewhere to live (that is clean and safe buy purchasing a kit from a website like this one https://id408.van.ca.siteprotect.com/beediverse/catalog/masonbees.php

OR http://www.masonbeehomes.com/bee_houses.php

The Blue Orchard bee is also known as The Mason Bee, Osmia lignaria,) is a solitary bee that is an effective pollinator that can not sting us. But does it make honey? Sadly no honey for you – from the blue friendly bee – but they will increase your fruiting yield in your orchard.

Until we can stop the mites from getting the Honey Bees we support honey producers who fight against mites by using the cleanest equipment, lower populations and extra space per colony, taking the extra time and care for their bees making sure they are not stressed out, also those who try to use mite resistant variety of honey bees available from specialized Bee Breeders.

I vote to support the local honey producers, and I will try not to swat and scream at the precious little Bee’s that buzz my way.

Cold vs Flu - A Respiratory dilemma

2007-10-12T21:34:00.000-07:00

Penny says: Ah - CHOOO! Is this a cold or a flu?

Which one do you have and how do you get rid of it as quickly as possible.

First off they are both viral so antibiotics (they fight bacterial infections) are no good here.

Symptoms are something we are all very familiar with includes:

Symptom	Cold	Flu
Sore throat	Common	Uncommon
Nasal congestion	Common	Uncommon
Sneezing	Common	Uncommon
Headache	Uncommon	Common
Chest congestion	Mild to moderate	Severe
Fever	Rare (low if any)	Mid to High
Body Aches and Weakness	Slight	Common often severe
Fatigue	Mild (except 2 days prior to onset)	Often Severe throughout
Onset of symptoms	Gradual develop slowly over a couple of days	Sudden (3-6 hours post exposure)
Coughing	Wet Hacking cough	Dry persistent cough
Mucous	Lots	Little
General yuckiness	YEP!	YEP!

So what do you do once you know what virus you are dealing with?

The Common cold is usually the result of a rhinovirus, coronavirus, or adenovirus getting in your nose or mouth when someone else sneezes or coughs on you. One reason for the high transmission rate is that you are infectious a whole day before your full list of symptoms appear and you continue to be contagious for the next five days. After you realize, wowzers I have a cold you have exposed everyone yesterday and will continue for the next 4 days.

The virus sets up camp and multiplies in your nasopharynx (the warm moist spot between your nose and throat. The cold is full blown with in 2 to 3 days post exposure. The most common first sign of a cold is unusually fatigue and a scratchy throat. As soon as you feel a tingle in your throat you should gargle with salt water or as several wise men once said have a stiff drink to give the virus a less attractive area to set up camp. Symptoms should resolve with in one week but could last up to 14 days. After you are sick you should probably avoid alcohol because it is a depressant and can decrease you ability to breathe.

How to best fight a cold - you will have to give your body the tools it needs to fight it off.
Plenty of fluids, plenty of rest and take meds to treat the irritating symptoms that are preventing you from getting enough sleep. There are no anti-viral therapies approved for the prevention or treatment of the common cold. So wash your hands and stop touching your face to help prevent the spread of colds.

The Flu is a different chapter of the feeling generally yucky story.

The Orthomyxoviridae virus is the cause of most Flu’s in people – with symptoms including fever, muscle pain, headache, coughing, weakness, and general discomfort. The Flu can lead to pneumonia hence it is deadly to some seniors and infants. If think you have the flu you can go to your doctor or a medical clinic in the first 48hours and get prescription anti-virals like Tamiflu, that stop the replication of the virus, easing symptoms, shortening duration, and helps prevent re-infection.

The flu shot is not evil and if you need one get one. They only real problem that can arise is due to possible allergic reaction to a component in the vaccine – do not get one if you are allergic - but if you are not allergic to vaccines in general and you are a senior, a kid, an asthmatic, or a person with chronic disease ask your doctor about getting a flu shot.

Even with the addition of antivirals – you still need to get rest and stay hydrated. Some research has shown that fever is the body's natural defense against virus (making the body less hospitable for virus to set up camp) but fever leads to dehydration and high fever can induce seizures in kids and is generally bad for adults.

Some things to keep in mind about over the counter medications for Respiratory illnesses

Only take medicines for symptoms that you have

Avoid stimulants like pseudophederine unless you need them (decongestants) they can have adverse effects on your blood pressure and heart function.

Cough suppressants – These medications work to stop you from coughing – this is fine and dandy when you have a dry cough like the one with Flu – but if you are full of mucus do not take a cough suppressant – you need to cough up that fluid and get it out of your lungs! Example of cough suppressants also called antitussives (codeine, and Dextromethorphan (DM)).

Advil vs Tylonol – this could be a topic on its own but for now lets remember the following
If you are pregnant – no Advil for you Tylenol will do.
If you are a kid – Ask a pharmacist and know your current weight before either is given to you!!
If you just have a fever and general aches take a regular Tylenol and wait to see if you require a higher dose.

I am not an MD but I can read and do have graduate level training in human physiology - but legal – this is not advise just information to ponder and ask your doctor or pharmacist what to do when you get sick!

- A side note – quit spending your money on so called preventatives like coldfx that are just expensive vitamins – eat some fresh veggies and fruits they are cheaper have the same effect and taste a whole lot better!!

Booze Cruise deservs and F-

2007-10-07T23:48:00.000-07:00

Pacey says:

I'm watching the national news, and a story is run regarding a video game developed by the University of Calgary Fine Arts Department to, I think, to deter kids from drinking and driving. The goal of the game is drive home drunk safely.

I'll let that sink in.

Now, albeit for me to defend drunk driving. Drinking and driving is an awful pr... blah be blah blah blergh. That aside, I cannot for the life of me understand why such a bone-headed video game gets praise worthy of national news coverage. This kind of thing should be subject to ridicule.

Here's the plot: in the game, the player has a blood alcohol level of 0.25 and tries to drive home. The player drives the car, but the car doesn't respond to key-commands appropriately, in an attempt to illustrate the decreased co-ordination and reaction time of the impaired driver. Other cars, police, pedestrians, etc are everywhere and the driver making collisions and arrests likely.

Why would a respected news agency validate such buffoonery? For that matter, why would a University?

The problems with this game should be obvious. One of the most glaring has to be that the children playing the game will want to get good at driving drunk. If they start 'winning' by getting good at driving drunk, it defeats the purpose of the game. If they cannot 'win' or otherwise improve, they will not play it, defeating the purpose of the game. Way to think it through, Fine Arts Department.

This news story is the culmination of a number of myths, including one where anything that spills out of a University is uncritically deemed worthy, where anything that combats drunk driving worthy, and where news agencies impede the perpetuation of nonsense.

You can read and watch the segment here:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20071007/booze_cruise_071007/20071007?hub=CTVNewsAt11

Any effort using Google will turn up Dr. James Parker, who lead the project:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~jparker/cv.html

... and his well thought out religious beliefs which led him to be a Quaker:
http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~parker/religion.html

Where does life come from?

2007-09-27T17:49:00.000-07:00

Pacey says:

If one would like to make a cool $1 Million (google: Gene Emergence Project), international fame, and, most assuredly, a Nobel Prize, all you would need to do is produce life on the lab bench, ex novo. One may have thought that, by now, scientists would be able to produce life in the lab, but this is not the case. It is true that scientists can replicate live, and mix two or more different living things to form a new living thing, but that is a far cry than starting with no life and producing something that lives.

There has been progress in determining how some of the building blocks of life may have occurred. In 1952, Harold Urey and Stanley Miller showed that many of the elements of primordial earth can 'self assemble' into amino acids which are essential for life when given a jolt of electricity from, say, a primordial thundercloud. However, these experiments have fallen short of showing how these amino acids become *alive* and not just mere amino acids.

Those who discuss the "RNA World" (where RNA is believed to predate DNA, and that RNA has both genetic and metabolic functions) fail to determine where RNA came from, and those who discuss Darwin's natural selection can only really comment on how these forces shape life. These theories remain silent with regards to the origin of life itself.

Maybe life evolved from alien RNA that was stuck to an asteroid as it crashed into primordial earth. That, and other strange possibilities, are still on the table when discussing the origin of life on earth.

