Tomorrow I'm getting my pacemaker/defibrillator changed. Three different potential surgical/tech outcomes that can't be known until the surgeon and electrophysiologist get inside me and can run some tests. Next week its right heart cath time. I love fall. I wonder when I'm going to be able to carve the pumpkins we got the other day.
Narrowing down the job offer that the Aussie company is sculpting for me. Emails going back and forth pitching ideas, work schedule - like, how do I help teams in Australia, New Zealand, San Diego, and London, and not work 24 hours a day?!? - and how to measure my deliverables and set good metrics for achievement. Also, how much of a chunk of the biz do I get when they/we sell in 4-5 years? Current job: People have pretty much forgotten I exist. Which is OK by me. Saw a New Hire notification of someone being hired in another department/team... with my same job title, and role. (Functionally speaking. Technically my role is broader-focused, but in reality all the work I do falls directly within this new guy's domain.) Dealing with in-law stuff is hard. My wife is the youngest of three daughters, and I overhear conversations where she is still treated as the baby - like a child - when she's in her 50's now. Familial roles are hard to shake, man! But, fortunately her skillset is becoming very valuable to her elderly parents, as their lives wind down, and they are beginning to understand the powerhouse capable amazing woman their youngest daughter has become. That part is kinda cool to witness... and then they are back to talking-down to her like she's a child again. Meanwhile, my dad continues to just fade away, with moments of bright sharp lucidity interspersed with long periods of not really engaging or participating in life/conversations/anything, really. It's hard on my Mom, who is much more vibrant, capable, and cognitively engaged... yet needs to throttle those things to be my Dad's caregiver for most of the time. And my knee is responding well to acupuncture. Again. I hate acupuncture... it works EXTREMELY well, but does not, in any way, shape, or form, conform to my worldview of How Shit Works. "Energy flows" and "pressure points" and fucking meridians and other hocus-pocus bullshit is NOT how this world or life works. It's all just simple chemical and electrical processes that can be broken down and examined. Not "energy flows" and other hokum. But holy fuck, does it work! My knee has been under Western Medical Care for a month, with little to no improvement. A single session of acupuncture has reversed the badness probably 80%, and I already know that the two-sessions-a-week will put me in great shape for hiking later this month in Sedona. But I still don't understand it, or how it works, or why. But I know it does work, and I just need to stop denying it, and do acupuncture regularly.
I don't want to be too 'out there' but, as far as I understand, IANAD, we still discover pretty basic things in anatomy and physiology. This paper from 2019 (yar-har!) describes a previously unknown network of capillaries transporting stuff from the bone marrow outside the bone. Maybe acupuncturists lucked out/gathered tremendous amount of data, and use something yet undefined clinically. It's not as outlandish as it sounds, IMO. 120 years ago we still tried detecing aether, 250 we still had remnants of phlogiston theory, and in-between our understanding of electricity evolved from being -- to quote one of my professors -- 'recklessly experimental' to Maxwell's equations. EDIT: And, who knows, maybe in a hundred years someone will shake their head saying the same about us fumbling about dark matter. I know the argument I bring up here isn't new, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if X years from now someone discovered that, say, trace amounts of whatever they use in those needles activate some biochemical process. For what it's worth, following demure here, I believe in Chinese remedies because it made my childhood motion sickness fade away over a couple of weeks. That, or in a placebo-like fashion, my body suppressed it to as a peace offering: no more puking in cars, but in return you'll stop drinking those awful teas. :PAnd my knee is responding well to acupuncture. Again. I hate acupuncture... it works EXTREMELY well, but does not, in any way, shape, or form, conform to my worldview of How Shit Works. "Energy flows" and "pressure points" and fucking meridians and other hocus-pocus bullshit is NOT how this world or life works. It's all just simple chemical and electrical processes that can be broken down and examined. Not "energy flows" and other hokum.
Oh I have no doubt that acupuncture will eventually fall to science, and we will discover the mechanism by which it works ... I mean, that's what science does; asses effects and test them until we understand how they work. And this is also me laughing at myself and my purely mechanistic view of the world. Today, acupuncture is magic to me, simply because we do not fully understand the underlying mechanisms that make it work. But someday (hopefully in my lifetime!) we WILL understand it. Then it won't be magic... the mechanism will be understood... and my dogged belief in a purely mechanistic view of the Universe will remain unsullied! :-)
Something lost in discussions of the placebo effect is that placebos have effects. Different cultures respond differently to different effects. Germans, for example, have a much higher response to shots than pills. Americans like pills. Statistical averages, obviously, but the fact of the matter is, a sugar pill has about a 30% chance of making you feel as good as an aspirin, even if I tell you it's a sugar pill. Homeopathics work on me, and I will freely and knowledgeably mock homeopathics. The fact of the matter is, I have an opinion, so I'm psychologically invested, and we don't understand a lot about the psychosomatic effects of medicine.
