A big day with one big thought.

Tags

capsaicin, Capsaicin experiment, Eligard, Ice dam prevention cable, Lupron, Testosterone-suppressing drug

Debbie and I got up early to go visit one of my prostate-treatment doctors. This one deals with my PSA scores and hormone treatments. The news on my PSA score was excellent because there is no detectable PSA, which means that at the moment all of the active prostate cancer cells have been killed by the one hormone treatment given me six months ago and the forty-four radiation treatments which concluded two months ago. Today I was given another six-month shot of Eligard (Lupron). The plan is to get two more of these for a total of two years of that testosterone-suppressing drug. 

 

I dropped off Debbie at home and went on down to the Commons to visit my dudes. Richard and I had a great conversation, as usual, about art and stuff. I showed him a couple of the shadow pictures taken since yesterday.

We have been having a good time talking about the nothing qualities of these photos. There is almost nothing there and yet we both find them strangely intriguing.

Debbie and I had a 1 PM lunch date with Steve B at Toomie’s restaurant. At some point, we got into a conversation about my various heat treatments of poison oak itching, and my current experiments with capsaicin. I have been treating what appears to be an arthritic ankle bone with capsaicin, which is a standard home remedy, but with a difference. My thought is that it takes a couple of days for the capsaicin to absorb all the way into the center of an ankle bone and that it is the burning sensation that creates the effect of helping to subdue the arthritic inflammation. The problem is that the capsaicin feels painfully burning hot on the skin long before it can penetrate to the center of the ankle joint. The capsaicin-loaded skin is very temperature-sensitive and from 100°F to 105°F goes from comfortable to painful. The coping technique I have been using is to take a hot bath, raise my body temperature to 101°F, including my ankle joint, which isn’t painful, and then raising the bathtub water to 104°F, which is painful but endurable. I hold this pain level for five minutes, it’s a challenge, with the idea that the pain is becoming available to the center of the ankle bone joint. If it is the pain that is causing the inflammation to flip its switch off, then the ankle inflammation should be gone the next day. This experiment seems to have worked and I was telling Steve about it.

He was very excited about the idea because he has been studying heat shock proteins and their effects for years, and this experiment was new to him. But he made some observations from his background of experience that seemed to confirm my findings. I have attended several of his lectures on the subject, so his ideas were known to me but this was a new arrangement of those ideas. It was fun. I wanted to explore how we might apply these heat-pain ideas to rejuvenating whole body cells. We are both going to be exploring that idea.

Debbie and I came home and I worked in the garden fairly hard for about two hours and put the ice dam prevention cable on the valley in my back roof. It developed a six-inch deep ice dam one year that had to be chopped away carefully before it forced water uphill and through the shingles.

I forgot to mention, this was the seventh day of my cold, and it is totally gone.

It was a memorable day, but the ideas about cleaning up the body may be the most significant. 

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A word for the decimal point location is needed.

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Coping with numbers, Increase accuracy of numbers, Locating the decimal point with tie

There needs to be an easy unequivocal word for locating the decimal point in my new system of simple counting. It is easier to state the whole system than to try to make it simpler. It is easy, but it requires a word to indicate the location of the decimal point.

“The International System of Units (SI) is intended to be simple, unambiguous, and easy to use. All you need to do is memorize and use accurately each of the items below. Or, use a chart.

The SI system of prefixes, abbreviations and values: yotta Y 10^24, zetta Z 10^21, exa E 10^18, peta P 10^15, tera T 10^12, giga G 10^9, mega M 10^6, kilo k10^3, hecto h 10^2, deca da 10^1, number, deci d 10^-1, centi c 10^-2, milli m 10^-3, micro μ 10^-6, nano n 10^-9, pico p 10^-12, femto f 10^-15, atto a 10^-18, zepto z 10^-21, yocto y 10^-24.”

Below is a simpler method that requires only a little understanding and memorization.

A number of any size, 1 or greater, has its decimal point placed the number of units indicated to the right following the letter t. Any number between 1 and 0 has its decimal point placed the number of units indicated to the left following the letter t.

Numbers greater than 0 have an implied + in front of them, and any numbers less than 0 have a – (minus) placed to the left of the number being considered.

