Cancer Blog

2004-05-05T20:16:00.000-05:00

day nine

Hey, things are getting a little better. Today I took my second dose of the Temodar. No vomiting whatsoever. Among anti-nausea drugs, Zofran's the best. As we go through time, the chance of nausea or vomiting from Temodar drops off dramatically, so hopefully I'm in the clear. Yesterday was almost routine. One curiosity is that this past Friday, April 30, my weight was 159.5. Yesterday, it was 172 pounds. Yeah, I've been making a concerted effort to gain weight, but this is ridiculous. It turns out that I'm retaining a lot of water, specifically in my right thigh (the one with the big tumor on top) and in my midsection. Yesterday afternoon, after the regularly scheduled program, they performed an ultrasound of my right thigh. This was to check whether there were any blood clots. I haven't heard back, so it's probably just a lot of fluid. What happened was that the tumor in the lymph nodes of my right groin grew and grew, and eventually choked off the lymph nodes; this caused lymphatic fluid to build up in the thigh. It's basically lymphodema, but without the surgery (this is when lymphodema usually occurs). My doctor was also not too surprised or concerned to see water retention in my abdomen. I've got so much disease in there that lots of little pockets and cavities are available for fluid to build up in. And so it builds up. If it gets a lot worse, they could start removing some of the fluid with needles. But hopefully, we won't have to do that. We did receive a hint of not so good news. Results from stool samples indicated that there is some blood in my bowel movements. Very little -- not enough for me to tell on my own -- but it's there. Again, my doctor is not surprised or overly concerned about this. With all the tumor in my bowel/colon area, it's not surprising that some disease should penetrate the walls of the colon and cause a little internal bleeding. What it will lead to in practical terms is more blood transfusions for yours truly, which I actually enjoy; you feel a noticeable boost of energy and strength after a couple of units of the good stuff. I think I'm supposed to get some more blood next Tuesday.

My temperature has stayed down, glory be, so it appears that I am infection free, and the anti-inflammatory drug that I'm now on seems to be able to deal with these tumor fevers. It's much easier for me to move around the house now. When I had a significant fever, I'd start breathing hard and my pulse would shoot up after very little physical exertion.

My next assignment is for this coming Friday: I will go in for another (fourth) injection of the experimental drug. Next week, we take a break from the experimental drug and just take the Temodar.

2004-05-03T19:28:00.000-05:00

complications

This past Friday's treatment was supposed to have been straightforward. Instead, I had a fever of 101.6. That was enough to put everything on hold; blood tests were done, my doctor was called, etc. Meanwhile, the fever goes down and I'm finally able to get my treatment and go home -- after seven hours. The mysterious fever elicited an ultrasound of my right neck area -- the most probably location for infection. That was done this morning. But yesterday evening, I had a fever of 103.1. High. This morning it was at 103.7. Damn high. So we went directly from the ultrasound, which was at 7:30 a.m., to the emergency room (per doctor's instructions). There, I got some fluids, more blood tests were done, and the fever subsided. Thankfully, my doctor let me go home rather than admit me into the hospital for a couple of days. The ultrasound results did not indicate any sign of infection in my right neck. So my doctor concluded that these sporadic fevers are most likely resulting from tumors rather than an infection. Fever from infection is dangerous in the very short term, whereas fever from the disease is a controllable nuisance. Just in case, I'll be on antibiotics for another week or so.

Hopefully, tomorrow will go as planned: doctor's appointment in the morning followed by my third dose of the experimental drug and my first dose of Temodar. It's important to start the Temodar. This is what actually kills the cancer cells. Tomorrow, if in fact I do get the dose, will mark the first day of whatever benefits I will get from this trial.

2004-04-27T21:00:00.000-05:00

day one

Busy, busy, busy... I met with my doctor this morning. The MRI of the brain was all clear. This is rather astounding, given that the brain is, unfortunately, one of the more common places for melanoma to spread. The radiologists had not gotten around to analyzing my CT scans until this morning, so my doctor was only able to give me a vague report. Everything was a lot worse, just as expected, and I could have told you that by looking in the mirror. I don't really have much interest in learning more about the gory details, so I won't follow up with him about it. The next set of scans will be far more important. These just established the baseline for the trial.

After a couple of hours of pointless hospital waiting, we were led over to a different part of VUMC where the experimental drug was to be administered. The infusion took 5 seconds. The bulk of the time, one hour, is spent, post infusion, getting your vital signs checked to make sure nothings going out of whack. Since today was my first infusion, it took us about three hours from start to finish. Normally it should take two. [The extra hour is because of a stupid hospital regulation that prohibits the hospital pharmacy from mixing the patient's drug until said patient has arrived and been seen to look 'okay' by a nurse. Or something like that.]

We will repeat this on Friday and I start the Temodar (a chemotherapy drug) next week. The drug I got today is supposed to make the melanoma cells more vulnerable to the Temodar. Possible side effects: rash, diarrhea, fatigue, neuropathy (numbness in the extremities).

2004-04-26T20:40:00.000-05:00

a tidy profit

Well, my connections with the previous trial are completely severed, personally and financially. The head nurse from Philadelphia called to see how I was doing and wish me luck. They will 'continue to follow my case through my doctor at Vanderbilt' (who is a colleague of my previous doctor in Philadelphia), to paraphrase her words. Like I said, the people up at the University of Pennsylvania were great to work with--very professional--despite what had to be a heavy patient load.

I also liquidated my Onyx stock. Around midday I checked the ol' stock quote and noticed that it was up 16.5%. I don't have to see that twice. The culprit was some good news with a related biotech stock which spiked the whole sector. So I'm out with a 140% profit on my investment from September of 2003, and left with a result that I did not expect: I thought that there would be a strong positive correlation between my health and the stock price. As it happened, when my health started failing the stock price started rising. I guess there's never a sure thing in investing.

2004-04-23T15:44:00.000-05:00

more blood

We ran into a small surprise when the lab results from Monday showed low hemoglobin, red blood counts, and platelets. More labs yesterday confirmed those results, and today I received two units of blood. I'm not sure if there is a critical value above which the hemoglobin has to be for us to start the trial, but with a value of 7.8 (the normal range is 14-18), my hemoglobin is very low. The platelets were at 63,000. The biopsy yesterday was routine. As I expected, the tumor in my lower back was too big for resection. They just did a 'core' biopsy, taking several little chunks out of it. And, finally, my screening week is done.

The transfusion should help me feel a little bit better. Along with everything else, I haven't had much energy at all. Last night, feeling terrible, I went back up to 45 mgs of morphine before going to sleep. I was rewarded with one of the best nights of sleep I've had in a while; there were many deep, satisfying dreams. It's almost worth living just to leave open the possibility of having dreams like this.

2004-04-21T11:38:00.000-05:00

labwork and biopsies and scans, oh my

I'm smack in the middle of my 'screening' week. On Monday they did labwork, an EKG, and a chest x-ray. This afternoon they will do CT scans and an MRI of the brain. And, finally, tomorrow morning will be the biopsy. The port was 'accessed' for the first time on Monday. The process is slightly more involved than I had expected, but overall, it was far easier than trying to go through one of my battered veins. I asked the highly competent nurse whether she thought they could use the port for the contrast during CT scans. Unfortunately, she said that's unlikely. I'll find out for sure this afternoon.

Last week I noted that we were going to increase the morphine from 15 mgs to 45 mgs. Well, I tried that for a few days, and then decided to back it off to 30 mgs. This has worked better. The fatigue this past Saturday--from the morphine, I suspect--was really paralyzing. I've also been able to get by on only two Percocet at night to help with sleep.

The tumors haven't grown outrageously in the past week. The most noticeable growth is definitely with the large, ablated tumor on the right side of my neck and face. If I cup my hand around it, it's as if I'm holding a grapefruit. It extends from the middle of my right ear to midway down my neck, and is about the same dimension across. Amazingly, I haven't had much pain. A good portion of the area is numb, most likely as a result of the ablation. One interesting development, however, is that the skin directly under my chin, kind of underneath the center of my jaw, has gone numb. I suspect that some disease in the neck somewhere has taken out a nerve. Fine with me; numbness is better than pain, I guess. But it's still strange.

2004-04-14T17:39:00.000-05:00

trial starts... on the 27th?

The doctor's appointment that was supposed to happen yesterday was rescheduled for today. My doctor decided to increase the MS Contin (morphine) dose to 45 mg from 15 mg. This should translate into better sleep tonight and hopefully enable me to back off the Percocet. The rest of the appointment time was spent discussing the new trial with the nurse in charge. Next week, I'll have CT scans done as well as the rare and always exciting MRI of the brain. My last MRI of the brain (an all clear) was last August. Even if they were to find a brain tumor, I don't think our course of action would change; but let's not think about that unless we have to. Sometime next week, they'll also take a biopsy of some tumor from somewhere. No dearth of tumor to choose from. My doctor wants to use the biopsy as an excuse/opportunity to have the surgeon do a full resection of a particular tumor in my lower back that is both easily resectable and quite annoying. He will leave it up to the surgeon. I'm all for it, but I have a feeling that the surgeon will think that the tumor is too big to remove altogether.

So, with all this pre-trial stuff to get through, the starting date for the actual beginning is now, tentatively, Tuesday, April 27. Wow. Almost two more weeks to go without any anti-cancer anything. The trial itself goes in nine-week cycles. My doctor admitted that these were rather long for my particular case, but believed that we should have a decent idea after 4-6 weeks whether or not the trial is working.

2004-04-10T19:02:00.000-05:00

grrrr...

The pain in my right leg has increased in the last couple of days. When I'm not in the 'sweet spot' (minute 27 to 120) of a Percocet, the act of hobbling around is difficult. I think my driving days are over for now. On the bright side, as long as I sit or lie down in the proper position, the pain is not too bad; it's when I try to move that it really hurts. So I was still able to get a decent night's sleep last night, and the current level of pain medication should hold me through this Tuesday, my next doctor's appointment.

Fortunately (I'm always looking on the bright side) the pain in other areas hasn't really increased in the last couple of days. And the dull soreness from the portacath surgery is fading away. Maybe I'll have to get crutches or something, I don't know. I'm still able to hobble around short distances, but at this rate, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to do even that. But I can feel pretty confident that walking around on it won't make things any worse; it's not at all like a sport's injury. So maybe I'll be able to get by with an increase in pain killers until we start the new trial in ten days or so. We shall see.

2004-04-08T20:51:00.000-05:00

easy access

I now have a 'portacath' in my chest. Hooray! No, seriously, this is a very good thing. Now if anyone wants to draw blood they can go straight to my portacath and draw to their heart's content. No more searching for veins in my arms or hands. It's supposed to be completely below the skin so there shouldn't be any inconvenience with showering or anything. I'll see how painless it is when I get blood drawn this coming Tuesday.

This was about as minimal as surgery can get, but it was still surgery. So I had to spend a total of six hours at the hospital this afternoon for what amounted to a twenty minute procedure. Fortunately there was no general anesthesia, and thus no nausea. They just gave me some really pleasurable crap through an IV and local anesthesia. I don't anticipate much significant post-op pain. This little wound can't compete with what I already got going.

2004-04-07T13:24:00.000-05:00

a touch more pain

On a scale of 1 to 10, my pain level has jumped from 4 to 5 in the last day or so. I had to take an extra Percocet last night in order to get to sleep. The two main problem areas are my right leg and my shoulders. The tumor in my right groin continues to grow. I have to limp around. The new tumors in my right shoulder and some not-so-new tumors in my left shoulder are combining to provide the shoulder pain.

The main problem with sleep is the difficulty in finding a comfortable position. For weeks now I've been unable to sleep on my back or stomach because of the disease in my back. Now the shoulder and leg pain makes it less comfortable to sleep on my sides. I guess we'll be increasing the pain medication soon.

2004-04-06T20:39:00.000-05:00

movie comments

Since I doze off after five minutes of reading these days, I've been watching a lot of movies. Here are some comments.

Capturing the Friedmans. I liked it. As I recall, the critics liked it too, but I had encountered a fair number of people who hated it and felt that they were manipulated by the film makers. I didn't feel this way. I could dig deeper with this 'review', but frankly, I don't feel like up to it.

Spellbound. Quite a softy after the Friedmans, but kind of disturbing in it's own way. I was the sort of kid who purposely missed words in spelling bees at school to avoid the sort of negative attention that academic success draws on a bright kid from his Southern peers. Not that winning proves anything besides an above average competitive drive and memory. Last year, while talking with a hispanic friend about spelling bees, he pointed out that the very idea of such a thing was absurd with the Spanish language. That hadn't occurred to me before; oh, to have a consistent language instead of the linguistic chaos that is English. Personally, I prefer French. Like the Friedmans, Spellbound tries to draw bigger conclusions about trends in America from the cases examined. They were fairly successful, I think, but, I suspect that the kids they profiled were among the more normal ones of the whole group. I enjoyed this movie.

The next one's not a movie, but I recently watched the first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I really enjoyed it. It's kind of like a higher proof version of Seinfeld: all the elements of Seinfeld that I enjoyed most are distilled into a more potent form. Also, it's great to be unconstrained by censorship.

Modern Times by Chaplin. I really liked The Gold Rush when I saw it last year, but this one didn't really do it for me. That's about all I have to say on the matter.

American Splendor. Yeah, yeah, good film. I'm not a comic book guy, and I really knew nothing about this aside from a couple of reviews I read a long time ago, but it was very good. There are some similarities between Larry David (from Curb Your Enthusiasm) and the main character Harvey Pekar; they're both lovable curmudgeon types. I guess I see myself as some sort of lovable curmudgeon, hence the sympathy for these sorts of characters; I sure got the baldness thing going for me. I knew nothing about his 'Cancer Year'. For those of you who don't know, Harvey Pekar writes an underground comic about himself entitled American Splendor. Anyway, he gets lymphatic cancer, and at the end of a year of successful treatment he and his wife publish a comic book about their experience entitled Our Cancer Year. Similar to what I'm doing here, I guess. I recommend it.

Let's see... Ikiru, or 'To Live', by the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. This was one of his early and lesser-known works. Read the following Netflix description and you'll see why I was drawn to it:

After finding out he's terminally ill with cancer, a government official (Takashi Shimura) quits his job to enjoy his last year alive, but with no family or friends, he faces a lonely death. Determined not to die alone, he heads to a bar to get drunk for the first time. Hoping to drink himself to death, he instead meets an artist who takes him to bars all over the city, and later, a female co-worker sways him on the value of leaving a legacy.

