coquina

Is it for real? The thread about would you still be "you" if your memory was lost made me think about this. From what I've read, this disorder occurs rarely to people who are suffering from severe abuse or psychological stress. I wonder if PET scans, EEG's, and polygraphs show the same results regardless of the personality that is currently being manifested.

I like geology - Coquina is a kind of sandstone that is impregnated with shells. It is also the common name for Donax variabilis, a tiny clam that is my avatar until I find something better. http://www.jaxshells.org/track4.htm Besides - I just like the sound of it.

I love these jokes from Scotland. In the middle of foggy night in the North-west Atlantic.....two lights are heading directly for one another... and on the radio an American voice is heard saying "We suggest you alter course by 10 degrees to port". Back comes the reply "We suggest YOU alter course by 10 degrees to port!" Then the American voice says "This is the battleship USS Missouri leading the American Atlantic battle fleet. You had better alter course by 10 degrees to port." Back comes the reply "This is the Outer Hebrides lighthouse, but it's your call, Jimmy". A Scotsman, an Englishman and an Australian were in a bar and had just started on a new round of drinks when a fly landed in each glass of beer. The Englishman took his out on the blade of his Swiss Army knife. The Australian blew his away in a cloud of froth. The Scotsman lifted his one up carefully by the wings and held it above his glass. "Go on, spit it oot, ye wee devil" he growled. From whence they came: http://www.rampantscotland.com/humour/blhumourindex.htm

I think a lot of the differences have to do with how parents interact with a child. YT writes women will state, "I can't do that", and makes some very general statements. One starts off learning skills and attitudes in life from one's parents. I am of the "baby boomer" generation. When I was growing up, most moms were working at home, dad went to the office. Little girls learned housekeeping skills from their moms. Little boys learned home and auto maintenance from their dads. It was different in my house. My dad started a machine shop business and I grew up in it. I learned to file burrs off metal before I was old enough to go to school. I watched him work, and I learned to read drawings and to make parts. When I was in high school, I took an aptitude test, to determine what career I would most likely be successful in. Part of it pertained to visualizing shapes and patterns. I aced it. The guidance councilor told me that if I were a man, I would be an excellent engineer. She said there really weren't any female oriented careers that suited my talents. I went to work for my dad, and he taught me the business end of the profession too. I have been running the shop since 1981. At times, I still run into men who make the wrong assumptions. I went to a tool show - the manufacturers had "hospitality suites" in the hotel for their customers. When I showed up, one of them thought I was a gate crasher. I was standing with a group of other shop owners when he remarked very condescendingly to me, "I don't guess you want to buy a CNC lathe, do you?" I said, "I don't know, I might." What's it swing, what's the bed length, does it have a hollow spindle, if so, how big? Does it program in absolute and incremental, can it machine in inches and metric?, etc. The other shop owners were ROFLTAO while the tool distributor slowly sunk through the floor.

SOMETHING TO OFFEND DAMN-NEAR EVERYBODY 1. What's the Cuban national anthem? Row, Row, Row Your Boat" 2. Where does an Irish family go on vacation? A different bar. 3. Did you hear about the Chinese couple that had a retarded baby? They named him "Sum Ting Wong." 4. What would you call it when an Italian has one arm shorter than the other? A speech impediment. 5. What does it mean when the flag at the Post Office is flying at half-mast? They're hiring. 6. Why aren't there any Puerto Ricans on Star Trek? Because they're not going to work in the future either. 7. What do you call an Arkansas farmer with a sheep under each arm? A pimp. 8. Why do drivers' education classes in Redneck schools use the car only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays? Because on Tuesday and Thursday! , the Sex Ed class uses it. 9. What's the difference between a southern zoo and a northern zoo? A southern zoo has a description of the animal on the front of the page, along with a recipe. 10. How do you get a sweet little 80-year-old lady to say the F word? Get another sweet little 80-year-old lady to yell *BINGO*! 11. What's the difference between a northern fairytale and a southern fairytale? A northern fairytale begins "Once upon a time..." A southern fairytale begins "Y'all ain't gonna believe this shit..." 12. My, my, how time have changed.Years ago...When 100 white men chased 1 black man, we called it the Ku Klux Klan; today they call it the PGA TOUR. 13. Why is there no Disneyland in China? No one's tall enough to go on the good rides

I like Sannibel too - but I like Captiva even better. We took our motor home there for the millineum new year. Those sunsets over the Gulf are spectacular. However, the best vacation I ever had was when we chartered a boat for a week in the British Virgin Islands. We cruised the islands, fished the pilin's and drank our green label each day. http://www.islandsonline.com/ I'm going to Suffolk, England at the end of September. My mom was a Brit, but I've never been there, so I am really looking forward to it.

