Into the John

What's a uvula again?

2009-07-01T14:09:00.005-04:00

This thing here (wow this guy looks weird):

Little known fact: it is also the most unimaginably painful location to develop a canker sore. This piece of information has become clear to me over the last week through personal experience.

If I were you, I would perform the following in order to avoid this fearsome eventuality: pray to the Judeochristian God, Allah, Mary (in all of her 752,341 local variants), Vishnu (and be sure not to eat any beef), Jupiter, Zeus, Ra, Baal, Chac Mool, Quetzalcoatl, your ancestors, rub Buddha's belly and meditate with every sect separately, receive treatments from your local Shaman, practitioners of Chinese, Ayurvedic, Chiropractic, Acupuncture, Naturalistic, Herbalistic and Voodoo medicine, and visit the Temple of the Unknown God and sacrifice whatever you can possibly think of in order to pacify any potentially existing deities, spirits, sentient forces, or aliens that might possibly be offended. Then cross your fingers and don't walk under any ladders.

If that doesn't work, then may God have mercy on your soul (and pain receptors).

Dani's MCAT Today...

2009-06-18T17:00:00.003-04:00

...also known as the reason we've been so antisocial lately. Tonight, it's all over.

Captain Picard once again succinctly summarizes my emotions regarding this event:

Wii(iiiiiii)!

2009-06-11T16:17:00.005-04:00

Dani and I are now the proud owners of a Wii, which we unwrapped yesterday. As Dani is still a week away from taking the MCAT, she won't be participating for a while. As for me, I started downloading classic Nintendo and Super Nintendo games immediately. It's interesting to see which of your childhood favorites are still awesome, and which don't hold up as well. The ones I've tried out so far:

Super Mario World:
Tons and tons of fun. This game is responsible for my obsession with Yoshi (though the fact that he is a dinosaur perhaps has a role to play as well). Eat things and poop them out? Yes! As useful items? Even better! Ride around on a dinosaur in a cape? Dino-tacular!

Mega Man 2:My favorites were the Mega Man X games, but since they don't have these for Wii, I made do with Mega Man 2. And promptly got my gluteus maximus handed to me on a silver platter. The game lets you choose which of the 8 stages (and bosses) you want to do first. I chose a wonderful little chap called Crash Man, thinking that anyone whose power revolved around accidentally running into things couldn't be that formidable. I didn't last 30 seconds. So... frustrating...

Super Street Fighter 2:

HADOOOOKEN! OHYOUKEN! Nothing like throwing blue fireballs at someone to get your stress levels down. Actually, this game isn't nearly as fun as I remember. I got bored pretty quickly. Chun-Li is still hot, though. And Sagat is still "a bundle of sticks, twigs, or branches bound together and used as fuel", too.

ARRRRRRRRRGH!

2009-06-02T11:10:00.003-04:00

No, it's not talk like a pirate day. It's frustration at the administration of your soon-to-be medical school day.

I've confirmed my acceptance of financial aid not once, but twice and filled out all the paperwork weeks ago. Somehow, they still are having trouble with my account, and are in "everything is fine, we're working on resolving the issue" mode just as they have been for the last 2 weeks.

The person in charge of immunizations finally got the forms I sent her more than 2 weeks ago as well, and is now telling me I need to get a vaccine that was listed as having been received on the paperwork I sent in more than one location. I received this vaccine less than a month ago.

This picture pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter.

Now they want me to fill out a questionnaire regarding the admissions and administrative process leading up to my acceptance. No, actually they don't want me to fill that out... they just don't know it yet.

A really enraging police story

2009-05-29T13:50:00.003-04:00

Watch this video.

According to the news story and witness statement linked on Youtube, the ambulance was on its way to the hospital with a patient inside, when the policeman decided to pull it over for failing to yield! As inherently absurd as this sounds (isn't it the police's job to make sure that the ambulance receives the clear path?) the policeman was in such a desperate hurry to protect society that he had time to spend 10 minutes harassing the EMTs, put one of them in a chokehold, threaten to arrest the driver, and then follow the group to the hospital to threaten them with later arrest again.

Obviously an officer with somewhere so urgent to be that it takes priority over a potentially dying patient.

The patient is apparently fine now, but the real damage comes from the mistrust of good policemen that comes from the few with authority complexes like these here. I think it would be an good idea to run social experiments in police academies, intended to simulate circumstances in which officers would feel justified in personally using their authority to hurt or establish their dominance over another person. Any subject that shows any sort of enjoyment from this position would be immediately washed out and placed on a national black list as a "risk to abuse authority" for police and military work.

Champions League Final Today!

2009-05-27T14:36:00.003-04:00

And no Chelsea in sight. Hopefully that means we might get to watch something resembling an actual soccer match.

I'm looking for this guy to put on a show... ... even if he does look like he's trying to hitchhike on a passing spaceship. All he needs is a towel.

What a strange family I have.

