Arctangential

I had a doctor I went to regularly when I lived in the southern part of Seattle, but since I moved up north I haven’t been able to find someone that I like. I’ve only needed to visit the doctor a few times; each time I try a new one I’m disappointed in some way and decide not to go back. It’s possible I’m a little bit too picky (people who know me are snickering at this, no doubt) but I figure there are enough doctors out there that I can afford to be.

Thus it came to pass that when I had my recent appendix situation, I visited a doctor I’d never met before. I liked him a lot; he was very personable and funny, and he explained the purpose and intent behind the different pokes and prods that went into his diagnosis. More importantly, he correctly identified my appendicitis quickly and was very clear that I had to go to the ER right away. While I think it would be a stretch to say that he saved my life with his astute diagnosis, he certainly helped me get the situation under control quickly and with a minimum of hassle and discomfort.

The only reservation I had about him came from his business card, which I grabbed from his office on the way out to the ER, in case the doctors there needed to know his name. After getting home from the hospital, I came across it in my jacket pocket, and noticed that under his name was the word “Homeopath”. I was shocked; he had seemed like a real doctor! He worked in an office building, had two receptionists and took my temperature with a digital thermometer. I didn’t really know what was going on, so I decided not to veto him on such a small thing, but rather discuss it with him the next time I was in to see him.

Which brings us up to the present. My knee’s been hurting lately, so I went to see him yesterday afternoon to have him look at it. While waiting in the front office, I took a look at his business cards, mainly to remind myself if they said “homeopath” or “homeopathy”, and was amazed to see that they said “family practice”. I wasn’t sure what to think, so when the time came I tried to approach the situation with as little bias as possible; I told him about the two business cards and simply expressed my confusion. He explained that he has two business cards, and that he must have accidentally given me the homeopathy one on my previous visit. My worst fears realized, I gritted my metaphorical teeth and asked him, with all innocence, what he could tell me about the subject.

The torrent of ridiculous codswallop that emerged from this man’s mouth was spectacular. He talked at me for over a half hour, telling me how exciting and special homeopathy was and how much he loved it. He told me about one patient who had chronic pain she described as “constricting”, for which he prescribed a preparation of python, neglecting to mention which part of the snake was used. Another patient had anxiety which she described as an “oval bug” attacking her with its legs and who complained of recurring dreams of her family dying in a house fire. For this he prescribed a preparation of “Coccinella Septempunctata”, or ladybug. (“Ladybg, ladybug, fly away home…”) Finally he told me about a schizophrenic patient he treated with a preparation of cannabis, because the patient described a fear of being separated from the universe and a sense of slow time.

I wish I was making this up. I wish I was creative enough to even be capable of making this up! His procedure seems to be to simply ask patients vague questions until they give him answers sufficiently specific to allow him to tie it back somehow to some kind of homeopathic preparation. Since he does this work at a naturopathic clinic (not, thankfully, from his “real doctor” office which I was visiting), his patients come predisposed to believe his rationales and the placebo effect makes many of them exhibit signs of a cure. Combined this with a healthy dose of confirmation bias and it makes the doctor feel like it’s something that really works. I eventually had to ask him for the name of a book just to get him to shut up.

So, long story short, I still need to find a regular doctor. Hopefully I’ll get lucky soon.

Oh, and for those who care, the problem with my knee is that I hyperextended either my right gastrocnemius. It probably happened when I was using a dangerously incompetent shoveling technique while digging a hole in my backyard. I’ve been icing it; it’s feeling a lot better.

Recently, Science News reported (in a very poorly-named but otherwise well-written article) that scientists had smashed two gold atoms together in such a way to generate temperatures of over 4 trillion degrees, creating a "quark-gluon plasma".  The article doesn’t really cover in depth what that means, partly because its main audience is scientists and partly, I assume, because the topic is a little bit too complex to cover in the kind of space they have.  Since I labor under no such limitations, I thought I’d give a shot at a rough explanation.
If the phrase itself may sounds like some kind of Wonderland medical treatment, it’s because it comes out of a branch of physics that was pioneered by scientists who suffered from an acute surfeit of whimsy.  "Quarks" and "gluons" are small particles that make up neutrons and protons, the particles that themselves make up the nuclei of atoms.  It isn’t really important what they are, just think of them like tiny specks that live inside of atoms.  The more interesting term here is "plasma", and the meaning of that will make the whole phrase clear.