Pacey is listening to The Tuss - "Rushup Edge" as he writes this, and is nearly convinced that the origins of this music is Richard D. James, an artist who thinks that coming up with a new alias will throw me off the track.

Music hoarding

2007-09-20T19:17:00.000-07:00

Pacey says:

I have an obsession with music, and with recent technology that makes access to music easier and cheaper, my obsession has evidenced itself as the compulsive hoarding of music. Were it not for my hard drive, the office would probably look like this:

Seeing as how we move from city to city (too) frequently, imagine hauling that crap around. Thanks to technology, my music collection fits nicely on a multi-functional hard drive and a few DVD CDs.

I don't miss the good ol' days of collecting music.

we can find the US Americans on our flat maps

2007-09-19T14:09:00.000-07:00

Penny Says:

Sherri Shepherd...

Q: Is the world flat?
Shepherd: I don't know I have never thought about it.

Sherri Shepherd is from the (canceled) show "Less than Perfect" is a new host on The View. She apparently doesn't know if the world is flat and if her son asks if the world is flat she will go to the library! Well at least she knows about the library, if only she would use it!!!

See the real video untampered footage! (~2 min)

This exchange followed her declaration that she doesn't believe in evolution. Too flabbergasted to type but this pic sums up how I feel

Philosophy of Goal Scoring

2007-09-17T23:01:00.000-07:00

Pacey Says:

Not a great night at hockey, but I managed to score two goals by the end of the night. They were two different types of goals, which makes me think about which goal was more prestigious.

The first goal was scored about three feet from the net along the goal line, where I was standing alone. At the time, all of the players were standing still, anticipating what I was going to do with the puck. The goalie gambled by crouching low to cover a cross-crease pass or a low shot. I guess he figured I couldn't place a perfect shot to the roof of the net. He ended up being incorrect.

The second goal was all power. A two on one opened up and I received a pass that was a little high. I realized I had time to settle the puck down to tee up the big shot. The goalie knew what was coming, but was unable to stop the blast low to the glove side.

Now, the first goal was accurate, a perfectly framed shot that looked as if I had picked up the puck and dropped it over the goalie. With all the time in the world, the shot resembled a perfect putt. The second goal was a great shot, but did I actually aim it? Retracing my thoughts, I recall thinking to myself (in my non-linguistic self monologue) "low", as I settled the puck down. The fact that all went well may suggest I was lucky.

It makes me think back to a quote commonly attributed to the most consistent 50-goal scorer in NHL history, Mike Bossy, when asked "How do you do it, Mike? How come you score so often?". His response was brilliant and elegant in it's simplicity: "The net doesn't move." To some, it may seem to diminish the beauty of his scoring prowess, but I think it adds another element of mystique to his legacy.

Leaving hockey, nearly everyone was blaring rap or hard rock out of their respective automobiles. I am likely the only one who was kicking it to the classic Kompakt sound of Triple R's "Friends":

I hope my next post isn't so self-indulgent.

Mainstream religion vs. other religion

2007-09-17T20:58:00.000-07:00

Pacey says:

I know you couldn't wait for my insight on this issue.

At this point in my life, I have read and heard it all when it comes to rationalizing religion. All. Every rationale ever put forward by religious cognoscenti and lay-folk alike for the existence of the supernatural reduces towards essentially two (often blended) categories, 'faith' and 'gap-filling' logic. In this sense, all religions are similar in being nonsensical and unnecessary, with the details of their particular beliefs being the only manner in which to differentiate among them.

So why is, say, a belief in Scientology more ridiculous than, say, a belief in Catholicism?

My theory is that since Catholicism/Protestantism/Jesusism/ is so prevalent in western society it is easy to have such beliefs taken as being true simply because if their omnipresence. But, if someone were to convert to some religion (Scientology) that does not have centuries of social cache, it leads me to believe that the individual actually considered the "evidence" and evaluated the merit between religions enough to switch.

Thus, the secular Catholic only suffers from complacent passivity, but the Scientologist is actively moronic, making an informed decision on which irrational beliefs they give their money to.

Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy

2007-09-16T12:46:00.000-07:00

Penny Says:
I came across a very well written informative article about the life choices of millions of woman and I thought I should share. I recommend that you read it and hopefully all we, as a culture, will all start to talk more about what ails us and question our doctors omniscience. Written by Gary Taubes the author of the forthcoming book “Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease" this article stood out to me as I was reading the New York Times online, This was not written by a media type person, and not by a research lab scientist, I have no idea what his training or experience is but I am going to find out - shucks darn he does not have a WIKIPEDIA page - but he is a freelance writer that has won some science writing awards.... Read for your self and feel a little more informed! He seems to chase down the facts and ignore the truthiness that is so common in popular culture.

September 16, 2007

Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?

By GARY TAUBES

Once upon a time, women took estrogen only to relieve the hot flashes, sweating, vaginal dryness and the other discomforting symptoms of menopause. In the late 1960s, thanks in part to the efforts of Robert Wilson, a Brooklyn gynecologist, and his 1966 best seller, “Feminine Forever,” this began to change, and estrogen therapy evolved into a long-term remedy for the chronic ills of aging. Menopause, Wilson argued, was not a natural age-related condition; it was an illness, akin to diabetes or kidney failure, and one that could be treated by taking estrogen to replace the hormones that a woman’s ovaries secreted in ever diminishing amounts. With this argument estrogen evolved into hormone-replacement therapy, or H.R.T., as it came to be called, and became one of the most popular prescription drug treatments in America.

By the mid-1990s, the American Heart Association, the American College of Physicians and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists had all concluded that the beneficial effects of H.R.T. were sufficiently well established that it could be recommended to older women as a means of warding off heart disease and osteoporosis. By 2001, 15 million women were filling H.R.T. prescriptions annually; perhaps 5 million were older women, taking the drug solely with the expectation that it would allow them to lead a longer and healthier life. A year later, the tide would turn. In the summer of 2002, estrogen therapy was exposed as a hazard to health rather than a benefit, and its story became what Jerry Avorn, a Harvard epidemiologist, has called the “estrogen debacle” and a “case study waiting to be written” on the elusive search for truth in medicine.

Many explanations have been offered to make sense of the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of medical wisdom — what we are advised with confidence one year is reversed the next — but the simplest one is that it is the natural rhythm of science. An observation leads to a hypothesis. The hypothesis (last year’s advice) is tested, and it fails this year’s test, which is always the most likely outcome in any scientific endeavor. There are, after all, an infinite number of wrong hypotheses for every right one, and so the odds are always against any particular hypothesis being true, no matter how obvious or vitally important it might seem.

In the case of H.R.T., as with most issues of diet, lifestyle and disease, the hypotheses begin their transformation into public-health recommendations only after they’ve received the requisite support from a field of research known as epidemiology. This science evolved over the last 250 years to make sense of epidemics — hence the name — and infectious diseases. Since the 1950s, it has been used to identify, or at least to try to identify, the causes of the common chronic diseases that befall us, particularly heart disease and cancer. In the process, the perception of what epidemiologic research can legitimately accomplish — by the public, the press and perhaps by many epidemiologists themselves — may have run far ahead of the reality. The case of hormone-replacement therapy for post-menopausal women is just one of the cautionary tales in the annals of epidemiology. It’s a particularly glaring example of the difficulties of trying to establish reliable knowledge in any scientific field with research tools that themselves may be unreliable.

What was considered true about estrogen therapy in the 1960s and is still the case today is that it is an effective treatment for menopausal symptoms. Take H.R.T. for a few menopausal years and it’s extremely unlikely that any harm will come from it. The uncertainty involves the lifelong risks and benefits should a woman choose to continue taking H.R.T. long past menopause. In 1985, the Nurses’ Health Study run out of the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health reported that women taking estrogen had only a third as many heart attacks as women who had never taken the drug. This appeared to confirm the belief that women were protected from heart attacks until they passed through menopause and that it was estrogen that bestowed that protection, and this became the basis of the therapeutic wisdom for the next 17 years.

