Go See Dancing People

Looking for some entertainment? Go see the DaVintage Code, Thursday (tomorrow) or Friday evening in Palo Alto.

I love how having a dance group with an unusually high number of physics and such PhDs means that the map location is given by GPS position of the front door.

Lost In Translation

Me:

"I've been pretty much bedridden 16-20 hours per day and housebound since August."

"I barely manage to eat and shower every day. (Though I do blog sometimes.)"

People:

"Do you want to go on a hike? We can come pick you up."

"Do you want to go out for dinner? A movie?"

"We're going to Maker Fair in San Mateo, if you're interested in going too."

Me:

Sigh.


Hiking... if people want to carry me in a bed while making sure there is not a single tick within a mile of me, sure!

Apparently, there is still a lot of work needed on my descriptions, and I haven't seen anyone be able to describe chronic fatigue syndrome in a way that is anywhere close to comprehensible to other people. Which makes me wonder if it is something that is even describable in words.

Searching For Waltz Costumes?

By far the most common search terms leading to my blog are variations on waltz costumes, waltz outfits, and waltz dresses. This blog is currently the first search result returned by Google for waltz costumes, and strangely even for things like TurboTax depreciation. Unfortunately I don't think I am the world's expert on TurboTax depreciation. It must be by virtue of having a blogspot.com URL, leading to a high PageRank. Or maybe I'm just the only person weird enough to blog about it.

I'm guessing that most people looking for waltz costumes are looking for ballroom dance competition outfits, and you will find none of that here. Maybe it's just me, but most of the time when I see pictures and videos of ballroom dance competition outfits, the words "Why why why?" repeat in my head.

The kind of waltz costumes that might be found here are Big Poufy Victorian Dresses over at Lady M's.

Note to self regarding the picture of me waltzing in my big poufy Victorian dress, if I ever get well enough to perform again - Do not strain during fast waltzes in such a way as to create a double chin on a skinny person.

Why It's Good For Children To Play With A Little Fire

So they don't become a college student who inadvertently burns down the Bio building when trying to put out a teeny tiny fire on an inflammable lab table.

For lack of blogging activity lately, I'm pulling out a draft I wrote a while ago.

Since I've been ranting about the retardednesses of doctors, I might as well continue with the story of how I saved the Bio Lab building from being burned down by a fellow Asian pre-med student. We were working on our lab projects for Bio 44X/Y. It was late at night and there were only two of us in the lab. People frequently accidentally set the glass dishes of alcohol on fire by putting a just-off-the-bunsen-burner hot glass rod in them. The other girl did this, and the flames shoot up quite high. I went over to get the big glass cover dish to snuff it out, but it's really not a problem to just let the alcohol burn out, since the glass and lab tabletops are pretty much indestructable. But before I got back, she was trying to snuff out the fire with a paper towel.

Now holding a flaming paper towel in hand, she was really freaking out, running around (fanning the flames) looking for a place to drop the flaming paper, and dropped it into the big garbage can... where there's a whole lot of other paper towels. Oh boy, but still a pretty small problem. Conveniently, the labs have these trays of squirt bottles with distilled water in them, next to trays of squirt bottles with ethanol. So I grabbed a bottle of water and started squirting. The girl decided it would be a good idea to copy me so she ran over and grabbed a bottle of ethanol and started squirting on the flames. Whew boy, does fire like alcohol. "No no no! Just STOP! Let me do it."

I should have thought of something to say afterwards to perhaps help the poor girl figure out how to put out a fire next time.

These kinds of things make you ponder while sitting in a doctor's office, even with something like a Stanford diploma on the wall, whether your doctor has ever tried to put out fires with paper towels and alcohol, and what that means for your medical care. You certainly hope this pre-med did not become an ER doctor or a surgeon.

But hey, maybe she had Lyme disease and her brain wasn't working. I can certainly understand that. :P

Peep

It's been over a week so I thought I would make a peep. Hopefully I'm having what they would call a big herx, yeah, and then I'll be magically better afterwards. I think for every e-mail I sent last week, I skipped a shower. I'm sure you all wanted to know that. And the too tired to eat thing has made me increase my Ensure consumption to 2-3 bottles a day. Most people who have the opportunity to taste this lovely drink are either elderly or hospitalized for anorexia. I hear they have already improved the taste, but I still have to hold my breath and gulp it down. And I still don't see any increased poundage. I wonder what my body is doing to burn all those calories because I'm mostly lying in bed all day.

Tick Blog

I've been neglecting this blog lately. Actually I've been feeling a teeny tiny bit better for the last couple of weeks, and with that little bit of extra energy to use beyond eating and showering, I've been collecting info for... hm... my new Tick Blog. Hopefully I won't get in trouble for the liberty with which I've taken very large quotes out of government publications. I haven't quite gotten to finding data on ticks for all of California yet... but most of the Bay Area.

