The Swine Flu, Bird Flu, and many others. All just a government conspiracy. Sure these viruses exist, but why? They are all created by the drug companies for profit. These drug companies, working along side the government create viruses and their vaccines right along with them. They then release the virus, and when the public is good and scared, they release the vaccine and rake in the money. The viruses act as a biological weapon against countries that can not afford the vaccine.

They use the viruses not only as a form of mass profit, and it works.

Okay, I don’t really believe this, although I do admit it may be possible. I was reading recently in Discover magazine about a battle with who “owns” the rights to the H5N1 (bird flu). Biological material as intellectual property is a hot issue, and has been around for a while. Indonesia is fighting for the rights – it’s a rather confusing battle, and one that you can read about on page 40 of the December issue of Discover.

But when reading the article, it got me thinking, that while they most likely do not do this, what is stopping these multi-billion-dollar drug companies from creating a virus or disease, and the cure at the same time, then infecting a bunch of people and selling them the cure for profit. The technology is certainly there, and while this is probably not happening, it is also certainly far from impossible.

We are a world of fat people. It’s true. (at least around here). It seems that the overweight far outnumber those who are not. I think much of this has to do with being lazy. We eat fast food cause we are too lazy to cook. We drive our cars cause we are too lazy to walk or bike. We take the elevator or escalator cause we are too lazy to take the stairs.  If we weren’t a lazy society, we would not be overweight!

This video is great, and shows that if you put a bit of fun into it, the laziness disappears and people actually get exercise!

It seems odd to me. The Canadian government spends countless funds on so called “free” health care. The truth is, no, it is not free. Cheap yes, but free – no. I pay $108 a month for my wife, daughter and I, in MSP (Medical Service Plan) premiums. This is mandatory. In exchange I can walk into any hospital in Canada and be treated without having to ever EVER pull out my credit card.

I admit, that $108/month is a good deal when it all boils down to it.. I am not trying to knock the system, but it certainly is not free.

But I think that that MSP premiums could be eliminated if the medical system could cut costs. Probably the biggest way to cut costs would be to reduce the number of patients. You can reduce the number of patients by having a healthier society. If you want a healthier society, why not offer tax breaks for things that can improve overall health: recreational programs, gym memberships, etc, and tax the crap out of things that are bad for you; Candy, fast food, alcohol, smokes (I know booze and cig’s are taxed like crazy as it is, but tax them more, and make it harder and harder to smoke – I hate that stuff soooo much)

If the government allowed you to write off anything that would improve your health, the money they lose in taxes would be far outweighed by the money they save in health care costs.

Okay, here is a list of some of my predictions for 91 years from now. Keep in mind I have no education relating to any of this stuff, I am just making it up off the seat of my pants.

Electricity
Forget Solar, Wind Power, and all those. We are going to be powered by the reaction caused by collision of atoms in the air and cosmic rays from space. All our appliances etc, will not need to be plugged in, they will just feed off the energy present around them. We wont be “off the grid” because there simply will be no grid. The grid will be a thing of the past.

Computers
Computers as we know them will cease to exist. Everything will be controlled with a simple and microscopic implant that will allow the unused portion of our brains to be our permanent computers. Our brains will do everything that modern computers today do – that and a 1000x more.

Exercise
Life will get a little boring, as everyone with the money to buy there computer implant, will have a health program installed. When you think that you are putting on a little too much weight, you will just run your “body-defrag” and the computer in your brain will remove the excess weight, tone your muscles, and keep you trim and healthy. There will be no more obesity.

This program is a welcome change too, considering the lack of exercise we will face with the advancements in transportation.

Transportation
Star Trekkies rejoice. Teleportation will be here, and there will be no more need for mass transit, cars, planes, or any of that junk. Heck, even now, we have built the technology to teleport information between two separate atoms. Just imagine where this will take us in 100 years from now. The impossible just may not be impossible.

Food
You’re going to miss that steak dinner. Global warming will cause mass chaos in the food chain and we will survive off of proteins grown in the lab, fake meat laced with all kinds of chemicals mimicking vitamins and other essential nutrients.

Sun Burns
You know those bad sunburns you get in the summer these days? They will be a thing of the past. We humans will evolve to make us immune to sunburns by causing our body’s to emit their own version of sun block.

