15 July 2010 II

Knee: I had my final doctor’s appointment today. I was able to hear was was actually done:
1. My knee cap was shaved
2. Damaged parts of my outside front and inside bad meniscus was cut away (no sewing)
3. Damaged parts of the cartilage on my lower thigh bone (articular cartilage) were cut away.

Now I meet with the PT tomorrow to be educated on the exercises I am supposed to be doing.

Swimming: he doesn’t want me in the water until August 9 (to keep the wounds from being infected). Oh well; that should give my shoulder a nice long time to heal up, if I am smart about it.

So, I hope to start the stationary bike this weekend, leg weights (as the PT allows) and light upper body weights and yoga classes when I can knee down without pain.

Physical Fitness It turns out that when it comes to heart disease, it isn’t just working out that matters. It is reducing the amount of “still time”; you really need to move around and “do” stuff:

Recently, however, scientists from the University of South Carolina and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., parsed the full data. In a study published in May in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, they reported that, to no one’s surprise, the men who sat the most had the greatest risk of heart problems. Men who spent more than 23 hours a week watching TV and sitting in their cars (as passengers or as drivers) had a 64 percent greater chance of dying from heart disease than those who sat for 11 hours a week or less. What was unexpected was that many of the men who sat long hours and developed heart problems also exercised. Quite a few of them said they did so regularly and led active lifestyles. The men worked out, then sat in cars and in front of televisions for hours, and their risk of heart disease soared, despite the exercise. Their workouts did not counteract the ill effects of sitting.

Most of us have heard that sitting is unhealthy. But many of us also have discounted the warnings, since we spend our lunch hours conscientiously visiting the gym. We consider ourselves sufficiently active. But then we drive back to the office, settle at our desks and sit for the rest of the day. We are, in a phrase adopted by physiologists, ‘‘active couch potatoes.’’

The amount of time that most Americans spend being inactive has risen steadily in recent decades. A 2009 editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine reported that, on average, adults spend more than nine hours a day in oxymoronic ‘‘sedentary activities.’’ For studies like these, scientists categorize activities by the number of METs they demand. A MET, or metabolic equivalent of task, is a measure of energy, with one MET being the amount of energy you burn lying down for one minute. Sedentary behaviors demand one to one and a half METs, or very little exertion.

Personally, I stand when I teach, take stairs, take quick walks, pace, etc. Sitting still really irritates me.

15 July 2010 (am)

Knee: my swelling is way down. But I am feeling a twinge or two at the entry points (where the arthroscope went in) and in the stiff tendons behind my knee. This is different from the previous pain; this is the “we’ve been in one position for two long” stiffness and is to be expected. Maybe a swim and a light weight workout isn’t too far away?

Posts

Is gravity really a consequence of other things (e. g., forces in another dimension)? There is some non-crackpot speculation that this is the case:

“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.

Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy, a kind of anti-gravity that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together.

Dr. Verlinde’s argument turns on something you could call the “bad hair day” theory of gravity.

It goes something like this: your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight, and nature likes options. So it takes a force to pull hair straight and eliminate nature’s options. Forget curved space or the spooky attraction at a distance described by Isaac Newton’s equations well enough to let us navigate the rings of Saturn, the force we call gravity is simply a byproduct of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder.

Some of the best physicists in the world say they don’t understand Dr. Verlinde’s paper, and many are outright skeptical. But some of those very same physicists say he has provided a fresh perspective on some of the deepest questions in science, namely why space, time and gravity exist at all — even if he has not yet answered them.

“Some people have said it can’t be right, others that it’s right and we already knew it — that it’s right and profound, right and trivial,” Andrew Strominger, a string theorist at Harvard said.

“What you have to say,” he went on, “is that it has inspired a lot of interesting discussions. It’s just a very interesting collection of ideas that touch on things we most profoundly do not understand about our universe. That’s why I liked it.”

I admit that I don’t have anything approaching an understanding of these issues. But here is one thing I know: for a long time, people wonder why gravity is such a weak force. For example: gravity can be easily defeated by a tiny magnet (which can attract a paper clip with enough force to defeat the earth’s gravity). People think that perhaps this is due to gravity being multi-dimensional in some way (gravity reaching into “perpendicular dimensions” that we can’t see); this conjecture is that gravity is a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics.

