Google Maps Street View, Zoom into My Living Room

I just saw Google Maps Street View for the first time, and looky here, you can even zoom this close into the living room balcony of my condo (which hopefully will be sold soon).

Can you find yourself?

Looks Like "Minority Report"

Google Labels

Among all the awesome things Google has come up with, one thing I don't "get" is Labels. It's basically a one-dimensional folder hierarchy. Non-recursive, such that you have to multi-label blog posts or e-mails with every sub/super-category, like waltz and dance. Or cats, pets, and animals. And you can't drill down to find the intersection of multiple labels, like waltz and music.

On another topic, the blogosphere is an interesting thing. Of all the things on my blog, apparently my rant on a certain doctor not "finding" an ICD-9 code due to some selective aptitude and patient care is being e-mailed around to people in Maryland and Pakistan. I should probably unpublish that post before it finds its way to the doctor. And people from wholefoods.com are doing blogsearches to see what people are saying about "Whole Foods Market."

Intestinal Microbiota

After sending in another disability application, and now waiting for them to reject it, I can now direct that energy elsewhere, like more blogging perhaps. I tried somewhat to avoid ranting about lameness but everything I thought to blog about was a rant. So if you do not want to read rantings about doctors, you might want to check back in in a few months.

On another note, I found this very cool set of open access scientific and medical journals when I read this article on a yummy topic, Digging in Diapers For History of Gut Bacteria, linked from Google Health News. The research article, Development of the Human Infant Intestinal Microbiota, is authored by a group of Stanford medical researchers, and browsing the other articles shows that many of them are authored by researchers from esteemed institutions such as Stanford, UCSF, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins. So this appears not to be just some dinky Internet journal.

Under the open access license, people are free to copy, distribute, and even make commercial use of the work, if proper citation is given. Wow, so I can copy large chunks of the articles into my blog and not break any rules.... Indeed, more people will read, and critique, and generate more ideas.

On the topic of gut bacteria..., I found this related article, Children May Breathe Easier If Antibiotics Are Avoided In Infancy, interesting.

Rural kids had less of a chance of developing asthma than urban children, overall. The researchers speculate that this may have to do with the differing microbes that colonize the guts of city and rural children as well as country kids' wider exposure to a variety of microorganisms. "Evidence for this hypothesis comes from epidemiologic studies, which link variations in gastrointestinal microflora and probiotic administration with less allergy and asthma," Kozyrskyj says.

And since I like to relate things that most people don't relate, I think this could be related to this interesting new finding that the gender ratio of people with chronic fatigue syndrome is strikingly different among people who live in large metropolitan areas, smaller urban areas, and rural areas. This is another open access article from a different journal:

Prevalence of chronic fatigue syndrome in metropolitan, urban, and rural Georgia

There were significant differences in female-to-male ratios of prevalence across the strata (metropolitan female: male 11.2 : 1, urban 1.7 : 1, rural 0.8 : 1).

The study also found that 2.5% of the population meets the definition of chronic fatigue syndrome, which is 6-10 times higher that previously found.

Perhaps I need to eat some dirt.

Reusable Shopping and Produce Bags

Oakland copies San Francisco in banning plastic bags in large grocery and retail stores. Maybe a chain reaction is coming. However, this just means people will be using more paper bags unless paper bags are banned as well. I haven't been out in about a year so I have no idea how many people you'd see these days using cloth bags.

Here are some interesting shopping bag choices at Small Slices. The netting bags are supposedly popular in Europe.

When I bought the fluorescent green Whole Foods Market bags on Earth Day last year, I had never seen anyone using a cloth bag ever, not even while shopping at Whole Foods. (And I'm not sure how environmentally friendly a dye that fluorescent can be. The bag also has a pane of plastic on the bottom.) Hopefully people carrying cloth shopping bags now will be like people talking on cell phones in 2000. I remember how weird it was to see people walking around campus talking on the phone, and even more weird to see people biking and talking on the phone. In only a few years, it became weird to not carry a cell phone.

I started telling store clerks that I didn't need a bag, and oftentimes that was met with an uncomprehending expression. Oftentimes they had already opened a plastic bag before I finished the sentence, so then they took the unused bag and threw it away. So it became a race, as soon as the previous customer was done, I'd have to jump in and say, "No bag, please," instead of something like, "I don't need a bag," because the first version gets the message communicated in two syllables while the second version takes five syllables.

One to two years ago, I was searching the Web for reusable produce bags, and didn't find anything except for opaque heavy cloth bags marketed as produce bags, and sheer plastic reusable bags like the kind used for party favors. To be practical, produce bags going through the grocery checkout have to be see-through. It would be better if they are leak-proof too, so that you can put wet lettuce in the bags and not drip all over the shopping cart and checkout counter while picking up all the germs on those surfaces. It would also be better if the bags are biodegradable and not plastic.