This is a very good film, there's no doubt. But the main character is utterly repulsive. It was hard for me to identify with him or sympathize with him in the least; I just wanted him to die already and get off the damn screen. Fortunately, the film is about much more than this one pathetic bastard; among other things, it is also an indictment of the Japanese bureaucracy. A bit tedious at times, but well worth watching.

The evening after I watched Ikiru I saw a very different 'Japanese' film, Lost in Translation. Damn did Miss Coppola get a lot of mileage out of Tokyo and Bill Murray's face. I'm not impressed. Maybe it's because I was feeling miserable at the time, but I almost turned this movie off. The two main characters did not interest me in the least. Somehow, Miss Coppola managed to suck the humor out of Bill Murray, and... for God's sake, why the hell should I give a damn about the Johannson character? First of all, let me get this straight. She just graduated from Yale. She's been married for two years. How many young women these days from New York City get married when they're juniors at Yale? She majored in philosophy. I don't know what sort of philosophy they teach at Yale, but I suspect that it's not the sort of stuff that leaves students susceptible to the pop Eastern shit that's supposed to make this character 'deep', or at least confused. She's duly equipped with an annoying laugh, always a minus in my book. What annoyed me the most was how typically American and vacuous the two main characters were. We go to a foreign country and it's still all about us. Why can't we get over our fucking selves and our petty problems and look out at the world? Why can't we show some goddamned respect? It'd be different if we were remotely interesting... My advice? Don't see this movie. Instead, watch Manhattan.

Dare to criticize... What did I see next? Of course, another comedy series, this time from Britain: The Office. Very funny. British humor is always superior to American efforts, and it's a damned shame that we don't get BBC America on my parents' cable system. I first learned about this show in a Slate piece last year. Has anyone noticed the similarities between the main character, David Brent, and our honorable president George W.? Highly recommended. Here's a more recent article from Slate, and you can go here to watch some clips from the show.

Ah yes, yesterday I watched Lolita. For some reason I've never read any Nabokov. But this movie was excellent. Directed by Kubrick, you see. There's so much humor in every one of his films, it's brilliant. The Peter Sellers character was really quite good. You gotta see this classic; it's head and shoulders above the rest of this bunch.

And today I watched, of all things, Airplane. It's so hard to find decent comedy. Yes, I've seen this film many times, and no, I didn't enjoy it this time. I don't know what I was thinking. It's better than Lost in Translation, at least.

That is all.

2004-04-05T12:03:00.000-05:00

watching the days go by

Not long ago I turned 27. This is an accomplishment. My 28th birthday will be much more difficult to attain. My birthday also marks, approximately, a couple of key anniversaries with my disease. It was around my 24th birthday, in 2001, that I had tumor resected from my left axilla. At that time I was at stage III and, while I still had a year of Interferon ahead of me, I had every intention--and better than even odds--of putting this thing completely behind me. It was shortly after my 25th birthday, in 2002, that I noticed a small lump on my right shoulder blade. I was at stage IV.

My 26th birthday was less eventful. I was in Nashville, my liver was rapidly filling with tumor, and I was recovering from a month-long episode of jaundice. I didn't expect to see my 27th birthday, but at least I knew there were a couple of decent options out there that we hadn't tried. Now, a year later, we've had some success with those 'decent' options, but not enough.

A birthday let's me think in terms of years. Now it's back to my days and weeks. Another week is gone. Two have passed since I stopped taking the BAY drug. Even though I've noticed a couple of new marble-sized tumors above my right collarbone, I think I'm doing pretty well overall; I haven't had to increase the pain medication. But we still have another two weeks to go before I can start the new trial. As we get further and further away from the last dose of chemo, the rate of tumor growth will increase.

2004-03-28T18:46:00.000-06:00

pain management

I've settled into a schedule with the pain medication which allows me to sleep fairly well while not leaving me too drugged up. The new pain medication I'm on is 15 mg of MS Contin, or slow-release morphine. I take one tiny pill every 12 hours. I can supplement this with the Percocet as needed. I've been taking the morphine at 10 a.m., going the day without the Percocet--which leaves me reasonably alert mentally--and then taking a Percocet in the evening as the morphine wears off. I then take another morphine pill plus a Percocet at 10 p.m. I can usually sleep until 5 a.m. or so. Another Percocet then gets me another couple of hours of sleep and carries me through to my 10 a.m. morphine.

With the pain medication, I'm feeling okay. My appetite is still way off, but at least it's stabilized. My right leg has been feeling better, but it's just a matter of time before we have problems in that area; the tumor in the groin has visibly grown in the past couple of weeks. The wound in my neck continues to discharge all sorts of disgusting debris. I have to change the dual band-aids twice a day. I guess that brackish muck is what dead tumor looks like. The ablation seems to have destroyed the center of the tumor, but, much like a doughnut rising in an oven, the unaffected perimeter continues to expand. But I'm fortunate that there is no pain. From that standpoint, I have to say that the procedure was a success.

My next appointment with my Vandy doctor is on Wednesday, April 13. I will not be starting the trial at this time, just the screening for the trial. I will probably start the trial a week after that. This seems like a very long time. I'll be making an appointment tomorrow to finally get this port installed in my chest.

As I said, my quality of life with the pain stuff is pretty good right now. This can't last long. I've always regarded the beginning of steady pain medication as the beginning of the dying process. The pain could escalate in any number of locations. As we escalate the pain medication in response, more and more of my brain--more and more of the true me--will be shut down; not a happy thought. But the alternatives are much worse. Last week, I tried to go a couple of days without the pain medication. I was completely miserable. While you might not be drugged, the bad signals bombarding your brain drown out everything else, and you become far more useless than you would be under the pain medication. From here on out, we'll be trying to choose the best of a lot of bad options.

2004-03-23T19:42:00.000-06:00

moving on

If I were completely consistent, I'd sell the Onyx Pharmaceuticals stock that I bought this past September. Today I'm officially out of the Bay/Carbo/Taxol trial. In three weeks or so, I'll enter a new trial at Vanderbilt. The new trial--I'm not even going to bother so much with the details--involves my old friend Temodar plus an experimental inhibitor-style drug. In the mean time, I have an intriguing new pain medication to play with, and the usual post-chemo blood tests. The sooner the better as far as switching goes, especially since I've just received a dose of chemo. Hopefully the chemo will be enough to see me through this transition period.

But there isn't much legitimate hope left for my case. My Vanderbilt doctor, whom I respect for his honesty, basically said that we can either do this trial or let things take their course. Since I have nothing better to do, we might as well do this trial. It will probably buy me some time, if nothing else, and the side effects aren't as severe as those in the trial I've been in these past seven months. So what the hell.

And I won't be selling my Onyx stock either (although I should consider locking in my 60% gains). I have only good things to say about the trial and the people involved with it. Today my Vanderbilt doctor told me that, in August, I was far too sick of a patient for careerists like Steve Rosenberg at the NIH to get near. But the people at Penn took me in and gave me another shot. In a way, my doctor at Vanderbilt is doing the same thing. We both know that having my data point in his trial won't help his career in the slightest, but he understands what's important. Okay, now I'm making myself feel guilty.

Netflix is frighteningly efficient: I signed up Saturday afternoon and two DVDs arrived today. An Amazon order with four CDs worth of spectacular music should arrive by Friday.

2004-03-22T18:45:00.000-06:00

in Nashville

I'm safely back in Nashville after having received my chemotherapy in Philadelphia this past Thursday. My Philadelphia doctor said that we should consider switching to a different clinical trial. The latest scans did not show unambiguous progression--as carefully defined by the trial specifications--but they were close. Until we find something else, it appears that I will continue with this trial. I have an appointment tomorrow with my doctor at Vanderbilt.

Once we do find something else, I will probably have to face the mandatory thirty day waiting period without treatment before we can start. This will be very difficult. I'm already experiencing a steady pain--primarily in the lower back--that makes it impossible to sleep without pain killers. My Vanderbilt doctor has a couple of trials in mind, both of them at Vanderbilt, that look like variations on the same strategy: chemotherapy coupled with a new 'inhibitor'-style drug. I guess this is the (near-)future for melanoma treatment. But he has never been as enthusiastic about these other trials as he has been about the one I'm currently failing.

2004-03-16T20:18:00.000-06:00

waiting for cycle eight

I'm still in St. Louis. I couldn't get on a flight yesterday to Baltimore, they were all sold out, and then I found out that my Philly doctor will be out of town on Wednesday. So I won't be leaving until tomorrow and I won't be getting chemo until Thursday. And so I won't be returning to Nashville until Friday, not that that matters a great deal.

Man, I'm still feeling awful. I've been living 'from Percocet to Percocet' the last couple of days, and I'm not liking it. Eating hasn't been much fun either. I'm hoping that the chemo will provide at least a temporary boost to my physical well-being. It's to the point now where I'm looking forward to being safely back in Nashville.

2004-03-13T15:15:00.000-06:00

dazed and infused

If you thought the last post was 'feverish', you're exactly right. That night I had a 102 temperature. The next morning, Tuesday, the fever was down--thanks to some Ibuprofin--but then it shot up again by midday. I went to the emergency room that afternoon.

And I finally came home yesterday. The most likely candidate for infection was the ablation wound on my neck, but they weren't able to pin anything down. I received a lot of antibiotics via IV, some potassium, and finally, two units of blood. Cycle eight continues to be pushed back, but I will almost surely get the chemo this Tuesday.

They went ahead and did a full set of CT scans. From what I was able to glean from talking with a semi-random doctor in the hospital, they don't look very good: lots of stuff growing, some stuff stable. I will get a copy of the reports myself on Monday and go over them in more detail with my regular doctor in Philadelphia on Tuesday. They appear to be slightly worse than what I expected, which is not good news.

I will probably be 'moving' back to Nashville this coming Thursday. The main reason for this is that I'm now experiencing steady pain from the tumor in my right groin. In the past, I've tried to stay off the pain killers as much as possible, but now it looks like I have no option. It will be interesting to hear what my doctor has to say about the scans, the pain, what comes next, etc. I'm also looking forward to seeing my Vanderbilt doctor again. Will be rejoining Netflix soon...

2004-03-08T18:19:00.000-06:00

a picture

There is a moment of anxious expectation that I'm sure we've all experienced, though the level of anxiety varies greatly among individuals. That is when, after having had your mug shot taken at the driver's license office and after having spent several awkward minutes waiting for the license to be processed, the clerk announces your name and it is time for you to claim your new 'official' identity.

There is a moment in The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (a proper write-up is coming... maybe) when young Dorian, an aristocrat of dazzling beauty, must see his just-completed portrait for the first time. Dorian, it is safe to say, suffered not a whiff of anxiety before the 'unveiling'--his painter-friend had been embarrassing him with compliments throughout the sitting; with a painter of such talent, how could it not be equally flattering?--but he was completely unprepared for what he saw.

As I waited for my new license, I expected the worst. The very fact that I was there, that I needed a new license at the precise moment when I could not have looked worse, was the culmination of a small, private farce. You see, three weeks ago, when I went in to have the tumor in my neck ablated, Barnes-Jewish Hospital managed to lose my belongings: a coat, a copy of the New Yorker, a tee-shirt, glasses, and my Tennessee drivers license. Today, in the driver's license office, the tumor loomed, ominous as ever, two band-aids separating the outside world from the by-any-measure grotesque neck-wound underneath. Outside light glared off the whiteness of my head. My glasses were noticeably absent--I believe they had added a fashionable sophistication to my otherwise bare head. At least they were something. At least they muted the effect of the missing eyebrows.

In the novel, Dorian is astounded by his own beauty. 'Is this really how I look? I had no idea.', he mutters. The scales fall from his ideas, his naivete is destroyed. Under the influence of a new world-wise (and world-weary) friend, he becomes sad. 'How long can such beauty last? How tragic that the beauty of this worthless combination of canvas and paint will last so long while the beauty that really matters to me, my intrinsic beauty, is as fleeting as a flower's bloom.' (paraphrasing)

I was not prepared for what I saw. What I saw was a portrait of my own corpse. It seemed like it was taken in some other universe, a universe where events had transpired slightly differently: I was young, healthy, cancer-free, but still, something terrible had happened. How did this man die? Most likely drowning, judging by the pallor of the skin and the bloating of the neck. He must have suffered some accident--maybe his car was forced into the river by a drunk driver? Perhaps suicide: the love of his life had had enough of him, and this pathetic, bookish bastard couldn't take it: he jumped from a bridge and wasn't discovered until the next day. But in this universe, somehow, I am still alive. And yet the two pictures match: my real image, the image that will be checked by innumerable low-wage employees for the indefinite future, and the alternate image, how I imagine I would look were I dead and decaying on a medical examiner's table, somehow correspond. Dorian's portrait perfectly captures his life to that date: pure, innocently divine beauty. This picture seems to capture my last few years. As I once remarked to a friend, my body has been a battleground on which the best of medical science has fought, and continues to fight, an inconclusive battle against one of the worst modern maladies. Like a battlefield, I look devastated.

You just gotta indulge me with this post. I've been feeling miserable the past few days. During this time I read The Picture of Dorian Gray. It left a big impact. Then, today I had the worst picture of my life taken; it left a big impact as well. Take these two, add the misery, and presto, you get posts like this. I'm feeling a little better now, but man would I prefer to be unconscious. The picture made clear to me what I already knew: 'You're dying, man. You may live yet, but right now, you're dying -- and there's no getting around that fact. Your independent life in St. Louis must end soon: you don't have the energy to properly take care of yourself anymore--you need to be eating better!--much less do anything with school besides grade the occasional intro problem set.'

When you're feeling this bad, it doesn't matter where you are, you just need to do all you can to keep the organism going. I'll get the chemo this week, see how I feel after that, complete my TA responsibilities (I did most of my share of the grading during the first half of the semester), and--unless I rally in a big way--head back home to Nashville.

2004-03-08T17:13:00.000-06:00

oh so close...

Platelets fine at 138,000. Neutrophils? 'Ugh' at 1300. I need 1500 for chemo. I'll try again on Wednesday.

2004-03-04T14:33:00.000-06:00

not today either

Platelets: low but improving at 81,000. Neutrophils fine at 2,000. I'll go in again Monday morning.

2004-03-03T17:25:00.000-06:00

life in a red state v

This post is related to the first 'life in a red state' post (and third ever post on 'Cancer Blog') way, way, way back, eons ago, on June 18, 2003, and also the 'life in a red state II' post on July 3, 2003. More license plate madness from Tennessee:

Thou shalt have another license plate to choose from — at least, if June Griffin gets her way.

