dehydrated water pills

I had posted a link to Amazon long back. Today, I just visited the Amazon site again. now there are 13 peoples' comments 12 of whom are all very thrilled with the product.
Can you believe it?

refrigeration

I had wondered, with my admittedly limited knowledge of physics and engg. , why there were no airconditioners/refrigerators based on the Ranque Hilsch vortex.
Here is a paper
http://www.dissigno.com/downloads/Vortex%20Tube%20White%20Paper.pdf

self congratulations

Young women these days are so much better focused on their lives than those of my generation. But on a self-congratulatory note, let me say that they are so because we, their mothers brought them up to be so.
I asked my daughter few months ago, if she wanted to get married in the traditional manner of my finding a suitable boy, and she said emphatically "NO" So there the whole matter ended unlike my parents who manipulated and made me feel guilty and finally made me agree to the same question.
I get a lot of pressure from relatives about when I plan to 'get her' married and I too emphatically say 'when she wants to'. I have also managed to keep my husband out of it.
So I think self congratulations are in order.

success stories.

I keep complaining about my students and their shortcomings. Here is the other side.
Two days ago, an alumnus came to give a talk to our current students about his work. He is post-docing at a medical center of a good University in the US. Another classmate of his is doing the same. A third one is close to completing his PhD. One other has a research position at the NIH. From a previous batch, one is postdocing at Berkeley, another was at Harvard. So these are some of our success stories in science.
There are a few in the services...Army/Navy/Airforce- a few of them women officers. One in the IPS. Then there was this batch in which quite a few have started their own businesses. A few of them very successful.
So, inspite of not knowing if the electron is in the d orbital or the d orbital is in the electron, some of them succeed. Which just goes to show d orbitals are not all that important even if I have to spend 20 lectures on them.

retirement

In a year's time I will be retiring from my job.
For me and many women like me, our workplace provides the only social contact other than relatives. After work and household chores, there is no time or energy for having a social life outside these two spheres. So retirement is quite scary.
Secondly, the daily contact with young people is definitely uplifting. They provide some purpose, some laughter, some energy in my life. After retirement, I may just have senior citizens for company-- those who I look upon as 'old people' forgetting my age.
For all my rants about them, I will miss my students the most.

some existential questions

I may have written about this before since this bothers me from time to time. This time it's triggered by Abi's post. So, here goes...
Many years ago, my children were small, and I found myself very intolerant of their minor transgressions. It worried me. For some other physical problem I went to a doctor. There, I discovered I was hypertensive and the doctor prescribed some medication. I took the pill and lo behold! after just a couple of days, I was much calmer, much more tolerant of my childrens' transgressions....a much better person!
So, I am a better person on the basis of a few milligrams of a chemical compound. Which is the real me? the very irritable person before the medication, or the much less irritable person after taking the medication? What kind of person I am, is defined by some chemical. Then, if my irritabilty had not been just a case of yelling at my children (bad enough) but had gone to a higher level, like shooting at a stranger who bumped into me on the road, or some such thing, is my crime not really mine? Also, since there is a medicine that has made me calmer, there must be some other chemical taht makes me angrier. If I was given that, and then committed a crime in anger, am I not culpable?
Our brain works on neurotransmitters...chemicals control whether I am sad, happy, angry, even my thoughts, to some extent...everything that I think define me.
So if everyone is given exactly same cocktail of such chemicals, can we all become people with one type of personality?
Like frontal lobotomy was used years ago to treat violent psychotics, will this dehumanise us?
It seems like that.
But why should it? In any case, it's the chemicals that determine what kind of person I am.

Advertisements on Television

I was just thinking about the new printer ad, when I read a remark on it in my friend's blog. The ad says you must buy this printer for your child to do well in school-- all that printing for projects etc. Why did it catch my 'eye' ? Is it any worse than the energy/milk drink ads that say that unless you give your son this drink, he cannot do well in his exams or in the gym competition or whatever?
I don't really know. Maybe because it is more specific...or maybe because the so called improved version of education is also so trivial.
There is this breakfast cereal ad that many women were annoyed by...where a husband needs his wife to climb upstairs to hand him his socks from the drawer next to him.
However, I always find our ads entertaining sometimes more so than the program.