Month: March 2006

I had my thallium stress test today. Tedious, but uneventful. The worst was the 4 hour fast, which ends up being a bit longer once the test is factored in, followed closely by the caffeine ban — 24 hours prior.

First a catheter was placed in my arm (interestingly, I could still flex my arm as it it weren’t there). A small dose of thallium was injected, flushed through with saline.

Then 22 minutes in a radio-imaging scanner, a long bed/platform with a pair of imaging cameras that rotated around me, a few degrees every few minutes. The treadmill was next: lots of sensors were affixed to my torso — 9, perhaps 10 — all leading into the controller for the treadmill. Then off I went for a brisk walk until my pulse was throbbing away at 150 bpm. The remaining thallium was injected into the catheter. Held that pace for 2 minutes, and then it was time to sit down, cool down, and then wander the halls for 20 minutes.

Back into the scanner for 16 minutes and that was that. Took about 2 hours total. The cardiologist will read the results and call them into my GP who can then tell me it was all for naught.

My knees were the biggest problem during the treadmill. I won’t say it was easy to get my pulse up to that level: it took a few minutes and from 140 to 150 was a slow going. But my knees starting complaining much earlier. They’re high-mileage, I realize, but I really don’t want to to replace them. My father has had both of this replaced, and while it’s been an improvement, I hope not to get to that point.

Now to go find a geiger counter I can mess with: I know the security checkpoints will notice me for the next month. I’ll find out later this week if federal office buildings have the same sensitivity . . .

Now playing: John Coltrane Stereo Blues by The Dream Syndicate from the album “Medicine Show”

I missed this back when the war in Iraq was still a dream in the eye of many a warhawk . . . . I knew there were some people with their own millennial fantasies, but this is just naked bloodlust.

Nick Denton:

But there’s a much more basic reason to crush Saddam Hussein’s regime. The Islamic world — mainly the Arab Islamic world — needs to realize that it has failed. Medieval Islam cannot compete with liberal capitalism either economically or culturally. Unfortunately, that message has taken several hundred years to filter through. There is nothing like cataclysmic military defeat to teach the lesson more rapidly. One could point at the examples of Japan and Germany after the Second World War. But the Muslim world provides its own case study. Ottoman Turkey only began to pay attention to Western science and organization after its first serious military defeats at the hands of Austria and Russia in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The US needs to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime because he’s a bad man, sure, because he may conceivably be connected with Al-Qaeda, because he’s developing weapons of mass destruction, because a friendly Iraq would alter the balance of power in the Middle East, sure, because of all of that. But the US needs to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime mainly because the West needs to humiliate the Arab world, and dispel the Islamic millennial fantasy.
Inhabitants of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries must realize that medieval Islam and strongman dictatorships are bankrupt. Arab political systems have held back progress, and even the Islamic traditionalists who deny those Western notions of progress will have to accept the objective measure of military accomplishment. Let the US send 40,000 soldiers against an Iraqi army ten times the size; let the defeat be total; and let Arab people realize that liberal democracy isn’t just a soft western indulgence, but the most effective form of social organization on this planet, and it is their future, if they want a future.

This is just tragically wrong, despicable, and ugly. If you wanted to crush and humiliate a regime that is holding back progress, Saudi Arabia would have been a better choice. But even then it would be a bad idea. I wonder if Denton has wised up at all in the intervening 3½ years? 40,000 soldiers? How about 4 times that many? As noted in the Times this weekend, Iraq’s defenses were crumbling before the war started.

Now if Iran does make a move, they can rightly say “yeah, and with whose Army?” now that we have wrecked ours. So much for humiliating the enemy, when all we seem to have done is emboldened the real enemy while settling old family scores.

Now playing: Psalm by Roxy Music from the album “Stranded”

curie – definition of curie by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.:

cu·rie (kyŏ rÄ“)n. Abbr. Ci A unit of radioactivity, equal to the amount of a radioactive isotope that decays at the rate of 3.7 × 10¹⁰ disintegrations per second.

I’ll be enjoying 3-5 millicuries at the start of my procedure today and then a booster of 30-40 at the peak. Since this is an exercise-based test, I expect it could be over in 20 minutes, given the appalling shape I am in.