Griffin, of Dayton, Tenn., has been crisscrossing the state for the past six years, urging county commissions to support the Ten Commandments. She's now going to head up an effort to create a specialty license plate proclaiming ''Tennessee for the Ten Commandments.''

''I'd like to get it done immediately, if not sooner,'' Griffin said. ''The Lord has sent me to do it, and I don't want to make any money off it. I'm doing it for the pure love of God and country.''

Her plans come at a time when the Ten Commandments' place in government is a subject of national debate — lawsuits are still pending about whether the Commandments can be displayed in the Rutherford and Monroe county courthouses. Likewise, the role of the state in issuing specialty license plates for political causes or groups — such as ''Choose Life'' or the Sons of Confederate Veterans — is also under fire and in the courts. [...]

Sheesh, just get a bumpersticker already.

2004-03-01T17:24:00.000-06:00

not today

Neutrophils? Good! (1,700) Platelets? Bad. (54,000). Overall the counts were a little better than what I expected: last Thursday they were at 1,000 and 30,000 respectively. Today, I was supposed to travel to Philadelphia, and, tomorrow, I was supposed to get chemo and start cycle eight. But my blood's had a rough go of it this cycle. It could certainly use a few extra days to recover. I'll try again on Thursday.

2004-02-29T23:40:00.000-06:00

give this kid a Ph.D.

Via Julian Sanchez comes this article:

An Oxford engineering student was surprised but undaunted when he was approached to deliver a series of lectures in Beijing on global economics.

Matthew Richardson knew "next to nothing" about the subject but, believing he would be addressing a sixth-form audience, he felt he could "carry it off".

Mr Richardson, 23, borrowed an A-level textbook entitled An Introduction to Global Financial Markets from a library and swotted up on its contents on the flight from London to China. [...]

As Julian says, just read it. I don't want to suggest that there's any hierarchy in academic subject matter or anything, but somehow I doubt that an undergraduate in economics, no matter how clever, would be able to pull off a comparable feat in front of Chinese engineers. Now Chinese social workers, that's another matter...

2004-02-28T15:26:00.000-06:00

The Passion of Bach

I'm not going to weigh in on Mel Gibson's movie. In fact, I probably won't even see Mel Gibson's movie. From what I read, it appears to be a bloodbath; and besides, I already know how it's going to end.

But let me take this opportunity to add my drop of free 'publicity' to the vast media ocean on behalf of a less divisive sort of Jesus product: St. Matthew's Passion, by J.S. Bach. During my most difficult times, stretches last August when I could barely eat or sleep, I would lie in my darkened bedroom and listen to Bach for hours, mostly the Brandenburg Concertos and the Passion. The Passion is not an easily accessible work, and I know that I don't appreciate it the way the deeply religious Johann Sebastian intended; but I don't care. It's beautiful. The words--incomprehensible German--(and thus, to a large extent the story) are, for me, beside the point. For a taste, go here and click on sample track 3 from disc 1.

When it's a question of Jesus' last twelve hours, I'll take Bach's beauty over Mel's vengeance any day of the week.

2004-02-26T14:29:00.000-06:00

my double life as a pin cushion...

...will be ending soon. Today's blood draw required four sticks before the red stuff flowed. These twice-weekly blood tests are hell on the ol' veins, I tell ya. One of my doctors will be hearing from me soon about getting a port put in.

Edit: Twice-weekly, or twice a week, for biweekly.

2004-02-23T13:53:00.000-06:00

winner: Barnes-Jewish Hospital, St. Louis

The award for best hospital food (Insert clever name for award here; half-hearted suggestion: the Barfy.) goes, in a landslide, to Barnes-Jewish Hospital, St. Louis. Barnes-Jewish beat out the NIH, in Bethesda, Maryland, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN. Barnes-Jewish's sole entry into the competition, a dinner consisting of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, and most spectacularly, carrot cake, was more than enough to secure victory. A special 'Excellence in Dessert' commendation is in order. Barnes-Jewish chefs served up the best carrot cake that this judge has ever had. The other competitors' strongest entry for dessert, orange Jello, didn't have a chance. Congratulations Barnes-Jewish. I certainly know where I want to fall ill.

2004-02-21T19:46:00.000-06:00

stuff that's growing

This past Tuesday night I noticed a rather significant new tumor in the left axilla (armpit). When I first notice a new lesion and that lesion is already pretty big, it's safe to infer that it's fast-growing. This could become problematic in the near future, not as a threat to my health, but as a source of pain. Maybe we'll ablate it as well. Who knows? Also, the small tumor (really tumors--there are several) on the left side of my neck--those opposite from the monster that was ablated this past Tuesday--have also grown.

So clearly I have plenty of disease that is not responding very well to treatment. Fortunately, it seems to be located in non-vital areas. I won't know what's happening on the inside for a few more weeks, but I've been feeling really good: no abdominal pain and my digestive system has been working well.

The next health-related event will be more chemo and the beginning of cycle eight in a week and a half. But I've got some work to do regarding the platelets: yesterday they were at a near-dangerously low 28,000. At least the neutrophils weren't too bad.

2004-02-20T13:56:00.000-06:00

Herbert is irrelevant

You know why I hate politics? It's because of stuff like this offshoring flap. Those nasty Indians, with their dark skin, their pagan religion, and their preternatural programming skills are in the process of eviscerating the American middle class. Or so we're told. From the New York Times' Bob Herbert--a columnist whose existence, from now on, I will not dignify with acknowledgement--has found his raison d'ecrire. From today's outrage, "Dark Side of Free Trade":

No one really knows what to do -- not the president, not John Kerry or John Edwards, and most of all not the economists and other advocates who have been so certain about the benefits for American working men and women of unrestrained trade and globalization.

And most of all, not the economists. Yes, in matters of trade, not the economists... No, we don't know what the fuck we're talking about. Anecdotal evidence over data, feelings over analysis, yeah, that's the ticket to good policy. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, progress, let's throw all that shit out the window because some Indians are doing things better and more cheaply than their American counterparts.

Quick, as an antidote, read the Economist: here and here. Meanwhile, I'll go on carefully grading these Econ 101 exams with questions on the benefits of trade, comparative advantage, and the like; my modest service for the "good guys" in the never-ending war on stupidity.

2004-02-20T12:40:00.000-06:00

I speak Dixie

It's Friday, the swelling's going down, time to relax with a light internet quiz. This Yankee or Dixie dialect quiz (via Andrew Sullivan) is particularly amusing. I've always been more conscious of language, dialects, accents, etc. than most, and somehow I managed to get through eighteen highly formative years in Nashville, TN without any discernible Southern twang.

Well this quiz pegged me as 84% Southern in dialect. I'm a little surprised, but not overly alarmed. Before you write me off as some backwater hick, I'd like to point out that there are only three questions (out of twenty) that give away my Southern heritage, and that, in all three, the Southern usage is in fact superior to the non-Southern. For example:How do you pronounce the second syllable in pajamas?
'-ja' as in 'father', of course. Consider the alternative: '-ja' as in 'jam'. Yuck. You almost have to crinkle your nose to make the sound; it's nasally; yuck, yuck, and yuck. Whereas, pajahmas. Ahhhhh, now that's civilized. Moving on... What's it called when you throw toilet paper over a house?
This, of course, is 'rolling'. To 'roll' a house, what could be more natural?--and cool. When growing up I was aware (through the popular children's literature) of the alternative--and deeply inferior--term: TPing. But this is just pathetic. To 'roll a house' is just the sort of language needed to glamourize petty acts of vandalism. Toilet papering a house? Come on, you can do better than that you sophisticated non-Southerners, you. What's next?What's that bug that rolls into a ball when you touch it?
Roly poly. End of story. It goes by different names apparently, pillbug, sow bug, etc. No... Roly poly just captures it. I mean just look at the thing, it's a roly poly! In fairness, I should mention one other regionalism that I'm not quite as confident about...
What is that bubbly carbonated drink called?
Okay, so it's a coke. Regardless of whether or not it's actually a Coke, it's a coke. I admit that this particular Southern idiosyncrasy is not at all adequate. To compensate for this, I modified my own behavior so that, when it is a question of non-alcoholic drinks, I almost always purchase a Coke; at least my behavior is consistent with my locution. But, again, consider the alternatives. Pop. No, I can't say pop, I just can't. How about soda? I hear the dreaded nasal coming in... Soft drink? I would use this if I didn't use coke, but no, too proper.

This is about all the regional chauvinism I can muster. My deviations from proper, Oxford English usually occur for either aesthetic reasons or because of my inferior childhood education. Bon weekend.

2004-02-19T15:30:00.000-06:00

that's a first

Hmmm... Door-to-door textbook salesman just dropped by my office. Prentice Hall. Free textbooks!!! All you can read!!! Come and get 'em... I would have preferred a hot dog guy.

2004-02-19T15:06:00.000-06:00

post-ablation

The tumor is ablated and the right side of my neck and face is swollen up nice and fat. It looks like the needle entered through only one location, the 'peak' of the tumor, and that they just kind of probed around there as best they could killing everything within reach. I'll take the dressing off tomorrow. There's supposed to be a clear, glue-like substance on the skin itself which will come off naturally in a few days. That's it. I'll follow up with the doctor in a few weeks.

No pain to speak of from the procedure itself. The pain I had been having from the tumor is gone. Success enough if you ask me. How much will it shrink?

2004-02-18T13:29:00.000-06:00

note to self...

When recovering from general anesthesia, always make sure you have an adequate vomit receptacle within easy reach, ESPECIALLY when being transported by stretcher from the recovery room to your personal hospital room.

2004-02-16T15:30:00.000-06:00

A-Day eveAblation: a medical term that refers to any procedure performed to destroy diseased or damaged tissue in the body.
Good, I made it. As expected, the chemo last week has kept the pain from the neck tumor more or less under control. Last night was kind of rough, though: I lost several hours of sleep because of the pain. But when I woke up this morning, all was better.

I'll go into Barnes-Jewish at 8:00 tomorrow morning to have this thing radiofrequency ablated once and for all. I should be able to go home in the evening, but I might have to stay overnight. I suppose the site will be bandaged for a few days, and there could be some swelling during the immediate aftermath, but other than that, 'normal' life should resume on Wednesday. Then the tumor should steadily deflate as the body slowly removes the dead tissue. The big question is whether they will treat the relatively new tumor on the other side of my neck; let's just say that it's no longer pea-sized. Is this the first of many ablations for yours truly?

Anyway, tomorrow will be an extraordinarily light blogging day.

2004-02-15T09:42:00.000-06:00

the Acura is dead; long live the Volvo

Not dead exactly, just, well, put out to pasture. I recently completed the purchase of a 1998 Volvo S70, black--far too much car for a scum-of-the-earth grad student like myself. But my approach to car buying is, 'buy something nice so it lasts a long time and never breaks down". The Volvo fits the bill. Plus I got a good deal: my sister (yes, I bought it from my older sister) was going to trade it into a dealer, so I just paid her the trade-in value. So now I have leather interior, seat warmers, cd player, etc., etc. There is, however, an uncomfortable disparity between the quality of my new car and the quality of the neighborhood in which I live (not to mention the quality of the clothes that I wear, etc., etc. again). I never had a second thought about leaving my Acura on the mean streets of UCity, St. Louis: nobody would be stupid enough to steal that piece of crap. But with this Volvo... Oh well, I'll just have to rely on the alarm, my insurance, and the restraint of my neighbors. I'm pleased, though; this is only the third car I've ever owned. Hopefully it will last as long as the '93 Acura did. Hopefully I will last even longer.

2004-02-11T19:09:00.000-06:00

cycle seven

Cycle seven went off without a hitch yesterday. The chemo drugs are duking it out with those nasty cancer cells as I type. I received some real good news from my doctor regarding the CT scans. It appears that the liver was not as big of a problem as I had thought. Aside from my neck, everything else seems to be stable or shrinking. In fact, he said that there was 28% tumor shrinkage since the last set of CT scans (not including the neck, of course). As an explanation for why this treatment is working for some tumors and not for others, my doctor hypothesized that perhaps the lymph node areas of the body were more favorable to tumor growth than non-lymph node areas. The tumors in my neck are located in lymph nodes, as is the tumor in my groin, both of which have grown more than everything else in recent months. The disease in my left axilla (armpit), however, has shrunk quite a bit, despite also being located in a lymph node area. I hope he's right though, because the alternative--that the disease in my neck has mutated further and has become resistant to the treatment--is not nearly as attractive.

Full steam ahead with this semester. The twists of fate are amazing. The chemo seems to have calmed down the big tumor in my neck a bit, so I'm fairly confident that things won't get out of hand before A-Day (Ablation Day), now only 6 days away. Once that's out of the way, I'll be in the clear for a while as far as the health stuff goes. Very good.

2004-02-05T15:52:00.000-06:00

seems familiar...

The tumor in my neck has made impressive gains over the past week. The skin is stretched tight, and the shape of the mass most closely resembles a rounded off pyramid, the base of which is planted firmly in my neck, while the point extends somewhere off to my right. The 'point' of this pyramid is not perfectly pointy, Huichilobos be praised, but it is rather hard, and certainly pointy enough to cause occasional non-trivial discomfort, to put it euphemistically. And there is an aesthetic cost: over the last few days, the 'peak' of skin that used to be snowy white--with some mild irritation, of course--has turned an inflamed, angry red. Sorry, I'm reading Rushdie. But the facts are correct: the tumor in my neck won't be ablated until February 17, and this thing is growing like gangbusters. I've begun to lose sleep.

I'm banking on getting chemo next week, preferably on Tuesday. After the last round of chemo, the 'discomfort' in my neck subsided for about ten days. I would expect another blast of Bristol-Meyers Squibb's finest to carry me through to ablation day. My latest predicament is vaguely reminiscent of this past August, but certainly not as serious. In early August I called to make the appointment to start the current program. I wasn't able to get an appointment until August 26, almost three weeks later. During those three weeks, I sat at home cultivating my tumors and wondered, not without interest, whether I would make it to the appointment; and if so, in what sort of sorry shape I would be in. I made it, of course, and by appointment time I was still able to walk about and eat a little. A couple of weeks ago, I made the critical decision of telling my doctor that the neck thing was not an emergency; I erroneously thought that a non-emergent condition would not significantly affect scheduling. Alas, it did. I still wouldn't call this an emergency, but I would call it goddamn rotten luck... Moving the ablation up to next week wouldn't make much sense, because next week's chemo is more important, and the actual day when I will be able to get the chemo is uncertain.