That’s it for my predictions today. I will write a part 2 later when I am feeling creative again. I would LOVE to hear your thoughts on these crazy ideas, and would also love to hear your far-out predictions. Leave them in a comment to this post, or contact me!

I don’t normally blog about cosmetics and beauty products but my wife recently started selling Beauty Control products and I thougth I would give her new website a little plug. Its still a work in progress, but she is quite proud of how it is coming along. If you are at all interested in makeup and all that kinda stuff, be sure to check it out and order some stuff through her. Her Beauty Control site is setup at http://www.beauty-control.ca/

I washed my hands today in the kitchen sink and proceeded to dry them on a tea-towel hanging on the stove. I, like most people, do this often. Today I stopped to think – that tea towel is probably not very clean – I probably just made my hands “dirty” again.

I am not a germ-o-phobe so this didn’t bother me. I’ll probably do the same thing again later today – probably more than once, but it did get me thinking.

Which is better, paper or air? Let’s look at the two options, and the three main categories

Environment
I think this is probably the easiest one to answer, obviously the air dryers are best for the environment. I have done no formal studies, but I think the electricity generation required to power the hand dryers probably has less of an impact than the electricity and raw materials used to create the paper towel. Even if the paper towel is made with 100% recycled materials you still have to use electricity to turn those materials into paper, and then fossil fuels to ship that paper, and then you ultimately wind up with all this recyclable paper towel in the land fill.

Germs
I suspect paper towels are the more sanitary product here. Hand dryers; for the most part just blow the bathroom air full speed back at your hands, likely contaminating them all over again. If you’re using a hand dryer that filters and purifies the air, then I suspect that the hand dryer is the least germy choice, but only if your hands get 100% dry.

Functionality
The vast majority of air hand dryers I have used absolutely suck – that is till I tried the Dyson Airblade. I had seen many commercials and thought, hey, its just another hand dryer, then when waiting at a recently revamped BC Ferries terminal, I saw in their washrooms, they had the Airblade installed. I was pleasantly surprised to see my hands 100% dry in a matter of seconds. According to their website, they use a HEPA filtration system, so that makes it clean too.

As far as I am concerned, paper towel is my method of choice, unless the hand dryer is one that actually works.

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A few weeks back I wrote a little post about Chimeras. A Chimera is a person who is born with two different sets of DNA. The DNA may be split up throughout different parts of the body and can result in patches of different colored skin, internal organs with entirely different DNA, or even in some cases can result in hermaphrodites (people born with both male and female sex organs). In a conversation I had with my wife last week I got to thinking about this.

If a person has split DNA, one of a male, and one of a female, I had to wonder if this is what could lead to homosexuality. If the part of the brain that determines sexual orientation had the DNA of a Woman, but the rest of the person had the DNA of a man, would this make the man gay?

People who have two sets of DNA (Chimeras) are a relatively recent discovery, and because the different set of DNA can be hidden pretty much anywhere, it would be very difficult to prove. They suspect this phenomenon to be rare, but seeing as how so few people go through DNA testing, and that it would be virtually impossible to test every part of ones body and internal organs this is something that could be far more common than we could ever know.

Political Correctness
For the record, I am not sure if the word “homosexuality” is politically correct, and for that matter I am not even sure if we are supposed to say “gay” any more. All I know is that what I have written here is not meant to be offensive in any way. Let’s face it, homosexuality is not “normal”, at least at the most basic levels of nature. The meaning of life as I see it is about reproduction and a same sex relationship does not result in the spawn of offspring. As a result, in order for someone to be gay would there not have to be something different about the inner workings of their brain? The whole “Chimera” thing, at least to me, seems like a plausible answer as to what makes a person gay.

I am not saying that there is anything wrong with women dating women, and men dating men – if that’s your preference, all the power to you, I support same-sex marriage etc – everyone is equal and should have the same equal rights. I am just saying that when it comes to the fundamentals of life, being attracted to the same sex is not “normal” and as such there must be some answer as to why this happens.

(If you are offended by anything I have said here, drop me a comment on this post and let me know your view – I am curious to see how other people feel about this)

A tumor found in a newborns brain contained a foot, according to a story over at MSN Health & Fitness

I find it hard to believe, but strange things happen!

