If you are not totally grossed out yet, I'd recommend reading "Eating Snot – Socially Unacceptable but Common: Why?", a chapter in the book Consuming the Inedible: Neglected Dimensions of Food Choice. You can read most of that chapter on Google Books. Author Maria Jesus Portalatin focuses mainly on the better documented socio-cultural implications, but gets into a bit of the biology. One thing she points out, nasal mucus is about 95% water, so there's a possibility that you might expect more mucus eating in arid places. But nobody has ever done the studies necessary to test that hypothesis out. Her main hypothesis—also untested—is that eating mucus might help prime the body's immune system, allowing it to have more contact with weakened forms of potential pathogens so it can better detect and destroy those pathogens later. In other words, she thinks that eating your boogers is sort of like self-immunization.

I must read this book.

We’ve become a nation of hypochondriacs. Every sneeze is swine flu, every headache a tumor. And at great expense, we deliver fantastically prompt, thorough and largely unnecessary care. There is tremendous financial pressure on physicians to keep patients happy. But unlike business, in medicine the customer isn’t always right. Sometimes a doctor needs to show tough love and deny patients the quick fix. A good physician needs to have the guts to stand up to people and tell them that their baby gets ear infections because they smoke cigarettes. That it’s time to admit they are alcoholics. That they need to suck it up and deal with discomfort because narcotics will just make everything worse. That what’s really wrong with them is that they are just too damned fat.  Unfortunately, this type of advice rarely leads to high patient satisfaction scores.  

I couldn't have said it better myself.

People are using energy drinks as a way to stay awake longer, so they are more likely to drink more, and they are at a greater risk for acute alcohol poisoning,” Donham said.

I finally asked one of my many patients in the ER why it seems like a good idea to drink the Red Bull/vodka combo so popular around here. "You can get drunker," she said, as if I were dim witted. Evidently, according to this article, that's true. Drunker enough to have to go to the ER. But I'm the dim-witted one.

Now that our patient satisfaction scores will actually affect reimbursement rates, Hood Hospital is trying to teach all of us ragamuffins down in the ER how to act right so our patients will be happier. Who better to teach us than a bunch of people from finance and upper management who have never taken care of a patient in their entire lives? I can't think of anyone with a better perspective. Anyway. They've been doing mandatory training the last month, and despite the fact I will never get those hours of my life back, at least the things these people think will work to improve our scores are hilarious.

This made me shriek with laugher. Go read it.

This works and is damn handy. It basically gives the functionality of SBSettings to a nonjailbroken iPhone, and that was last thing I missed about no jailbreaking.

I love these eyelets. I shouldn't be buying anything with possible financial trouble looming, but really, financial trouble could ALWAYS be possibly looming, and LOOK at them. They're adorable. They're double flared, which my lobes are well healed enough for, and I think they're gonna be good for when I need to dress it up a little.

I also had to toss in a 20-g half-dome nose screw and some gray pyrex plugs while I was on the site. I mean, you might as well maximize your shipping, right?

Say what you want about earlobe stretching, you can buy some cool-ass jewelry for stretched lobes.

Integrating With Your Mac

One of the great selling points of WriteRoom is the ability to have it integrate with all other applications on your Mac. Whether writing an email, blog post or office document, you’re able to enter a distraction free space.

In the preferences window, turning on the “Edit in WriteRoom” plugin will add a menu option to all other applications. Clicking Edit > Edit in WriteRoom will open the current text, then pressing the key combinations of Command-S and Command-W will save the text and return it to the original application when you’re done editing.

I'm giving WriteRoom a try (I've been using Bean, but I WANT FULL SCREEN THAT WORKS). I'm choosy. The above review sounds like a feature I would use, but I can't find it. What am I missing?

According to a study published Monday in The American Journal Of Medicine, a previously unknown ingredient in red wine has been shown to cause a marked improvement of vocal clarity and emotional acuity—while reducing overall inhibition—after only four glasses.