I'm all on-board with placebos. Totally fine with them. An effect is still an effect, right? In fact, I've had a long series of unrelated medical issues that have been plaguing me for about a year or so. I have a strong belief that they may be psychosomatic. Because literally the day after I am relieved of one ailment, another will magically appear in its place, and be just as bad, but completely unrelated. I'm fairly sure I have some sort of psychological issue I need to address. If for no other reason, than to reduce the number of copays I have to make! :-)
As part of some work I'm into I've been reviewing a bit of literature on anti-depressants recently. Holy fuck is that a mine field. Literally every study the patients feel better in a matter of days no matter what the treatment. Looking for a signal in the noise is a really heavy lift. So the two things they can look for are magnitude of change in symptoms and persistence of change in symptoms. Seems like the placebo effect is generally as strong as the effect of the best drugs, but the best drugs tend to make people better for longer. It's pretty wacky altogether.
Complicating the issue is the exquisitely individualized response of patients to psychotropic drugs. You can't do a study with an n of 1 so you end up averaging everybody, and then saying "look it beats placebo" and then leaving it to the psychiatrist to puzzle it out one pill at a time, ten minutes at a time. Our system is deeply imperfect, and I am utterly bereft of the expertise to suggest anything better.
Chinese herbal medicine did for my allergies what several years of weekly allergy shots did not. At least in that case it's basically a case of "hey here's a bunch of compounds that we've found to be helpful for certain things, but it's a tea instead of a powder compressed into a pill"
Ya know what REALLY does my head in? I have had severe hay fever for my entire life. Like, since I was a teenager, I had to take two Claritin a day from about March to October, or else turn into a sneezy, snotty, disgusting fountain of human fluids and misery. Acupuncture flat out CURED MY HAY FEVER. For about two months I went in for regular acupuncture on my knee, about 10 years ago. The practitioner asked me if anything else was bothering me, and I mentioned my hay fever, and she said, "Ok, I can take care of that, too." So November and December I got two treatments a week for my knee - and hay fever, apparently - and the next spring? All Summer? Into fall? Not a SINGLE DAY of hay fever symptoms. NOTHING. To this day, no hay fever. It is INSANE to think that sticking needles in my face/head can alter my body's histamine production/reaction circuits. That's just not rational. BUT IT WORKED. (And I slacked off on the hay fever needles for a while, and ya know what? The symptoms resurfaced... until I told my new acupuncturist of my hay fever symptoms, and she started using those needle points again. Now the hay fever is gone again.)
If it makes you feel better about acupuncture think of it as "it works and we continue to develop hypotheses and experiments to identify why."
I also like to lump it into the category of "trees use the mycelial networks around their roots to talk to each other, help each other out, and learn about impending dangers." Another totally whacky idea that is absolutely true and makes my brain itch.
Have a week off from work. I almost always enjoy a quick break in between Summer and Christmas, as it's always the busiest time of year in terms of work for me. We had some travel plans, but ended up simply taking time off to do whatever instead. I've been praciticing the piano and reading a bit more, and spent a few hours cooking an extravagant dinner the other day. Today we visited a framer for a piece of art I'd bought two years ago - a Stanley Donwood piece in his Holloway series. We also spent a good while figuring out how best to frame some beautiful maps that we really want to give a beautiful spot in our home. Yesterday I spent the day making a start to a new side project. Basically, I want to make a website that's as nice & approachable as How Many Plants, but for (Dutch) shared mobility solutions, to solve the problem of discoverability and lower the barrier to access on my own. I don't know if anyone else wants that to exist, but I do.
Temp TA thing turned into "we need you to take one extra group" which isn't as exhausting as it may sound, but takes more time than just the expected "times two." I'm also kinda annoyed with one student in particular, persistently asking questions like "when will the real physics start," but that's practically a given. Last time a student asked why we're doing 'those trivial Newtonian/Kepplerian approximations', I asked him to show a tidal-lock condition of a black hole rotating around an arbitrarily bigger black hole. The student tapped out when I started writing the formulae, noting he'll need to use strong-field regime. For the record, I never bothered to actually calculate it myself -- it's clearly a busy-work problem that's no doubt an example/exercise in Misner anyway. Having said that, the scenario might come in handy soon-ish. Helped my brother and his folks move in, it'll be a nice change to have people around. I've been spending so little time around anyone that it's odd even by my usual standards. Also, it'll be good to have someone help me with all the yardwork and chores around the house.