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I'm leaving tomorrow at 1pm. I have two things left to do: get a haircut, and get an adapter for European plugs so I can plug my cell phone, camera, and iPod in. Oh yeah, I got a new iPod. A 60GB iPod photo.

So I won't be writing until at least the 7th of June or so.

Another thing. I'm angry. Like the deep down in your bones, slow-burning, all-consuming anger that I was feeling all last week. I don't know where it came from. Probably from the stress of packing, and from the anger about MCP again. Just mad that I'll be graduating with the class behind me. I'm glad to be taking a semester off, but it hurts my pride (a lot) that I'm a year behind. I almost put a hole in my closet door out of frustration. It's strange because I've been in such a good mood for the last week or so. I'm just a little burned out on work and life right now. I've not really had a break since Monday. I don't like being angry. It's like the Dark Side of the Force: it gives you strength and sustains you, but at terribly cost. It leaves you feeling weaker and emptier than you were before. I don't like being angry.

Truth be told, as much as I try to keep my overactive ego in check, my feelings are (and always have been) that I'm smarter than everyone else that I've ever met. To let my ego speak freely for a minute, I've only ever met one person that I felt was truly smarter than me, and could actually keep up with me when I'm going full-bore.

(Okay that's enough of that, because egos are almost never right about their owners.)

Note to the people that like to post comments: I didn't say I was smarter than everyone else, just that my conceited side likes to burn me up sometimes. Logic is such a poor substitute for emotion when dealing with feelings: the emotion always wins out over the logic. I guess it's a good thing then that people see our actions and not our feelings. (How fucked would you (and me) be if everyone knew what we were feeling at a given moment? That asshole at the register that you wish would just drop dead, but instead it's "Hi, are you picking something up today?" Yeah. You know what I'm talking about.)

I've noticed something in male-dominated fields of study, especially computer science and physics: militant, stand-offish intellectual arrogance. An "I'm-smarter-than-you-so-fuck-off" sort of attitude. I'm not sure why this is, but it seems most prevalent in male-dominated fields of study. Maybe the reason is because there are no women, and things revert to a sort of intellectual boys' locker-room heirarchy. I'd venture that it is for this reason that women tend to avoid these branches of study. (This, of course, does not take into account the "Omg! A girl!" reaction so often seen when one is female and is studying physics, astronomy, or anything that is traditionally a "male" field. I would imagine that this is a giant turn-off as well, of course leading to these fields remaining male-dominated by their very attitude problem.)

In physics, new ideas are often ridiculed unless you're part of the inner circle. I wouldn't know from first-hand experience — I'm not a physicist, or a computer scientist (though I have studied in the two fields some). But I did find an older account, and a modern — theoretically unproven, but widely accepted — parrallel.

Franz Zwicky first discovered that galaxies in the Coma cluster were not moving in the way predicted by Newtonian gravity. According to Newtonian mechanics, they should fly apart and disintegrate. He postulated that they could only move as quickly as they were if there were hundreds of times more mass in the cluster than had been measured. This was in the 1930s.

Physics as a collective has often ridiculed the truly outlandish ideas. The same thing happened to Walter Baade in 1933 when he coined the word "supernova" and predicted that it would result in a neutron star about 14 miles across.

Ironically, it's these ideas that seem outlandish and absurd that often revolutionize a field like physics: Baade was right; Zwicky was right (which has lead to the ongoing search for dark matter); and of course the perennially-popular Einstein was also right.

I came across a Wired article this morning on Peter Lynds. Some of you may recall Lynds from a few years ago when he published a paper on the nature of time and whether there are finite, discreet instants of time. Anyway, I recall the slashdot story and the ensuing comments. Many of them flamed Lynds and called into question his grasp of modern physics. I have news for you: people smarter than you (and me) proofed the article before it was published (it was rejected twice). Random people on the Internet flaming someone published in a respected, peer-reviewed physics journal is hilarious, and would make for a great Kevin Smith movie. Moreover, the indignant, self-righteous absolutism expressed by so many of the people in that discussion thread seemed a little ridiculous to me. If you disagree with something, and have a reason, express it clearly and cogently. Don't come across like a flaming asshole, because nothing productive is accomplished when you do. An intelligent discourse on a topic is more likely to lead to both sides learning something than comments that amount to little more than "haha you're a fucking idiot!"

Sometimes I wonder if the cliquish elite is really as smart as it thinks it is. In my experience the true intelligentsia realize that they don't have all the answers and want to learn more, as opposed to getting their rocks off by shooting down something that they don't like because it challenges their position of intellectual authority and superiority. It's also "cool" to shit all over someone else because apparently it makes you look smart in comparison.

I really like some of Zwicky's parting shots in a self-published catalog of galaxies:

A Reminder to the High Priests of American Astronomy and to their Sycophants.

[...]

Today's sycophants and plain thieves seem to be free, in American Astronomy in particular, to appropriate discoveries and inventions made by lone wolves and non-conformists,

He proceeded to call them "spherical bastards," because "they are bastards any way you look at them."