That is all you need to know to eliminate all the weird words in the SI system, their associated decimal adjustment values, and their abbreviation letters.

With a little practice, the user of this new system will have a better feel for the relative size of everything.”

 

There is an infinity of possible words for the decimal point but some of them stand out because they have some useful properties. Because it appears we will be using a qwerty keyboard for a while it seems best to choose a word that begins with a letter next to the numbers. A letter near the center is easier to touch routinely so the letter t is a good choice from that line  – qwertyuiop[] – and it has lots of words that begin with t. Another advantage of t is that it appears to be part of a word in many languages that indicate a tag point such as tip, tag, tie, toe, tee, in English. It is a plosive letter that begins with a clear puff of air making it clear where it begins, and it isn’t a vowel which would have a blurrier beginning. That leaves only  – qwertyuiop – qwrtyp – q is hard to begin a word with, and w is too soft, r a blurry beginning leaving only t and y by my way of pronouncing easy words. The letter t has the advantage of popularity for a tag point.

Thus I went through the most likely words trying to find an appropriate one. I liked “tee,” but it wouldn’t work because many English numbers already use the sound and meaning of tee in their current existence. For example, fifteen, forty-five, seventy, and seventy-five. To say a random number like 45,155,075 would create confusion because it would be pronounced forty-five million, one hundred and fifty-five thousand and seventy-five. For a number string that long it becomes difficult to keep track of the values, (million, hundred, thousand) and when pronounced in my new system, each of those tee sounds would confuse the issue of where the decimal point is located even more.

But that problem is instantly eliminated by choosing the word “tie” for the decimal point. The word tie is not easily confused with the existing pronunciation of the long number strings that include a tee sound. The sound tie or the written symbol t is all that is needed to indicate the magnitude of any number, even a very large or tiny one.

The way that eight digit number would be pronounced is – four five one five five oh seven five tie seven. It is just the numbers of the value with the word tie and a locator number. The word tie shows the users of the system that a magnitude value is going to be expressed.

Now is the time to find a name for this numbering system.

Why You Eat What You Eat – Rachel Herz

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Book review Rachel Herz, Rachel Herz, Why You Eat What You Eat

Why You Eat What You Eat by Rachel Herz

This book is a wonderful source of facts about what people eat, and why. It is well researched, sourced, and written. Food is more than a substance we eat with our mouths, it is also an emotional connection to our family, our culture and our whole world. It is also a spiritual connection to those things and our own soul too. In short – food is life. It’s my life. It’s your life. Without food we don’t exist for very long. Food is important!

One of the important things about food for restaurant owners is that it is about the feelings the customers have while they are in their restaurant. This book has a multitude of thoughts on the feelings associated with the infinity of variations of what food can be and become. Many of these go back to Charles Spence, a gastronomic guru whom I blogged about a year ago in Gastrophysics – The New Science of Eating. That book influenced the way I eat because it made more aware of the fact that I am a dabbler, a little of this, a little of that, with quite a few different items on the plate at one time. I like to have lots of variation in the flavors, the odors, the smoothness, the crunchiness, the weird patterns, and colors of my food. Once I became aware of my natural inclinations I was able to exploit them and help to enrich my particular lust for life.

One curious “scientific” discovery that I have felt but don’t remember ever verbalizing is that people who are involved with something that requires their emotional and moral effort become short-tempered with other people who fail to make those same efforts. That concept is discussed on page 278-81 under the sub-title “Green and Mean.” In that section, we discover that people who get active in a special kind of moral cleansing and moral superiority are ultimately bad for humanity. There forms a strange reaction from these people who pursue a moral high ground of ethical foods and ethical behavior. You must toe their line of rectitude or suffer their judgments, or those righteous people will project feelings of moral transgressions upon you.

There is a moral undertone to this book that is covered beautifully with what feels like underpopulated small scientific studies.

It’s time to search for my person of the year 2018

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person of the year

I began blogging in January 2008 with thoughts about what was memorable that had happened the previous year. That idea has grown into my mentally projecting myself five hundred years into the future and looking back at someone who did something this year that is still remembered at that distant time. Below are the people I selected who might be remembered.

