12 May 2008 - 14:52Math for Younger Children

I found a new site called F2-4Kids that’s for younger children.
It’s designed to help parents teach them basic addition and subtraction and covers the numbers 1 through 9.

Even a 4 year old is capable of learning very basic math, add to this the alphabet and the ability to recognize a few one or two syllable words and you will have given them a tremendous head start in school.

There are also a couple of online coloring books for when the math starts to bore or frustrate them(or you).
One is a click and fill, and the other teaches mouse skills through the use of a coloring book and a basic color wheel.
They offer Sponge Bob, My Little Pony, and Little Mermaid and other coloring books.

This is all done with flash and for the grownups there’s a link to French Squared; a site that offers tutorials on action scripts.
I believe Mr. French is the author of the F2-4 Kids site.

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9 May 2008 - 9:557-year-old plagued by mystery illness

This is from KSL TV Utah

Two years ago, Tiffany Searle was an active, happy, healthy little girl. Today she’s confined to a wheelchair. The 7-year-old with bright eyes and big smile now has a body that hangs like a rag doll, muscles that she can hardly move, and no one knows why — not her parents Scott and Valerie, not even her doctors.

Scott said he was told, “I’m sorry to inform you but your daughter has something so rare that we don’t even know what to test for.”
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A young lady (10yrs old) here in town has been in and out of the hospital so many times that everyone there knows her name.
Her troubles have been diagnosed as “beats us” but it must be……. and let’s try……..

She finally got a doctor who said that one of her primary problems was Chrome’s.
When another doctor said she hadn’t tested positive, the response was a very simple, “here’s why it’s chrome’s, and you needed to run a more advanced battery of tests.”

Just before my sister died(of other causes, at age 34) she was diagnosed with lupus. She had suffered from it since her teens, but the basic tests showed nothing. It took a specialist at UCLA to come up with the proper diagnosis and the reason why it had slipped past the priliminary screening.

The basic problem is there are too many patients, too many diseases, too many possible tests, and too few doctors who know enough about the particular problem at hand.
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In this case, maybe a little publicity will bring someone forward who can help, or maybe even an offer from one of the advanced children’s hospitals.

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6 May 2008 - 19:17Porphyria

I was reading a blog called “Madness Beckons” on the origin of the vampire myth and porphyria’s connection to it.

One of the diseases that has been most misunderstood through the ages is porphyria.
This is paragraph is from Pravda.ru
This is a rare disease – only 1 in 20000 people suffers from it. The body doesn’t produce red corpuscles and thus a person’s blood lacks oxygen and iron and this leads to hemoglobin breakdown under the sunshine. Soon blisters and ulcers pop up; a person starts to have sun energy and can even die. This disease can also cause nose, ears and cartilages deformation. His fingers start to convolve; the skin around mouth gets dry and reveals gums, which turn yellowish because of porphyrine deposition on the teeth. Garlic that stimulates red corpuscles emission in the body of healthy person causes the exacerbation of symptoms among the ill people. This goes hand in hand with harsh pain, so these people also often suffer from mental disability.

The extreme cases would seem to be where the vampire / werewolf superstition originated.

This much better explanation is from the American Porphyria Foundation:
Porphyria is not a single disease but a group of at least eight disorders that differ considerably from each other. A common feature in all porphyrias is the accumulation in the body of “porphyrins” or “porphyrin precursors.” Although these are normal body chemicals, they normally do not accumulate. Precisely which of these chemicals builds up depends upon the type of porphyria.

The clinical manifestations of the different types of porphyria are not the same. Forms of treatment also depend on the type of porphyria. Therefore, it is difficult to make general statements that apply to all these disorders.

The symptoms arise mostly from effects on the nervous system or the skin. Effects on the nervous system occur in the acute porphyrias. Proper diagnosis is often delayed because the symptoms are nonspecific. Skin manifestations can include burning, blistering, and scarring of sun-exposed areas.

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