(29 May, 2001)
...That is, if we're talking about Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, so-called. (Some people do appear to be sensitive to MSG, but not many.)
If I may quote one line from http://www.nutrition.org/cgi/content/full/130/4/1049S?view=full&pmid=10736380,
In its conclusion on this matter, the JECFA stated "controlled double-blind crossover trials have failed to demonstrate an unequivocal relationship between ÔChinese Restaurant SyndromeÕ and consumption of MSG. MSG has not been shown to provoke bronchoconstriction in asthmatics."
I haven't bothered to go find the original research, but
it's out there if you care. Near as I remember, what
does cause 'Chinese Restaurant Syndrome' is
something that occasionally occurs during the
fermentation of soy sauce, but don't quote me on that.
(25/26 April, 2001)
This afternoon I mixed up one last glaze test and dipped my last test tile in it. Threw the tile into the kiln on a pedestal liberally strewn with stuff designed to catch the excess glaze, because that test is a crystal glaze, and if it works at all it should run like water. Turned on the kiln, waited an hour or so, turned the kiln up to high, and ran off to class.
At the end of class I ran back up to the lab, ran in, turned the power off, and only then put on the goggles and checked the cones. Cone 9 was just about right, so I left the spyhole plugs out, ran home, ate hurriedly, ran back, put the plugs in and turned the power on low, waited a bit over an hour, and turned the power off. (Crystal glazes want to sit and soak for a while at a slightly decreased temperature after the peak, so the crystals have a chance to grow. This is an initial test, so I'm not worrying about precise control yet, just want to see whether I get crystals at all out of the stuff.)
A rather successful run, but I'm peeved about cutting it so close. Mind you, cone 9 is just about as hot as that particular kiln will get, so even if I'd been a few minutes later, it probably would have been fine, but if I'd pushed it much longer, the kiln would have shut itself down and I'd have had some annoyance trying to work the crystal soak.
When I have a moment, I'll report any results that seem to warrant it.
(29 April, 2001)
Ahem. The crystal glaze base is trash, but Fa Shimbo suggests that part of the problem may be the firing curve. She does lots of crystals, as you can see from her site, and she has found that it is important to heat crystals glazes up to melting as rapidly as possible. One way she can tell that the elements in her kiln are aging is that her glazes stop working.
I've redesigned that glaze anyway, and will try a version or two in the larger kiln when I get a chance.
One of the pink glazes worked, but the coating on the test tile was very thin, so it doesn't look very good. I may also need to make some ruby dust that's more concentrated, so it gives me a richer color.
One of the clear glazes is milky, and would probably work better at higher temperatures. I think I'll try it down at Glen Echo. It's probably the one that worked as a pink, with 5% ruby dust thrown into it. The other clear glaze (which failed as a pink, btw -- turned gray and dribbled... sigh...) is actually pretty good. It hasn't crazed, and although it does have some bubbles in it and has a slightly pebbly surface I can certainly use it for now, while I think about how to improve it.
Next I get to try for a cone 9 glaze that will work on the translucent porcelain. I'm looking at clear, blue, and some fluorescent colors. I may have a line on pink and yellow as well. After that we'll see about other colors, like green and purple.
(29 April, 2001)
I'm not going to bore you with details, but I've been tweaking my glaze records and working on new versions of things. I've got plenty to test. Meanwhile, I've been at the wheel, throwing, and I conclude that my translucent porcelain is truly weird when it has too much of the various additives in it. I've got to go make a new batch, so I can get back to something reasonable. (I can throw it, that's not the problem. The trouble is that it gets little bubbles in it, and they wreck the glaze when I fire the pieces. At least, I think that's the problem, or part of the problem. I could always be wrong.)
I'm also not going to bore you with a photo of a clear glaze, which looks mostly like nothing. There are, after all, limits. When I've got something at least marginally interesting, I'll put up a photo.
(12 May, 2001)
Last weekend, I retrieved some tests from the kiln at Glen Echo. Two of these were pink, a recent "cone 9 clear" with ruby dust in it, on two different bodies. Both worked quite well, whereas that "clear" was a pleasant but decidedly unclear milky white at cone 9. I derive some small satisfaction from this: first, I now have a pleasant milky white for cone 9. Second, I have a rather decent clear glaze for ordinary porcelains at cone 11. Third, I've proven that the ruby dust is an effective stain at cone 11.
