In March I was running for a bus when I noticed a strange tightness in my left knee. It was a bit painful and a little hard to describe, but my knee seemed to be saying "if you don't stop running right now terrible things will happen". I made an appointment at my NHS GP, which is hobbling distance from my house ( Read more... )

All diets work. If you limit what you can eat - no fat, no carbs, no eating before 6pm, no eating after 6pm - you'll lose more weight than if you can eat anything you want whenever you want ( Read more... )

A few years ago my brother was diagnosed with a kidney disorder that was damaging his kidneys. A few weeks ago we learned that it was genetic. My other brother got scanned and he came up positive as well, confirming that hypothesis which put the rest of us in danger. It's a dominant trait, which means at least one of my parents had it. I had a 50 ( Read more... )

For a long time I've been skeptical about the bad things people say about high fructose corn syrup. HFCS isn't "natural" but so what. It's cheap, but cheap is good, especially since it's easy for us to grow corn and hard to grow sugarcane. It's a solution in search of a problem, but at least we're doing *something* with corn surpluses right? It's ( Read more... )

Recently The Smoking Gun revealed the identities of the formerly anonymous social engineers behind PrankNet. Members called strangers via Skype and convinced them to smash their windows by claiming that there was a gas leak, or urinate on each other by claiming that it was the only antidote to chemical burns from fire suppresant chemicals. They ( Read more... )

So I got my teeth cleaned for the first time in 2 years. New dentist in San Rafael. It went more or less OK but with two weird complications ( Read more... )

Remember when I told you fools to get a flu vaccination? The CDC's guesses for the 2008-2009 flu season were A/Brisbane/59/2007 (H1N1), A/Brisbane/10/2007 (H3N2), and B/Florida/4/2006. The 2009 swine flu outbreak is A-H1N1, the CDC's first guess. That's good news for people who got vaccinated this year, even after the already good news that we had ( Read more... )

I am still sick today, which reminds me of a story about vitamin C.

To say that Linus Pauling was "a very smart guy" is an understatement. Linus Pauling was one of the founders of modern chemistry. He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1954 from his research predicting chemical bonding and the structure of the nucleus. When he got bored with ( Read more... )

Last week I got a flu shot. On Friday I started exhibiting flu-like symptoms, leaving me in the unenviable position of being a vaccinated vaccine proponent with the symptoms of the disease I was attempting to avoid. I appreciate the irony, but I'd like to equivocate ( Read more... )

Last year I told you to get a flu shot. This year I'm reminding you again. It's November. The start of flu season. Go get a flu shot.
To recap:

• The influenza flu shot uses a killed virus which will not give you the flu. (There's also a live nasal spray vaccination which you should not get if you're taking care of immunocompromised family ( Read more... )