Mathematics and randomness Have you ever wondered how a “random number generator” is really a bit of an oxymoron (something that is random can’t be produced by an algorithm). Now-a-days, we can obtain randomness from quantum signals! Check it out.

Painful Social Commentary from FAIL blog…

For the humorous: just watch.

For the painful, from here:

(Yes, I know you can interpret this in many ways; but even the “look who has money to spend” interpretation is painful)

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

I should start with my background: I am not a multi-day hiker, though I’ve gone on on many short day hikes. I also have a trail walking background, having walked numerous trail races ranging from 30 miles (or 50 km) to 100 miles, but my walks were organized in that there were aid stations every so often (say, 3 to 5 miles apart) and I was aiming to finish the course as quickly as I could. I wasn’t walking with a 40-50 pound pack, filtering water, reading topographic maps, setting up tents, etc.

I have dreams of taking a multi-day hike, but for now, I might work on building up to something like this.

But it all depends on how/if my knee heals up.

Now back to the book: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

The plot is simple: an overweight, out of shape smoker decides that he is going to hike the Appalachian Trail from one end to the other. He gets someone to go with him: someone who is a fatter, even more out of shape smoker. Yes, this character is based on a real person, though Bryson uses some creative liberties in telling the story.

What I liked about it: of course, the writing is engaging and the stories are funny. But this was not a “we did this and that today” journal entry story. There is much about the history of the Appalachian trail, the geology (both present and natural historical), the associated nature and wildlife, as well as rants against the Forrest Service, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Park Service. There are social observations on the various types of people that one meets, including the “full of beans know-it-all” (Mary Ellen), the “full of themselves and oblivious to others” (the suede boots group) types and the lovable but bumbling and yet somehow successful types (Chicken John), among many others.

There was also some good, solid information (what to expect in what parts of the trail, what the shelters were like in places, stuff about the terrain and the necessary hiking gear).

There was also some interesting observations/rants about human nature, some of which I will comment on.

What I didn’t like about it: Some of the humorous stuff (Katz getting rid of stuff from his pack, throwing soda cans into the brush, leaving cigarette buts as “bread crumbs to be followed” was littering, plain and simple. I cringed when I read that. Also, well, you can guess part of the story from the last line of the book:

So Katz was right after all, and I don’t care what anybody says. We hiked the Appalachian Trail.

This is a classic rationalization for failure that is so accepted now-a-days: “we ran the marathon even though we didn’t do the whole course“, “I healed the patient even if he died”, “I built the bridge even though it collapsed”, etc.

By the way, they did cover many miles though, remember, these were two fat, out of shape guys.

What the book isn’t: it is not a “how to” manual (though some good tips are given; I found the blurb about hypothermia to be useful) nor is it a journal about athletic/physical competence. For the latter, I recommend the chapter about David Horton’s AT speed record (52 days!) in the book Runners and Walkers by Steven Boga. Note: Horton, while a world class ultrarunner, is also very religious and invokes help from his deity a lot. Nevertheless that chapter is a gripping read that many of us mere mortals can relate to.

Now back to Bryson’s book:

Bryson takes some shots at certain aspects “Americana”. On page 103 he talks about Gatlinburg, Tennessee (in the Smoky Mountains):

And then we went out to see the town. I was particularly eager to have a look at Gatlinburg because I had read about it in a wonderful book called The Lost Continent. In it the author describes the scene on Main Street thus:

Walking in an unhurried fashion up and down the street were more crowds of overweight tourists in boisterous clothes, with cameras bouncing on the bellies, consuming ice creams, cotton candy and corn dogs, sometimes simultaneously.

And so it was today. The same throngs of pear-shaped people in Reeboks wandered between food smells, clutching grotesque comestibles and bucket-sized soft drinks. It was still the same tacky, horrible place. Yet I would hardly have recognized it from just nine years before. Nearly every building I remembered had been torn down and replaced with something new; principally, mini-malls and shopping courts, which stretched back from the main street and offered a whole new galaxy of shopping and eating opportunities.