Faith in the protective powers of estrogen began to erode in 1998, when a clinical trial called HERS, for Heart and Estrogen-progestin Replacement Study, concluded that estrogen therapy increased, rather than decreased, the likelihood that women who already had heart disease would suffer a heart attack. It evaporated entirely in July 2002, when a second trial, the Women’s Health Initiative, or W.H.I., concluded that H.R.T. constituted a potential health risk for all postmenopausal women. While it might protect them against osteoporosis and perhaps colorectal cancer, these benefits would be outweighed by increased risks of heart disease, stroke, blood clots, breast cancer and perhaps even dementia. And that was the final word. Or at least it was until the June 21 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. Now the idea is that hormone-replacement therapy may indeed protect women against heart disease if they begin taking it during menopause, but it is still decidedly deleterious for those women who begin later in life.

This latest variation does come with a caveat, however, which could have been made at any point in this history. While it is easy to find authority figures in medicine and public health who will argue that today’s version of H.R.T. wisdom is assuredly the correct one, it’s equally easy to find authorities who will say that surely we don’t know. The one thing on which they will all agree is that the kind of experimental trial necessary to determine the truth would be excessively expensive and time-consuming and so will almost assuredly never happen. Meanwhile, the question of how many women may have died prematurely or suffered strokes or breast cancer because they were taking a pill that their physicians had prescribed to protect them against heart disease lingers unanswered. A reasonable estimate would be tens of thousands.

The Flip-Flop Rhythm of Science

At the center of the H.R.T. story is the science of epidemiology itself and, in particular, a kind of study known as a prospective or cohort study, of which the Nurses’ Health Study is among the most renowned. In these studies, the investigators monitor disease rates and lifestyle factors (diet, physical activity, prescription drug use, exposure to pollutants, etc.) in or between large populations (the 122,000 nurses of the Nurses’ study, for example). They then try to infer conclusions — i.e., hypotheses — about what caused the disease variations observed. Because these studies can generate an enormous number of speculations about the causes or prevention of chronic diseases, they provide the fodder for much of the health news that appears in the media — from the potential benefits of fish oil, fruits and vegetables to the supposed dangers of sedentary lives, trans fats and electromagnetic fields. Because these studies often provide the only available evidence outside the laboratory on critical issues of our well-being, they have come to play a significant role in generating public-health recommendations as well.

The dangerous game being played here, as David Sackett, a retired Oxford University epidemiologist, has observed, is in the presumption of preventive medicine. The goal of the endeavor is to tell those of us who are otherwise in fine health how to remain healthy longer. But this advice comes with the expectation that any prescription given — whether diet or drug or a change in lifestyle — will indeed prevent disease rather than be the agent of our disability or untimely death. With that presumption, how unambiguous does the evidence have to be before any advice is offered?

The catch with observational studies like the Nurses’ Health Study, no matter how well designed and how many tens of thousands of subjects they might include, is that they have a fundamental limitation. They can distinguish associations between two events — that women who take H.R.T. have less heart disease, for instance, than women who don’t. But they cannot inherently determine causation — the conclusion that one event causes the other; that H.R.T. protects against heart disease. As a result, observational studies can only provide what researchers call hypothesis-generating evidence — what a defense attorney would call circumstantial evidence.

Testing these hypotheses in any definitive way requires a randomized-controlled trial — an experiment, not an observational study — and these clinical trials typically provide the flop to the flip-flop rhythm of medical wisdom. Until August 1998, the faith that H.R.T. prevented heart disease was based primarily on observational evidence, from the Nurses’ Health Study most prominently. Since then, the conventional wisdom has been based on clinical trials — first HERS, which tested H.R.T. against a placebo in 2,700 women with heart disease, and then the Women’s Health Initiative, which tested the therapy against a placebo in 16,500 healthy women. When the Women’s Health Initiative concluded in 2002 that H.R.T. caused far more harm than good, the lesson to be learned, wrote Sackett in The Canadian Medical Association Journal, was about the “disastrous inadequacy of lesser evidence” for shaping medical and public-health policy. The contentious wisdom circa mid-2007 — that estrogen benefits women who begin taking it around the time of menopause but not women who begin substantially later — is an attempt to reconcile the discordance between the observational studies and the experimental ones. And it may be right. It may not. The only way to tell for sure would be to do yet another randomized trial, one that now focused exclusively on women given H.R.T. when they begin their menopause.

A Poor Track Record of Prevention

No one questions the value of these epidemiologic studies when they’re used to identify the unexpected side effects of prescription drugs or to study the progression of diseases or their distribution between and within populations. One reason researchers believe that heart disease and many cancers can be prevented is because of observational evidence that the incidence of these diseases differ greatly in different populations and in the same populations over time. Breast cancer is not the scourge among Japanese women that it is among American women, but it takes only two generations in the United States before Japanese-Americans have the same breast cancer rates as any other ethnic group. This tells us that something about the American lifestyle or diet is a cause of breast cancer. Over the last 20 years, some two dozen large studies, the Nurses’ Health Study included, have so far failed to identify what that factor is. They may be inherently incapable of doing so. Nonetheless, we know that such a carcinogenic factor of diet or lifestyle exists, waiting to be identified.

These studies have also been invaluable for identifying predictors of disease — risk factors — and this information can then guide physicians in weighing the risks and benefits of putting a particular patient on a particular drug. The studies have repeatedly confirmed that high blood pressure is associated with an increased risk of heart disease and that obesity is associated with an increased risk of most of our common chronic diseases, but they have not told us what it is that raises blood pressure or causes obesity. Indeed, if you ask the more skeptical epidemiologists in the field what diet and lifestyle factors have been convincingly established as causes of common chronic diseases based on observational studies without clinical trials, you’ll get a very short list: smoking as a cause of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease, sun exposure for skin cancer, sexual activity to spread the papilloma virus that causes cervical cancer and perhaps alcohol for a few different cancers as well.

Richard Peto, professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at Oxford University, phrases the nature of the conflict this way: “Epidemiology is so beautiful and provides such an important perspective on human life and death, but an incredible amount of rubbish is published,” by which he means the results of observational studies that appear daily in the news media and often become the basis of public-health recommendations about what we should or should not do to promote our continued good health.

In January 2001, the British epidemiologists George Davey Smith and Shah Ebrahim, co-editors of The International Journal of Epidemiology, discussed this issue in an editorial titled “Epidemiology — Is It Time to Call It a Day?” They noted that those few times that a randomized trial had been financed to test a hypothesis supported by results from these large observational studies, the hypothesis either failed the test or, at the very least, the test failed to confirm the hypothesis: antioxidants like vitamins E and C and beta carotene did not prevent heart disease, nor did eating copious fiber protect against colon cancer.

The Nurses’ Health Study is the most influential of these cohort studies, and in the six years since the Davey Smith and Ebrahim editorial, a series of new trials have chipped away at its credibility. The Women’s Health Initiative hormone-therapy trial failed to confirm the proposition that H.R.T. prevented heart disease; a W.H.I. diet trial with 49,000 women failed to confirm the notion that fruits and vegetables protected against heart disease; a 40,000-woman trial failed to confirm that a daily regimen of low-dose aspirin prevented colorectal cancer and heart attacks in women under 65. And this June, yet another clinical trial — this one of 1,000 men and women with a high risk of colon cancer — contradicted the inference from the Nurses’s study that folic acid supplements reduced the risk of colon cancer. Rather, if anything, they appear to increase risk.

The implication of this track record seems hard to avoid. “Even the Nurses’ Health Study, one of the biggest and best of these studies, cannot be used to reliably test small-to-moderate risks or benefits,” says Charles Hennekens, a principal investigator with the Nurses’ study from 1976 to 2001. “None of them can.”

Proponents of the value of these studies for telling us how to prevent common diseases — including the epidemiologists who do them, and physicians, nutritionists and public-health authorities who use their findings to argue for or against the health benefits of a particular regimen — will argue that they are never relying on any single study. Instead, they base their ultimate judgments on the “totality of the data,” which in theory includes all the observational evidence, any existing clinical trials and any laboratory work that might provide a biological mechanism to explain the observations.