So the key to this particular mini-crisis is, again, my blood. The blood counts from Tuesday were good and bad: platelets? Good! Neutrophils? Bad. Not so bad (900), but we need 1500 by Monday for chemo on Tuesday; or if not by Monday, by Wednesday for chemo on Thursday; or if not by Wednesday, by next Thursday for chemo next Friday; or if not by next Thursday... 1500 by Monday would be nice.

2004-01-30T16:40:00.000-06:00

scans: better than expected

I picked up last week's CT scan films and report from Barnes-Jewish Hospital here in St. Louis. The interpretation of this report is not as clear to me as the others had been since the previous scans from December 5 were done at Vanderbilt. The Barnes-Jewish radiologists compared the new scans to the last ones they had, which were from almost a year ago. But I was able to match things more or less to the results from last month's post here on this blog. Overall, they were better than expected. Given the growth in my neck tumor and the recent abdominal pain (which has subsided since last week's chemo), I was prepared for the worst. Happily, the news is more favorable.

Still no action in the chest, so let's proceed to the abdomen. Lots of crap in the liver--as has been the case for ten months now--and the largest lesion is reported as 2.5 x 2.0 cm, an increase from 2.1 x 1.7 cm on December 5. There is also another, similar-sized lesion mentioned: 2.7 x 1.7. The Dec. 5 report only mentioned the largest, so I'm not sure what to make of this. It is likely that the second tumor has increased--perhaps dramatically--in the last six weeks, but I can't be sure. Next, the tumor in the colon. This had been the largest, and last time measured in at 5.8 x 3.6 cm. Well, according to this report, it now measures 3.8 x 3.3 cm. Quite a significant decrease, and very good news. However, the report also mentions an adjacent tumor--not mentioned in the Dec. 5 report--measuring 0.6 cm in diameter. It's possible that the Vanderbilt radiologist counted these two tumors as one, which would put the two together at roughly 4.4 x 3.3 cm. We still have a significant decrease. Unambiguous goodness. There's a tumor in my lower back that has changed from 2.6 x 1.5 to 2.4 x 1.7 cm; fine. Then there's the relatively new tumor in my right groin which has changed from 2.4 x 2.1 to 2.6 x 1.9 cm; fine. And then there's the old tumor next to my spine. This has increased from 2.8 x 1.9 to 3.2 x 2.1; bad. That's about it. No new tumors in the chest, abdomen, or pelvis (excepting the ambiguous action in the liver), but I should mention... Incredibly, there is a new tumor in my neck. I noticed it a few weeks ago. It's a pea-sized lump on the left side of my neck; this is opposite from the soon-to-be-ablated monster on the right side (roughly 4 x 3 x 4 cm in dimension). Is fate trying to impose some perverse symmetry on poor, beleaguered me? Will I end up looking like a cobra? My interventional radiologist said that he will try to ablate the new tumor if he can, but that it's location--up against a major artery--might make this impossible.

With results like this, I think I should be able to continue with school, but I will wait until my next doctor's appointment before completely jumping to this conclusion. There is some cause for concern with the liver, however. The changes in my digestion in recent weeks seem consistent with the liver problems that I had last April, rather than the bowel problems that I had last August, so I'm thinking there was some significant growth in the liver. If we have to have tumor growth, this is not the place we want it.

Finally, the date is set for the neck tumor ablation: February 17. Much later than I would have liked, but such is life. I'm feeling pretty good; counting the days until my next round of chemo. Ten to go...

2004-01-28T14:58:00.000-06:00

21st century medicine

I spoke with my new interventional radiologist yesterday, and it looks like we're ready to go ahead with the radiofrequency ablation of the tumor in my neck. They just have to get back to me about when they were able to schedule the procedure. A large needle will be inserted in the tumor, small prongs are then extended from the tip of the needle. Heat generated between the prongs then kills whatever tissue lies between. No incisions required. Unfortunately, given the location and size (kind of a squished racquetball) they will have to use general anesthesia. Depending on how I recover from the anesthesia, I should be able to go home the same day. The doctor said he should be able to kill almost all of it, but he will definitely have to leave the little bit that is in close proximity to a major nerve. This procedure will not increase my long term chances of survival, but it should greatly improve my day-to-day life. I'm pretty excited.

Meanwhile, I remain in blissful ignorance of the results from the CT scans that were done last week...

2004-01-25T12:21:00.000-06:00

recently read: Calvino

This is one of the most remarkable passages I've ever read in fiction. From Italo Calvino's novella, The Nonexistent Knight:

He [the young knight, Raimbaut] found him [the nonexistent knight, Agilulf] under a pine tree, sitting on the ground, arranging fallen pine cones in a regular design: an isosceles triangle. At that hour of dawn Agilulf always needed to apply himself to some precise exercise: counting objects, arranging them in geometric patterns, resolving problems of arithmetic. It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence. He, Agilulf, always needed to feel himself facing things as if they were a massive wall against which he could pit the tension of his will, for only in this way did he manage to keep a sure consciousness of himself. But if the world around was instead melting into the vague and ambiguous, he would feel himself drowning in that morbid half light, incapable of allowing any clear thought or decision to flower in that void. In such moments he felt sick, faint; sometimes only at the cost of extreme effort did he feel himself able to avoid melting away completely. It was then he began to count: trees, leaves, stones, lances, pine cones, anything in front of him. Or he put them in rows and arranged them in squares and pyramids. Applying himself to this exact occupation helped him to overcome his malaise, absorb his discontent and disquiet, reacquire his usual lucidity and composure.

I'm not sure how much you can appreciate this when it is removed from the context of the story, but there it is. My fondness, no, that's not strong enough, my passion, for Calvino continues to grow with time. There is something effortless, beautiful, and right about his language. Reading him is like listening to Mozart: first, the work as a whole is perfect; but within the piece there are little figures, inventions, flights of fancy, feats of the most elegant virtuosity--often completely unexpected-- that bring a smile to the listener's or reader's face. I won't even comment on Calvino's other novella in this particular volume, The Cloven Viscount. Never has wisdom been so delightful.

2004-01-24T19:15:00.000-06:00

new musical director at SLSO

I was pleasantly surprised last night to learn that the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra had hired conductor David Robertson to replace Hans Vonk, who retired a couple of years ago. The SLSO is one of the big (and admittedly few) perks to living in St. Louis. It's great that they were able to land one of the "top American orchestra conductors" (NY Times). I first learned about Mr. Robertson in a big NY Times Magazine cover piece about a year ago. He came to visit the SLSO a couple of times last spring, and I wondered whether St. Louis really had a chance of getting this guy. Whaddya know. Good for St. Louis.

2004-01-23T16:30:00.000-06:00

recently read: Bernal Diaz

File this book, The Conquest of New Spain, by Bernal Diaz, under the Josh Marshall reading plan. Let me heartily second Mr. Marshall's recommendation.

Diaz was a soldier with Hernando Cortes' expedition and two other, smaller, voyages of exploration in what is now Mexico. The collision between the Spaniards and the Aztecs has to be one of the greatest and most tragic stories in human history. Thank Huichilobos Diaz survived to give his account of it. I would like to learn more, much more. I'd like to take a trip, see the ruins of the Aztec civilization...

2004-01-23T15:50:00.000-06:00

scans done, advice received

I had CT scans done of the neck, chest, abdomen and pelvis yesterday. I had expected only the chest and neck, but I think a nurse messed up and either scheduled them all, and/or didn't inform me that she scheduled them all. An error in my favor. My Philly doctor wanted me to wait another week and a half before having the abdomen and pelvis scans done, but oh well. Ten days won't change much. So I'll be getting the full scan results sometime next week, much sooner than I expected. I still haven't heard from my interventional radiologist. He's supposed to review the scans and get in touch with me. I'm still hoping to have the neck tumor ablated next week.

Several days ago I sent an e-mail to my Vanderbilt oncologist updating him on my situation and asking for advice about what we might do next if it turns out that I'm failing this trial. His advice was: 'don't stop this treatment until there's no doubt that it isn't working.' Not exactly the response I expected or hoped for. It's sink or swim with this trial, it appears. I guess that simplifies things.

2004-01-21T13:54:00.000-06:00

cycle six

My blood was fine on Monday so I finally, after a two-week delay, got my chemo yesterday. I would expect a short-term reduction in abdominal pain. Meanwhile, further up the body, I'm getting CT-scans of the chest and neck done tomorrow here in St. Louis. This is for my new interventional radiologist, the latest addition to my constellation of doctors. It's possible that I could have the tumor in my neck radiofrequency ablated as early as next week. I won't be getting new CTs of my abdomen and pelvis, the more interesting pictures as far as my Philly doctor is concerned, for another couple of weeks. He wanted to allow the chemo time to take effect. I suppose that's okay, but it does complicate the timing of my decisions regarding school.

Speaking of which, there I was sitting in a classroom today, for the first time in almost a year. Strange, but nice. Hopefully I will have a very busy semester ahead of me. I only plan to take one class for credit, but I'll be sitting in on two more, plus research, plus some other things. Busy is good.

2004-01-16T19:00:00.000-06:00

if it isn't the platelets, it's the neutrophils

Back in dreary St. Louis. The neutrophils, sneaky little devils, were just under the minimum level and I wasn't able to get chemo. I did get more of the Bayer drug, and I did see my doctor. Other than the neutrophils, my blood looked great. The platelets were "sky high". If the neutrophils are more cooperative this coming Monday, I will fly back up to Philadelphia to get chemo. And, yes, that chemo will be at a reduced dosage.

As for the tumor in my neck, my doctor agreed that something should be done. He suggested that we try one of the newer, not-so-invasive procedures before resorting to surgery. His favorite is radiofrequency ablation. Fine with me. I'm not so keen on acquiring another scar, especially if there are smarter ways to get the job done. I spoke with my long lost St. Louis oncologist today, and he should soon refer me to an interventional radiologist at Barnes-Jewish (the hospital associated with Washington University Medical Center). I'm kind of excited about the prospect of attacking this thing, even if it isn't that important in the long run. Getting rid of it would significantly improve my quality of life.

My doctor was not as pessimistic about my situation as I have been recently. That, along with the fact that I've been feeling really good the last couple of days, has led me to change my mind (again) about school. I am returning to my original plan: start the semester, get scanned in a couple of weeks, and then decide whether or not to pull out. This makes more sense. You gotta allow for pleasant surprises, however unlikely.

2004-01-16T14:57:00.000-06:00

the blue and the black

Introducing a laughably modest innovation here at Cancer Blog. Post titles in blue will indicate content that is unrelated to my health condition (metastatic melanoma). All health related posts will remain titled in default black. I will slowly update the archives.

2004-01-13T18:40:00.000-06:00

more chemo, I guess (*yawn*)

My bone marrow seems to have recovered. Platelets okay, neutrophils (the youngest of the white blood cell clan) close to the minimum mark for chemo. Should be fine by Thursday. Tomorrow is a travel day to Philadelphia; Thursday is doctor's appointment/chemo/travel back to St. Louis day. Let's hope I make my flight Thursday afternoon. It could be close.

No other news, except that I felt damn good yesterday, and hence my mood was far less apocalyptic than it had been the day before. Today I feel okay. But the facts haven't changed: the tumor in my neck is still there; my abdomen is still unruly. But at least my gut had no problem with the large quantities of sushi I subjected it to last night. Appetite okay? Check.

2004-01-11T20:05:00.000-06:00

into focus

Time is slowing down. My decision about whether or not to return for the spring semester has been made: no way. There were two major developments this week, both of them bad. On Tuesday, the tumor in my neck began to ache. It has continued to ache, sting, and hurt in various ways ever since. It seems to be growing upward toward the ear. I will push my doctor for surgery, a procedure that would be simple, and in the long run cost me only a scar. But the removal of this one tumor--granted it's an especially troublesome bastard--will not improve my chances at winning the war. The second unfortunate development happened yesterday morning. An old familiar pain returned to my right abdomen, just below the rib cage. It has been fairly steady ever since; nothing severe, just enough to distract you. Is this the liver? The stomach? Does it really matter? I last had this particular pain back in August. Come to think of it, my neck was also acting up at that time. The progress that we've made over the past few months is slipping away.

I will have a blood test tomorrow morning. If the platelets are okay, I'll call Philadelphia to see if I can fly up for a doctor's visit and chemo, presumably at a reduced dosage. I'm in an awkward position regarding my doctors. My Philadelphia doctor is supposed to hand me off to my primary doctor at Vanderbilt as soon as Vandy's able to get their version of this trial up and running; the start date continues to be postponed. My doctor in Philadelphia is specific to this trial, so he won't be of much help in speculating about what to do if we determine that, yes, this treatment is no longer working. The bottom line is that I probably won't learn much this week. The most dramatic thing that could come out of the Philly trip is that he recommends surgery on the neck, which would probably be done back at Vanderbilt. I would expect that he would give me more chemo and wait for the next scan results before throwing in the towel and sending me back to Vanderbilt. He might decide to move up the date for the CT scans, but probably nothing more.

So what comes next? Well, for starters, it is premature for me to conclude that things are going to hell in a hand-basket, but suppose that this is the case. We'll try something else, of course. But there are difficulties. When you switch from one trial to the next, you have to go a month without any treatment; this is so that the treatment from the previous trial doesn't contaminate the data for the new trial. My disease, if left to itself for a month, would probably go nuts. One way to address this problem is to get a round of biochemotherapy immediately following stoppage of this current treatment. Biochemotherapy is a nasty concoction of several chemotherapy drugs (not Taxol or Carboplatin), interleukin, and interferon. It is the traditional 'last resort' for melanoma patients and my Vanderbilt doctor, correctly, considers it cruel and unusual punishment; I would probably be laid up in the hospital for a week or two in recovery. Another possibility is that he will put me on light interferon. In my doctor's experience, this has been about as effective in buying patients time as biochemo, but without all the collateral damage. If we can pull this off--buying the time, that is--what clinical trial should I get into? I have no idea, but I suppose this is something I should start reading up on. I'm sure my Vanderbilt doctor has a few other trials going on himself, and I'm also sure that I won't be eligible for the exotic stuff being done at the NIH--for the same reason I wasn't eligible in August: my bilary stent.

