The way they tell it to us, vitreous potassium rises linearly for the first eight hours after death. From which point, it goes any where it damn pleases.
And since it reflects blood potassium, which usually runs 3.5 to 5.0, you’d have to know the person’s blood level as a starting point.
So if a guy came out of his doctor’s office, where he had electrolytes drawn, and was killed in the parking lot, and the body was found within six hours, and we actually got the body to the lab and started working on it and drew the vitreous (aka sucked out the eyeball juice with a syringe) and got it processed before eight hours had passed, it might be of some use.
But then you’d have a last seen alive time within eight hours, which is usually more than precise enough!
It’s basically useless.
I didn’t know Henry Lee lectured at U Conn. Of all the great old storytellers he’s the best.
Isn’t court reporting fun, EddyTeddyFreddy? I’ve spent my holiday weekend cranking out a board meeting of an organization I shall not name, whose board is comprised of doctors and associated medical personnel. Some of the subject matter can be occasionally interesting, but when you have a bunch of doctors talking about finances? Painful doesn’t even begin to describe it. Some want to never spend a penny even if it could cure cancer and reverse the aging process, and others want to raise fees 250% to meet every item in their wish list, ignoring the year’s worth of work that has gone into coming up with the proposal the finance committee actually put forward. Economists are positively fascinating by comparison.
The good news is that working over a holiday weekend on a rush job can pay really, really well.
GAH!!! I hate reading board meeting transcripts! And public hearings on utility rate increases! GAH GAH GAH. :eek:
But economists are the WORST. Especially when they’re arrogant assholes who love to show off how smart they are by pontificating endlessly, however tenuous the connection to the examiner’s question. :rolleyes:
Fortunately I’m a proofreader, not a reporter, so I don’t actually have to see and hear the fumblemouths, blowhards, screamers, equivocators, selective amnesiacs, etc.
Ah, yes, expedite rates pay very, very well. Some of my reporters give me a per-page bonus over my normal rates when they sell a lot of copies. Happy days, happy days.
I’m sure you would never, ever be one of those white coats who annoy me, gabriela. And actually, these guys don’t except for their unrealistic views of money and the spending thereof. Doctors like you who actually perform a service to society? I’ll never complain.
But I’m glad the rookie apologized. I assume you’d been less than, er, charitable on the phone at 0235?
I actually don’t mind some board meetings, ETF, as long as they’re organizations I find interesting. I just transcribe the stuff, though, I don’t go sit there and try to stay awake during the actual recording thereof. So if I get bored, I can go take a nap. My tolerance level is a bit odd, though – after doing this for over 20 years, as long as it’s something I can crank out quickly and easily, I can ignore boredom. It’s when people mumble or constantly interrupt each other or snivel about how it’s not their fault when it’s clearly something that’s totally their fault, or other such annoying habits, that I get bored and pissed off.
Until 12:00pm today, I was working at the ARC Disaster Relief Operation #244-06 in Wilkes-Barre, Pa for the Pennsylvania Flood of '06. Tomorrow I go back to my regularly scheduled work.
I went into work (restaurant) at 4:00PM today, and by 6:00 it was still completely dead (usually it’s reasonably populated by 6) so they sent me home. I only made $6. No independence for me.
Know how you can tell you pissed off a court reporter? They record you exactly verbatim. Throwing in all those verbal tics – the ums, ers, you knows, likes, etc. – that, if we like you, we’ll clean up somewhat. Or all the repetitions of a word or phrase. Especially when it’s not for a court proceeding, verbatim has many different shades of meaning. The more incoherent someone looks, the more likely they’ve pissed off the reporter.
I went to work at 8 in the morning, as usual. Ate a lot of company-purchased pizza for lunch and went home at 3, when we were told we could go. I managed to finish everything I was going to do today, so tomorrow and Thursday will be mop-up days, going back and clearing out a bunch of AP entries.
Hee hee! And one good way to piss off the court reporter is to BE incoherent. Or mumble. Or zip along at warp speed when reading a document aloud. Or refuse to provide spellings when asked. Or argue endlessly over every possible nuance of a question rather than answering it. Or…
Hey, screw it, I’m off the clock now. Time to go read for pleasure and watch a DVD with a purring cat in my lap and a nice hot cuppa tea at my elbow.
