Alcohol as a therapeutic?

From Australia (where else?) comes this gem of a story about alcohol being used therapeutically:

DOCTORS used a case of vodka to help save an Italian tourist being treated for poisoning in a Queensland hospital. And hospital authorities later proved very understanding about the booze bill. The 24-year-old man was brought to Mackay Base Hospital, in north Queensland, two months ago after he had ingested a large amount of the poisonous substance ethylene glycol, found in antifreeze, which can cause renal failure and is often fatal.

Well I got curious, of course, as to how exactly it was possible for alcohol to be GOOD for you (asides from red wine, but then its not the booze in red wine that's helping you, but some of the other stuff). I also got curious, however, because this story directly relates to the Chinese Poison Toothpaste Fiasco that has been leading headlines this year (you may recall, ethylene glycol is similar to glycerine and was substituted in toothpastes made in China).

Luckily, the beauty of the modern 'radiated library' known as the internet has merged with the 1980s/90s 'evidence-based medicine' movement to let average Joes like me access lots of free medical information. Here, you can find "Methanol and ethylene glycol poisoning: a case study and review of the literature" which neatly summarizes (in fairly penetratable medspeak) exactly what happens with ethylene glycol poisoning.


Essentially, ethylene glycol and alcohol go through the same metabolic pathways in the body, and thus are broken down by the same compounds. Ethylene glycol itself is not poisonous, it is its after-molecules that cause trouble. Oxalate acid in particular has a tendancy to build up in certain bodily tissues, especially the kidneys. This 'oxalate crystal deposition' is a primary mechanism of ethylene glycol's toxicity, and leads to kidney failure (and potentially death). This is ethylene glycol's metabolic pathway:

Treating ethylene glycol poisoning is really easy, you first have to block the molecule's metabolic pathways, to prevent further harm. This is usually accomplished with IV ethanol (alcohol) or fomepizole, and seeks to block the action of ADH in metabolizing the compound. Fomepizole simply inhibits the ability of ADH to do its work, while ethanol 'competes' with ethylene glycol for ADH floating around in your system. It turns out that booze is 100 TIMES more able to soak up ADH than ethylene glycol, so putting just a little bit of alcohol into your system quickly takes up all the available ADH, simply preventing ethylene glycol from breaking down while you are drunk. In the meantime, while ADH is being blocked, ethylene glycol is simply floating around, not dangerous, but not going away. Simple hemodialysis (filtering of the blood through an external machine) can accomplish the task of scrubbing your blood of the ethylene glycol.

This is why the docs gave the guy 3 drinks an hour for 3 days, because they essentially needed to keep him long-term buzzed , to prevent his kidneys from failing, while they scrubbed his blood. I guess he took so much, that it took them a while. HAH.

Also check out wikipedia.

More cool architecture

I've been seeing some pretty cool buildings lately, in a sort of 21st century modernism based on glass, steel, aluminum and totally unconventional vertical aesthetics. It's funny how much our impression of buildings is rooted in our deep reliance on the functionality of buildings, as solid structures whose stability protects us from the element. It seems that we therefore prize solid, secure aesthetics, namely the importance of 90 degree angles. Even the Bilbao Guggenheim ascribes to this innate need for secure stability. Despite its titanium sides and smoothly fluid lines, it is fundamentally squatly anchored in the ground.

Newer 21st century architecturs even seem to challenges this, I have been noticing. This new architecture seems to revel in illusions of instability through leaning, slumping, and surging at angles neither paralell, nor perpindicular to the horizon. Three examples:

Stata Center, MIT

The new crystal addition to the Royal Ontario Museum:

And my personal favorite, the new Central Chinese Television Tower (CCTV), being built, in Beijing:

Prophetic futurists from the past

Check this out:

Here, the workspace is no longer cluttered with any books. In their place, a screen and a telephone within reach. Over there, in an immense edifice, are all the books and information. From there, the page to be read, in order to know the answer to the question asked by telephone, is made to appear on the screen. The screen could be divided in half, by four, or even ten if multiple texts and documents had to be consulted simultaneously. There would be a loudspeaker if the image had to be complemented by oral data and this improvement could continue to the automating the call for onscreen data. Cinema, phonographs, radio, television: these instruments, taken as substitutes for the book, will in fact become the new book, the most powerful works for the diffusion of human thought. This will be the radiated library and the televised book.

Sounds kinda like computers and the internet right? Well that was one hell of a prophetic dude, from back in 1934 (check it out). Ridiculous.

What crazy idea have you heard of recently that will actually become the future?

Why I love the View

I think Barbara Walters is secretly a genius. Let's review.

Star Jones. 'nuff said.
Rosie's Trump feuds and loud radical lesbo-feminist crassness.
Barry Manilow hating Elisabeth Haselbeck (yup, he's definitely gay)
Whoopi Goldberg saying Michael Vick should be excused because black culture doesn't care about dogs.
And now, Barbara Walters has finished the latest version of the view cast.....Sherri Shepherd.

It inspires speechlessness.

And then she tries to make me feel bad for daring to think such airy thoughts as 'why does the sun rise in the east but set in the west' while she slaves away providing for her children? That's rich.

Freedom for the Burmese

I have been following with great interest and hope the ongoing events in Burma, and I still don't know what to make of it. Generally speaking, revolutions require a uniting of disparate lesser power sources with the common people. This generally involves something like radicals and moderates finding common cause (see French, Russian, or Iranian revolutions), or previously neutral parties joining in (Turkish or maybe Burmese with the monks?). There is an important distinction, however, from many overthrows of corrupt tottering regimes and superpower client states like the revolving door of Pakistani/Bangladeshi governments, the Afghanistan cold war saga, or even the Indonesian 1998 revolutions.



This is a totalitarian state. Burma isn't some carefully sown together balance of power between conflicting factions like ethnic groups (see Lebanon), sectarian parties (see Iraq), ancient political families (see Bangladesh/Indonesia), or any of the other traditional pedestrian power centers that must be carefully managed in many traditional governments. This is hard-core, orthodox totalitarianism. Kickin'-it Stalin style, if you will. Belarus and the old N Korea are close competitors for truly worst places on earth. In a vacuum, they would simply not exist, but would collapse under the weight of their own oppression. They only exist as client states of major powers-ironically more useful the more oppressive they are-because they are more annoying to the open democratic societies of the world.



In this kind of state, revolutions aren't quite simply a matter of aligning domestic power interests, but removing the external sources of power. Without Russia, Belarus would not exist the way it does today, without China, their would only be one Korea and no Myanmar-Burma. Pressure on China is the key, but where can this come from? Considering how important image is to China these days, maybe simply public pressure from its customers (us) can bring the pressure? Sign this petition.