This in turn leads to the argument that the fault is with the press, not the epidemiology. “The problem is not in the research but in the way it is interpreted for the public,” as Jerome Kassirer and Marcia Angell, then the editors of The New England Journal of Medicine, explained in a 1994 editorial titled “What Should the Public Believe?” Each study, they explained, is just a “piece of a puzzle” and so the media had to do a better job of communicating the many limitations of any single study and the caveats involved — the foremost, of course, being that “an association between two events is not the same as a cause and effect.”

Stephen Pauker, a professor of medicine at Tufts University and a pioneer in the field of clinical decision making, says, “Epidemiologic studies, like diagnostic tests, are probabilistic statements.” They don’t tell us what the truth is, he says, but they allow both physicians and patients to “estimate the truth” so they can make informed decisions. The question the skeptics will ask, however, is how can anyone judge the value of these studies without taking into account their track record? And if they take into account the track record, suggests Sander Greenland, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an author of the textbook “Modern Epidemiology,” then wouldn’t they do just as well if they simply tossed a coin?

As John Bailar, an epidemiologist who is now at the National Academy of Science, once memorably phrased it, “The appropriate question is not whether there are uncertainties about epidemiologic data, rather, it is whether the uncertainties are so great that one cannot draw useful conclusions from the data.”

Science vs. the Public Health

Understanding how we got into this situation is the simple part of the story. The randomized-controlled trials needed to ascertain reliable knowledge about long-term risks and benefits of a drug, lifestyle factor or aspect of our diet are inordinately expensive and time consuming. By randomly assigning research subjects into an intervention group (who take a particular pill or eat a particular diet) or a placebo group, these trials “control” for all other possible variables, both known and unknown, that might effect the outcome: the relative health or wealth of the subjects, for instance. This is why randomized trials, particularly those known as placebo-controlled, double-blind trials, are typically considered the gold standard for establishing reliable knowledge about whether a drug, surgical intervention or diet is really safe and effective.

But clinical trials also have limitations beyond their exorbitant costs and the years or decades it takes them to provide meaningful results. They can rarely be used, for instance, to study suspected harmful effects. Randomly subjecting thousands of individuals to secondhand tobacco smoke, pollutants or potentially noxious trans fats presents obvious ethical dilemmas. And even when these trials are done to study the benefits of a particular intervention, it’s rarely clear how the results apply to the public at large or to any specific patient. Clinical trials invariably enroll subjects who are relatively healthy, who are motivated to volunteer and will show up regularly for treatments and checkups. As a result, randomized trials “are very good for showing that a drug does what the pharmaceutical company says it does,” David Atkins, a preventive-medicine specialist at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, says, “but not very good for telling you how big the benefit really is and what are the harms in typical people. Because they don’t enroll typical people.”

These limitations mean that the job of establishing the long-term and relatively rare risks of drug therapies has fallen to observational studies, as has the job of determining the risks and benefits of virtually all factors of diet and lifestyle that might be related to chronic diseases. The former has been a fruitful field of research; many side effects of drugs have been discovered by these observational studies. The latter is the primary point of contention.

While the tools of epidemiology — comparisons of populations with and without a disease — have proved effective over the centuries in establishing that a disease like cholera is caused by contaminated water, as the British physician John Snow demonstrated in the 1850s, it’s a much more complicated endeavor when those same tools are employed to elucidate the more subtle causes of chronic disease.

And even the success stories taught in epidemiology classes to demonstrate the historical richness and potential of the field — that pellagra, a disease that can lead to dementia and death, is caused by a nutrient-deficient diet, for instance, as Joseph Goldberger demonstrated in the 1910s — are only known to be successes because the initial hypotheses were subjected to rigorous tests and happened to survive them. Goldberger tested the competing hypothesis, which posited that the disease was caused by an infectious agent, by holding what he called “filth parties,” injecting himself and seven volunteers, his wife among them, with the blood of pellagra victims. They remained healthy, thus doing a compelling, if somewhat revolting, job of refuting the alternative hypothesis.

Smoking and lung cancer is the emblematic success story of chronic-disease epidemiology. But lung cancer was a rare disease before cigarettes became widespread, and the association between smoking and lung cancer was striking: heavy smokers had 2,000 to 3,000 percent the risk of those who had never smoked. This made smoking a “turkey shoot,” says Greenland of U.C.L.A., compared with the associations epidemiologists have struggled with ever since, which fall into the tens of a percent range. The good news is that such small associations, even if causal, can be considered relatively meaningless for a single individual. If a 50-year-old woman with a small risk of breast cancer takes H.R.T. and increases her risk by 30 percent, it remains a small risk.

The compelling motivation for identifying these small effects is that their impact on the public health can be enormous if they’re aggregated over an entire nation: if tens of millions of women decrease their breast cancer risk by 30 percent, tens of thousands of such cancers will be prevented each year. In fact, between 2002 and 2004, breast cancer incidence in the United States dropped by 12 percent, an effect that may have been caused by the coincident decline in the use of H.R.T. (And it may not have been. The coincident reduction in breast cancer incidence and H.R.T. use is only an association.)

Saving tens of thousands of lives each year constitutes a powerful reason to lower the standard of evidence needed to suggest a cause-and-effect relationship — to take a leap of faith. This is the crux of the issue. From a scientific perspective, epidemiologic studies may be incapable of distinguishing a small effect from no effect at all, and so caution dictates that the scientist refrain from making any claims in that situation. From the public-health perspective, a small effect can be a very dangerous or beneficial thing, at least when aggregated over an entire nation, and so caution dictates that action be taken, even if that small effect might not be real. Hence the public-health logic that it’s better to err on the side of prudence even if it means persuading us all to engage in an activity, eat a food or take a pill that does nothing for us and ignoring, for the moment, the possibility that such an action could have unforeseen harmful consequences. As Greenland says, “The combination of data, statistical methodology and motivation seems a potent anesthetic for skepticism.”

The Bias of Healthy Users

The Nurses’ Health Study was founded at Harvard in 1976 by Frank Speizer, an epidemiologist who wanted to study the long-term effects of oral contraceptive use. It was expanded to include postmenopausal estrogen therapy because both treatments involved long-term hormone use by millions of women, and nobody knew the consequences. Speizer’s assistants in this endeavor, who would go on to become the most influential epidemiologists in the country, were young physicians — Charles Hennekens, Walter Willett, Meir Stampfer and Graham Colditz — all interested in the laudable goal of preventing disease more than curing it after the fact.

When the Nurses’ Health Study first published its observations on estrogen and heart disease in 1985, it showed that women taking estrogen therapy had only a third the risk of having a heart attack as had women who had never taken it; the association seemed compelling evidence for a cause and effect. Only 90 heart attacks had been reported among the 32,000 postmenopausal nurses in the study, and Stampfer, who had done the bulk of the analysis, and his colleagues “considered the possibility that the apparent protective effect of estrogen could be attributed to some other factor associated with its use.” They decided, though, as they have ever since, that this was unlikely. The paper’s ultimate conclusion was that “further work is needed to define the optimal type, dose and duration of postmenopausal hormone use” for maximizing the protective benefit.

Only after Stampfer and his colleagues published their initial report on estrogen therapy did other investigators begin to understand the nature of the other factors that might explain the association. In 1987, Diana Petitti, an epidemiologist now at the University of Southern California, reported that she, too, had detected a reduced risk of heart-disease deaths among women taking H.R.T. in the Walnut Creek Study, a population of 16,500 women. When Petitti looked at all the data, however, she “found an even more dramatic reduction in death from homicide, suicide and accidents.” With little reason to believe that estrogen would ward off homicides or accidents, Petitti concluded that something else appeared to be “confounding” the association she had observed. “The same thing causing this obvious spurious association might also be contributing to the lower risk of coronary heart disease,” Petitti says today.

That mysterious something is encapsulated in what epidemiologists call the healthy-user bias, and some of the most fascinating research in observational epidemiology is now aimed at understanding this phenomenon in all its insidious subtlety. Only then can epidemiologists learn how to filter out the effect of this healthy-user bias from what might otherwise appear in their studies to be real causal relationships. One complication is that it encompasses a host of different and complex issues, many or most of which might be impossible to quantify. As Jerry Avorn of Harvard puts it, the effect of healthy-user bias has the potential for “big mischief” throughout these large epidemiologic studies.

