Teleidoscope

Sun, Apr 29, 2007

Ah Hah!

Posted at 11:41 am MDT to Miscellaneous

I finally found the Mortgage closing papers. Two of the lamps I take with me to Corporate housing gigs were standing on them, on the desk in the study. I moved the lamps to the closet where I keep the corp housing kithen and bathroom stuff.

Most people who have two sets of household equipment also have two households to keep them in: their main house plus a place at the beach, or in the mountains, or in Florida (or in Connecticut, if their theoretically main place is in Florida, like my Uncle Tom and Aunt Irma).

Maybe if I ever come to a trustworthy end of this road-warrior working mode, I should look into acquiring an actual second place. That's a joke. But if I ever get to that point, I'm gonna have a heck of a yard sale, or make the Disabled American Veterans collectors very happy.

And even before then, I should go through my kitchen cupboards again and see if there is stuff that the Disabled American veterans would take away. I've got pans and utensils I never use any more because I've changed cooking styles (or found ones I like better) and which are too awkward or specialized to include in my remote-household supplies.

The top of the desk in the study is now bare.for the first time in about forever. Man, do I need to dust! Other areas of the room are still buried, but I've cleared some floor space and some space in the bookcase where I try to keep my technical books, so the ones that have been living in a milk crate can move to real shelves. The top of the bookcase and the tops of the filing cabinets are going to wait for a later round of excavation.

One of the milk crates that used to contain papers is now full of CDs and floppies and cables and adapters. And a lot of papers and other things from the desk are now in a heap in the living room, which gives me some incentive to actually get the stuff sorted: I need to tidy the living room before the next time my cleaning ladies come (Wednesday after next).

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Vitamin D and Cancer

Posted at 8:06 am MDT to Technology

It is reported that some researchers have found a startlingly large correlation between vitamin D deficiency and the incidence of cancer and other diseases including multiple sclerosis, juvenile diabetes, influenza, osteoporosis and bone fractures among the elderly. It's suggested that Vitamin D is the reason people in developing countries, who are more likely to work outdoors and not use sunscreen, have a much lower incidence of many cancers and other affected diseases than Americans, Canadians and Europeans.

It's being investigated further, but in the meantime, making sure you have plenty of vitamin D in your diet (or taking supplements) is probably not a bad idea unless you spend a lot of time in the sun.

A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error.

And in an era of pricey medical advances, the reduction seems even more remarkable because it was achieved with an over-the-counter supplement costing pennies a day.

One of the researchers who made the discovery, professor of medicine Robert Heaney of Creighton University in Nebraska, says vitamin D deficiency is showing up in so many illnesses besides cancer that nearly all disease figures in Canada and the U.S. will need to be re-evaluated. "We don't really know what the status of chronic disease is in the North American population," he said, "until we normalize vitamin D status."

I avoid sun exposure because I burn instead of tanning, and I'm lactose intolerant (though the article says you'd need to drink 3 liters of Vitamin-D-fortified milk a day to protect against cancer without sun exposure), so I should check the Vitamin D levels in my supplements, and start taking them more regularly again (I've gotten sloppy about it these past few months: one of my supplements seems to aggravate my swallowing problems, and I'm not sure which).

This data suggests that the official 'daily requirement' levels for vitamin D are much too low. I checked the toxicity levels: keeping cumulative dosage below 10,000 IU would also be a really good idea.

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