"Raise Your Hand...Raise Your Hand - If You're Sure"

"Everyone who believes in telekinesis, raise my hand." -- James Randi

Be Still My Heart

It's been another "medical incredible" week, which made me think of the time where I got a first-hand demonstration of a slightly different "white coat effect." And maybe Pavlov's dog. Or rather just being a dog.

"Hmmm...your blood pressure was very high, twenty points higher when she [the nurse] took it, but the EKG is completely normal." I was trying to surpress a wide grin. Had the doctor not figured out that maybe having the most gorgeous nurse I've seen in my life ask me to take off my shirt so she could put on the EKG's contact strips might have a little to do with it? Sheesh, the guy could probably just assume a nurse 10 factor, and safely take off 10 to 20 points off any resting BP she measures.

On the subject of the nervous system, or my nervous nervous system, I've started reading "Freedom Evolves" by Daniel Dennett. I'm interested to see how he interprets free will from a naturalist perspective. Did I really have a choice to put my tongue back in my mouth and stop drooling dumbfoundedly? Could I really choose my motivators, versus just trying to surpress the autonomic reactions that come before conscious thought?

I love me my Parentheses.

If you haven't guessed.

Internet Manifesto of Note (gotta love it with colorful phrases like "psychochemical Dark Ages")

...The ultimate strategic objective should be the neurochemical precision-engineering of happiness for every sentient organism on the planet.

I highlight this manifesto not so much because I as yet think it will happen, but rather that I'm still trying to think up a philosophical or other objections based on more than a general dismissal of utopian-thinking or obvious potential side effects and misuses. (I'm interested what precisely is objectionable about the notions expressed when those objections don't come from notions based themselves on consolations for the imperfect world). In point of fact, with the discovery of some of the key pleasure centers of the brain back in the 1950's, it's far from inconceivable with current technology to have cranial implants to induce directly feelings of well-being. (It would be fun to be on the marketing department of whatever med equipment company that does it, sure to be a lot of laughs in thinking up the name and commercials for the implant. It's on my list of joke/satirical fake company websites worth developing.)

The objection that I see as being the weakest is the naturalist fallacy. That is, the notion that "is" (or how it's always been until now before humans gained in power) equals "ought." Or the allied idiom of thinking that "100% natural" is always a good thing. "Ah, nothing like the smell of 100% natural radon gas in the morning."

The more powerful short-term objections are the medical ethics of developing a hypothetical device to the point of being F.D.A. safe and effective (if the anatomy of the brain would ever make that practical), for what amounts to treating the human condition (and hence amounts to human experimentation). Perhaps such a device will get its start as a sort of last-resort methadone, seeing as it's now become a popularly-known practice to perform bariatric surgery versus the perceived greater risk of morbid obesity. That it already hasn't happened yet is likely in part due to the lobotomy-legacy and the palatability of having "fifty" pharamaceutical options that can be tried in succession, even if the efficacy is questionable in many cases. If a drug doesn't work, but won't kill you ("give it a shot") it still has the advantage over a surgery that might be more likely to work, but also more likely to kill you ("drastic").

Okay, now that I've gone completely beyond my knowledge and I'm just doing simplistic speculation, it's back to researching my armchair philosophy.

My parting thought is that if something like this scheme could happen, there would need to be even more thought put into alternate regulation of handling external threats (how negative feedback could still occur). There is a rare syndrome that causes the sufferer to be insensate to physical pain, and the horrific result is that they literally mangle their bodies beginning from infancy from the lack the corrective feedback (as occurs in other conditions like leprosy). Analogously, emotional pain does have it's raison d'etre....

Xiaojie Manners (Guanxi)

If Beijing's New Party Line is an accurate depiction, after three months of living in the Big, Big City, if I ever go to the Big Apple, they're going to think I've been a New Yorker since before I was a zygote. Hell, that NYC was encoded in my DNA.

Cadence Ventriloquism and My Unsportsmanlike Conduct

Today I found myself reminiscing about my favorite football move from my glory days as defensive lineman number 31 for the Aurora Shamrocks.

We were scrimmaging against the Shamrock Junior A's, year-older monsters. The offensive lineman started talking smack and pissing me off. Being half the size, it wasn't an fair match-up, so I couldn't get even by knocking him on his keister. So, I decided to do launch a psi-op maneuver from my intel on the pattern of their quarterback's "Blue 42, Blue 42."

"Hut 3!" I interrupted their QB's squawking. The linemen lumbered over the line of scrimmage before the hike. "Excellent," I grinned. Offsides! A whistle.

"Yellow 23!" Again the suckers fell for it. This time, the Junior A's were confused and angry at losing another down and more territory, but cluelessly suspected their own. "Who said that!?"

(Cue to inspirational sports movie music, cut to quote from "Art of War.")

What ever shall I do? (Well for starters you can put your left palm down from the top of your upturned forehead and stop sighing)

I'm getting ready for a new round of apps. Luckily most of them don't involve logic or programming. My theory on the programming lifestyle's effect on me is that each completed app equals a permanent cheetos layer, such that a scientist could measure the ring of cheetos and determine how many apps I've worked on.

