Better living through very basic chemistry

I recently picked up a copy of the book Green Clean by Linda Mason Hunter and Mikki Halpin. Not surprisingly, a lot of the stuff that is in our cleaning supplies now is at best questionable, and at worst quite toxic. I had started looking around for different ways to clean since the past few times I've used bleach (and yes, I do know to dilute it), I felt nauseated for several hours afterward because of being overwhelmed from the smell.

There's not very much to the plan at all, really: Borax, lemons, club soda, baking soda, and vinegar are the mainstays; the only difficult thing to find was Castile soap, which I finally located at the health food store. (It's pricey, but fortunately, you need very little of it in almost every recipe that uses it.) Since my bathroom was in need of a clean, I decided to give the book its inaugural run: Baking soda and vinegar for the toilet bowl; water, vinegar, and essential oil for the sink and outside of the toilet; club soda for the mirror; and baking soda for the tub.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, exactly, but I was surprised when vinegar and baking soda actually got the toilet clean. The great thing about being ad-washed by cleaning chemical companies is that it didn't really take much convincing that I don't need to use anything more than incredibly cheap, dirt common supplies. Goodbye Comet.

The only thing I have to watch out for is the essential oil. I think I used too much of it in the recipe and now my bathroom smells like mint patch. At least it's not making me nauseated like the bleach did.

I'd like to save your life, but I'm gay.

According to new regulations passed by Health Canada, many groups including any gay man who has been sexually active in the past 5 years will no longer be able to to donate their organs for transplant. In the words of the story, "Transplant programs have been screening potential donors, but in some cases use organs from people in high-risk groups if they've tested negative for diseases. The new legislation means that the practice must stop."

I have to admit that I'm a bit perplexed by the move to ban certain groups from donating beforehand especially if they're testing organs in any case. I'm not convinced that the emphasis on "risky behaviour" is necessarily sufficient either, for the same reason. If the organs are getting tested, but this isn't enough to keep Health Canada from banning outright certain groups from the organ donation process entirely, what the hell is wrong with the tests? I do know about the HIV/AIDS latency period, which has no doubt lead to the blanket ban, but as far as I know, it doesn't take 5 years for it to become detectable by standard tests (when I've gotten the tests done, I thought it was 6 months, but the nurse had informed me that the tests had recently gotten better and could detect most in 3 months). If nothing else, could they not reduce that period between risky action and organ acceptability?

I am also astounded that Health Canada would be so naive to think that they can easily catch all members of the groups they identify through "interviewing" people as well: people lead secret lives all the time, and the whole idea behind "secret lives" is to engage in dangerous, questionable, immoral, unacceptable, etc. actions that you don't want other people to know. The interviewing process is not going to catch people like this. They're also not even going to be able to soundly estimate this population: I just hope that they have contingency plans in place for those kind of wrinkles.

Here's another thought: given that there's already a severe shortage of organs for donation in the health care system, and given that this will potentially knock off 7% of donors as estimated by the story, we need to retain as many organs as we can. Here's my suggestion: you give the family the full history of what's known about the donor to recipient (or whoever is responsible for making the decision), as well as what medical tests have shown, and then allow them to make an informed decision to accept or reject the organ based on what's known about the donor. I would have thought this is standard practice in surgery anyway: allow the patient to know the risks and choose from options, including to refuse all treatment.

Psychology of the Cell Phone

Here's an anecdote that pretty much sums up my major issues with a cell phone.

I stood in line of a Tim Horton's close to my apartment. I go up to the first cashier and place my order, and then go to the middle of a long island to wait for her to deliver my food. Cell phone guy gets called to the far counter by one of the cashiers, and she's rather loud because of the distance to the line. No response from him. She calls again. Then he notices that he's being called, and continues to talk on his phone. Does he put it down or hang up when he's ordering? No. He pulls it away from his face for about 2 seconds and then goes right back to talking on his cell phone [1]. The server puts his coffee on the counter, and then he starts to walk away, apparently forgetting that, yes, even cell phone owners and users are expected to pay for their goods and services in our economy.

The next time I hear somebody say that we can't possibly ban cell phone use in driving cars, or someone who claims that they among all people really are good at driving while talking, I'll give them this anecdote and see what they think. A $1.39 transaction seems a bit easier than driving down a multilane highway in a car with other drivers around you, but that didn't keep cell phone dude [2] from screwing it up.

[1] Because cell phone dude [see note 2] was not speaking English (I think he was speaking French), I couldn't evaluate the Theorem of Conversational Importance. Stated mathematically, the theorem suggests that the importance of a cell phone conversation is in inverse proportion to the product of the amount of time spent talking and the appropriateness of having the conversation at that moment. In symbols, that is

I=(1/TA)

That is, people who talk on their cell phones while driving or waiting for coffee in Tim Horton's, or who speak for hours at a time on it (and this includes texting) are unlikely to have anything meaningful to say on their phone.

[2] "Dude" is like "winner" is for other people: seldom used positively despite the possibility of those connotations, but instead used almost always derisively.