I just talked to Dad on the phone from England and he asked about Tom Stoppard, if I knew him; he was surprised that Tom Stoppard "started life as a Czech," and anyway was very enthusiastic about a new play. "He keeps up with science; that's what's good about him," came the warm apprisal over the line. "The play is called The Big Question, or The Connection, or something like that. I'll tell you what, why don't I send you the review in the post?" I almost objected but instead agreed, thinking of friends who crave real correspondence in letters. The title of this blog flashed before me. "That sounds really good," I said easily, thinking of consciousness puzzles and a Czech-British modern playwright, "I want to see it!"
We also talked about Jimmy's last conversations, his "approaching what he was approaching with a sense of curiosity - really, just that." But I'm on my way to work, and if I didn't have time to step on the phone plane in the first place, I have negative time to write. It is in fact negative: I have since edited this.
lundi 16 février 2015
samedi 14 février 2015
Valentine's Heart
Happy Valentine's Day!
I don't get why people complain about commercialization on holidays, but not the rest of the year.
It would make some practical sense: on a few days a year, you moan about what a con it all is. Get the darkness out of your system. Then the rest of the year you're happy, right?
But... our lives are far more commercialized than holidays. I don't resent people for trying to make money on Valentine's Day, or from peddling Christmas gifts. I resent people for, please excuse this dreary relentless unoriginal observation, shredding wild places like cabbage for cole slaw or stale bread for schnitzels and replacing them with gas stations and Subways and room for more people, as if we were running a shortage.
Holidays are days when I decide not to care about this at all. While y'all get cynimical, I take a break from critiquing the human machine. Valentine's Day - didn't do anything with it really, but I'm glad it's around, and I'm glad to be around for it! Really! Have fun with sweethearts! Hearts and chocolates! Themed drinks at Starbucks! That's just holiday cheer. A salesperson on my back asking me repeatedly if I need "help," now that's intrusive. Heart-themed stuff on Valentine's Day just reminds me what day it is. I like it.
Woke up early, taught 6 hours in a row, helped all 9 students as well as I could. Bought a couple used DVDs, fell in love with a brief blizzard, most awesome snowy whipping gusts I remember ever seeing! For a flash I worried a trash can might pick up and hit me! That was exciting!
I don't get why people complain about commercialization on holidays, but not the rest of the year.
It would make some practical sense: on a few days a year, you moan about what a con it all is. Get the darkness out of your system. Then the rest of the year you're happy, right?
But... our lives are far more commercialized than holidays. I don't resent people for trying to make money on Valentine's Day, or from peddling Christmas gifts. I resent people for, please excuse this dreary relentless unoriginal observation, shredding wild places like cabbage for cole slaw or stale bread for schnitzels and replacing them with gas stations and Subways and room for more people, as if we were running a shortage.
Holidays are days when I decide not to care about this at all. While y'all get cynimical, I take a break from critiquing the human machine. Valentine's Day - didn't do anything with it really, but I'm glad it's around, and I'm glad to be around for it! Really! Have fun with sweethearts! Hearts and chocolates! Themed drinks at Starbucks! That's just holiday cheer. A salesperson on my back asking me repeatedly if I need "help," now that's intrusive. Heart-themed stuff on Valentine's Day just reminds me what day it is. I like it.
Woke up early, taught 6 hours in a row, helped all 9 students as well as I could. Bought a couple used DVDs, fell in love with a brief blizzard, most awesome snowy whipping gusts I remember ever seeing! For a flash I worried a trash can might pick up and hit me! That was exciting!
jeudi 12 février 2015
Mother Teaching
My mother is weird, but in many ways she's just an exaggeration of most people. She can't admit that she's possibly wrong when there's any emotional charge at all. To get her to understand something, you have to somehow get her to quietly mull over the information, preferably in writing, in such a way that she understands it and can then inform you. This is not always possible or convenient, and later she may well revert to her old way of seeing. In regular conversation, the main thing is to be able to suggest ideas without directly contradicting or challenging her own. It turns out to be very difficult, but it's good exercise.
I do not assume most people are like my mother; actually, I try to assume most people are like me. The wisdom of this is debatable, but I mean it as a compliment.
My mother is intensely anti-communist and, obviously, Republican. She will stand witness to KGB interference and dictatorship of the proletariat in every personal annoyance and political scuffle, not sparing innocent human errors and garden-variety capitalist excess in her perpetual testimony. She lives in a world of sociopolitical monochrome. Fortunately the view outside her window does not go quite so far as Ayn Rand's did, not quite seeing altruism itself as a con. (Though she complains about ads for starving children guilt-tripping her, she does donate to veterans.) The monochrome glasses seem to come from growing up in a communist country, Czechoslovakia, where there was a vertiginous movement to ditch communism just as she was coming of age. The Prague Spring of 1968 took place when she was a senior in high school; a brimming breeze of freedom was snuffed by Russian tanks rolling in. You can see a depiction of Prague as she and her friends would have experienced it, she says exactly as she remembers, their hometown terraformed by tanks in a day, in the movie "The Unbearable Lightness of Being."
