Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Corneal Ulcer
Now, this is definitely something you don't hear everyday: "I have an ulcer on my eye". I just got back from my Dr visit and have to put antibiotic drops in my eye every hour while at night I have an ointment I need to put in my eye before bed. My right pupil is dilated, and will be for 3 days because of some special drops he put in order to prevent spasming. I have to return to him tomorrow at 2:15pm so he can see if it is responding to the antibiotics and what our next course of action should be. He praised my quick response to the condition because it really allowed him to catch it early. He was a little perturbed by the fact that my primary car physician didn't prescribe any pain relieving eye drops. He was also late because of a surgery he was performing and by the time he got to me he realized his nurses hadn't given me any pain drops either which really irritated him. He put them in right away and they felt amazing. He said I must have been in a lot of pain, which I was but I don't like making too big of a deal out of it because I don't want to overreact. When his nurse checked me in she was going to do a preliminary exam but when she had me remove my sunglasses she said she couldn't do it cause looking at my eye was making her eyes water. She said she sees eyes everyday and mine was not good...um thanks? The light was hurting my eye so much that I wore an eye patch, sun glasses, and a hat while my mom drove me to Harbor City. I felt like a movie star running from the paparazzi (kind of) lol. Anyway, I am sure this is not completely coherent but I want to get an update out there and I really shouldn't be using the computer in the first place. I guess the only good thing coming out of this is no work or driving for 3 days...
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
The state of things
So I am sitting here at work as my right eye swells and waters and turns red. I have no idea how it started but it is definitely getting worse. I have a ton to do so I cannot really go home, but I did try calling Kaiser at which time I was informed there were no appointments to see any doctor today and that they would call me to set something up as soon as possible. I don't understand that at all. What exactly am I supposed to do? Should I go into the office and drain my eye juices all over the receptionist until she can find some room to squeeze me in? How do people make their health insurance work for them? I stand by my belief that Kaiser is the McDonald's of health care, it is convenient, you know what you are getting, but it is never really that satisfying.
For those that are interested here is the current state of things:
For those that are interested here is the current state of things:
*EDIT* I have an appointment at 1:50 today with my actual Primary Care Physician!!!
Bettie Page
Has had a heart attack and is in a coma here in LA. She is 85 so it doesn't look very good...
Monday, December 8, 2008
Matt's Parade Picture
Unfortunately my camera died right before the longest-parade-in-the-history-of-the-world ended so I had to use my camera phone to capture the moment. Obviously the quality leaves quite a bit to be desired but if you squint and tilt your head you can just make out that there is a Matt in the picture. Santa was strapped to an office chair that was in turn strapped to the ladder in front of the tiller box. I am not sure how Montrose is able to fill 2 hours (scheduled to be 3) of parade time, but I am fairly certain the city requires every inhabitant to participate in some way which is the only possible explanation I can conjure. My Dad, Martha, and sister all joined me to share in this exciting event which made the time so much more enjoyable! After the parade we walked down to Station 29 where I introduced my family to the other men at the station, it was a lot of fun for me to show it all off!
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Holiday Season Update
So today I finally feel the season begin to sink in. Tonight I am going up to Montrose to watch Matt tiller the fire truck through the parade route with a drunkard Santa strapped in to the ladder in front of him. I promise there will be plenty of pictures of this event coming soon! We also got our Season's Greetings cards which we designed together, so of course they are awesome! I cannot wait to send them out ASAP. Next week is our 2nd annual holiday party which means super decorating and lots of tasty foods to share with our friends. Oh and last night we booked a trip to Las Vegas where we will ring in the new year! Matt has only been to Vegas one time so it will be fun to show him around since I love the Vegas probably a little too much. Of course the family parties are really starting to add up as well: 21st - Van Winkles, 25th - My Mom, Matt's Mom, the Creekmurs, My Dad, 27th - the Safraneks. It's too bad I recently decided to wholeheartedly buckle down on my thesis, I hope it doesn't detract from the festivities too much :)
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Closest Book Fun
Rules:
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST
Here was mine:
"Because of these individual differences, Stins and Michaels concluded that, for both S-R mappings, some subjects used hand-referenced response coding (which would yield a negative S-R compatibility effect with respect to the wheel rotation) and others used wheel-referenced response coding (which would yield a positive effect)"
Who's jealous of the way I am spending my Saturday night???
