If your introduction to autism came from Dustin Hoffman’s groundbreaking performance in the 1988 film Rainman, you’ll catch the play on words. This young man has autism, and he runs to raise money to help raise awareness and make the world a better for autistics.

I first came into contact with Alex’ Mom, Janet (jypsy) when our Bug was waiting for his diagnosis. She and I corresponded only a couple of times, but she left a lasting impression on me. Seeing how Alex had been much like my son when he was younger, and seeing how far he had come over the years, gave me hope at a time when daily life was truly a struggle.

My Bug has gone from a non-verbal whirling dervish who ripped every book and paper he could get his hands on, to a thoughtful and expressive child who at age 8 is learning to read. I have every hope that he will continue to blossom, much as Alex did. In the years to come I can see him taking class trips, getting his high school diploma, and discovering his purpose in life.

Thanks so much to jypsy and the Run Man for their inspiration!

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I saw an educational program some weeks back, featuring Montreal’s very own Joe Schwarcz. It was a tremendously interesting history of cold breakfast cereals, and I’ve been meaning to blog about it ever since. When I sat down to gather up some more resources before I blogged, I realized the information is pretty much all available on the internet. I don’t want to replicate any of a half dozen pages that lay out the exact same sequence of events, so I think I’ll leave the cereal topic unless I find something really new and exciting about it.

But I wonder, do my readers who live outside Montreal know about our “Dr Joe”? He is a great resource for homeschool science - and usually also history. He’s a chemist and teacher by profession, and the director of McGill University’s Office for Science & Society - the mission of which is to demystify science. He appears frequently on our local news shows to address a topic of current interest, do a little consumer education, or maybe answer a question submitted by a viewer.

I love to watch the demonstrations he comes up with. When I was a college student I had a chem teacher who did a demo every Friday, and I know from personal experience these are the kinds of things that really hold a student’s attention. They can even be the deciding factor in a young person pursuing a career in science. Where would we all be today, if Einstein had never been shown how a compass works?

Dr Joe has a weekly radio show that airs Sundays at 3:00. In Montreal you can hear him on CJAD 800 AM; alternatively, you can tune into the show on Toronto’s CFRB (Newstalk 1010.) He also had a show called “Science To Go” on Discovery TV, which you may be able to get on DVD or catch as reruns. I believe the cereal show I saw was part of this series, which is apparently all about food.

You can find several books written by Dr Joe, as well. They are:

• An Apple A Day: The Myths, Misconceptions and Truths About the Foods We Eat (2007, ISBN 978-0-00-200764-1)
• Let Them Eat Flax: 70 All-New Commentaries on the Science of Everyday Food & Life (2005, ISBN 1-55022-698-3)
• The Fly in the Ointment: 70 Fascinating Commentaries on the Science of Everyday Life (2004, ISBN 1-55022-621-5)
• That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles: 62 All-New Commentaries on the Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life (2004, ISBN 1-55022-520-0)
• The Genie in the Bottle: 68 All New Commentaries on the Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life (2001, ISBN 1-55022-442-5)
• Radar, Hula Hoops, and Playful Pigs: 67 Digestible Commentaries on the Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life (2001, ISBN 0-8050-7407-4)

If you’re not able to access Dr Joe’s books or TV and radio shows, you can find his weekly column archived at the Gazette’s web site, and you can also find the Office for Science and Society online. Joe’s latest column deals with colon cleansing products.

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks to the Gazette. Photo courtesy the Office for Science and Society.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you will have seen a couple mentions of a past time I very much enjoy: dictionary tag. Below you will find a delightful lecture from the TED Talks series, in which lexicographer Erin McKean looks at the nature of the dictionary, where it’s going, and the job of a lexicographer - what people think it is and what it ought to be.

Parental advisory: Part of this talk discusses the judgements we make about words (”good” vs “bad” words.) There is a reference made to the “f” word” (it’s not spoken, though) and I believe one other mild curse word.

Advisory for proponents of the Queen’s English: You may be put off by the speaker’s unwillingness to play traffic cop!

Everyone else: By the end of the video you will know (if you don’t already) what erinaceous means. Enjoy!!

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

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Sometimes I wonder how many people know how BOTOX® came to be used as a medical treatment for wrinkles and other signs of aging. I used to do a good bit of canning in the years before the kids came along, so I was quite familiar with Botulinum toxin and the necessity to get foods hot enough to destroy the spores.

I first heard about medical use of Botulinum toxin when my children were quite young. I was on a mailing list with some parents of children who were multiply disabled. Many of the children were unable to sit up unassisted, and had painful muscle contractions that twisted their bodies or made them hold their hands in tight fists all the time. Some parents talked about the kids getting relief from BOTOX® injections. I wasn’t familiar with the medication, and because I’m curious I looked it up.

