dear god, the windchill is…

…eighteen below.  And it is actually nine below.

Colorado, must you do this to me every year at exam time?  As if one form of misery isn’t enough.

sexual health: inform thyself

This article from Violet Blue (yes, this is pretty much a repost, but I skipped the link through her blog and went straight to the column in the SF Gate, for those of you who may be reluctant to click on the link titled “open source sex”) made me realize just how lucky I’ve been in terms of my healthcare.  Well…in some parts of it, anyway.

Anyhow, the column, titled “The Sex Doctor is Out,” is about the difficulties of talking to your doctor about sex, meaning anything from disease to dysfunction to general questions.  Not just the difficulty of having the conversation, but the very real chance that they will give you misinformation.  For instance, from the column:

It started with an email from a woman whose doctor told her to use Crisco for lube with condoms, claming that Crisco would not break latex because it is “natural.” (FALSE: Crisco contains oils that break condoms easily.) Then I got a panicked call over the weekend from a female friend in the East Bay who was just diagnosed with HPV. A lesbian, she asked her doctor how to keep from passing the virus to her sex partners. The doctor replied, “You’ll be fine. Men can’t get it.” (FALSE: If men didn’t get HPV, how would it be transmitted? And what an –hole. Dr. Jerkface needs a slap.)

trip report! part four: on the trail at last…or so we thought

The last installment of our story left us geared up and ready to go.  As we were heading out on the trail, we thought to check with the ranger regarding wildlife — mostly, how careful did we need to be about hanging our food out of bear reach?  Turns out the bears were already hibernating (we should have taken this as an omen), and our only real concern should be for javelina, which are apparently pretty nasty little hog-like beasties.  Didn’t get to see any, which I don’t think I’m very disappointed about.

And so, we departed down the Gila west fork trail.  Most of our hiking at first was through some pretty nice sandy floodplain, and the trail, being along the river and well-marked with cairns, was easy to follow.

As described above, wide, flat floodplain. We've already had to wade a few times, evidently.

blue cross’s ideas of cost control

…are not the same as mine.

I’ve been watching the healthcare reform saga unfold in congress vaguely attentively (meaning mostly I read op-eds about it, and did skim through the text of portions of the house bill that passed), and have been excited to see the cost control measures that have been included. Yet, as much as I applaud parts of the bills getting tossed around right now, I’m a bit torn about what’s gotten through so far.

Like the Stupak amendment.  That’s pretty massively uncool.

Anyhow, national politics aside, every so often I get absolutely enraged with insurance companies, and extremely fired up about anything that would start to clean up their act getting through congress.  By “every so often,” what I really mean is “every time I have to deal with Blue Cross Blue Shield.”

the man who couldn’t remember

This is crazy cool neuroscience. An article in the NYT talks about dissection beginning on a “famous brain.” It would be great to be considered to have a famous brain one day, but I think if it were me, I’d rather it be famous for ideas that came out of it, rather than an interesting malfunction it has.

The gist of it, if you can’t be bothered to check it out, is that this man had an experimental operation to relieve seizures, which removed part of his brain. The operation was a success — sort of. No more seizures, but no more memory, either. He completely lost his ability to form memories, or so they thought for long years.

But, over time, it turned out that he could actually form certain kinds of memories, like being able to map out the floor plan of the house where he lived, and recalling how to perform certain physical tasks. Now that he no longer needs his brain, researchers are getting to take a look at it in detail, and they hope to figure out much more than is currently understood about how memories form.

They’re starting by slicing it up into 2500 very thin slices.  If you’re morbid like me, you can even watch this process live online here.