I frequently have dreams that take place about a hundred years ago. No cars - horses and buggies - cobbledstoned streets, gas lamps, women wearing bustles. I live in a historic area - Southeast Virginia. Williamsburg, Jamestown, Yorktown, Hampton, and I dream about the area as it might have been at that time. I am not "me" in my dreams. I do not know the person I am, nor do I know any of the characters. Sometimes I dream in the third person - I am an observer, like watching a play. I guess some people would have a heyday with shades of Bridey Murphy and Edgar Cayce, more likely, it was all those romance novels I read, and all that Virginia History that was crammed down my throat during my early years - doncha think?

Thanks for the link, it was quite interesting. I now have a "furry gray alarm clock", an eighteen year old Maine Coon cat named "The Toad" - he goes off at 6am, doesn't have a snooze alarm, and doesn't know the difference between weekdays and weekends.

I once had a particularly obnoxious alarm clock - it sounded like an air raid siren. After a few mornings of being scared silly by it, I would wake up about 30 seconds before it went off - giving me just enough time to turn it off ahead of time. How are our biological clocks programmed so precisely?

...if I hadn't been able to laugh about the weird things he did, I would have gone crackers.

The "ship eating waves" are called "rogue waves" or "freak waves". Here is a NOAA paper about them: http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/pubs/20040008.pdf Check out the graphs. Tsunamis - falsely called, "tidal waves" originate from undersea earth quakes or landslides. The latter are not even noticable when they are at sea - they rise up when they approach shallow water. The bottom of the wave encounters the sea floor and the wave builds up and collapses on itself. Here is a page with Tsunami FAQ's and answers from NOAA's Tsunami warning center: http://www.prh.noaa.gov/itic/library/about_tsu/faqs.html Then of course - there are the plain old storm generated heavy seas, which are quite impressive in their own right. http://tv-antenna.com/heavy-seas/

Poke around the USGS Geophysical Products site: http://crustal.usgs.gov/geophysics/

Glider, thanks for the reply. It is scary to see someone with that kind of memory loss. We had a hell of a time "child-proofing" the house - dad would pick up a bottle of any kind of liquid and drink it if he weren't stopped. At one point, he managed to drink a weak detergent solution - when mom found out what he'd done she trucked him off to the ER. When I arrived, his surroundings looked like a demented version of the Lawrence Welk show. He was puking soap bubbles. He'd urp, then say, "Why am I puking bubbles?" "Because you drank soap, dad." Five minutes later, he'd vomit some more and ask the same question and get the same reply. Broken record syndrome.

Glider, the information on Korsakoff's psychosis was very informative - especially the part about the B1 deficiency. My dad was an alcoholic for many years, he had pernicious anemia - B12 deficiency. I read an article somewhere that stated there is a connection between pernicious anemia and alcoholism, but I never knew precisely what it was. Do you? Dad was diagnosed with "alcoholic dementia" - is that the same thing? He certainly confabulated all the time. (I love that word.) I think the most amazing thing was that although he didn't know doodly most of the time, he retained some mathmatical and mechanical ability. We used to play "21" all the time. When he was hospitalized I took a deck of cards when I visited him. He kept forgetting the rules of the game, but when it came time to count his cards, he could look at them and instantaneously tell you the number. Another time, my mother sent him to the garage to get in groceries. She then realized he had been gone some time and asked me to retrieve him. I found him sitting in the car with her cell phone (the old box kind) totally disassembled in his lap. He had taken it apart without the benefit of so much as a screwdriver. When I asked him why he dismantled the cell phone, he said, "What? This? I didn't do it." He had no recollection whatsoever. Enough to make one go on the water wagon.

