msb-0107 The Elephant in the Room

msb-0107 The Elephant in the Room

Feed back come first, so...

This is where I go into what "so-and-so" told me about previous shows.

Things have been pretty quiet at the "Casa di Chaos" this week.

I just got an email from a podcaster in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where Dr. William E. Code hailed from, before he moved out to BC.

DJ Jeff ( http://confessionsofadj.libsyn.com/ ) is one of the best podcast DJs I've heard in a while. He's got a kick-ass taste in music.

His wife was recently diagnosed with MS and he's been subscribed to the MSBPodcast for a little while. (When will "she" get in touch and drop me an email? :-)

I've just downloaded his shows, sent him my Don Lafontaine promo and we'll see what happens.

We traded a couple of emails and he's right.

Apart from event specific podcasts, like the "Race for MS" and the "Walk for MS", which don't need to come out more than a couple of times a year, and the MSBPodcast, the other MS related podcasts seem to all have podfaded.

Its tragic really.

But I'm hoping to get another interview, with him, or to entice him into producing a show for us. He's got some really kick-ass taste in music and, being in Canada, he's got a different series of artists to choose from, and they are "great."

----

From another blogger DiditalKaren ( http://www.digitalkaren.com/ ) I've discovered that her husband Norm has a podcast ( http://normradio.com/ )

(Well, he's actually got an "on demand" audio webcast, not a podcast.

I didn't see any RSS feed mechanism.

RSS is the last bit of the podcasting mosaic allowing a podcatcher program to just ask a podcaster site for "any new episodes since [date]" and then to download them automagically.)

You just know I'm going to try to get in touch with them with the same offer.

----

I'm still waiting on "Chris" ( http://www.chrishasms.org/ ) for a mascot to stick on people's websites as a "button" to get to my site.

Dang, people with MS are talented.

----

The stats for the show of the interview with Allison Reynolds ( http://www.netxperiment.com/ ) are telling me that its one of the fastest pickups I've had since I started this train wreck of a podcast.

"Krikey! Oy guess oy'm going to practice my Auzie speak.

But I won't eat me no "marmite."

Stuff's just foul, mate. :-)"

---- "Elephants Trunk Up Yours Remix" by: "Sir Shree" http://www.sirshree.com/

Feed-forward comes, so...

This is where I go into what I discovered that is quaint, curious, weird and/or wonderful.

I just bought "The Elusive Obvious" by "Moshe Feldenkrais" ISBN: 0-916990-09-5.

I haven't time to do more than do more than unwrap it. (Okay, okay, I just read a chapter or so.)

I remember hearing about Feldenkrais from the seventies. "Awareness through movement" was published in 1972, and I remember reading it about the same time I was interested in "Jean Piaget" and his "Theory of cognitive Development."

(Tol'dja I was weird.

I was into dance, architecture, music, mobiles and movement.

Other guys my age were wondering what girls really looked like under their clothes.

I knew, so I could focus on different crap; like the cognitive development, which lead people from "Moi", to "me".:

• Sensorimotor stage [years 0-2]
• Preoperational stage [years 2-7]
• Concrete operational stage [years 7-11]
• Formal operational stage [years 11-adulthood]

Turned out later to play a role in the development of the "Logo" computer language, by "Logo Computer Systems" in Montréal, Québec, Canada, [I remember going to their West Island office and being throughly unimpressed, {see http://www.atarimagazines.com/v2n12/logoslineage.html }] and in Alan Kay's development of the "Smalltalk" computer language. [see http://www.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis400/smalltalk/smalltalk.html .])

Basically, I'm about to investigate it for its potential to help me improve past this physical, emotional, cognitive and neurological plateau that I seem to be stuck on.

Today I just read about "The Importance of Knowing What the Doctor Is Talking About" in the New York Times, ( ) but I'm saving that whole rant about it until next episode.

This feed-forward section is "also" where I go into what "so-and-so" told "me" to tell "you".

---- "Donkeys and Elephants" by: "Gecko 3" http://www.gecko3.com/

Reminder ads come next, (I guess if the first two sections are called "FeedBack" and "Feed-Forward", I guess I could call this section "Feed Me!" :-) so...

This is where I go into what "so-and-so" is "paying me" to tell us all.

This is really cheap. $0.03 per reminder, per download of this episode of the show. (I will pre-record these, or use their own voice-overs, and make the links "hot.")

(Click on a "particular reminder" link,

• on the show notes in the multiplesclerosisblog.blogger.com blog entry, or
  
• on the show notes in the MSBPodcast.com blog entry, or
• on the iTunes window while the show is playing, or
  
• on copying the URL from the lyrics tab in the associated iTunes "Get Info" window,
  

and your browser gets launched onto that specific page, be it text, audio or video. [No play, no pay.])

Since I'm also giving away to anyone that asks "deep linking" capacity, I don't necessarily get any money from the reminders, (but at $0.03 each, I figure I can afford it.)

"So-and-so" could, or make that should, also bought advert space on MSBPodcasts.com, and if you go and download their ad, you have got to be really interested, so its $3.00 per download.

---- "Elephant Island" by: "Pilotdrift" http://www.pilotdrift.com/

Main Topic: "The Elephant in the Room".

MS, the exhibiting of multiple sclera on the central nervous system, comes in two basic flavours:

• relapsing/remitting and
• chronic/progressive.

On that we can all agree.