Plasma is is often called the fourth phase of matter, coming after three more everyday phases: solid, liquid and gas.  So, before we dive right into the deep end and talk about what plasma really is, let’s dip our toes into a short discussion of first three.  I won’t be discussing any particular material here, since any type of matter can be found in any phase, given the right conditions.  We may think of some substances as being gases, like helium or oxygen; some as being liquids, like mercury or water; and many others as being solids, but this is just because those substances tend to arrange themselves in those phases in the environments in which we spend most of our time.  For the rest of this discussion, I’ll just be discussing a sample of material as being made up of some number of "particles" which interact with one another.

The reason that we see distinct phases in matter and not gradual transitions between phases is that a material’s phase depends on the kind of forces that dominate interaction between its constituent particles.  For example, in a solid the particles are held together with electron bonds, a very strong kind of attraction that operates only over a very short distance.  This means both that it’s difficult to pull the individual particles apart, and that they tend to be held in rigid shape with relation to one another, giving solids their particular properties.  Different materials have different strength electron bonds, so it takes different amount of energy to pull particles away from one another.  A material like ice has relatively weak electron bonds and maintains solidity only in relative coldness.  Helium has an even weaker electron bond, maintaining solidity only at extremely high pressures and low temperatures.  Steel, on the other hand, has extremely strong electron bonds, requiring immense temperatures to melt.  But, if you just get it hot enough, eventually the individual particles start to move out of the range of the electron bond, and even a metal will melt into a liquid.

In the liquid phase, the rigid electron bonds have given up the ghost, but there are still a number of attractive forces keeping things roughly together.  These forces operate over a longer range than the electron bond, so individual particles have more freedom to move around, but they still hold relatively strongly, so liquids have a surface tension and tend to stay together in one unit. The nature and strength of these forces determines the viscosity of the liquid, so mercury and other liquid metals tend to run slowly due to the powerful metallic interactions while water is very thin due to the weak hydrogen bonds holding its molecules together.  As with the electron bonds, these forces have limited range and can be further overcome if the constituent particles move with more energy, which can be caused either by increasing temperature or lowering pressure.  Once particles have broken free from the bonds holding them together, there is no other force holding it in place, so it drifts free; the liquid evaporates.

In a gas, there is no overall force binding the particles together, so they simply move around in straight lines, bouncing off of one another, or whatever vessel contains them.  Not all gases are exactly the same: because the molecules do continue to interact with one another (wen they bounce), the exact nature of those interactions will differ depending on the makeup of the gas.  Thus, some gases will absorb heat more readily, others will be more or less resistant to objects moving through them, and so on.  However, there is no single overall force which defines the behavior of a gas; in fact, it’s this lack of overall binding force which defines that behavior best.

Now that we understand that the three everyday phases of matter exist because of different ways in which their constituent particles interact, we can turn our attention back to plasma.  Don’t confuse this with the plasma in your blood; the two things are entirely unrelated.  An early scientist who first described the phase-of-matter-plasma seems to have thought it looked like stuff-in-your-blood-plasma, so now we’re stuck with a confusing pair of names.  The more I learn about science, the more I realize that scientists really shouldn’t be allowed to name things.  In any case, like the other three phases, plasma is what it is because the molecules that make it up are interacting in a particular way.

A plasma is like a gas, in that there is no overall binding force holding its particles together.  However, a plasma is unlike a gas in that its particles don’t only interact when they happen to run into one another; they also interact at a distance via electromagnetic forces.  A plasma is also sometimes called an ionized gas, and is formed of particles which are not electrically neutral, but hold some overall electric charge, either positive or negative.  The consequences of this new manner of interaction are many, fascinating and far beyond the scope of this writing to explain, not to mention my ability to understand.  Plasmas come in many varieties: the sun is made of plasma, as are most flames.  Fluorescent lights contain a plasma when in operation and I even have a small plasma globe on my desk; it’s powered via USB from my computer.  We’re even looking at using very high temperature plasmas to generate electricity in fusion reactors.