Because, do you hear doctors (and other people) say that you can't get Lyme disease in California, and here in the Bay Area? I think about 19 of 20 doctors I've seen said so. Only one of them actually had looked up the facts.

"Where does she live?... here in the Bay Area? Then it shouldn't be Lyme disease."

"Have you been to the East Coast, New York, Massachusetts, etc.?"

...etc...

Wonder, where do doctors (or other so-called experts on any topic) get their information from? Have they even bothered to look up any data or information before spewing their expert "knowledge"? Did they get their information from overhearing some other uninformed doctor say the same thing, and thus continue spreading the myth? Does "can't happen here" just mean the doctor or whoever just doesn't know any information on the topic and hasn't bothered to find out that it can happen here?

So anyways, almost every Bay Area county has been for many years conducting tick surveys with regard to infection with Lyme disease bacteria, and publishes the data on the Web. (Wow, where a doctor could just look it up with a few clicks if he or she bothered to know something before talking?!)

The average tick infection rate for the Bay Area is 2-3%, with data ranging up to 14% (that I've seen so far). The chances of being bitten by a tick, multiplied by 2-3%, is at least greater than the chances of winning the lotto jackpot. But even winning the lotto is possible in California! And if you have already been bitten by a tick, your chances are higher than getting E. coli from a bag of spinach. Some people I know pick up several ticks each when they go hiking.

A lot of the data is collected from big parks, but really, does a tick or the deer, mice, and lizards that they feed on care if a blade of grass is in an open space preserve or in your backyard? Some counties did collect data from smaller parks and roadsides in the middle of suburbia.

So if this is doctors' attitudes on Lyme disease and tick infection rates, sometimes you have to wonder if doctors know what they're talking about with regard to any other medical issue. Having 90-something percent of doctors think it is okay to BS and not be aware that they are BS-ing from a void of knowledge, is pretty scary.

Just Surfing

Clicking on the strange searches that bring readers to your site to see what other results come up, can sometimes provide interesting reading.

This is an interesting article about the waltz ball season in Vienna: Waltz This Way. I want to see how people in Vienna really waltz, so I searched YouTube. I didn't find too much, but yes, it looks like how we waltz, not that ballroom stuff. Maybe I would find more if I search in German.

My blog has degenerated into an annotated bookmarks list, interspersed with rantings.

Testing

This was one of the most e-mailed stories on the New York Times:

Chemotherapy Fog Is No Longer Ignored As An Illusion

Sounds a lot like Lyme brain and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome fog.

But somehow I bet there are still a ton of doctors who think it's not real. They can't imagine that people can perform normally on neurocognitive tests and still have trouble functioning. Blame the test or blame the person? Do we really expect the little test to cover so much of human brain function? Maybe it can find severe brain problems, but there's nothing in the test that is going to see whether a person puts their shoes in the freezer, or whether they can do their job which requires much more complex and coordinated brain activities.

In software, the QA engineers can put the software through the most thorough testing they can possibly do, but customers are still going to call up with all sorts of bugs. Imagine telling customers that it must just be their perception because all our QA tests passed 100%!

Reading About Religion

These days I've been able to spend a good portion of my awake time reading things on the Web. My brain is not getting as fatigued. It's amazing how much information you can traverse with just millimeter movements of a finger on a mousepad. With severe chronic fatigue, the difference between the effort needed to use a mouse and a mousepad is noticeable. Surfing the Web is also more doable than watching TV or listening to audio because you can do it in as small as one minute increments.

I finally started using an RSS-reader instead of my click everything method, after seeing Google Reader links in my blog logs. However there seems to be a delay of many hours before updates appear. Discovered I like seeing the short version of feeds so I've changed my own feed settings.

***

Much of what I've been reading is stuff about religion from various sources including blogs a few blog degrees away. Let's just say my mind is completely boggled trying to make sense of all the different views, opinions, and beliefs everyone has. I don't know if I've read any two views that are alike even among people of the same denomination.

For someone not in the know, it's mind-boggling just to try to figure out what it means to be Protestant or Catholic. And then what does it mean to be Presbyterian, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Pentacostal, Calvinist, etc? What do different Christian denominations think of each other? Some seem to accept some more than others. What is considered okay to disagree on, and what not?

I've read discussions on whether it's okay for Christians to practice tai chi or have acupuncture done, and debates between Christians and Muslims, and Catholics and Protestants. I surfed my way on over to some interesting sites that a lot of Christians would probably consider not Christian, yet they seem to make a lot of sense to me. At the same time, something has been calling me to investigate Christianity.

Well, I started reading the Bible, and I got through the Book of Matthew. I got side-tracked by all the reading about religion.