There whole a series of factors, of triggers, which influence the initiation of the formation of sclera.

These tend to be chemical and/or biotic in nature, operating deep within our white blood cells and acting in combinations with the oligodendrocytes which produce the myelin which sheathes our nerves.

An attack, whatever its causes, has to be matched by an ineffectual response at "remyelination" by the oligodendrocytes.

(Otherwise there would be no sclera formed and therefore problem because there's no M.S.

M.S. is caused as much by the cascade of non-reactions to it, as it is caused by the initial insult to our system. [This may be where stem-cell research could perhaps offer the best result, by illuminating the mechanisms of myelination.]

No sclera, no M.S., regardless of the actual "cause".)

There are also a whole series of factors, of triggers, which influence the onsets of "demyelination". (The "cause" I just referred to.)

Some of these triggers are environmental, some of these triggers are genetic predispositions to reactions acting in concert with some offending agent.

That's why there are a whole bunch of drug regimens out there.

Some "suppress" the immune system, which has its own consequences. (For instance, I wouldn't want to trade my "Multiple Sclerosis" for, say, "Kaposi's Sarcoma". [That's why I not too trilled with immuno-suppressants.])

(I'm not going to name names.

That's not the point of these shows.

There here to entertain and inform, not to suddenly decide and declare that any regimen is better than any other.

That's impossible to do in any case because it depends on an individual's reaction which causes the M.S. in the first place. Talk to your neurologist and your physician.)

Some "promote" or "revitalize" the oligodendrocytes, which has its own consequence.

(Again, I'm not going to name names. [Actually, I don't know of any off-hand; which is a damn shame as I might sign up for a trial myself. {Google helps me find things, (say, http://www.nature.com/ncb/journal/v4/n11/abs/ncb1102-e253.html) but I don't pretend to really understand them.} I'm reduced to eating fatty lamb chops, just in case, {and besides, they taste "mighty good". :-} I also eat duck, but that's just out of revenge for giving us the influenza virus.]

As I said, that's not the point of these shows.

There here to entertain first and inform next.)

---- "RAMPAGING ELEPHANTS ATE MY SOUP" by: "NEIL SMITH" http://www.myspace.com/neilsmithmusic

Main topic "part deux": "The Other Elephant in the Room"

Man its getting crowded in here.

Positively pachydermian.

There was a fascinating article in the New York Times about food and nutrition. (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html)

Food and nutrition have been separated by a yawning gulf since 1977 by something that shouldn't even exist, started as a mere comma on a document that told people to eat less red meat.

And then the fires of the beef producers started to roast Senator McGovern's ass.

Since then we have been in a spiral of "good" news that has turned out obese children, obese adults, deaths from diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, other ailments related to our "avoir-du-poid" and general confusion about what we eat.

The insanity, as Susan Powter ( http://www.susanpowtershow.com ) put it in those annoying info-mercials, was not about to stop.

It was instead to get diced, chopped, refined and blended into "nutrition speak."

Now we have "gurus" who speak to us about all these ingredients (like Dr. Perricone, [ http://www.nvperriconemd.com/ {After one his PBS fund raiser shows, I feel like I should get a degree in organic chemistry.}])

These are supposed to make up for the fact that we're eating processed crap, because the FDA got swept into the same processing crap, so that now we almost don't have any choice but chowing down on processed "swill".

Nutrients aren't "food".

"Food" is food.

Lydia's Family Table show on PBS ( http://www.lidiasitaly.com/index2.htm ) is about food, not chemicals, reactants and unpronounceable crap. (Don't mind me, I just had a great meal. None of that processed "yeurk" for me. :-)

People wouldn't be so unhealthy, and/or so fat, if they took some time to eat some food instead of a pile of processed nutrients.

I've made it a rule to never eat anything anything that my late father, a chemist and micro-biologist, would recommend as an excellent preservative.

For all I know, he caused my immune system weakness and my propensity for inappropriate immune system reaction to the flu virus, leading to my M.S., by baking all of my milk bottles in the oven instead of letting me get a little sick like all the other kids.

The rise in juvenile asthma in North America is being blamed on the parents' over protectiveness.

Kids never get exposed to air borne environmental hazards because parents keep the environment too sterile.

Kids are "supposed" to get their immune systems stressed by childhood diseases, when they're still young enough to make complete recoveries.

Instead, now they get asthma (and possibly worse things, like MS!)

---- "Elephant" by: "Jason Brock" http://www.jasonbrockmusic.com/

And now a throughly geeky thought about MS combined with what I do as a software designer.

Given that Boolean algebra divines a whole system of logic based on the foundation of zero (none) and one, the fact that there are two types on MS gets us, post-facto, into a third type of reductionist system: many.

That gives a complete system based on "none, one and many."

Many is a simple, though essential, system of describing relationships.

Viz:

Relationship joins
(0|1|N) (Object{,Object}) and
(0|1|M) (Object{,Object}).

All relationships are fundamentally "N:M".

0|1 on either side of the ":" are merely existential, evanescent stages.

That's all there is to it.

My job as a software design engineer consists of divining which things are objects and which things are, uh, merely relationships. Here's a "BIG" hint, I always ask who, what, where, when, why and everything is subclassed off of that or its a relationship.

Recursively viz:

Relationship joins
(0|1|N) (Object|Relationship{,Object|Relationship}) and
(0|1|M) (Object|Relationship{,Object|Relationship}).

Outro.