Tag Archives: medicine

Viral Video Vini Vici Vino Vincent Vickie, via Wiki

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The colonists looked everywhere but in each other’s eyes.

Despite their knowledge, their scientific curiosity and their access to the ISSA Net database, none of them was quite willing to talk about the elephant in the room:

When the only source of protein, the flesh of a recently-deceased colonist, was known to contain stage-4 cancer, was it edible?

On so many levels — emotional, ethical, practical, moral.

Back on Earth, body parts recycled for food had entered the fictional mainstream eons ago, the food made flesh (or was that the other way around?) long before Martian colonisation became a buzzword, let alone a reality.

On Mars, though, there was not the sophisticated equipment to separate healthy flesh from diseased flesh.

Malnutrition and scurvy had swept through some of the outer settlements.

Colony No. 1 was not supposed to suffer the fate of poor planning and execution.

Burying the dead was no longer an option, had been argued and regulated out of existence several generations back.

The colonists put the decision off a day.

Sure, they were rational beings but mourning the dead was still an active part of their subculture.  Give themselves a day to grieve before making this important decision, they told each other without saying a word by leaving the lab where a dear friend, colleague and family member lay motionless, eternally unresponsive.

Working on posture

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After watching the self-filmed video of myself Lindy hopping with my shadow at the dance studio this afternoon, I SEE what I look like – a slouch!

I know why Joe, Jenn and Abi have been telling me, “Stand up straight!”

Time for fixing my bent-over back.

I’m just glad I’ve 26 pounds since the first of the year.  I want to get down to 215 pounds by the 21st of September.  I’m at 218 now, well within range.  Maybe I should make 200 a stretch goal and 205/210 intermediate targets?

Can this blog have any influence on reality?  What if I said that I’m envious of men who have humbly joined in matrimony with their Church of God wives who dress modestly?  Would I see more of them shopping at Walmart the next couple of days or, as I’ve commented before, writing about it draws my attention to subcultures that aren’t part of my daily life?

I’ve been told I’m a role model for others whether I want to be or not because I let my light shine, in good [mental/physical] weather or bad, in my words, images, videos and links to your wonderful lives/stories.  The role I play in your lives is whatever you want it to be — I thank you for your consideration of any influence I may give you because the seven-plus billion people on this planet influence me in so many different directions I have no way to count.

The little boy and the postsecondary school party guy inside me can’t believe they co-exist in this middle-aged guy who’s miraculously still alive and discovering what life is all about in this vast universe.

For those reasons, I’m practicing how to stand up straight and overcome the pain in between my shoulder blades that runs up through my shoulders and neck.

For you and you alone (the cats don’t care), I’m willing to overcome slouching.

What is a hug worth?

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I almost started this blog entry with an apology to readers for delving too much into thoughts and not enough into actions lately but only because I’m looking at a set of stamps entitled “MUSCLE CARS: AMERICA ON THE MOVE,” which invites me to jump behind the steering wheel and burn rubber.

A song jumped into my thoughts this afternoon: “I Heard It On The Grapevine.”  What a doozy!

I have a business plan to complete tomorrow and a video to record later this week as my Kickstarter campaign nears its launch date.  Not sure which parts to include as part of a robot construction package.  Also, should I have a combined campaign or launch a separate project on PledgeMusic?

My mechatronic children are going to miss their new playmates, I can tell you — a desktop lamp has its shade pulled down in sadness, for instance.

But that’s okay.  Change is good.

With only 13401 days to go, I’ve got some significant fundraising to promote.

I can no longer sit on the fence and watch the world rush past me at this crossroads of life.

I admit that sitting here is scarier than taking action, action which takes up my energy and reduces me idle thoughts.

That’s okay, too.  Variety is good.

I can slip in and out of the colloquial without noticing.

What I’ll discover is the difference between a person who hugs politely, a person who hugs for comfort and a person who doesn’t hug at all.

Just like the fact that land wars are declared in order to test new technology and deplete the stock of old technology.

For whom are the lyrics of a song written?  What undertones and undercurrents are designed into the melody?

I know if I want the brass ring, it’s not going to jump into my hand, no matter how far outstretched it may be, then I better make the grab while I can.

The person who can jump in and tell the story with me the quickest — that’s what I’m talking about.

A true model citizen.

What are you looking for in the long run — a single person to be your one and only or a plethora, a cornucopia of tastes?

