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Monday, September 02, 2002 |
Glow in the dark diabetes monitor?
Tattoo To Monitor Diabetes [Slashdot]
The tatoo measures when your glucose levels are too low. Since Diabetes is a disease whereby your blood sugar levels rise too high, this seems like a paradox. But those who have serious cases of diabetes -- normally Type I, or childhood diabetes -- often have to inject themselves with insulin, the danger then is that your blood sugar plummets. This tatoo will work in conjunction with an instrument, like a watch, that would warn you when your levels are too low. Since the method uses polyethylene glycol beads coated with flourescent molecules, that evokes a vision of a patch on the skin glowing when sugar drops.
The bad thing about this story, and most like it, is the repeated reference to diabetics having to prick their fingers. But for at least the past two years, there have been devices which allow you to measure blood sugar by sampling on your arm; considerably less painful than using a finger!
6:20:29 PM Permalink
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The H-Word
Last autumn, something peculiar began to happen at more than two dozen elementary and middle schools scattered across the US. Suddenly, groups of children started breaking out in itchy red rashes that seemed to fade away when the children went home and to re-emerge when they returned to school. Frustratingly for the federal, state and county health officials who were working to explain this ailment, it did not conform to any known patterns of viral or bacterial illness. The children had no other symptoms: no fever, no runny noses, no headaches or joint pain or respiratory complaints. Moreover, they were not passing their rashes on to parents or siblings outside school. Large groups (a dozen here, several dozen there) came down with it simultaneously, or within hours, rather than over the course of days or weeks, as you would expect with person-to-person transmission of a contagious illness. In many of the outbreaks, girls accounted for a majority of the cases. Since neither germs nor the other likely culprit, environmental poisons, make a habit of discriminating by sex, this was puzzling.
Riveting story about the rash of rashes that hit young girls in schools around the country last fall and winter. Bet you can't read it without scratching your head.
3:51:11 PM Permalink
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Dave Marsh on The Rising
Excellent Dave Marsh review of Springsteen's The Rising.
Fans commonly explain that The Rising's topic is not 9/11 but 9/12. But that's not really it, either. The 9/11 attacks and fragments of their aftermath provide Springsteen a setting but The Rising isn't trying to be Guernica or even Born in the U.S.A. The Rising's really returns Springsteen to one of his central preoccupations, the war about choosing life or death that rages in his everyman.
Indeed. One of Springsteen's best lines is "it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive," and the concerts are always about making the choice for life.
Does Springsteen understand what it really means to encourage such people to "rise up"? It'll take an album good enough to follow in this one's footsteps to find out. Meantime, we are left, as always at the end of a gospel song, with some choices to make for ourselves.
3:27:29 PM Permalink
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A Song for Labor Day
Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)
Woody Guthrie, 1948
The crops are all in, and the peaches are rotting,
The oranges are piled in their creseote dumps,
You're flying them back to the Mexico border
To pay all their money to wade back again.
Chorus:
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus and Maria.
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane,
And all they will call you will be deportee.
My father's own father he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life.
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees
They rode the truck till they took down and died.
Chorus
Some of us are illegal and some are not wanted,
Our work contracts out and we have to move on.
Six hundred miles to that Mexico border,
They chase us like outlaws, and rustlers, and thieves.
Chorus
We died in your hills; we died in your deserts;
We died in your valleys and died on your plains;
We died neath your trees, we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.
Chorus:
The skyplane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, it scarred all our hills,
Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says they are just deportees.
Chorus
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is the is the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves, to rot on the topsoil,
And be known by no name except deportee?
Chorus
9:17:01 AM Permalink
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Child Labor
From Goodshit, a link to this excellent collection of Lewis Hine photographs documenting Child Labor in America, 1908-12. My daughter is 13 now; it's amazing to know that children her age were working in factories and worse in this country for a long time. And now, in many places in the world, kids this age are working now to create superficial products we all buy.
Now, in this country we have Child Labor laws that put a stop to this thing here (though we effectively moved it elsewhere). Who stopped it? Was it liberals or conservatives? Was it the anti-government crowd that put a stop to it? Was it the no-tax conservatives, pro-business people of the day? Or was it the women, the leftists, the liberals? Did business decide on its own to not hire children? No, it took laws passed by pro-government legislators, fighting powerful money interests and lobbyists with fat wallets. And if those no-government, pro-business types were on the wrong side about this issue years ago, why would we assume they're on the right side about anything today?
9:00:52 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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