He went from this:

To this:

In just 120 days! That’s 84 pounds of weight loss in just 4 months! If you want to know more just look at his blog post that I stole the images from. He links to the diet program he’s using at the bottom of the post. Now, it is a commercial product, and that generally triggers my BS meter, but I’ve seen a very similar program, if not this actual program, work for other folks that I know

Aside from JR I’ve seen one of my uncles go from being so overweight he needed help getting out of a chair, then to having open heart surgery, getting on a similar plan, and at this year’s family reunion somebody had to fetch some rope so he could keep his friggen pants up because he lost so much weight. The other guy I know of 3rd hand is somebody I knew as a child that hit 500lbs. He got on a similar program and he’s now 170lbs. My brother interacts with him on a regular basis. He’s a real person and the program he was on actually worked. Actually it’s still working for him because he admits he can’t go back to regular food. He has to stay on these diet programs, but that’s a rather extreme case.

What these programs do isn’t rocket science. If you eat fewer calories than you burn in a day you’ll lose weight. There’s really no mystery behind the science of the matter. However what these programs seem to excel at is keeping you feeling “full” even though you ate very little in caloric content. That’s not something most of us can do in our own kitchens.

My bicep

Seems I had an allergic reaction to the meds and now I’ve burst out in hives.

UPDATE: Went to a doctor again today around 1:00pm. The doc concurred that it was an allergic reaction and I should quit taking the antibiotics. Looks like my throat is clear anyway. I’m now on some prescription strength cortisone and antihistamines to get rid of the hives.

Great. More drugs.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this.

First, let me present the first entire paragraph to the article:

Sixth-grade girls in Michigan could be the first required to be vaccinated against cervical cancer under a proposed new law.

Now, since we already require other vaccinations this seems to be reasonable, right?

Well, we don’t actually require them. Parents are always allowed to sign a waiver that will allow their children into public schools without getting the diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis B, polio, etc. vaccines. I cannot imagine the legislature actually making this “required” without also providing the waiver option. It would be a major divergence from the status-quo not only because the other requirements have a waiver option but because this infection is sexually transmitted while the others are not.

However, we’ve already nailed my beef with such legislation. It isn’t how it’s written, it is how it is presented to the public.

When you pull up the current official document of “Required Childhood Immunizations for Michigan School Settings there is no mention of a waiver at all. The media outlets reporting on it all term it “required” when it likely wouldn’t be.

That’s my beef. I don’t want to see people herded down the path of immunization, even for the older vaccines, just accepting that they “must” be done because a government employee said so.

People tend to take the path of least resistance. So, they’ll do the vaccinations without really thinking about it much. Of course, if you also present the waiver option immediately to parents that have not done any immunization procedures out of ignorance you open up a new path of least resistance that may not be the best thing for society as a whole and the actual child. This point was brought to my attention by a very intelligent woman, whom I love dearly, that doesn’t really agree with my take on the issue.

To that point, I’m not sure how to strike a proper balance. How you present the option of the waiver, which should be well understood by the local educators, without also protecting children from ignorant parents? This I do not know, and I will likely ponder it for some time.

Should the HPV vaccine be promoted? Absolutely. Over 50% of the population now carries HPV and around 3,700 women die of cancer annually because of cervical cancer caused by it.

Should it be mandated by the government for school girls? Absolutely not — no medical procedure should ever be mandated by the government. While such programs are often very good, and done with the best of intentions we have seen them go awry in this country before. Incidentally Michigan was the first state to propose a eugenics program in the United States. Right here in this country we sterilized women up until 1976^* without their knowledge in an attempt to better our society.

I see grave danger in accepting government mandated health care procedures. I do not worry that this very proposed program will do so, but I do worry that the populace will continue to accept said programs out of hand. If we, as a people, continue to accept them without great scrutiny I have no reason to believe that our “benevolent leaders” will return to their previous thinking and start right back up with the previous atrocities.

^*: I’ll see if I can dig this up. The Wikipedia article says 1960′s but I recollect an article some years back that brought the issue to light again stating that it was up until 1976 in either North Carolina or South Carolina. It was where I learned the term “eugenics” so you’ll just have to trust that I have a decent memory. That, or you can disregard my date and just admit that we did some pretty f-’ed up things in this country anyway.

This is… interesting.

Dapoxetine belongs to the class of drugs known as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) used in the treatment of depression but has been specifically developed as a treatment for premature ejaculation.

SSRI’s are a freaky thing. Unlike the street drug MDMA (“Ecstacy”) they prevent your brain from sucking up the dropped serotonin whereass MDMA causes a massive drop of serotonin all at once. The effects should be similiar, with MDMA more pronounced, but from what I gather an SSRI won’t let you “bounce back” to normal as quick.

So, how are the results?

At the start of the 12-week study, the men ejaculated on average less than a minute after penetration. By the end, those taking the lower 30 mg dose were lasting 2.78 minutes while those on the higher 60 mg dose were lasting 3.32 minutes.

Three minutes and twenty seconds? I think we’re a long way from curing this one. I can hold my breath longer than that.

Something’s not right with the story.

First, I’m in the camp that a one day boost of testosterone wouldn’t do much for an athlete. Others would disagree, saying that it does increase your endurance. To quote Dr. Black from the above article:

“I have injected myself with testosterone in doing research, and I can tell you from personal experience that within hours, you feel a profound psychological change, a sense of well-being, aggression and energy,” Black said.

Well, from my personal experience the psychological changes are there, but there’s no physical benefit short term. I’ve never injected the stuff but I have taken testosterone supplements (after I had left the world of sports) in pill form and the only thing that happens, short term, is you get a really strong desire to fight everybody and screw any woman you see.

