a thermodynamicist said to me today

"Intelligent design? whoever thinks that intelligent design created people is crazy! If there ws a really intelligent designer, do you think he or she would have created a body that is this fragile and messed up?"

I particularly liked that line.

Me, I'm sitting here at an ungodly hour a whole hour past when I said I could go home and I'm still here, even though I really want to be in bed, I just don't feel like I can go and come back to do this, so I'm going to plug through it and try to get to the end. I did promise myself 5 horus of sleep though... I just hope those 5 hours of sleep don't start at 5 or 6am. I am at ther mercy of a potentiometer though.. and well, frankly potentiometers are crappy pieces of engineering when one wants precise adjustments. Of ocurse, this is why PID (no, not pelvic imflammatory disease, but proportional, integral, derivative tuning loops/control loops were designed... of couse those only work but so well too.. figures..

Recently, I read two articles by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk about complex trauma. There's been some interesting work done by him, Robert Levine, and an Israeli psychiatrist/MD studying trauma. What amazies me is that the level of trauma efect in Israel is lower than the overall level in the US. The Us is a wealthy country and has relatively lower levels of crime, wouldn't you think? van der Kolk and Levine see patients suffering from traumas in their childhood, little things... some of the worst of it being neglect or abuse at home, but the little things add up and sensitize the child the way a PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) event might. van er Kolk asserts that this little but compounded and complex kind of trauma no matter how little it might seem, is the underlying cause for a great deal of the poor health of Americans. He believes that DESNOS/developmental trauma leads us to the point where there are so many obese and sick people in the US. I don't know if he's right, but it sounds like a viable argument actually.