Proper use of the colon

No, I'm not talking about this kind of colon: that wouldn't be, shall we say, earthy enough.

I'm talking about the large intestine.

I bring this up because I noticed an advertisement on this blog whose title was: "Are you clean inside?"

This by itself raises many philosophical issues, but what really caught my eye was the sub-heading: "Death begins in the colon."

So I had to go to the site: the last thing I want is to die colon first.

They're selling a trio of prducts that are (thankfully) taken orally, which they claim will clean out your colon.

Clean enough to eat off? Probably not.

What will a clean(er) colon do for you?

Colon cleansing can provide
the following benefits:

▪ Relief from Constipation
▪ Elimination of Parasites
▪ Relief from IBS
▪ Relief from Gas & Bloating
▪ Weight Loss & Flatter Stomach
▪ Improved Skin, Acne, and Hair
▪ Increase in Fiber intake
Plus relief from:
▪ Chronic Fatigue
▪ Diverticulosis
▪ Digestive Problems
▪ Acid Reflux
▪ Stomach Pain
▪ Bad Breath
▪ Diarrhea

To support these assertions, they have amassed a large quantity of the professional scientist's favorite type of evidence: testimonials.

This is what I call doing "Readers Digest" research: Compelling anecdotes that support the assertion.

What should be more compelling is of course randomized double blind clinical trials, but the presentation of these is kind of dry and just doesn't have the same impact as: “Here's what I've lost: abdominal pain, bloating, gas, worms”

Of course the biggest reason they don't use randomized double blind clinical trials is that they are a lot of work and cost a lot of money. Why do that when you can sell your stuff with no regulation from the FDA by calling it a "dietary supplement?"

Mind you, if you take these supplements you definitely will get a lot of stuff out of your colon that you probably didn't know you had in there: you may actually have worms. But will this stuff do all they say? Probably no more than a placebo.

The Deschutes River

Before 7/22, I had only been down the Maupin stretch of the Deschutes river once, about four years ago. As of 7/21, I, for the life of me couldn't remember why I didn't go there more often. Now I do, and it will be at least another four years before I forget enough about the experience to do it again.

My antipathy has nothing to do with the river itself: it is a nice, relatively warm river, it has a few good drops, it is dam regulated so the flows are very predictable, the weather tends to be very good. So what is not to like?

For one, this is the only roadside rafting I've ever done where I had to buy a permit.

Personally, I don't think that is such a bad thing: use fees are something that all commercial outfitters have to pay to various agencies: BLM, Forest Service, etc. I personally don't have a problem with the idea of private users paying use fees when they use a resource. In principle. And in fact, but it still seems weird to actually do it. Especially when it is the only place I know in these parts to do it. The river isn't that great: the water isn't warmer than the Lower Salmon at Riggins, the rapids aren't any better than the White Salmon across the Columbia from the Deschutes.

My hypothesis is that because this is a relatively "easy" river in close proximity to Portland, there has grown up there a thriving raft rental industry. Because most of the river use was coming from these quasi-private boaters, no revenue was being generated for (in this case) the BLM. So they instituted the use fee. I imagine it still doesn't completely fund the cost of the BLM staff that patrols the river, but at least it defrays a big hunk of the cost.

So the fee isn't really that big a negative for me. But this is:







I am the type of guy who likes to raft for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons is that I like to get away from big crowds of people. On the Deschutes on a weekend day during the summer, that will not happen.

The last picture is of the take out just above Sherar's Falls. I think they actually station an Oregon State Patrol officer there on the weekends to "keep the peace." I think that is probably a good idea.

While we were there, no fights broke out, but I personally witnessed two incidents that easily could have ended in fistfights if one of the parties involved had been as obnoxious as the other. One party on each occasion was acting like a jerk, but in both cases the other people were more reasonable.

By far, most of the people there were just trying to get along, but there was a lot of drinking, it was really hot, and a lot of people were packed together in a small area with sometimes conflicting agendas.

The take out, all by itself is enough to keep me from going back there for a few years.

Kill your I-pod?

I-pods cause autism!

For those that don't know, some people are asserting that autism is caused by mercury poisoning. This has been a very lucrative assertion for a small group of doctors, but has not been verified scientifically.

Up until now, the main focus of their attacks have been towards childhood vaccinations. A common misconception is that a preservative in the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps, ruebella) is thimerosol, which contains mercury. However, MMR is a "live virus" vaccine that does not, and never has contained thimerosol. This does not prevent these peolple from going on incessantly about it though.

Perhaps owing to a large study done in Canada, they are finally accepting the fact that vaccinations aren't the (only) cause. They are looking now for other sources of mercury.

So in a brilliant rhetorical move, they may start backing away from the vaccination claim, while retaining the belief that mercury is the underlying cause of autism. Instead of hooking their wagon exclusively to the vaccination horse, they will claim that increases in the "enviromental" mercury are the cause of autism. This is brilliant, since whereas it is relatively simple to track and therefore study whether there is a correlation between vaccinations and autism (and there isn't one), it is vastly more difficult to track all the sources of enviromental mercury. This makes testing the hypothesis much more problematic.

This allows them to continue asserting the link between mercury and autism, while making it more difficult to test. So they get to keep charging desperate parents exhorbitant amounts of money for "chelation therapy" to remove mercury from their children, without the burden of actually showing any correlation.

Back to the I-pods. Since I-pods (as well as most other portable electronic devices) use batteries, they postulate that all the batteries going into landfills are contributing significant amounts of heavy metals (including mercury) to the enviroment, thereby causing an increase in the incidence of autism. Ergo, I-pods and autism.

As an aside, since chelation therapy doesn't actually cure the autism, though some parents claim that it does alleviate some of the symptoms (can you say confirmation bias?), the proponents of the mercury/autism link have hypothesized that the mercury is "bound" to tissues in autistic children.

