Being bedridden today reminded me that your health is second in priority only to your children. When you are too sick to function, your life stops.
It also occurred to me that it makes sense that healthcare spending keeps rising. I think modern industrialized society is at the point now where the costs of other needs such as food, clothing, shelter, and entertainment will continue to drop. I am amazed at how little nutritious food costs now in dollars per calorie. Likewise, it is somewhat stunning how many hours of electronic entertainment you can now access for a flat monthly fee in the form of music, videos, and games. Once we fully transition to delivering education electronically, I expect that we will see further price drops in that realm as well. Except for cases of conspicuous consumption, it appears that consumers can easily become satiated to the point of saturation with regard to our non-medical needs.
With regard to healthcare, however, there appears to be no limit to our requirements. As our healthcare increases, we live longer; as we live longer, our healthcare needs increase. As expected, and as it should be, healthcare spending will continue to rise as a percentage of our personal and national income.
I was inspired to create a checklist for my daily maintenance tasks. I created it using round refrigerator magnets on strips of painters tape.
Each task is written on its own strip of tape with the strips ordered by priority or sequence. I used foot long strips of painters tape of the type that is easy to peel off and reposition. The strips are mounted on the side of a refrigerator or metal bookcase so that magnets can be placed over the tape under the TODO or DONE columns.
For the magnets, I used one and a quarter inch diameter round magnets since they are large enough to discourage toddlers from swallowing them. The kind that I bought were beveled to make them easy to pull away from the metal surface. Sometimes I will position a magnet partway between the TODO and DONE columns to indicate that I have made partial progress.
On some daily checklist tasks that seem overwhelming or tedious, I try to work on them a little bit each day. Even at just a tolerable minimum of five minutes a day, you can start to see some progress over time.
I like to use my full name on the things that I write. As far as I can tell, nobody else in the world shares this name so it is my way of saying "I was here".
I want to disclaim, however, one case that I know of in which a person wrote under my name with the intent to deceive others into believing that it was me. This person typically wrote on websites and blogs associated with Unitarian Universalism (UU). He had a grudge against UU and chose me as he knew that I had been a member of that organization.
To a lesser degree, I also want to disclaim things that I wrote where editors then changed the wording to the extent that it changed the meaning. This includes letters to the editor of newspapers and the letter to the readers on the back cover of my book. I have stopped writing letters to the editor for this reason. In the age of the Web, I think self-publishing is the way to go.
To an even lesser degree, I disclaim computer code that I have written where someone else then subsequently modified it without adding their own name to it. Their modifications, both good and bad, are then inappropriately attributed to me. In this situation, I would prefer that they add their own name or "unattributed" even if their changes are minor.
For our HumanLight celebration party a few months ago, one of our planned activities was a used book exchange. This last time I made some improvements to the exchange. Here is how it works:
Announce the used book exchange in the party invitations
Clear a table for the used books that the guests bring
Put a clear glass bowl on the table
Put a pen on the table
Put outdated business cards on the table
For each guest, put a card in the bowl with their name and the number of books that they brought
At the designated time during the party, announce the beginning of the book exchange
Before the drawing begins, invite those guests that are willing to come to the front and talk about the books that they brought
Randomly draw a card from the bowl
Call out the name on the card
Invite the selected person to choose a book from the table
Subtract one from the number on the card
Unless zero, write the new number on the card and then put the card back in the bowl
Repeat drawing cards until there are no more in the bowl
For a group of guests such as a family, create a separate card for each individual and divide up the number of books that they brought together among the cards in the group. Having a separate card for each person helps the guests learn the names as they are called out.
Because each participant has just one card, everyone has an equal chance of being selected in each drawing no matter how many books someone else brought. Once they have chosen a number of books equal to the number that they brought, guests can leave the book exchange to mingle.
While randomly selected guests always have the option to skip their turns, encourage everyone to leave the party with the same number of books that they brought.
The hosts drawing the cards might want to exclude their own names from the drawing and instead choose from the remaining books after the other guests have left.
I bought a copy of the DVD Transcendent Man: The Life and Ideas of Ray Kurzweil. In this documentary video, an old friend states that Kurzweil had ambitions from a young age to create inventions that would help the blind to see, the deaf to hear, and the lame to walk. After I saw what he had achieved, I knew this belonged in my list of Optihumanist Heroes Movies.
I also added to the list the television episode "I Dismember Mama: A Story About Saul Kent". You can watch this video on YouTube in three parts:
When you watch these biographical movies, it is interesting to note that many of the heroes were supported by other heroes. In some cases, the hero had to proceed alone. Their efforts to preserve their individual rights benefited all of us.
I have uploaded my annual update to the Optihumanist Principles. I have inserted one sentence:
Progress promotes pattern perpetuation.
With this statement, I am attempting to summarize a couple of ideas:
Living things are a type of self-sustaining pattern.
Living things adapt over time to prevent extinction.