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The complete up-to-present list of – Probaway Person of the Year:

• 2018 – Astronomers for discovering the signatures of the heavy elements like gold in the collision of neutron stars.
• 2017 – Albert Einstein for predicting black holes, their collisions creating gravity waves, and the laser for observing the gravity waves.
• 2016 – Xi Jinping for taking China from a backward economy to the most powerful one on Earth.
• 2015 – Peter Higgs and Alan Guth created theories that led to proofs this year of mass and gravity sources.
• 2014 – Jennifer Doudna created a method for insertion of designed DNA precisely into existing DNA.
• 2013 – Plague Inc. is a computer game that explores the problems of creating a disease that will kill every last human being on Earth.
• 2012 – Zebrafish research-technique advances made it possible to observe drug interactions within living animals.
• 2011 – Craig Venter laid the groundwork for creating entirely new forms of life (greater than species) out of computer-generated DNA sequences.
• 2010 – Nadya Suleman (Octomom) and the society that created this travesty of good sense will be remembered into the distant future by many hungry people.
• 2009 – Jimmy Wales for Wikipedia, which will be still be used after our current computer operating systems are surpassed and forgotten.
• 2008 – Cesar Millan (the dog whisperer) because he shows people how to relate to dogs and people much better than anyone else. His videos and techniques will be remembered and used as long as there are people and dogs.

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I don’t think Trump will be remembered for what he has done so far this year. And, as a personality, he isn’t that memorable compared to many historical figures.
I have been reading John Shelby Spong‘s book Unbelievable – Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today, and I was struck by his claim (p. 285) that God is the source of life. That excites me and my search for a person of the year because I personally know people who are attempting to create “first-life” forms out of raw materials.

If one of those people succeeds in creating life out of basic materials, will they become like gods?

My numbering system goes to t.

Tags

Evolution of numbers, Locating the decimal point, The decimal point

My numbering system needed a word for the placement of the decimal point that was easy to say in all languages, and I had been using the word tic because it is reputed to mean variations on a one-unit of a thing in almost all languages. But I didn’t like it because it also seemed to connote the insect tick, and also it meant an unwelcome twitch in the face. So, I was experimenting with the word tip because it connoted a suggestion. That is, in this case, a suggestion as to where to place the decimal point. That was okay, but then there arose a question as to how to say and write that word tip in the briefest way possible. That seemed to be okay for the word tip, but why should everyone who uses this newly designed system forever more be forced to write a three-letter word for the location of a mere point?

The briefest way to indicate that concept, in its context, would be the lowercase letter t. Well then, if that were the letter, why not use the concept of the golf tee because it is a little circle on which to place a ball before hitting it? The t then represents the location of a specific point upon which you wish to place your attention, and that is exactly the intent of the whole operation.

Thus, in usage, the usual number one would be 1 t 0. The number 10 would be 1 t 1, the number one-hundred would be 1 t 2 and the number one-thousand would be 1 t 3, a million would be 1 t 6, a billion 1 t 9, a trillion 1 t 12, etc..

This is a longer form for these simple numbers but when the whole system is revealed it becomes vastly easier to state nearly every number more briefly than it is now done and to get the decimal point place in one’s mind in the correct place.

The letter t becomes the indicator for the location of the base of the decimal point in any number.

 

Truthiness and its companions.

Tags

Steven Colbert, truthiness, Truthiness variations

“American television comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term truthiness in this meaning as the subject of a segment called ‘The Wørd’ during the pilot episode of his political satire program The Colbert Report on October 17, 2005,” that’s according to Wikipedia as is, “Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions.”

That’s wonderful, as far as it goes, but what about the whole blizzard of similar words that need a similar treatment and raft of definitions.

Trust ~ Trustiness ~ believableness that usually fails when needed most.

Treason ~ Treasonish ~ appearing patriotic but helps enemies to destroy trusting friends.

Imposture ~ Imposturish ~ Perfect role model but only to get imagined status.

Inconceivable ~ Inconceivableick ~ Spouting of bizarre experiences with the glow of a new revelation.

Spurious ~ Spuriousiness ~ All aglow with radiant nonsense.

Pantomime ~ Pantomimick ~ A waving about of arms and body to give a physical feeling of verisimilitude.

Probable ~ Probablish ~ Stating the improbable with the tonalities of probable truth.