Remember, this is being written by a fat smoker.

This followed his observation from page 102:

For years, it [the local tourist industry] has prospered on the confident understanding that when Americans load up their cares and drive enormous distances to a setting of rare natural splendor what most of them want when they get there is to play a little miniature golf and eat eat dribbly food. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most popular park in America, but Gatlinburg, this is so unbelievable, is more popular than the park.

I can believe this. In 2001, I took in the “Georgia Alps” and drove to hike some of the trails; I ended up running 10 miles of trails in Unicoi State Park in Northern Georgia during Labor Day weekend. (easy trails and the trail that takes you into Helen). The towns and local areas were crowded; the trails were all but empty, though they were well maintained.

In Chapter 14, Bryson describes his experiences in Pennsylvania. In this stretch (which he did alone), he would drive to a trail head, do part of the trail in out and back fashion, get back in his car and drive to another access point. In short, he did a series of day hikes on many parts of the trail. But most interesting was his description of the the (former) town of Centralia. Basically, there was an underground coal fire that just could not be put out; that lead to this town becoming unlivable (page 181)

Sensors sunk into the earth showed that the temperature thirteen feet under the [gas station gas] tanks was almost 1000 F. Elsewhere people were discovering that their cellar walls and floors were hot to the touch. By now, smoke was seeping from the ground all over the town, and people were beginning to grow nauseated and faint from the increased levels of carbon dioxide in their homes.

In the later pages, he describes the almost surreal scene of observing this mostly razed area with roads (and stop signs!) still standing while smoke seeped from the ground. Later, on page 185, he talks about his being hassled and run away from a parking lot where he was attempting to observe environmental damage from a zinc mill:

At one end of town, I spotted what I had come to find, a steep broad eminence, perhaps 1500 feet high and several miles long, which was almost entirely naked of vegetation. There was a parking lot beside the road and a factor a hundred yards or so beyond. I pulled into the lot and got out to gawk; it was truly a sight.
As I stood there, some fat guy in a uniform stepped out of a security booth and waddled towards me looking cross and officious.

He goes on to tell how he was asked to leave and tried to; but he was then kept from leaving when he wouldn’t give his name to the security guard. You’ll have to read the book to find out how it turned out.

Bryson spends a bit of time discussing some philosophy of how to lay out hiking trails. He makes an interesting point: he feels that the very long trails ought to include a mixture of wilderness and of civilization, including farm land and towns (as the trails do in Europe) (pages 199-200):

…America’s attitude toward nature is, from all sides, very strange if you ask me. I couldn’t help comparing my experience now with an experience I’d had three of four years earlier in Luxembourg when I went hiking with my son for a magazine assignment. Luxembourg is a much more delightful place to hike than you might think. It has lots of woods but also castles and farms and steepled villages with winding river valleys; on the whole, as it were, the whole European package. The footpaths we followed spent a lot of time in the woods but also emerged at obliging intervals to take us along sunny back roads over stiles and through farm fields and hamlets. We were always able at tome point each day to call in at a bakery or post office, to hear the tinkle of shop bells and evesdrop on conversations we couldn’t understand. Each night we slept in an inn and ate in a restaurant with other people. [...]

In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition; either your ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart as along the Appalachian Trail.

Bryson also takes shots at some of the technology and, well, just read to get the point (from pages 211-214; he was at the peak of Stratton Mountain):

eight or nine other people were scattered around the summit, including one youngish, rather pudgy man on his own in a very new and expensive looking windcheater. He had some kind of handheld electronic device with which he was taking mysterious readings of the sky or landscape.

It turned out to be a meter which read off things like temperature, humidity, UV exposure, etc. Byson goes on:

…he [the pudgy man] had no pack, and so no waterproofs, and was wearing shorts and sneakers. If the weather did swiftly deterioate, and in New England, it most assuredly can, he would probably die, but at least he had a machine that would tell him when and let him know his final dew point.

Bryson goes on to argue that this technology can lead unprepared people to think that they know what they are doing, and he goes on to list a few episodes in which people called for rescue because “they were tired” or “were out longer than they thought and that they might miss an important business meeting”, etc.