But I've been here before. I was in worse shape last summer during the months of June and August. The difference now is that I have probably failed the most promising treatment option going. Maybe something new has emerged in the last few months. If so, it would be unproven, but it might be the only chance I've got. Until then... Time to rejoin Netflix.

2004-01-08T16:39:00.000-06:00

Ever read The Onion?

I would be remiss in my duties as a young guy with both cancer and a sense of humor if I didn't link to this article.

2004-01-05T14:28:00.000-06:00

What lies ahead?

The tumors and I are relocating to St. Louis today. I kept my extraordinarily cheap apartment in St. Louis during these last ten months, so the ‘move’ will be a small one. As far as treatment goes, I will just fly from St. Louis to Baltimore on Southwest for this next round of chemo instead of Nashville to Baltimore on Southwest. Once I switch to Vanderbilt, I will be driving to Nashville.

For what it’s worth, the platelets today were 57,000. This was up from 38,000 on Friday, so at least I’m headed in the right direction. I was supposed to start cycle six tomorrow, but given my recent difficulties, I’m happy to hold off on the chemo for a while. I have an ample supply of the Bayer drug to keep the tumors in check (hopefully). I’m still really tired, but otherwise I feel okay.

This latest hospitalization was only partly responsible for my reconsideration of the decision to return to school this spring. There were a couple other potentially more important factors. The first is the fact that the tumor in my neck seems to have increased slightly in size over the past couple of weeks. Also, the tumor in my groin might have also increased. I was not expecting this sort of growth. The second factor is my GI tract. I’m just not processing food as well as I had been six weeks ago. My system is behaving like it was in September: not so good. My appetite has also dropped off. These symptoms could signal tumor growth in the abdomen. So I’m getting some negative signals and that, coupled with the fact that the chemo regimen will most likely be reduced in the months to come, is cause for concern. Nevertheless, I’m going to give school a shot. It’s not that big a deal if I have to withdraw—I should know, I’ve done it twice already—and I will have some new CT scans in late January, which will give me plenty of time to withdraw within two weeks of the start of the semester (January 20) if things look bad. It’s more convenient, from an administrative standpoint, to withdraw early.

So that’s my story; so much for a sense of security. A few weeks ago I believed that my condition would be relatively stable or improving for at least the next five months. Now I have no idea.

2004-01-03T15:27:00.000-06:00

recently read: Hardy

Ahh, there's a special place in my heart for mathematicians. I particularly enjoy their prose. Terse, laconic, to the point. They can't bear the idea of writing anything superfluous. So if you have a spare hour or two, let me recommend G.H. Hardy's autobiographical work, A Mathematician's Apology. Trust me, it was torture for Hardy to write even this slim volume of non-mathematics, but I thank him for it.

It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesman despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings; there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.

As the possessor of a second-rate mind, I have to grudgingly agree. Why be a mathematician? Why be an economist? It would be nice if, when I come to the end of my career, I could make as convincing a defense of my life's work as Hardy's. But sadly, I highly doubt it. Hardy himself is highly skeptical of the way he passed his years. But the case for mathematics is a strong one. There is a part of this book that hits close to home for me. I have struggled over the last ten years or so over the question of what I should do, what career I should choose. Hardy asks the question 'why do men do the work that they do':

Their answers, if they are honest, will usually take one or other of two forms; and the second is merely a humbler variation of the first, which is the only answer which we need consider seriously. (1) 'I do what I do because it is the one and only thing that I can do at all well. I am a lawyer, or a stockbroker, or a professional cricketer, because I have some real talent for that particular job...' I am not suggesting that this is a defence which can be made by most people, since most people can do nothing at all well. But it is impregnable when it can be made without absurdity... (2) 'There is nothing that I can do particularly well. I do what I do because it came my way. I really never had a chance of doing anything else.' And this apology too I accept as conclusive. It is quite true that most people can do nothing well. If so, it matters very little what career they choose, and there is really nothing more to say about it. It is a conclusive reply, but hardly one likely to be made by a man with any pride; and I may assume that none of us would be content with it.

Again, sadly, I think that I fall in the second category. My misfortune is that I am able to do many different things pretty well, but no one thing really well. I'm the classic jack of all trades, etc., sort of guy. Naturally, when I was growing up, my elders pegged me as an engineer, for they were engineers, and I was to follow in their footsteps. Unfortunately, although I'm good at many things, I'm not an engineer. Hardy is correct, I would be happier if I could do one thing really well.

I have always been fascinated with virtuosity, the mastering of some form of expression, or framework of thought, be it language, music, painting, math, or even economics. To me, the attainment of virtuosity is when technique, which in itself is unimportant, ceases to be a significant constraint on the creativity of the individual. Some people are capable of virtuosity; most are not. Moreover, a substantial number of people might be capable of virtuosity in a genetic sense, but only if it the technique is cultivated from an early age. I suspect that I fall in the latter case, and that I probably will never be able to do anything really well. It certainly helps to have wise elders. Ideally, children should explore many different subjects in their education, and their elders should be able to correctly identify and develop their particular talents, whatever they may be.

Most of this very short book is quoteworthy. If you have any interest in mathematics, however small, it's a must read.

2004-01-03T14:18:00.000-06:00

recently read: Orwell

I finished Homage to Catalonia a couple of weeks ago, just before my recent stay in the hospital. The book is a non-fiction account of Orwell's experiences fighting the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. Thanks to Monsieur Hitler, the Spanish Civil War has always seemed rather historically insignificant to me. After reading Orwell's account, it still does. It seems to have been hugely significant, at the time, to British and Western intellectuals who, like Orwell, were smitten with certain communist and socialist fantasies that were in the air. It didn't take long for Hitler and Stalin to blow the Spanish Civil War into irrelevance for even these intellectuals.

After reading Orwell's masterful Burmese Days, this book was a bit of a letdown. There is something dated about it. A significant chunk of the book is devoted to an expose of what really happened in the war, not what the biased British and American press had reported. The target audience seems, at times, to have been his fellow intellectuals, leftists, journalists or friends. I confess that it was hard to summon much interest in the numerous political parties and minor political players whose complicated interactions Orwell so carefully disentangles. Dear God, what's happening in Germany right now? Or the Soviet Union? This tedium does serve an important function, however. It helps to show how Orwell's own political naivete was exposed. This travel account contains the beginnings of the ideas of 1984. Orwell learns the danger of a politics that cares nothing for truth, and sees the public perception of events as something to be molded by the tools of propaganda. It's really a profound book. But I quote only two unprofound passages:

It is curious that when you are watching artillery-fire from a safe distance you always want the gunner to hit his mark, even though the mark contains your dinner and some of your comrades. (p. 84)

Later on, Orwell is shot in the neck and wounded. It's the perfect opportunity for him to employ his amazingly clear and unsentimental powers of description:

Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock--no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled up to nothing. The sand-bags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in a space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense. (p. 185)

The wound ended the war for him, and he soon returned to England to make a full recovery. I highly recommend Homage to Catalonia, but I recommend Burmese Days even more.

2004-01-01T14:27:00.000-06:00

sleep

I slept a solid nine hours last night. I would have slept more but my one-year-old niece decreed that everyone in the house must be awake at seven. That's okay. Looking forward to more good sleep tonight. In the hospital I was only able to get five or six hours at the most. Even with earplugs, the racket from the nurses' station outside my room managed to keep me up.

Still feeling pretty lousy. It will probably be a few more days before I fully recover. Nothing like a two-week illness to ruin the ol' holidays. I still have to figure out what I'm going to do about school. One minute, I think I should return, the next, I think there's absolutely no way I can return. Today, I'm leaning towards returning.

2003-12-31T15:09:00.000-06:00

what I got for Christmas: two pints of A+ with a side of platelets

A week ago Monday I started to come down with what I thought was the flu. Last Tuesday my temperature was as high as 102.2. Christmas Eve was no better. By midday on Christmas my fever was 103.5. I packed a small bag and had my father take me to the emergency room at Vanderbilt. They drew blood and found that my blood counts were low: the platelets were 19,000, and the white blood cells were low enough for me to be designated "neutropenic". I was admitted into the hospital Christmas evening.

They started me on antibiotics. That first night was the worst. My fever peaked at 103.8. On Friday morning my platelets were "not detectable". The doctors continued with the antibiotics and also gave me a ton of potassium and other electrolytes, which were low. I had severe diarrhea. On Saturday they went ahead with a blood transfusion: two bags of blood and a bag of platelets. I felt much better after that. My fever subsided for good on Monday and I was finally able to return home today. I apparently 'hit the wall' as far as the chemo is concerned. My bone marrow reached the point where it could no longer produce an adequate amount of blood. My doctor in Philadelphia will probably lower the chemo dosage for the next cycle, which I will most definitely not be starting on Tuesday, January 6.

I have to sort some issues out. I'm on the fence about whether or not to return to school. There are a couple of tumors, namely those in the groin and neck, which seem to have increased slightly in size over the past couple of weeks. With a reduced chemo dosage, one would expect more tumor growth in the upcoming months. On the other hand, I'll probably go insane if I go on living with my parents like this. I'm not sure what to do.

2003-12-21T22:19:00.000-06:00

the best (and richest!) university you've never heard of

I learned from the NY Times today that Washington University in St. Louis--the school where, in good times, I study economics--has moved up to number 9 (gasp!) in the U.S. News & World Report 2004 rankings. We are now tied with Dartmouth. As a disclaimer, I should say that the ranking of the economics department is not commensurate with that of the overall university. That's why I was accepted into the program.

WashU (as we like to call it) suffers from severe anonymity. This is caused by many different factors. First of all, there's the bloody name. And then there's the fact that we have come out of nowhere. As the Times article--which I'm about to discuss, just be patient--says, in 1995 we were ranked #20, and now we're #9. Now that's a dizzying climb. But we don't have a rich tradition of academic excellence and the reputation that goes along with it. What we do have, however, is a great big pile of money, and--what is equally important--the wherewithal to use it effectively. That counts for a lot these days. And of course, I must give the usual disclaimer about how such rankings are inevitably flawed, etc., etc. But like them or not, it is undeniable that they have a real impact on the school with time. Here's the article. I'm tempted to post it in full, because, as it's from the Times , it's ephemeral, but I won't:

Less than 30 years ago, Washington University was so obscure that the trustees decided to stick "in St. Louis" at the end of its name, exasperated by the perennial question "So, where are you guys anyway? Seattle or D.C.?"

Today, Washington University in St. Louis has 15 times as many applicants as it can accept. Beyond that, the former "streetcar college," as it once called itself, pierced the top 10 circle of U.S. News & World Report rankings this year, humbling several Ivy League institutions along the way, including Brown, Cornell and Columbia.

Such an ascent is what almost every university strives for, but none have come close to matching Washington's success.

Exactly how this happened, however, is a mystery to most here. Maybe it is the stately campus, the very model of American collegiate Gothic. Some cite the teaching; the research; no, the medical school. It could just be that warm Midwestern charm. Yet underneath the ascent and the debated theories behind it is a remarkably consistent theme, a sort of elephant in the Quad.

"We've raised a lot of money," said Mark S. Wrighton, 54, the university's chancellor.

To put it mildly. In a clear showing of how integral money can be to the educational equation, Wash U.'s rise in the rankings has come alongside a wildly successful capital campaign, the second of two in which the university has raised roughly twice as much as it originally sought.

Not only has the money raised the university's standing -- one of the main factors in the U.S. News rankings is financial resources -- but it has also provided Wash U. the wherewithal to advance its footing in another category the magazine weighs: caliber of the student body.

With one of the most liberal uses of financial incentives for academic achievers among the top 20 universities, Wash U. is open about its reliance on what is typically called merit aid to compete with the elite schools in the recruitment wars.

"It's something that helps people pay attention to us, and not just think of us as something in flyover land between Pittsburgh and Denver," said Benjamin S. Sandler, who oversees Washington's financial aid.

But could the university fare as well without merit aid, a strategy that neither the Ivy League, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nor several other elite universities employ?

"Is it possible? Yes," Mr. Sandler said. "Could we achieve the same success and maintain it? I'm not sure. It would be a lot harder."

Indeed, the two U.S. News categories in which Washington University has made its most significant gains, financial resources and student selectivity, seem inextricably linked to its fund-raising prowess and $3.5 billion endowment, the 11th largest in the nation. As if to underscore the point, Wash U. is the highest-rated university by Charity Navigator, which measures nonprofit organizations for the strength of fund-raising, the growth of revenues, efficiency and, in a phrase, programmatic bang for the buck.

Washington University is hardly the only highly ranked university to give merit aid to top students who may not need help to pay for school -- Vanderbilt, Rice and Emory all devote a greater share of their financial aid budgets to the same end -- but the issue has become a volatile one among elite institutions.

Many of them scorn merit aid as a not-so-subtle means of buying a better class, sometimes at the expense of lower-income students who need financial assistance.

"It's very frightening," said Heather McDonnell, director of financial aid at Sarah Lawrence College, referring to those few top institutions, like Wash U., that spend at least 15 percent of their financial aid budgets on merit aid. "If we were at a meeting together, I'd be growling at them." [...]

Trust me, it's not the warm midwestern charm. WashU people, and others who have an interest in academia, will no doubt want to read the whole thing. Yes, WashU is flush. When walking around certain parts of the campus, one is struck by the impressive new buildings. Even more are on the way up. Again, the one anomaly here is the econ department, but I won't get into that... I applaud WashU's use of merit aid. It makes sense to me. After all, as a former professor of mine put it, "you don't go to Harvard to learn from the professors; you go to Harvard to learn from the students." Thanks in part to merit aid, this is increasingly becoming true for WashU. Positions like that of Ms. McDonnell strike me as economically naive. Incentives work. By putting money towards incentives that attract high-quality students, universities are just using their resources efficiently. We're not talking about a zero-sum game where money that goes to a smart rich kid is taken away from a not-quite-so-smart poorer kid, the end. Raising the level of the student body improves the university, boosts fundraising, and, in the long run, makes more and more money available for even the not-so-smart poor kids. And the value of the education they, and everyone else, receives will be higher. Now, if the WashU administration could just set its mind to improving the econ department, then we'd be in business...

