Learning Episodes

I discovered yesterday that Friday morning at 0530 is a good time to go to the hospital emergency room. Not for me, but the maternal parental element who, it turned out, had to be admitted for further testing. And that in its Chinese Fire Drill entirety is why no blot yesterday.

Today is sorta another matter. The skies have opened, as the old saying goes, at the apparent behest of the weather beavers. Soggy. Very soggy.

And I noted [Link] that some U California wonks are going to gather a sufficient quantity of anti-matter to see if it has positive or negative gravitational mass.

This is the sort of thing that sounds exciting and Richard Ballenger Seaton to the mediaists. Sadly, it is rather hum drum terrorizing. All the theory indicates that antimatter has the same kind of gravitational mass as regular matter, it’s just an oleo of the anti-particles that not-anti-matter is made of. But it is an experiment that needs to be done, just for testability.

The nasty part of it is that such a large amount of anti-matter is needed that care must be taken not to BOOM!

Incidentally, that BOOM would be a REAL weapon of mass “destruction”, not what the Yankee government says one is.

humans, health, medicine, physics, anti-matter, gravity

Methane Management

While we’re picking on the Yankee government for being WRONG. Notably in the matter of gun control and hounding geeks to death, both issues of death and likely horribly misplaced and ill done even for a bureaucracy, I have to offer up an instance of somewhat greater humor.

It seem the Social Security Administration, the folks who mishandle almost everyone’s old age money and work very hard to ensure the employment of lots of attorneys to litigate their mismanagement, have actually admitted to some wrong doing. [Link]

Seems they issued a letter of reprimand to an employee suffering from chronic flatulence.

Ayeh, a gas passer in the non-physician sense.

Back when I was a young man working in industry before I found a better calling working for the Yankee army, I had to go endure Friday office-out luncheons at the El Palacio, at that time almost the only (pseudo) Mexican restaurant in Huntsville. Long story made short since these luncheons were just shy of Tartarus for me, Friday afternoons were a matter of great flatulence. The wisdom was that it was the beans. The wisdom that I obtained from this was that management needs to be VERY careful on how it imposes organizational social activities.

Now I should also comment that even in Yankee government circles the SSA and the VA are considered to have rather archaic management styles, somewhere between medieval and robber baron, supposedly because of the general distrust of both citizenry, and by slop, associates. Thus, while management in almost every part of YG would know that a flatulence problem is likely medical in cause, evidently not the SSA. This seems in keeping with their disability management.

Happily the chap in question came up with a medical advisory and the bright headed managers of the SSA wisely retracted the reprimand.

Before they provided more employment for attorneys.

humans, management, organization, government, medicine, flatulence

Big Phones, Little Medicine

OK, now we can clear out tabs. Huzzah! Having revealed the nation’s public education system as mind rot, we can move on to mind rot of our own.

First, Spanish researchers [Link] have a maths demonstration that “physics is hard”. Yes, I realize this is a real ‘duhhhhhhhhhhhhhh’ piece. All of us know physics is hard. Except maybe a few mathematicians. Certainly physicists know it is hard. But that is part of the fun. But why this article is noteworthy is for a quote,

“As we are taught in school, physics tries to provide mathematical equations that explain the evolution of a system over time, starting from observations of that system. With the current advances in supercomputers, one might expect that this process could be automated, replacing the creativity of scientists by the calculation power of computers.

Fortunately for scientists, Toby Cubitt and colleagues have shown mathematically that this is not possible, in an article recently published in Physical Review Letters.”

So one more benny for physics, or at least physicists. We cannot be replaced by robots. Maybe. Anyway, for now it adds a new dimension to being human. I can now tell colleagues that being a physicist means being more human than the mean.

Next, an article [Link] from the Marketplace Tech folks (used to be Future Tense back when they were good,) saying that cellular telephones are getting larger. I hope so. My first phone was a Motorola folding brick and it was a welcome thing to carry about, especially on TDY when I might need it to beat a mugger into goo. Oh, and call home to call the local fuzz since there was no 911 for cellular telephones then.

But as I have said before I really hate these dinky cellular telephones now that I can either hear or be heard on but not both because the speaker and microphone sweet spots don’t cover both my ear and mouth. Of course it is very hard to talk on a board which is what the new phones resemble. My face is curved, the phone aren’t. Not holding my respiration on this.

