Gardening & Google Voice

Well, my garden is doing… OK now, I guess. At least half of my peppers have died – all the bells, 10/12 jalapenos, 8/12 hungarian hot, all the rio grand hot, and a rather random selection of others. But, those that have survived are looking pretty good. So, hopefully we get some peppers, though I’m definetly going to have to buy jalapenos to pickle like I did last year.

Unfortunately though, my cucumbers & zucchini appear to be doing the same thing as my peppers. They all looked absolutely awful on Monday when we got back from Findlay. Right before we left I sprayed them pretty good with peroxide & spread my remaining cornmeal around on them, and I think it *might* have helped as some of them are looking like the might survive. Though they still look pretty awful. But we’ve gotten a handful of zucchini (like.. 5 or 6 now), and I think we *might* get some more. And I got one nice lil cucumbuer the other day too, and theres a few more that look like they *might* keep growing and get slightly bigger than 3 or 4″.

And then today I went ahead and pulled out all of my peas, broccoli & onions. The peas were definetly dead, and I’ve just been highly disgusted with how they’ve done – I swear I got more broccoli from 6 plants last year than I did all 40 odd plants this year!! But, I did get quite a few nice onions from between my broccoli plants… Now I’m just trying to decide what I want to re-plant in those beds. I’m thinking I’m going to try and plant broccoli from seeds where my peas were and put peas & beans where the broccoli were. Who knows if I’ll actually get any peas/beans/broccoli, but its at least worth a try!!

On a totally, completely, utterly unrelated note, I got an invite (and then registerd) for Google Voice – which seems pretty darn cool. I can send text messages from my computer now (which is super cool since I normally can’t since I don’t have cell phone reception at home), and the fact that I can call anyone from home for free is also super cool. So yeah, go request an invite and try it out. It seems quite cool!!

Children and the Flu Vaccine

Yesterday a CDC federal advisory panel voted to recommend annual flu vaccines for all children from age 6 months to 18 years. If followed, it would bring about the largest expansion of flu vaccine coverage in history, necessitating about 30 million children being vaccinated every single year.

All of this despite the fact that the flu vaccine has not been shown to be effective for all children. Up to age two it is no more effective than a placebo at preventing flu. And for older children the problems with the flu vaccine remain the same as for any other group.

The conclusions of the Chocrane Study is as follows (bolding mine):

Influenza vaccines are efficacious in children older than two years, but little evidence is available for children younger than two years. There was a marked difference between vaccine efficacy and effectiveness. That no safety comparisons could be carried out emphasizes the need for standardization of methods and presentation of vaccine safety data in future studies. It was surprising to find only one study of inactivated vaccine in children younger than two years given recent recommendations to vaccinate healthy children from six months of age in the United States and Canada. If immunization in children is to be recommended as public health policy, large-scale studies assessing important outcomes and directly comparing vaccine types are urgently required. 

Because the flu virus changes so rapidly a new vaccine is required every year, and in some years (this one, for example), is barely effective because they guessed wrong, and didn’t put the “right” strains of the flue virus in the vaccine.

In children, the flu is only rarely deadly, though it does cause school absenteeism. Support for extending flu vaccination to children was provided by a 2-year study which found a high rate of seroconversion, though there was only a small decrease in the rate of flu in the first year and no difference in the second year. In school-age children, it may help to prevent children missing school.

Despite all of this though, the CDC is now recommending that all children from 6 months to 18 years receive flu vaccines. Despite the fact that it is no more effective than a placebo up till 2 years old, and after that prevents little more than children missing school and parents missing work. But I suppose that is enough to soon make it mandatory. The mandate for the chickenpox vaccine used the same logic, and as we all now know is a scary, horrible, sometimes fatal disease.

Vaccines in Court

The past few days have been rather exciting. There are two big stories here, neither of which has gotten much (if any) press in the US: vaccine manufacturer’s being taken to court in France over hepatitus b vaccines, and the US Department of Health & Human Services concedeing a case on a vaccine-autism link.

The first case comes to us from France, where vaccine manufacturer’s are being sued for manslaughter for failing to fully disclose side effects to hepatitis-B vaccines. Judge Marie-Odile Bertella-Geffroy has opened two separate investigations one against GlaxoSmithKline & Sanofi Pasteur and another against Sanofi Pasteur MSD a joint venture between Sanofi Aventis and Merck.

Between 1994 and 1998 about two thirds of the population (including almost all newborns during the time period) was vaccinated against hepatitis B, before the campaign was suspended because of concerns regarding side effects. Among the 30 plaintiffs are 5 families of people who died after being given the vaccine.

