I had my 10th High School Reunion for Paul G. Blazer today. It was... surreal. *wrinkles nose* Part of me wonders if it would have been less so if I hadn't also been on a fair amount of cold medicine due to this sinus infection. Eh, probably so. Some people had changed immensely. Some people hadn't changed at all. Most of us... if you squinted, we looked like we did in high school, same shape of the face, same manner of moving, but time had left its mark. There were some interesting stories, journeys to foreign lands and the studies of arcane arts. And, well, there were some people who'd clearly fallen hard somewhere in the 10 years and were still nursing broken bones. And I suspect there were even more stories of success and failure in those who chose not, or were unable, to attend. Goodness only knows what people thought of me. Like I said, I'd taken some cold medicine before and either I took too little or too many because I was in a seriously abstract mood all night. My hair was longer and I had some dead end stories about my jobs with the government and L-3. Meh, I was there. I had some interesting conversation. I had a fascinating if somewhat disjointed conversation with someone about the perils of computer science jobs that led me to wonder again why I'm in still in this field. Besides the chicks, of course.

But, I don't regret it. The reunion, at least. Some part of me wonders what might have been if I had decided to work in a different field. But, then again, how can one ever know how things might have been different. And now I'm getting weirdly philosophic and it's just too late at night for that. Say good night, Gracie.

*wrinkles nose* A few weeks ago, I heard two political radio ads one after another with one candidate stating that they were in support of stem cell therapy and their opponent was. One ad was for Obama and one for McCain. This morning, I heard an attack ad for Obama saying that McCain and Palin opposed stem cell therapy and abortion. ^_^ The latter... that's one of my motivations for voting for them, since I've never been a believer that killing a baby to avoid taking responsibility is a good idea. As for the other, my understanding is that McCain is for stem cell therapy, just not fetal stem cell therapy, which makes the ad not only an attack ad, but one which relies on equivocation to pass off a lie as the truth. And yes, Obama endorsed it.

The issue here is that almost all of the research, and all of the miracle cures so far, it's all adult stem cells. Fetal stem cells are alleged to have greater flexibility and the companies who were doing research on them have done their best to market the hell out of them, but so far there's nothing fetal stem cells have been able to do that adult stem cells haven't. Yes, I know that one of the reasons so far is that fetal stem cell therapy has not been allowed to get federal funding. *rolls eyes* So, if I were to go out claiming that the blood of a murdered virgin was a more refreshing electrolyte than gatorade, would the government be wrong for preventing me from going off and slaughtering virgins (if one could find them these days) to prove my point? This is not even including the fact that a couple years ago, the Japanese found a way to make adult stem cells just as flexible as fetal stem cells. So, in short, we have a method which doesn't require human beings which has been proven to be effective and we have a method which requires killing babies which might be more effective if we just let the scientists work on it. On one side, we have scientific results. On the other, we have marketing hype. We have the use of tissue samples from consenting adults and we have the harvesting of the flesh and blood of mutilated children. Really, why is this seen as such a hard choice?

And I would be remiss if I didn't note that the successes of stem cell therapy on both sides is not a miraculous "inject the patient with stem cells and they walk" (there were some amazing recoveries of people with Parkinson's within days of being injected, but then they found out that sticking needles into the brain without the stem cells functioned just as well) but rather a situation where the scientists grow cultures and test their drugs and treatments on that culture. It cuts research down from decades to years, but it's still not instant cures by any means. Like the line goes, "anyone who tries to tell you different is selling something".

Last night, I dreamt Bev's mother died while I was visiting. She looked so old and grey and small... The shock of seeing her die woke me up and I remember it took me a while to get back to sleep again. The dreams in the rest of the night are somewhat disjointed, but I remember that in one, I was talking to Tessa Gillum (Tessa Church when I knew her back in Ashland). I don't remember much of the dream other than at some point, I asked her how exactly she'd gotten married and she told me that they weren't really married, not yet despite the two kids. For whatever reason, I don't have answers to follow-up questions like whether they'd only had a legal wedding so far (Tessa is Baptist IIRC, which means she'd really want a church wedding) or if there was some legal technicality or somesuch. That's really all I can remember of my dreams right now.

Oh, and I am feeling better if not 100%. The OTC drugs I'm taking are reducing the congestion and coughing down to a bearable minimum. *wry grin* I woke up this morning to find my left upper arm was sore. My first thought was that my nightly push-up regimen (keep doing sets interspersed with light reading to cool down until I can't do any more) was having an effect, but then I realized that that was where I'd gotten my flu shot early this week. Well, darn.

