"Pre-Rehabilitation"

This article about Alex Rodriguez's missing the first half of the 2013 Baseball season due to injury includes the term "pre-rehabilitation", which has got to be just about the most retarded 'word' ever.

I tried to figure out via google if that monstrosity is a real word, and the main thing I found out is that Clemson University offers a degree in "Prerehabilitation Sciences".

I know, I know: I am a grammar Nazi. Guilty as charged.

Trampoline Accident

Yankees pitcher Joba Chamberlain injured himself rather gruesomely in a trampoline accident.

This isn't quite at the level of Glenallin Hill's injury that resulted from the spiders that attacked him in his sleep, but it does seem like a new entry in baseball's version of the Darwin Awards. (The spider incident is described briefly on Glenallen Hill's wikipedia page. Skip Carey used to always bring this up whenever Hill was involved in a game.)

Update: Courtesy of Sammy Kline, here is a slideshow of freakish baseball injuries. Naturally, this includes Glenallen Hill as well as Clint Barmes's bout with deer meat. But where is Chris Brown's bruised tooth?

Most Improbable

Here are some interesting tidbits from the latest issue of Mini-AIR.

(1) An article in Journal of Forensic Sciences called
Blood and Tissue Spatter Associated with Chainsaw Dismemberment. This reminds me a bit of a problem that I thought would be great for Physics 103 (on 'order-of-magnitude physics') on the mean free path of a person after they exploded in a certain way.

(2) An article called Self strangulation by hanging from cloth towel dispensers in Canadian schools. Blame Canada, indeed.

(3) An article in Journal of Food Science called Magnetic Resonance Temperature Mapping of Microwave-Fried Chicken Fingers. I wonder if any of the chicken fingers were shaped like Italy?

Medical Condition of the Day

Carl Crawford of the Tampa Bay Rays is missing today's game with a "testicular concussion". Ouch!

I had never actually heard this term before, but it sounds painful. You can guess how such an injury might occur when playing baseball, and Crawford insists that he will continue to not wear a protective cup. That's playing with fire...

Update: Apparently, it's a testicular contusion, not a "concussion". That makes much more sense, though I swear the Orioles' announcers called it a "concussion" during the broadcast today. Though I have to say that I do very much like the term "testicular concussion"...

Like ping pong injuries, except even more manly

Sadly, my hands have been horribly savaged by the British winter this time.

The cold has lingered a bit longer than usual, and at many times, the winter has actually been quite dry, so the skin on my hands has nicely cracked, become rough, and developed a couple of open sores. It's rather unpleasant, actually.

I realized today that one of the things that has been exacerbating the problem is that I have been lecturing this term with chalk rather than with whiteboard markers. I forgot to make my usual request in advance to get a room with a whiteboard, and I am paying the price. Giving my lecture was literally physically painful today. (I warned by students at the beginning of lecture that my writing would be worse than usual, which is unfortunate given that my writing is messy anyway, and I indicated the reason why; upon hearing that, one of them actually sneered. That's pretty insensitive, Dude!)

Lifting the boards, which are very stiff and require some effort, was unpleasant, and it turns out that chalk dust and open sores really don't mix.

It's now gotten to the point that I can barely lifting my cutlery to eat, carry my plate to the table to start eating, etc. (And it hurts a lot to do all of these things.) Ugh. I have one more lecture tomorrow, and then maybe I can start recovering.

Update: After I pressed the button to publish the post, blogger gave me an advertisement for whiteboard markers. Now that's service! :)

Update 2 (3/11/10): I just noticed (because the website was still up) that after the update, I received an advertisement for Vaseline for chapped skin. I guess I can sometimes rely on responses to my blog entry not just from my readers but also from automatic advertisement. I'm amused. :)

Baseball Injury Cover-Ups

Jerry Crasnick writes about some baseball injury cover-ups. I'm not sure how he got through this article without mentioning Chris Brown's "sore tooth" or the injuries that Glenallen Hill sustained while apparently battling spiders during a nightmare. (Skip Carey often harped on the Hill incident, invariably bringing it up whenever the Braves faced a team that included Hill.)

Adrian Beltre possibly lost for season with injured testicle

As pointed out, it's way too easy to come up with some sort of lame joke about this story, so instead I will only provide the straight line: Mariners third baseman Adrian Beltre might be lost for the season with an injured testicle. Ouch!

OK, fine. I need to do one joke in honor of the late great Jim Healy. Take it away Jim Harrick.

(Tip of the cap to Rob Neyer.)

Corridors and Fingernails

I have spent a decent bit of time wandering the corridors of Heriot Watt buildings trying to find cafeterias, bathrooms, exits, and the like. Why do they design their buildings like mazes? They make Sloan Annex and even Dartington House seem easy to navigate. (Yes, the last two buildings in which I have offices are both rat mazes. That says something about my lot in life, doesn't it?)

Also, I am the early leader in our brand-new Study Group injury pool. I managed to savage one of my fingernails trying to lift an empty lunch tray (in fact, two empty lunch trays). Ouch!