In a related matter, the folks at U Pennsylvania [Link] are worried that the land lines are going to go away – economic reasons – leaving lots of folks without telephone service because the cellular map only goes where there is enough density of pictures of dead politicians. I am conflicted by this. Since I have a metal rook, most of my house has bupkus for cellular coverage. So if I lose my land line access – already provided by a sub-micro local provider – I can look forward to not having to worry about telephone calls, almost all of which are either advertising, solicitation, and relatives trying to do the same.

Somehow I doubt all this. Cable television isn’t going away soon, nor I suspect is DSL, at least here in the heartland, so there is always VOIP. And if it does, all it will take is a single Democrud administration to put a geas on the cellular providers to provide all Amerikans telephone service or be nationalized. Deregulation is a two edged political sword.

Last, it seems that humans are more defined by genetic diversity than previously thought. [Link] It seems that low denisty, ~ 0.005, mutation levels have greater determination of human actuality than previously thought.

“Two studies1, 2 published today in Science find that most human genetic variants are rare, and that rare variants are more likely than common ones to affect the structure or function of proteins, and therefore to have biological or medical consequences.”

The medical consequences is that at some point medicine is going to peter out in terms of advances. Simply put, if there are 200 different types of humans per thousand, or in a town the size of Greater Metropolitan Arab, about 2000 types of folks, there are limits to how much improvement can be made in medical instrumentality with the available resources.

So don;t expect any medical breakthroughs to aid you in senile decrepitude.

humans, health, medicine, communication, society, physics

Cour de Stress

Absence yesterday was due to a medicalist preemption so I could perform the first part of a so-called “stress” test. This consists of getting wired and tubed up for EKG [1] and injection of high x-ray cross section substance ‘dye’, which is a homonym of why this activity is so fragging somber, running with hamster intensity on a treadmill until one reaches 0.85 of MAXIMUM heart rate, the sits and eats fatty junk food until they take you back to a room that reminds of a funeral parlor laboratory except for the absence of embalming odor to do a pi arc x-ray of your heart.

That’s the desired flow pattern. It even has a bit to do with reality. But only if you get past the irritating fluff.

The first piece is cutting short my gym visit to go rushing through the dark to get to the facility for my promised ‘first’ appointment time, and then waiting an hour past that to be summoned into the sanctum. Alright so it is the first, but an hour late? That is raising lack of attention to appointment time to a new height. Why is it that medicalists are the only folks for whom appointment calendering is a farce?

Next, run on a treadmill and not fall off, or over. And then be the hypocrisy of the food. I understand the ‘dye’ is fat soluble but this is a floor removed in the facility where the cardiologists preach salt and fat as earthly damnation.

After sitting around, go and lie motionless on a board less than a foot in width while the x-ray source half circles your chest at a punctuated speed seemingly designed to make you jump. Then trying to get off the board period, much less with some dignity and grace, after suffering tremors and cramps after the first five minutes of stationarity.

Then arise again, this morning, early, too early, on the one day of sleeping in, and drive again, this time through rain which cannot be counted against but is still harrowing. This time, only an injection, a begrudging issue of crackers as if they are fiscally offended you didn’t bring something more palatable but since no one tells you how much fat has to be ingested the risk is too great.

And then told to walk interior laps for ten minutes and having to continually ask excuse as you pass everyone, some twice in a circuit. Before going and hanging on the board once more but this time not tired enough from exertions to control the tremors. But oh!, how good that floor felt once fallen upon.

And thence dismissed with a sniff that is hopefully only an indication of allergy to the now reduced pollen. And a fervent hope that this will not occur again soon and when it does that some other facility will be available.

[1]  Why is this the only (?) instance that the medicalists actually use the Greek ‘hard’ “C”?

Sometimes Dark is Good

Returned, at least in pieces and a partial semblance of my previous self. Survived – obviously – surgery on tuesday and the curfew period of not-looking. Although the curfew was a bit stretched last evening by the weather beavers and the nastiness moving through Greater Metropolitan Arab. Happily nothing major happening here other than me trying to peer around medications, sans glasses to find a manual to reprogram the weather wireless after I discovered the accumulators had expired.

