WTF!!!

So I was just in the middle of grading midterms after having been to the dentist this morning to get some cavities filled; yeah, talk about a fun day. As is expected, the anesthetic is slowly wearing off and I can feel my face and jaw properly now that I've been home over an hour. As the feeling began to return to my tongue I noticed that things didn't feel quite like they are supposed to. My tongue felt out of place, as though it didn't fit in my mouth properly.

As I was moving my tongue around I felt something very unusual; something moved under my tongue! Now I still don't have all the feeling in my mouth back just yet, so I cautiously probed what I was feeling with my finger. Next thing I know something fell out of my mouth (onto one of the exams of course) and I kind of freaked out. Below is the photo of my "prize".


It seems the dentist forgot to remove a large tube-shaped piece of gauze she placed under my tongue! I was never told that it was left there, I had no warning of any kind. I know this is just a minor incident, but this certainly doesn't enhance my confidence in her work.

Dumbass law

So did anyone else hear the news that North Dakota has passed a new bill wherein any "any organism with the genome of homo sapiens" is considered to be a person, protected by all state laws and rights. The idea behind it is that this way a fetus is now considered to be a person, obviously making the legality of abortions a big question now. Now ignoring the fact that a fetus really isn't a person, George Carlin had a pretty good explanation of the difference between a person and a fetus, there is a serious problem with this new bill.

See, though the legislators probably thought that they were being all smart by using the term "human genome" to define a fetus, there's a slight problem with that definition. It is inherently broad and in fact undefined. See, the question becomes, what is the exact human genome? We all have our own genome with some variations, so the definition of the human genome really depends on perspective. So, where is the line drawn?

Ok, so maybe that line is easy to draw, but when you think of it, the genetic sequence of fetus is only 50% that of the woman. So the genetic sequence is rather different from that of the mother. Now, the law will protect the right of the fetus to live and prosper. But what if you have cancer? Cancer is in fact your own genome , just with a slight mutation that causes the problems; which would be far far less than a 0.01% difference in the genome. In fact, cancer has a more similar genome to that of a woman than the genome of her child. So, by extension, the law that is designed to protect a fetus even should protect cancer, as it is an organism with a human genome. So are cancer treatments going to be outlawed in North Dakota as well?

Somehow I don't think that the politicians are going to be applying this law to it's letter, only in it's spirit, which is to limit individuals rights for religious reasons.

Back on the bike

So after about a month of not riding my bike to work I decided that it was time to get back to it. The reason I chose to stop riding was mainly due to the lack of light on the way home, plus it was getting pretty cold in the mornings. I have mentioned before that I'm now a wimp about the cold right? It now feels like anything below 10 C is downright frigid. But now that things are nicer, I'm going to be riding in as much as I can.

I did enjoy taking the bus, it gave me a chance to relax a bit and catch up on the TED videos that I have been collecting in iTunes. But of course the bus has it's disadvantages; it's not all that comfortable and I have to stick to a schedule that isn't my own. So other than the inability to watch videos while riding taking the bike to work has significant advantages. Counterintuitively, the ride actually boosts my energy during the day, rather than sapping it; it's just something about being active and keeping active.

Now of course, me being who I am, I tend to analyze things as much as possible, so my bicycling is no different. I've been using a heart rate monitor/speedometer for ages and the one I currently have allows me to upload the data to the web to analyze it further. I'd track the changes in my ride times and even look to see if there was a correlation between the time I left work and how fast I rode home... yes I'm a geek! So of course after almost a month off from riding I was obviously slower on the ride in. It's kind of interesting to see what that much downtime does to your cardiovascular capabilities. Below are figures from my web page, the first image is from in December (when I was fit). The red bar is how long I was working really hard, a heart rate over 180 beats per minute. Green is the zone I want to train in, from 160 to 180 and blue is when I was riding nice and easy. The total time for the ride was about 25 minutes.

The ride today was only a bit slower, around 26 minutes, but clearly I had to work a lot harder to get to work in that time. Obviously I still have the muscular strength, but clearly my cardio is shot. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes to get me my lungs/blood back up to the level it used to be.