And as far as unpredictable weather goes, Chapter 18 describes Mount Washington. That is very entertaining; he describes being caught in a sudden weather change, without HIS waterproofs, that HE forgot to pack! I suppose that one can show up unprepared even if one isn’t a techno-geek, huh?

The final sections are devoted to Byrson and Katz attempting to finish the final 100 miles of the Appalachian trail in Maine; given that this is said to be the toughest stretch…well, read to find out how successful they are. Nevertheless, reading this gives one an appreciation of what David Horton and other successful through hikers did, especially when you realized that they covered this 100 miles after a 2100 mile warm up!

In short: I am glad that I read the book; it is well written, engaging, and talks about many topics (nature, social, political, human nature, and yes, hiking). It is funny too. But there will probably be parts that offend different people (me: the littering and smoking).

14 July 2010 posts

Injury update The swelling is way down, though the pain is up slightly. The right shoulder is slightly sore from using the crutch/cane with the right arm; I now have a way of using the left arm. Mostly I can walk without it…for brief periods of time.

Posts of the day

Mathematics and education This is an inspiring article about teaching calculus in earthquake ravaged Haiti.

Politics Sarah Palin talks about the politics of divisiveness on her facebook page! Pots and Kettles anyone?

Society

This video about “hard jobs” makes some good points, but I think that it is too hard on things like OSHA. Yes, there is nothing wrong with hard, blue collar work, but we ought to be a bit humane too, right? Do we really want our blue collar friends and neighbors developing black lung or avoidable repetitive stress injuries, or working in fire traps? Still, the 19 minute video is worth watching.

Realism: Barbara Ehrenreich advocates realism, rather than false optimism. Via PZ Myers.

Microbes: Jerry Coyne points us to this Carl Zimmer article about microbes and how they are essential to the operation of our bodies. In fact, sometimes, people can benefit from…the transfer of FECAL MATTER from one body to another!
Evidently, part of evolution is evolving to take advantage of microbes; the first are passed from the mothers birth canal to the baby. This is also a good case against over sterilization:

Some scientists argue that these studies all point to the same conclusion: when children are deprived of their normal supply of microbes, their immune systems get a poor education. In some people, untutored immune cells become too eager to unleash a storm of inflammation. Instead of killing off invaders, they only damage the host’s own body.

The whole article is interesting; we are learning a great deal.

13 July 2010: a couple of political opinion pieces

Via Truthout: From The Disappearing Intellectual by Henry Giroux

[...]In a media scape and public sphere that view criticism, dialog and thoughtfulness as a liability, such anti-intellectuals abound, providing commentaries that are nativist, racist, reactionary and morally repugnant. But the premium put on ignorance and the disdain for critical intellectuals is not monopolized by the dominant media, it appears to have become one of the few criteria left for largely wealthy individuals to qualify for public office. One typical example is Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who throws out inanities such as labeling the Obama administration a “gangster government.”[2] Bachmann refuses to take critical questions from the press because she claims that they unfairly focus on her language. She has a point. After all, it might be difficult to support statements such as the claim that “the US government used the census information to round up the Japanese [Americans] and put them in concentration camps.”[3] Another typical example can be found in Congressman Joe Barton’s apology to BP for having to pay for damages to the government stemming from its disastrous oil spill.

This “upscaling of ignorance”[4] gets worse. Richard Cohen, writing in The Washington Post about Sen. Michael Bennett, was shocked to discover that he was actually well-educated and smart but had to hide his qualifications in his primary campaign so as to not undermine his chance of being re-elected. Cohen concludes that in politics, “We have come to value ignorance.”[5] He further argues that the notion that a politician should actually know something about domestic and foreign affairs is now considered a liability. He writes:

[W]e now have politicians who lack a child’s knowledge of government. In Nevada, Sharron Angle has won the GOP Senate nomination espousing phasing out Social Security and repealing the income tax as well as abolishing that durable conservative target, the Education Department. Similarly, in Connecticut, Linda McMahon, a former pro wrestling tycoon, is running commercials so adamantly anti-Washington you would think she’s an anarchist. In Arizona Andy Goss, a Republican congressional candidate, suggests requiring all members of Congress to live in a barracks. This might be tough on wives, children and the odd cocker spaniel, but what the hell. Nowadays, all ideas are equal.[6]

