The Life Experience ~ Spring '13

[bloodyrosemccoy]

What I Learned Since the Spring Equinox:

• There are a number of strategies being suggested for towing asteroids away from Earth. I can't decide if my favorite is gravity snare, where you send up something that has enough mass to tow the asteroid with gravity, or big Space Lasso.


• The Good Samaritan who helps Dairine in High Wizardry is, in fact, supposed to be the Fifth Doctor.


• The term for when someone blanks out and appears to be conscious but unresponsive to the people around them is dissociative stupor.


• Museums are really concerned with pest control. Which makes sense, but I had never thought about it before.


• When you post a job listing, it's probably better to figure out what you want the prospective employee or intern to do before putting it up.


• Since the Iranian Revolution, there has been a ridiculously high spike in multiple sclerosis among Iranian women. This is likely due to a lack of vitamin D caused by wearing sun-blocking burqas all the damn time. Talk about unintended consequences.


• There is catnip in our garden.


• The symbolic food of a Passover seder is not intended to be the main Passover meal. Which is good, because I also learned what food is acceptable for the Passover plate, and it hardly makes a good meal anyway.


• Nobody ever remembers that the T-rex in Jurassic Park is female, even though it is explicitly pointed out.


• Deep-frying is actually fairly easy; it's the battering/coating that is annoying.


• Although it is made slightly less so with the use of chopsticks.


• You're supposed to replace thyme plants every 3-4 years lest they get all woody. I don't know, I'm so impressed that my thyme has lasted this long that I'd feel kinda bad replacing it.


• The Europeans call moose "elks." I have no idea what they call elks. Europeans are so confused.


• "These aren't the droids we're looking for." - Launchpad McQuack, apparently


• Water can deflect bullets! Mostly because they tend to shatter on impact, which is kind of awesome.


• Sealed soda bottle with a little dry ice + water = EXPLODE


• The butterfly that employs mimicking the monarch is called the viceroy. They used to think the viceroy was mimicking the more poisonous monarch, but evidently the viceroy's got some poison in it, too.


• Butterfly namers have a thing for bureaucratic hierarchy, what with all the queens and viceroys and admirals and soldiers and emperors and whatnot. I swear at this point I would not be surprised to find that there is a Minister Of Agriculture and Transportation Butterfly.


• Unlike almost every other video game, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link did not prove itself to be easier now that I'm well past kindergarten.

Comments

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

Um. Is it also true that there's a high incidence of multiple sclerosis among men in the Arab peninsula? Because the whole-body-envelope thing is not exclusively female. *Everybody* covers up to avoid the sun, particularly in the Arab peninsula and North Africa.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Possibly! I know that it's more prevalent in northern latitudes.

There's been a ridiculous spike in cases in Iranian women in the last 40 years, though--which seems to correlate with the full-body, mandatory hijab implemented after the revolution. Covering up to avoid the sun is one thing, but this is pretty much covering yourself in a blackout tent whenever you get near sunlight. So I suspect it's still more excessive overall.

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

Women did wear more Western clothing before the Iranian revolution, true. So maybe there is such a spike, which would be interesting (although surely doctors recommend supplements?). But I'd expect to see levels in men as well--not spiking, perhaps, but higher than what we'd see in the West.

Interesting to see the data, anyway!

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

although surely doctors recommend supplements?

As I understand it, that's exactly what they're doing. here's the link to the article I found. Dad got interested and printed out more, but I'm not sure where they got to.

While I do think that the Iranian moral codes are weirdly pathological, that doesn't really extend to hijab in general. And I am guessing that even the most zealous proponent of the moral codes was not actually trying to give women MS. It just struck me as a fascinating illustration of unexpected consequences.

[black-rider.livejournal.com]

...it would be, yeah, overreaching to think that they intended to give women MS. If for no other reason than MS leads to all sorts of things which would devalue a woman on the marriage market. Wow look at me being a jerk there. Sorry, I have been researching Hitchcock all day, and he was seriously an asshole. I think it is rubbing off. You know. In reverse.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Dude was an asshole, yes. I always feel guilty that I think Rear Window and Psycho are awesome movies.

[redbird]

I suspect there's some seasonality there: people who aren't forced/strongly pressured to cover up entirely may be exposing more of their bodies during the part of the year when the sunlight is less direct.

What I'm wondering about now is the incidence of rickets; the amount of vitamin D that's needed to protect against MS is almost certainly* higher than the amount you need to prevent rickets, but burqas might mean women and girls not getting even that amount.

* Almost because the last I heard, the correlation between vitamin D and MS looks pretty solid, but the causation is not proven. (It's also possible that this is one of those multicausal things where vitamin D deficiency increases the risk, but there's another factor, possibly an infection or genetic susceptibility. And some researchers think MS is two or more different diseases with similar symptoms, but that's not likely to get teased out until/unless they identify the cause of at least one of them.)

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

I suspect there's some seasonality there: people who aren't forced/strongly pressured to cover up entirely may be exposing more of their bodies during the part of the year when the sunlight is less direct.

Not entirely convinced by this, because among the poor, there's no such thing as seasonal wear. (I am thinking about Libya, in particular, because I lived there for a year as a kid, and while my memory may not be absolutely accurate, I've retained an interest in the whole North Africa/Arabian Peninsula as a result. In winter, the highs are in the low seventies/high sixties during the day, and I didn't see any difference in what people wore.

I think my point is that we shouldn't get so fixated on burkhas that we forget that men cover up too. (And men are also enjoined to modesty, so the cultural rationale is in play there as well.) I'm not trying to downplay FEMALE OPPRESSION OMG, just add perspective.

[black-rider.livejournal.com]

(If you come across any interesting news which has a reasonably scientific backing, I would be interested to know about it, as my husband has recently (well, within a year) been diagnosed with MS, and I am all about learning about things and mitigating symptoms. It might be too late, but hell, some extra vitamin D isn't gonna hurt.)

[redbird]

1000 IU/day of vitamin D is easily available (one non-huge pill) and safe. Yes, it's possible to overdose on vitamin D, but you have to really work at it and/or be unlucky. (The only case I can think of offhand is someone who was aiming for high doses and got a supply of pills that contained a thousand times as much as it said on the label—and then, when he got sick, assumed that this was because he didn't have enough vitamin D, and increased the dosage.

Get plain vitamin D, not D plus calcium, unless you (or in this case your husband) are dealing with specific, known calcium deficiency. It turns out (population-level epidemiology keeps turning up surprises) that supplementing with calcium actually increases mortality in the general population. (This is relatively recent news; I threw away part of a bottle of Citracal and bought plain vitamin D when I heard about it.)

Disclaimer: I am neither a doctor nor a biologist; I have a BA in history and read a lot.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I've been taking 10,000 IU of vitamin D per day for a couple of years now, with only positive effects. I do absolutely shun the daystar, tho, and live in the Pacific Northwest, so I get basically zero actual sun exposure. And I weigh 350+ lbs. It correlates with weight, too.

But the point stands, you have to really work at it to OD on the D.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Dang, I did not know that! Sorry to hear it.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Nicola Griffith has had some pretty interesting stuff on her blog in the past year. She's been keeping up with research and mitigating her own symptoms as well as possible and has ties to an MS researcher.