albert haynesworth?!?!

ummmm..... wow. Dan Snyder is back to his true form.

link.

delicious.

Matt made this black bean hummus one night last week. We really liked it. A quick and easy snack - it's a different take on traditional hummus. And it has a nice kick to it (for those of us who aren't Spades, who laughs in the face of the Scoville scale).

um, what?

I've been told I'm a gullible person.

That being said, is this for real?

NASA = not so much

While the idea of personally traveling to/in space scares the crap out of me, I am fascinated by that weird and wonderful vacuum. I commend NASA and its employees for their creativity, ambition, and courage. And I recognize that with progress and discovery, come risk and missteps.

Unfortunately, recent events seem to continue to fall in the "uh oh" category:

The space trash problem. (Perhaps we could try a modified version of Leave No Trace)

Shuttle equipment problems. (Latest update from NASA)

CO2 Hunter epic fail. (Appears to be $273 million down the drain)

never in a million years...

...did I think this would happen.

I couldn't believe my ears when I heard that on the radio on my way home from work (listen to the audio clip on the link above for the full story).

I'm not gonna lie, that place was pretty gross to visit when Matt lived there.

since I found these pictures on my camera...

...you get a few photos with blurbs.

Halloween Fun

with (Tina Fey impersonating) Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber.

Snow Day, Inauguration Day!

this actually happened in January.

A few weekends ago, Matt and I took a Saturday to visit Hanging Rock State Park. We both love hiking, and we’ve done a bunch of trails in MD – including sections of the Appalachian Trail, Great Falls, and Cunningham Falls – and we have some great memories of the Cascades near VTech.

Lately though, we haven’t been anywhere besides Umstead State Park here in Raleigh. Don’t get me wrong, we love Umstead. It’s big and beautiful, right down the road from our house, and we especially like the Sycamore Creek trail. We also have fond (haha) memories of running Sal’s Path (of DEATH). However, in wanting to get to know NC a little more, we headed out west a little ways to Danbury.

After stopping at Grayson’s Café for a breakfast sandwich (me) and a breakfast burrito (him), we hopped on I-40W. Then it was onto a series of progressively smaller roads as we passed by Greensboro, and headed north of Winston-Salem. Somewhere around Walnut Cove, we picked up some Bojangles’ chicken and biscuits (sorry, I just drooled on the keyboard) to have for lunch later. As the roads became smaller and the land less developed, our ears started popping and we knew we were close.

The park was awesome. And since we chose one of the coldest days for this adventure (I don't think it ever got about 25 degrees F), it wasn't crowded. We felt like we had the whole place to ourselves. As you can see from the photos, we were bundled up and loving it!

Globalization of Clinical Trials

Researchers from the Duke Clinical Research Institute and the Duke Translational Medicine Institute wrote an interesting article that was just published in the New England Journal of Medicine. If you don't have the time to read the full paper (it's really not that long), you can find a brief summary of their manuscript in this article from the Triangle Business Journal (affectionately known as the TBJ, thank you Jess). I did notice that only two of the authors are mentioned in the TBJ write-up (the only two who are affiliated with UNC, in addition to Duke), and there’s actually no mention of the Duke Institutes, which all the authors are affiliated with. It makes me a little curious about how the TBJ found out about this...possibly a UNC press release?

Nonetheless, this is a complicated issue and I found the authors’ discussion of the historical and current situation well-balanced. By enumerating both the pros and the cons, of globalizing clinical trials, they not only aid in the understanding of the present trend, they also initiate the necessary discourse about the ethics and the response. Moreover, they conclude with a number of proposals, “next steps” as they put it, empowering the academic, medical, and legislative worlds to respond.

**A curiosity: All of the authors on this paper reported conflicts of interest (which they are required to document in order to publish) – which you can only find details about in the Supplementary Appendix online. Turns out they all have involvement (intellectual and monetary) with a wide variety of Pharma and BioTech companies.**