No, not really. ^_^ I blame it all on Andred.Anyhow, I am sick, just not with that. *grumble* Sinus infections, we hates them... My ears are all pressured up, my nose is alternately congested and leaking clear fluids, and I feel like someone stuffed bloody cotton up my nasal cavities. Which, actually, is a sensation I am familiar with. *wry grin* Fourth in ranking on Google for nose cauterization. Actual story of the removal of bloody stuffing is available too as well as the beginning of the nosebleed drama (yes, I'm intentionally having fun and seeing if I get surges of odd search results). Anyhow, long story short, work was miserable as a result.

On a complete side note, remembering the incident with the stuck tissue plug made me suddenly realize where an errant false memory of body horror came up. I'm pretty sure I blogged about it here, but I had this one odd dream a few years back which included a scene where I was staring in my bathroom mirror when I realized something was irritating my left eye. So I reached up into the corner and pulled at what felt like a bit of rheum. Instead, I had this weird sensation of something pulling at the back of my eye, and I pulled out this long strand of clotted blood. I remember that in my dream, the vision from my left eye went blurry as the clot got pulled out. Well, when I was describing the situation with the tissue plug, I suddenly remembered that there had been a similar feeling as I was discharging the clot/tissue, probably because the sinuses do partially interface with where the eyes are.  So, yeah... now I know where I got the sensation of pulling out a clot and feeling like something was pulling on the back of my eye. Probably more than you wanted to know. ^_^

Apropos of nothing, I've been playing Tiny Adventures on Facebook since last night (no, not continuously). I remember Eric Burns namechecking it and thinking it sounded cool, but being dissuaded by the fact that he said it was down and probably would stay down for a while due to scaling issues. And then I forgot about it, until recently when I noticed someone on my Friends List had it up (speaking of... some day, I need to trim my friends list. Or at least alias it to be called the "acquaintence's list"). It's fun and low impact. And... really has absolutely nothing to do with the D&D ruleset beyond an extremely simplistic implementation of the d20 resolution. Your choice of class modifies your initial stats and what equipment you can use, and that's about it. Your paladin will gladly kill and loot sleeping creatures. Your rogue will leap into combat against the orcs. Your wizard will decide that running a marathon sounds like a good idea. Yeah. But, it's low impact. And it is fun. That is enough.

Remember how a while ago, I was commenting on the sudden onset of extreme neck cramps? Well, one of the managers in our group was asking around if any of us had been experiencing neck cramps. It seems that two people in the Ops building from his project had been suffering the same thing, and to an even worse degree (they were experiencing actual nuchal rigidity rather than just pain when they tried to move their neck and apparently the muscles were clenched so tight that their veins and tendons were popping out). On the plus side of things, this stiff neck may not have been a totally random thing. On the minus side, there are a lot of nasty viruses that cause sudden neck stiffness such as meningitis. On the plus side, as one co-worker mentioned, if I had contracted meningitis two weeks ago, I'd be dead now, so odds are it's something a little more benign. Still, kind of worrying, you know?

On another totally random note, that last entry has apparently become one of the top Google search results for "sudden neck pain" just like one of my other entries scores high for "burning sensation in arms". Lucky me, to capture such keywords...

Aliens made them do it *snicker*

I had a bad session at Capoeira today. I was feeling off when I arrived and it just got worse as the practice progressed. My balance was off, my focus was all over the place, and I just couldn't summon the energy half the time. After about an hour of it, I just wanted to walk away. But I kept at it because sometimes there's a wall and if you can push through it, you'll be fine. I wasn't. But at least I can say that I tried. When we were doing Aú Cortado, I couldn't seem to stick the landings and a few times, I only partially softened my landing. One of the times, I bumped by elbow. It didn't hurt terribly, but it bruised instantly and there was this little hard bit that moved when I poked it... that scared me enough that I stepped out after the next exercise to ask Mestre Doutor about it (Mestre Coresco, Doutor's teacher, was running the class, but I can barely follow his accent when he speaks English and he doesn't speak much of that). Apparently, I just broke a blood vessel and the hardness was due to that section being swollen with the blood. I managed my way through the rest of practice. After the roda, Mestre Coresco (through some degree of translation) talked about what was important in the roda and talked about not kicking opponents while they're down. And I think he was directing it at me, although that could have just as easily been a matter of me looking like I didn't understand at all (I often don't... and when I do, I usually take a few seconds afterwards to finish parsing what's been said, so I still look confused). I... don't remember throwing any kicks at people on the ground, but then again, I never remember much of what I do in the roda. For those few minutes I'm in there, all I can do is react as best I can. *sigh* It would put a cap on that day.

