This entry is more because I thought of a cute catchy title to describe one of my current questions about life. When I will get my full sense of taste back.

I had my tonsils out almost exactly 2 months ago. The issue it was intended to cure is now indeed gone and I'm much happier. My ENT was fantastic, my recovery really quick, and I found vicodin in my milkshakes to be quite the yummy treat for someone in throat pain. That said, my sense of taste has not totally recovered, and it kind of drives me nuts.

I tend to be a creature of habit -- I tend to order the same foods and usually like them to taste the same from order to order. I've noticed that there are some things I definitely cannot taste as well as I used to. Garlic is one thing. Salt as well. It has made me cautious when I cook not to over spice.

Fortunately, my sense of smell is still fine -- I can smell garlic in food, and so on. Just the taste is, well, off. But that also makes for another question which is why if my sense of smell is okay, why is the taste still off. The two are related after all.

Oh well, just be forewarned if you're coming over and I'm cooking, the food might taste a little off!

A few weeks back, Zandra and I had a chance to attend a talk on Autism. The talk was actually a talk for the Pediatric service at my wife's hospital, but they were nice enough to let a surgeon and her spouse attend to listen. The talk was given by Dr. Andrew Zimmerman from the Kennedy Krieger Institute where Andrew goes for his speech therapy.

Disclaimer: Don't blame Dr. Zimmerman if I write a few things wrong. I'm sharing what the uneducated engineer in the family took away from a talk aimed at physicians...

This was a very refreshing and informative talk, though I have to admit, it helped that at least I have, after all these years of living with a doctor, picked up on some medical terminology. The most encouraging point, for me, was one of the 3 objectives of the talk that Dr. Zimmerman listed - the challenges in autism research and the need for evidence (his italics, not mine). It made me think of a phrase a co-worker of mine has used a lot in the past: "In God We Trust. All others, bring data please." It's refreshing to see someone talking scientifically on this topic. I'm tired of all the movie stars who pretend to know more about medicine than doctors (I can list several examples, but then, this would turn into a rant).

Without outlining every single slide in his talk, here's a few thoughts that I found enlightening (that I didn't know before or were refreshing to have confirmed).

- 3 core deficits with Autism: Communications, Social Interaction, and Sterotyped Behaviors. Of the three, the Social Interaction part is what eventually hurts children the most. For those with Asperger Syndrome, they are often spared from communication deficits.

- Stunning fact: Children diagnosed with Autism has gone from 1:2000 in 1987 to 1:150 this decade to 1:91 in the last few years. Wow. Talking with our pediatrician a few days later, even he was stunned to hear the 1:91 figure. Yet, there is no specific "test" for Autism, which makes diagnosis difficult.

- That said, even though there is no specific "test", there are a lot of "comorbidities" associated with Autism, including ADHD, OCD, Seizures, Bipolar, Depression, Anxiety, and even Tourette Syndrome. And there are other notable physical features which tend to be more common in those diagnosed with Autism. But none of those alone is a "trigger" or "cause". I think the expression Dr. Zimmerman used was something along the idea of a "Perfect Storm" of genetic pieces that made a person more susceptible to Autism.

- Something else that was interesting were that certain antibodies were more likely to be present in children with autism along with different nerve activation patterns in the brain.

- There are definitely environmental items that influence the development of Autism. If detected early (and early detection/identification is important), many effects can be overcome with various treatments and therapies. He also noted that many children develop normally, up to a point, and then begin to regress. Examples are that they will start to speak and communicate, and then stop. In retrospect, Andrew exhibited some signs of this. Especially in the area of communications, one sign of proper development is an infant pointing and looking at the parent/adult to get their attention, even before speech. Absence is apparently an early sign of possible issues since it indicates behaviors which aren't developing correctly.

- The thimerosal/mercury/vaccine theory for causing autism has been thoroughly disproven. Dr. Zimmerman's comment here was something along the lines of, "If we had only had all that money to use over again for other Autism research..."

Conclusions, if any can really be reached is that there is no "one thing" that is a trigger nor is there "one test". Environment, genetic susceptibilities, and timing all have a hand in this.

Been cleaning the basement the last couple of weeks. Came upon an original Apple Newton MessagePad in one box. Finally found the power supply for it and plugged it in. Voila! Still works!

To show the advancement in technology, I took a picture comparing it to my iPhone...



To give a perspective on the age of the MessagePad, it booted up with a date of January 1, 1993....

My blog is not broken - I just haven't had that much to say of any length that I felt like I wanted to expound about. And it's been a busy summer including fun things like family gatherings.

I did, a few weeks ago on Facebook send a link to this article that I found interesting. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204409904574350432677038184.html. I still find it interesting, but I think the most I really want to say about this is that it's a shame that we no longer teach, through schools or parenting, how to run a household. And that means doing things like budgeting. Surely, lots of people were misled by ARMs and shyster mortgage brokers hawking mortgage products that didn't make sense.
That said, it really is sad that people don't realize that even at the absolute lowest payment you could have on your ARM, that they didn't realize they didn't have enough money to make that mortgage payment. That they were in over their heads from month 1 - forget a few years down the line when the mortgages adjusted upwards.

But I don't feel like writing more about that, other than to say that that particular article made me think of the concept of Home Economics (for whatever reason - maybe the idea of "Home" and "Economy"). To that end, I'll leave readers with another link. http://hearth.library.cornell.edu/h/hearth/home_mgt.html. Cornell University was well known for its Home Economics degree - I found this site to be fascinating. And think that maybe teaching budgets and "how to select dishwashers and washing machines" in an educational setting instead of in a commercial setting might be more effective.

Of course, on the cynical flip side, a university today would probably take a grant from a major appliance company to start an endowment to fund this program, inevitably opening up the door to bias towards those who funded the endowment...

But maybe safer than learning about mortgages from someone whose commission check depended on you signing on the dotted line.

I got an interesting piece of Nigerian 419 spam today. For those of you who don't know what Nigerian 419 spam is, this is the spam that you get asking for assistance to transfer a large sum of money out of some overseas company where you are promised a percentage of the money for helping - aka "Advance Fee Fraud".

This particular message was interesting because of the intro. I paste it verbatim below:

Hello,

I am Mrs. Annette E. Jenkins, I am a US citizen, 48 years Old. I reside in District of Columbia 20534. My residential address is as follows 320 First Street, NW Washington, District of Columbia 20534, United States, am thinking of moving since I am now wealthy.

I wondered what this particular address was. So I ran it through Google. Here's the search link.

Should be pretty obvious from the search what's located there.

You have to believe this is deliberate....

Tags: Humor