Here’s a question for travelers in our security-minded era: Should the TSA put Pop Rocks, above—the fizzy, crumbly, kids candy from the ’70s—on its air travel prohibited items list?
I ask because it’s long been known what happens to the human digestive system when you swallow Pop Rocks, then mix it with Coca-Cola, a drink available on every commercial flight: Your stomach explodes!
The effect on the individual is, obviously, catastrophic. As for the craft’s airframe, well, suppose this were to happen while flying over the Pacific, right?
Heh, heh. Of course, it’s nonsense, the idea that these two substances, when combined, detonate. It’s a 30-year-old, urban myth. But, as every parent knows, kids have lots of questions about how our bodies are affected by all kinds of phenomena, and why we work as we do.
Andrea and Julia Ditkoff sure did. For example, they wanted to know:
Why do you get a headache when you eat ice cream too quickly?
What’s that small, dewdrop-shaped thing in the back of your throat?
In fact, they came up with all the interrogatives Dr. Ditkoff uses in her text. She thought her daughters’ inquiries were, indeed, provocative, but commonplace. Other children, and other adults, would want to hear the answers, also.
They will: Dr. Ditkoff is the guest today on a repeat edition of my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, June 18, at 2 pm ET.
You can listen to this thoughtful writer / physician’s ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.
Looks like knowledge reigns supreme over human biology at Tiger Woods’ alma mater: For an undergrad course there, says the Stanford University News,
instructor Tom McFadden has created a series of rap videos to explain concepts such as gene regulation and evolution. His latest video, entitled “Oxidate It Or Love It” explains how metabolism works while paying homage to “Hate It Or Love It” by 50 Cent/The Game and “On To The Next One” by Jay-Z.
Most third-year students of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College use a Computed Axial Tomography scanner for medical purposes. But for Satre Stuelke, the technology works best as a new form of camera. By running children’s toys, cell phones, and electrical appliances through this advanced scientific tool, Stuelke produces rather unearthly images, of a kind perhaps never before seen. Radiology Art, he calls it.
Trembling at the toxic and terrifying sight, above?
Everybody knows what these two substances can do in combination with each other. That is, throw down a mouthful of Pop Rocks. Then, chase it with several gulps of soda. Wave goodbye to your family and your record collection, because your stomach is about to explode, killing you.
Really?
Andrea and Julia Ditkoff, 12 and 10, respectively, had a lot of questions like that one:
Why do you get a headache when you eat ice cream too quickly?
What’s that small, dewdrop-shaped thing in the back of your throat?
In fact, they came up with all the interrogatives Dr. Ditkoff uses in her text. She thought her daughters’ queries were, indeed, provocative, but commonplace. (That combining Pop Rocks and soda will kill you is a 30-year-old, urban myth.) Other children, and other adults, would want to hear the answers.
They will: Dr. Ditkoff is the guest today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, January 30, at 2 pm ET. We’ll be speaking with her, live, on the air, during the first half of the hour. Then, during the second half, we’ll take your calls over our master control studio line: (212) 209-2900.
You can listen to this thoughtful writer / physician’s ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.
In writing his book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Dr. Atul Gawande says, “I’m trying to examine all the gaps involved in what we do. I wanted to show how situations of risk really work, how people in different situations grapple with that.”
Questions like, why do so many people in a hospital die, not from their ailments, but from infections acquired at the medical facility? Or, how does one measure excellence as a physician, when the currency is human life?
Or, as he states, “The paradox at the heart of medical care is that it works so well, and yet never well enough.”
Dr. Gawande is the guest on this repeat edition of my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, November 21, at 2 pm ET.
You can hear his ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, you can check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, check out our archive for up to 90 days after broadcast.
the sweetly belittling form of address that has always rankled older people: the doctor who talks to their child rather than to them about their health; the store clerk who assumes that an older person does not know how to work a computer, or needs to be addressed slowly or in a loud voice. Then there are those who address any elderly person as “dear.”
My least favorite form of this practice is when a person refers to an obviously aged woman as “young lady.” However, overall,
Bet she kept this clip off of her reel: Ayds diet candy commercial
What do you do when the name of your number one product, under which you’ve been selling your goods for decades, becomes a homonym for a deadly scourge?
That’s the foul question the makers of Ayds, an appetite suppressant, found themselves having to address 20 years ago. By that point, it had become clear that acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, was not going to be a flash in the pan—a temporary blip that the company could just ride out—but would be, in fact, the disease of the century, if not the millennium.
I met Wilford Brimley once, on the set of Hard Target, John Woo’s first U.S. production. I had no idea he was a master of club music remixes, as these YouTubes, here, here, here, and especially here, of his Liberty Medical commercials clearly demonstrate.
Wow: Can you believe anything anybody writes any more?
The New York Times is still reeling after their gut-felt rave over the book Love and Consequences, and loving profile of its author, Margaret B. Jones. Love and… is Jones’ memoir of her life as a scrappy, foster white girl, growing up wild with the Bloods in the streets of South Central LA.
Meanwhile, Consequences are what her behind, the Times, and he publisher, Riverhead/Penguin, are feeling right this instant.
We now know that “Margaret B. Jones” is actually—get this—Margaret Seltzer. (Wow…does it get any whiter?) Instead of being dragged through inummerable foster homes, Seltzer was raised by both parents in the well-heeled San Fernando Valley. As opposed to ducking in and out of violent, drug-infested Compton alleyways, she spent her teen years ducking in and out of private Episcopal school hallways. Instead of gangs, she had her hair in bangs…o.k., I’m going too far, now, but you get the point: She made up the whole 296 pages.
But did a group of eminent medical researchers, including a Nobel Prize-winner, just get caught doing the same thing?
The effect on the individual is, obviously, catastrophic. As for the craft’s airframe, well, suppose this were to happen while flying over the Pacific, right?
…not to mention the query which forms the title of their mother’s book, Why Don’t Your Eyelashes Grow?: Curious Questions Kids Ask About the Human Body, right, by Dr. Beth Ann Ditkoff.