Unfortunately, I still don't have a good cone 9 clear,
and it becomes apparent that the glazes I'm designing
for cone 9 are actually cone 11 glazes. This is somewhat
annoying. As we say, back to the mixing bench.
(26 April, 2001, et seq.)
About two months ago, I started noticing that my gut was more annoyed than usual. About a week later, I complained to my doctor about it, so we have some sort of timestamp on the beginning of the slide; I don't remember exactly when that was, but she's got it written down in my chart. It proceeded to wobble around for a while, sometimes better and sometimes worse, and I have seen her several times since then. All of the tests to date have returned negative results. I still have a thyroid, a liver, and reasonable ratios among my white blood cells. I don't seem to be growing critters in there. I may have a slightly enlarged lymph node in my abdominal cavity, but the doctor at the imaging place thought it was more likely to be a little accessory spleen, something she said was not uncommon. (It can even come in handy, if you lose your main spleen -- the little extra bits take over the function.)
My doctor wanted me to see a gastroenterologist, who would doubtless want to scope me, and that is apparently a huge amount of not fun. I would also have to fight with him about Versed, which I regard as anathema and which is apparently The Standard Stuff these days. (Versed prevents you from converting short-term memory to long-term. You have the nasty experience, but later you can't remember it. You also can't remember anything they told you when they thought you were out from under, but you actually weren't. This happened to me, the one time anyone used Versed on me. After some consideration, I have decided that the use of Versed is neither ethical nor acceptable.)
Meanwhile, however, I have improved rather dramatically since last Saturday (21 April) It's possible that my doctor would agree with me that there's much less point in going to a gastroenterologist now, when I have almost no symptoms. In fact, much of the time my gut is in better shape now than it was before this entire mess started. The problem, of course, is that I have no idea what happened, what caused it to happen, what made it worse or better while it was going on, why I feel better now, whether I'll continue to feel better, what might restart it or how I can avoid restarting it... I feel like I'm on slippery ground all the time, and it's rather annoying.
We Shall See.
(12 May, 2001)
I have now demonstrated that I have at least some control over my symptom level. If I am extremely careful to avoid anything I might be sensitive to, and if I eat a fairly strict rotation, I have minimal symptoms. As soon as I mess with anything "bad", I'm in trouble. This supports my notion that the entire business was and is allergic in nature and is my own doing. Unfortunately, I've never been worth a damn at keeping a strict rotation or at avoiding all the things I'm sensitive to, which is why the pancreatic enzymes were such a blessing. The problem is that I have very likely become sensitive to the enzymes now (they're proteins too), and I'm reluctant to use them. Maybe in six months.
It's pretty bleak, from here... I can't eat anything that's the least bit interesting, and if I eat any given kind of protein on a given day, I shouldn't eat it again for about four days. This means that if I eat a cookie that contains corn (maize), tapioca, potato, and soy flours, I should avoid corn, tapioca, potatoes, and all soy products for over half a week. Clearly, any such food (with multiple ingredients) is dangerous, because I could very quickly paint myself into a corner and have nothing left that I can eat. I have a food substitute, but it's very expensive, and it tastes absolutely wretched. I've never managed to ingest more than about 700 calories' worth of it in a day.
(12 July, 2001)
You'll notice that I kept reporting improvement, and then losing ground again. After a number of such oscillations, and after various tests (all of which returned nominal or negative results), I concluded that I had sensitized myself to my enzymes (as I think I report above), that I had probably had some sort of virus or other infection that destroyed the balance of flora in my gut, and that I had failed to react in an exemplary, thoughtful, and appropriate fashion to these conditions. Ahem.
At that point I got stricter about the rotation diet, and started taking some "probiotics" (a ridiculously stupid term; don't get me started). This time I'm using Lactobacillus reuteri, which is claimed to colonize the upper gut particularly well, along with a fairly hefty (about 2 billion organisms per capsule) Bifidobacterium supplement for the lower gut. When I started, I was also taking a certain amount of FOS to help the bifids establish and to discourage the "bad" bacteria. (I'd reviewed what information I could find on the Web, and had concluded that although there were reasons to be somewhat wary about FOS, it was likely to help.)
