Laxatives and Boredom

Catchy title, huh?

My daughter recently discovered she has an in-grown toenail and the doctor recommended she soak her foot in a warm Epsom salt bath. So of course she asked us what the Epsom salts did. My wife thought Epsom salts (essentially MgSO4) kept the bath warm longer, but that didn’t seem very likely to me since you could get the same effect from cheaper salts like NaCl. So of course, I had to look it up.

Apparently, MgSO4 absorbs through the skin and does reduce inflammation. It acts as a calcium channel blocker and relaxes the smooth muscle groups (blood vessel walls, for example). If you absorb enough of it, it can lower your blood pressure. If you consume enough magnesium (for example, Milk of Magnesia or Maalox) you’ll discover it behaves as a laxative. If you consume MgSO4, you'll discover it is a very good laxative since the sulfate group enhances the effect.

Irrelevant fact: MgSO4 was given the name Epsom salts in honor of the town in which it was originally discovered back in the 1500s -- Epsom, England.
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I was looking over the statistics for this website today and noticed that while traffic has been slowly rising over the past several months, a very noticeable periodicity has begun developing. It’s a weekly cycle, with a minimum on the weekends (no surprise there), and (almost) always peaking on Wednesdays. It’s a triangle waveform, with Tuesdays and Thursday roughly equal but lower, and Fridays and Mondays equal but lower still. Not the distribution I would have expected. Does this represent middle of the week inquisitiveness, restlessness or boredom? Perhaps I should save my best posts for Tuesday evening?

Question of the day: Do you find your blog reading habits to be that structured?