The last week of school, Meg at Grandma and Grandpa’s, and new chickens have kept me too busy to remember to post our dinners, so I’m a little behind! This was my birthday dinner of bacon-wrapped sirloin, fresh broccoli, and buttered new potatoes! Andy got out of making my birthday cake this year by taking me to Dairy Queen instead since my mom made Jello Poke Cake while we were at their house!
We have been meaning to get to a baseball game in Cedar Rapids for awhile now. Never quite made it last summer, but then again, we had a 6 mo old, so it wasn’t exactly the ideal place to be going on a hot, summer day. However, with Meg staying with her Grandparents in Missouri this week, we took the opportunity on Memorial Day to take in a ball game at Veterans Memorial Stadium, home of the Cedar Rapids Kernels minor league team (a Los Angeles Angels farm team).
Firstly, let me start by saying that tickets are cheap for these games. They range from $7 to $10, depending on if you want lawn, bleacher or standard seating. We opted for bleacher seats ($8 each), though in retrospect, the extra $1 would have been worth it (more on that shortly). The food/beer prices were also pretty good. $3 for peanuts, $3.50 for nachos, $4 for a 16 oz beer and $7 for a 32 oz beer. With regards to beer, while they had your standard A-B, Miller and Coors fare, they also had a selection of other varieties, from Fat Tire to Blue Moon to Leinenkugel’s. Enough to suit just about any taste.
As you can see above, the stadium itself is relatively small. Again, we were in the bleacher seats when I took that picture, but you can tell that we were practically sitting on home base. Unfortunately, however, the bleachers have absolutely no shade whatsoever. And when it’s 87 F and sunny, that can get tiresome. It would have been worth the extra $1 to move to actual seats, with the promise of some shade. We did have our 30 SPF sunscreen on, though, and for the most part, we got out of it unscathed.
The other downside that I certainly didn’t anticipate was the length of the game. Granted, I tend to expect spending maybe 3 hours at a baseball game, though games are shorter or longer than that, too. We were sitting there for 2 hours and we had made it through the 4th inning (we got there a bit early…but still…). The problem, of course, was that the teams weren’t hitting anything – they would go through all counts, strikes and balls, and get bases loaded without bringing any of the runners home. At the time, the Kernels weren’t doing all that well, and we were sun baked, so we decided to leave.
Of course, as can be expected, the Kernels ended up winning. The Peoria Chiefs (a Chicago Cubs farm team) were up 0-3 when we left, and by the end of the game, the Kernels won 7-5. I guess they just needed a few warm up innings?
All in all, we had a good time. The prices were good, the stadium was easily accessible, and the atmosphere was pretty good. I’d like to go back, but I’d either a). pick a night game, or b). spend a few bucks extra for some shade. I can’t fault the team for those particular blunders on my part, though.
A good way to spend Memorial Day, though. Sun, beer and baseball. Can’t go wrong.
These posts, tagged “Primer,” are posted for two reasons: 1). to help me get better at teaching non-scientists about science-related topics; and 2). to help non-scientists learn more about things they otherwise would not. So, while I realize most people won’t read these, I’m going to write them anyway, partially for my own benefit, but mostly for yours.
It’s crazy to think that I’ve been posting these things monthly since last June. For my first Primer, I talked about Pharmacology, as I had just completed a Ph.D. in it. Now, a year later, I’ll elaborate further on the subject that got me interested in it in the first place: psychopharmacology.
As I wrote back then, I took a class at Truman State based out of the Psychology department that taught students about psychopharmacology, defined as:
Psychopharmacology — noun
the branch of pharmacology dealing with the psychological effects of drugs.
In broad strokes, we’re talking about how a drug can change your state of perception, whether it causes or alleviates hallucinations, alters your mood, dampens your emotions, and so on. Something that changes your “normal psychological state” to something else, whether that be therapeutic or “recreational.”
In order to grasp what happens in your brain when your mood is changing, you need to have a basic idea of the structure of the brain and neurotransmission, both subjects I have discussed in the past. For example, much of your cognition happens in the brain region called the Cerebral Cortex, and it is dependent upon neurotransmitters like acetylcholine and dopamine. Alternatively, emotions like anger, aggression and fear tend to be centered in another region called the Amygdala. Bear in mind that the varying areas of the brain “talk” to each other, and if you affect the signaling in one area, you may very well affect another area. This may well be the point of any pharmacological intervention, but frequently, you get undesired consequences we call “side effects.”
Let’s look at the Cortex first. Schizophrenia, a disease characterized by delusions, hallucinations and disorganized speech or hearing, is thought to be caused by misfiring neurons in the Cortex that release dopamine. Therefore, if your cortical neurons are releasing too much dopamine, for any reason, you can end up with hallucinations and delusions, etc. Interestingly, you can induce schizophrenic-like symptoms in an individual if you give them amphetamine or cocaine, both of which also increase the release of dopamine, though on a wider scale throughout the body. For those with Schizophrenia, you typically prescribe an antipsychotic, a drug that inhibits dopamine release or reception.