One recent motion to get her to see things a little differently was bizarrely successful. I said: "I think the country in the world that is the most like what the original communists, you know, the idealistic ones, minus all the nonsense about no ownership, the country the most like what the original communists imagined is actually Denmark." Then I briefly explained why. She said - she said absolutely nothing. Maybe she said "oh" or "hm." What did I do? It was remarkable not to be arguing for the next hour. In the imagination that suddenly had a moment to roam, I thought she even seemed to like the idea. In truth, she experiences some cognitive dissonance over the fact Republicans are against universal healthcare: she does not accept that fact as true.
She also had very little to say when I sent her an Oxford study abstract and a popular science write-up about some research that found countries with big governments, on average, happier and healthier.
Now - I don't actually know. This is how I try not to be like my mother. I don't know. But I'm looking at scientific evidence (and methods, though the latter not as much as I should). Obviously "communism" as it officially stands in various countries is not the best way to go. And I don't idealize the original communists, either. It seems to me Mr. Marx must have gotten some subtle (and major - he later admitted to one, the need for violent overthrow; I wish that were more widely quoted) things wrong with his analysis.
Whenever my mother launches into an angry tirade about "dictatorship of the proletariat" and "those who can and those who can't" and "putting incompetents in power because 'it is not fair that they are incompetent'" and all the other claims I have been analyzing most of my life, I try to remind her that she was forced to take years of Marxist theory in school and perhaps the terminology and analysis itself is not right. After all, why would she speak to me using the language of a philosopher and creed she hates?
This has not had much of a lasting effect, but she always sees my point.
As for my political views, I try to make them as unpolitical as possible. I do not care about "optics" unless they mean "clarity" or "beauty." Public perception irritates the goddamn blazing tarnations out of me. But you know what makes the masses smarter? Education! A spirit of inquiry! Less materialism! That stuff!
I do not assume most people are like my mother; actually, I try to assume most people are like me. The wisdom of this is debatable, but I mean it as a compliment.
My mother is intensely anti-communist and, obviously, Republican. She will stand witness to KGB interference and dictatorship of the proletariat in every personal annoyance and political scuffle, not sparing innocent human errors and garden-variety capitalist excess in her perpetual testimony. She lives in a world of sociopolitical monochrome. Fortunately the view outside her window does not go quite so far as Ayn Rand's did, not quite seeing altruism itself as a con. (Though she complains about ads for starving children guilt-tripping her, she does donate to veterans.) The monochrome glasses seem to come from growing up in a communist country, Czechoslovakia, where there was a vertiginous movement to ditch communism just as she was coming of age. The Prague Spring of 1968 took place when she was a senior in high school; a brimming breeze of freedom was snuffed by Russian tanks rolling in. You can see a depiction of Prague as she and her friends would have experienced it, she says exactly as she remembers, their hometown terraformed by tanks in a day, in the movie "The Unbearable Lightness of Being."
One recent motion to get her to see things a little differently was bizarrely successful. I said: "I think the country in the world that is the most like what the original communists, you know, the idealistic ones, minus all the nonsense about no ownership, the country the most like what the original communists imagined is actually Denmark." Then I briefly explained why. She said - she said absolutely nothing. Maybe she said "oh" or "hm." What did I do? It was remarkable not to be arguing for the next hour. In the imagination that suddenly had a moment to roam, I thought she even seemed to like the idea. In truth, she experiences some cognitive dissonance over the fact Republicans are against universal healthcare: she does not accept that fact as true.
She also had very little to say when I sent her an Oxford study abstract and a popular science write-up about some research that found countries with big governments, on average, happier and healthier.
Now - I don't actually know. This is how I try not to be like my mother. I don't know. But I'm looking at scientific evidence (and methods, though the latter not as much as I should). Obviously "communism" as it officially stands in various countries is not the best way to go. And I don't idealize the original communists, either. It seems to me Mr. Marx must have gotten some subtle (and major - he later admitted to one, the need for violent overthrow; I wish that were more widely quoted) things wrong with his analysis.
Whenever my mother launches into an angry tirade about "dictatorship of the proletariat" and "those who can and those who can't" and "putting incompetents in power because 'it is not fair that they are incompetent'" and all the other claims I have been analyzing most of my life, I try to remind her that she was forced to take years of Marxist theory in school and perhaps the terminology and analysis itself is not right. After all, why would she speak to me using the language of a philosopher and creed she hates?
This has not had much of a lasting effect, but she always sees my point.
As for my political views, I try to make them as unpolitical as possible. I do not care about "optics" unless they mean "clarity" or "beauty." Public perception irritates the goddamn blazing tarnations out of me. But you know what makes the masses smarter? Education! A spirit of inquiry! Less materialism! That stuff!
An Unsent Cancer Description
Here's the stalled, unfinished email I never sent to my uncle:
It's possible to explain cancer as a failure of error correction - a spelling mistake, or more accurately, a fateful series of spelling mistakes in the genetic growth program. You could imagine perfectly fictional monks in your cells transcribing ancient tomes of incantations. Most spelling mistakes are caught, others are harmless, but a few, compounding on each other, create a Sorcerer's Apprentice (or "gray goo") spell of runaway growth, namely a tumor. The tumor is sometimes obviously chimeric, with tissues from different body areas growing inside it - teeth, skin, gums, hair, cartilage, etc. That's the kind of tumor that was recently removed from me, anyway.