The embrace of a type of rabid individualism, anti-intellectualism and political illiteracy is also at work in the Tea Party movement. As social protections disappear, jobs are lost, uncertainty grows and insecurity prevails, Tea Party members express anger over a weakened social state that represents one of the few institutions capable of providing the capital, policies and safety nets necessary to protect those who have been shaken by the economic recession. And, yet, in light of what Bob Herbert calls “the most painful evidence imaginable of the failure of laissez-faire economics and the destructive force of the alliance of big business and government against the interests of ordinary Americans,”[7] the Tea Party movement wants to abolish government and expand even more the deregulated capitalism that has unsettled the lives of so many of its members. Ignorance prevails around both the movement’s policy recommendations and its often racist protest against “the election of a “foreign born’ – African-American to the presidency.” As J. M. Bernstein pointed out in a New York Times opinion piece:

When it comes to the Tea Party’s concrete policy proposals, things get fuzzier and more contradictory: keep the government out of health care, but leave Medicare alone; balance the budget, but don’t raise taxes; let individuals take care of themselves, but leave Social Security alone; and, of course, the paradoxical demand not to support Wall Street, to let the hard-working producers of wealth get on with it without regulation and government stimulus, but also to make sure the banks can lend to small businesses and responsible homeowners in a stable but growing economy.[8]

As the belief in the libertarian agent, free of all dependencies and social responsibilities blows up in the face of the current economic meltdown, anger replaces critique and ignorance informs politics. Bernstein thinks that members of the Tea Party are angry because they have been jolted into recognizing how fragile their so-called individual freedom actually is and that it is the government that is somehow responsible for making them feel so vulnerable. Maybe so, but there is also something else at work here, less metaphysical and more pedagogical – a kind of intellectual vacuum produced at different levels of American society that cultivates ignorance, limits choices, legitimizes political illiteracy and promotes violence. [...]

The author does note that, at times, events manage to break through.

The Right Wing Thought Police (or, why do we take a beating in the media?) by Lawrence Davidson

[...]The Foreground:

1. This situation gives the political right a very big head start when it comes to shaping public opinion and then policing the “neutral” corporate media to make sure it does not step out of line. The right is very good at this because their leaders and spokespeople tend to be bullies and authoritarians. On the other hand, American political liberals are really centrists who are trying to hold together a conglomeration of different groups. That might get them votes when it counts, but it doesn’t make for principled backbone. The liberal centrists tend to be accommodating rather than resistant to right-wing bullying.

2. The “neutral” media that is primarily concerned with the bottom line, their owners and bureaucratic operators, readily sacrifice the principles underpinning a free press if they are seen as hurting the company image. There are, of course, occasional exceptions to this rule (just remember the Washington Post and Watergate) but they are rare and momentary.

3. So, you put together a for-profit, largely unprincipled, “neutral” media with an aggressive political right run by loud-mouthed thugs, throw in a liberal political class that has very little backbone, and you get the present day situation.

Surf to see the background. Note: this is an opinion piece but it rings true. Basically we have a crazy right wing media and a chicken “center” one; the truly liberal one (like The Nation) is at the margins.

13 July 2010 posts

These will be all over the map….

This boxer had a knee injury similar to mine; he too recently underwent arthroscopic surgery:

Champion Ironwoman triathlete, even at over 40. That is Fernanda Keller.

Navel Staring
I am optimistic and wondering what my next athletic challenge will be. For some reason, I want to know if I can finish one more marathon in under 4 hours. Is that a good goal, or is it folly? I’ll find out in the next few months. But it reminded me of something that came up in the video Facing Ali, which is about boxers who faced Muhammad Ali. (I can recommend both the book and the video; they are similar but different). The question came up about why do some formerly top boxers continue to try to fight for the title long after they have a valid chance?