At its simplest, the problem is that people who faithfully engage in activities that are good for them — taking a drug as prescribed, for instance, or eating what they believe is a healthy diet — are fundamentally different from those who don’t. One thing epidemiologists have established with certainty, for example, is that women who take H.R.T. differ from those who don’t in many ways, virtually all of which associate with lower heart-disease risk: they’re thinner; they have fewer risk factors for heart disease to begin with; they tend to be more educated and wealthier; to exercise more; and to be generally more health conscious.

Considering all these factors, is it possible to isolate one factor — hormone-replacement therapy — as the legitimate cause of the small association observed or even part of it? In one large population studied by Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego, having gone to college was associated with a 50 percent lower risk of heart disease. So if women who take H.R.T. tend to be more educated than women who don’t, this confounds the association between hormone therapy and heart disease. It can give the appearance of cause and effect where none exists.

Another thing that epidemiologic studies have established convincingly is that wealth associates with less heart disease and better health, at least in developed countries. The studies have been unable to establish why this is so, but this, too, is part of the healthy-user problem and a possible confounder of the hormone-therapy story and many of the other associations these epidemiologists try to study. George Davey Smith, who began his career studying how socioeconomic status associates with health, says one thing this research teaches is that misfortunes “cluster” together. Poverty is a misfortune, and the poor are less educated than the wealthy; they smoke more and weigh more; they’re more likely to have hypertension and other heart-disease risk factors, to eat what’s affordable rather than what the experts tell them is healthful, to have poor medical care and to live in environments with more pollutants, noise and stress. Ideally, epidemiologists will carefully measure the wealth and education of their subjects and then use statistical methods to adjust for the effect of these influences — multiple regression analysis, for instance, as one such method is called — but, as Avorn says, it “doesn’t always work as well as we’d like it to.”

The Nurses’ investigators have argued that differences in socioeconomic status cannot explain the associations they observe with H.R.T. because all their subjects are registered nurses and so this “controls” for variations in wealth and education. The skeptics respond that even if all registered nurses had identical educations and income, which isn’t necessarily the case, then their socioeconomic status will be determined by whether they’re married, how many children they have and their husbands’ income. “All you have to do is look at nurses,” Petitti says. “Some are married to C.E.O.’s of corporations and some are not married and still living with their parents. It cannot be true that there is no socioeconomic distribution among nurses.” Stampfer says that since the Women’s Health Initiative results came out in 2002, the Nurses’ Health Study investigators went back into their data to examine socioeconomic status “to the extent that we could” — looking at measures that might indirectly reflect wealth and social class. “It doesn’t seem plausible” that socioeconomic status can explain the association they observed, he says. But the Nurses’ investigators never published that analysis, and so the skeptics have remained unconvinced.

The Bias of Compliance

A still more subtle component of healthy-user bias has to be confronted. This is the compliance or adherer effect. Quite simply, people who comply with their doctors’ orders when given a prescription are different and healthier than people who don’t. This difference may be ultimately unquantifiable. The compliance effect is another plausible explanation for many of the beneficial associations that epidemiologists commonly report, which means this alone is a reason to wonder if much of what we hear about what constitutes a healthful diet and lifestyle is misconceived.

The lesson comes from an ambitious clinical trial called the Coronary Drug Project that set out in the 1970s to test whether any of five different drugs might prevent heart attacks. The subjects were some 8,500 middle-aged men with established heart problems. Two-thirds of them were randomly assigned to take one of the five drugs and the other third a placebo. Because one of the drugs, clofibrate, lowered cholesterol levels, the researchers had high hopes that it would ward off heart disease. But when the results were tabulated after five years, clofibrate showed no beneficial effect. The researchers then considered the possibility that clofibrate appeared to fail only because the subjects failed to faithfully take their prescriptions.

As it turned out, those men who said they took more than 80 percent of the pills prescribed fared substantially better than those who didn’t. Only 15 percent of these faithful “adherers” died, compared with almost 25 percent of what the project researchers called “poor adherers.” This might have been taken as reason to believe that clofibrate actually did cut heart-disease deaths almost by half, but then the researchers looked at those men who faithfully took their placebos. And those men, too, seemed to benefit from adhering closely to their prescription: only 15 percent of them died compared with 28 percent who were less conscientious. “So faithfully taking the placebo cuts the death rate by a factor of two,” says David Freedman, a professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. “How can this be? Well, people who take their placebo regularly are just different than the others. The rest is a little speculative. Maybe they take better care of themselves in general. But this compliance effect is quite a big effect.”

The moral of the story, says Freedman, is that whenever epidemiologists compare people who faithfully engage in some activity with those who don’t — whether taking prescription pills or vitamins or exercising regularly or eating what they consider a healthful diet — the researchers need to account for this compliance effect or they will most likely infer the wrong answer. They’ll conclude that this behavior, whatever it is, prevents disease and saves lives, when all they’re really doing is comparing two different types of people who are, in effect, incomparable.

This phenomenon is a particularly compelling explanation for why the Nurses’ Health Study and other cohort studies saw a benefit of H.R.T. in current users of the drugs, but not necessarily in past users. By distinguishing among women who never used H.R.T., those who used it but then stopped and current users (who were the only ones for which a consistent benefit appeared), these observational studies may have inadvertently focused their attention specifically on, as Jerry Avorn says, the “Girl Scouts in the group, the compliant ongoing users, who are probably doing a lot of other preventive things as well.”

How Doctors Confound the Science

Another complication to what may already appear (for good reason) to be a hopelessly confusing story is what might be called the prescriber effect. The reasons a physician will prescribe one medication to one patient and another or none at all to a different patient are complex and subtle. “Doctors go through a lot of different filters when they’re thinking about what kind of drug to give to what kind of person,” says Avorn, whose group at Harvard has spent much of the last decade studying this effect. “Maybe they give the drug to their sickest patients; maybe they give it to the people for whom nothing else works.”

It’s this prescriber effect, combined with what Avorn calls the eager-patient effect, that is one likely explanation for why people who take cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins appear to have a greatly reduced risk of dementia and death from all causes compared with people who don’t take statins. The medication itself is unlikely to be the primary cause in either case, says Avorn, because the observed associations are “so much larger than the effects that have been seen in randomized-clinical trials.”

If we think like physicians, Avorn explains, then we get a plausible explanation: “A physician is not going to take somebody either dying of metastatic cancer or in a persistent vegetative state or with end-stage neurologic disease and say, ‘Let’s get that cholesterol down, Mrs. Jones.’ The consequence of that, multiplied over tens of thousands of physicians, is that many people who end up on statins are a lot healthier than the people to whom these doctors do not give statins. Then add into that the people who come to the doctor and say, ‘My brother-in-law is on this drug,’ or, ‘I saw it in a commercial,’ or, ‘I want to do everything I can to prevent heart disease, can I now have a statin, please?’ Those kinds of patients are very different from the patients who don’t come in. The coup de grÃ¢ce then comes from the patients who consistently take their medications on an ongoing basis, and who are still taking them two or three years later. Those people are special and unusual and, as we know from clinical trials, even if they’re taking a sugar pill they will have better outcomes.”

The trick to successfully understanding what any association might really mean, Avorn adds, is “being clever.” “The whole point of science is self-doubt,” he says, “and asking could there be another explanation for what we’re seeing.”

H.R.T. and the Plausibility Problem

Until the HERS and W.H.I. trials tested and refuted the hypothesis that hormone-replacement therapy protected women against heart disease, Stampfer, Willett and their colleagues argued that these alternative explanations could not account for what they observed. They had gathered so much information about their nurses, they said, that it allowed them to compare nurses who took H.R.T. and engaged in health-conscious behaviors against women who didn’t take H.R.T. and appeared to be equally health-conscious. Because this kind of comparison didn’t substantially change the size of the association observed, it seemed reasonable to conclude that the association reflected the causal effect of H.R.T. After the W.H.I. results were published, says Stampfer, their faith was shaken, but only temporarily. Clinical trials, after all, also have limitations, and so the refutation of what was originally a simple hypothesis — that H.R.T. wards off heart disease — spurred new hypotheses, not quite so simple, to explain it.