So since tuesday morning about this time, I have not really read anything, nor watched anything on the audio-visual electromagnetic receiver. That has been a mixed boon. As I lay about with first cold gel packs and then yesterday alternating between cold and hot packs over the surgeon’s tender ministrations I had plenty of time, and opportunity!, to think and so I got FD SCP to dig out a digital recorder, the kind that fits in pocket, and I exercised it in lieu of my wanted notebooks. So I have a long list of things to go gnaw away at ranging from minor internet searches through major efforts including a patent application. There is much to be said for meditation, especially when it can be enhanced by chemicals. I would have preferred beer but what I was issued under surgeon’s orders was adequate at least for the once.

While I did not get to watch a lot of television, peering nearsightedly at radar tracks on the Huntsville station of selection last evening to see what was in the vicinity of Castellum SCP, I did get to hear quite a bit, too much of it political tripe. Indeed, much of that tripe was not only indigestible but unmasticatable. Some examples:

• I am told that the Twinkie is widely beloved by Amerikans, I have had such a couple of times and can honestly respond “ehhh”. That is on a scale from 1-10, they are maybe a strong 3 or 4. Nothing to get up from a warm bed for, but better than prisoner rations. The point is, why is the only Alibam politician of gender female named amazingly similar to a twinkie? Can the state repulsians find no one with a less ridiculous name, like Nefertiti and Tallulah? Can anyone seriously think a politician with a name so similar to twinkie is to be taken as anything other than party tokenism?
• Why do politicians tell us that they will only ‘protect us from the liberal/conservative special interests”? Are there no inimical (at least relatively and partisanly) ‘general interests’? Does this indicate that politicians only disagree on little things and not general philosophy? And is then the gridlock across the Yankee republic nothing be a conspiracy by politicians to retain power?
• And lastly, why do we want elected officials to not learn and adapt? Do we believe that perfections is more likely than stupidity? Is the elected one the messiah? And how many messiahs do we expect? I would expect that we should want our elected officials to learn and change to better reflect what needs to be done for the best of the nation and the citizenry. But apparently we only want little tin deities so we can sling mud and listen to political vitriolic nonsense.

Spring Slicing

Things may be a bit sparse around here for the next few days. I have to have a bit of medicalist attention that will require a constrained recovery away from lights and looking. I have stacked a few bits and pieces to (hopefully, if everything works properly) pop up over the anticipated period. And then after spending all that time in darkness have all sorts of nasty comments to blog.

Heart Movie

Yesterday was my pilgrimage to Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill for an examination by cardiologist. At this stage in my existence the mean time between encounters with cardiologist is approximately one year. It has been as short as one week in times past. But what I was impressed with was the experience itself.

The examination was conducted in a facility dedicated to such and despite the tacky failure of efforts to humanize the environment I was struck by a comparison with Fritz Lang’s movie “Metropolis”

First there is a large sitting area next an administrative station. One arrives and registers, then sits, carefully seperated from anyone else even though none of the diseases are contagious but because conversation is alien to this place. Then one of the clerks is supposed to call one’s name so one may advance to the station and assume a servile stance. There innumerable forms absolving the organization of any action it may take including ripping your heart out as part of some Mayan ritual and paying them for the privilege. The sums are small, the increment of personal involvement beyond what the insurance company will pay. Hopefully. No one who is here lacks insurance. The atmosphere is such that no one asks about that subject.

After signing away everything except your thoughts, which are rather dim and cloudy at this point, one resumes sitting until your name is again announced, this time by a technician. They escort you through a rat’s maze to a cell only slightly less grim than those beneath the Vatican for the education of auslanders, heretics, – and physicists? The time of appointment is largely immaterial. There the technician reviews medical history while maintaining strict eye contact with the computer monitor. A brief electrocardiogram follows and then the technician beats a thankful retreat. The atmosphere of waiting is consistent with the atmosphere of a dungeon except the scurrying of rats is replaced by the often coherent mutterings of examinations in other cells. 

Yesterday I was ushered into my cell thirty minutes prior to my appointment time and the cardiologist did not arrive until thirty minutes after the appointed time. The technician was present less than five minutes of that period. Thereafter I was left to amuse myself with listening to the examinations going on around me. I was struck by the uniformity of the examinations, the cardiologists tone, and the false camaraderie and good cheer. Here the association with “Metropolis” was at its strongest.

