Garlic and medicine

Garlic has many wonderful uses. It is good for helping to prevent several forms of cancer, it lessens arterial hardening due to cholesterol in persons who are not already at a high level, it's a known vasodilator, and it's a great expectorant. It is a wonderful topical antibiotic, and when used as such is even a lowlevel antiviral compound.

What it is not, however, is an internal antibiotic. Your stomach acid promptly breaks down the polysulfides (which give it the topical usage) into the vasodilative compound mentioned above.

Let's make this crystal clear: garlic is a wonderful TOPICAL antibiotic. A garlic compound spray could work better than even Bactine.. just remember to wipe it off after a bit or allow it to absorb into a bandage rather than spray directly on a wound. In fact, it's often overkill to leave it on a potentially infective entry point for too long because it will also kill healthy cells in high enough concentration. Ingesting garlic has absolutely no antibiotic properties of any kind; that is nonsense. People are mistaking it's properties as a vasodilator and expectorant for antibiotic ones. Garlic treats the symptoms of bacterial infections internally, it absolutely does NOT treat the cause.

Just because it's making you feel better does not mean it is actually making you better. That said, feeling better IS important for recovery, when you are happy your immune system works better, but that does not make garlic an internal antibiotic any more than chicken soup is an internal antiviral. These particular folk remedies ease you and comfort you, which allows your immune system to do it's job better; nothing more. Reading your favorite book and avoiding stress would do the same job and better.

I suppose in theory if injected it would be an internal antibiotic... but "biotic" means "living thing". It'll happily kill friendly cells as well as unfriendly ones. I'm not willing to risk it any more than I would ingest the necessary amount of silver to suspend in my flesh to create a small internal antibiotic use. Your skin will be grey long before you derive any usage of it.

Allow me to go more in depth about how internal antibiotics work. Read this part carefully. Internal antibiotics generally do NOT directly kill the infection! In fact, most are simply bacteriostatic. The ingested compounds enter your bloodstream and slow the growth of the bacteria. That's all they do, slow down the bacterial growth and reproductive cycle.

Bactericidal substances (such as lysol, bactine, garlic, silver) do destroy bacteria, but they do so by permeating their cellular walls and causing effects ranging from not allowing the bacteria to take in needed nutrients or oxygen, to flatout drying the bacteria out until they die. Now, I will back this off a bit. In high enough concentrations, most bacteriostatics are also bactericidal. However, that is an incidental sideffect, it is your own immune system doing the work with the bacteriostatic aid that helps you get better.

Bactericidal compounds are topical. Bacteriostatic compounds are internal.  An easy way to remember it is this: if it works when you rub it on, it invariably has little to NO use when ingested.

Everyone knows that pouring alcohol on a wound will cleanse it. Everyone also knows that drinking alcohol has no internal antibiotic properties (beyond the throat). You don't swallow lysol pills, you don't drink your antibacterial soap. It's almost frightening quackery to claim garlic or silver are any different. The human body simply does not work that way. Anyone who says otherwise is willfully ignoring thousands of years of evidence to the contrary, most of it from the _exact same old sources_ they claim backs their quackery. You might as well talk about the amazing benefits of mercury while you're at it, cause that's something they used to give people doses of in the "old days" as well as an antibiotic, simply because it was a decent topical antiseptic.

More science-like misconceptions.

Sometimes you will hear things about light being the absolute limit at which information can be transmitted., and causality.  The speed of light has nothing at all to do with causality.  From such nonsense comes the pseudo-science people call "Quantum Mechanics".  Travelling faster than another beings relative speed of light won't make you see events before they happen.  There is no speed of information; period.  None.  Of any sort, whatsoever.  There is only speed of perceiving events.

While we're at it, people like to misunderstand Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as well.  Light particles knock around subatomic particles, all he was saying is that it's impossible to observe CERTAIN events without disrupting the "no light" version of the outcome.  It means that, as of right now, we are uncertain about how certain particles behave because we have no non-obstrusive way to observe them yet.

Some scientists like to read that as "observation changes outcome" and start extrapolating nonsense from it.  Schroedinger's Cat is actually an exercise to demonstrate how absurd this line of thought is, not to provide layman's proof of "transfer of information" or "alternate probability outcomes".

Ludicrous Speed!

"Is there any definitive proof that we can't travel faster than the speed of light?"

None whatsoever and Einstein never said it was an unbreakable barrier. Light is just a particle, and we can vary it's speed with gravitational forces. I've often spent my life wondering why people read more into what Einstein said than he did. The extreme layman's terms is this: he theorizes that light appears as a constant TO YOU no matter what speed you're travelling. You can easily be travelling, relativistically speaking, faster than the speed of light from another observer's standpoint but you can never travel faster than light from your own perception, because you'd necessarily be disrupting it at your base speed always. Remember we do not see light, we see deviations in it and reflections of it.

Have you ever been in a car travelling 60 MPH and thrown a ball to another person in the front seat? To you, the ball's maybe going 5 MPH; it is, in fact, going the "speed of thrown ball". However, the "speed of thrown ball" to you would be oh... 65 MPH to someone standing on the roadside observing only your ball.