Sincere ~ Sincerish ~ All of the feelings and expressions of candid honesty without the expected behaviors.

Prudent ~ Prudented ~ Seemingly proper behaviors that have a smoothly rounded flaw.

Authenticating ~ Authenticatingish ~ A rush of stated facts which seem to verify but when searched for are not to be found.

Demonstrating ~ Demontrashing ~ A physical demonstration by various contending parties that fail to function as promised.

Steven Colbert’s truthiness concept variations as attempts to discover other obscure false realities.

On the Future by Martin Rees – Book review

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Book review, Martin Rees, On the Future

This is a great book, an easy read filled with basic science properly presented for public consumption. However, it is a book aimed at Rees’s peers and the rest of the public gets to watch. It is written for the in-group and to some extent to chide the peripheral of the in-group for not being in the in-group. This slightly scathing remark from someone who isn’t remotely part of that gang can be verified on page 209, where the undertone of the whole book can be seen:

“It’s conventional wisdom that scientists don’t improve with age—that they ‘burn out’. The physicist Wolfgang Pauli had a famous put-down for scientists past thirty: ‘still so young, and already so unknown’ (p. 209). Of the many people mentioned in this book, nearly all were famous. I don’t know their biographies but nearly all of them were famous enough to be known to me, a distant outsider, and most, most probably before they were thirty.

In the concluding chapter, Rees does offer some suggestions to those aspiring to be scientists and still way under that magic age. “It is unwise to head straight for the most important or fundamental problem. You should multiply the importance of the problem by the probability that you’ll solve it, and maximize that product.” (p. 208). “Scientists, in contrast, (to music composers who build on what they know) need continually to absorb new concepts and new techniques if they want to stay at the frontier—and that’s what gets harder as we get older.” (p. 210).

There were cute sayings throughout the book, from famous people, of course; for example: “The unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable” (p. 118), “Extraordinary claims will require extraordinary evidence”, “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence” (p. 162), and my favorite already mentioned, “past thirty: ‘still so young, and already so unknown.'”

Rees concludes this fine book with a frantic optimism: “Now is the time for an optimistic vision of life’s destiny—in this world, and perhaps far beyond it. We need to think globally, we need to think rationally, we need to think long-term—empowered by twenty-first-century technology but guided by values that science alone can’t provide.”

On the Future by Martin Rees is readable by everyone, but ultimately the advice is simply—hang on for dear life, the coming ride will be an adventure.

Prostate radiation treatment is a challenge to simple endurance

Tags

Learning how to pee, Prostate treatment adventures

Today I finished my forty-fourth radiation treatment for prostate cancer. It was the last one and I am glad to be done with it. All of the doctors and nurses and other hospital personnel were very competent and kind. The treatments themselves were totally painless and they were kind of like going on a rickety county fair Merry-go-round. The equipment was very elaborate and modern looking, but it made strange sounds and there were bright green laser lights making bright green lines around the floors and walls of the room. They were used to align the three small gold fiducials inserted into my prostate gland with some small tattoo dots on my sides with the object of sending the radiation exactly to my prostate and killing the cancer cells located there without killing the surrounding tissues and organs.

So, now the radiation has killed those cancer things or not, and I will continue taking hormone treatments for two years. Those are giving me symptoms similar to menopausal women’s hot flashes. I get spontaneous sweats about five times a day. They are a bit annoying but don’t hurt.

The thing that does hurt is peeing. Several times per day I suddenly get an intense urge to pee “right now.” When I get to the pee place it often is slow to start and burns the whole time. Peeing takes about five minutes on average. Being inclined to do experiments with everything I do, I have done lots of experiments on the details of this ability which I thought I had mastered about the age of two.

I mentioned to my doctor that I was intending to write a blog post about this new-found ability and make a YouTube video. He suggested I wait a month or two because there were more problems to be faced. It will be fun trying to cope with an ounce or so of dead tissue being cleared away by my natural bodily processes.

I have done my best to make prostate cancer an interesting and worthwhile adventure. So far it has been like a scenic vacation to a rugged outback.

Another needed step for self-actualizing the Universe is self-assembly.

