Having music in my head almost all the time certain works buzz around over a period of days or weeks. If I am talking to you I’m usually engaged but I start to hear music as soon as I walk away. Lately Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring has been one of those musical pieces. There…
Just published in the New England Journal of Medicine (Persistence of Ebola Virus in Ocular Fluid during Convalescence, Varkey, JB et al online May 7, 2015) is the story of finding Ebola in the left eye of a physician patient thought to have been cured of the disease. I marvel at the men and women…
China is a land with many hands whereas in the US we lack labor. Be not deceived by the US unemployment rate. Too many oldsters have retired. We need younger folks to support them and our economy. We are troubled being unable to match skills with available work. Through American economic history we have always…
Those who believe in a literal Bible mistakenly take Adam and Eve of Genesis as the first human couple. It isn’t abundantly clear that Adam and Eve were the only living humans at the time. For instance when Cain murders Abel and was to be shunned by other humans he was saved from being immediately…
I now saw very distinctly that these were little eels or worms… Lying huddled together and wriggling, just as if you saw with your naked eye a whole tubful of very little eels and water, the eels moving about in swarms; and the whole water seemed to be alive with the multitudinous animalcules. For me…
The way I look at it, why take a religious belief if it does not tell anything about what is larger than ourselves and what’s left after we die? Religion is about the knowing there is something larger than yourself, greater than your own life, more encompassing and coextensive in space and time, that was…
For a long time before and after President Obama was elected Americans debated whether he was truly one of us.The opposition harangued about his incompetence as a community organizer turned senator. They maintained that he was not American, impugning his birth certificate from the State of Hawaii. Donald Trump had a trial run for president on…
When it comes to learning new things, we adults are our own worst enemies. Watch a child learn. Little children have a sense of over excited anticipation. Kids are empirical learners. They tend to try things out without any encumbering anxiety of making mistakes. Adults, on the other hand, conceive of ways to make their…
In the 1960s my dad had ulcers causing painless profuse rectal bleeding and prostration. He hemorrhaged a number of times. Doctors admitted him to the hospital where he got 6 or 8 units of blood. His doctors thought bleeding ulcers were caused by aspirins which he used hardly at all. NSAIDs like ibuprofen, the first…