I hope to make everyone I meet a better person than before, whatever better may mean in the moment.

How many of us can keep putting ourselves out there and give and give and give without end?  How do we recycle energy to keep recharged?

What defines us?  Our vocation?  Our social network?  Our possessions?  Our family?

When you’re talking alone with someone, is your conversation any different than when someone else is in the room?

The years of chronic pain in the tensed muscles of my shoulders hunched over in anticipation of being beaten by my father are slowly dissipating.  I no longer have to fear his passive-aggressive love, never sure if a hug was coming or a smack in the face, physical and/or verbal.

Hugging someone without fear is a tremendous feeling.  So is dancing with someone without fear while letting my emotional state and set of thoughts rest in my fingertips, palms, forearm, biceps, shoulders, neck and back.

The passive-aggressive relationship with my father is partially tied into the relationship between my wife and me and it is damn hard work to overcome old habits tied to responding to passive-aggressive people as a chameleon personality.

Maybe I should summarise this blog in a single phrase: dancing is mental AND physical therapy.

Abi, as our dance instructor, is like my father — I’m never sure from moment to moment if she’s going to praise or criticize me.  Last night, when I saw a deep-seated fear briefly flash in Jenn’s eyes, I realised that the old fears of my father were showing on my face and in my reactions to Abi, and wanted to run as fast and as far away from the dance studio as my legs and lungs could take me but I was attached to Jenn, who herself seemed to have withdrawn a little.

It was a revealing moment for me, if not for her, showing me why dancing with her was so much different when only my wife was watching us than when Abi and my wife were watching.

Enough of thought set reconfiguration, although it is fun to write about what goes through my thoughts in these personally enlightening moments to complete the circle of the mental/physical therapy.

Time for action, assisting my wife, Abi and Jenn get whatever it is out of me, this humble set of states of energy, that makes them better than they were before, maybe even happier — some of our goals are aligned but not every single one of them, as it should be.  Hopefully, I’ll be better and happier, too.  I sure plan to be!

God’s School of Medicine — “Change for a change”

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I walk this planet as if I’m a visitor from outer space, surrounded by the nicest people who treat me as if I’m one of them so either I am or I am not.  We certainly seem to be from the same universe and share almost all of the same symbol sets (i.e., memories of similar social/mass media training).

I as this set of states of energy exchange energy states with other people in the form of body movements such as voiced symbol sets, facial expressions, torso/limb placement and electrochemical/heat interaction via handshakes, hugs and kisses.

Also via this blog.

When a feeling of familiarity seems to pull out of my core being, I cannot distinguish the difference between whether I am meeting someone for the first time, neither one of us having heard of or encountered the other, or whether we have heard through hearsay, second opinion, reputation or written/spoken fact about the other.

This afternoon, my wife and I attended a local “home improvement” fall home & garden show in the south exhibit hall at the Von Braun [Civic] Center.

We met a lot of the exhibitors and engaged in both humorous and informative conversations, starting with a guy who joked I must be the father of one of his fellow exhibitors and ending with the guys who plan to look at our roof for much-needed repair work.

In between were numerous insights and observations.

Toward the end of our tour of the show, we stopped at the Alabama Cooperative Extension System booth which advertised and sold home radon testing kits.

The person we met and talked with most was a woman named Patricia “Pastor Doc Pat” W. Smith.

Pat looked at my wife and me as if she knew who we were.  She felt something special about us that went beyond the need for a radon test kit.

If I didn’t know better, I would say that she had read my blog and knew something about me or had heard from someone who had read my blog; that or the fact I live my life the same way I write my blog so that I am truly the multifaceted crystal ball that takes light in, reflects/refracts it back in new patterns but all in accordance with who I am through-and-through.

