Fortuitous accidents

The joys of geekly conversation include being able to mention a possible head injury to one friend and end up with the links to a couple of free iUniversity lectures by a fascinating scientist studying the relationship between chronic stress and disease. I've had mixed luck with iUniversity before: It's easy to fantasize that I'll spend the endless Metro delays learning about Russian novels or basic anatomy, but in too many cases the lectures don't live up to my hopes. Boring speakers, poor sound quality, material that's out of my league...for one reason or another, a lot of the lectures fall short. Robert Sapolsky's "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" and "Stress and Coping: What Baboons Can Teach Us," however, are completely fascinating, like classes with that one professor who made you consider switching majors halfway through college. He's good at boiling down reams of data into clear descriptions of physiological reactions and consequences, then giving advice on how to be one of the "good" responders. Of course, there's a risk that you'll come away with a neurotic desire to check your various hormone levels multiple times each day to make sure that you're not so stressed that you're prone to disease, and that will both increase your baseline stress and probably cut down on your number of friends, further diminishing your coping mechanisms aiee. Caveat lector. Also, the nonendocrinologically educated among us will get the major wiggins about the Peter Pan story he tells, so if it's important to you to keep a sense of childlike sparkling wonder about the book, (a) you're beyond my help and (b) for pity's sake don't learn anything about J. M. Barrie's early life.