But let’s get back to our quark-gluon plasma.  When the scientists slammed those gold atoms together at enormous speeds, it smashed the hell out of them — all of the protons and neutrons in those atomic nuclei smashed apart into the quarks and gluons that make them up.  Once the material was made up of just those two kinds of particles, another kind of force became dominant over the interactions between the constituent parts: the quantum "color force".  Again, we may roll our eyes at the prosaic nomenclature of modern physics.  The color force is a complicated 8-way interaction model that describes how quarks interact with one another in a gluon field, and while the details again aren’t important, it’s a kind of interaction we’ve never seen before because usually the quarks and gluons are tucked away inside of the atomic nucleus.  Thus, we see that the quark-gluon plasma is a fifth state of matter, governed by a new kind of interaction.  It isn’t really a kind of plasma, but the mathematics of the color force are similar in some ways to the mathematics of the electromagnetic force which governs normal plasmas, so there’s some sense is using the same term for it.

We don’t really have a good understand of the properties of this new phase of matter.  The sample created at Brookhaven lasted for only one trillionth of one trillionth of one second, so there wasn’t a lot of time to get really up-close and personal, but the measurements they were able to take while it was around gave them interesting data to use as input into some of the current theories of how this interaction works.  This kind of research might seem incredibly esoteric, which is because it is, but the fact is that this kind of basic research into the fundamental nature of the makeup of the universe can someday serve to give us better understanding and control of the reality we inhabit.

So, for those who care, here is a rough breakdown of my recent appendicular situation: (times are approximate)

Wednesday, January 27th — I wake up in the morning with an odd pain in my side. I think at first that it’s a pulled muscle, but it doesn’t act that way. I decide to wait and see what’s up.

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I was watching News Radio just now, which for those of you who might not remember was a sitcom in the mid-to-late 90s. It’s not a great show, but it has a mostly great cast and some good moments. Also I got it for cheap.

The episodes I watched tonight originally aired in April of 1996. Given that time frame, there were two lines in those two episodes that I found interesting to consider from our current perspective. The first was (roughly), “You can’t take something off of the internet; it’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.”

This is a very well-put and not-obvious truth. We, now, know this fact very well, but at that time I don’t think it was very widely understood. To see so prescient an idea spoken about with such eloquence, and on a mid-ranked sitcom, no less!

The second comment was not as prescient, but it still makes us think about how far we’ve come in our thinking about computers. Someone is given advice: “You don’t want to delete your file until you’re sure you have a hard copy.” When was the last time you deleted a file from your computer because you had it on hard copy? We delete files we don’t need any more, but the ones we do need, we keep them on the computer.

Back then, the computer was a tool for creating pieces of paper with writing on them. These pieces of paper were the artifact that contained the idea or the message. Today, the artifact is the file on the computer, and we only print to paper if we need to. We might use the paper to read on and mark up, or to bring with us if we need the information where a computer isn’t handy, or to hand out. In fact, we use the paper as a tool just like we used to use the computer as a tool.

Of course this isn’t true with all computer files. We still use software to create posters or magazines or books, and in that case we still think of the finished product as the thing and the file as the tool, but you don’t know how long that will last. It wasn’t long ago that physical photographs were the medium of transfer, but with today’s memory sticks and portable digital screens, that’s pretty much over already.

Both of the lines that I so liked were spoken by the character Joe Garrelli, played by Joe Rogan, longtime UFC fight commentator and host of the hit show, Fear Factor. So, you never know where it’s gonna come from.

P.S.: While trying to remind myself what the internet was like in 1996, I came across this page, which is wonderful and worth a read:
https://www.msu.edu/~karjalae/internet96.htm

It’s been a while since I did a book project update. I blame work, mostly. Or myself. Either way, it’s been so long that this post is actually the last one for 2009. On the 14th, I finished reading Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s “The Shadow of the Wind”, which was my 120th book of the year. I also was able to do some math and make it work out that my page average this year was precisely 310 pages per book. Last year I really struggled at the end of the year to hit my more modest goal — this year I’m done 2 weeks early. Next year I’m going to still go for 10 books a month, but I’m going to bump my page average up to 330 per book. We’ll see how it goes. For those who care, here’s my final stats:

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The following is entirely fictional, just something I wrote and decided to not be a complete coward about it.