The second case takes place right here in the US. David Kirby in the Huffington Post reports that on November 9, 2007 US Assistant Attorney General Peter Keisler quietly conceded that vaccines aggravated an existing mitochondrial disorder and thereby caused the manifestation of Autism Spectrum Disorder in one child. Mr Keisler and the other Justice Department officials were working on behalf of the Department of Health & Human Services.

This is huge because while mitochondrial disorders are extremely rare in the general population (0.2% or 1 in 10,000), they are far more common among people with ASD. An incredible 10-20% (estimated in some journal articles) of all autism cases may be linked to them, making them the most common disease associated with ASD. And in the Journal of Child Neurology Dr Zimmerman (the doctor who diagnosed the child in this case), co-authored an article which “showed that 38% of Kennedy Krieger Institute autism patients studied had one marker for impaired oxidative phosphorylation, and 47% had a second marker.”

All of this begs the question “What next?”. What will the US government do now. They have been claiming for the past several years that autism is in no way shape or form connected to vaccines or thimerosol. And yet, now they have conceded one case, which may be just the first of hundreds or thousands to come. With 4900 cases pending in vaccine court, how many can the government realistically afford to settle?

Training

So I’m going to call some colleges today and make a decision by this weekend, on what exactly I’m going to do. I’m leaning towards Baker College’s online Computer Programming associates degree right now. Though, I’m also considering Westwood’s Software Engineering associates, and Oregon State University’s Bachelor of Natural Resources. I’ve pulled out my old copy of The C Programming Language and am working my way through the first chapter right now. Its going pretty good, and I’m enjoying it so far, which is a large part of why I’m leaning towards computer programming. We’ll see though..

Andros is so close to walking, its incredible to see. He’ll pull himself up, turn around, balance, and turn around and grab something as he takes a step. Its absolutely amazing. Any day now he’s going to just stand up and start walking around… I actually dreamed that he did so the other night.

I’ve stated trying to exersize more now too. I rowed for 15 minutes-ish today, did 40 cruches and 10 pushups along with some other random exersizes. Hopefully if I really start exersizing every day, I’ll be able to get into shape and loose the last 15lbs ish of pregnancy weight. That’d be awesome, so, we’ll see if I can really stick to it. Plus, it’d be nice to be in decent shape for my black belt test on the 9th…

Finally!

Well, I really did not expect to spend all day long working on my grandpa’s new iMac… but I did. About half the time was spent on technical support… because it didn’t come with OS X pre-installed, I was trying to upgrade it. And, apparently the CD with Leopard that came with it is faulty. Which, was my guess after 15 minutes. But, of course, it took 2-3 hours on the phone for apple tech support to figure that out!!

But, after that it was (mostly) smooth sailing And, in anycase its up and running nicely now. iChat, Mail, Address Book, Safari – everythings working, with all of grandpa’s stuff. And, I got him OpenOffice for writing his papers and such I chatted with my aunt for a big chunk of the day, while getting everything set up… we even did a three-way chat with her and her daughter, which was pretty cool.

I just really, really wish that I could figure out a way to video chat with everyone else… I still can’t quite believe that there is absolutely no AIM vidoe chat client for linux…

Anyhow… I never really made it shopping while I was up there, so now I’m shopping (as usual) online! Probably cheaper this way, anyhow;)

Computers & Shopping Hurrah!

Ugh. So today we went up to visit my grandparents and get their new iMac set up. It came like a week ago, but between us being sick, them being sick and their trip down to the Biltmore, its just sat in a box since then… In anycase, I figured it’d take me about a half hour to get it all set up and then another half hour or so to show grandpa how to work it. I figured that sounded fairly reasonable. Don’t you?

Well, it wasn’t. For starters, I could not figure out how to install their cable modem (Motorola SB5101) from Time Warner on the Mac. I had the install disc, but it simply did not work. I read the instructions and it just was *not* working. I’m not sure if it was a windows-only disc somehow, or if I’m just totally stupid. Who knows. Of course, Motorola’s site is totally unhelpful. Lots of info on how to install the damn thing for Windows 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista… but not a word on OSX!!

The other big hang up was (is?), that they have been using AOL for the past several years, and there is apparently just no good way to get ones contacts, email and bookmarks off of AOL. I mean, I understand *WHY* AOL makes it soo hard to do so… but that doesn’t mean I have to approve. Ugh. Mind you, its just made me all the more determined to figure it out, one way or another….