If you are interested in gravity and magnetics as they apply to geology, there is an interesting web page here: http://www.gravmag.com/gmprimr.html

I spoke with a geology professor who thinks the Genetic Engineering will be quite valuable in the field of bioremediation. Chemosynthetic bacteria could be engineered to break down hazardous waste into harmless substances.

Myoclonic Jerk! No - not you. That's what they are called. AKA Periodic limb movement disorder, nocturnal myoclonus http://www.ecureme.com/emyhealth/data/Periodic_Limb_Movement_Disorder.asp Seems to be a number of theories of what's behind it. Occasionally epilepsy or some other disease - often idiopathic.

Here's another article on the subject: http://www.earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm?ID=689&category=Science It says methane could last for 300 - 350 years before breaking down. And here's an article that describes the formation of volcanic methane on the Hawaiian Islands: http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/2002/02_10_17.html According to the article, the volcanic methane forms when lava encapsulates large amounts of biomass on the surface - so that doesn't apply to Mars either. The third hypothesis is that the methane was brought in by comets.

Here is an article I found quite interesting about a group of bacteria that produce magnetite. http://www.agu.org/revgeophys/moskow01/moskow01.html Here's a snippet about magnetosomes: If I were starting out all over again, I would really like to become involved in researching the Archaea in general and chemosynthetic bacteria in particular. I think there will be great advances made with them in bioremediation.

I named the squirrel Rocky. I found him early in March, when it was still cold. As I said, he had no fur. I wore a sweatshirt with a kangaroo pouch in the front. I would wrap him up in a piece of flannel and stick him in the pouch so my body heat would keep him warm. As a result, he "loved" for me to pick him up and cuddle him. When he got older, I put him in a parrot cage in my back office. There was a bell in the top of it. He slept in a pile of towels in the bottom. One day, when he was running around in the cage he accidentally hit the bell. When it rang, I heard it and got him out of the cage. The next day I heard the bell ringing like crazy. When I went to check it out, he had climbed to the top of the cage and was beating the hell out of it with his paws. It may be attributed to a conditioned response, but he learned what would get my attention after only one try. Also - food wasn't the reward, attention was. He had a supply of food in his cage all the time.

Anecdote - y'all can decide. I raised a squirrel from only a few days old (no fur, eyes closed, and ears closed) to adulthood. When he got old enough that he could eat, he hid half of his food - under the cushions, or in the pockets of coats - any place he could find. Innate behavior, sure. You'd think that he'd try to dig a hole in the carpet, wouldn't you? He never did. The most amazing thing that I witnessed was as follows: I had made the bed and folded a blanket at the foot. He watched what I was doing. I gave him a peanut. He took it to the blanket, folded back a corner, used his paws to make a small depression (he did not scratch), put the peanut in the depression, folded the blanket back down and used his paws to smooth it out. Then he stood up on his hind legs and looked at what he'd done, to make sure his nut was hidden. Yeah - I know about making anthropomorphic statements, but that is what I observed. I have come to believe we don't give animals enough credit for their thought processes.

In another (non-scientific) forum in which I participate, there was a thread about nano-bacteria which secrete calcium deposits, which have been linked to the development of breast cancer. When I searched the term, the majority of hits on google seemed to be ".com", however, I did find this one from the Mayo Clinic. http://mayoresearch.mayo.edu/mayo/research/vascular_physiology_lab/nanobacteria.cfm Apparently there is speculation about whether they are living critters, and if they are, whether they cause the formation of plaque in the arteries, as well as kidney stones, and the calcifications that are found in some breast cancers. I also read about a treatment where the protective calcium coating has been removed followed by treatment with tetracycline. As I say, I am distrustful of ".com" sites. What is the general concensus amoung medical and scientific professionals about nano-bacteria?

Hello everyone - I live Southeast Virginia, USA - near Yorktown. I am not a scientist, but I'm interested in it. I became particularly interested in geology, when I learned that the Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater lies buried about 400' beneath my feet. I have been independently studying geology in particular and the impact crater specifically since about 1996. Are there any other geologists or geologist wannabe's who participate in this forum?