2003-12-20T00:04:00.000-06:00

may even apply to social "scientists"

I really like Stephen Weinberg. Here, in a short piece in Nature, he gives four golden rules for the scientist (via Michael Nielson). A sample:

[...] Another lesson to be learned, to continue using my oceanographic metaphor, is that while you are swimming and not sinking you should aim for rough water. When I was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1960s, a student told me that he wanted to go into general relativity rather than the area I was working on, elementary particle physics, because the principles of the former were well known, while the latter seemed like a mess to him. It struck me that he had just given a perfectly good reason for doing the opposite. Particle physics was an area where creative work could still be done. It really was a mess in the 1960s, but since that time the work of many theoretical and experimental physicists has been able to sort it out, and put everything (well, almost everything) together in a beautiful theory known as the standard model. My advice is to go for the messes — that's where the action is.

My third piece of advice is probably the hardest to take. It is to forgive yourself for wasting time. Students are only asked to solve problems that their professors (unless unusually cruel) know to be solvable. In addition, it doesn't matter if the problems are scientifically important — they have to be solved to pass the course. But in the real world, it's very hard to know which problems are important, and you never know whether at a given moment in history a problem is solvable. At the beginning of the twentieth century, several leading physicists, including Lorentz and Abraham, were trying to work out a theory of the electron. This was partly in order to understand why all attempts to detect effects of Earth's motion through the ether had failed. We now know that they were working on the wrong problem. At that time, no one could have developed a successful theory of the electron, because quantum mechanics had not yet been discovered. It took the genius of Albert Einstein in 1905 to realize that the right problem on which to work was the effect of motion on measurements of space and time. This led him to the special theory of relativity. As you will never be sure which are the right problems to work on, most of the time that you spend in the laboratory or at your desk will be wasted. If you want to be creative, then you will have to get used to spending most of your time not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientific knowledge. [...]

A couple of years ago, Weinberg came to WashU to give a nontechnical talk entitled: "Science and/or Religion". During the talk, he rejected "science and religion" in favor of "science or religion". Then he rejected something else...

2003-12-19T23:15:00.000-06:00

Feynman 1.15: The Special Theory of Relativity

I've read and half-understood several popularizations of relativity over the years, but here's a secret: the equations make it easier. At least Feynman's use of equations certainly does. This chapter sparked a mini-existential crisis in my blogging life. Why exactly am I doing these posts on Feynman's lectures? Do I really think I can communicate something of value to anyone who reads this? Is this purely for my own benefit, and if so, what is the best way to structure them? Should I broadly summarize? Should I tick off the main points, or just--in a more literary way--record my emotional and intellectual responses to each lecture, as if they were paintings or great poetry? Alas, these are questions that I would rather not face. And so these posts will remain inconsistent, mostly incoherent, and addressed towards both myself and anyone else who also has too much time on their hands. Now, to the lecture.

Certain lectures leap out from the others, and this one leaps the highest so far. It is the third chapter in Feynman's smaller book Six Not-So-Easy Pieces which is just a selection of six of the Feynman Lectures that deal with relativity. I would recommend that book to anyone who wants to get a taste for Feynman without biting off too much. I'm happy to report that I understood this lecture perfectly. This is a credit to Feynman, not to me. His thought is crystal clear. Nevertheless, I had to read this chapter three times carefully (so far, I have been reading each chapter twice) and I'm certain that when I read it again, something else will click that didn't before.

I will discuss only Feynman's historical account of how the contradiction in Newton's laws was identified and how Einstein's discovery came about. As we saw in previous lectures, to use Newton's words, "The motions of bodies included in a given space are the same among themselves, whether that space is at rest or moves uniformly forward in a straight line." The question is whether all of the laws of physics, not just Newton's, obey this principle of relativity. When Maxwell developed his equations of the electromagnetic field, it was observed that they did not satisfy this principle. In particular, the speed of light was the same whether it was emitted from a moving object or a stationary one. So if both Maxwell's and Newton's equations are correct, this has some interesting implications, such as: if the speed of light is always the same, then if you are traveling in a car at speed v and light is emitted from behind, then, as it passes you, the speed of light, c, should appear to you, the passenger in the car, as c-v. In this way you could determine the speed of the car, or any other moving object. Analogously, if we set up an experiment in the proper way, we should be able to determine the speed at which the earth is moving through space, the "ether wind". Experiments were done, the most famous of which was the Michelson-Morley experiment, and the surprising result was: the earth has no velocity. But we know that the earth revolves around the sun at around 15 miles/second. This illustrates the contradiction between Maxwell's equations and Newtonian dynamics. Where was the problem? At first the scientists thought Maxwell's equations, being young and unproven, had to be in error. But after much fiddling and experimentation, they emerged unscathed. Lorentz made an interesting discovery: under a certain transformation, later named the Lorentz transformation, Maxwell's equations satisfy the principle of relativity. These equations are really the crux; Feynman spends most of the lecture succeeding in making sense of them. Among Einstein's contributions was to observe that what should be done is to modify Newton's laws in such a way that they also satisfy the principle of relativity under a Lorentz transformation. He did this, and the only modification required was to make the mass of an object depend on it's velocity: m = m,o / [1 - (v^2/c^2)]^(1/2). In words, the mass of an object is equal to the mass at rest, m,o, multiplied by a scale factor which is very close to 1 for everyday speeds, but as the speed approaches that of light, c, blows up to infinity. Once you have this modification, the rest follows. Well, not exactly... Now you have to reimagine the universe.

I, for one, can't imagine a more accessible, yet rigorous, exposition of the special theory of relativity. If you are at all interested in this stuff, you should give it a try.

2003-12-19T22:19:00.000-06:00

progress made in the war on my ignorance

One pleasant byproduct of my recent rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four (see December 9, below) is that I now understand more of DeLong's post titles. For example: Oceania Has Always Been at War with Eurasia, Part CII. For more Orwellian commentary, see this Mark Kleiman post (also via DeLong).

2003-12-18T21:32:00.000-06:00

Bush's secret weapon

Idiot...

Ralph Nader, accused by some Democrats of helping elect President Bush by seeking the presidency as a Green Party candidate three years ago, said on Thursday he wants to make another White House bid in 2004 and will announce a decision next month...

It is a fact, Nader did help Bush win the election. And apparently he wants to do it again. Woe is me, woe is me...

2003-12-16T23:37:00.000-06:00

Nashville, architectural mecca

From the department of "I'm so ashamed, so ashamed..." Again, from Crooked Timber, Kieran Healey links to an "Eyesore of the Month" site which is run by a particularly cantankerous critic by the name of James Kunstler. Then comes this:

Incidentally, I had no idea that the Dark Tower of Barad-Dur--eye of Sauron and all--is now located in Nashville.

Since I'm not a Tolkienhead, I didn't get the joke. But clicking the link gave me the gist. Yes, there it is, the jewel of the Nashville skyline: the batman building. To be honest, although I never particularly liked the design, I had always thought it wasn't that bad. The thing is, in the context of the Nashville skyline, it isn't that bad; far uglier buildings surround it. So it is, in a sense, the right design choice given the location. A better-looking building would not have fit in. In almost every other city in the world, this design wouldn't have made it past the drawing board, but here in Music City, by Gawd, we like our buildings gaudy.

By the way, this Kunstler guy must be really miserable. There are literally millions of architectural eyesores in Tennessee alone. Horrific, cheap building is one of the costs of a dynamic, fast-growing economic landscape. We Americans seem to prefer convenience over beauty. I don't, but most of us do.

2003-12-16T23:03:00.000-06:00

Saddam stumps for Bush

Here's a very good article about some of the implications of Saddam's capture for American politics. First of all, I'm glad that he was captured alive, it really was the best of all possible resolutions. But still, I can't believe that he didn't shoot himself or go down in a hail of bullets. What a coward; he must have been wanting to postpone some kind of eternal damnation or something. If nothing else, the fact that he was taken alive is incontrovertible proof that he's insane. But more to the point, although Saddam's capture is undoubtedly good for everyone involved (excepting the Evil One himself, of course), it is especially good for Bush. And anything that is especially good for Bush is probably not so good for those trying to defeat Bush in next year's election. Really deep analysis, I know. The question is: "How will the Bush administration try to maximize the political benefit of Saddam's capture?" Don't forget, we're not constrained by facts or integrity here. From the Boston Globe:

The coming trial of Saddam Hussein will blanket world media with the daily evocation of decades of atrocities, potentially recasting the Iraq war from a campaign rationalized by the still-unproven threat of weapons of mass destruction to a moral undertaking justified by ending his regime's massive human rights abuses.

Had Hussein been killed by US soldiers, his final chapter would have made headlines for only a few days. But the improbable fact that he allowed himself to be taken alive offers President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain the opportunity to watch their critics squirm under a sustained flow of headlines that will emphasize the humanitarian argument for their war -- even if it was not the one they most often articulated before the fighting.

While the president yesterday offered only a pledge that the trial will be public and "stand international scrutiny," war supporters envision a televised tribunal, replete with the surviving victims and relatives of the dead offering riveting testimony of torture, massacre, and other personal encounters with horror -- thus obliging opponents to reconsider their assertions that it was a mistake to invade Iraq.

"Without ever appearing to be partisan, but merely by cataloging Saddam's numerous heinous crimes . . . it will become implicit in a lot of people's minds that this was a terrible person and that toppling and catching him was undoubtedly a moral and practical good," said John Hulsman of the conservative Heritage Foundation. "That undermines the moralism at the base of left-wing opposition to the president's Iraq policy. It hits them where they live." [...]

But watch out Bushters, you don't want 'em to dig too deep. Saddam's not the only one with blood on his hands...

There is the chance, however, the trial will not play smoothly for supporters of US policy. Depending on how far back the charges go and how much opportunity Hussein is given to defend himself, he could try to implicate the United States in his crimes, said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator of the antiwar protest coalition United for Peace and Justice.

"If all that comes out during the trial is the crimes that Saddam committed -- and I'm not saying those shouldn't come out -- then I think it could serve to buttress the Bush administration," she said. "But if it also comes out about the role of the US in setting up that regime, then I think there will be even greater questioning about why this war happened and why this occupation is going on and what the real interests of the US are at this point."

Yesterday, Iran said that it is preparing a criminal complaint over Hussein's war crimes from the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, in which about 300,000 Iranians were killed -- including many who died in chemical weapons attacks by the Iraqi Army. Iraq was supported by the United States -- and many other nations -- when Hussein invaded Iran the year after its radical Islamic revolution. According to the Arab-language television network Al-Jazeera, an Iranian spokesman said yesterday that after the Iraqis try their former dictator, an international court "should determine who equipped this dictator to disrupt our region." [...]

Read the whole thing, etc. Never forget: "The human rights justification 'was really a third and distant reason for entering into this war,' after purported weapons of mass destruction and links to the Al Qaeda terror network[.]"

2003-12-16T22:38:00.000-06:00

Feynman 1.14: Work and Potential Energy (conclusion)

One chapter was not sufficient for our introduction to work and potential energy, but first some wisdom:

In learning any subject of a technical nature where mathematics plays a role, one is confronted with the task of understanding and storing away in the memory a huge body of facts and ideas, held together by certain relationships which can be "proved" or "shown" to exist between them. It is easy to confuse the proof itself with the relationship which it establishes. Clearly, the important thing to learn and to remember is the relationship, not the proof. In any particular circumstance we can either say "it can be shown that" such and such is true, or we can show it. In almost all cases, the particular proof that is used is concocted, first of all, in such form that it can be written quickly and easily on the chalkboard or on paper, and so that it will be as smooth-looking as possible. Consequently, the proof may look deceptively simple, when in fact, the author might have worked for hours trying different ways of calculating the same thing until he has found the neatest way, so as to be able to show that it can be shown in the shortest amount of time! The thing to be remembered, when seeing a proof, is not the proof itself, but rather that it can be shown that such and such is true. Of course, if the proof involves some mathematical procedures or "tricks" that one has not seen before, attention should be given not to the trick exactly, but to the mathematical idea involved.

This reminds me of a professor I once had in a grad-level math class. He asked us if we knew such-and-such a theorem. Somebody said yes (it sure as hell wasn't me). Then he asked that somebody to prove it. The somebody then mumbled a few sentences of incoherence. The professor declared: "From now on, when we say we know something, we mean we know how to prove it." I said to myself: I know very little mathematics.

Most of this lecture is a deepening of the ideas that were presented in the last lecture, so I won't spend much space on it. All forces are conservative, that much we should know. And when a force acts on an object, work only occurs when the force is applied in the direction of motion; no work is done if a force is at right angles to the motion. I also need to learn (Relearn? I passed calc 3 way back when) line integrals. When we're computing the work done by a force, integrating force over a path, we're talking line integrals.

2003-12-15T23:35:00.000-06:00

gem of a post

One of my favorite bloggers, Daniel Davies, has an excellent post up on Crooked Timber. The subject is a familiar one to economist types, like myself: the use of math in economics. The first year (years... decade?) of grad school in econ is often spent wrestling with math at many different levels: at one level we have to learn the math to get by, but on a deeper level we have to philosophically accept it--we have to either buy into the idea, or not, that most of the math in good economics is not merely a sadistic, obfuscating appendage, but actually central to what makes modern economics so powerful. But there are plenty of economists, not all of them savory, who do practice les maths pour les maths. Davies, sensibly, is not gung ho one way or the other. Here's the main point:

The level of mathematics used in most printed academic journal articles is, I have come to conclude, about right. The point is this; economics is, as Deirdre McCloskey points out regularly, a form of rhetoric. At its heart, it is and has always been about the construction of a certain kind of argument, which is meant to be persuasive over human action. I state this without argument, in the knowledge that many people at work in the field believe that they are involved in a project of genuine scientific enquiry. I feel no argument of mine is ever going to carry the day on this issue, so if anyone wants to make the case for economics as a science, I’ll simply respond thus: “Sir, I gracefully concede that you yourself and your department are engaged in a value-neutral quest for scientific facts about the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. I apologise for having suggested otherwise. But would you at least grant me that the description ‘A form of rhetoric … the construction of arguments aimed to be persuasive over human action’ is a decent description of what all those other bastards are up to?”

And the point I’m trying to make is this; in the construction of arguments of this kind, there are certain kinds of mistake which it is fearfully easy to make. It’s easy to spot particular benefits and miss the fact that their counterparts are costs elsewhere in the system. To come up with arguments which, if true, would imply that people systematically allowed others to impoverish them without changing their behaviour. To miss the fact that your model requires the build-up of debts forever that never get repaid. Etc, etc. The bestiary of really bad economic commentary is full of all sorts of logical howlers. And the good thing about building mathematical models is that, in general, it acts as a form of double-entry book-keeping, to make sure that, if you’ve followed the rules of the game, your economic argument will not have any of these most common and most egregious flaws. It doesn’t mean that it won’t be bad or misleading for other reasons, of course, but it does mean that you’ll at least be saying something that makes sense, if only to other experts.