On Gaming

I read this in a thread elsewhere about why Microsoft made their Kinect and Sony their Wiimote and Nunchuk Move

"Why wouldn't Sony and Microsoft want a piece of the braindead sheep market ? "

Sony has controlled that market since PS1 days.  What Nintendo did was make gaming a widespread affair again, like it had been up until halfway through PS1 days.  Sony has you convinced that playing games as if they were your job makes you "hardcore".  It does not, it makes you sad and pathetic.  Gaming on video systems was, at one time, like any other hobby; working on models, board games, playing impromptu baseball with the guys.. it was something you do in your leisure time.  There have always been people who take hobbies far too seriously, they have unbalanced lives.  As it should be, these obsessions are looked at askance.

We are the true core of gaming.  Sony simply has a vocal minority convinced that it's normal to forgo a life in favor of a hobby.  So long as Nintendo continues to find fun things for us to do with our friends... REAL friends not just anonymous names on a  contact list, and fun things to do when you can snatch moments of spare time... Nintendo will always be around.  And Nintendo has always (post Atari)been on top.  "Portable" gaming is not a magical different category, it's all video gaming.  The systems that have sold the most have always had Nintendo's name on them, except for the days of Atari.  The Sony PS1 did not outsell the GBA.  The DS outsold the PS2 (and obviously XBox), but I'll be darned if Sony and Microsoft didn't go through contortions to try to play that fact down.  The Gamecube?  Ugh.  They shot themselves in the foot not releasing the model with a fullsize DVD player, if it weren't for their core designers working hard on their other systems, that piece of junk woulda hurt them.

Hobbies are not a lifestyle, they're hobbies.  Just because you're not part of the main herd does not mean you're not brainless, unthinking followers.  Sony (and to a lesser extent, Microsoft) has you herd of black sheep convinced that it's healthy to spend 30+ hours a week hiding from the real world in a hobby.  You are told that it's a badge of pride to be "hardcore" into gaming, despite it providing no advancement, and you swallow it up and line up in the pasture to be fleeced by the next time sink.    You play the same three games over and over, afraid to try something new, afraid to innovate, afraid to be challenged.  When something different comes along, you dismiss it as "casual" like it's a bad thing when adults treat a leisure activity as a leisure activity.  Nintendo will continue to innovate like it has since they first took a chance on this "arcade" media when they were a small card game company in Japan, and everyone else will continue to play catchup.

Also, anyone noticed how sad and pathetic gaming magazines are getting?  "PS3 sold more during this month than the Wii did!" and all the sad and lonely people who treat gaming as a lifestyle rather than a hobby rejoice, even while claiming sales don't matter.  Game Informer's statements were the funniest "If this trend continues, in the next 3 years the PS3 will outsell the Wii!"

So which is it guys?  Do sales not matter or are the HD consoles are inherently superior, which is why the sales are "finally" starting to catch up?  Are Sony and Microsoft showing Nintendo how motion control should be done (three years later) or are they grabbing a "piece of that casual pie"?  Are you the "real" gamers, part of some "silent majority", or are you the minority oppressed by the masses?

28 years ago, my father, Grandfather, and I played Atari 2600.  My father hung with me until SNES days, but darn it the PS1 stopped being a fun social activity.  Sure, there were deep time consuming games in all generations until then, but plenty to do with your whole family.  Not so once Sony got on board.  The PS2?  Forget it.  Litte to do with your friends, much less your family.

Gaming has come full circle again, and I can see my wife, her parents, and our future children playing the Wii 2.  Thank the Sun that gaming has gone back to they way it was always supposed to be... I want to have fun times with my kids... not argue about who gets to use the TV to play the latest RPG or FPS for hours at a time.

And it marches on

We got a nice propane stove/range combo unit a few days back.  I'll link it with an affiliate ID and so on later, but for now.. we haven't tried it yet, but I like it.  It fits a 9x13 pan, and has two racks, so it can go just about anything.  The gas for it will be so phenomenally cheap it will actually be more affordable to start using it NOW than to use our electric range.  Even averaging out for heating cycles, the electric range uses one entire kilowatt hour in 15 minutes flat!  That means the thing costs us 12 cents just to properly pre-heat.  To compare, it takes my computer two and a half hours of hardcore intense gaming to use one kilowatt hour of power.

By my calculations, using the propane instead will save us almost 40% over using electricity.  The oven, the dryer and the water heater are the biggest power consumers around.  I'm considering getting a solar shower bag for doing dishes (and possibly showering!) to save money there as well.  The propane oven has me all excited again, and I may have to steal cooking duties back form my wife.  She decides WHAT we eat, I cook it.  Cooking with propane is an art form, and one I am eager to learn.  Took care of Valentine's Day shopping today, and SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER.  So SPOILER and then SPOILER!  Lol.  Took forever to find what I wanted, in other words.  Picked up my wife's new Green Rider book today, The Black Veil.  I ran into the former best friend of one of my ex's, she checked me out.  She messed it up, just as stupid as Juliana herself was, and charged me for the book.  I had to come back with the receipt pointing out we had already paid for it and get a full refund.  No way in heck will I pay $30 for a book we got for $10!  No worries, it enabled me to get the last thing I needed for the big holiday.

Got volume 2 of A Dance in the Vampire Bund as well.  Can't wait to read it.  I'm thinking hot coca, a snack, and then Miba and I dash to our respective reading holes and read.

War

Young men aren't seasoned enough to know what's actually worth fighting for, but old men who have never lifted arms are awfully good at using jingoism to convince them to die on their behalf.