At the moment, at least three plausible explanations exist for the discrepancy between the clinical trial results and those of the Nurses’ Health Study and other observational studies. One is that the associations perceived by the epidemiologic studies were due to healthy-user and prescriber effects and not H.R.T. itself. Women who took H.R.T. had less heart disease than women who didn’t, because women who took H.R.T. are different from women who didn’t take H.R.T. And maybe their physicians are also different. In this case, the trials got the right answer; the observational studies got the wrong answer.

A second explanation is that the observational studies got the wrong answer, but only partly. Here, healthy-user and prescriber effects are viewed as minor issues; the question is whether observational studies can accurately determine if women were really taking H.R.T. before their heart attacks. This is a measurement problem, and one conspicuous limitation of all epidemiology is the difficulty of reliably assessing whatever it is the investigators are studying: not only determining whether or not subjects have really taken a medication or consumed the diet that they reported, but whether their subsequent diseases were correctly diagnosed. “The wonder and horror of epidemiology,” Avorn says, “is that it’s not enough to just measure one thing very accurately. To get the right answer, you may have to measure a great many things very accurately.”

The most meaningful associations are those in which all the relevant factors can be ascertained reliably. Smoking and lung cancer, for instance. Lung cancer is an easy diagnosis to make, at least compared with heart disease. And “people sort of know whether they smoke a full pack a day or half or what have you,” says Graham Colditz, who recently left the Nurses’ study and is now at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “That’s one of the easier measures you can get.” Epidemiologists will also say they believe in the associations between LDL cholesterol, blood pressure and heart disease, because these biological variables are measured directly. The measurements don’t require that the study subjects fill out a questionnaire or accurately recall what their doctors may have told them.

Even the way epidemiologists frame the questions they ask can bias a measurement and produce an association that may be particularly misleading. If researchers believe that physical activity protects against chronic disease and they ask their subjects how much leisure-time physical activity they do each week, those who do more will tend to be wealthier and healthier, and so the result the researchers get will support their preconceptions. If the questionnaire asks how much physical activity a subject’s job entails, the researchers might discover that the poor tend to be more physically active, because their jobs entail more manual labor, and they tend to have more chronic diseases. That would appear to refute the hypothesis.

The simpler the question or the more objective the measurement the more likely it is that an association may stand in the causal pathway, as these researchers put it. This is why the question of whether hormone-replacement therapy effects heart-disease risk, for instance, should be significantly easier to nail down than whether any aspect of diet does. For a measurement “as easy as this,” says Jamie Robins, a Harvard epidemiologist, “where maybe the confounding is not horrible, maybe you can get it right.” It’s simply easier to imagine that women who have taken estrogen therapy will remember and report that correctly — it’s yes or no, after all — than that they will recall and report accurately what they ate and how much of it over the last week or the last year.

But as the H.R.T. experience demonstrates, even the timing of a yes-or-no question can introduce problems. The subjects of the Nurses’ Health Study were asked if they were taking H.R.T. every two years, which is how often the nurses were mailed new questionnaires about their diets, prescription drug use and whatever other factors the investigators deemed potentially relevant to health. If a nurse fills out her questionnaire a few months before she begins taking H.R.T., as Colditz explains, and she then has a heart attack, say, six months later, the Nurses’ study will classify that nurse as “not using” H.R.T. when she had the heart attack.

As it turns out, 40 percent of women who try H.R.T. stay on it for less than a year, and most of the heart attacks recorded in the W.H.I. and HERS trials occurred during the first few years that the women were prescribed the therapy. So it’s a reasonable possibility that the Nurses’ Health Study and other observational studies misclassified many of the heart attacks that occurred among users of hormone therapy as occurring among nonusers. This is the second plausible explanation for why these epidemiologic studies may have erroneously perceived a beneficial association of hormone use with heart disease and the clinical trials did not.

In the third explanation, the clinical trials and the observational studies both got the right answer, but they asked different questions. Here the relevant facts are that the women who took H.R.T. in the observational studies were mostly younger women going through menopause. Most of the women enrolled in the clinical trials were far beyond menopause. The average age of the women in the W.H.I. trial was 63 and in HERS it was 67. The primary goal of these clinical trials was to test the hypothesis that H.R.T. prevented heart disease. Older women have a higher risk of heart disease, and so by enrolling women in their 60s and 70s, the researchers didn’t have to wait nearly as long to see if estrogen protected against heart disease as they would have if they only enrolled women in their 50s.

This means the clinical trials were asking what happens when older women were given H.R.T. years after menopause. The observational studies asked whether H.R.T. prevented heart disease when taken by younger women near the onset of menopause. A different question. The answer, according to Stampfer, Willett and their colleagues, is that estrogen protects those younger women — perhaps because their arteries are still healthy — while it induces heart attacks in the older women whose arteries are not. “It does seem clear now,” Willett says, “that the observational studies got it all right. The W.H.I. also got it right for the question they asked: what happens if you start taking hormones many years after menopause? But that is not the question that most women have cared about.”

This last explanation is now known as the “timing” hypothesis, and it certainly seems plausible. It has received some support from analyses of small subsets of the women enrolled in the W.H.I. trial, like the study published in June in The New England Journal of Medicine. The dilemma at the moment is that the first two explanations are also plausible. If the compliance effect can explain why anyone faithfully following her doctor’s orders will be 50 percent less likely to die over the next few years than someone who’s not so inclined, then it’s certainly possible that what the Nurses’ Health Study and other observational studies did is observe a compliance effect and mistake it for a beneficial effect of H.R.T. itself. This would also explain why the Nurses’ Health Study observed a 40 percent reduction in the yearly risk of death from all causes among women taking H.R.T. And it would explain why the Nurses’ Health Study reported very similar seemingly beneficial effects for antioxidants, vitamins, low-dose aspirin and folic acid, and why these, too, were refuted by clinical trials. It’s not necessarily true, but it certainly could be.

While Willett, Stampfer and their colleagues will argue confidently that they can reasonably rule out these other explanations based on everything they now know about their nurses — that they can correct or adjust for compliance and prescriber effects and still see a substantial effect of H.R.T. on heart disease — the skeptics argue that such confidence can never be justified without a clinical trial, at least not when the associations being studied are so small. “You can correct for what you can measure,” says Rory Collins, an epidemiologist at Oxford University, “but you can’t measure these things with precision so you will tend to under-correct for them. And you can’t correct for things that you can’t measure.”

The investigators for the Nurses’ Health Study “tend to believe everything they find,” says Barrett-Connor of the University of California, San Diego. Barrett-Connor also studied hormone use and heart disease among a large group of women and observed and published the same association that the Nurses’ Health Study did. She simply does not find the causal explanation as easy to accept, considering the plausibility of the alternatives. The latest variation on the therapeutic wisdom on H.R.T. is plausible, she says, but it remains untested. “Now we’re back to the place where we’re stuck with observational epidemiology,” she adds. “I’m back to the place where I doubt everything.”

What to Believe?

So how should we respond the next time we’re asked to believe that an association implies a cause and effect, that some medication or some facet of our diet or lifestyle is either killing us or making us healthier? We can fall back on several guiding principles, these skeptical epidemiologists say. One is to assume that the first report of an association is incorrect or meaningless, no matter how big that association might be. After all, it’s the first claim in any scientific endeavor that is most likely to be wrong. Only after that report is made public will the authors have the opportunity to be informed by their peers of all the many ways that they might have simply misinterpreted what they saw. The regrettable reality, of course, is that it’s this first report that is most newsworthy. So be skeptical.

If the association appears consistently in study after study, population after population, but is small — in the range of tens of percent — then doubt it. For the individual, such small associations, even if real, will have only minor effects or no effect on overall health or risk of disease. They can have enormous public-health implications, but they’re also small enough to be treated with suspicion until a clinical trial demonstrates their validity.