I love it because I can understand his frustration: it's gotta suck to be right for so many years and never be acknowledged by the close-minded group of intellectual elitists whose approval you so desperately desire. I'd be jaded, too: the Nobel prize was awarded to someone else for the discovery of the neutron star, when by rights it should have gone to Zwicky.

Learning is not a zero-sum game. Everyone wins when knowledge and new ideas are shared and discussed. Even if it upsets your fragile little intellectual bubble. That's something I've learned over the last few years; were I to go back into CS, I would probably behave significantly differently towards my classmates. I can still remember one of the comments I made in one of my homework assignments because I thought I was hot shit: "Haha! I win!"

Sometimes I depress myself.

I decided to experiment with my diet today to see if I could eliminate/reduce the incidence of my heart skipping beats. I consumed about 24oz of orange juice (not from concentrate), a banana, 32oz of Gatorade, and a potassium supplement.

No skipped heartbeats. Not a single one.

After doing some reading and thinking I thought that I might be slighly hypokalemic. See, when I was in the hospital for my Crohn's, I pretty much had an IV hooked to me 24/7 dripping KCl solution so I'd stay hydrated. I remember I never once had a skipped heartbeat while I was there, and for the few days to a week afterward, I never had a skipped beat either.

I wracked my brains for the answer. Anxiety alone could not be the answer, and it wasn't. I was getting enough potassium then, and the more I thought about it, I realized that I wasn't getting enough here at home. I always crave orange juice, and maybe this is why, I don't know. I do know that I feel great today: strong, with no heart sensations or anything of the sort. I'm going to give it another few days like this and see if the palpitations stay away. I'll give a status update just before I leave for my trip to the UK and France.

So if your heart skips beats with any regularity, you might be hypokalemic, or short on potassium. Try taking a potassium supplement and upping your intake of natural potassium. Eat a banana. Drink lots of good OJ. Don't be a lazy fatass.

The other side of the coin is that taking too much potassium can be harmful, so don't overdo it. Consider that when someone is executed via lethal injection, the fatal drug is a bolus of KCl to stop the heart. Potassium is meant to regulate the heart, but only in moderation.

I finally released MeDic this morning. It's completely free and has about 41,000 words. I'm going to make it larger over time, but I thought that was a good place to begin for a first release.

I just finished my word list for my 0.0.1 release of my freeware medical spell-check dictionary. 41,011 words, no duplicates. It's sorted alphabetically, and broken up across 9 different files for compatibility with Word 2000 and before.

Word 2003 doesn't have a custom dictionary filesize/entry limitation, but Word XP and before have a limit of 10,000 entries or a 64KB maximum filesize.

Now I have to get ready for work and after that, a 12.30 showing of Star Wars.

Wired's running a story on Microcyn — a water that kills single-celled organisms. They say it looks, tastes, and smells like water, but carries an ion imbalance that kills bacteria, viruses, and even spores.

Developed by Oculus Innovative Sciences in Petaluma, the super-oxygenated water is claimed to be as effective a disinfectant as chlorine bleach, but is harmless to people, animals and plants. If accidentally ingested by a child, the likely impact is a bad case of clean teeth.

[...]

Oculus said the solution, called Microcyn, may prove effective in the fight against superbugs, crossover viruses like bird flu and Ebola, and bioterrorism threats such as anthrax.

Apparently this concept has been around for a while, though I had not heard of it. For some reason I would have thought that I would, given that I've now taken Pharmaceutics I and II. We went over several forms of water for medical purposes: this was not among them. Maybe it should be.

While super-oxygenated water is nothing new — Microcyn has its roots in efforts to decontaminate nuclear reactors' cooling pipes, according to Alimi — it is typically effective for only a few hours after it is formulated. To keep it handy, hospitals and labs must invest in extremely expensive machines costing $100,000 or more.

To me, $100,000 doesn't seem like much money for a typical piece of hospital equipment. If super-oxygenated water is this effective at treating so many things, particularly things like MRSA and whatnot, then it would seem like a good business decision to treat with it, especially since it would more than pay for itself over the long-term. Maybe I'm missing a piece of the puzzle, though.

And unlike prior formulations of super-oxygenated water, Microcyn is pH-neutral, so it won't damage healthy tissue. This has prompted successful experiments in the treatment of challenging wounds like diabetic ulcers.

Physicians in Mexico using Microcyn observed rapid healing of burns and ulcers that the body could not repair for a decade or more because of infections, said Dr. Andres Gutierrez, head of the cell-therapy unit at the National Institute of Rehabilitation in Mexico City and an adviser to Oculus.

"Mexico was early to obtain the technology and give regulatory approval," he said. "Doctors using the product noticed the horrific smell of diabetic wounds was gone." The smell came from bacteria.

Dr. Amar Pal Singh Suri of the Diabetic Foot Care Clinic in Delhi, India, began experimenting with Microcyn after learning of it last fall in Germany. Trying it on a severe necrotic wound of a patient whose only remaining option was amputation, Suri said he was surprised to see rapid improvement and the growth of healthy skin tissue.

"I shifted my other patients onto Microcyn treatment and we are now treating more than 50, with very good results," said Suri.

