If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, United States (Photo credit: Wikipedia) What Is It About February and Suicide? I have long believed people have some control over the exact date of their death, short of a tragic accident. It may only be a day or two, or a week or two if they have some event they are trying to live to see. So, when my father died of a hemorrhagic stroke on February 12, 1991, four days after the stroke hit him, I thought he was trying to spare my mother the grief that... (Read More ...)

Is 98.2 Degrees Fahrenheit the New Normal? Glass Thermometer Although Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich (1815-1877) introduced body temperature into hospital charts and believed that a high fever was not a disease but a symptom, his analysis of the average oral body temperature is no longer believed to be the 98.6 F he reported. Allowing for a healthy normal range, and the fact that body temperature is affected by time of day, and whether someone is hungry, sleepy, cold or jet-lagged, to say nothing of where the temperature measurement is taken, oral, internal or ear, since the 1990s scientists have... (Read More ...)

When Did We Start Teaching Babies Sign Language? Learning sign language (Photo credit: daveynin) Both my grandchildren were taught to sign as infants and toddlers. They learned simple words, like “Milk”, “More,” “Hug,” “Teddy Bear,”  and “Sleep.” Modern parents believe that early language training with sign language reduces a baby’s frustration and speeds up and enhances their language ability. How Did This All Get Started? A graduate student, Joseph Garcia, an interpreter in American Sign Language, reasoned in his 1986 graduate thesis that even hearing... (Read More ...)

Uncles. Coaches. Priests. Joe. Joe. Penn State Coach Joe Paterno, 2006 I believed Joe Paterno, beloved coach of Penn State’s Nittany Lions, when he said the reason he turned over the allegations about child sex abuse made against his friend and former employee to university officials in 2002 was that he didn’t know what else to do. I think we are way more sensitized to the cruel and common reality of this behavior because of the Catholic Church’s having had to wrestle with it publicly in recent years. The Penn State community was told, several times, about Sandusky’s behavior and underreacted. So,... (Read More ...)

Image via Wikipedia We had just finished a light lunch. The young mother, whose daughter is friends with my granddaughter, said, “How come we never have to wait after eating to go swimming anymore?” Good question. How many hours did you spend waiting impatiently the 30 minutes to an hour that used to be required by all responsible parents before children were allowed back in the pool? When did this requirement stop being enforced? Apparently, after at least one survey of deaths by drowning, the myth we were brought up with regarding cramping because of blood flow being diverted by digestion... (Read More ...)