If the association involves some aspect of human behavior, which is, of course, the case with the great majority of the epidemiology that attracts our attention, then question its validity. If taking a pill, eating a diet or living in proximity to some potentially noxious aspect of the environment is associated with a particular risk of disease, then other factors of socioeconomic status, education, medical care and the whole gamut of healthy-user effects are as well. These will make the association, for all practical purposes, impossible to interpret reliably.

The exception to this rule is unexpected harm, what Avorn calls “bolt from the blue events,” that no one, not the epidemiologists, the subjects or their physicians, could possibly have seen coming — higher rates of vaginal cancer, for example, among the children of women taking the drug DES to prevent miscarriage, or mesothelioma among workers exposed to asbestos. If the subjects are exposing themselves to a particular pill or a vitamin or eating a diet with the goal of promoting health, and, lo and behold, it has no effect or a negative effect — it’s associated with an increased risk of some disorder, rather than a decreased risk — then that’s a bad sign and worthy of our consideration, if not some anxiety. Since healthy-user effects in these cases work toward reducing the association with disease, their failure to do so implies something unexpected is at work.

All of this suggests that the best advice is to keep in mind the law of unintended consequences. The reason clinicians test drugs with randomized trials is to establish whether the hoped-for benefits are real and, if so, whether there are unforeseen side effects that may outweigh the benefits. If the implication of an epidemiologist’s study is that some drug or diet will bring us improved prosperity and health, then wonder about the unforeseen consequences. In these cases, it’s never a bad idea to remain skeptical until somebody spends the time and the money to do a randomized trial and, contrary to much of the history of the endeavor to date, fails to refute it.

Gary Taubes is the author of the forthcoming book “Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease.”

Yeah, I am a little exhausted from the facts too - but just in case you need more - here
Another great topic is covered in this PBS interview with Gary Taubes - saturated fats - blood pressure and the myths about increased risk of heart disease.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/diet/interviews/taubes.html

Book list for those of you who want more of this insight -

author of ''Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion" plus what seems to be many many more.

Is this man an MD I don't think so, is he a Scientist I am not sure, he does seem to think logically and ask questions using the information we already have available to us - is everything he says golden - of course not - but If I had to put money on who's asked the right questions to answer some serious health problems - I put money on Taubes before I would risk a cent on the medical center doctors opinion!

____

Its cloudy and lush here today - fall flowers in bloom, trees showing us all of there colorful leaves (some are turning but many are still green)!
Good day for some smooth jazz and a hot coffee.

Acknowledging a trend

2007-09-14T20:43:00.001-07:00

Pacey Says:

As the internet gains prevalence as the greatest source of information technology that humanity has ever known, current staples of information gathering will become obsolete.

As I write this, I am checking back to the Eskimos/Al's game on TSN.ca.

Live streaming of television on the internet will increasingly reduce the need for a cable feed, and my high quality computer monitor is reducing the need for a bulky, single-functional television. Moreover, internet sites provide television shows without commercials. Thus, a new model for television broadcasting using the internet is immanent. Television industry, get hip, and don't go the way of the music industry went down. Don't fight the technology, work with it.

I already cannot imagine buying a radio, as virtually any station in the country now steams around the world via the internet. As car companies begin to take notice, internet streaming will replace normal radio consoles. Look out long distance telephone companies, as the internet will also encroach on your ability to charge for long distance calling, as people will call each other over the internet (via videophone, no less).

See, via the internet, you get all of my valuable insight for nothing.

Pacey discusses Ticketmaster

2007-09-14T19:49:00.000-07:00

Pacey says:

So, I looked into going to a concert at a small local venue because one of my favourite artists, Caribou, is coming to town in support of his newest album "Andorra". At the venue's website, I found tickets. The price: $15.50. That is a decent price for a night out (I don't get many of those, ever) and considering I have been blown away by Dan Snaith's shows in the past, and the fact that "Melody Day" is going to be an incredible performance, I can rationalize parting with $15.50 for a great time.

But wait ... when I attempted to purchase the ticket online, the total was $19. What happened? In order to purchase the ticket, they charge a $3.50 "Convenience Fee". This led me to think, what if I wish not to have the 'convenience' and just have the ticket? Is there a less 'convenient' option so I can keep my $3.50 for bus fare or something?

Anyone who has ever asked themselves these questions or have attempted to get around this fee have had no success. The fee for convenience is non-negotiable. There is no way around Ticketmaster and this fee. One would think that the word 'convenience' could not live in a vacuum, but apparently it can in Ticketmaster's monopoly on concert ticket prices.

Am I being ridiculously frugal griping about $3.50? I don't think so. This is because Ticketmaster preys upon such thinking in commanding a ludicrously inflated fee, depriving one of my favourite artists money I would endorse them for a performance. I don't care about Ticketmaster, I care about the music and the artists involved.

I have no problem with people making a buck, and I agree with the sentiments Penny alluded to below where 'profit' is not a dirty word. But in order for me make sense of Ticketmaster's "Convenience Fee", I need to believe there is another option (even a potentially a more expensive option) for accessing a concert. As of today, there is no such option, and when the middle-man between you and the music you love calls the tune, one has no choice but to dance. The only way around it is to not see Caribou, and I have to consider that option.

Dr. Snaith, if you are reading this, I'm sorry if I don't show up to your show. You rule, but endorsing Ticketmaster makes me ill. Oh ... and "Andorra" isn't as great as most of the reviews have been. I know what you were getting at, and I think, to your credit, you achieved your goals with this album. But, for me, it seemed more of a genre exercise than something truely dazzling. I'm still a huge fan.

The above was not proofread.

Calgary Flames New Uniforms

2007-09-06T12:06:00.000-07:00

It's best not to tamper with a classic, and I'm glad the Flames didn't alter the "C" in any way. Other than that, not much new with regards to the uniforms, other than an extended torso (by narrowing and flattening the lines), adding thin lines around to armpits to illustrate the Rbk Edge jersey design, and a small NHL logo in the neck. The ponderous additions to the uniform is the Canadian flag and an Alberta flag on the shoulders, which removes the "Fire Horse" from the Calgary Flames brand. My feeling is that the Flames had attempted to design a second logo to replace the "Fire Horse" but couldn't come up with anything suitable, making the flags on the shoulders a kind of "Plan B" logo.

I won't be getting this new Flames jersey because this design was stated by the club to only last one season, probably until they come up with a suitable logo. When the 'real' jersey gets released (next summer?), I'll get one, for sure. It's comforting to know the Flames are taking any new logos seriously enough not to rush out an unfinished 'companion brand' to the "C" of red.

Holiday Monday activities

2007-09-03T13:14:00.000-07:00

Penny Says:

Books that have been on my brain lately…

I recently revisited Nick Hornby’s High-fidelity a favorite from years gone by, but it lead me to his other books that had been previously unread by me.. How to be Good was the first available at my local public library I read it in one night, witty dialogue does not begin to describe Hornby’s writing style. I am not British by any means and I could hear the English accents, granted I will admit to having to look up a couple of the slang phrases, but it was like being a fly on the wall of your neighbors house. You know the ones with the 2.5 kids working professional parents that leave you wondering everyday – how do they do it? Just how do they keep up with their lives working all the time, loving the kids enough, loving each other enough, and yet they seem just fine. Until that day when the husband goes a bit crazy and invites a local hippie dippy trippy basically homeless drug (current or recovering) addict to move in to the family home. Some how finding out that these seemingly well adjusted folks were a total and complete mess made me feel better about not being perfect. How to be Good by Nick Hornby is highly recommended on my list.

I am just diving into his 2005 publication A Long Way Down - It too seems promising..

Just as soon as I have gotten my fill of Hornby’s banter, I am moving on to my recently received gift from my good friend in Toronto, The Witch of Portobello a novel by Paulo Coelho – stay tuned for a full review.