What would bind mercury to human tissues and how to unbind it so the chelation therapy works better? The answer is in the Lupron Protocol.

For those unfamiliar with Lupron, it is a chemical used in some extreme cases on incorrigible sex offenders. It effectively "castrates" a man chemically by inhibitting the production of testosterone.

It has been noted that autism is almost exclusively found in males. So the hypothesis is that testosterone binds the mercury to the tissues.

The Lupron Protocol essentially chemically castrates autistic boys by preventing the production of testosterone in the testes. This allows the chelation therapy to "clean out" more mercury.

Which would be great if it actually worked any better than a placebo. But it doesn't.

For a better discussion of this, I recommend here.

I just keep Yaaking this back up

I just can't stop talking about the Yaak river. The trip Sparky and I made was really special: the weather was great, the water was warm, the rapids were steep, the scenery spectacular, the geology fascinating.

This was by far the steepest pool and drop river I have ever rafted: generally, in my experience, rivers this steep tend to be what are termed "continuous drop" rivers, but at the level we boated --750 cfs--, there were very well defined drops followed by well defined pools.

Mind you, the pools were not particularly long, so perhaps at higher water the rapids would feel more continuous, but at 750 cfs, it was a textbook pool and drop run.

This was also the maiden voyage of our new "waterproof" digital camera: a Pentax Optio W-10. It is the first waterproof digital camera that we've seen that looks just like any other camera. I'd take a picture of it, but I'd need to use it to take a picture, so that wouldn't work. Instead I'll link to another site that has a picture of it.

One of the biggest frusterations I've had while rafting, is the inability to take a lot of pictures. We have a really nice digital camera, but it is too difficult to get it out of (and into) its waterproof box quickly, so we haven't gotten a lot of good rafting pictures with it. Unless we happen to be scouting a rapid, but you all know how I feel about that.

The new camera we can leave out (though securely attatched) throughout a float, so we now have the ability to get many more pictures.

On the Yaak, we thought we took pictures of almost every "major" drop, but unfortunately, we weren't as familiar with the controls as we thought, so most of the pictures were lost. Which is quite sad, because there were many unique views both of rapids and of geology that we won't be able to share. We still ended with a lot of good pictures, and here are a couple more, but this was a river with a lot to experience, and you are only getting a small taste.


This is the "put-in" eddy, with a bad brown dog in it.











Looking downstream as the river starts to narrow.











Looking back upstream through a chute. Beautiful rock formations.











We can hear the drop around the corner, but can't as yet see it.








This is a big "S-bend" rapid, and the only place on the river (other than the put in) that we saw any people. Apparently, it is a pretty easy hike into this spot where a log completely bridges the river (fortunately high enough for us to pass under).





This is looking back upstream at the last drop of that "S-bend" rapid. By this time, Sparky was getting worried about fatigue, but there was a relatively long flat stretch of river below this that allowed her to recover.




PS. Don't forget you can "click" on any of the pictures for a close up view.

James Blake serving update

Granted this is a little late, but I see that James Blake lost to Max Miryni at Wimbledon. According to Blake, "My serve stopped going in. He's one of the toughest guys to play with just a second serve."

Wow, his serve stopped going in. Who would have guessed?

Oh, yeah, I would.

Yakkity Yaak (don't talk back)

It has been a while: my wife Sparky and I have been out of town on a week long rafting, biking, hiking, lounging adventure in Idaho and Montana.

It is offical: I have a new favorite whitewater river! The above photo is the top half of one of the bigger rapids on the Yaak river, known as "Stone Chest." We missed the eddy at the top of the rapid because I was busy being impressed with myself for our run through the previous rapid, which while big, was nothing like Stone Chest.

This is a river that is steeper than a "cow's face." Over the course of 9 miles, the gradient averaged 67 feet per mile. And no, I don't know what that cow face thing means, but it was used to describe a very steep valley in this book, so I think it is appropriate.

The cool thing about this river was the number of big rapids. That number was big. Those rapids were big. If I were smart, I would have counted the number, but I didn't. Instead, we just ran them, rapid after rapid until we got to Stone Chest.

When we got to the top of Stone Chest, Sparky began to babble incoherently. As previously noted, we had missed the eddy, and were fully committed to the rapid. She had run rapids like this before, but only much shorter, and usually after we had run it with me rowing at least once. On the Yaak, we were doing a side by side R-2 run, and while this kept the trip light and gave us plenty of control, Sparky felt somewhat "exposed" in the safety department.

So this time, she was, shall we say, somewhat chagrined about our inability to scout. As I have mentioned before, I hate to scout rapids: it just kind of scares me, and this time would have been no exception.

In this case, in my esteemed opinion, I think it was a good thing to have missed the eddy, because if we had scouted the upper portion of the rapid, I never could have gotten Sparky back in the boat. And this would have been a monster portage, even with the small raft we used.

As it was, even with Sparky spewing gibberish, she didn't forget how to paddle, and we made it through the upper portion of the rapid with no problems. Towards the bottom of the first drop, Sparky once again began speaking english, and asked politely (in the sense that no words banned by the FCC were used) if we could eddy out and scout the rest of the drop. This seemed reasonable to me since I needed to rinse the fresh urine out of my wetsuit anyway, so we pulled over here:


Still a lot of rapid to go, but it was nice to get out of the boat and take some pictures.

We made it through the rest of Stone Chest with no issues, and through several other big drops too: Sparky was getting weary (too much adrenaline) and it was nice when there was a couple mile long respite in the rapids.

The last rapid on the river is called "Good to the last drop," (get it?) just above the take out. It was a good boulder hopping class IV rapid, and a great way to end the whitewater portion of the trip. Here is a picture: