Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Aging: Disease Is Often at Fault in Falls. When elderly people have problems with falling, the cause is less likely to be any medications they are taking than any of a number of common chronic diseases. By Eric Nagourney. [New York Times: Health]My grandmother was beginning to suffer from Alzheimer's, when she fell at her nursing home. She broke her hip due to both the osteoporosis and the muscle wasting common in the elderly. She had hip surgery and a week later a blood clot lodged in her brain leading to a stroke. Falling is a scary thing for someone in their nineties. This story also highlights why I and many others work to discover new drugs. At the time of my grandmother's problems we had no viable treatments for osteoporosis, post-surgical clotting, age-related frailty, stroke, or Alzheimer's. Today we now have four treatments for osteoporosis in women, but have not had much success against the other diseases. 8:37:52 PM

Behind a Masterpiece, a Merchant and a Modernist. Franklin Toker's utterly fascinating book about Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural miracle raises issues that have not eagerly been dealt with before. By Janet Maslin. [New York Times: Books] Janet's reviews are often as fun to read as the books she critiques. I have not visited Fallingwater, but thoroughly enjoyed Taliesin, his institute in Arizona. 8:26:48 PM

The AppleScripting I spoke of previously was significantly easier than I thought it would be. But now it is easy for me to bold text or add a URL to a Model Shipbuilder. I just wrote some simple scripts that act on text in the clipboard. So a copy/paste adds all the html code. 8:17:54 PM