2009-05-26T12:42:00.004-04:00

A glimpse of Sunday family night at the Younce house:

Ross (Rachel's boyfriend) has a birthday that day. Rachel buys him a pink and white cake with a princess wand on it and very frilly frosting edges. Nobody thinks that this is more than slightly unusual.

Ross's present from our family is a semi-automatic, highly accurate Nerf weapon. We then have a large Nerf war in which Becca ends up hiding behind a chair for a long period of time, Hannah gets ambushed while coming down the stairs, and Dani suffers carpet burn while diving for cover.

Upon conclusion of the Nerf war, somebody turns on the Shrek soundtrack and everyone dances to Smashmouth for half an hour or so.

Beni (the dog) spends lots of time looking confused.

In further news, I want one of these. I presume that the ordinance it fires will be heat-seeking.

How to lose your sense of humor...

2009-05-22T12:45:00.007-04:00

...in 3 easy steps:

Step 1: Join a tight-knit group which is single-mindedly focused on the same task.

Step 2: Associate primarily with members of that group.

Step 3: Repeat until you are no longer funny.

When I returned from my mission (in California), I was probably the least funny person in American history (or, at least, the history of my family). As I had just spent 2 years primarily socializing with other missionaries, these other missionaries were the funniest people I knew. We would laugh hysterically at jokes that no other group of sentient beings in the universe could possibly find humorous in any way. Detoxification from this extreme level of jocular insularity took months.

I recently watched this video, one of a series created by medical students, presumably ones who were approaching graduation.

If this, after 4 years of associating with geeky med students, is to be the fate of my sense of humor, then I am truly terrified. Athazagoraphobia? Hmmm...

Anacyclosis

2009-05-21T11:50:00.003-04:00

My friend and coworker, Tim Ferguson (yes, he's been called Turd Ferguson before), is somewhat obsessed with Classical history and political theory. In particular, he is a proponent of an obscure idea called anacyclosis, and has created this webpage to explain his basic ideas.

Check it out. It's actually pretty cool, and he's put a lot of work into it.

Much ado about... this?

2009-05-20T09:15:00.007-04:00

If you read any sort of news, especially of the online variety, you've probably run into this image at some point in the last couple of days. This skeleton is purported to be representative of a species which is the primate "missing link", or earliest common ancestor of apes, humans, and monkeys, linking them (and us) to more primitive primates, such as tarsiers and lemurs. Potentially neat discovery? Seems like it.

Of course, where would we be without hype? This skeleton was presented to Michael Bloomberg and the media as a "revolutionary scientific find that will change everything". CNN had the finding on its front page. Google even redesigned its logo today:

So why is this such a huge deal? Some possibilities:

1. This proves that humans evolved from primates once and for all! Look, if you don't already believe this (or at least consider it to be a strong possibility supported by the overwhelming current weight of evidence), then you either attended a religious high school and/or college where the evils of evolution were carefully omitted or "discredited", are immune to evidence and likely believe in ghosts, ESP, or UFOs, or are simply fond of this. This skeleton is hardly the strongest evidence we have to support our common ancestry with the rest of the biological world, as there are already mountains of fossil, biomolecular, and genetic data which enable that conclusion to be made with confidence.

2. It's a missing link, so it has to be a big deal! Missing links are everywhere in biology, simply because the fossil record doesn't provide a perfect picture. If there was a perfectly fossilized specimen from every existing species produced at a regular interval of, say, 10,000 years, and preserved intact to this day in areas that are easy to excavate, we might be able to live without the term for the most part. Unfortunately, the fossil record doesn't always cooperate. Simply finding a "missing link" within an already well-established phylogeny doesn't "change everything". Actually, since it mostly just supports the way we already thought the tree would go, it really changes nothing.

3. A whole skeleton of this quality preserved intact will be a pillar of primate taxonomy for decades. I might be able to buy this one, if I hadn't already read what some anthropologists and taxonomists had to say on the matter. The reviews aren't exactly glowing.

Common Sense

2009-05-19T11:45:00.003-04:00

Here's something that should make all kinds of sense to most people, but which I really didn't think much about until the last few weeks:

If you're going to med school, you should probably be OK with needles.

Mind you, I'm not terrified of needles by any stretch, but the sight of a particularly thick one (or of a nurse whose competency I'm not entirely sure of holding one) makes me rather nervous. Furthermore, I loathe getting vaccines for most illnesses, as the side effects listed as occurring in, say, 1 in 8 patients inevitably hit me with all the force of the actual illness they are supposed to protect me against for at least a day.

You mean I'm going to have to actually get the flu shot every year? Ah, crap.

This last month, I've been stuck full of the dreaded things. Tetanus (with associated body aches and fever for 2 days)... check. Blood draws? Check. Antibiotics? Check... one in each butt-cheek. TB tests? Check squared. I'm beginning to think that the reason that med schools require so many needles is to weed out those prospective students with trypanophobia.