A doctor operating on a 3 day old to remove a brain tumor discovered a nearly perfect foot, hand, and thigh growing out of the newborns brain. It is believed that it was a case of “fetus in fetu” – a situation where a twin forms within another – a very rare case, and even more rare to have it occur in the brain.

I must say, this is rather freaky. I have heard of many strange cases of conjoined twins and birth defects, but this is the first I have heard of something like this. Makes me wonder what would have happened with the foot had the tumor gone unnoticed.

I had a weird dream last night. I remember next to nothing about it, other than two parts. #1 – It was really weird and #2 – I had the power to rid the world of all disease. Not sure where the power came from, or what I did with it, just that I had it.

When I woke up I thought “that would be cool”. Then I started to wonder – but would it? Most of us (probably all of us), have been affected by some disease – whether it’s cancer, diabetes, MS, MD, Aids, ALS, or any one of the countless disease out there – so on the surface, curing everything seems like a great idea.

But is it? Is it really? Earth is suffering from a horrible virus called humans. We’re killing this planet – sort of. In the long run, Earth will survive long after humans are gone, but we’re not doing it any favors. Perhaps disease is simply Earth’s way, to try and fight this horrible human virus. But let’s forget about that for a moment, what about what’s best for us?

Humans as a whole are dealing with overpopulation, and in many areas there simply isn’t enough food or clean water to keep us going – so how would riding disease help – I’m not sure it would – ridding disease would mean an even faster population growth on this planet, and more people without food and water.

As of November 2008, the world population was an estimated 6.72 billion. By 2050 it’s predicted that we will be closing in on 9 billion people (according to a page on Wikipedia).

To see if curing all disease would be a good thing, I wanted to know how many people die each year as a result of disease alone. Good luck finding that statistic! I did find a stat that noted roughly 56,000,000 people die each year. I couldn’t find any figures however, on how that number breaks down…

So here we go – I am not a scientist, the numbers represented in this blog are not official in any way – I am going to take a totally rough guess as to what percentage I think that number may represent in terms of death by disease. Lets say… hmm… 25%. Too low? Too High? I dunno. It’s a guess. Leave me a comment if you think I’m way off – I’m listening.

Let’s assume for a moment that my figure is correct, cause, well, it probably is perfect, after all I chose it. That would mean that roughly 14,000,000 people die each year from disease. If we go 42 years into the future, and assume that this rate stays the same – that means that between now and 2050, the population could be 588 million people denser (assuming none of these people die of old age)

Hmm… In some super rare off-chance that my figures are 100% perfect, that’s really not that big of a difference – I suspected the figure to be in the billions before I wrote this blog post. This of course doesn’t factor in the natural death of old age, or other tragic accidents, nor does it factor in a lot of other stuff – its just an incredibly rough, uneducated guess, but if in fact my numbers are even remotely close to anything representing reality, then I guess, curing all disease, wouldn’t really be a bad thing for humanity after all.

If disease is nature’s penicillin to rid the world of humans, then it needs to get a stronger dose, assuming that my figures are even in the ball park (which they may very well not be).

November 12 is the 316th day of the year (or in the case of leap years such as 2008, the 317th).

Today I was looking for something to write about and thought I would note a few things that have happened on this day in history:

1933:
The first known photographs of the Loch Ness Monster were taken by Hugh Gray, a British Labour Party politician and lecturer at the University of London. Gray was walking back from church when he saw a large object making a big splash. Armed with his camera he snapped the photo to the left. Skeptics dismissed the photo as being too blurry to show anything.

1935:
The first Lobotomy is performed in a Lisbon hospital by Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz. At that time things were done a little different. He essentially drilled two holes in the patients skull and injected pure alcohol into the frontal lobes of the brain. This destroyed the tissue in an effort to alter the patients behavior. No word on what happened to that original patient, and my brief efforts to find out who it was came up blank.

1970:
The famous “exploding whale” incident occurs when The Oregon Highway Division attempts to destroy a rotting and beached Sperm whale. This turned out to be not such a good idea as onlookers were covered in little bits of whale remains. This YouTube video of the incident tells the whole story