It might also be illustrative to compare cancer to drug-resistant bacteria. Chemotherapy is similar to antibiotics in the analogy, only it breeds resistant strains of your very own cancer (strains) awfully quickly. The reason seems to be that, as Bebs says, cancer cells mutate faster than normal, and chemotherapy mutates them faster still, while quite brutally getting rid of any cancer variants that aren't "fit" to survive it.
Another idea that can help explain cancer is "contact inhibition," which is the jargon for what cells normally do when they're growing and they bump into each other: they stop growing. Cancer comes from mutations in the growth program that disable contact inhibition. The affected cells begin growing where they shouldn't. If they happen to have mutations that prevent the immune system from noticing and destroying them (either step), I believe the situation is sufficient to call a "neoplasm" or benign tumor. Maybe Beba can comment if any of this is inaccurate. For the benign tumor to become malignant, it's generally necessary for the cells to coax new little blood vessels to grow like tiny roots from the nearest existing blood vessel and carry in more nutrients, and then for some cells to detach and spread to distant locations. But most growth creates new blood vessels anyway. As for how difficult it is for "neoplastic" cells to acquire the ability to detach and spread to new organs through the blood stream or lymph stream, I have no idea. Once they begin migrating, though, which is the definition of malignancy, they still have to get past the immune system, which is more active in blood and lymph, particularly against solitary rogue cells. If you can prevent the surviving (and now definitely immune-resistant) solitary cancer cells from stimulating new blood vessel growth in their new locations, you can often prevent a new tumor (malignant by virtue of the cell type) from becoming dangerous. Unfortunately that's one of many ideas for treating cancer that sound as if cancer should all be cured, but it isn't, even though the principle is not incorrect.
Jimmy
February 11 2015
An uncle I never met passed away this morning. Cancer - he was old. I'm sad because I never met him; now that I can't, I'm particularly aware that I don't know what he looks like. Barring one WWII-era family childhood photo, the borders of which I took it upon myself to trim off messily when I was 5 (and which I have only been shown once since), maybe I never will know an outer form of Jimmy. But I suddenly do know more acutely how much I would have liked to meet him. Unfortunately, the chance never came up; he was schizophrenic and reclusive, and lived somewhere I'd never heard of in England. But when I think about it, I'm considerably more sad that my dad has lost his only younger brother. That seems weirdly cruel, perhaps moreso in some physical way when you're older. I've always heard about Jimmy, the younger fellow picked on most by their abusive father, who lived with my father in London and had lucid and poetic things to say about society and his experiences. I've heard so many impressions of a voice I'll never hear; I've never met him, but he's always been around. Now he
isn't?
A few days ago, I had a chance to write a paragraph or two to help explain to Jimmy what cancer is. My brother had already done an illuminating job, being a biologist with a PhD who works with DNA. I wrote out my own explanation, then stalled as I usually do, uncertain about this or that. That would have been my one clear opportunity to communicate with Jimmy. Now it's gone. That's sad, and the more I think of it, the worse it is... I should reflect on that, on what uncertainty does. But ultimately, for myself, I would have wanted to know what he was like and what it was like to be him, not just send a metaphor or two about what cancer is. Still: I could have done that.
My heart goes out to those who knew him.
I will combine my new attitude of no guilt and the insight about not wasting breath telling people when you really want to do things.
An uncle I never met passed away this morning. Cancer - he was old. I'm sad because I never met him; now that I can't, I'm particularly aware that I don't know what he looks like. Barring one WWII-era family childhood photo, the borders of which I took it upon myself to trim off messily when I was 5 (and which I have only been shown once since), maybe I never will know an outer form of Jimmy. But I suddenly do know more acutely how much I would have liked to meet him. Unfortunately, the chance never came up; he was schizophrenic and reclusive, and lived somewhere I'd never heard of in England. But when I think about it, I'm considerably more sad that my dad has lost his only younger brother. That seems weirdly cruel, perhaps moreso in some physical way when you're older. I've always heard about Jimmy, the younger fellow picked on most by their abusive father, who lived with my father in London and had lucid and poetic things to say about society and his experiences. I've heard so many impressions of a voice I'll never hear; I've never met him, but he's always been around. Now he
isn't?
A few days ago, I had a chance to write a paragraph or two to help explain to Jimmy what cancer is. My brother had already done an illuminating job, being a biologist with a PhD who works with DNA. I wrote out my own explanation, then stalled as I usually do, uncertain about this or that. That would have been my one clear opportunity to communicate with Jimmy. Now it's gone. That's sad, and the more I think of it, the worse it is... I should reflect on that, on what uncertainty does. But ultimately, for myself, I would have wanted to know what he was like and what it was like to be him, not just send a metaphor or two about what cancer is. Still: I could have done that.
My heart goes out to those who knew him.
I will combine my new attitude of no guilt and the insight about not wasting breath telling people when you really want to do things.
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