It could be worth your while to read the whole thing. Davies' writing alone is worth the read. For those of you who give a damn about economics and have the time, check out Davies' links to the Krugman stuff. Krugman boils the debate down to a fundamental conflict between the literati and the nerds. (Keynesians versus neo-classicals?) Can it be that I'm a nerd? I've had to fight this label almost all my life. Why else would I suffer through the hell that is high school football? The South ain't no place to be a nerd, that's why we so forward thinkin' and all. Ok, I'm tumbling off topic, time to go to bed...

2003-12-14T22:57:00.000-06:00

Feynman 1.13: Work and Potential Energy (A)

Time to write... Let's see how many schizophrenic typos I can avoid... Oh, by the way, happy Saddamday, everyone; I hope yours was better than mine. The fatigue from the chemo is especially bad this cycle.

This was the most difficult lecture for me so far. We already know, from the principle of the conservation of energy, that the kinetic energy of an object plus that object's potential energy should be constant. Yes, but can we show this directly from Newton's second law, f = ma? Of course... Kinetic energy = 1/2 mv^2. Potential energy = (say we have an object some distance h off the ground) mgh. Differentiate these two terms and notice that for the time rate of change of kinetic energy we get mv(dv/dt). Now, apply the appropriate case of Newton's second law, namely F = ma = m(dv/dt) = -mg. Plug in that mother and we see that the time rate of change of kinetic energy is equal to -mgv. When we differentiate the potential energy term, mgh, we simply get mg(dh/dt), or mgv. Add them together, and voila, 0.

The above is the first, and easiest, example that Feynman considers. Some terminology: What is power? Power is the rate of change of kinetic energy. This is equal to the force acting on an object times (dot product) the velocity of an object. What is work? Work is power x time. Or, equivalently, power is work done per second. We measure energy in joules (really newton-meters), we measure power in joules per second (watts), and work is measured in watts x time (kilowatt-hours, for example). Fine.

Suppose we have an object that orbits around a sun. How much work is done when the planet orbits the sun? None. In fact, the orbit doesn't even have to be a nice ellipse for this to be true. Suppose we have a crazy orbit with many different steps each of which is either a move along an arc (equal radius) around the sun or a move radially, directly towards the sun, and all the steps together make up any pattern whatsoever so long as we end up where we started. In the first step suppose we go directly towards the sun. Clearly, some work is done here. Now suppose we shift over along an arc. Here no work is done at all. Why? Because the only force, gravity, is acting perpendicular to the motion: potential energy has not changed, we are still at the same distance from the sun. So we go along like this, and if we integrate all of the little radial steps towards and away from the sun, then we find that, if we end up where we started, that the total work done is zero. We can extend this to any smooth orbit, since any smooth orbit can be approximated however closely we desire by nice little triangles that use the above logic.

Now the good stuff. Suppose, instead of just particles, we want to know how the kinetic energy of an object changes when we have some sheet of matter of uniform density. Suppose, for simplicity, it extends out infinitely in each direction. Well, it can be shown that the gravitational force acting on some object P some distance a away from the sheet of material is independent of the distance a. How is this? It makes sense that if we're closer to something then gravity acts stronger. But consider the angles, my friend. When we're very close to the sheet of material, only the matter directly in front of us attracts forcefully. Most of the matter is off at an oblique angle, and thus does not attract as strongly. As we back away from the sheet, the attraction from the matter that lies generally straight ahead diminishes in exact proportion to the strength gained by the more favorable angles of the matter off to the sides. There is a cone within which the matter attracts us, and outside of which it doesn't really attract us. The further we are away, the more matter lies within the cone, but the less that matter attracts, and vice versa. Feynman uses this idea to prove a very interesting result. Throughout this book so far we have implicitly assumed that we can idealize the earth as a point of mass rather than some big ball. We have assumed that, in terms of forces, they are equivalent. Are they really? Yes. Using the same logic, and a few mathematical tricks, he shows that the potential energy of a particle a certain distance away from the center of a thin shell (sphere) of mass m is the same as the potential energy of the same particle at the same distance away from a point with mass m. Of course, the earth can be characterized as thin shells within thin shells all the way down. As far as the physics goes, It might as well be a point.

2003-12-14T13:50:00.000-06:00

recently read: Orwell

Finished up a wonderful Orwell novel this morning, Burmese Days. Unlike Down and Out in Paris and London, this is a proper novel, not a nonfiction travel account. Highly recommended.

2003-12-13T20:12:00.000-06:00

from the department of borrowed eloquence...

Last month, Will Baude at Crescat Sententia posted this excerpt from Steven Landsburg's book, Fair Play:

Protectionism is wrong because it robs individuals of a basic human right: the freedom to choose one's trading partners. The freedom, for example, to buy any car, at any price, from any willing seller.

But protectionism is wrong for another reason. It's a reason that my daughter understands and Pat Buchanan doesn't, and it sits at the core of what it means to be a decent human being. My daughter knows that all people are created equal, and that nobody's right to prosper should be altered by being born on the wrong side of an imaginary national boundary line. It would never occur to her to care more about an autoworker in Detroit than about an autoworker in Tokyo or Mexico City.

Forget all that stuff about how much it costs American consumers to save the job of an American worker. Suppose Buchanan were right; suppose he did have some miracle formula that could save American jobs at zero cost to consumers. His views would still be repugnant, because they start from the presumption that an American worker is more worthy of protection than a foreign worker. What moral foundation could support such an ugly division of humanity?

Buchanan has frequently been accused of racism, and I happen to think he's suffered a lot of bum raps on that score. But there is poetic justice in those bum raps, because his simplistic nationalism is every bit as ugly as racism, and in exactly the same way. Encouraging people to "buy American" is no different in principle from encouraging people to "buy white".

We need to care about others. We need to care about those who are close to us, and we need to care about strangers. But to care more about strangers who happen to be American than about strangers who happen to be Japanese or Mexican is an expression of the basest and most wrong-headed instincts that a person can have. Thank God my nine-year-old knows better.

Take that you righteously indignant non-free tradin' protectionist hypocritical xenophobic leftist non-Adam Smith understandin' Michael Mooronomical America firstin' onward Christian soldier marchin' right-wing Anne Coulterin' burn-me-at-the-stake-traitor-that-I-am scared witless nationalist bastards.

2003-12-12T21:38:00.000-06:00

recently read: Orwell

Yesterday, while relaxing with my Taxol in the cancer clinic, I finished Orwell's "travel account", Down and Out in Paris and London. A young Orwell describes his experiences living among the destitute in, yes, Paris and London. The title really says it all. There were several passages that I would like to quote, but I will choose just two (p. 120-121):

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? [...] From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. "Anything," he thinks, "any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose." He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and--in the shape of rich men--is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as "smart" hotels.

And further on, a related point (p. 174):

Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?--for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars, fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a business man, getting his living, like other business men, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

Lots of good stuff in this book. It's funny, too. I recommend it.

2003-12-12T21:05:00.000-06:00

Feynman 1.12: Characteristics of Force

This was probably the most difficult chapter for me so far. What does Feynman mean by characteristics of force? Take Newton's second law, for example. Is F = ma just a tautology?

The real content of Newton's laws is this: that the force is supposed to have some independent properties, in addition to the law F = ma; but the specific independent properties that the force has were not completely described by Newton or by anybody else, and therefore the physical law F = ma is an incomplete law. It implies that if we study the mass times the acceleration and call the product the force, i.e., if we study the characteristics of force as a program of interest, then we shall find that forces have some simplicity; the law is a good program for analyzing nature, it is a suggestion that the forces will be simple.

One property of a force that we've already seen is gravitation. This chapter, by discussing the different kinds of forces, is a "kind of completion of Newton's laws." First we learn about friction. Here's an interesting point:

Formerly the mechanism of...friction was thought to be very simple, that the surfaces were merely full of irregularities and the friction originated in lifting the slider over the bumps; but this cannot be, for there is no loss of energy in that process, whereas power is in fact consumed. The mechanism of power loss is that as the slider snaps over the bumps, the bumps deform and then generate waves and atomic motions and, after a while, heat, in the two bodies.

What was new to me, and at first a little confusing, is Feynman's discussion of fields. At first this seems like a needless complication. Rather than just talking about a force acting between objects, we separate the force into two parts: one object creates a "condition" at the particular point in space where the other object is located, this is the field, and the force is some number associated with the second object multiplied by the number associated with the field. For example, the electrical force between two objects would be the field E (bold face indicates vectors) multiplied by the electrical charge associated with the second object. Or, with gravitation, the first object creates a gravitational field at the location of the second object and the resulting force is the mass of the second object times this field, which Feynman labels C. This separation becomes useful when we have many different forces acting on an object. As in the example of planets in a solar system, gravitational fields and electrical fields may be summed together. We then simply multiply the mass or charge of the object in question by the sum of the fields. Feynman closes the section on fields with a 'take it on faith' discussion of magnetism. Very curious and very incomplete; I won't reproduce it here.

The most interesting part of this lecture is at the very end, pseudo forces. In the previous chapter, we learned about symmetry in physics: Newton's laws are invariant under rotations and translation. In fact, even if we have a coordinate system that is moving at a constant speed with respect to another, where it is known that Newton's laws are valid, then the laws are valid for the moving coordinate system (Galilean relativity). But what if the second coordinate system is accelerating with respect to the valid system? Now we have pseudo forces. In order for Newton's laws to work in the accelerating coordinate system, one must take into account the accleration of the coordinate system itself. Think of centrifugal forces. If we are spinning around in a centrifuge, then there is something funny going on that does not occur when we are standing still. These pseudo forces are always proportional to mass. Just like gravity. Einstein noticed that it is impossible, at a given point, to distinguish between pseudo forces and gravity. Is it possible that gravitation is just a pseudo force? Maybe, but to think about things in this way, we need to abandon Euclidian geometry. The true geometry of the world is not Euclidian geometry. As an example of thinking about changing the geometry, imagine someone who believes they live on a two dimensional plane, but they actually live on the surface of a sphere. If they shoot out an object along the ground (assume no forces are acting on the object) then this object appears to travel in a straight line, but it actually curves around the sphere. If they shoot out another object in a similar manner, but in a different direction, then this object also appears to travel in a straight line. Given their apparent geometry, the observer expects the two objects to continue to diverge forever. But if they measure properly, what they find is that, with time, the two objects actually become closer together. It appears that they attract each other. But in fact, they are not attracting each other at all, "there is just something 'weird' about this geometry. This particular illustration does not describe corrrectly the way in which Euclid's geometry is 'weird', but it illustrates that if we distort the geometry sufficiently it is possible that all gravitation is related in some ways to pseudo forces; that is the general idea of the Einsteinian theory of gravitation." Lots more to come on these topics, I'm sure.

2003-12-11T21:37:00.000-06:00

real world, here I come

Well not quite, it's only grad school after all. Back in Nashville now, all chemoed up, as I like to say. My doctor agreed with my interpretation of the scan results, and thought that it would be a good idea for me to return to school in January. Ochenh horrorshow. Of course this means responsibilities, and work. This cancer deal isn't all bad... I've been on vacation for about nine months now. Granted there were extended periods of pain and suffering during this vacation, but at least I didn't have to do any work. The worst situation to be in is to know that you're going off a cliff and yet you still have to grade fifty problem sets by the next morning. Returning in January is a risk. I started the fall '02 semester and had to pull out after a month. I started the spring '03 semester and had to pull out after a month and a half. The difference this time is that my doctor believes it's quite likely that I can look forward to at least six more months of stability or better. Before the previous semesters there was far more uncertainty.

As for the trip, it was almost ludicrously routine. Interesting events: (1) waiting outside at the BWI Amtrak station yesterday; the weather was cool, damp, and dreary. I was thinking how perverse it was for me to be enjoying it so much; (2) loquacious Philly cab driver spends ten-minute ride ranting about how the city shuts down with the slightest hint of snow. His credibility is shaken when, to back up his claim, he resorts to a 13-year-old anecdote about how kids got out of school for "nuthin! nuthin!" when a blizzard that had been forecast completely missed the city. (3) This trip was the 'just in time' trip. When I arrived at the Nashville airport economy parking lot I had to run to hop on the shuttle; if I had missed it, I would have lost at least 10 precious minutes. After arriving in Baltimore airport, I walk right up to the Amtrak shuttle; I usually have to wait at least 10 minutes. I did have to wait for 30 minutes for the Amtrak train to Philadelphia; not quite optimal. Today, immediately after getting chemo, I walk right on to the subway train to take me to the 30th street station. I then only have to wait 15 minutes for the next train to Baltimore airport. As I arrive in the Baltimore airport Amtrak station, I see the shuttle waiting at the stop. I break into a dead run, thinking for sure that my string of luck would continue. The bus takes off and, sprinting, I parallel it for about 50 yards before falling behind. I have to wait 10 minutes for the next shuttle. After arriving at Baltimore airport I'm able to jump on the 6:00 flight back to Nashville; it's 5:35. After arriving in Nashville this evening, I hustle off the plane and through the airport. I walk right on to the economy parking shuttle, just in time. (4) I'm behind a few guys waiting to get on the shuttle to go from the Amtrak station to Baltimore airport today. We have to wait for a lot of passengers to get off before we get on. From the bus, I hear some guy, who is not carrying that much, saying "Isn't somebody going to help her?" I then notice this very pretty young woman in front of him struggling to carry two heavy bags down the stairs of the bus. The girl finally makes it down off the bus, unaided, followed by the guy. The guy then says in everyone's general direction "geez, one of you guys could have at least helped her out." One of the 'guilty' mumbles back, "fuck you". The guy from the bus pretends not to notice. There then occurs a slight augmentation of my big block of misanthropy.

Well they sure corrected the problem with the Bayer pill. I am now the proud possessor of a 4 1/2-week supply. I'm really a fiend with this stuff, can't live without it. Cycle six (I appear to use the words cycle, course and round interchangeably) is scheduled to begin Tuesday, January 6. This is a little later than usual because of the conflict with New Year's Day. No sweat though, not with all these damn Bayer pills. I should be able to transfer to Vanderbilt at the beginning of cycle seven, which should be in late January. School starts in mid-January. 'Tis all.

