Below is a link to a NYT article on people trying to live with Alzheimer’s. The observations in the article line up with my own. If you read the article you will see there is one man profiled who still retains his short term memory but is losing his motor skill rapidly. Then there is a lady who retains her motor skills better but has completely lost her short term memory. Grandpa isn’t so much to one extreme or the other, but those cases reflect how Alzheimer’s progresses differently for every individual.

I would say Grandpa has lost probably short term memory and motor skills in equal measure. He hasn’t lost either entirely, but both are getting progessively worse.

Here is the link: NYT Article on Alzheimer’s

Wonder if this is any more accurate then our weather forecasts….

This week researchers announced that a storm is coming–the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one,” she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.

That was a solar maximum. The Space Age was just beginning: Sputnik was launched in Oct. 1957 and Explorer 1 (the first US satellite) in Jan. 1958. In 1958 you couldn’t tell that a solar storm was underway by looking at the bars on your cell phone; cell phones didn’t exist. Even so, people knew something big was happening when Northern Lights were sighted three times in Mexico. A similar maximum now would be noticed by its effect on cell phones, GPS, weather satellites and many other modern technologies.

Dikpati’s prediction is unprecedented. In nearly-two centuries since the 11-year sunspot cycle was discovered, scientists have struggled to predict the size of future maxima—and failed. Solar maxima can be intense, as in 1958, or barely detectable, as in 1805, obeying no obvious pattern.

The rest of the article talks about the conveyor belt that they think operates on the sun.

There is an interesting article in the New York Times on dark matter and dark energy. A quote from the article…..

And if the right ripples hadn’t shown up? As Frieman puts it: “You just would have thrown up your hands and said, ‘My God, we’ve got to go back to the drawing board!’ What’s remarkable to me is that so far that hasn’t happpened.”

Yet in a way it has. In the observation-and-theory, call-and-response system of investigating nature that scientists have refined over the past 400 years, the dark side of the universe represents a disruption. General relativity helped explain the observations of the expanding universe, which led to the idea of the big bang, which anticipated the observations of the cosmic-microwave background, which led to the revival of Einstein’s cosmological constant, which anticipated the observations of supernovae, which led to dark energy. And dark energy is … ?

The difficulty in answering that question has led some cosmologists to ask an even deeper question: Does dark energy even exist? Or is it perhaps an inference too far? Cosmologists have another saying they like to cite: “You get to invoke the tooth fairy only once,” meaning dark matter, “but now we have to invoke the tooth fairy twice,” meaning dark energy.

The article makes me think of the argument in Spinoza, Einstein, and the Failure of Reason. Especially those places in the article were they are speculating that the answer might be more complicated then we can conceive.

According to the New York Times, the answer cannot be blamed just on the varroa mites. They say that there is more to it then that. An excerpt from the article…..

Beekeepers have fought regional bee crises before, but this is the first national affliction.

Now, in a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie, bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their colonies. And nobody knows why. Researchers say the bees are presumably dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold.

As researchers scramble to find answers to the syndrome they have decided to call “colony collapse disorder,” growers are becoming openly nervous about the capability of the commercial bee industry to meet the growing demand for bees to pollinate dozens of crops, from almonds to avocados to kiwis.

You can read the whole article here….

Seen by Ape Man

From this study…..

The sham device had greater effects than the placebo pill on self reported pain and severity of symptoms over the entire course of treatment but not during the two week placebo run in. Placebo effects seem to be malleable and depend on the behaviours embedded in medical rituals.

Also, read this Discover Magazine article. (h/t DocBug)

Found by Ape Man

I’ve encountered two Microsoft Office problems recently that were peculiar enough that I decided the solutions would be worth sharing. Let me know if this helps you!
The first one was in Excel 2000. The Save As menu option errored out claiming that it could not find GWXL97.xla. The Save, close, and a few other options Click Here to continue reading.

Most of you have probably already read the letter about DRM Steve Jobs put on the Apple site, but if you haven’t, you should check it out. He doesn’t say anything that isn’t old news to most of us, but it’s nice to have him finally admit that DRM doesn’t do anyone any good. Click Here to read more.

Derek Lowe has an interesting post up on the patenting of genes. Well worth taking a look at for a more technical description of the problems with the practice.
Best part….
How about polymers that aren’t man-made, like cotton or silk? We have no good way (at present) to produce or isolate individual single isomers of such Click Here to continue reading.

I came across an article about “random” numbers recently that I found quite interesting. It found that when people are asked to pick a random number between 1 and 20, they favor prime numbers, particularly the number 17. Read the article here, and the follow-up article here/