This conference also has its version of Housequotes, which are apparently supposed to be collected for a final presentation on Friday. These objects are described in this article. I already uttered a comment about the well-known "vegetable kingdom" that may or may not have any staying power.

Oh, and I found out a paper on which I played an ancillary role as a grad student apparently just got published in a collection---only 6 years after I ceased to have any involvement in it. I always just thought it was going to just remain a preprint, but I think the book ended up being partly a conference proceedings for a conference from back then where one of my coauthors presented the paper. I got an e-mail about it today, and this was a paper that had been out of my radar for so long and to such an extent that I hadn't even included it in my CV since before my first postdoc.

Ping pong in Oxford

Or as the Chinese say, "ping pong."

I went to my first meeting of Oxford's table tennis association yesterday. Unsurprisingly, the club here is done more formally than it is at Caltech. They have uniforms, warm-up jackets, and all sorts of other stereotypical things one would expect to see for sports at a place like Oxford. The team members are pretty hardcore, though a couple of them did have trouble with my serve. The other people I played --- others in the club and people considering to join the club --- couldn't hit my serve at all (which is the usual thing I see). I didn't notice anybody using the pen-holder grip, though I did some some play styles that I knew about and had occasionally seen (Wei Wang demonstrated them). It will be good to get more of a chance to play against people who employ those styles regularly.

I only played once during the summer, so I was a bit rusty. One could thing about the club being more formal is that we do some drills during the club meetings, which makes up for not having a class as we do at Tech. This was a very pleasant surprise. The drills we did on Sunday were pretty familiar (though they were specified a little too much, IMO). This included a particular drill with the backhand loop, which I don't have but most of the team members do. Also, there was a variant on this in terms of playing a 21-point game with one's partner and not being allowed to use forehand at all. That was a good drill, although I lost a couple of points when my opponent used forehand anyway (granted, in shots that definitely called for it).

Most of the club members seem nice, but a couple of them seemed to have the sort of stereotypical holier-than-thou attitude that one hears about Oxonians. We'll see how that goes.

I played for 2.5 hours yesterday, which is a bit much for me at one time. The surface on which the tables were placed is made of some sort of rubber turf. The ball wouldn't bounce when it hit it, so there was a lot more bending down to get the ball than I'm used to. I found that to be both annoying and tiring. Also, it didn't help my knee, which was a bit sore before I started. Playing on that surface seemed bad on my knee, so we'll see how that goes as well. I feel like it's much easier to hurt oneself seriously with this surface rather than just a wood one below the tables. One person did suffer a slight ping pong injury, though he was better in a few minutes. (Some dumbass went right behind him while were were in the middle of a point, so of course there was a collision. Why can't people understand that when somebody is in the middle of a point, you give them space and don't go right next to them? I fail to grasp why people find this so difficult, and most of the ping pong injuries I've seen occur when some dumbass does this. Also, is it so hard to wait for the end of a point? It's not like they last that long at non-professional levels!)

This club also charges --- it's 15 pounds per year or 30 for life (as long as one is affiliated with Oxford). I chose the latter because that's a dominant strategy if one is going to be around >= 2 years, and I'll obviously be around a lot longer than that. Oh, and I'm not eligibile for the team because permanent faculty aren't eligible. Grrrr.... At Tech, postdocs weren't eligible because the NCTTA rules work just like the NCAA ones. Now I go to a place where postdocs are eligible but permanent faculty aren't. Ah well. Next Sunday, I'll try out for the team anyway and if I would end up making it (which is iffy, but I might sneak in there at the bottom, which is what happened both at Cornell and at Tech when I was an undergrad), then I'll be allowed to practice with the team in their extra Friday practice and just won't be able to participate in tournaments. Alternatively, I could just be the mascot again...

Anyway, it was great to play ping pong again! (No Sean mauch sighting this time, however... I would have been really impressed had I run into him doing martial arts there.)

Quick Thoughts (I'm Still Standin')

What do you think the plot of the average severity of an injury as a function of the number of syllables in its name looks like qualitatively?

Also, my father (a doctor) is coming by today to look at my eyes. I believe this is to make sure that I didn't suffer a concussion. The police officer mentioned this test to me last night and I realized today that the small talk (asking about one of the books on my shelf and so on) probably had much less to do with his general interest than it did with just seeing if I was alert (i.e., again checking for symptoms of a concussion).

I don't know if I lost consciousness when I was punched. I do know that I can't remember what song was on my iPod at the time. (Though, perhaps ironically, Elton John's "I'm Still Standing" was the next one I was going to pick when I wasn't in the mood to listen to the random selection.)

For what it's worth, the odds weren't good (4-5:1 ... I can't remember if there were 4 or 5 of them). I have nothing to report regarding whether the goods were odd.

P.S. Fists to the head suck! (Mind if I just lie here for a minute?)

P.P.S. Hopefully coming soon: Blog entries that are actually positive in tone.