September 2006
Monthly Archive
September 14, 2006
“In the previous verse it was explained that in dreams we see that which was experienced during the day. But why is it that we sometimes in our dreams see what we have never heard of or seen at any time during this life? Here it is stated that even though such events may not be experienced in this life, they were experienced in previous lives. According to time and circumstance, they combine so that in dreams we see something wonderful that we have never experienced. For instance, we may see an ocean on the peak of a mountain. Or we may see that the ocean has dried up. These are simply combinations of different experiences in time and space. Sometimes we may see a golden mountain, and this is due to our having experienced gold and mountains separately. In the dream, under illusion, we combine these separate factors. In this way we are able to see golden mountains, or stars during the day.”
SB 4.29.67
September 13, 2006
Posted by Madhava Gosh under
Jokes
[36] Comments
From the Google Blog: Googlebombing ‘failure’
” Googler insights into product and technology news and our culture.
Googlebombing ‘failure’
9/16/2005 12:54:00 PM
Posted by Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products
If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We’ve received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I’d like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns.
Google’s search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them. By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush’s website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don’t condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we’re also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don’t affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission. ”
September 12, 2006
“Just see! This pigeon is like a messenger of death. The shrieks of the owls and their rival crows make my heart tremble. It appears that they want to make a void of the whole universe.”
SB 1.14.14
Crows are scavengers. We don’t compost our kitchen waste; if it is put out in the morning, by evening it is usually gone. If they don’t finish it during the day, raccoons and possums clean it up at night. Crows are rascals, smart rascals, who use team tactics to achieve objectives. One will stand guard while the others eat and caw a warning if someone approaches. If we are busy working outside, they keep their distance, only coming in while the coast is clear. They will come right down onto the porch and eat pet food or anything left out if you don’t constantly keep them away. If you plant corn or squash, they will walk right down the row and pull out the seedlings and eat them when they sprout through the soil. They are destructive buggers.
They are also carrion eaters, feasting on roadkill or other dead animals. While I was bed ridden before my transplant, ergo not out and about in the garden, they became bolder and bolder in hanging around in the trees by the house. It made me feel like they were waiting for me to die so they could pick my bones clean.
About a week after I got home from the hospital, Tulasi started the lawn mower for me (I couldn’t do it) and I sort of fell forward against it, pushing it around the front yard; I actually cut the big easy part in the middle. The next morning, there was a crow feather laying in the newly mown grass. It is uncommon to see crow feathers, and as this was the first time I had ever seen one in the yard, I took it as a positive sign that I might survive the whole experience.
While my wife was selling at the Yankee Peddler Festival this past weekend, a Native American came up to her booth, said a lot of prayers, honored the Directions and handed my wife a parrot feather, saying, “This is for your husband.” This may be more meaningful to me than I can communicate in a few words, because I have some history with medicine men (as American Indian holy men are called). They are more into mysticism than Vaisnavas, and I have seen some things that you may not believe.
“Describing the contribution of Sukadeva Gosvami to the Bhagavatam, Prabhupada writes, ‘The Vedic fruit which is mature and ripe in knowledge is spoken through the lips of Sri Sukadeva Gosvami, who is compared to the parrot not for his ability to recite the Bhagavatam exactly as he heard it from his learned father, but for his ability to present the work in a manner that would appeal to all classes of men.’ ”
MM 52
September 11, 2006
I am convinced that unless a drug causes abdominal discomfort or diarrhea, it won’t be approved by the FDA. :-) At least it seems that way. I have always tried to take some yogurt, because I think what happens is that the drugs fry the beneficial bacteria in your gut and then the nasty ones take over. Yogurt repopulates the good guys, and helps with the various drugs’ side effects. I had heard that it is best to take live yogurts with acidophilus and bifidus added, so I have been doing that.
The other night I was at the temple and struck up a conversation with an elderly Indian gentlemen visiting with his family. He was a retired microbiologist whose company had spent 18 years in a joint venture with the Japanese working on the microencapsulization of bifidus so it could be effectively added to food. Bifidus helps populate the intestines, where it is normally present in healthy humans. The difficulty with supplementing it is that it is an anaerobic bacterium. Yogurt cultures are aerobic bacterias, and conflict with the bifidus, reducing the populations. They are good bacterias for the stomach, which is also aerobic (also bad for bifidus), but are not effective in the gut, because the intestines are anaerobic. So the challenge was how to get the bifidus to survive the yogurt and the trip through the stomach. They solved this through microencapsulization, and you can now buy yogurts with bifidus added.
Following is an exchange between the pharmacist on the liver transplant team and me, as we negotiate the reefs of rejection. It is T cells that we are suppressing because they are the agent of rejection:
>Anecdotally, I believe my taking daily at least some yogurt with bifidus added has helped me.
>This doesn’t sound like T cells, though a little vague about “immune-related substances”. My guess it isn’t T cells, but would appreciate your opinion.