After shopping at Thai Silks for fabric to make my 1930s gown, since I'm weird and have no fashion sense, I ordered the artist sample instead for the purpose of looking for sheer durable fabric that could make produce bags. Most of the sheer fabrics are silk and I wasn't sure how washable those were.

Since one to two years ago, the search results for reusable produce bags seems to have grown a lot. Here are some cotton net bags with drawstrings that I didn't see back then. I still think they should be more see-through, and these are not at all leak-proof. So here's an idea to make your own produce bags out of sheer tulle. Apparently, some tulle fabrics are made from natural fibers, and some are made from synthetic fibers. They look very see-through and can be colorful. I'm sure someone will be selling them commercially soon, if not already.

President Bush Says...

"Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical. And it is not the only option before us.''

Bush again vetoes stem cell legislation.

So what is he saying? That he and the government know that they are not ethical, or that there are thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives that he doesn't consider to be human life?

***

Oh, I figured it out. "Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical." But destroying human life for some *other* purpose is okay.

Blogger's Block

Sometimes I find myself thinking in terms of blog posts, but then I don't have the energy to actually write it. Or, maybe it's just uninspiring when you don't have the energy to do anything, so there's nothing to write about even mundane daily things.

Along the lines of Lara's birthday wish, I received a virtual gift this week from monoceros. A song to add to the waltz collection, "We're All In The Dance" from the soundtrack, Paris Je T'Aime.

I was also looking for a poem or something of some sort, so I went looking on her blog...

for the boy who loved nature, my sister's friend whom I never met.

Doctor Demographics

I've been to see many doctors during the last year, and I wonder why all of them are men, and most are men around 60 years of age. Aren't medical schools graduating about half and half, male and female these days? Though I suppose, if most of the doctors I've seen are around 60 years old, then most would be men.

So here are some interesting statistics. Apparently only about a quarter of working doctors are women. But still, all the doctors I've seen are men, in contrast to knowing so many women in medical school, residents, etc.

And a lot of 60 year old male doctors really do think that if you're a 30-ish female, especially single, highly educated, and working (since working is a male thing, and women need a man to be sane), that you must be extremely neurotic. ("Do you have a boyfriend?" should not be part of medical history taking.)

Or maybe they just think that chronic fatigue syndrome is neurotic, like this one doctor describes how other doctors reported back to her that all her patients were neurotic:

From Skepticism to Science: After 20 years, chronic fatigue syndrome may finally be getting some respect and cutting-edge science

Bone Marrow and Blood Drives

From my Stanford InCircle network in the past week:

There's a bone marrow drive today in Santa Clara, and many more upcoming, to help Vinay.

And this guy needs white blood cell donations in Houston. http://marrowdonor.blogspot.com

If a health insurance claim for a bone marrow transplant to try to save someone's life from leukemia can be denied, then gee, how can people possibly expect to get disability insurance for something like chronic fatigue syndrome.

I am hearing about way too many people in their 20s and 30s with cancer and other serious illnesses. I don't know if it's really just the Internet (and Stanford InCircle e-mails) that just spreads more information. I went to visit a church service in October, and they have a time for anybody who wants to share any news. All but one of them was bad news about someone fighting cancer.

And then there's all the stories of people I happen upon in the blogosphere. And they're a little too hard to read.

Do Babies Feel Pain During Surgery Without Anesthesia? Um...

I'm supposed to be saving my energy so that I can manage to fill out more disability forms, for this illness with no objective medical evidence. Objective medical evidence is required by disability insurance. Chronic fatigue syndrome by current definition has no objective medical tests for diagnosis, and by definition is a disabling illness. Sigh.

But what I had to post is this: Believing Babies Feel Pain.

Is this for real?!? Or is this some Snopes-worthy story that made it into USA Today?

Did doctors en masse really think that babies are like not born with pain nerves and then one day magically grow them at some arbitrary age when they are no longer considered "babies"? Was it really necessary to have to conduct studies on levels of stress hormones in order for doctors to believe that babies feel pain when having surgery without anesthesia?


We're talking about open heart surgery in the 1990s. Here are more articles on the topic:

Study Backs Deep Anesthesia for Babies in Surgery, New York Times

"Indeed, babies once routinely underwent surgery without any anesthetics. Many doctors believed newborns did not feel pain the same way adults do."

Babies feel pain - babies remember pain

"When he went to an anesthesiologist and asked why neonates were not given an anesthetic. 'He just told me, ‘hey, babies don’t feel pain. If we give them an anesthetic, it might make their blood pressure go down.’'"

Premature babies 'feel true pain', aka Doctors need to see brain scans in order to think that premature babies feel pain from painful procedures. I'm sorry, but babies' brains are developed enough to feel hungry, to move their arms and legs, and to cry, especially if you slap them or poke them with a needle, so why wouldn't they be able to feel pain?


Even if this began as a coping mechanism for doctors at a time when anesthesia was too dangerous for babies,

I call this DELUSIONAL.