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST
Here was mine:
"Because of these individual differences, Stins and Michaels concluded that, for both S-R mappings, some subjects used hand-referenced response coding (which would yield a negative S-R compatibility effect with respect to the wheel rotation) and others used wheel-referenced response coding (which would yield a positive effect)"
Who's jealous of the way I am spending my Saturday night???
Thursday, November 20, 2008
In Celebration of World Philosophy Day
Today the BBC had an interesting article about Philosophy and 4 questions to make your brain hurt which can be read in its entirety here
I love having my way of thinking challenged especially since I know most of my conclusions come from years of learned behavior imposed on us by external forces. Below are the four questions from the article. I was going to include my personal thoughts on each question but I think it would be best to leave it untainted and let you make up your own minds. Enjoy:
1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?
Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be OK painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?
Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he'll release you.)
If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.
But then why not kill Bill?
2. ARE YOU THE SAME PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE?
Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you're an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement - this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.
But are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush's brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being.
But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it's actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. So the view is that even if the surgeons didn't implant your brain in Bush's skull, but merely scanned it, wiped it, and then imprinted its states on to Bush's pre-wiped brain, the Bush look-alike recovering in the White House would again be you.
But the view faces a problem: what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush's and Gordon Brown's? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There's nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once.
In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works. You are not the person who started reading this article.
3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?
What reason do you have to believe there's a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths.
Are things always as they seem? The Muller-Lyer illusion indicates not
But this, you might reply, doesn't show that the senses cannot provide good reasons for beliefs about the world. By analogy, even an imperfect barometer can give you good reason to believe it's about to rain.
Before relying on the barometer, after all, you might independently check it by going outside to see whether it tends to rain when the barometer indicates that it will. You establish that the barometer is right 99% of the time. After that, surely, it's readings can be good reasons to believe it will rain.
Perhaps so, but the analogy fails. For you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they're generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you."
4. DID YOU REALLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE?
Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.
After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.
And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one's denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.
Now, of course, Fred didn't really exist, so he didn't really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred's predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly."
I love having my way of thinking challenged especially since I know most of my conclusions come from years of learned behavior imposed on us by external forces. Below are the four questions from the article. I was going to include my personal thoughts on each question but I think it would be best to leave it untainted and let you make up your own minds. Enjoy:
1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?
Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be OK painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?
Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he'll release you.)
If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.
But then why not kill Bill?
2. ARE YOU THE SAME PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE?
Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you're an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement - this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.
But are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush's brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being.
But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it's actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. So the view is that even if the surgeons didn't implant your brain in Bush's skull, but merely scanned it, wiped it, and then imprinted its states on to Bush's pre-wiped brain, the Bush look-alike recovering in the White House would again be you.
But the view faces a problem: what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush's and Gordon Brown's? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There's nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once.
In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works. You are not the person who started reading this article.
3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?
What reason do you have to believe there's a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths.
Are things always as they seem? The Muller-Lyer illusion indicates not
But this, you might reply, doesn't show that the senses cannot provide good reasons for beliefs about the world. By analogy, even an imperfect barometer can give you good reason to believe it's about to rain.
Before relying on the barometer, after all, you might independently check it by going outside to see whether it tends to rain when the barometer indicates that it will. You establish that the barometer is right 99% of the time. After that, surely, it's readings can be good reasons to believe it will rain.
Perhaps so, but the analogy fails. For you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they're generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you."
4. DID YOU REALLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE?
Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.
After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.
And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one's denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.
Now, of course, Fred didn't really exist, so he didn't really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred's predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly."
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Congratulations Michelle and Edgar!
It was a beautiful wedding for a beautiful couple! I was honored to be included in their day and I know their love will be a lifelong gift to each other.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
So True...
I really would like to know why people voted yes on Prop 8. I honestly cannot comprehend it at all. It seems to me this issue shouldn't be decided by a vote. I am so confused...
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