What do you say when the doctors proclaim someone is in a "persistent vegetative state"? Pull the plug? Give up and walk away? Just forget the patient and move on?
What if the patient then suddenly wakes up and talks?
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - A woman who went into a vegetative state in November of 2000 awoke this week for three days, spoke with her family and a local television station before slipping back on Wednesday. "I'm fine," Christa Lilly told her mother on Sunday — her first words in eight months. She has awakened four other times for briefer periods.
"I think it's wonderful. It makes me so happy," Lilly told television station KKTV-TV. She also got to see youngest daughter, Chelcey, now 12 years old, and three grandchildren.
Her neurologist, Dr. Randall Bjork, said he couldn't explain how or why she awoke.
"I'm just not able to explain this on the basis of what we know about persistent vegetative states," he said.
The sad fact here is that the "authoritative pronouncements" of the doctors need to be carefully judged by the people involved. A lot of what they say is based on a consensus of opinion. Sometimes, those consensus decisions are not, in fact, correct. How many times in my lifetime alone I have seen things which were adamantly proclaimed to be the absolute TRUTH™ turn out later to be completely wrong, I can't even count. This happens rather often in the medical field although the doctors don't actually like to announce their sudden reversals. (The treatment of stomach ulcers for many years would be a rather good example. It turns out that most of what the doctors strongly recommended was either useless or harmful. Or both.) It happens in the hard sciences, too. There were physicists who went to their graves believing Einstein was completely wrong for having overturned all the consensus opinions from generations of physics thought and belief.
There is much we do not understand. And sometimes the doctors make a pronouncement that is exactly correct. Only it might not be.
Bryan over at Hot Air has the latest - how to put this delicately - insanity over the Scooter Libby conviction. A member of the jury who voted for coviction and now wants him pardoned.
Because it would be "fun".
It takes an awful lot to leave me speechless, but that clip leaves me speechless. She wants Libby pardoned because “It would be fun…It would be fun to follow” and because it would make work for people like Chris Matthews…? A man’s freedom hangs in the balance and she a) convicted him and now b) wants him pardoned, for the fun of it. Egad, how was this jury chosen?
Well. It would be "fun". It would also be "fun" if a juror actually did their job instead of planning ahead for the "fun" later, wouldn't it?
I suppose that's too much "fun" to ask for.
So, your just about to carry out the funeral. All of the mourners have gathered, the proper clergy contacted, the guest of honor, so to speak, has been suitably prepared. Then a telephone call interrupts the whole thing.
Getting a call from the guest of honor can kind of ruin the whole flow.
NEW DELHI (AFP) - An Indian man's family almost cremated a dead body that resembled their relative but stopped when they got a telephone call from him, a report said Wednesday.
Deepak Bhattacharya, who had left his house on Tuesday to pay a phone bill, was shocked to hear from his family that they were preparing to cremate a dead body they thought was his, the Press Trust of India reported.
The mix-up in the central Indian city of Raipur occurred after police called the family about an hour after Bhattacharya had left his home and asked them to identify a corpse.
"Bhattacharya's brother-in-law identified the body and took it home for the last rites," Superintendent of Police Sashi Mohan Singh told the news agency.
Hey, the guy should be happy the family didn't insist on carrying on with the real guest of honor!
Workers at the headquarters of 3M were given a rude introduction to the Animal Uprising™ on Tuesday. Instead of a normal, quiet lunch hour, they had a deadly deer rampage through one of their laboratories.
Just before noon, employees in Building 201 heard the crash. Then, a company alert went out about the unwelcome corporate raider.
"The guy on the PA system said, 'Emergency response, emergency response. Deer just went through the window,' " said Andrew Hine, a 3M researcher who works in an adjacent building. "Everyone just went down there to look."
Police officers arrived to find shattered glass everywhere and one edgy deer.
"It got into the lab and was really breaking stuff up," said Lt. Kevin Rabbett of the Maplewood Police Department. "The officers said there were beakers flying all over the place."
Officers couldn't find anyone nearby with a tranquilizer gun, so they put their heads together and hatched a plan.