Finally the presence swept in with an entourage of a data entry technician who clicked at the keyboard industriously and a student of the art who tried hard to not look bored. The progression was almost identical to the several I had overheard through the acoustically nonexistent walls. Scant moments were spent, I was told everything looked good but I needed to indulge in the unloved stress test (infinitely preferable to a colonoscopy) that involves a bit of running on a treadmill followed by hours of sitting and eating artery clogging fatty snacks so one may lie motionless on a board for thirty minutes while your body is illuminated by X-rays. And then one returns the next day for another illumination sans the rest of the drill.

After being escorted back out the maze – the escort being more to assure I didn’t wander off into forbidden territory than any real need of direction – I got to resit and resign more paperwork that had been forgotten earlier. At this moment I was struck with remembrance of the clock wrestling scene.

Once dismissed, until such time as I schedule and return for the stress test, I wended my way, unescorted but not unobserved, out the facility to my motorcar, exhausted from doing little but sitting and signing my name, so I drove straightforward home to nap. And muse on how much better life was when the dire wolves ate us. Maybe?

Bridge Seeking

Bit of a side jaunt there. The ScribeFire folks have committed a Canonical, I fear. They have rolled out their ‘New’ Scibefire with spell check still NOT working and so I had to go load a blog editor that does support spell check because my generation is a bit insistent on that capability. The allusion to Canonical is, of course, their necrophilia with Unity that has already gotten them demoted to also ran. It is yet to see if Linux Mint will retain its new found primacy in the face of dumping Gnome 2 for the Tiled Gnome 3.

I am continuing my Unity experiment, this morning trying the one program/client per work space/screen as I have been recommended to do with Unity. It seems a thin lubricant.

AH! But spell check does work now that I recalled to turn it on. Another small victory for old technology.

The big news this morning is that a transfusion of artificial blood has been successfully performed. [Link] The research was performed at Curie U in Paris, which seems rather fitting given the French affection for blood: guillotine; Tours; and pudding. The thought is whether this signals the end of the Red Cross – noted for charging the troopies for dough nuts – or a shift from socially contracted vampire to socially contracted Frankenstein?

The second thought is a childhood memory of the television program based on the Dr. Kildare movies. I recall a scene where the mentor, Dr. Gilllespie, portrayed by Raymond Massey, is saved from the pawing of a donor-cougar by Dr. Kildare, portrayed by Richard Chamberlain. I shall not comment on the acting, but the reason given for Gillespie being called away was a breakthrough in the ‘Artificial Blood Project’. Gillespie was rather nasty after being rescued about the whackedness of the excuse, as if artificial blood was a nonsense.

I think the series is available on DVD now but I don’t have those files with me.

Nothing else comes anywhere close to this in magnitude so selah.

Contemporary Babel

It may not be as low temperature as we have had but the rawness quotient is definitely up this morning. Perhaps a bit more wind speed to suck the calories out of my senior corpus? One of these days I am going to have to study up on meteorology to grok daily temperature ranges.

The human density at gym is still down although, so far as I know, shul has resessioned. Not that I am complaining, mind ye, but the vacuity is observable and I have actually been able to turn down the volume on my MP3 player with the dearth of strident educationalists (yes, redundant I know.) The days podcasts were largely disappointing, except for the SCIENCE podcast clearly targeted for an audience of bogs and distressing to me in the not-quite-accurate-statements-but-spayed-for-the-minds-of-proles rhetoric. The piece on python heart enlargement following meal – gorging – was intriguing, putting me in mind of one of my high shul colleagues, Current Density Force, who wanted to make a herpetologist and had to settle for biologist. Sadly, like too many of my generation steeped in the rocket response of Containment, not suited to the academic lifestyle. This fellow often brought his pet boa to shul, a practice that I suspect would be viewed as terrorism or some such today, but merely difficult in those days when the shuls taught something other than the national test questions.

On which religionist/organizational ground, I note [Link] is selling boxes in China with Ubuntu pre-installed. Not sure this is a big surprise, but what is a big annoyance – Preparation H magnitude – is that they don’t do this in the Yankee republic. I doubt this had anything to do with them dropping to third but it is intriguing that the new second – Lenovo – is much better liked by Linuxians.

