It seems I had taken a 2mg dosage of the Doxazosin Mesylate (brand name innocuous enough: Cardura) around 10:30pm Friday evening. This was my first time with the stuff and I thought I’d give it a whirl. After all, I had a great time at the Halloween Open Mic Friday evening and particularly enjoyed singing my favorite song, with Heather Pierson’s great piano accompaniment, When the Night Wind Howls out of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore. But it turned out it was Cardura that gave me the whirl!

This medication was prescribed for me by a urologist because of its effectiveness in treating benign prostatic hyperplasia (enlarged prostate). But also it’s a blood pressure medicine, a so-called alpha blocker, and I’m already taking a beta blocker for my hypertension. How many blockers can one tolerate? Too many blockers and blood pressure could in principle go to zero! Not good.

The info sheet on the medication, which I hadn’t read, warns about the dizziness it could produce, due to blood pressure and heart rate drop, so the advice is to take the pill at bedtime. Of course, a person with that benign prostatic hyperplasia, like me, might want to get up to go to the bathroom. End of story.

My fall on the cold bathroom floor caused quite a bruise on the side of the head and also my back and side muscles were badly bruised, so that when I got back in bed I found I couldn’t move without experiencing severe pain. So, off to the emergency room I went on a stretcher. My first ambulance ride. The Doc on call over the weekend has rearranged my hypertension and other meds, and the day after tomorrow I’ll go to my primary care provider and reevaluate the meds.

Maybe I should go off my meds entirely!!! YIPPPEEEEE! Off my meds!! Well, only for a day as a celebration if Obama wins tomorrow! If he doesn’t, maybe I’ll just double up on them and go poof.

In this NYRB article Dyson reviews two books on global warming and provides his own prologue to the piece. In this prologue he shows that there is a rapid (twelve years) exchange of carbon between the atmosphere and vegetation which is very important for the long range future of global warming. Neither of the two books he reviews mentions it, he says. But he devotes considerable space to the book by Nordhaus who concludes that a “low-cost backstop” might provide the best climate policy. However, Nordhaus is reluctant to discuss this in any detail, partly because, as an economist and not a scientist, he does not wish to question the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which considers the science of climate change to be settled.

Dyson shows that the “low-cost backstop” option of Nordhaus has considerable potential in view of the evidence for rapid exchange of carbon between the atmosphere and plants. He considers it likely that genetically engineered carbon-eating trees could be developed within twenty years. These carbon-eating trees would convert the carbon from the atmosphere into root systems which are then buried underground so that the carbon is not returned to the atmosphere. Here is a great potential solution to the problem of reducing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

He spends less time on the book by Zedillo which covers a wider range of topics than the Nordhaus book. This book provides the minority opinions of Richard Lindzner of MIT who answers the question of whether the alarm of global warming is founded on fact with a resounding no. The majority opinions, most dogmatically presented by Howard Dalton of Great Britain, state that urgent action is needed now across the world to avert a major threat to the environment and human society. Dyson clearly questions this view.

After reading the NYRB article, I found an even more fascinating article by Dyson on the subject of climate change in which he goes deeper into his views on the subject. It reads very well and I strongly recommend it to any interested parties.

Finally, I was fortunate this morning to find a wonderful interview with Freeman Dyson by Robert Wright. It’s interesting what he says about religion. To him, religion is a way of life and not a matter of belief. He claims he is a Christian without the theology. What is left of Christianity when you take the theology away?, he is asked. Well almost the whole thing, he says, it’s a community of people in a church who are taking care of each other, and also there’s a great deal of beautiful language and there’s a great deal of music; it’s an art form much more than a philosophy. (Sounds a lot like humanistic UUism!) But he does believe there is some instinct of a mind at work in the universe. Not only that, but quantum physics shows that matter at the micro level is clearly not anything we can have experience of. The mathematical theory works just fine, but the reality of it is quite literally out of our world. He has much to say about the macro level as well. His bottom line is that the universe is filled with enormous mysteries of which we know very little indeed. One such mystery is the almost daily bursts of extremely intense gamma rays from completely unknown origins. But there are countless others. The universe is unimaginably amazing and mysterious.

In fact they even say it’s sinful for men to wear kilts. Gad, what party poopers! Any comments??

ps. I found the link on the MadPriest’s blog.

These types of things highlight even more profoundly the dichotomy between the physical state of the brain and consciousness. Are we seeing dualism here?? Naw, we must eschew supernaturalism, say the sensible ones, like the Churchlands and many, née most, others in the scientific communities.

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Notice that the left eye is yellow and the right eye is blue. Spooky! In fact that’s the name my neighbor gave the cat, Spooky.

Incidentally, I found the picture and a good discussion of odd eyed cats here.