09:01 – Interesting article in the paper this morning about the costs of various diseases. Dementia, including Alzheimer’s, is by far the most costly, at around $1,000/year for every man, woman, and child in the US. And no possibility of a cure. Neil Young’s lyrics kept running through my mind: “And once you’re gone, you can never come back, when you’re out of the blue and into the black.” People with profound dementia are in a very real sense brain-dead. Even if our medicinal chemists come up with a miracle cure, at best it will stop the progress of the disease. It won’t reverse the physical damage to the brains of people who already suffer from profound dementia. A person without a functioning brain is no longer really a person. The kindest thing we could do is euthanize them.
Work on kits continues.
15:40 – The weather around here this time of year is highly variable. Yesterday, for example, it was sunny and the high according to our thermometer was 74.3 F (23.5C). At this moment, it’s 36.4F (2.4C) and there’s frozen precipitation falling. And it’s of a sort that I don’t remember ever seeing before: snleet. Or perhaps slnow. It’s simultaneously snowing and sleeting.