Shannon Love

Bleg – Medical Images and Coordinates?

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To any Doctors, medical researchers or biologist out there.

I’m working on a little medical db app for patients to record and communicate the apparent location of symptoms in three-dimensional space. I’ve code named the app “Hypochondria.”

I was inspired by my own experiences having trouble communicating with doctors. One time my spouse almost got a gall bladder infection missed by a doctor who interpreted her description of the pain as superficial back pain instead of being deeper in the abdominal cavity itself. I think such miscommunications occurs often, especially across language and cultural barriers.

I’ve been trying to find both images and a coordinate system that naive patients can use to map and log the apparent internal location of pain or other symptoms. I expected that there would be some public domain images because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them before on either medical forms or back in college.

I just need simple related outlines, that show:

  • Coronal (right-to-left or x-z plane),
  • Sagittal (front-to-back or y-z plane )
  • Transverse sections (left-to-right and front-to-back cross section or x-y plane ).

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The Assads are Riding the Tiger

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Michael Totten notes diplomats reporting that:

… the government of President Bashar al-Assad had no wish to change and that there was no immediate prospect for a diplomatic breakthrough.”

That’s because if they do, they’re dead. Syria is a majority (71%)  Sunni Muslim country but the Assads and the rest of the ruling class are a minority (11.0%) Alwai Shia. In case you haven’t been keeping track, Sunni and Shia get along about as well as Protestants and Catholics did during the reformation. If you imagine a 16th century country that was 71% Protestant ruled by a 11% Catholic nobility (or vice versa) you get the picture of the religious dynamics.

It doesn’t help at all that the Assads and the rest of the Shia have been both inept and brutal towards the majority Sunni for the last 90+ years. Most Sunni are very, very poor and most Alwai Shia are very rich in comparison. The Assads and collateral families are very wealthy.

The Assads have kept power to date solely by using Israel as the evil outsider to give common cause between Sunni and Shia. That is why Syria has long maintained such bizarre stances on negotiating with Israel e.g. “give up back the Golan Heights artillery positions we used to shoot at you from first and maybe, just maybe, we’ll negotiate.” The biggest disaster they could imagine until recently would be if Israel suddenly disappeared.

Now, the people of Syria have gotten so hungry that they don’t give a damn about Israel. In any case, Israeli raids against what most people assume where Syrian/Iranian WMD sites of some kind caused the Assads to loose serious face in the eyes of the people. The Sunni majority may feel they can give Israel a good kick as well as the Assads.

Serious religious friction, brutality and oppression, and systematic looting of the people has made the majority of Syrians very, very angry. Many ordinary Syrians have suffered so they have every right to blood vengeance and they will take it they get the chance.

For the Assads, there is no negotiated end. They saw how quickly Gaddafi’s regime disintegrated and how he died at the hands of his own people. If the Assads’  grip on power slips even a bit, they’re dead.  The Assads know full well that they are riding a tiger they can’t jump off of without being eaten.

This isn’t going to end well for somebody.

Who Really Cares – The Myth of the Compassionate Secular-Left

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Mitt Romney gave 29.65% of his income last year to charity and gave an average of 13.5% over the last 20 years.  No surprise. He’s a Mormon. That’s what they do along with wacky things like staying married, paying attention to their children, being involved in their communities and other things that Leftists find strange and disturbing. The people we should really be surprised to find generous are the only notionally religious Leftists like Kerry, Edwards, Biden and Obama.

Surprise! The ironclad faith of Secular-Leftists in themselves as vastly more compassionate than anyone else, is, according to the best research, nothing but self-righteous, egomaniacal, self-aggrandizement. Leftists make the Pharisees of New Testament parable look pretty good in comparison. At least when the Pharisees bragged about their piety and how much they gave to the Temple, they actually performed the rituals and gave money. Leftists brag about how compassionate they are and then don’t give much from their own time and pocket books.

This would be a good time to mention again Arthur C. Brooks’ Who Really Cares, which, as near as I can tell, is the only scientific (as much as sociology can be scientific) study of charitable giving in the US. Brooks was very careful in methodology correcting for variables of income, race, etc as well as breaking apart giving to religious versus secular charities.

I found a summary online [PDF] that covers most of the findings of the book in condensed form..   It makes an eye opening read if you’ve always taken the Left’s self-mythology for granted.

Some choice bits:

Conservatives are more likely to give to charity than liberals, but only by a percentage point or two. Liberals, on the other hand, are more likely to volunteer their time than conservatives, but only by a percentage point or two. This might make it seem as if there really isn’t that much difference between the two groups when it comes to giving. However, when factors like average dollar amounts donated are examined, the differences become striking: “In 2000, households headed by a conservative gave, on average, 30 percent more money than a household headed by a liberal.” This, despite the fact that families headed by liberals earned more on average than conservative families.  

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Don’t Trust Screen Shots

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Here’s a screen shot of a post at Instapundit. See if you can spot any differences between the current post and the screenshot.

That took me literally five seconds to alter.

I use an organization/document-management app for the Mac called   DevonThink Pro. The app has many supporting scripts to capture information from various sources. Today, I learned of one called “Make Editable” a bookmarklet script for Safari and Firefox. When activated, it switches the browser page into developer mode that allows the editing of the original page right in the browser window.

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Why I Haven’t Been Blogging

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One of my older relatives once explained why he didn’t play poker. He’d done so when he was in the army but stopped as soon as he came out. His reason? He said, “I enjoyed it too much.”

He wisely recognized that it’s the things you really enjoy that can do you damage. There is no “hitting-myself-in-the-head-with-a-hammer  anonymous” but there are 12-step and rehab programs for almost any conceivable overindulged pleasure . If you don’t discipline yourself, pleasurable activities create a dangerous feedback loop that can lead you down an implosive spiral.

I really like blogging and picking fights on the internet.

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