—

When we lost her, I lost a piece of myself. Her passing left a gap in my soul. I know, I know, that’s hackneyed, it’s a cliche, it’s what everybody says. I’m smart and articulate, I should be able to come up with something better, something more true or at the very least more original. Right?

The problem is, there is no more true statement. Sure, I could describe the sadness, how it sucks you in and engulfs you. I could describe the physical symptoms: the loss of appetite, the headaches and exhaustion. These are just symptoms of depression, though, and could be caused if your favorite car were totaled or if your home team bungled the big game at the last minute. Of course those things are sad on a much lesser level, but the basic components are the same, it’s just a question of how much and how often and for how long. There’s another difference, an entirely other thing that happens to you when you lose a person, and that’s what I and others are talking about when we say we’ve lost a piece, and that’s what I want to try to explain.

There was a time, when we each still had her and one other, that I was happy most of the time. Not everything was perfect, but whenever I found myself in a trough in the road, I’d just think of her and everything would seem better. It wasn’t any specific memory; once it was a bath she’d had the night before, how she wouldn’t go in until it was just the right temperature and that she farted and forgot to be scared long enough to belt out one sharp laugh before breaking into tears. Sometimes it was as simple as watching her sleep or pushing her in a swing, but whatever memory it would happen to be, it helped. It didn’t make the work easier or the pain lesser, but it touched the deepest part of my instincts and gave me strength.

It became second nature to me, like a dozing dolphin coming up for air, automatically and rhythmically. Throughout the day, I’d find myself reflexively going back to her in my thoughts. I’d be reading over double net lease documentation and she’d just pop into my mind, blowing bubbles or propped in the corner of the couch, sound asleep. After that, things just seemed… better. It didn’t just happen when things were bad; sometimes I’d be feeling great and I’d think of her and then I’d feel even better. It wasn’t a band-aid or a pep pill, it was a simply a cherry on top: a breath of wind at my back on a long walk home.

Now, of course, that’s all gone. No, not gone. It might be ok if it was gone; I’d lived without that for decades and was quite successful. The problem is that it’s all still there, but flipped over, poisoned. Instead of just being able to leave it behind me, I think about her more now than I ever did before. It’s a chain reaction: I could be anywhere, say, driving home and like always before she’ll pop into my mind. But now, instead of a cool breeze, it’s a dark wind. It stops my heart, catches my breath, makes my hands shake and my eyes well up. I’m nauseated and chilled and it takes everything I have to pull it back together enough not to wreck. Once I get it going again, get my mind clear, it’s only a matter of time until my focus wanders again and my natural reaction to the lingering ill-feelings from the previous incident is to call her back again. The only solution is constant internal vigilance.

So that’s my missing piece. It isn’t a figurative thing, no kind of Platonic ideal or metaphor but an actual, tangible void, as real as a missing limb and just as debilitating. There’s no better way to describe it. You don’t search for simile when describing a missing hand, and I can’t do it now either.

I had to leave the firm, of course. The practice of law isn’t as stressful and life-destroying as people make it out to be, but it is hard work and it demands faculties of which I find myself in short supply these days. We divorced soon afterward as well. Neither of us blamed the other but it turns out that the one person least able to help someone with a missing piece is the only other person in the world who is missing that same piece. We still love each other but we just can’t be together any more. It’s the insult to injury, this massive loss precipitating the death of an otherwise healthy relationship.

So here I am, a thousand miles from the only other place I’ve ever lived, a bachelor legal secretary living in a studio apartment overrun with roaches from the deli downstairs. People ask me, sometimes, in moments when they feel very close to me, how I keep going. That’s easy: nobody knew her but the two of us. We are the only people in the entire world who spent more than a total of 10 days with her. Her memory lives on only with myself and with her mother. I carry a precious cargo, so I don’t have an option. I don’t have to thrive, I don’t have to be happy, I don’t have to do anything except carry that gift with me for as long as I can.

