MONOPOLY!

I'm a sucker for McDonald's Monopoly.
No really. It's terrible because I don't really like their food, just the game pieces. I have such great memories of playing Monopoly with my Dad, the real game as well as McDonald's version.
It's Monopoly time again and, vegetarianism on hold, I've eaten every meal there thus far.

My husband told me to enjoy my epic plunge into fatness.
Oh, I will.

I even went back to McDonald's after the box containing my Big Mac didn't have pieces on it. Yep, I'm that person.
So far I've won a breakfast sandwich.

Evidence of things not seen.

I can get a lot done when I have nothing to do.
Here's the proof of John's fall break.
Saturday- Watched House season 6, ate a pizza and made a penguin
Sunday- Watched Scrubs, and painted some minis for Last Night on Earth
Monday- I can't say I remember...

Tuesday-Had sushi with Sarah and Vito, watched zombie movies, played zombie board games and watched A Bit of Fry & Laurie.

Wednesday-Beat Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Climbed Pinnacle Mountain



GAME REVIEW:

Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Yes, its a scary game. I recommend to play it as prescribed, with headphones and all the lights off. You can't "fight" any of the bad guys, you have to run and hide from them. If you see them, your sanity goes down, if you're in the dark too long your sanity goes down, if anything "creepy happens" your sanity goes down. When your sanity is low the screen is all wonky, fuzzy, and you can't control your character as well. Makes for running from the bad guys really difficult. You have to solve puzzles and wander around this Prussian castle to figure out who you are and why you're being held hostage. There are these undead monsters all over the place that kill you pretty quick, plus weird creepy things like pulsating pink goo that takes over certain rooms and whispering flashbacks of screaming and sounds of torture. The puzzles are not that difficult to figure out (pull some levers, mix some potions) and the game is pretty linear. The graphics are great and yes the game is graphical. No one wears clothes. I don't get it. The corpses I'm ok with them being naked but the main boss? Uh, well old wizard men opening portals to other worlds are normally clothed in the other games I've played. However, it worked. I was ok with it.
I don't want to give the plot away just in case you decide to play it. It's a good game with good graphics and a very small development team that did a great job. Get on Steam and buy Amnesia, but I recommend you have a friend to call when you can't get to sleep at night.

The cat has chewed through the last power cord for the iphones. So... can't up or download anything anymore. I have to email my pictures to myself...Sigh.
Also the Wii won't read discs and the DVD player broke. I don't know what I've done but the tech-gods are angry at me. I guess I didn't kill enough frogs...
Well, there's always the NES with Adventures of Lolo.


My husband has been reading me reddit posts for a while now.
This one is actually a good question.
What's the best thing from your childhood that you can't indulge in now because you're a stinkin' adult?
I'd say trying to get from one side of the room to the other without touching the floor. That was the BEST game ever! I would even try to get from the basement to my room (the attic) as a child, man, it would get tricky in the kitchen, that china cabinet was not too sturdy... Climbing on the furniture, taking huge leaps, man, it was great.

I guess I could do that now but the layout is all wrong. My mom was MUCH better at designing obstacle courses out of furniture. ;)

Its a good day.

It's fall break for John. Which means we've been doing NOTHING since I got off work 11pm Friday.
I take that back.
We've watched the entire 5th season of House and the 1st season of Scrubs. I made a penguin out of a glove and painted some minis for our Last Night on Earth Zombie game. We've also played with little cat and had an extensive water fight that ended up soaking the bathroom and each other.

It's been good and it's only Monday.
I did have to wake up at 5 to get to the hospital though. Today was the first day of my pilot study and I wanted to make sure the shift huddles started well.

Nobel Prize for Medicine goes to.... Robert Edwards for his work on invitro fertilization. I'm sure you all know what this is, so I won't go into detail. It just seems sad to me that there is such a lag time between discoveries and the recognition for them. I guess we have to "wait and see" if a discovery is really as important as it seems before we get around to awarding people for it. I say this because the man is pretty old now, not in great health, and his partner (who probably would have shared the prize) has already died.

The ethics section on Wikipedia's IVF thread is very interesting. Sometimes I think people make up issues where they don't exist just so they can hear themselves speak. Such as the Catholic Church's argument that IVF is a separation of the marital act and therefore an immoral way to conceive children. It opposes "Natural Law," (to which my husband griped, "If it couldn't happen then it WOULDN'T happen.")

This brings up an interesting (and I feel unrelated point, but I'm going there anyway.) in the current book I'm reading (Hitler's Scientists) the argument is made that scientists are there to discover and explain things. They should not be morally bound or ethically responsible for how their discoveries are then utilized. There are so many comic book villains suffering from this it's not even funny.
Then there are real people.