The trick with drugs like antipsychotics, however, is that you want to inhibit dopamine release in the cortex, yet you want to limit that drug’s effect on other areas of the body where you still need dopamine release, or other neurotransmitters like norepinephrine that are responsible for completely different things (hence, side effects). For example, if you were to design a drug to limit release of dopamine, you could fix their symptoms of Schizophrenia, but you could also affect mobility, as dopamine is responsible for voluntary control of movement.
This is how we arrived at “typical” and “atypical” antipsychotics. The “typical” drugs were the first-generation antipsychotics that did a reasonable job at limiting schizophrenic symptoms, but also affected other dopaminergic neurons in your body (i.e. your movement). People on these drugs for decades frequently came down with a movement disorder called Tardive Dyskinesia. The second generation “atypical” antipsychotics were more specific to the Cortex, and limited schizophrenic symptoms while mostly leaving other dopaminergic signaling pathways alone, thus alleviating dyskinesias.
As another example, Depression is a mood disorder that makes you feel sadness, anxiety, and general hopelessness. This disease is thought to involve the limbic regions of your brain, which includes the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. Depression, however, is opposite of Schizophrenia in that it represents a lack of the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine. The drugs of choice used to be TCAs (tricyclic antipsychotics), a drug that blocked the reentry of serotonin and norepinephrine into neurons, thus prolonging the activity of these neurotransmitters. In short, it made your serotonin work longer than it usually does, thus alleviating the need for production of more. As with Schizophrenia, this earlier drug class generated a large number of side-effects because it affected norepinephrine and serotonin throughout the body. Because TCAs worked on norepinephrine, that also meant that its action would increase in your body, for example, affecting your blood pressure through action on your blood vessels and causing arrhythmias due to action on the heart. Once SSRIs were developed, they rapidly replaced the TCA drug class because they were more specific toward only serotonin and not norepinephrine.
Both Schizophrenia and Depression are examples of psychological disorders that can be treated effectively with some kind of pharmacological intervention. Frequently, a given patient will end up trying multiple different drugs over the course of their treatment, and sometimes in various combinations. Unfortunately, there isn’t a single “silver bullet” for taking care of a given psychological disease, as most people manifest the disorders in different ways, with different drugs being more effective at treating different symptoms. While an SSRI may prove useful in the short-term, it’s possible a doctor will prescribe a TCA later on after the SSRIs lose their effectiveness. Antipsychotics act similarly. And more research is being done on new classes and new modifications to old drugs in order to make them more effective, and especially more selective toward their specific target(s).
The larger point to all of this is that the study of psychopharmacology is an effort to control one’s emotions and behaviors while not affecting the other aspects of their day-to-day life (i.e. side effects). These drugs typically manipulate neurotransmission to some degree, and hopefully have some kind of selectivity toward specific aspects of a given disease rather than affecting all transmission of that particular compound. This can be difficult, and can take decades to fully investigate, but it is certainly possible. As researchers develop more complex maps of the brain, with more detailed pharmacological profiles, new drug classes can be produced that are more specific to a given individual’s needs.
As this is more than long enough, and I still have more to say on the subject, stay tuned until next month when I hit up Part II.
I thought we had some frozen ground turkey and beef, but we didn’t, so these were “mini chicken parmesan” with spaghetti. Really, they were the end of a bag of chicken nuggets covered with cheese, but I won’t tell if you don’t!
Breakfast casserole…
…Meg was EXCITED!! (but she still only ate the oranges)
I realized recently that, besides the fact that we’ve now lived in Iowa for the last year, it also means we’ve lived without cable television. After all that time, what have we missed?
Not a whole lot, it turns out.
Sure, there are some things that I would like to have. Some deficiencies I figured we would see in this newfound lack of endless channels, but there are others I didn’t expect. For one thing, I knew we’d miss having the ability to record a program on a DVR, as we’d gotten used to having one for the previous 4 years. I thought that we’d be fine without it, however, as most of the shows we watch were on some kind of digital service, a la Hulu, etc. And for most shows, we were right.
Unfortunately, a select few of my shows (e.g. Stargate Universe and Sanctuary) have some silly deal with SyFy that makes them show up on Hulu 30 days after premiering. That, my friends, is an eternity. Those shows, however, are the only ones that seem to have this problem. Many of the others, in fact, show up the day after premiering on television, while others show up a week later. These are time-frames we can deal with.