It’s been like 2 months since I wrote anything in here. I have actually been doing some writing, but I’ve been throwing out more than I’ve been keeping. Also the new house and all that stuff is still taking up a fair amount of my time. Do you like excuses?

Despite it all, I’ve still been keeping up on my reading. I’m one book short of my goal for the end of the month, but I’m above my page goal, so I’m happy about that. I’ll write more later, promise.

The stats:

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4 of the first 11 books I’ve read this year were written by Isaac Asimov. This isn’t a statistical fluke; I’m doing my best to read all of his books over the next few years. Let me tell you why.

I’d never really been a fan of Asimov. As a teenager, I was really into classic SF, reading as much Heinlein, Clark, Ellison, Bradbury and their ilk as I could get my hands on. I read Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage books at some point, disliked them greatly, and wrote him off from then on. Three years or so ago I decided that I should give him another shot, so I picked up all of his Foundation novels. I enjoyed them somewhat, but not enough to really get back into his work, so I decided that Asimov just wasn’t for me and that I probably wouldn’t be reading anything else of his.

I had, however, while shopping for the Foundation novels, found an anatomy book of his called “The Human Body”. I was really surprised to see that a science-fiction author had written a non-fiction book, so I picked it up, but was in no hurry to get to it and it sat on my shelf for some years. Last August, I finally read it and I was blown away at how good it was. It was incredibly clear, very detailed and very easy to understand. Since it was written in the 70s, the actual science was somewhat out of date, but that really doesn’t matter very much when you’re dealing with popular science like this.

It turns out that Asimov was never a science fiction author who wrote some non-fiction. He was really a popular science author who wrote some science fiction. He was not just any popular science author; he was an unbelievably prolific popular science author, with something like 350 books to his credit (the exact number depends on how you count them.) After learning all of this, I’ve decided to try to read his complete works. After having read about a dozen of his books now, I’m totally committed to completing the project; the man is a master explainer and I even enjoy having him explain things to me that I already know.

To that end, I picked up his book Opus 100, his 100th book which contains excerpts from and discussion of the 99 books he’d written previously, and I’m using the book list on its rear cover as a shopping list. I’m finding that this approach has kind of front-loaded the difficulty in terms of finding and affording the actual books, as I’m starting with all of his oldest and rarest work, but I will have to get all this stuff eventually. I should be done with the first 100 books in a year or two and then I’ll have to pick up Opus 200 and start the process over again. Should be a fun couple of years for reading.

And, of course, the reason that I didn’t like his science fiction writing was that it simply isn’t very good. In fact, most of his fiction work is really just the same as his popular science work but with thin plots wrapped around it. This is not the kind of approach that generally produces great literature. Luckily for me, he didn’t really write much fiction.

Ok, first post on my new blog. Super exciting. Or whatever. I’ve imported all of my old posts from livejournal, so any post older than this one is from there. Any comments on those posts from “do_not_lick” are me.

So, on to the book stats. Yup, I’m going to do the N Book Challenge again; I liked keeping track of what I read and seeing how much it actually amounted to. I also really enjoy looking back on my old lists and remembering when I read what. Kind of a book nerd nostalgia. This year I’m going to again aim for 120 books, or 10 books per month. I’m going to try for an average page count of 310 per book instead of 300. I think if I gradually increase my targets, I’ll eventually be reading twice as much as when I started this.

I’ll do another post later talking about the books themselves. I just want to get this numbers part out of the way first.

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Well, there goes 2008. I did manage to meet my reading goal for the year; 120 books with an average page count of 300 per book. Actually 300.04, but who’s counting? I almost didn’t make it; I do most of my reading on the bus to and from work, and with the terrible weather and the holidays, I haven’t been on a bus in weeks. It was close going up to today, but this morning I inexplicably woke up at 4:30 and sat down to read. I finished Straight over lunch this afternoon, bringing me right to the finish line. Here’s my final stats for 2008:

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