Diet Coke – Blech

I think I’ve nearly rid myself of any affinity for Diet Coke. I’ve been avoiding it due to my scare with high blood pressure, and the fact that the only listed nutrient with a nonzero value is sodium.

I bought a bottle today from the machine at work to perk me up a little, as I was feeling a slight afternoon dip in alertness. I only made it halfway through the bottle before I stopped drinking it. Later I tried to make myself drink a bit more (waste not, want not, plus mmmm — caffeine). No dice. I just threw away the bottle with at least 1/4 of the contents.

This is a good thing. I don’t need to be drinking that crap. The less I crave it, the better.

Catch-up

I’m doing a lot of catch-up today. You may have noticed that I’ve added another backdated conference entry. There are several more to add, and I won’t be doing them all at once. It’s a bit arduous, especially linking pictures in, and I’ve still got so many other things to take care of that the backdated blog entries are going to have to wait.

Unlike previous attempts at such entries, I do have a lot of the relevant info already written in my travel journal, so it’s largely a matter of sorting and transcription, rather than trying to remember week-old information correctly.

I went and saw Willy Noveck’s (sp?) movie premiere at the Hi-Ho Lounge, A Day in the Life. It was as entertaining as I had hoped, and about twice as entertaining as I expected. Cover was $2, I bought the DVD for $5. $7 is not bad even for a movie ticket depending on where you go, and I daresay this was much more original and interesting than the majority of films seen in your typical theater. Production was also higher quality than I expected. I highly recommend it. If you live near here I’d be happy to let you borrow my copy, but only if you promise to return it. Or I’ll send sharks after you.

I finished Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass on the trip, but unfortunately did not have any other reading material on the trip. Yesterday I picked up The Miracle of Mindfulness, The Selfish Gene, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius from my mailbox at work. I had ordered them through Amazon a little bit before we left for CA. If only they’d arrived sooner! This is the cost of free shipping.

Gordon Research Conference: Day Four

The first notes I have for the day are from a talk by Alexy Zaitsev titled “Many Faces of Ventricular Fibrillation in the Ischemic Heart,” a title which he gradually worked up to from something much simpler, given what a complex issue it is.

I was very excited when he came to speak at Tulane last year, given that he does experimental work on ischemia, which I study via simulation. One interesting thing that he talked about was that he induced ischemia after ventricular fibrillation, and watched how it affected the fibrillation. He showed that [K+]O elevation results in organization of VF.

After Dr.Zaitsev, Alan Karma spoke about Nonlinear Dynamics of Reentry and Fibrillation. He covered mechanisms setting up a heterogeneous substrate.

That was the day that I put my poster up and subsequently defended it against quite the barrage of questions. It helped me to realize that I really needed to get on top of the material better.

Was it only four days? I thought it was longer. Anyway, that’s the last of the notes that I have. Oh right, I think we skipped a bit :). Also, for some things like molecular biology, I didn’t really take notes, as I was totally lost. I’m going to try to amend that by taking some molecular biology classes next academic year.

Kalyra

This is out of order, but I’m concentrating on other things. Here we are at Kalyra this afternoon. It was featured in the movie “Sideways.” From left to right: Blanca, me, Natalia, Molly

We bought a couple of bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon after tasting their selection. The Gewurtztraminer was amazing, we may go back and get some tomorrow!

Gordon Research Conference: Day 3

I don’t have notes for whether I ran on the third day of the conference or not. If memory serves me correctly, I did, and it was the last one. The morning sessions started off with a talk on calmodulin as a sensor for calcium regulation. I don’t have record handy of who the first speaker was. I got better at taking notes as the conference went on.

Next was a talk by Dr.Pogwizd, of whose papers I have read a couple. He talked about sodium/calcium exchange with regard to contractile dysfunction and arrhythmogenesis.

Then, Guy Salama talked about intracellular calcium as a trigger of arrhythmias, particularly with regard to LQT-3.

I don’t want to disclose details of the talks due to the nature of the conference and so on… I have a note here that I should compare Vm and Cai in regional ischemia when I see alternans. I was very interested in his talk, but at some point realized that it didn’t directly apply to my current work, as the experiments he covered involved global ischemia. This of course especially interested Blanca.

I spoke with Dr.Pogwizd at lunch following the morning session and he noted that I should check papers by M.R. Rosen for info on the QT interval for male vs. female animals. Apparently it’s often sexually dimorphic.

I don’t have any notes on what we did in the afternoon break. I think we may have gone to Kalyra that day. This is what I get for doing this post so late. The evening session was started off by Mario Delmar, who elaborated on regulation of connexin function by binding partner. I didn’t realize quite how complex the behavior of connexin was until this talk, not having had to investigate it in detail previously. He showed a really gorgeous image of a computer model of the connexin protein, found in Science (PubMed abstract/access) done by Unger VM, Kumar NM, Gilula NB, and Yeager M.

Next Andre Kl?bert covered the role of connexin proteins in cardiac impulse propagation, covering the different types of connexin and pointing out distinguishing characteristics thereof.

Finally for that session (at least as far as I took notes 0f) was Stephen Rohr, who covered the coupling of cardiac myocytes by firbroblasts of cardiac origin.He cited Camelliti 2004 (in both Circ Res and Cardiovasc Res) as well as Goldsmith et al 2004 in a dynamics journal… but I can’t read my writing very well. This talk generated several pages of discussion. Five pages, actually.

I’ll have to do the next GRC entry tomorrow, I’m tiring of this.