90% True

.: Last night my dad took me to the ER to watch him work. He’s an ER doctor and, as I learned throughout the night, a pretty good one at that. His shift was from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am; we left a little before seven. During that time, I saw people with serious problems—fractured C-1 vertebrae, total renal failure causing hyperkalemia, massive heart attack followed by seizure followed by asphyxiation via gum, severe dementia—all of which were rather mundane ailments to the people who worked there.

.: I took notes throughout the evening, notes which I plan to turn into something larger than this post. (I smell a screenplay!) Therefore, with these plans in mind, I leave you only with a sample of what’s to come. In order of arrival, here are Key Quotes From Patients:

.: Bed 9 - Seizure
Dad: “She’s what we call a Drug Seeker. They come in, moaning and groaning, trying to score some painkillers. I’ve seen ‘em all before. Watch, she’ll start complaining as soon as we step foot in the door.”

.: Bed 11 - Heart attack
Nurse: “Dr. Cobb, please inform the respiratory therapist before you proceed to defibrillate next time.”

.: Bed 1 - Emphysema
Dad: “Do you smoke?”
Pat.: “No, I don’t smoke.”
Dad: “Good for you!”
Pat.: “Not since four days ago.”
Dad: “…”

.: Bed 4 - Seizure
Dad: “And who grabbed the steering wheel when it happened?”

.: Bed 15 - Fever
Dad: “What do you think? Five year old girl, worst headache of her life, temperature 100.7, white blood count 17.2—”
Doc.: “Tap her!”
Dad: “You think I should tap her?”
Doc.: “Yeah!”
Dad: “You’re a mean old man.”

.: Bed 2 - Fractured C-1 Vertebrae
Dad: “Sir, how many drinks have you had tonight?”
Pat.: “What?”
Dad: “Have you been drinking tonight?”
Pat.: “A little, yeah.”
Dad: “How many drinks have you had tonight?”
Pat.: “Total?”
Dad: “Yes, total.”
Pat.: “About eight or nine.”
Dad: “Eight or nine?”
Pat.: “Yeah.”
Dad: “Where did you come from?”
Pat.: “I—”
Dad: “Were you coming home from work?”
Pat.: “No—”
Dad: “Were you coming home from a party?”
Pat.: “Part—”
Dad: “You came back from a party?”
Pat.: “Yeah, it’s a party—”
Dad: “What do you do for a living?”
Pat.: “Ink.”
Dad: “You make ink?”
Pat.: “I have to go see my son.”
Dad: “No, sir, you just wait right here. You’re intoxicated.”
Pat.: “My son needs me.”
Dad: “Your son needs you to stay where you are.”
Pat.: “I need to see my son. He needs me.”
Dad: “Sir, you cannot leave this bed.”
Pat.: “My legs work—”
Dad: “Your neck is broken, sir. Do you realize if you move one wrong step, you could be paralyzed for the rest of your life?”
Pat.: “…”
Dad: “Your neck is broken. You cannot move it.”
Pat.: “…”
Dad: “It doesn’t matter if you can move your arms and legs, your vertebrae is not in a position to support your head.”
Pat.: “I have to see my son.”

.: Bed 7 - Atrial Fibrillation
Dad: “We get this every year. People drink lightly throughout the year, maybe one drink a day, then around Thanksgiving and Christmas, they have a little too much to drink and their heart goes haywire. We call it Holiday Heart.”

.: Bed 4 - Fall
Pat.: “Hey!”
Dad: “He’s got dementia, he doesn’t know—”
Pat.: “Hey!”
Dad: “—where he is.”
Pat.: “Hey!”
Dad: “Says here he fell in the hallway at a nursing—”
Pat.: “Hey!”
Dad: “—home, might’ve busted his right knee.”
Pat.: “Hey!”

.: Bed 12 - Hyperkalemia
Dad: “This is by far the sickest patient we’ve had tonight. This one’s seriously ill. We’re going to—”
Nurse: “Dr. Cobb!”
Dad: “That’d be me.”
Nurse: “Bed six, homeless 18 year old with—”
Dad: “Is it life-threatening?”
Nurse: “No.”
Dad: “Then leave me alone.”

.: Bed 3 - Nausea and Vomiting
Dad: “Do you smoke?”
Pat.: “I just started.”
Dad: “What?! You’re fifty! Why would you start now?”
Pat.: “Well, my husband was dying of lung cancer, so I tried to be inspirational for him, make him choose life.”
Dad: “So you chose death?”

.: Bed 6 - Anxiety
Dad: “Do you hear how her voice is the same, no animation? That’s called a Flat Affect, and it’s a sure sign of mental illness.”

.: Bed 5 - Pneumonia
Nurse: “It took us three nurses to pin him down for the shot, and he’s only two!”

