“I’m furious about Women’s Liberationists. They keep getting up on a soapboxes and proclaiming that woen are brighter than men. That’s true, but it should be kept a very quiet or it ruins the whole racket”. Anita Boos

“If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own”. Charlotte Bronte

“As you climb up the ladder of success don’t let the boys look up your dress!” Jennifer Bunis

“Behind every successful woman…is a basket of dirty laundry”. Sally Forth

“They say getting thin is the best revenge. Success is much better”. Oprah Winfrey

“Men are taught to apologize for their weaknesses, women for their strengths”. Lois Wyse

“I wanted to be scared again…I wanted to feel unsure again. That’s the only way I learn, the only way I feel challenged”. Connie Chung

“To be tested is good. The challenged life may be the best therapist”. Gail Sheehy

“Don’t be afraid your life will end; be afraid it will never begin”. Grace Hansen

(Words from the book, “Witty Words from Wise Women, Hallmark Gift Books, B. J. Gallagher, photo courtesy of Jerry Daykin’s Photos used under Creative Commons License)

Like the JFK assassination a generation before us, our generation will always remember where they were on 9-11-2001. The day the United States was attacked on it’s own soil for the time since World War II.

My story is like so many others. I travel alot for work but on this day I just wasn’t, though many of my colleagues were. Working in high tech you have to spend time travelling to certain areas such as Silicon Valley, Shanghai, China, Texas or India. It’s just part of our world. But on 9-11-2001 I wasn’t travelling I was working in my office when one of my co-workers came in and said a plane, a passenger jet, had struck one of the World Trade Center towers. That was it. What a knucklehead I thought to myself. Air traffic must have messed up or maybe there was a malfunction in the instrument panel of the plane and with heavy fog well anything could happen. I shook my head and just thought, “damn” and went on with work. I figured it was bad but not horrible. Until I tried to reach some other co-workers for some information. They were not to be found.

So I stepped out of my office and headed down the hall then I saw them. All 50+ of them, crowded around a small portable radio. And they were listening intently. As I drew nearer a women looked up at me, terrified, and said, “they’ve attacked New York City”. I looked at her trying to understand what she meant as I strained to make sense of the radio broadcast.

Who attacked New York City? As I was thinking it through, my mind flooding with more and more bits of data, another man turned to me to say that “there are planes all over, no one knows how many more will go down”. Still a third person, their hands over their mouths, said, “it’s rush hour, there are 25,000 people in those buildings”.

Finally I understood what was happening. A chill went through my body, and it does still today, the United States was under physical attack from an outside entity, an unnamed (at that point) enemy.

I sat with the others, all 50+ of us, around a small radio listening as the second plane hit, as the Pentagon burst into flames and as the confusion, fear and terror of the day wore on. It wasn’t a productive day. It was a day I’ll always remember though. And something I will never forget.

More stories and pictures of that sad day have been archived the 9-11 Digital Archives. In case you don’t know about this site, it is, in their words, about:

The September 11 Digital Archive uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the history of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania and the public responses to them. Funded by a major grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and organized by the American Social History Project at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University…

(Photo courtesy of Babasteve’s Photos, used under Creative Commons License)

It’s a pretty common, yet cyclical theme to beat on the internet as the reason why some parts of our society is in decline. I don’t know this for a fact, but I’d bet a tray of my chocolate chip cookies that the telephone and TV were probably blamed for damaging some part of our society too. Any new technology that comes onto the scene is, generally, neutral in it’s effect on society. It’s how people use it that determines it’s impact whether positive or negative.

So it came as no surpise to me see a recent article in Network World magazine entitled, “Study: Internet partly to blame for your lack of close friends“. The study, as you might have read in the June 23rd, 2006 edition of Network World or as originally published in the American Sociological Review, was done by by sociologists at Duke University and the University of Arizona.

In the study, the researchers conclude that:

Increased use of the Internet, along with the number of hours people are spending at work, are factors contributing to a drastic decline in the number of close friends that Americans have.

I don’t think anyone would argue about the hours at work piece. With downsizing, rightsizing and efficiency re-work programs in place, more people do less work now than ever before (or the work gets pushed down to customers under the guise of automated customer service, see a sad example of that practice at this article I posted on that topic at this link HERE).

But the internet reducing person-to-person contact? Lets look at that again. The researchers note that, “New technology links people over greater distances, but cuts into face-to-face meeting time, the researchers said”. I’d have to say that all depends on the sub-community using the technology and how they are using it. Certainly the risk for people living holed up not seeing daylight exists and cases have been documented. But what about communities of people that are already isolated by society anyway?