>”In addition, lactic acid bacteria stimulate the proliferation of macrophages, resulting in the enhancement of the capability of
macrophage to recognize and sterilize harmful bacteria invaded in intestines.They, further, stimulate the secretion of immune-related substances, resulting in the enhancement of the immunity (Gabriela perdigon et al., J. of food Protection 53:404-410, 1990; Katsumasa sato et al., Microbiol. Immunol., 32(7):689-698, 1988).”
>http://freshpatents.com/Novel-microorganism-pediococcus-pentosaceus-erom
101-having-immune-enhancement-anticancer-and-antimicrobial-activities-dt
20050616ptan20050130288.php?type=description
>These are the studies cited in the excerpt:
>http://www.annalsofsurgery.com/pt/re/annos/abstract.00000658-199812000-0
0005.htm;jsessionid=FGCdjYYQnGBt8QPWjZ2HVjxhYGSBY2WNfCw855jDGGWb93Nn7cH8
!1230047961!-949856144!8091!-1
>http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1365-2672.2004.02158.
x?journalCode=jam
You are correct – this is not T cells. Macrophages are also part of the rejection cascade, but by a different mechanism. They don’t actively contribute to rejection. Their role is to bring the foreign substances (bacteria, organ donor antigens, etc) to the T cells and get the T cell process started. I think this will be fine for you to take. This will sensitize the macrophages to bacteria, but not necessarily sensitize the macrophages to everything else, such as organ antigens.
I hope that helps!
Kristine
September 10, 2006
Posted by Madhava Gosh under
Illusions,
Poetry
1 Comment
Me Real The The Real Me
?real more what’s what’s more real?
image mirror my my mirror image
image self My ah, or, or, ah my self image
September 9, 2006
Posted by Madhava Gosh under
Liver Transplant
[4] Comments
My liver biopsy went smoothly. My wife was out of town going to Yankee Peddler, a crafts show where you have to be in costume and have crafts consistent with 1848. Gourds are natural for that. After a biopsy you can’t drive for 24 hours, so Sacipita drove me up, then went apartment hunting as their daughter is doing a mall kiosk for Christmas and needs a place to stay. I had to be there at 9 AM, the procedure was at noon, then I had to wait 4 hours afterwards in case of internal bleeding.
The biopsy itself is quick, about 10 minutes, most of which is preparation. They clean up the area, then use an ultrasound view to find the best place. They use a gun that sounds like a big stapler when they pull the trigger. They demonstrate the sound so you aren’t startled when they do it for real. They use a little lidocaine to numb the area so no pain. You have to hold your breath for a few seconds, “Bang” and it’s over. The doctor on the ultrasound told the doc with the gun to go 7 cm (3 inches) deep and they got a good slice so they only had to do it once.
A radiologist then did a more complete ultrasound to see the condition of my liver. She said all the blood was flowing in the right direction and it looked fine. We got to chatting about our kids, because I had had a living donation from my son, and she was nice and looked up my ultrasound from my discharge. The liver hasn’t grown much, unlike the donor’s, which can regrow to normal size in 2 weeks, but that is normal for a recipient, I found out. I guess because the immune system is still annoyed by the allographic liver. That explains why I still have so little stamina.
The down side was my blood pressure was high, borderline hypertensive, which is very uncharacteristic for me. At first I suspected the BP machine was out of calibration, but the nurse was nice enough to do a manual one, and the results were consistent. I barely qualified to do the biopsy, 140/88. (“Your blood pressure is at its highest when the heart beats, pumping the blood. This is called systolic pressure. When the heart is at rest, between beats, your blood pressure falls. This is the diastolic pressure”). The diastolic has to be under 90 to do the biopsy. I was 150/100 when they first tested it, though some of that was nervousness, “white coat syndrome”.
The high BP is a side effect of Prograft, my anti-rejection drug. So I am doing some research in naturally lowering BP so I don’t have to take another drug for that.
September 8, 2006
I’ve been posting pictures of Sydney, Manjari’s baby, so here is one of Manjari as a baby. We had a fairly unreal concept of what detachment was, at that time, so early pictures are rare. Manjari was given this one by Meghamala, who is the adult in the picture with her nursery class.
It is her son Ananta on her lap, and Acuytananda at her side, then Suta. Manjari is standing next to Vishnu, with Kapila next to her, and the last one is unknown, I guess, at least to me. The caption is about the winter of 1977 when it was -20 F (-29 C ) for two weeks, one of the coldest spells ever since I have been here. Most winters lately it hasn’t gotten below zero (-18 C ).
The picture has seen better days. Most of the early pictures we have of our kids we got when my father-in-law left his body at 96 years of age, and we got the pictures back we had sent to him over the years, and some his sister-in-law, Vidya’s Aunt Marie, had taken on her regular visits to NV.
The first big building built by devotees at Bahulaban was the barn, with cows on the ground floor and devotees had rooms on the second floor.
September 7, 2006
Posted by Madhava Gosh under
Jokes
1 Comment
Did you hear about the Hindu yogi who was having a filling put in a tooth? When the dentist asked him if he wanted novocaine, the yogi said, “No. I can transcend dental medication.”
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View From a New Vrindaban Ridge 