One of the boxers put it this way: every boxer wants to know if he can do it “one more time”; it is almost an irresistible urge. You think: “am I just letting my weak mind get in the way? If I make this or that adjustment, could I do it again, after so many failures to “do it again”? Accepting that “I can’t” is very difficult.

But that got the phrase “One More Time” in my head which reminded me of this two movie series that I enjoyed as a junior high kid:

These were not great movies, but I liked them at the time.

From the personal blogs that I read (non-newsy items)

One friend is coming back from a bike crash injury.

Another is tapering for her goal event (5K/10K racewalk at USATF National Masters Championships)

One talks about meeting Gwen Ifill at a book signing (I talk about her book here) This reminds me that our outlooks are shaped by our own life’s experiences, no matter how aware and empathetic we attempt to be.

One talks about her garden and her “city chickens”; you can see her in her garden on the last photo of the page. She is back on her bike after being out with a toe injury and has survived her moving and “trying to get her mail restarted” experience. Yes, some “routine” things can blow up on us; we tend to forget this when things are going right.

Newsy Posts

Robert Reich: notes that the economy will struggle and that the Democrats might be seen as not having fought hard enough. He also points out that Democrats are also too influenced by corporate money. This makes me wonder: perhaps the best strategy to go forward is to get corporate America to understand that they won’t thrive if people don’t have money to buy their products. Henry Ford seemed to have understood that.

What all of us should have learned is that the “supply sider” economists were wrong and the Keynesians were right. But the conservatives will never admit this.

What you know isn’t necessarily so It is interesting: 2 years after electing a black guy as president we are hearing all sorts of whining about “reverse racism” from the right wing. Huh? What about the other 42 presidents? (“43″ counts Grover Cleveland twice). Well, many of the things that you hear repeated as “common knowledge” is, well, false. See a whole list refuted BY DATA here. In life, I’ve come to learn that “what you know isn’t necessarily so”.

13 July 2010: doing nothing edition

The knee was even better upon waking up, though there is still some swelling. Total pain medication yesterday: two extra strength Tylenol prior to going to bed; iced several times. The knee is stronger. But I did next to nothing yesterday other than watch a movie, read and surf.

Hopefully I’ll get inspired to rehab and get out there:

Ok, this was taken at an advanced racewalking clinic. I don’t know who this is but she has excellent technique and…

By the way, my wife is in fashion this summer!

12 July 2010 (am)

I can’t quite get full extension nor can I bend it past 90 degrees (swelling) and my lower quad muscles are very sore. So no running today.
In all honesty, only two pain killing pills yesterday and none in the past 12-14 hours today, so I continue to progress.
I am taking these photos so I can remind myself where I was; after all, I am bound to get impatient.

Update: shower (Yeah!), some leg extensions with bands and ankle weights and some straight legged leg lifts. I’ll start counting these a couple of days from now; right now I want to just do a few from time to time. I can walk a little bit without crutches; my leg doesn’t fully extend as yet.

Update: the knee is quite swollen (though not painful) and the doctors office (who called me) told me that I should stay off of it more and that I should keep it elevated; I haven’t done a good enough job on keeping the leg up. Even while sitting, I’ve kept it down.

I am reading a book about Illinois trails (Tales and Trails of Illinois by Fliege) and history and another about hiking the Appalachian trail. (A Walk in the Woods by Bryson)

Homeopathy: just read.

Paul Krugman: he is right, I think. Why don’t the Democrats go for the jugular?

11 July 2010 Training walk

.19 miles with Barbara and Olivia. Ok, I walked out with crutches and back with one crutch; I took a few steps without any.

This is as straight as it goes:

and as flexed as it goes:

Note: no hydrocodone since 8 pm last night (14 hours).

Note: I am not trying to be narcissistic here but rather trying to record the progress. I like measuring things; I am an unrepentant geek.

Note: some slight right shoulder ache due to crutches.

Science As a “frog” joke, I’ve been saving the flies that I’ve killed in a sealed “baggie”. I noticed that one of the “fatter” dead flies moved around a bit. I then found out why: it had an egg, which is now a maggot.

Look in the upper left hand side; it is surviving in the zip sealed plastic bag.