I couldn’t believe that children were being injected with one of the most poisonous naturally occurring substances in the world! Was this safe? Well, I did some more reading and learned that the powerful neurotoxin was used only in the tiniest doses. It works by blocking neuromuscular transmission, effectively relaxing the muscles. It has been used medically for about two decades, for a number of conditions.

Regardless of how you feel about using BOTOX® cosmetically, it might interest you to know that it was a Canadian husband and wife team that pioneered its use for eliminating wrinkles and frown lines around the eyes. The treatment had been approved earlier for a condition called strabismus (very simplistically, being cross-eyed.) Vancouver ophthalmologist Jean Carruthers and her husband, dermatologist Alistair Carruthers, recognized that patients treated for strabismus with BOTOX® also had more relaxed, younger looking faces. They developed treatments intended to just lift the wrinkles from around they eyes, and cosmetic use was approved in the United States in 2002.

It may not be quite a miracle drug, but many people do feel BOTOX® helps to restore their self-esteem. Research is still underway to see if it will be effective in a number of other conditions, including asthma, migraine and obesity. It may boost the effects of chemotherapy, making cancer treatments more effective. There is even a doctor who in 2006 published a pilot study whose results point towards the possibility that cosmetic BOTOX® treatments can be helpful to people suffering clinical depression. Because their faces look happier and they can’t frown so much, they actually tend to feel less depressed! It may be a little bit of sympathetic magic, or maybe a placebo effect, but if further studies can show that BOTOX® is truly almost as effective as anti-depressants this could certainly be an interesting option for patients - especially those whose risks of side effects from medications are elevated.

So, while most of us know about BOTOX® as a cosmetic treatment, it is actually a much more versatile medical treatment. Dermatological clinics such as rhinoplasty Maryland offer it alongside surgical and non-surgical treatments intended to make us look younger - chemical facial peels, facelift, brow lift, Restylane® - and this may be what gets most of the attention in our “greying” society. But the more profitable BOTOX® is, the more money will be available to conduct more research into all its known and yet unknown properties. If it can take the pain away from someone who suffers daily headaches, or help to treat asthma or depression, we certainly can’t turn our noses up at it!

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

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Well, we did our part on Saturday night. Did you?

If you are one of our neighbours here in the southwest boroughs of Montreal, I’m willing to bet your answer is no. We took a look around while our home was quiet and lit only with the glow of candles, and it seems most of the folks nearby were carrying on business as usual. While the streetlights were left on for reasons of safety, few of the local residents followed the city’s example of turning off unnecessary lights during the one-hour period on Saturday night. Many of our neighbours had porch lights on whether they were needed or not, and a goodly number had the usual lights on inside their homes.

We were most disappointed when we looked towards Montreal and saw that, despite the fact that the searchlight atop Place Ville Marie had been switched off, there were several other buildings with prominent lights and these were obviously from large coloured signs advertising one thing or another. Would it have hurt to turn them off for one hour?

Even more disappointing was the fact that city’s page at the official Earth Hour web site had no sponsors, and no links to events or news stories when I visited. Other cities were sponsored by major corporations or by the local power company. No news about Earth Hour on the Hydro-Quebec web site, and as far as I know they didn’t shut off their infamous “Q” which also remained lit throughout most of the 1998 ice storm when some parts of the province were without electricity for up to a month.

The news reports after the fact were fairly lukewarm too. A handful of folks gathered at city hall to watch the lights go out, and another handful were up on the lookout trying to spy the difference between “before” and “after”. I looked at the panorama supplied online, and though there is some difference I wouldn’t have known the film was taken during Earth Hour if I hadn’t been told. Same goes for the slideshow provided by the Gazette.

So what message are we sending? Is it that we as a group didn’t believe Earth Hour was going to have a significant impact, and we didn’t feel it was worthwhile? Or are Montrealers just too apathetic to participate in something so easy they didn’t have to leave their homes to do it?

By comparison the recent St. Patrick’s Day Parade has been held every year since 1824 in Montreal. This year’s parade was sponsored by no less than eighteen groups - branches of the municipal and provincial government, and television and radio stations among them. Every year there is a big deal made of having school children and community groups (who have nothing at all to do with being Irish) march in the parade, and we get at least one official invitation from the school to join our children in marching alongside the school board’s float. And anyone not marching has got to wear green and turn out to line Ste. Catherine Street to watch the parade go by.

We got not so much as a mention of Earth Hour from my son’s school, even though this would have been a perfect opportunity for them to promote family sharing and to educate kids about the environment. It’s part of the curriculum, after all.

Perhaps the message is that folks in Montreal will turn out for things, but only if they think it’s going to be fun. Christmas shopping, Santa Claus Parades, St. Patrick’s Day. But ask people to do something like - gasp! - recycle or turn off their lights for one hour in the year, well we’re not the best at following through even if we mean to do it. I guess that’s something we as a group have to work on.

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

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