The treatment will be available in the United States in June. It'll never be available over the counter, though, because the public tends to think that all bacteria and "germs" are bad (Chlorox commercials, anyone?), and they'd probably guzzle this stuff down to keep them healthy and then end up with GI problems over the long haul when they wipe out their normal flora. But I suppose that would only happen if the water retained its bug-killing abilities throughout the entire GI tract. I think the stomach might change its chemical properties, though.

For some reason I can see Microcyn enemas being used to treat C Diff. :p

I'm very tired, and I don't really feel like writing, but I should anyway, just in case the MCP shenanigans continue past Friday. I figure if I write everything as it's happening, I'll remember more and have a fuller account should things get more absurd.

I had a conversation with the Dean of Students this morning on the phone that lasted for about 20 minutes. We set up a meeting for Friday at 4pm to discuss "potential disciplinary action," I believe was the phrase. That sort of dumbfounded me and I wasn't sure what she meant, but she explained that I might be in violation of some of the policies laid out in the student handbook. More specifically, my rant could have been construed as threatening. Against who, I'm not sure. Another possibility was that I did not act in a professional manner, which apparently extends outside the bounds of MCP. Perhaps, but then, I can think of a lot of things that people say and do that are not professional. You could make an argument that having a bowel movement the wrong way is unprofessional, so I think that argument is a crock of shit too — no pun intended — and it serves as a potential catchall for anything they don't like. Seriously, just because we're pharmacy students doesn't mean we're all running for Jesus or anything.

The fact of the matter is, MCP is getting some fairly negative publicity by my rant being so prominent when someone searches for "mcphs", and they're going to do everything in their power to make it go away. They'd be fools not too — I know I would if I were in the administration. But bullying is not the way to get it done. Maybe you can bully the majority of the sheeple in the world, but not all. Some people say I'm too stubborn for my own good, because I never give up until every possible realistic recourse has been exhausted. In the case of stifling free speech… well I'm not going to get into that until after Friday.

Since I know you administrative types at MCP are reading this, I'd just like to say that you catch more bees with honey than with vinegar. And to the faculty that I also know are also probably reading this, I would just like to say that just about all of you rock; none of what I said was directed at you. And to the others who think I'm just a stupid kid whining about school, you might be right. But if that's all I am, then why the 3-ring circus?

In more MCP news, I'll be taking a leave of absence for the Fall semester. It's sort of depressing that I'll be a year behind, but that's my own fault. I don't blame the administration for me falling a year behind — I know the rules: I just think the policies regarding progressing from one year to the next, suck.

Anyway, I told my boss about everything that's happened lately. The meeting on Friday, and the leave of absence. He asked me why I rock the boat, and why don't I conform? The answer is twofold.

First of all, I don't want to be a pharmacist. (There, I said it.) Pharmacy was always something to fall back on that could give me a nice life if nothing else worked out; it was just something to do if my grand ambitions of eventually ending up a billionaire philanthropist somehow didn't work out. (Hah!) The second part of why I don't conform is simply because I cannot. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did, and I think it would be a slap in the face to my parents if I didn't stand up for what I believe to be morally right.

He also asked me why I just didn't keep my mouth shut for a few more years until I'm collecting "the big paycheck." The answer to that is because I'll be too fucking comfortable then, and I'll get fat and stupid and be too busy enjoying myself to rock the boat. Because the status quo will be in my favor then, and instead of taking the risks that might tilt it even more my way, I'll be conservative because the risks are, well, risky, and instead I'll be content to just let it ride. Ambitious people with nothing are so much better off than ambitious people with something: they've got so much less to lose if they fail.

I find it funny that some of the same people that are so vehement about how people should stand up for themselves shy away so quickly when an adversary so much bigger than them comes along. All of a sudden, standing up for what you believe in doesn't seem like such a good idea because it's not easy or comfortable. It seems imprudent.

But when you get right down to it, what's the worst that could happen? I could get booted out of school (unlikely), and I'll have $100K in student loans to start paying off, assuming I don't just go re-enroll somewhere else. Big fucking deal. Donald Trump was once in the hole $8 billion.

There's no age limit to standing up for yourself, nor is there an age limit for rocking the boat or disturbing the status quo. The younger you start, the better your chances for overwhelming success (and conversely, failure) instead of boring mediocrity. Pick and choose your battles carefully, but never compromise your character. When I was younger, people older than me always said that they wished that young people would have more backbone to stand up for something. But when they finally do something that makes them stand out, they get told to sit down and shut the fuck up because all of a sudden, they don't like what those younger people have to say about their system.

Fuck that. You can't please everyone. I will always speak my mind, no matter how unpopular it might be.

Well I've made quite a bit of effort over the last two days to expand my medical spell-check dictionary. Right now I'm at 44,335 words. Assume about 1,000 duplicates, and that's still 43,000 words. That's crazy, and it still has a long way to go.

I hope to have version 0.0.1 complete in a week. Figure a wide release in the beginning of June when this month's bandwidth rolls over, and I'll be golden.

If you see the site changing abruptly and/or looking like ass, it's because I'm working on a new layout for it. When I'm not playing with it, you'll see the normal layout until I finish the new one, at which time the old layout will disappear.