So what's the thing? Invent and let others use to destroy? Or keep it to yourself and hope no one else figures it out? You can't control how people use your data. Maybe we should all just curl up in little balls and hide inside so no one can discover anything and no one can cause harm.
On the other hand, how will we ever learn to do good? How can we learn what feels good if we never get hurt?
Wow, too deep for 2:15 on a Monday...

I say knowledge is power. Do the most good for the most people. I don't think scientists can figure out every possibility that their discoveries can be used for. What if they mean well, but it is utilized for bad? Who gets the fault? He guy who invented the gun or the one holding it? Come on now. But, I know things are not that black and white.

How did we get from the Nobel Prize to Oppenheimer? The guy never won a Nobel Prize.

This does remind me of the time in high school when I memorized all the Nobel Prize winners, years and contributions. Phew. Like I said, I like to stalk scientists. Especially dead ones.


Also, a clown was just voted into office in Brazil. It seems he won, by a lot.

Habits

I'm a creature of habit. I know this. I also know I can get a bit cranky when those patterns are altered. Throw extra balls at me and if I can't figure out the trajectory in time I'll drop them, and every thing else. Quite angered too.
Not really saying this with much specific in mind, just throwing it out there.
I like to wake up, go running, listen to my podcasts, shower, eat a bit of toast while browsing my google reader and listening to NPR. Then I blog and I go to work. That's how I like to start a day. When that doesn't get to happen, I feel off all day long. Like I've missed the best parts.
Unfortunately, on my days off once I've done my "plan" I have to think of what to do with the next 13 hours.
I'm not off work today, so no worries mate!

I'm reading Hitler's Scientists. It looks at the science in Germany leading up to the WWII and how it affected Hitler's mindset as well as opened/closed certain doors during that war. I'm getting the feeling a LOT of German scientists hated Einstein. Simply HATED him. I've also learned that Hitler was a terrible scientist. Not at all the clever, scheming mastermind he's been portrayed as. If he couldn't understand something he would shake his head and walk away (good thing he couldn't understand Von Braun!) He believed in astrology and homeopathy as well as various other pseudosciences. Once I get further (heh heh) in the book I'll give a better review.

Man, I had this girl shadowing me at work yesterday that simply could not handle silence. I talk, I think I talk too much sometimes, but wow. She was amazing. I didn't handle it very well. Now I'm super aware of how much I speak. I'm working on only talking when necessary. That was a terrible experience. I like silence. It allows for thought.

Oops, work time!
Oh read this if you have time.
Individual intelligence isn't as important as we thought for group functioning!

Brain pain

Auuuugh.

Brain hurts. Multiple factors I believe. Largest having to deal with this article from SciAm.
Oral contraceptives and brain plasticity. Are you really "yourself" when taking estrogen/progesterone or whatever combo. Maybe no. (Side note: What constitutes a person anyway?)

Timing is fitting. I took my last oral contraceptive pill today so I'm beginning an additional log to monitor changes as time progresses away from that era. Just the usual, blood pressure, body weight, mood fluctuations. Good thing I keep fairly good journals. The coding on my writing style can be a bit time consuming.

Anyway.
So SciAm posts this review on a study monitoring the effects of hormonal contraceptives and brain plasticity. Great, but they don't give a link to the article! Just to pubmeds main page!

Auuugh.
This is where my pain really sets in. I wanted to see this study. So now I'm digging through pubmed to try and locate it.
More pain as I realize that SciAm doesn't list the author, the title, or really much of anything that could help me locate it. Just the name of the Journal and that it was published "recently"

Ah, found it. Maybe the article did have the author. Just halfway down and it looked like Pfizer. So, naturally I thought it was the drug company.
My bad....

Bah. I don't want to purchase anything. I just want to read the article.
It's times like this I wish more people thought like Cory Doctorow.
Who needs copyright? Make everything creative commons and we can get along and share nicely...

Plus, I can read those articles if I wish.
Anyway, enough rant about how I can't read it. Lets dive right in and discuss it.

Oooh ohh! I found it!
Wow, it's at this point I wish I had my sisters' brain.
This is confusing stuff.

This study assessed grey matter volume in men, women using hormonal contraceptives and women not using hormonal contraceptives. The women not on contraceptives were assessed twice. Once when estrogen/progesterone levels were high (folicular) and again when they were low (mid-luteal).
For the scans they utilized the fMRI machine. A functional MRI maps blood flow and oxygen. This is based on the theory that neuronal activity is reflected by greater consumption of O2.
So the fMRI lights up the areas where O2 consumption is high, and we believe that area of the brain to be "workin."