In communities that are already isolated,(perhaps by geography, or in case of the transgender community, or perhaps autism, or other non-mainstream sectors of our society where person-to-person contact is very important for figuring out what is wrong then doing something about it), I would suggest that the internet acts as a strong bridge that can bring together people for person to person relationship building. I can only talk to my experience in the transgender community of course.

When I was first coming to grip with what was going on I didn’t know a single person or even where to turn to for help. I thought I was really in trouble. Well, after some snooping on the web I found out that not only wasn’t I as messed up as originally thought, there were others out there too. Relationships started on the net and soon grew to in person. Fears had to be conquered, “what if they don’t like me in person”? Then our groups of friends introduced each other to others and the snowball grew. Did I have to be careful? Sure, that’s the common sense approach to any relationship building where it starts in a relatively anonymous manner like the internet. But over time I learned who was real and who wasn’t and today I’m face-to-face friends with these and many others. All because the internet provided a bridge to others that didn’t otherwise exist.

So what is your experience?

(Brunel Bridge pic courtesy of didbygraham’s photo’s, used under Creative Commons license)

Could a sad heart lead to an unhealthy heart? That seems to be what is suggested from a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) led by Dr. Mary Whooley, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco (see link to abstract at JAMA here). A recent article published by her discusses how major depression is a risk factor for the development of heart disease in healthy patients and for poor outcomes in patients with known heart disease.

In Dr. Whooley’s study she looked at over 7500 elderly women and tracked them over 7 years. She tracked them on a sort of depression scale to see how many symptoms and signs of depression they had. What she discovered was that 7% of women with no signs of depression passed away over the period of her study while 17% of women with three to five signs of depression passed away. Most alarming of all, 24% of the patients with six or more signs of depression passed away. In short, the more depressed her study subjects were the more likely they were to die of heart disease. Dr. Whooley was able to make the link between heart disease and depression by correlating her data with that of many other studies, most notably:

• A study in Denmark of 700 men and women that was followed for 27 years showed that those with depression had a substantially greater risk of hear attack and death
• Another study of 8000 men and women that showed an increase risk of coronary heart disease in depression patients
• a study of patients who were healthy and free of heart disease but for whom the risk of developing heart disease and dying from it was actually caused by depression.

But what might be the connection between depression and heart disease? Is it simply being blue clogs your heart or is depression a trigger for biological changes that bring on the disease? In an article by Dr. Tedd Mitchell for USA Weekend (July 28-30, 2006 edition) and an in an interview for National Public Radio (NPR) of Dr. Sydney Spiesel, Yale Medical School professor and Slate medical columnist, they both note the following possible biological connection between heart disease and a sad heart:

• Depressed people have a greater resting heart rate potentially leading to heart stress or abnormal heartbeats
• Hormones that control blood pressure and heart rate are higher in depressed patients
• Blood platelets are more activated in depressed patients that could lead to a greater incidence of blood clots and heart attack or stroke
• Behavioral issues come to play too, depressed patients tend to generally smoke more, exercise less, eat more poorly and are less compliant to taking medications that you’ve been prescribed to help keep heart disease from advancing.

So since being depressed is one cause of heart disease, what to do if your so blue? There are a number of potential weapons at your disposal that will help your mood and your heart too. Anti-depressants are one way to go. Dr. Whooley notes in her study that treatment with anti-depressants with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors is a generally safe approach to alleviate depression. But some studies have shown that exercise is actually more effective.

In a study done in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (April 2001;35:114-117) found that just 30 minutes of walking daily improved depressed patients symptoms faster than medication. And in another study, published in Psychosomatic Medicine (September/October 2000;62:633-638) the researchers found when comparing treating depression with either 45 minutes of exercise three times per week or Zoloft, a popular anti-depressant that is a selective seratonin reuptake inhibitor, the exercise group were more likely to be partially or fully recovered from depression than those in the medication group.

So a sad heart can indeed be a sick heart too and treating it best may include anti-depressant medication or perhaps plain old exercise to make your heart happy and healthier too. My bet is on the exercise, it’s easy and cheap and has many side benefits in helping you physically and mentally, a combination that is time efficient and can’t be beat.

(silver heart photo from Lonely Angel Photos, used under Creative Commons license)

Beck’s Cafe has two sides. A big backside that has all the tech weenie stuff in it and the front side where we do the actual writing, recipe testing, frugal tech experiments, coffee swilling and general goofing around. The front side is the nice side for sure and one day, when we finally get the kitchen cleaned up enough, the tables actually shining and some of the crap off the floor (what IS that gelatinous glob over there anyway that everyone avoids) we’ll show the front side too.

But for now I thought the more technically inclinded and the generally curious might like to see what our big backside looks like You can click to see picks of the datacenter we share, as hosted at A Small Orange, at this linke HERE.

(amazingly big butted cat pic from Denise Michelle’s pics, used via Creative Commons license)