They opened a door.
Police steered the deer into a hallway that dead-ended at an exit door. Officers blocked other passages, which left the deer one option — leave. Finally, it did.
Sure, it left and the police helped it to do so. (We here at Blue Crab Boulevard are highly suspicious that the police were in on it. Note the last name of the police spokesman.) The problem is, the deer also got the top secret formula for the glue used on Post-It Notes®. We're not sure what the animal overlords are planning to do with that formula. We shudder to think of some of the possible uses for self-adhesive animals that can be removed and reapplied.
If you're like us here at Blue Crab Boulevard, you lay awake at night thinking about the dreaded Animal Uprising™ and trying to figure out what they will strike with next. Atomic ants? Nuclear newts? Taser-proof pigs? Oh wait, they already did that one. But never, not even a little, tiny bit, did we see this one coming.
Carnivorous cattle.
But Ajit Ghosh, the owner of the missing chickens, eventually solved the puzzle when he caught his cow — a sacred animal for the Hindu family — gobbling up several of them at night.
"We were shocked to see our calf eating chickens alive," Ghosh told Reuters by phone from Chandpur village, about 240 km (150 miles) northwest of capital Kolkata.
The family decided to stand guard at night on Monday at the cow shed which also served as a hen coop, after 48 chickens went missing in a month.
"Instead of the dogs, we watched in horror as the calf, whom we had fondly named Lal, sneak to the coop and grab the little ones with the precision of a jungle cat," Gour Ghosh, his brother, said.
Consider the fact that the cow is currently enjoying poultry. But what comes next? It's only a matter of time until children start going missing. Then full grown humans. Be afraid. Your steak is about to turn on you.
An Iraqi national, in the US with a green card, triggered a scare at the Los Angeles airport. He had a magnet and wires secreted inside his rectum. And authorities say there is no apparent cause for concern. Sure.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - An Iraqi national wearing wires and concealing a magnet inside his rectum triggered a security scare at Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday but officials said he posed no apparent threat.
The man, identified by law enforcement officials as Fadhel al-Maliki, 35, set off an alarm during passenger screening at the airport early on Tuesday morning.
A police bomb squad was called to examine what was deemed a suspicious item found during a body cavity search of the man. Local media reports said a magnet was found in his rectum.
"He was secreting these items in a body cavity and that was a great concern because there were also some electric wires associated with that body cavity," Larry Fetters, security director for the Transportation Security Administration at the airport, told reporters.
Well, gee. I missed the newest craze, apparently. The butt magnet must be all the current rage if the Feds aren't even concerned. They apparently have no worries that the man could have been testing security to see what he could get through. But no worries. Just a butt magnet. Nothing to see. Move along.
Only it isn't really actually geeks anymore. It is two monster corporate entities going at one another. Microsoft is attacking Google - very publicly. The opening salvo was from one of Microsoft's top attorneys.
Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association of Publishers in New York, Thomas C. Rubin, Microsoft's associate general counsel, devoted much of his remarks to an attack on Google's practice of copying entire books into its database, often without the permission of copyright holders.
"It systematically violates copyright and deprives authors and publishers of an important avenue for monetizing their works," Rubin said, according to prepared remarks. "In doing so, it undermines critical incentives to create."
Microsoft's salvo came as the software giant faces mounting pressure from Google, which is increasingly extending its reach beyond the Web search that made it the darling of the technology industry.
Last month, Google began selling an online productivity suite, including e-mail, calendar and Web services, that competes with Microsoft's Office software. Google also continues to extend its substantial lead over Microsoft in Web searching, an area where Microsoft has struggled and that remains the main way users navigate the Internet.
Microsoft is taking the position that Google needs to be curbed by publishing companies. Now I have been through a very, very bad week due to Microsoft Windows XP. So I'm not exactly unbiased here. At the same time, every stinking time I tried to install updates to various products, they "offered" to install various Google software for me, just for my convenience. Sure. Both of these companies are behaving as if they own your computer because you use their software. There is a basic problem with that whole mentality.
Medicine, News | Gaius Wednesday, 7 March , 2007 | 
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