All in all what they found is women on hormonal contraceptives had a minor inlargement of the prefrontal cortex.
This is the part that known as your "personality" in layman's terms.
They don't discuss how this effect anything, just that there are differences. So conclusions about behavior cannot really be drawn from this study. Only that brain plasticity and structure is affected by hormonal regulation. Hormonal regulation is enhanced by hormonal contraceptives.

Limitations?
They don't specify what type of hormonal contraceptives the women used. Oral, injections, etc. Nor do they separate the estrogen/progesterone group from the progesterone only group.
I don't think they administered hormones to the male population either, it's tough to tell.

Now my brain really hurts.

I purchased the 6th edition of the APA publication guide. I think I go read that. It might make the headache go away...

What a weekend.

I've worked since the last update, and that's about it.

Very, very busy days. Finally got a chance to run again yesterday. I ran at 5 in the afternoon and I'll be honest. It was a bit chilly. Weehaw! Autumn is finally here.
For my run this morning it was 53 degrees. I wore long sleeves. I was still cold. It felt great.

Haven't had a great amount of time for "fun" research. I've been doing REAL stuff. I've been working like mad for the past three days on an actual project for work. I put a proposal together for "change of shift" huddles. Complete with a lit review, a pilot study, a data collection tool, etc etc etc. I scienced all day Sunday.

John and I watched the original Taking of Pelham 123 last night. We had seen the remake a month ago or so. It was very interesting to note all of the differences. I appreciated that I could watch and enjoy both movies. They are similar and yet different enough to keep one intrigued even though the plots are essentially the same.
A few of the major differences that were interesting to note were things such as. Everything is so yellow in the 1970s while it's blues and greens in 2000s. People were much, much ruder to each other in the 70s version and cared much less about the people on the subway. Another difference was the mayor of New York was such a pansy that everyone hated. You just can't do that anymore. It's way too taboo to make fun of the mayor of New York. The President is free game, but not New York. Interesting no? Also, the remake worked in this twist of wall street that used some crazy technology.
All in all, I can't actually choose which Gerber I liked more. Walter Matthau, or Denzel Washington. Both excellent. Both great movies. I recommend both. They each stand on their own feet exceptionally well.

Zombie nightmares last night. Shudder.

They're coming for you, Barbara....

Something about being a maze of a building and having to get out while zombies were bursting through the walls. This is what I get for playing Last Night on Earth, before going to bed.
I almost lived this time too. Rats.

Time for work again. I'll be so excited when John's next test is over, he's been studying for a long time. He needs a night off. That will be tomorrow. We'll probably go get some pizza.

Take THAT b-thalassemia!

Back to work today!
I always get more done when I have a time crunch. I guess that's what makes me such a procrastinator.

I had a great few days off. Didn't really do much on my "list" I read a lot of books though. I'm currently in the midst of "Hitler's Scientists" it's a quick overview of the crazy and unethical things that surrounded WWII, plus all the things we learned from it. *Whistles* Review once I'm done with it.

I got a book on cat training, but SOMEONE wasn't the the mood to be trained. Sigh. Spock is pretty good about coming when he's called, but... I'd like to teach him a few more things. You know, sit, fetch, things like that. He'll do them occasionally, but only if he wants to. So there. I just he's just a cat.
Honestly, that's one of the reasons why I like cats, they don't fall all over themselves to make you love them. They have the attitude that they could really careless. So when they do really want to snuggle, its doubly sweet.

Like last night, John and I were kinda laying in bed, exhausted. Teasingly, we "kicked" Spock off the bed. Next thing we noticed, he was burrowing his way back up under the covers where we couldn't see him and he snuggled up next to us, hidden. So cute!

This morning on my run I listened to last week's Nature Podcast and learned some pretty awesome stuff. Such as THIS article.

That's the medscape btw. SO, using gene therapy they've "cured" someone of b-thalassemia.
b-thalassemia is an anemic blood disorder similar to sickle cell. In this disorder there's a mutation of one of the heme molecules that are on your redblood cells. Heme is used to transport oxygen.

Here's a rough and dirty version. They modified a virus to contain the gene they needed to replace in this guy's DNA and introduced it. The virus did it's "Virus-y" thing of going in and taking over the DNA replicating and replacing etc etc. Through this method they essentially fixed him.

This young man has had blood transfusions since age 3 and subsequent transfusions approx every 3 months to keep his blood levels at a functional level. He underwent this therapy 3 years ago and hasn't required a transfusion since June 2008!
Wow.
That's great.
Of course limitations include small sample size and length of observation.
Awaa??

Sorry. I've been working on a lit review for the past few days. Pointing out limitations has become a bit of a habit. I'm putting together my stuff for the introduction of change of shift huddles in our ER. It's a pretty impressive report. I've got to get my crap together for the pilot study I'm starting in October. Augh, I've got to create a reliable and valid measurement tool in the next few days...
Blerg.

Oop! Off to work!