And, finally, I could not get it to upgrade to OSX Leopard. Since its so new it came with the install disc (although it wasn’t pre-installed)… but, when I put it in the drive, and it started restarting the computer… it’d just lock up. I didn’t share this with either grandpa or anyone else as I figured it’d just piss them off. I found it both bizzare and obnoxious, but don’t know what I can do, really.

In anycase I’ll probably be driving back up either tommorrow or the next day to finish up, and then go holiday shopping some more. We did manage to find gifts for both my brother and his fiance’ and Kevin’s sister and her family though…. Which basicly leaves just my mom, and his (Kevin’s), mom & stepdad, and his grandparents… Hopefully we can make it over to Lehman’s sometime here soon and figure them out

Ubuntu

Well… I had the bug the other day to play with Linux again – something I haven’t really had the chance to do in going on two years now… So I went ahead and started the 3-day long process (yes, you read that right – 3 DAY process, I’m on dial-up. Still.) of downloading the newest version of Ubuntu (6.10) – After all, 3 days of no phone calls is better than waiting 4-6 weeks, right??

Anyhow. I finally got it downloaded, at which point, it occurred to me that I inexplicably did not have any blank CDs – so I ran to town, and bought 20. Got home, burnt it, got it installed. OK, all good so far…. only I couldn’t figure out how to get wvdial to configure for the life of me, so I figured I’d just reboot to windows… and realized that my boot loader had gotten changed, and I was thus locked out. So I started trying to figure Grub out, gave up after a bit an figured I’d just throw College Linux back on, and all would be good, right? Wrong. Long story short, after (trying to) install various old Linux flavors I realized I’d somehow accidentally formatted my Windows partition… So I re-installed Ubuntu. And after a bit more effort… figured out wvdial. And am currently loving Ubuntu.

Now, when I say that, I really mean it. For the first time, I’ve successfully gotten my modem working, my sound card working… hell, even my iPod’s up and running (I’m listening to it right now!!). In short, I really don’t think I’ll bother to re-install windows… I can’t think what I need it for. Now, its always possible that at some point in the future I’ll want/need it… but, for now, meh.

I think it all boils down to the fact that I’ve been living off of other people’s computers for the past 1+ years. As a result, most everything I actually use on a day-to-day basis is online to one degree or another – pictures (smugmug), email (gmail), documents (google docs), and of course all my mp3’s are on my iPod, so not even they have been lost this time around (and even if they hadn’t been, my wonderful brother burned them all to CD when I formatted THAT in Spain!!)

Anyhow, its just a really strange feeling to be totally free of Windows for the first time, well, ever. And not the least bit worried/unhappy about it. As I think about it… my computer probably needed a good format anyhow – its been a good 4+ years after all.

Legos & Blackholes

Right nifty news on the lego front – LEGO has finally gotten around to opensourcing the MINDSTORMS firmware, which means that lego mindstorms will be that much more fun to mess around with in the future. Thats to say, you can now not just mess with the robotics/building part, but also with the software itself. Which is cool.
http://mindstorms.lego.com/press/2057/Open%20Source%20Announcement.aspx

As for blackholes… its mostly, actually, about the new LIGO “telescope” which is just now opening up – its cool, because maybe, with a bit of luck we´ll be detecting black hole mergers here sometime soonish. Which is cool, cause´with that knowledge, maybe we´ll figure out more about the universe, life and everything =)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/science/space/02hole.html

Language; starlings, monkeys and us

So, its looking like starlings have the capability to create/understand language. Which is really cool. Scientists created an artificial language, and then played it back to people, monkeys (cotton-top tamarin monkeys, to be exact), and starlings. People got it (80% of college students could figure it out), the monkey´s didn´t, and the starlings did.

Of course, everybody´s not in aggreement that this equals language, or that starlings aren´t just cheating, but you´ll have that. Here´s a couple of the comments =):

Dr Chomksy: “It has nothing remotely to do with language — probably just with short-term memory,”
Dr Gentner: “Chomsky may find this trivial, but that is a bit like saying apes use tools, but only the trivial kind that lack the sophistication of a tri-square or a laser level,”
Dr Hauser: “This shows a capacity that goes way beyond what we showed with tamarins. That’s what makes it an important paper.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/science/02song.html

New species!!

Wow, nifty. Awesome!

Scientists have discovered a new species, a new genus, a new family of crustaceans in the South Pacific. They´ve named it Kiwaida (after the Polynisian crustacean god =)…

Its covered in “sinuous, hair-like strands”… Quite nifty. We´re always finding new species in the oceans, but new genus aren´t all that common, let alone new family´s!!

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/03/08/furry.lobster.ap/index.html