She told us the following story about her life that she wants to share with the world, being a “retired” pastor of the AME Christian denomination and a PhD in cell biology:

  • Born in 1944 and raised in Jackson, Tennessee
  • Her father, a stockboy at a Kroger-type grocery store, sent all five of his kids to college, including Patricia
  • Patricia was sent by bus by her father to attend Knoxville College in 1962
  • Patricia graduated in 1967 and went to work at Oak Ridge National Labs testing the effects of chemicals on rodents, including the famous test that proved the white sweetener in the pink packages is carcinogenic and states so.
  • While she worked in Oak Ridge, she lived in an efficiency apartment in one of the old barracks where the original Oak Ridge nuclear bomb development employees lived.
  • Patricia often processed film slides in a darkroom where her boss, a Japanese man, would sneak in and scare her so she decided she couldn’t stay in that job, leaving in 1969 to get her master’s degree.
  • I can’t remember but she said she either got her master’s degree at Virginia Tech, where she stayed at Fox Ridge Apartment, or she got her PhD there.
  • Anyway, she moved to Florence in 1971 and worked for TVA, studying the effect of the hot nuclear plant effluent water on local wildlife, including a salamander.
  • She later attended seminary school and became an AME pastor, preaching for 17-1/2 years.
  • Her son was born in Blacksburg, Virginia, the first black/African-American baby born in the county hospital in over 25 years; he lives in Atlanta and is CEO of some aviation group associated with an Atlanta airport.
  • Her adopted son, from Cameroon, who still calls her Pastor Doc Mama, graduated from the University of North Alabama, lives in California and works in the computer industry.
  • Her daughter is married to a computer animator, also in California.
  • Patricia is working with her adopted son to launch a website dedicated to roving ministry she calls God’s School of Medicine, started in 1994, the website slated to go public next month.  The ministry is basically a place where people get to tell their life stories, sharing how they overcame adversity to get where they are so those who are in a dark place in their lives can see no matter how bad you’ve got it, you’ve got hope that someone like you has made it.
  • As part of her ministry, Patricia is going to share her own life story, where God told her simply “Change for a change.”  What does that mean?  Well, if you give a twenty-dollar bill for a three-dollar purchase, you roll the seventeen dollars you received as change into the receipt and put it into a container — bucket, jar, box, whatever.  You keep accumulating that change until you’re ready for change.  Get it?  She can tell you more about it on her website.
  • Meanwhile, she misses her church ministry.  A bishop told her that she has put enough effort into God’s School of Medicine that God may be giving her the message it’s time to go back to serving a church; in fact, the bishop has three churches, at least one in Walker County, that need her more than she knows.

Until tonight, I didn’t even know someone like Patricia existed, a seventy-year young woman whose father was a humble produce stocker at a grocery store, a black man in the upper South of the United States of America, put his daughter through college, who majored in cytology and got a job at ORNL in 1967 as an African-American research associate, going on to get her master’s degree and then her PhD.

Amazingly, her story almost parallels that of my father, whose father was an illiterate day labourer and grandfather a tin smith for the railroad, making sure my father stayed focused on completing his college degree and going to greater social heights than them.  My mother’s story is similar, graduated as valedictorian and got her master’s degree as daughter of a factory worker/farmer with a sixth-grade education.  The story of two women and one man, two white and one black/African-American.

Patricia asked for our prayers as she launches her website, twitter feed, and PayPal donation tithe system, meeting with the board of directors as they finalise plans to lease a building to house their God’s School of Ministry in all legal respects to “do as the Romans do” here on Earth, and then, after the website is live and the ministry growing, going back to preach in Walker County.

She told us there’s one message she wants to get out to everyone she knows, including the man who lives down the county road from her outside Florence, Alabama, a prominent Caucasian farmer in the community — he asked for her healing for his blood sickness (leukemia?) and she gave him some verses of the Bible to repeat as medicine, thanking Jesus for taking care of any side effects of the prescribed medication he takes three or four times a day:

No matter who you are or how old you are, DO SOMETHING! Don’t just sit there, feeling hopeless.  She’s living proof that no matter where you come from, you have hope to go somewhere else, if you just choose to do something, anything, about it, just as she has and she continues to do at almost 70 years of age, come next year.  And by doing something, you make changes that influence other people to get out of their hopelessness, changing themselves and so on.

Breaking News!

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In a few minutes, the U.S. President and other world leaders will release a joint statement.

We got an advance copy of the statement but can only paraphrase what they are about to say until they have actually spoken directly to their citizens.

In essence, governments around the world are finally admitting that the creation of the NSA and similar secret/covert government agencies is actually to the benefit of the citizens and is not, as has been widely reported, a negative “spying” program.

Instead, the governments have been secretly recording all the words and actions of its citizens in order to preserve their personalities (via their behaviour (see B.F. Skinner’s research for further explanation of behaviour-based personality traits)) for future generations.

Want to know why you are the way you are?