One thing I didn’t think I’d miss, however, was baseball. I don’t really watch baseball religiously, but I do like catching the occasional game on a rainy Saturday or Sunday afternoon. For the most part, many Cardinals games are actually televised up here in Iowa, using KDSK‘s feed. This isn’t always the case, however, and sometimes, because we’re in Iowa, we get enough wind that the TV station’s antenna is cutting in and out, making my viewing of a game troublesome. I have considered getting MLB.tv service, which would allow us to watch any baseball game throughout the season in HD through the PS3, but at $90 per season, I just don’t watch enough to make it worth it.
Other than that? I don’t think we miss all that much. We watch quite a bit of Netflix, streamed through the PS3 or Wii, and we have a few “standby” shows in our Instant Queue at all times when we get that “we just want to veg out in front of the TV and watch nothing specific” feeling, such as No Reservations, Man v. Food, Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs. The best part being that we can choose which episodes we want to watch, rather than being at the mercy of whatever theme that particular station is running on that day. And, no commercials.
We are still watching Hulu through the computer, but it seems to work alright. I’d prefer to have it on the TV, but I don’t want to run a cable that far, and the 19″ monitor we’re using is “big enough” for our purposes.
In the end, I don’t think we miss cable all that much. We can find little things here and there that would be nice to see live, but more often than not, we’re living without it.
Not something my parents could have believed they’d ever say, methinks…
Last year’s garden was remarkably successful, considering that we moved to Iowa in early-May and didn’t get much planted until later that month. In the end, we had a ridiculous number of tomatoes and squash, but good yields of sweet potatoes, carrots, radishes, and green beans (if you count the latter as “good”…).
This year, however, we more than doubled the size of the garden, partially because everything grew too close together last year, but also because we wanted to expand into some different vegetables. A few weeks ago, we borrowed our land lord’s tiller, which made short work of the existing garden, but also took care of the surrounding area we didn’t take care of last year. Believe you me, Iowa dirt is quite a bit easier to till through than Missouri dirt. I think it took me 10 minutes to go over the whole thing, and I did it again the next day just to make sure I got it all. Since then, I’ve just used a spade fork to “turn over” the dirt and limit growth of weeds. Then, two weeks ago, Brooke planted peas, broccoli and spinach, which are three things that we either didn’t grow at all last year, or didn’t find much success in growing.
This past weekend, however, we moved on to the other, larger items. Brooke is pictured above watering tomato and pepper plants, though she also planted a few rows of two-color hybrid sweet corn. If I recall, she ended up planting over 20 plants in the plot she’s watering, and the vast majority of those are tomatoes. Mostly romas, but also some that should make for reasonable sandwiches, etc. Some of those plants we inherited from my Mom (thanks!), but the others she started in peat pots indoors awhile back. I mowed the lawn the next day and saved the grass clippings to help surround the individual plants, hopefully limiting the growth of grass (that you can clearly see growing to the right of Brooke, where the broccoli, peas and spinach are). Brooke also put some milk jugs around the tomato and pepper plants to help protect them as they get bigger.
The only thing(s) I know of yet to go in are the green beans and the soup beans. Brooke is starting to plant herbs in pots up closer to the house over this next week, now that the temperatures seem like they’ll stay above freezing (finally…). We’ll probably get everything else planted by Memorial Day, but then we’ve got a large amount of weeding to take care of, especially over by the peas. We’ve got pea and spinach plants coming up, so it’s easy to identify the weeds around them. The carrots, however, haven’t popped up yet, so we’ll have to wait for them.
On a side-note, Meg had great fun playing outside while we were doing all this. I took some pictures while we were outside, as I tend to do when there’s a camera attached to my phone. She discovered that eating dirt annoys her parents, though, so we’ll have to keep a close eye on her in the future…
Dinners recently have been mostly repeats, so not much to post. Last night’s dinner was also something we have frequently, and takes pretty much no effort: stir fry and egg rolls. But, I thought you might want to see something we ate for once!!
As I’m sure Mom would tell you, I was never really eager to mow the lawn back in high school. I would certainly do it, and do a reasonable job at it, but I was never asking Dad, “hey, can I mow the lawn for you?” In the past year, however, I’ve found that I kinda missed it. Back in Kirksville or St. Louis, I never had the opportunity or the need to mow any lawns. For all intents and purposes, I hadn’t actually mowed a lawn in about 10 years before moving to Iowa. A lot changes in a decade, and apparently, over that decade, I learned to enjoy mowing.
We have a pretty large yard up here in Iowa, and only a self-propelled push mower to do it with (plus an electric trimmer). It takes me almost 2 hours to mow the whole thing, usually. Thankfully, the yard is pretty flat, except for a plethora of molehills. When I tell people up here that I do this lawn with a push mower, they get wide-eyed, probably chuckling in their heads with disbelief. Somehow, I don’t really see it the same way.