But times are a changin'. I have decided to become functionally illiterate. I have decided to become tone deaf. I have decided to make fifty faux-pas. To be a stammerer and stutterer. I have decided to use those squat muscles. I have decided to go on a crash diet of rice and more rice.

I have decided to get a noseful of the industrial revolution, and a lungful of the Gobi. I have decided to see just what's in that little red book (probably a lot more than my little black book :). I have decided to see what Chairman Mao is always smiling about.

Assuming the Visa app and BCLU app go fine, I'll be in Beijing in late March.

This one's to King Kong. All Hail.

I just spent sixteen dollars to learn that green-eyed blondes go for big apes who on occasion are sentimental at sunrises and sunsets, but mostly destroy everything in their path while playing chest bongo drums. Oh, yes, and "beauty kills the beast." "Beauty kills the beast." That's the plot synopsis/double entendre, to spoil everything, if a spoiler is possible for a re-re-make. Which makes me wonder, when I'm 120, what movie will have the record for remake count?

The clay-mation department must've worked a lot harder this time, they're definitely getting their act together. I loved it mostly for the 1930's scenery, and in part for the endless fodder for Mystery-Science Theater 2000 voice over comedy. I'm imagining the process at the production company. "I got it! Monkey-Fu! If we remake King Kong we can have him open a can of quasi-bipedal whup-ass on Mothra...no wait...T-Rexes. Raaaaaara." (Creative type takes out Ape and T-Rex action figure, proceeds to re-enact epoch childhood battles.)

Skin-Deep and Confidently Wrong

"What brand of shampoo do you use?"

"What type of conditioner?"

"What sunscreen?"

"What shaving cream?"

I had my first dermatologist appointment this morning, the first step in joining the bleached-white-teeth, blemish-free, full-head-o'-hair bunch.

I think the DermaDoc was frustrated that I didn't know the answer to any of his questions.

The DermaDoc then proceeded to bejezus-scare me, telling me that a prescription I had been on for two years could destroy my liver and cause lupus, and since I have only worn sunscreen once in a while when I go outdoors I might as well be dead. Basically at Colorado altitude, we need defense against deep-space X-rays. I barely exaggerate.

And I agreed to a point, that I should've been more careful, as I had moved and had different doctors I hadn't paid much attention. However, when I mentioned that I had also taken doxycycline as a malaria-prophylaxis, the know-it-all style of the DermaDoc started to annoy me. He said doxycycline wasn't an anti-malarial with an undue tone of confidence, since I was very certain that was an accepted use for it.

He may have just meant it wasn't the first-line prophylaxis, but he expressed it obnoxiously as if I had confabulated it. I didn't get into a debate that early in the morning, but it reminded me that medicine is so vast it's not smart to give just one doctor the final word, while at the same time it is also wise to look into the risks of medications and procedures on your own and not assume harried doctors have the whole picture.

I'm going to give the DermaDoc's RX a shot, although after looking at what it entails, you could could say the RX amounts to becoming a metrosexual. "Buy only from the following list of approved moisturizers...Apply an even coat of sun block...ad naseum."

What a bitter pill! Then again, a month or two ago I met this resident doctor who had worked in rural Ecuador, who talked about the difficulties of medical compliance there. One of the problems was that people thought they needed a shot or drug to cure anything, and stopped taking their medication as soon as they felt better despite her directions.

So, it looks like I have to squelch my carping at minorly altering my routine, and maybe I can take up some other metrosexual hobby like cooking food that doesn't come from a box, while I am waiting for a facial peel or whatever the hell the DermaDoc wrote in his scribbling that I ought to do.

Decided.

Stay tuned for details!

Mori Momento-- Death of a Momento (Sorry, don't know how to inflect that sunavagun to be all smartalecky)

I'm finding symbolic irony in the grey T-Shirt I put on just before I'm going to go to bed. It's a couple of years old, and the silkscreen has faded so that I can only see traces of the English lettering, but the Chinese characters that formerly adorned it have long since been washed away. Too late for a nod of recognition if I had so chanced to enshroud a portion within the tendril characters of my brain.

The need to feel heroic versus pointy-headed economic and policy analysis

Paul Theroux speaks from experience + time. He makes a number of salient points about the law of unforeseen consequences, and the need for "Thinking Beyond Stage One" in the phrase of the economist Thomas Sowell.

The Rock Star's Burden

Check your Cookies

Since it's a pull-hair-out-root day, fighting the machines which have taken over the planet, I thought I'd mention the time I had to troubleshoot a computer gone mad.

My co-worker thought her computer might have gotten a virus. Windows would open and shut mysteriously in response to a single-typed character. Print queues would fill with another keystroke. My first thought was "it's almost as if the control key is pressed when you type anything."

I don't think very linearly/logically without a lot of caffeine, so I spent another thirty minutes duly checking for viruses and wasting time on other hypotheses, before noticing that my first diagnosis was correct, the control key was depressed. The culprit: a cookie crumb had lodged in the control key! A clear case of the
Cookie.Monster8@MC virus.

How high the canopy?