With the NSA and its peers opening its archives to the public, you can now see and hear everything about your parents, guardians, friends, acquaintances and world events associated with your conception, gestation, birth and formative years.

TRUST YOUR GOVERNMENT!  GOVERNMENT WORKERS CARE ABOUT YOUR WELL-BEING, MAKING SURE YOU HAVE ACCESS TO ANY INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR LIFE THAT YOU MIGHT FAIL TO REMEMBER AT THE WRONG TIME WITHOUT THEIR HELP!

And now you can create the perfect avatar of yourself, using the NSA database to construct a virtual personality profile of yourself at any age, even projected into the future!

Long live the information technology revolution!

But how many women fully support the idea of a patriarchal system and want their men to rule the universe?

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To get hit with the blinding headaches of a major sinus infection in the middle of summer (but during the coldest days in decades), hands shaking and body not able to sleep due to intake of suphedrine, Mucinex D and the usual cholesterol/blood pressure control medication is the least of my worries.

To be able to write stories, I must have a polyamorous and polysexuality thought set.

Being in love with the characterised versions of people I know whom I use as models is driving me mad at this point.

[Pardon me while I honk my nose.]

Rarely do the people match the characters I’ve created.

Rarely still do the people feel the way I do toward them as characters.

But sometimes it takes experimenting with the people and their emotions to give me better understanding of where I want to take the storyline.

Meanwhile, keeping two mapsets — one of reality and one of the science fiction fantasy mapped onto the reality — takes its toll on my sanity.

Throw in an attack on my body’s balanced health and the imbalance throws me off-kilter.

I am a rudderless boat caught in a horrendous storm.

Then, while drifting in and out of daydreams while my wife snores and the cats lickclean themselves while resting on my chest, a story emerges…

[NOTE: Amateurs plagiarise, professionals steal.]

My successful Kickstarter campaign for a 3D printer that’s connected to a computer program that creates a 3D-layered robot complete with 100-DOF motion and 3D built-in electronics which can repair/replicate itself using the 3D printer and eventually creates its own successful Kickstarter competitor for robots that create their own successful businesses, giving me residual revenue for copyright/trademark/patent purposes.

In my dreams, I find ways to build layers to protect me from my klutzy personality and its intersection with other sets of states of energy.

I admit that my polyamorous side is in love with many people right now and the only way to keep myself straight is to write myself a controlled situation in which we are all relatively happy in our cocooned thought sets as we encounter each other in fictional life.

Fortunately or unfortunately, writing these fictional tales here adds to the confusion when the plots seem to align with storylines taking place in what, for lack of a better phrase, I’ll call “real life.”

Sometimes, I hypnotise myself into believing that I can imagine a future which has almost completely aligned with real events and think I have made a prediction.

That is why I keep a calendar countdown which tells me sometime 13,410 days or revolutions of our mother planet from now, we will experience something that is related to our species establishing permanent colonies off-Earth.  It can be the Moon or Mars, preferably the latter, which followed in our species’ timeline of sending one of our electromechanical wonders outside of the solar system; I’d be happy with a human-populated space probe, too.

As they say, if you work hard enough on a goal, it becomes reality.

At the beginning of the year, when I weighed 244 pounds, I told myself that I wanted to weigh 225 pounds by the fall quarter.  Yesterday morning, on the 17th of August, I weighed 225 pounds.  Goal became reality because I believed I could reasonably reach the goal and worked diligently, slowly, with setbacks, frustrations and elations, to get there.

Which reminds me, why aren’t we working more diligently and telling our species about the ways we plan to capture/collect water on the Moon and Mars?

There aren’t enough water molecules in near-Earth orbit for us to capture but there are certainly places on the Moon and Mars for us to dig in the ground and/or “net” water from the air, if not generate water (or its equivalent (hint, hint)) using other processes.

Instead, using my “robotic” money-generating algorithms on the stock market, I am putting myself out of business by skipping Kickstarter altogether and going straight to the 3D-printer self-repair/replicate robot realised dream.

If only there was some way I could automate my polyamorous/polysexual storylines and get me out of the thought-mapping business!

But then, what would I do about my thoughts that pop up when I’m engaged in normal small-talk conversations with people whom I fear would not understand my verbalised thought maps in realtime, as they have in the past?