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Nano non carbon self assembly, Universal self-actualization, What's needed next

To self-actualize the Universe we need to have forms of thinking matter that are extremely stable because the processes involved will take tens or perhaps hundreds of billions (1tic11) of years to carry out that mission. Our present organic thinking brains need constant retraining and are physically unstable, and their maximum usage life is approximately one hundred (1tic2) years. (1tic11 – 1tic2 = 1tic 9. Or 1 with 9 zeros after it times longer than humans live.)

Organic life has evolved from simpler quasi-life forms in part because the carbon atom and its molecules have the ability to self-assemble into more complex forms. They were stable enough to evolve to more complex forms via reproduction of what survived in their local environment. Atoms other than carbon can self-assemble into large and complex crystals, but they are more limited in the physical forms they can take compared to those available to carbon. Carbon easily mutates from one form to another which is okay for organic evolution but for our goal, super stable forms are needed. Some of these other atoms may be limited in the forms that they can take but once they are formed they are stable. For example, zircon crystals are used for age dating early Earth geological forms because they behave in stable ways for billions (1tic9) of years.

If we are to make a thinking being (machine) that can endure for billions of years it will need to be made with these more stable atoms and molecular forms. At present we can manufacture thinking chips at sizes approaching atomic levels but it requires expensive and sophisticated factories to do these things. What we need to devise are ways that at least some of these processes can be done on the nanoscale by atoms themselves. This is already done by carbon-based systems but humans may be able to intervene, as natural organic evolution can not, and create the nanotools that do these assemblies one atom at a time.

Some things cannot be evolved because evolution requires functioning steps in between functioning organic beings. Humans and goal-directed robotic devices can make things that don’t have intervening functional steps. They make the thing they want to exist as a goal-directed activity. A pocket watch found on a beach may be a much simpler thing than an amoeba found beside it but the watch cannot evolve from simple matter because it can have no functioning intervening steps, at least not without human intervention. 

A key step that needs to be created by humans, probably with computer aid, is the nanomachine that can make various nanomachine parts. Once a nanoassembly process can be made functional and self-sustaining, it should be possible to make everything that will be needed. That would include being able to make machines like themselves and thus to generate a logarithmic increase of themselves. Like Bill Joy’s grey goo, but not as scary. With an abundance of these generalized manufacturing machines, anything could be made if they were provided with the needed supplies and energy.

We are on the cusp of being able to do these things and thus to begin the process of self-actualizing the whole Universe.

How can I identify and eliminate my false beliefs? 18

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Identifying false beliefs, On, On Anger, Personal analysis, Seneca, Trustworthiness of information

The discovery of my false beliefs can begin with analyzing the source of the information. These false beliefs can’t be eliminated until they have been potentially identified and then analyzed for their likelihood of being false.

Once a belief has been identified as being false, a search can be made for others who have had similar false beliefs and then reported the various ways they attempted to cope with their problems.

The Roman author Seneca wrote a book-length article on On Anger about the year  45 AD that I found helpful when attempting to challenge one’s own beliefs and behaviors. He struggled mightily with that problem and was functionally murdered (forced to commit suicide) about fifteen years later by Emperor Nero, the very person whom he had tutored as an adolescent.

There are many ways to attempt to cope with the discovery of true information, which will be discussed below, but first, it is reasonable to filter the information coming to us according to its source. The chart below analyses the information’s source from intentional obfuscation by an unknown author about unverifiable facts through 14 steps of increasing agreement culminating in opposing forces with skin in the game finding an agreement about some details of the information. That information is itself available for open assessment for its trustworthiness because all of the various factors are readily observable by any interested person.

This style of information assessment is presented in the chart below and a larger chart can be printed by clicking here — Trustworthiness of Information.

Trustworthiness of Information

We can prioritize information in various ways by checking through various techniques. And apply all of them and then choose which will be most applicable to our goals and needs. Pareto charts, Scattergrams, Timeboxing, Triage, Reverse triage, SAP value mapping CARVER matrix. All of these techniques are intended to help the user make the problems and their potential solutions more available to the investigation. Once they are visible the relative merit of the potential solutions may be prioritized and the most beneficial outcomes with the lowest risk and highest likelihood of success chosen. Then there will be coping methods such as antifragility, etc.

I hope to work with each of these soon as I become more aware of my false beliefs.