Not that I can complain. I have several Dell boxes in Castellum SCP, some running Winders XP (FD SCP’s boxes,) and some running Linux and maybe a dual boot or alternate HD with Winders (SCP’s boxes.) Dell makes what I consider to be quite nice Linux boxes. Maybe not as nice as HP or Lenovo, but not bad although some of their box hardware is a bit too specialized for my taste. Every time I need to muck with the internal plumbing of a Dell box I have to search the web to find a part and then wait days to get the thing and then days to have slack time. The other boxes usually have fairly standard parts I can buy – overpriced – at Wireless Hut or some such.

Along a similar sewer, I also note [Link] a survey of several recent or on-going studies that compound indications that vitamins and pseudo-vitamin supplements are ineffective or deleterious. This is one of those area where I would desire communication with medicalists to be a bit more robust. Every time I see one of those ask-your-medicalist-questions advertisements on the audio-visual electromagnetic receiver, I mentally gag at the flaws in the presentation. First, I hold the hypothesis, with steadily increasing confirmatory observation, that medicalists don’t really want to entertain questions. If anything, I suspect they have patient envy of veterinarians.

Second, the timing is absurd. I admit that I am not the fastest of thinkers, especially on new intellectual/technical ground. So asking me if I have questions and then giving me maybe 15 seconds to offer up one is nothing more that pro forma. The perception is hardened by the barriers to asking questions later when I have had time to formulate them. And third, the answers I get to the questions I do ask are almost universally poor. Even my generalist, who has poked and prodded me for twenty years, and knows my background, tries to give me third grader answers that I have to say ‘give me obtainable references.’ to restore some communication. Adults goo-gooing to babies is not communication.

Vitamins soundly fall into this crevasse. I only take vitamins because some hospital staffer came and lectured me – poorly and rotely -  when I was in hospital for stents after attack. Every time I ask questions about dosage, diversity, brand, frequency, …. I get either complete evasion or skunk smell look with one of those goo-goo answers. Once more, this is not communication.

Sad to say, I am entertaining the hypothesis that communication is becoming a form of advertising. These days, the surest way of knowing something is inaccurate and parasitic is if it is a commercial. The most outrageous, unsubstantiated, self-serving things are claimed with no hope of elaboration or validation via communication. Evidently this erosion of intent has afflicted communication itself with the claim of such being all that is required and validation is impossible.

Health Hibernation

On my return this morning from gym, I observed a skunk about to cross what would have been my path down the street if I were not about to turn into my driveway. Both of us stopped and waited on the other. Finally, entertaining the hypothesis that my headlamps were deterring the beast from continuing, and wishing it no ill will, I turned in and observed a hasty progress past the edges of my visual solid angle of sensitivity.

For some reason this put me in mind of the podcast episode I had been listening to at gym, an episode of the Full Circle podcast dealing with the events at a recent ogg camp in England. The themes I had obtained from the podcast was (a) the desktop is dead so Linux desktop is now irrelevant; and (b) organizations are trying to over-control us and free software must be protected. The latter seemed rather out of character as a message from the land of tyranny and oppression.

I do recall however, one of the epiphanies I had obtained, that

modern medicine is at the heart of consumerism.

The idea is that the hallmark of modern medicine is chemical compounds and physical/chemical testing that is obscured from the scrutiny of the laity. The medicalist apparat has always been a bit of a priesthood but that has intensified over the years as its barriers have firmed up. Back when medicine were compounded of naturally available materials and testing was blatant, it was possible for the discerning to be aware of what was about. But increasingly that discernment has been abridged.

Yes, medicines do come with little sheets of Yankee government mandated gobbledygook but no actual information about mechanics or shut-outs. And less information is available about the tests that are performed. Yes, there is the internet where supposedly information is available, but again Sturgeon’s Rule applies and there is the problem of discriminating the accurate tenth.

So the laity, often even the non-specialist, are reduced to becoming undiscriminating, asentient, unintelligent users of treatments. This is the panorama of modern consumerism where the product quality is irrelevant, only the recognition and adulation of the organization is significant. The problem is that it is also the only game in town so the validity and integrity are also irrelevant.

So it strikes me that the issue of free software is also irrelevant, at least in this instance. Only in the context of all aspects of our lives does it truly matter and then we have to realize that the fight is probably foredoomed. After all, the bogs will do nothing; they like the velvet glove. So we are left with only the geeks and nerds to fight for the freedom of spirit and action of the species.

I will comment on the absence of choice in modern politics later. Selah.

humans, behavior, health, medicine, society