The saddest most heart gripping movie I have watched to date – Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Bleu the first in the three colors trilogy released in 1993. Juliette Binoche ,most of us North American’s are familiar with her great role in Chocolat (2000), provides an oddly detailed portrayal of a woman who is lost in her own life after the death of her husband and child. She is never overtly turning on the water works; she doesn’t need to you feel her pain in other more creative ways. There is very little dialogue in this movie and yet I her every thought is clear. Her sadness, her refusal to live her old life, and her true survival instinct rang true and clear. The amazing cinematography made me wish I could watch this movie on the big screen. I have never been to Paris but somehow I feel as though I have experienced it from a local’s perspective. Kieślowski had a talent that I am very glad to have gotten the chance to enjoy – even if I did not know about this fabulous film until 14 years after its release.

Today’s music mood – sound track from The Last Tango in Paris
Conditions – overcast – perfect for a lazy day of reading and relaxing

Stuff I've been checking out and stuff

2007-09-02T20:45:00.000-07:00

Pacey Says:

Michaelangelo Antonioni - A bit of an Italian movie festival in our apartment, albeit we only watched some of his English films. First, "Blow up", a movie about murder (maybe) but more about our perceptions of reality requiring context. I didn't totally follow the first time I saw it, probably because I've been conditioned by Hollywood to look for obvious clues and to use the soundtrack as an emotional guide. Hollywood sucks. Watching the DVD with commentary was a great help to figuring out the concepts, and I now think it's a great film. Hopefully, I am cultured now. Next up, "The Passenger", a movie about a man who switches his identity with a deceased stranger. Again, themes of context distortion arise. While the concepts are compelling to discuss, do they make for great cinema? Tough to say, considering how Hollywood movies have conditioned me to accept movies that have no substance. I liked "Blow up", and I would recommend any potential Antonioni fans to start there.

The New Canucks Uniform - Dreadful again. They got rid of the red and silver and added green. Big deal. It still has that ridiculous fish that has nothing to do with a 'canuck'. I'm glad I don't cheer for them.

And not much else. I must say though I love the library. I cannot imagine actually paying money to see movies after seeing the selection at our local public library. Blockbuster doesn't come close to the selection of crazy art films by directors I've only read about (Herzog, Kieslowski, and the aforementioned Antonioni.

Penny says I have to tell you what I'm listening to:

John Cale - "Paris 1919"

our first post

2007-09-02T20:00:00.000-07:00

Penny Says -
I recently read this list - from http://www.steve-olson.com

Money is the root of all evil *
Money isn’t good or evil. It’s a tool like a hammer or a saw. You can create with it or destroy with it. People use it to build infrastructure, to build research facilities, to find cleaner sources of energy, and to create timeless art and literature. If you use your money to create value for yourself and others, your money will grow – and you will have all the money you’ll ever need. However, if you hoard money selfishly or spend it frivolously, you will never have enough. Don’t you think you could contribute more to society, the world, and other people if you had great wealth? So what’s wrong with intending to be wealthy? Do you believe you have the capacity to create value in other people’s lives? Those that think and act create wealth, so if you intend to become wealthy, don’t wait around for a government grant or the winning lotto numbers, get out there and start creating value for other people today.
Why People Believe Money is the Root of All Evil
Getting a good job is the best way to earn money
Ask any entrepreneur if she’d like to quit and get a job. Then ask most people with a job if they’d like to quit and work for themselves. Most wealthy people will tell you a job is the worst way to make money.
Why Getting a Good Job isn’t the Best Way to Earn Money
Emotional people are weak, vulnerable, and easily manipulated
It’s the exact opposite. Strong emotions are a source of strength and power. The stronger your emotions and the better your ability to focus your emotion, the more creative and powerful you are. Denying your emotions creates weakness and vulnerability.
The Secret Great Leaders Know About Emotions
Admitting a mistake is a sign of weakness
If you aren’t making mistakes you aren’t learning anything. Fearing mistakes is the real weakness. Denying your mistakes, repeating them, and expecting different results is insane.
Success is 99% Failure
You can’t be successful without a college degree
This one was drilled into my head for years and I believed it. The results of this belief were devastating. I didn’t earn a decent living until I was able to squash the belief. ~~85%~~ 76% of Americans do not have a degree. I want to be very clear about this – I know I am on dangerous ground – so here goes – All of you with college educations are valuable and you have tremendous ability to create value in the world. This is not a criticism of your achievements. But I also must say – if you are one of the ~~85%~~ 76% that do not have a degree, you are equally valuable and you are not inferior. You have equal potential to create value in the world, even if you never get a degree. People with and without degrees create amazing results everyday. If you hate flipping burgers or ringing orders at Wal-Mart don’t continue just because our culture tells you it’s your lot in life. Don’t listen to the voice in your head that tells you what you can’t do. Tell it to shut-up. Then start to visualize what you desire to be and you will slowly become what you visualize.
10 Tips to Secure a Management Position without a College Degree
Your doctor is the best source of medical or psychiatric information
Medical information is expanding so rapidly doctors are increasingly using Google to diagnose patients. According to studies, 30% of patients are misdiagnosed and treated for a condition they do not have. Obviously, if you have a medical or psychiatric problem you should see a doctor, but question what they tell you. Don’t accept it on blind faith. Use your critical thinking. Ask difficult questions. Many people are afraid to question their doctor. Don’t be afraid! I believe questioning my doctor saved my life (I plan to do a post on that experience). Do research online about your condition and you may find that you know more about the condition than your doctor. If that happens, it may be time to find a new doctor. Remember there is nothing special or magical about doctors, they’re people just like you and me. Many of them are extremely busy, and they make mistakes – lots of mistakes. So be your own advocate. See your doctor, but do your own research in the library and online. And if you need to make a big medical decision, get a second, third, or fourth opinion. Your health is in your hands. You make the final decision.
Always Question Your Doctor - Three Stories Why
School is the best place for kids to learn
It’s probably the worst place for kids to learn. I wrote this in my last blog post:Bob Proctor said that the problem with education is that it teaches us what to think, not how to think. Bob is wrong. It’s much worse than that. Our schools teach us to think destructive thoughts, which produce negative results in our lives and in the world. I know this sounds crazy and defies conventional wisdom, but it isn’t an attack on teachers or intellectuals. They are victims of the same monolithic government system as the students. Most teachers know intuitively how screwed up the system is and they know they are powerless to change it. So instead of explaining my position, I’ll let the New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto make the argument in his essay The Seven Lesson School Teacher and his interview in Fast Company Read my follow up: How the Public School System Crushes Souls
Personal Development or Self-Help is a left-wing hippy thing
You may have a preconceived notion about Self-Help, but if you look closely I think you’ll find it is an inaccurate stereotype. When some people think of a ‘hippy’, they think of a bunch of scruffy unshaven kids in tie-dye shirts tripping on acid at a Grateful Dead show. When they think of ‘left-wing’, they think of socialism, communism, and atheism. All the Personal Development gurus I’ve seen are clean cut, positive thinking, deeply spiritual, entrepreneurs awash in wealth. Hardly a bunch of scruffy, atheistic, drug abusing, socialists. I highly recommend a Personal Development program regardless of your political or religious beliefs. My program has created amazing positive results.
I should ignore my feelings and make decisions with hard reason and logic
This is a lie I used to tell myself. You buy the house you buy because of how it makes you feel. You bought the car you drive because of the way it makes you feel. You eat the food you eat because of the way it makes you feel. You choose the relationships you have because of the way you feel. You choose a career because of how it makes you feel. There is no such thing as an emotionless rational decision. All good marketers and sales people know this. Accept the role your feelings play in decision-making. So if you are getting lousy results in your life, it’s probably because of the decisions you are making. You can only change the way you make decisions by changing the way you feel. Hard reason won’t change anything. Trying to plan your life with hard reason and logic results in inertia.
Give me 3 Minutes and I’ll Make You a Better Decision Maker
That I Should Put Political Opinions on This List
Big mistake on my part. See #4. I used to have a political opinion as #10 and it tainted this list. This isn’t a political blog. My goal is to help everybody, regardless of political opinions. I apologize to anyone I alienated. I’ll view it as an opportunity to learn.

I am now re-evaluating my career plans - now that I have several university degrees I was planning on getting a job to make money !!!! Silly me....

Current favorite album - Koop Island -
Conditions: late summer rain