It’s like being 16 all over again.

Second, it’s fairly easy to absorb it through your skin. A fellow I hung out with during my college years worked at a pharmacy and would lift some of the liquid testosterone, mix it up with Purell hand sanitizer, and smear it on his body. It helped with his weight lifting. It isn’t inconceivable, to me, that somebody could have smeared some liquid testosterone on Landis somehow the night before the 17th stage just to disqualify him.

Just one lone individual with access to testosterone and a strong desire to keep yet another American from winning the Tour. That’s all it would have taken.

I didn’t see this one coming.

Long story short boy has Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymph nodes, and after going through round one of chemo treatment the boy decided he’d like to do something else.

State steps in and takes partial custody of the child and insists on chemo treatment. On appeal a judge has overturned that decision and given control back to the parents and the child.

As it should be.

I do feel differently about this case than I do about Katie who I’ve mentioned in the past. In this case, presuming the media is presenting it properly, the only reason young Abraham doesn’t want to continue chemotherapy is because it was extremely uncomfortable. In Katie’s case there was concern of her becoming sterile and the parents were getting differing medical opinions on the right way to proceed. They were also looking for treatments within the realm of accepted treatments by the FDA — not herbal stuff from Mexico.

While I believe that the choice should be left to the sick and their parents, in Abraham’s case I would strongly recommend chemo based upon what I have seen. Of course, I am not a doctor, but, his only complaint is that it’s too hard on him.

Man up, nancy-boy! Life’s hard. Sometimes doing what you need to do to stay alive is going to hurt. Did you know that the first chemo patient ever was taken off chemo because doctors, aside from his own, objected to it and insisted that the patient was going to die from the treatment? The cancer was shrinking, and the patient would have likely lived if treatment was continued. Did you know that it was for a fairly treatable cancer these days? Throat cancer. The patient contracted throat cancer likely for his love of cigars and chewing tobacco.

The patient was George Herman Ruth. Babe Ruth. The Great Bambino.

Now, perhaps “man up, nancy-boy!” is a bit harsh but the primary reason that I found this case so appauling is because the “child” in this case is a 16 year old male. He would easily be tried as an adult in a murder trial anywhere in the country because at that age people understand life and death. I’m also biased when it comes to his gender — I’ll heap responsibility and critisim on a 16 year old male before I will a 16 year old female.

Yes, I’m sexist, if you want to call it that. I’m more likely to harsh on a young male than I am a young female. I’m also more likely to bitch out a family member than I am a stranger for the same reason: I’m part of that group, I’ve been there, and I know what you’re thinking.

If I were the judge I would have dismissed this too, but with the above nancy-boy talk.

Which, naturally, I care not a whit about.

I do find the biology aspect rather interesting though, and I’m not alone. There’s a blogger that has put up a series of test audio files for you to check your own hearing.

With headphones on, AIWA brand, I was able to hear up to 22,000 Hz. I picked that particular set of headphones out because they had such a wide range of frequency, and since I listen to a fair amount of classical music, I figured that was a pretty important thing to have.

He has now put up test files that go to 25,000 Hz so I’ll see if I can pick that up on my headphones later.

Given my age (26) I suppose I should be thankful that I can pick up anything above 16,000 Hz.

I have no idea why I can hear such high pitches noises. I often pick up on squeals from CRT monitors that nobody else in my office can detect. My ears are sensitive enough that when it happens I’ve found it is proportional to the amount of white on the screen. I can actually resize a big white window and hear the differences. Go figure.

If a television is on, but totally black, and the room is quiet, I’ll hear it.

This is probably related to my ability to see things too.

I have horrible vision. I’m 20/50 in my bad eye even with corrective lenses on. My left eye does not function in accordance with my right eye naturally, and because they’re so far out of whack my depth perception is akin to somebody watching a scene on the television screen. This makes doing simple things like catching a ball rather difficult. The portions of my brain that would naturally figure out how far away something is are useless, and it becomes a higher brain function for me.

It made gauging distances from a stop sign rather difficult when learning to drive. I’ve compensated, but I’m nearly constantly reminded that I have that difficulty. Just watch me try and parallel park.

Still, as bad as my eyes are I can occasionally catch a bullet flying. It only happens with .45 ACP — a big slow moving slug. If the light is right I can sometimes spot the slug moving away from me after I fire.

The other odd one, and I’m really surprised I don’t see more people notice this, is a computer monitor set to refresh at a rate of 60 Hz. I can see it blink! It makes me sick to my stomach in short order. So quick that as soon as I spot it I immediately fix it, even if I’m only going to be working on the machine for a matter of minutes.

You see, in the USA our AC electrical currents “pulse” at a rate of 60 Hz. When you have fluorescent lighting around you, and your monitor refreshes at the same rate, there’s a period where the light and monitor aren’t both emitting the same level of light.

I see a monitor that’s changing brightness with a regular rhythm on me. Nobody else in any of the offices I’ve worked in have noticed this. Thankfully they’re also entirely unable to tell the difference between a monitor at 60 Hz and 75 Hz so it doesn’t bother them when I immediately change their refresh rate.

Makes you wonder why, doesn’t it?

An IQ test I took about 9 years ago gave a couple if different metrics. It was heavily biased toward people with a good comand of the English language and it was also scoring you based on speed. Apparently my ability to think quick is twice that of the average person according to said test. My ability to swallow a complex problem is far less above normal, but apparently my brain can do a bunch of simple tasks twice as fast as average.

I’m basically a RISC brainded human being it seems.

You think this is all related? Seems to make sense to me.