Mowing the lawn has become an excuse to go outside for me and get disconnected. No need for my headphones, no need for my TV, no need for my computer. I can’t really use those things while I’m mowing (I probably could use headphones, but I’d have to turn them up loud enough that I’d hasten my need for hearing aides, so I’m avoiding them in this case). It’s one of the few times that I force myself to go without any form of technology, let alone one of the few times I ever get any exercise.
I will probably change my tune by August, but right now, there’s nothing like sitting down with a beer while surveying a freshly trimmed yard after 2 hours of work.
Oh, and here’s a random picture of Brooke and Meg. 🙂
There have been various announcements over the past few months that got me excited about both options. They both have some great benefits and the implementations are very functional, if not even downright awesome. To some degree, it isn’t really a “tough choice” at all, as I already know which option I’m going to go with.
Of course, I’m talking about Google Music vs Amazon Cloud Player.
To be fair, as of this writing, I haven’t actually tried the Google Music Beta, though I signed up for an invite as soon as I found out that this thing exists at all. I’ve been using the Amazon Cloud Player, though, and like it quite a bit.
I guess I should describe the pros and cons. The Amazon Cloud Player was launched in late March, providing users with 5 GB of free storage space for their files. MP3s, documents, pictures, videos, etc. Any MP3s stored on this virtual drive, however, can be streamed over the internet through your web browser or smart phone (i.e. Android and iOS), through what they call the Cloud Player. If you buy any digital album from Amazon MP3, then your 5 GB of storage is increased to 20 GB – you can purchase additional space thereafter. The service has worked well, from my perspective, and it’s nice to be able to pull up any of my albums and play them from practically anywhere, especially as I’m not carrying my laptop around with me 24/7 like I used to.
Amazon kinda shocked the world when they released this, however. It was long expected that Apple or Google would go there first, but they were dealing with the legal rights to stream music over the internet. The question, from a legal standpoint, is whether it is legal to purchase music, upload it to a different location, and then stream it like a radio station. Does that violate the license that you agree to when you purchase an MP3? No clear answer was given, so Google and Apple were trying to get things finalized before going ahead with their respective plans.
Amazon basically just said “oh well” and did it anyway. And so far, to my knowledge, no one has sued them.
Therefore, it was expected that Google would make an announcement during their now annual I/O developer’s conference. And as expected, Google announced their long-awaited solution: Google Music. Since Amazon took the lead, they had to come forward with something to show their burgeoning community. And show they did.
The Google Music Beta, rolling out piecemeal by invitation only (much like Gmail did), allows you to upload 20,000 songs to their cloud service, and then you can stream it to your Android devices or the web. In that way, it’s very similar to the Amazon Cloud Player. The catch is that Google Music should be capable of providing better sound quality, even over a relatively slow 3G wireless connection. Right now, however, you cannot actually purchase music through the Google Music interface like you can from the Amazon system. Therefore, for digital music, you still need Amazon MP3 or iTunes.
The kicker for me, however, is offline play.
With Google Music, you can “pin” a song, album, or playlist that will synchronize that music on your various devices. It will automatically synchronize your “recently played” music, as well. So, for example, if I want to “pin” Under The Table And Dreaming (and I will…), Google Music will download the album to my phone, allowing me to play that music even when my phone isn’t on an internet connection. And this is extremely important for people like us that don’t have unlimited data plans, or that tend to drive long distances through areas that don’t have the best cellular coverage. I can rely on streaming, but I don’t have to.
With a single, software-based approach, Google provided me with a good reason to abandon my iPod Nano.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my iPod. The thing is light, gets good battery life, and is tiny. Or “nano,” if you will. But, I have to physically connect it to my laptop to transfer podcasts and music. This isn’t that huge of a deal breaker for me, to tell you the truth, but I’ve got its cute little 8 GB hard drive maxed out, so I’m constantly selecting which podcasts need to go on the hard drive and when. And sometimes, new editions of my podcasts are released while I’m at work, preventing me from being able to actually add them to my iPod, because my iPod is only linked with my laptop.
Now, using my phone, I can stream all of my music (~15 GB?) over the internet, and save the ones I want on my phone’s mini-SD card. Moreover, as my phone has WiFi on it and a wealth of apps, I can access most if not all of those podcasts without having to download them to whatever device I’m using.
So in the end, I think I’ll be using the Google Music offering. At least, once I get an invite. For the time-being, I’ll settle for the Amazon Cloud Player. It’ll be interesting to see what Amazon does to compete here, as Apple will be announcing their own “iCloud” service sometime in the relatively near future, and if Amazon wants to compete, they’ll have to do some drastic things. iCloud will be built into every iOS device, and Google Music will be built into every Android device. And the legal drama certainly isn’t over, as the record labels are unhappy with Google’s plan, and likely won’t be all that happy with Apple’s, either.