To stretch this, any self-sustaining pattern that does not evolve might not be considered alive. The self-sustaining fusion of the Sun is not alive. Similarly, a personality recorded in great detail within a computer simulation would be lacking if it could not learn and change; it would simply be a high fidelity ghost.
Any self-sustaining pattern that does evolve might be considered alive. Viruses mutate from one flu season to the next. Corporations adapt to changing market conditions. Laws are amended. Religions revise interpretations of holy texts.
Self-sustaining patterns comprise more complex self-sustaining patterns. Wedding ceremonies are perpetuated by humans which are perpetuated by genes. Animals breathe in what plants breathe out and vice versa. The Sun shines upon the Earth, birthplace of an intelligent species which might someday learn how to extend the life of a dying star.
For a human physiology course that I am taking, I wrote a short paper on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). ECMO is a medical procedure used in cases of heart or lung failure in which the blood of a patient is pumped through an external device in order to add oxygen to the blood.
I was interested in this topic for multiple reasons:
A number of years ago I was sick in bed for a month with pneumonia. Many of the ways we die, from pneumonia to heart attack to stroke, are essentially variants of death from a lack of oxygenated blood to the brain.
I think you could combine this with other procedures such as hemodialysis. How long before we can get oxygenated nutrient-rich artificial blood piped to our homes as a utility like water or electricity?
Some of the same technology is used in cryonics after death to help preserve the structure of the brain.
In my ECMO paper, I describe each of the medical terms including the Latin and Greek word origins. I also describe and compare a number of related medical procedures. You can download the paper in Open Document Format (ODF).
From time to time when I am lying in bed I will get a painful leg cramp. When my children were younger, they once witnessed me suddenly start writhing upon my bed yelling "Charley horse! Charley horse!" This caused them some distress and moved one of them to tears as they could not understand why I would call out the name of a puppet from Lamb Chop's Play Along.
I had noticed that many of these leg cramps were initiated by a morning stretch in which I would extend my toes. I now know that I can instantly relieve a cramp when I feel one initiating by pointing my toes up and extending my heel instead.
I recently decided to buy a BlackBerry mobile phone when a friend sent me a copy of his book Learn BlackBerry Games Development. As a computer programmer, I was pleased to see that BlackBerry provides full support for the cross-platform Java programming language standard.
I became a little worried about my decision when I heard that BlackBerry was being asked by dictatorships to provide decrypted access to communications within their nations so that they could spy on their citizens. Then I realized that this was not an issue with the other mobile phone manufacturers because they did not bother to encrypt.
I wanted to get a BlackBerry with both a touchscreen and a keyboard but my wireless carrier AT&T was pushing iPhone instead. I was just about to switch to another carrier when AT&T came out with the BlackBerry Torch 9800. I was able to get it for just $150.00 because I was due for an upgrade discount on my mobile plan. That seems like a pretty good deal given that Amazon.com is selling this phone for $729.97, a $30 increase from the day before.
In the past I have had smartphones but I did not bother to use their features. I let my kids figure out how to set the wallpaper and ringtones for me. I rarely responded to text messages with text replies as it was just too tedious to use the condensed keypads. I stopped paying the extra fee for Internet access after I found that I did not want to surf the Web or watch videos on the tiny screen.
Now I am reluctantly paying the extra $25.00 a month to AT&T for up to 2 gigabytes per month of mobile data usage. Fortunately I figured out how to configure my application to only download my podcast subscriptions when a Wi-Fi connection is available which does not count against your 2 gigabytes monthly of mobile data usage. I am enjoying the NPR science podcasts.
Convergence has finally arrived for this late adopter. With this mobile phone I decided to dive into it and learn how to use all of the features. It just seems to have crossed that certain threshold for me personally with regard to the screen size, user interface, and the potential for becoming an important tool in my daily life beyond just serving as a phone. I am now using my BlackBerry for the following:
I was going to use it to connect to my work e-mail but the BlackBerry Enterprise data plan from AT&T would have cost me an extra $15.00 a month. At that price, I decided I needed to maintain my work-home personal boundary.
I avoided earbuds in the past but I am getting used to them now. I accidentally figured out that the BlackBerry earbuds have a built-in microphone and that I can initiate voice dialing just by squeezing the cord in the right spot. I know I look like a schizophrenic talking to myself when I use them but the phone call sound quality and privacy is just so much better than holding the phone up to your head.
I definitely see the need for neuroprosthetic interfaces for devices like this. A Bluetooth cochlear implant seems like something they should have now. Retinal input would give you virtual screens of any size. Peripheral nerve output would give you fine control of the cursor. Given the future possibilities, I continue to entertain the idea of getting a degree in Biomedical Engineering. I am currently enrolled in the introductory course Anatomy and Human Physiology and I am enjoying it.
Thus far I am pleased with my purchase and I can recommend it. Check out the BlackBerry Torch website.
I am just waiting for a touchscreen iPhone user to admit their envy of my touchscreen plus slide out full-alphabet keyboard. So far this has not happened yet.
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