.: Bed 13 - Chest Pains
Dad: “Do you smoke?”
Pat.: “Yes.”

.: Bed 8 - Hand Injury
Pat.: “So whatcha gonna do?”
Me: “Oh, I don’t work here.”

.: That’s all you get for now. Stay tuned for future developments.

.: I saw The Incredibles for a fourth time tonight, this time with my Dad and his soon-to-be-wife. As I expected, it was still awesome, easily one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.

.: After the show, my sister and I went to our house in the Woodlands. We decided we didn’t want to stay there this holiday break, so we grabbed all our stuff and took it to our house in Spring. It’s just the two of us here, and it’s a pretty big house. We have everything (two computers, high-speed internet, ginormous HDTV with DVD player, king size beds for the both of us, clothes), everything except food. That could be a problem.

.: I heard from my sister that we will both get to share an awesome apartment next year. The place we’re likely to get is definitely a place I would be comfortable calling home: it’s a two story apartment, two full-size bedrooms, a badass kitchen and a massive living room. Plus, since I’ll be living with my sister, it’ll be like having my own personal maid—for free!

.: Last night I went to a Christmas party hosted by Susan. I met people from high school, all of whom were familiar faces. We traded some funny and some not-so-funny college stories, and then we played some games. (One of the games was Charades, always the popular choice. My phrase I had to act out: “Ethiopian Love Slave.”) All in all, it was a fun night.

.: I think I’ll go work on another writing project now.

.: I finished my last two finals today. They were easy, easier than anything we did in the class. I would have left immediately afterwards, but tragedy struck.

.: I was making some last minute additions to my iPod when suddenly and inexplicably, I clicked a button that started deleting ever file on the iPod. It was horrifying. There was no cancel button, so I did the next best thing: I yanked that sucker right out of the socket, cord and all. When I plugged it back in, I saw the damage that had been done:

Half of my 80’s playlist gone
Half of my Oingo Boingo gone
All of my Billy Joel gone
A quarter of my Classical gone

.: All in all, about 150 songs that I had to reload onto my iPod. Needless to say, it delayed my departure considerably.

.: Now that I am home, however, I’m wondering precisely what the second title of this post asks. Where indeed? My brother took my old desk for his first computer, then used the laptop tray for his second computer. My dad’s got a monopoly on the computer room, so I can’t put it there. I’m thinking, maybe I should go without a computer for a while?

.: Nah. Oh, and consider the AIM fast over. Losercmc is back online!

.: Some people say that any statistic can be twisted to support any view. Indeed, some people are very good at this. But what of a view that is supported by statistics that don’t exist? And then, what of a view that is supported by non-existant statistics that have nothing to do with it? That’s precisely the case with one Focus on the Family article I read.

.: It all began when Fox released Kinsey. Kinsey pissed off religious groups back when he was alived, and with the release of this film he’s at it again. I haven’t seen the movie, though I would like to. Just out of curiousity, I looked up some websites like www.family.org. Sure enough, I found their tirades against Kinsey on the front page.

.: I now direct you to this article, entitled “How to Change the Kinsey Culture.” Scroll down about halfway until you come across this List:

School Teachers Rate Top Disciplinary Problems

1940 (A few years before Kinsey’s books were published)
Talking out of turn
Chewing gum
Making noise
Running in the halls
Cutting in line
Dress-code violations
Littering

1990 (A generation after Kinsey’s books were published)
Drug abuse
Alcohol use
Pregnancy
Suicide
Rape
Robbery
Assault

.: You might be wondering, “What does this have to do with Kinsey?” The answer is “nothing.”

.: Read that list again. It’s pretty shocking, no? Gum and Litter opposite Suicide and Rape? These are the kind of statements that prompts you to look for sources at the end of the article. Go ahead, go look; you won’t find any. According to Snopes.com, “Dr. O’Neill eventually tracked the supposed list of discipline problems to former Fort Worth businessman T. Cullen Davis. The multimillionaire was arrested in the 1976 slayings of his ex-wife’s lover and daughter. After his acquittal, he became an evangelical Christian and began opposing sex education and the teaching of evolution in Fort Worth schools. He wrote the list in the early 1980s, not as a hoax, but as an argument for how schools have declined.”

.: So, short of being the scientific study Family.org implies with its citation of the List, it’s actually just one man’s opinion. I emailed Family.org with the following query:

In your article entitled “How to Change the Kinsey Culture” (link), you make use of a list of “Top Disciplinary Problems,” as rated by school teachers:

(copy of the List)

My question is: have you read snopes recently? (link) They say the list is T. Cullen Davis’s personal opinion, not an actual study.

Surely you can either provide evidence to the contrary or, failing that, attribute the statistic to its proper source?

