10/24/10

I listen to NPR a lot.  In terms of political content the folks on those stations tend to be opposed to my views for the most part, but that doesn't bother me.  I know who I am and I know what I believe.  Hearing some self-described genius call me an idiot isn't going to change anything.  When they get outside the political arena though, the NPR shows cover a breadth of topics that no other local radio channels seem to touch.  I enjoy the variety.

One of tonight's NPR segments involved an author whose main point was that scientists need to learn how to speak to "regular folks" more effectively.  The host of the show, in true NPR fashion, had a hang-up about climate change.  In his view this is an area where the rubes among the general population simply haven't been made to understand.  Obviously, as a right-wing reactionary hatemonger, I'm one of those rubes.  I'm a Democrat now but, you know, I'm an idiot nonetheless.

The author guy, scientific expert that he is, said a few generic words about messaging.  Then the host pressed him for an answer concerning how to make the unwashed masses fear climate change.  The 'Climategate' situation was brought up as an example.  Apparently, as nearly as I can tell from the ensuing conversation, it wasn't a problem that the self-described scientists were lying about their data.  That was a non-issue.  The problem was that they didn't react to the breaking news by taking control of the message.  Instead of being a story about scientific fraud with global economic consequences, the story should have been about ILLEGAL e-mail hacking.  That was the real scandal, according to the expert.  I'm not an advocate for breaking into e-mail accounts or anything, but really?

This discussion, interesting as it was, didn't make me want to buy the scientist guy's book.  He just sounded like a left-wing hack to me, which comes as no surprise given my status as a right-wing hatemonger.  The discussion did, however, get me thinking about the scientific method.

You all know by now that my ass hurts quite a bit of the time.  You also know that this seems to be the result of some kind of spine/nerve issue relating to my lower back.  I've tried pain killers.  I've tried anti-inflammatories.  I've tried exercise.  I've tried rest.  The damned injury just seems to persist.  (Obviously I haven't tried medical treatment just yet, but you would just have to understand my makeup...)  Today's version of the experiment brought heat treatment into the equation.

I put one of those warming wraps on my back before I started work this afternoon.  I was hoping to work a shift without pain, obviously, but the definition of success was hard to define.  In terms of the scientific method that I'm trying to discuss here, the problem was that there's no control group.  My symptoms are so random that I never know what to expect from one day to the next.  One day I can walk without pain but can't sit.  The next day I can sit without pain but can't walk.  How would I know whether or not the heat wrap was working?

In the absence of any reliable measure of success, I decided to reduce the question to one of whether or not I would buy more heat wraps in the future.  If my pain-free (or anything remotely close) shift were to occur, I decided, I would buy more of the wraps, even if they had nothing more than a placebo effect.  Science can go only so far when a man has a painful ass, after all.

I made my drops in Lapeer and Imlay City without incident.  I wasn't feeling like a million bucks afterward, but I was holding my own.  I drove back down to Livonia and grabbed my second load.  As I drove toward Toledo, I realized that I might be heading for another showdown with the supreme asshole of the dairy business.  He wasn't there though, so I got to deal with the friendly old guy who has been there most of the times that I've gone to that store.  That was nice.

There's a bunch of highway construction around Monroe, where my last stop was to take place, so I'm never quite sure which exits I can use and which ones are closed.  I chose to drive into Michigan on Telegraph Road and then hop over to Dixie Highway, running the latter all the way into town.  This worked pretty well in terms of routing.  I'm not even sure that it would have been any quicker to take I-75.  As I rolled toward town, my dispatcher called to ask if I had pulled my second load yet.  Sure thing, sister, I'm headed to the last stop right now.  Apparently the folks at the Monroe store were running out of milk and wanted to know how soon I would be there.  I arrived about fifteen minutes later.

As I started to get everything situated for my fairly huge milk delivery (13 pallets and ~27,000 pounds), I noticed that something was missing.  Umm, where's the power jack?  Broken, as it turns out.  Fuck, that's a lot of milk.  I'm not a total weakling or anything, so I have the ability to pull milk from a trailer with a manual pallet jack.  Throwing one more wrench into our attempts at scientific observation, however, is the fact that this particular activity doesn't seem to be good for my spine.  By the time I got all 13 pallets out of the trailer I was feeling awful.  Today's experiment in pain-free work had gone terribly awry.

Since I was set to do a back workout tonight and it was painful for me even to move, I chose to skip the gym and head home.  We'll try getting back at it after some rest tomorrow.  Seems to be the pattern, eh?  Hurt - rest - work - hurt - rest - repeat.  This doesn't lend itself to very effective science, but we're gonna figure out something that works, sooner or later.