At 2:30 a.m. in the morning, I don’t have an answer to that question.  Best keep my tangentially-weird thoughts and ideas to myself and my closest friends, whom I fear more than most because their weird thoughts and ideas are even more amazingly complicated than mine!

Don’t Fear the Robot

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Boy, oh boy, was last night’s presentation a doozy?!

Dr. Goldfarb, a thin fellow, prone to blinking a lot, told us about his biomechanical engineering/science work at Vanderbilt University.

[Disclosure: I had the choice of Georgia Tech or Vanderbilt for my four-year U.S. Navy ROTC scholarship in 1980, which means I should be biased toward Vanderbilt, but I’m also a football season ticket holder for the University of Tennessee, an in-state sports rival to Vanderbilt, so it probably balances out.]

I took notes during the presentation, recording some of the technical details of the work performed at the Center for Intelligent Mechatronics by Goldfarb and dozen or so assistants (which he showed in a slide at the end of his presentation — looked like 11 males and 1 female, assuming their faces reflected stereotypical gender roles and none of them are cross-gender dressers like Bradley Manning).

After I returned home and ate my wife’s peach-glazed pork roast with sweet potatoes, I took a short jog around the neighbourhood, processing what Goldfarb’s research meant for me, a person who could, at any time, suffer a debilitating injury should a drunk/texting driver jump the curb and hit me before I have time to react.

What’s it like to lose a fully-functioning limb?

What’s it worth to put in the time to learn to use an artificial limb, one assisted by microprocessor-centred circuitry?

Goldfarb’s approach to prosthetic devices is the least-invasive — no tapping into the brain or surgically implanting electrodes in nerve/muscle tissue.

There’s a whole industry devoted to this type of technology and history has shown us that prosthetics are valuable.

We can take the humorous approach and think of Captain Hook or a pegleg pirate.

Humour is a valuable asset when coming to grips with the change in one’s physical capabilities while adjusting to becoming a more apparent cybernetic organism, cyborg or borg.

Goldfarb’s three main approaches to solving the problems of limb/nervous system functionality include prosthetic hand (Vanderbilt multigrasp hand), prosthetic leg (transfemoral prosthesis) and powered lower limb exoskeleton.

The state-of-the-art is always years behind science fiction fantasies.

I would wish our artificial limbs of today could operate mechanically as well as give complete skin/nerve cell feedback — hot, cold, soft, hard, calloused, sweating, etc.

But even more, I wish our artificial limbs could give us functions that are greater than the capabilities of our human counterparts, not just the boy-toy dreams of Iron Man or Avatar but something entirely outside of our current range of thoughts/emotions.

In the meantime, I encourage university researchers like Goldfarb to give people what they once had, including the young father who would like to walk to a bench seat and watch his son’s baseball team from the stands rather than from the wheelchair section; one who wants to walk down the aisle to marry his bride next August, perfectly happy with Goldfarb’s exoskeleton as it is today, but probably after bugs have been worked out and the design refined a little better for commercial use.

Speaking of which, Goldfarb said that the cost-benefit analysis of his designs show that the improved quality of life, active/reactive prosthetics reducing hospital visits because of falling down with the use of passive prosthetics, for instance, clearly offsets the initial cost of the prosthetic devices over time.

Do insurance companies agree?  Would the ACA condemn a person to a wheelchair his whole life or offer the chance of walking via exoskeleton?

Goldfarb thanked the NIH for funding some of the research at CIM.

There are hundreds of thousands of Americans — military amputees, car smashup victims, and stroke recovery patients — who can benefit from CIM’s research.  Imagine those in the rest of world who could also gain mobility?

I never hope to have to use prosthetics but look forward to the day I might, given what I saw and heard from Dr. Goldfarb last night.

Setting up

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image

While the doc preps for his presentation, we take you to the news in progress:

The NSA denied today that it had been hacking the radio frequencies of baby monitors for years, using subliminal messaging to indoctrinate future cybersecurity experts in their formative years.  In contradictory addition, the NSA apologised for not indoctrinating Edward Snowden at an early enough age to keep him healthy and happy within the Spookaholics Anonymous system.

More as it develops…

Now back to the Kukla, Fran and OLLI show…or is that the Laurel and Hardy act? OLLIE!  Wait, I mean the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s 20th Anniversary Celebration Speakers’ Series presentation on wearable robotics by Michael Goldfarb, PhD.