Meanwhile, I continued to take N-Acetyl-Cysteine ("NAC") and Alpha-Lipoic Acid, which my allergist had mentioned to me a full two years back and which are only now beginning to show up in places like Science News. (This is not by any means to disparage Science News, btw. I think Science News is terrific. Rather, I mention it to point out that my allergist is a very forward-looking and alert guy.)
That was about four weeks ago. Within a day and a half I felt noticeably better, and I've continued to improve almost monotonically. I can now eat in restaurants without particularly reacting, if I'm very careful. I don't yet know whether I'm gaining weight, but it seems likely. I have little or no gut pain most of the time, and little or no swelling, likewise. I'm almost entirely free of foot and leg cramps, which appear to have been part and parcel of the malabsorption I was apparently experiencing. I'm not entirely out of the woods yet, but I have a nearly normal energy level and I'm no longer sleeping 10 hours a night on a routine basis.
I'm somewhat distressed that a regular stool culture entirely fails to reveal this problem: the lab people can tell whether you're growing any of several "bad" organisms, but they get no least clue about whether you are growing workable proportions of the "good" ones, and I could begin to suspect that there are a number of "bad" ones that fail to show up. In other words, if you have a problem like mine, it's somewhat unlikely that your doctor will be able to discover it by standard methods. I think that's greatly unfortunate, but there it is. (I have to say, btw, that I am very happy with my doctor -- her attitude is great, and she has been staunch and upright about working on these issues. The fact that the available tests were incapable of giving her the information she needed in order to decide on a viable course of treatment is, after all, someone else's doing.)
(12 July, 2001)
About a year ago, I showed up with what looked like the beginning of narrowing of the internal carotid arteries, when we did a doppler ultrasound. My doctor put me on Lipitor, and after I'd been on that for a while and she had established that my liver function continued to be entirely normal, she allowed me to go back onto niacin. I also put myself onto Hawthorn berry extract.
At this point I should note that if you put yourself onto anything medicinal, you should tell your doctor promptly. Some herbs interact (either well or badly) with other herbs and/or pharmaceuticals; and even if you don't have any interaction issues you want to keep track of what happens when you take them. Your doc is trained to observe certain things that you either cannot observe from within, or at least are probably not trained to observe, and will help you keep tabs on how things go. Besides, just as with proofreading, it's generally a good idea to have another set of eyes go over the galleys.
I should also mention the curious fact that the "Commission E" monographs from Germany include a recommendation for a standardized extract of Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) leaves and flowers, but don't even list a standardized berry extract, and mention the claimed active ingredient of the berry extract only as another fluorescent spot on the chromatography plate -- there is no discussion about whether it has any activity as far as I remember, and they state that berry extract has not, as far as they are aware, been demonstrated to work. I find this rather mysterious. Mind you, the translation I saw was several years old. Also, I haven't bothered to search the Web for information about isovitexin (the presumed active ingredient in the extracts I can buy here in the US).
Be that as it may...
I have now been on this combination for just over a
year, and when I went through another doppler, a couple
weeks back, they were entirely unable to replicate last
year's findings. Moreover, my LDL:HDL ratio, the last
time it was checked, was one. (!) Let's hear it for
Lipitor and niacin.
(12 July, 2001)
I have finally started building a nitrogen laser, something I was originally going to do almost as soon as I got to Laurel. I even got most of a design down, and collected just about all of the necessary bits and pieces, but somehow the thing kept not happening. After a year and a half of that, I was rather distraught.
Then, a few weeks back, I started rethinking a particular possibility that I had already discarded: liquid dielectrics. The advantages of liquid dielectrics include the fact that if you manage to rupture the stuff, it heals by itself; also, they tend to have nice high dielectric constants. The problem is that the common ones depolarize after about one millionth of a second, so you have to do whatever you're going to do in something of a hurry.
Fortunately, a nitrogen laser pulse is over in a few
billionths of a second, so as long as I can charge the
capacitor fairly swiftly, I'm in good shape. I have now
built a charger that should do that job in 30
nanoseconds or less, and I hope to construct the
liquid-dielectric cap itself within the next few
weeks. If it works worth a tinker's dam, I'll give you a
few pictures of it. (I don't want to say too much more
right now, because Murphy awaits behind every corner,
ready to strike down those who show too much hubris.)
Pseudo-mailto: jon [at] bazilians [put it here] org
Last modified: Sun Jan 6 09:37:19 PST 2002