Holy crap, Mike Nickel lost. It's a miracle!

I think this is the first election where I've voted for the winner(s). Ever. Scary thought.

Wait, Alison, did you want to vote in ward 3 so you vote for "Thomas J. ‘the Instigator’ Tomilson"? (Previously known to many as mayoral candidate Thomas James "Buffalo Terminator" Tomilson.)

The strange this is that, with polls still uncounted, he's already surpassed his vote total from 2004.

I was wondering why I hadn't read any of that before. Then I read this, and I remembered.

So, today in the clinic I saw my first patient with the common cold. You'd think "common" would show up in my first four weeks, but I guess not.

But that's not my story. My story involves my preceptor prescribing this patient codeine to help with the cough that was keeping her up at night all week. After the visit, I decided I didn't really know a lot about working up a cold, what warning signs you look for, what therapy you can provide outside of "bedrest + fluids", so I looked it up.

MD Consult (a website I had greatly underestimated until a couple of weeks ago) had a remarkably complete review of this kind of thing. And then one line struck me. They quoted a systematic review (a fairly high level of evidence in the medical research world) stating that studies had shown no benefit for codeine over the placebo in the treatment of cough due to cold.

I thought it was interesting, asked my preceptor about it (assuming that he knew this, and prescribed it more on a per-patient basis, or that he had had some positive experience with it.) Turns out, he had no idea about this finding, and we looked around for the literature around it and, sure enough, no benefit to using codeine as an antitussive.

Then it came back to bite me on the ass. Last patient of the day: a cold with cough lasting through the night, keeping her up for eight days. I finish the history, do a pertinent physical exam, and go meet my preceptor to present the case. And he proceeds to throw my smartass research right back at me. "What do you recommend, now that you've blown my conventional treatment out of the water?"

Bottom line, we tried the second patient out on dextromethorphan (the "DM" in things like "Robitussin DM"), which the studies said did show evidence of benefit, and we'll see what happens. And I learned to be careful when asking about studies that question my preceptor's standard treatment. (Also, he told me at the end of the day that he was going to do some reading about antitussive agents and promises to respond to my challenge in kind. Yikes.)

Fun day.

AW SHIT. I'm clearly not up to the task of working with HTML today. Check out the link to the pentagon report in the first post and see the links to my previous messages in the second post.

ARRRGGGHHH.

(kindly delete/ignore the previous post from me, thanks)

YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING ME.

So the Pentagon put together a report saying that space-based solar power stations are totally feasible but that nobody wants to invest the money required (lame).

But didn't I say THE EXACT SAME THING that everything in that report said... but like, oh I don't know, TWO FUCKING YEARS AGO?

WITNESS:

LINK1 LINK2

Seriously, compare that article to my comments from 2005. I could have given them those conclusions a long time ago.

YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING ME.

So the Pentagon put together a report saying that space-based solar power stations are totally feasible but that nobody wants to invest the money required (lame).

But didn't I say THE EXACT SAME THING that everything in that report said... but like, oh I don't know, TWO FUCKING YEARS AGO?

WITNESS:

LINK1 LINK2

Seriously, compare that article to my comments from 2005. I could have given them those conclusions a long time ago.

you know, this website says nothing about how to decide WHERE you vote... as in what ward...


"To be eligible to vote, you must:

* be at least 18 years old,
* be a Canadian citizen,
* be a resident in Alberta for the six consecutive months immediately preceding election day (as of April 16, 2007)
* be a resident of Edmonton on election day,
* not have voted previously in this election"


so... if I wanted to, could I vote for ward 3??

well, regardless GO OUT AND VOTE TODAY!

"When Norman Mailer wrote his true-to-life novel about World War II, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948, his compromise with the sensibilities of the day was to have soldiers use the pseudo-epithet fug. (When Dorothy Parker met him, she said, "So you're the man who doesn't know how to spell fuck.")"

And yet he had no reservations in drunkenly stabbing his wife in the back at a party? haha

That's funny. The story of him stabbing his wife just came up the other day, so when I read that above bit from the article you posted, Paras, I couldn't help but laugh at it.

our neighbour has a leaf blower/vacuum (I never can tell), and it seriously sounds like he's trying out a hover craft in the back yard... it's sooooo loud.



at least backslashes are more efficient than "directeur(trice)" for typers... that's what I used to do.

It's strange to see the clumsy backslash construct for gender neutral terminology in French:

Le CLC cherche un/e directeur/trice.