Eh... I know I'm coming off all gloom and all. It's just kind of frustrating. There's a part of me which just wants to quit (although that's very easily drowned out by the voice with a slight Scots burr telling me that I've paid for the lessons, so I'm damn well going to take them). There's a part of me which wants to go back to the beginner classes (honestly, I have some problems with a few fundamental basic movements... and the only way I know of to get the teaching to fix them is to take private lessons which are very expensive). And there's definitely a part which is nagging me that if I practiced a bit more outside of class, did more exercise to build up stamina, strength, and flexibility, I wouldn't suck so much. Anyhow, I have signed a contract for lessons over the next year, so I'm definitely not giving up now. I'll just have to bear with it.

Several years ago, I made a post on a blog entry about a bill protecting doctors from being forced to do abortions. Recently, someone routed to this site off of my comment and I saw someone had made a comment in response to me. The contents thereof:

Then one shouldn’t take the Hippocratic Oath in the first place.

He was probably trying to say that doctors serve a higher order of health, that a doctor should put aside personal concerns for the benefit of a patient. Except, well, his comment falls in with something I've long felt is wrong with the current state of the medical profession. Between abortion and euthanasia, fetal stem cell research and the patenting of peoples' DNA when they never signed it over, it seems to me that doctors are no longer living up to the Hippocratic oath as a group. Individually, there are many good doctors out there. But there are far too many who've decided to play with life and death, or who have handed their soul to another to hold so that they don't have to feel bad about the things they do. There was a time when the Hippocratic Oath meant doing what was right, whether it was popular or not. There was a time when the physician vowed to avoid euthanasia and abortion and vowed to protect the greater good. Now, the AMA says it's OK, and they're under pressure from hospitals and research firms to forgo the ethics so that new procedures and cures can be found and sold.

*sigh* And the worst part is, most physicians probably do still uphold the oath in their hearts. But those who don't will continue to sully the name of medicine.

I was following some footprints on my site and I wound being pointed to this photo site. I feel like a bit of a voyeur seeing all that. Cute kid, though.

So, one of the common tricks in roleplaying games to provide a way of improving rolls is to do something like roll twice and take the higher of the two values. I got curious as to how exactly the probabilities fell out. I started by calculating it for rolling twice and taking the higher of the two values (using a d20 because it's a nice round number). Normal distribution, of course, is a chance of 1 out of 20 for each number. Rolling two dice and taking the higher of the two values, you of course start with 20*20 =400 possible results and the distribution turns out to be:

There's an obvious pattern here with the probability increasing by two with each step. So, I tried to extend it out to three dice. At this point, I stopped trying to calculate out the probabilities of the output and I quickly wrote out a table in longhand for the results of rollind a d3 three times. I got the following results:

At this point, the lightbulb came on and I was able to generalize this out to that the probability at a given number was the same as the total number of possibilties for a sided die of that size (n³ for three dice, minus the prior numbers. So, in this case, the chance of getting 3 was 27 - 7 - 1 = 19. The chance of getting 4 would be 64 - 19 - 7 - 1 = 37. And, since the previous number consisted of a cube with the smaller numbers subtracted, this abstracts out to taking the cube of the current number and subtracting the cube of the prior number. So the change of getting a 20 by rolling 3 20's and taking the best result is 20³ - 19³ = 1141 out of 8000, a bit more than a 1 in 8 chance. This extends out to however many dice you want to add. The chance of getting a 20 by rolling 20 dice and taking the best result is about 64%, or (20²⁰ - 19²⁰) / 20²⁰. Neat, huh? ^_^ Yes, I know that I'm a geek.

Nothing huge to report... I had a very lazy weekend. My desktop is still down (turns out it's not the power supply after all) so I'm trying to find out who's a reliable repair place in town. My fortress in Dwarf Fortress continues apace. I've had a few really weird dreams lately including some odd half-awake bits while reading documentation at work including one where I suddenly had this impression that I was taking someone's fingers and slowly twisting them until the bones splintered. No, I don't know who it was or why I was doing it. And no, I have no first-hand experience to know how bone would splinter in such a situation (I suspect the joints would go first), but in the middle of reading dry technical details, *finger splinter*! {shakes head} I wonder about my psyche sometimes. In other news, I was trying a handstand while waiting for my coffee to finish brewing and pouring and all of a sudden, I hit an island of stability where I wasn't wobbling at all. I was totally still with no strain and no need to correct my motion and it lasted for a few seconds of utter stillness before the coffee machine beeped, startling me into a graceful dismount. ^_^ Now if I can just do this in class and in the roda...