Sayin’ a mouf full.
(‘Nother Nearly) Wordless Wednesday
Sayin’ a mouf full.
Author Archives: Dick
Sayin’ a mouf full.
T-Day
I’m of the age that I get a tube stuck up my butt every few years. Tomorrow is T-Day.
I saw the tube doc last week for the standard pre-procedure visit, got my instructions. They asked how I was going to pay.
“With Blue Cross, of course,” I said.
“Your last colonoscopy was November 3, 2003,” the doc’s insurance clerk said. “You haven’t passed 10 years so I don’t think they’ll cover it.”
<sigh>
“Please call BC/BS right away to get the authorization then. I won’t fill this prescription for Reglan™ unless we’re go for launch.”
Remember Fleet™? The FDA has become aware of reports of acute phosphate nephropathy, a type of acute kidney injury, associated with the use of oral sodium phosphate products for bowel cleansing prior to colonoscopy or other procedures. Not only that, the explosive results were … uncomfortable. Docs use Reglan™ followed by magnesium citrate plus half a gallon of clear liquid now so we patients slosh ever so briefly as we run.
The doc’s office promised they would call back the next day. That was a week ago.
I called them this morning. “What’s the verdict?” I asked.
“She hasn’t had a chance to call your insurer,” the receptionist told me after a brief 10-minute wait, “but it’s OK because you’re just coming in for the checkup.”
Say what? I’m due on the table at noon tomorrow. She did promise then to call me right back and she did. “Blue Cross says you should be covered.”
Should be? SHOULD BE?
I did what I should have done in the first place. I called Blue Cross direct. Their advisor, Matt, thanked me for my call and told me I was covered 100%. Including the Reglan™. He saw that the doc’s office had called not long before and got the same answer.
It’s lunchtime here in North Puffin. I’m on clear liquids for the day, now, and grouchy. And I haven’t even gotten to sign up for Obamacare yet.
Later today, in a small and echoey room, I shall express my real opinion of all this.
Shut Down
For 10 days, every MSM news outlet and every elected Demonbrat reported that the House Repuglicans “refuse to pass a budget unless it shuts down ObamaCare.”
That, of course, is not exactly true.
For 10 days, the House Repuglicans have passed about 47 budgets so far; the Senate Demonbrats have refused to consider any of them and Obama has stated publicly he will “veto any bill that shuts down ObamaCare.”
Who is refusing what?
For 10 days, John Boehner (R-OH) and Harry Reid (D-NV) lobbed the spending bill back and forth.
Mr. Reid sent the Senate home on Sunday.
The bill would have prevented the government from running out of money at 11:59:59 p.m. last night.
Mr. Reid sent “his” Senate home when Mr. Boehner passed “his” conference request last night.
And we pay these airheads to work for us?
There are 800,000 “furloughed” federal workers this morning. Each and every one of them should go to the Capitol and demand our money back.
Mo’ Brains
Certain mice and voles have grown bigger brains over the last 100 years.
In her new study, Anthropogenic Environments Exert Variable Selection on Cranial Capacity in Mammals, University of Minnesota biologist Emilie C. Snell-Rood offers a startling affirmation that where critters live may well cause the evolution of bigger brains. And smaller ones.
Dr. Snell-Rood looked at a collection of mammal skulls collected as early as the beginning of the 20th Century by the University of Minnesota. She measured the dimensions of the skulls of ten species including mice, shrews, bats and gophers.
The brains of the white-footed mouse and the meadow vole who had lived several generations in cities were some six percent bigger than the brains of animals collected from farms or wood. She concluded that their brains grew when these species moved to the bright lights and big city distractions.
Uh oh. Does that mean I would have gotten that Nobel by now had I just not stayed a country mouse?
Maybe it’s not just city life.
Evolutionary biologists recognize change is a formidable evolutionary force. Corn’s wild ancestor is teosinte, a grass with tassels. While grasses don’t look much like corn-on-the-cob, a single gene changed by a single kernel’s (almost) uninterrupted passage through a wolf brought about a longer cob in the next season. Likewise, bacteria have adapted to antibiotics in less than a century.
Dr. Snell-Rood found two species of shrews and two species of bats grew mo’ brains in rural Minnesota as well.
She proposes that the brains of all six species have gotten bigger because the radically disrupted environment allows only the animals better at learning to survive.
[Ed. Note: Neanderthal cranial capacity is now believed to have been larger than human skulls. Reconstructions of Neanderthal infants showed that Neanderthals and modern humans started with the same size skull but the Neanderthal brain outpaced the modern human brain by adulthood.]
The Minnesota study also found that the cranial capacity shrinks in species in environments that require no added learning to survive.
A subsequent study at the Lightman Group looked at rattus norvegicus trained to hide food from their study group. The animal models developed an interesting added behavior: after the initial concealment, the animals studied distracted all the others in the environment away from the hiding place. In other words, they lied to their study group. After just three generations, cranial capacity in the entire cohort shrank by eight percent.
Finally, a Smithsonian Institution study of groups of 535 people in Washington DC from 1900-2012 shows that brains have gotten 11 percent smaller in that sample.
Wordless Wednesday
