Droppings ...

Some scattered thoughts while taking solace in the fact the liver regenerates every 300 to 500 days.

* When John Bolton presented his credentials at the UN, did his CV include the line “was not approved by the United States Congress”?

* If this little dispatch from Colombia is correct in its assessment, I think there will soon be some extremely overworked indepepndent contractors in San Francisco.

*So, not to appear materialistic or anything, but when this happens, do you get reimbursed for the value of your carry-on bags?

* Just in case you haven’t gotten your dose of hypochondria today, here’s a report on the “next AIDS epidemic” of the week. Of course, if this does turn out to be even one-tenth as devastating as AIDS in a few years, this post never existed. I repeat, never existed.

Anyway, I’m not going to summarize the article on “Metabolic Syndrome” because it’s so blatantly alarmist, but it does – inadvertently – raise one interesting point in the following paragraph:

“One of the most alarming results in this study is how many non-smoking teens are being exposed to second-hand smoke. He (Michael Weitzman, M.D professor and associate chair at the University of Rochester School of Medicine) says a shocking 66 percent of teens in the study have a measurable amount of cotinine, a biochemical remnant of the breakdown of nicotine in the liver. Presence of cotinine in the blood indicates exposure to secondhand smoke.”

Is anyone else “shocked by” the things that scientists are “shocked by” when they perform these studies? I know you spend a lot of time in the lab doc, but really, “shocked” that 66 percent of teens have exposure to secondhand smoke? In other news, the American people were “shocked” to learn that 66 percent of scientists don’t get out much. Then again, I’m typing this from a bar which places me pretty high on the dork-out scale, so the glass house rule probably applies here.

* Lastly, just in case you ever wondered what might happen if, instead of immediately deleting those Nigerian investment emails, you kicked the tires a little bit ’cause, you know, it wouldn’t hurt to take a look:

"In the course of a rare crackdown on Nigerian "419"/"advance-fee" scams, a Nigerian court in July sentenced a woman to 30 months in jail, plus fines, in a case in which the victim was not a gullible, e-mail-reading American, but a bank. Brazil's Banco Noroeste S.A. was apparently suckered into advancing money for a nonexistent new airport in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, which ultimately cost it $242 million (much of which it later recovered)." [Reuters, 7-16-05]