.: They responded:

Recently you submitted a question or comment to Focus on the Family. We are honored by the confidence you have expressed in our ministry. Please know that we are currently experiencing higher than expected volumes of e-mail. Should your situation require a response, we ask that you please allow a few additional days for handling. We appreciate your patience.

.: Then, a week later, they really responded:

Greetings from Focus on the Family. We appreciate the honesty with which you provided your feedback to a portion of the content of our online article, “How to Change the Kinsey Culture.”

We shared your comments with the article’s author who informed us that he received the information from the Reason Public Policy Institute’s, “School Violence Prevention: Strategies to Keep Schools Safe” Policy Study No. 234. We don’t have contact info for the Reason Public Policy Institute, but if you wish to reach them about the “discipline lists” you can probably find the organization on the Web.

Thanks again for contacting us. God’s blessings to you and yours.

Scott Smith
Focus on the Family

.: I googled the article they mentioned and came up with this link. Sure enough, they use the List—without citing the source. To be fair, they precede the list with the following passage:

In 1940, public school teachers ranked the top seven disciplinary problems at public schools. Public school teachers ranked the top problems again in 1990. A comparative glance at the two lists, shown in Table 2-1, does not give any actual data regarding the incidence of the problems detailed, but is nonetheless instructive. [emphasis mine]

.: I’ve already shown that the list was not the result of an extensive 50 year study, but one man’s opinion. Here’s another interesting fact: the article that Family.org cites as their source for the List mentions nothing about Kinsey! Notice above what Family.org adds to the list:

1940 (A few years before Kinsey’s books were published)
1990 (A generation after Kinsey’s books were published)

.: Huh? They might as well put this:

1940 (A few years before America entered World War II)
1990 (A generation after America entered World War II)

.: The wrong side won the war! Look at the cost of victory! Of course both of those scenarios are nonsense. Golden rule of statistics: correlation need not imply causation.

.: I wonder who the readers of Family.org are. Do these people ever think to stop and check the sources? The facts? As it stands today, Family.org has made no attempt to correct or clarify the error in their article that I so kindly pointed out to them. I wonder why.

.: I finished the changes I made to Unicorns. You can find them here. The major changes/additions are highlighted in yellow for easy viewing, in case you don’t want to read the entire thing again. If you haven’t, shame on you. Go read it. Now.

.: (If you want, I even made a .doc file which you can download by right-clicking and selecting “save target as” here.)

.: The second portion of this post—the “science” part—has to do with more Christmas shopping. My sister and I went to Hastings again this evening to find things to buy for other people, when in fact we were subconsciously looking for things to buy for other people that we could then, at a later date, take for ourselves. Two books intrigued me: “Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time” by Michael Shermer and “The Blind Watchmaker” by Richard Dawkins.

.: Also, as I was looking for things to buy people who aren’t already on the list (see below), I couldn’t help but find things that I wanted to get for people who were already on the list. I saw a really cool math book with lots of pretty pictures that would surely appeal to a certain mathematically-inclined friend of mine, but I already got him something better. I saw an interesting science history book that would be a perfect read for my family’s resident long-distance pilot, but I had already got him something else (I ended up buying the book anyway for him, but the official excuse is that it’s “from my sister”). I noticed this bitchin’ photobook about prehistoric sea-ceatures that would bring out the inner-child in my brother, but he’s already getting what is clearly a lesser gift solely for the reason that I already purchased it. And then I came across a hilarious movie collection that I just know the token whore among my friends would love, but that I decided not to get (just out of spite).

.: All in all, my sister and I spent five hours crouched over several dozen books on the floor, just thinking of all the wonderful knowledge to be shared, and for the life of me I couldn’t locate a single gift for somebody else. Not a one. (The exception being the Pride and Prejudice miniseries for my grandmother we bought today, but I had planned long ago to get that for her, so it doesn’t really count.)

.: I took my Calculus final today. Kind of odd: last year my most difficult class was Caculus; this year it was the easiest. The final was ducksoup, to say the least.

.: Anyway, that means I’m down to two more finals, English and Econ, both of which are on Tuesday. I could either a) study for Econ or b) not study for Econ. Since it happened to be my second easiest class, there will be a minimal amount of studying.

.: That said, I think I’ll spend the remainder of this day and the next two working on my stories. There are some things I want to tweak on Unicorns, and I need to finish writing my other one about college. The reason for devoting some time to Unicorns is because I have about 130 pages left in my “Paper Balance” (Yes, Baylor is lame enough to have a “Paper Balance”—if we print more than 400 pages, each additional page costs us seven cents). Well, the balance restarts next semester, so I’ll be damned if I let 130 perfectly good piece of paper go to waste.

.: Should be a fun weekend.