2003-12-10T08:47:00.000-06:00

good news

Platelet count du jour: 108,000! Fantastico. I'm flying up to Philadelphia this afternoon. Hopefully this is a turning point in my treatment. The low platelet counts have slowed me down so far, turning what should have been three-week cycles into four-week cycles. Now, for the first time, my platelets are okay after only three weeks. It was the exercise, I'm sure of it. When I get back from my trip I will continue to push my body and get stronger. If we could continue with three-week cycles from here on out, that would literally shave months off the time required to become disease-free.

2003-12-09T22:34:00.000-06:00

recently reread: Orwell

Over the weekend I reread Orwell's 1984. The 're-' is actually very faint here, because the first reading took place when I was around twelve years old. For fourteen years after that I fooled myself into believing that I had 'read'--read in the sense of understood--1984. Like hell I did. This is a book that, as Douglas North says, "should be read every four or five years". For me, simple prole that I am, it was long overdue.

If only 1984 had become irrelevant. If only we denizens of the twenty-first century could say that it should only be read for historical reasons. On the contrary, it should be read now more than ever. Instead of "victory" gin, we have "freedom" fries. Instead of "freedom=slavery" we have the Patriot Act. Our government has learned Orwell very well: 2+2 can equal 5, and the policy of continuous war is indeed very useful in consolidating power. It is a shame that many who read 1984 lack the imagination to apply Orwell's warnings to both sides of the political spectrum, not just the left. Perhaps we need an update. The year 1984 has long since passed us by; we need a new prophet to carry on Orwell's crusade against tyranny. I know just the man for the job. Maybe, in the not too distant future, we can look forward to Paul Krugman's new dystopian novel, 2034. The symmetry would be beautiful, and frightening.

2003-12-09T14:15:00.000-06:00

armchair radiology

Well, the scan results are in. I would describe them as "pretty good". They are almost exactly what I predicted in the December 5 post below: some disease is stable, some has shrunk, some has increased (though not too much), and there is no new disease. They are far from the best case; in fact they are not definitive enough for me to say right now that I will return to school in January, though I almost surely will. I need to discuss the results with my doctor before going ahead with the decision. But they are even further from the worst case. It is still quite reasonable to say that what disease growth there was occurred because of the two four-week cycles with only three-weeks of the Bayer drug. Since the last scans, October 7, there have been twenty days when I was not on the Bayer drug, while there should have only been six. During these ten-day no-Bayer drug stretches, I felt a part of the tumor on my neck grow. This problem will soon be corrected, and hopefully all of the tumor growth will stop completely. Now the details...

There are "innumerable" small lesions in the liver, but they have not significantly changed since last time. The largest lesion in the liver, however, has increased from 1.7 x 1.3 cm to 2.1 x 1.7 cm: bad. A lesion in my lower back has changed from 2.9 x 1.4 cm to 2.6 x 1.5 cm: okay. Another tumor in my abdomen which had increased dramatically from 1.8 x 3.2 cm to 4.3 x 3.3 cm in between the Aug 1 and the Oct 7 scans, has now decreased to 3.6 x 2.5 cm: bravo! My trophy tumor, the big daddy, measuring 6.6 x 4.4 cm in the Oct 7 scans and located in the colon, has decreased to 5.8 x 3.6 cm: bravo! bravo! (maniacal cheering). The relatively new tumor in my right groin has increased from 2.1 x 1.7 cm to 2.4 x 2.1 cm: *sigh*. And finally, the subcutaneous tumor in my lower back, the one that I can monitor myself, is "essentially" unchanged at 2.8 x 1.9 cm (it has slightly shrunk from 3.0 x 2.1 cm).

Alas, this could be the last time that I review the scans and results on my own. When I switch to Vanderbilt, I won't have any reason to get the disk from the film library; I will just hear the results from the doctor. I don't think I'm going to go out of my way to see the scans and results myself. While the results sound very precise, radiology is an inexact science. There are a lot of discrepancies between the October 7 and the December 5 results. The October 7 radiologist didn't even see the tumor in my right groin. In my opinion, the December 5 radiologist is clearly superior, not only in competency, but also in literary style. But all that really matters to me is whether I'm improving or not, and my doctor can tell me that better than the radiologist's report.

I'm not really feeling any strong emotions right now. The strong emotions come when you get unexpected news; these results were about what I expected. But the news was good, and I am pleased. My time horizon now extends somewhat farther out into the near future than it did before.

2003-12-09T13:08:00.000-06:00

passable platelets

The last time I was in Philadelphia we had to adjust the scheduling a bit for cycle five. Today--three weeks after the start of cycle four--should have been the day for chemo and the start of cycle 5--platelet permitting, of course. But my doctor is out of town today, and with the new scan results, I have to see the doctor when I go up. So this Thursday is when I am supposed to get chemo and see the doctor--again, platelet permitting. This morning, my platelets were a surprisingly high 104,000. If they had been really low like last time, I would have just waited until next Monday to try again. But now I will go in tomorrow for another blood test, and if the platelets are still above 100,000, travel to Philadelphia in the afternoon. The exercise over the last few weeks appears to have worked. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to exercise much this past week because of all the travel and bad weather (oh yeah, don't forget laziness), but I will definitely take a nice, long walk this afternoon and tomorrow morning.

2003-12-05T13:31:00.000-06:00

scans are done

CT scans were done this morning. I should get the results this coming Tuesday. As I wrote a while back, these scans are very important: they will tell us how well this treatment is working. I would expect--given how I'm feeling and how the tumors that I can monitor look--that some of the disease is stable, and some of the disease has probably shrunk. I wouldn't be surprised if there's also disease that has grown a little bit, but not too much. I wouldn't expect any new tumors. Based on the scan results, I will make a decision about whether or not to return to school in January.

2003-12-04T21:33:00.000-06:00

Feynman 1.11: Vectors

Time to learn about symmetry in physics: "Professor Hermann Weyl has given this definition of symmetry: a thing is symmetrical if one can subject it to a certain operation and it appears exactly the same after the operation." This is more general than normal, everyday symmetry, but it does cover the case when you have a vase which is left-right symmetric: you can subject it to a 180-degree rotation about it's vertical axis and it still appears the same. What we learn in this chapter is that certain physical laws, including Newton's Laws, are symmetric in the sense that they are invariant under translations and rotations. If you build a machine in one location and then build an exact duplicate in a different location then they will function in exactly the same manner. If they don't then you have overlooked something. An interesting implication of this is that there is no mathematical "origin" of the universe. We can't place the origin, (0,0,0) of some x,y,z axes at the exact center of the universe and then measure everything using that frame of reference. Why? Namely because we could never know when we have the axes at the center of the universe; there is no way to distinguish it. In physics, it doesn't matter where the origin is.

Most of this chapter is spent developing some of the math that will be used throughout the rest of the course. Vectors, of course. Since I am quite familiar with vectors already, my post is ending............now!

2003-12-04T21:09:00.000-06:00

in Atlanta

I was in Atlanta for the last couple of days visiting my sister and niece, hence the lack of blogging. I lived in Atlanta in '95-'96 so I know the place all too well; don't like it one bit. The city is a big sprawling mess. One of the few good things about Atlanta, lots and lots of trees, actually contributes to a claustrophobic effect: there are very few decent views anywhere in the city. But the bottom line is, I don't like cars so much, and the evolution of Atlanta was driven almost exclusively by the automobile, not the pedestrian. Public transit is worthless. There are alarmingly few sidewalks. Everyone seems to drive either an SUV or a full-sized pick-up. Not my kind of town.

I'm off to St. Louis tomorrow. Next week the platelet melodrama begins anew, so this weekend could be my last chance to visit "home" for a few weeks. I'm feeling good, except for this strange pain and swelling in my left arm. It's probably nothing, but inconvenient nonetheless. It's kind of near where the chemo IV was, so I'm thinking that it's just an adverse effect from the infusion. Hopefully it will go away in a few days. I hope it's not lymphodema, that would be annoying. It is in the arm where I had the two surgeries, but I had thought that lymphodema was most likely to occur soon after surgery, not one year. Besides, my hand isn't swollen or anything, just my upper forearm. Oh well.

2003-12-01T13:53:00.000-06:00

scrapping the steel tariffs

In order to avert a trade war (we already have plenty of wars on our hands), Bush will drop most of his dastardly steel tariffs sometime this week. Good... but it's better not to be so stupid as to institute such policies in the first place.

2003-11-30T16:49:00.000-06:00

recently read: Bellow

I have a weakness for Chicago-style conservatism. This is not to say that I buy into it, but the no-nonsensicality of it--or attempted no-nonsensicality, for we can never entirely escape nonsense--appeals to me. This morning I finished Saul Bellow's novel-tribute Ravelstein. In the front of the book is the standard publisher's disclaimer: "This is a work of fiction. Names, characters...any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead...is entirely coincidental." Ok, sure... Ravelstein is Allan Bloom, the professor of classics at the University of Chicago who died in 1992. In the late eighties Bloom wrote the bestselling book, Closing of the American Mind, and instantly became the Right's showcase intellectual. Today's Right is not worthy of him; not that they would want him: he was an atheist, homosexual, and died of AIDS. (He hit the trifecta, as Bush would say.) The last two bits of information were brought to light only upon publication of Ravelstein in 2000. Ravelstein is an easy read; Bellow focuses on the last months of the life of Bloom the man, not the academic.

I read Closing of the American Mind when I was an undergraduate, not for any course or anything, just on my own. Most of the philosophical argumentation flew over my head but I think I got the main point: the humanities departments in America are "sick", having been infected by German philosophers (I'm being deliberately vague here); the sickness, or weakness, of these educators--those who transmit "culture" down the generations--has contributed to the growing dominance of the non-humanities departments--science, engineering, economics, etc.; after decades, the result is a materially wealthy, but culturally impoverished America. As an economist, I should know better than to think about such things or take seriously those who do, but it can be entertaining. Amid the leveling that is cultural relativism, the wholesale demolition of values and absolutes, it's refreshing to come across someone with the confidence of Bloom. 'Learn life from Plato and Rousseau! Listen to Mozart!', he would shout from the rooftops. How many academics worth anything could get away with writing something like this?

In short, life [as a result of rock music] is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbation fantasy.

This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some would prefer to regard it as such. The continuing
Allan Bloom
exposure to rock music is a reality, not one confined to a particular class or type of child. One need only ask first-year university students what music they listen to, how much of it and what it means to them, in order to discover that the phenomenon is universal in America, that it begins in adolescence or a bit before and continues through the college years. It is the youth culture and, as I have so often insisted, there is now no other countervailing nourishment for the spirit. Some of this culture's power comes from the fact that it is so loud. It makes conversation impossible, so that much of friendship must be without the shared speech that Aristotle asserts is the essence of friendship and the only true common ground. With rock, illusion of shared feelings, bodily contact and grunted formulas, which are supposed to contain so much meaning beyond speech, are the basis of association. None of this contradicts going about the business of life, attending classes and doing the assignments for them. But the meaningful inner life is with the music.

This phenomenon is both astounding and indigestible, and is hardly noticed, routine and habitual. But it is of historic proportions that a society's best young and their best energies should be so occupied. People of future civilizations will wonder at this and find it as incomprehensible as we do the caste system, witch-burning, harems, cannibalism and gladiatorial combats.

Ah, the good old days, when kids listened to rock music.

Saul Bellow

Now popular culture has evolved to the point where rap dominates. <mytwocents>Popular culture is partly a race to the bottom. One can only expect the music that appeals to the most people to appeal to the basest instincts. But at some point you have to hit rock bottom. I think that mainstream rap is that rock bottom. Once you hit bottom, there's no place to go but up, so I actually think it's good that today rap dominates: popular music can only get better from here. Do I think people shouldn't listen to rap? No. Would I prefer that they listen to something else? Yes.</mytwocents> This passage on rock music gives you a pretty good taste of Bloom the cranky intellectual.

Bellow's portrait shows Bloom/Ravelstein in a different light. He is dying, and thus vulnerable; it's hard to tyrannize when you yourself will soon be no more. What Bellow hits again and again is Ravelstein's love: love for himself (il va sans dire), for friends, and for intimates. Not necessarily for family, Ravelstein got a poor draw in that regard ('Couldn't even make Phi Beta Kappa', rails his father), but for those who are worthy of his love.

Without its longings your soul was a used inner tube maybe good for one summer at the beach, nothing more. Spirited men and women, the young above all, were devoted to the pursuit of love. By contrast the bourgeois was dominated by fears of violent death. There, in the briefest form possible, you have a sketch of Ravelstein's most important preoccupations.

If you want to learn more about this grumpy old conservative, I would recommend that you read Closing of the American Mind first, then Ravelstein. The two together give a fairly complete picture. I'm not qualified to discuss Bloom's philosophy, but the implications of a lot of the stuff he spouts are not realistic. I don't think students today should learn Greek and spend as much time reading Plato as studying math. I, for one, never cared for learning "culture" in the classroom; better to read it, listen to it, live it, on your own. Nevertheless, he was an interesting character, and we can never have too many interesting characters.

2003-11-30T09:58:00.000-06:00

Wal-Martians

This could only happen in America:

A mob of shoppers rushing for a sale on DVD players trampled the first woman in line and knocked her unconscious as they scrambled for the shelves at a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

Patricia VanLester had her eye on a $29 DVD player, but when the siren blared at 6 a.m. Friday announcing the start to the post-Thanksgiving sale, the 41-year-old was knocked to the ground by the frenzy of shoppers behind her.

"She got pushed down, and they walked over her like a herd of elephants," said VanLester's sister, Linda Ellzey. "I told them, 'Stop stepping on my sister! She's on the ground!"' [...]

Paramedics called to the store found VanLester unconscious on top of a DVD player, surrounded by shoppers seemingly oblivious to her, said Mark O'Keefe, a spokesman for EVAC Ambulance. [...]

$29 for a DVD player? Hey, that's not bad!

2003-11-29T20:16:00.000-06:00

Feynman 1.10: Conservation of Momentum

As you can see, I'm experimenting with these images. Let's see, where were we... So we have the first two of Newton's laws: inertia and force equals mass times acceleration. Newton's third law is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction; or momentum is conserved. If we have two objects, this just means that the derivative with respect to time of the sum of the momenta equals zero.

Alternatively we can look at things from the viewpoint of what Feynman calls Galilean relativity. Galilean relativity asserts that the laws of physics look the same whether we're standing still or moving with a uniform speed in a straight line. This perplexed me as a very young child: when I tossed a ball in the back seat of a moving car, I thought it should have flown back in my face, rather than dropping in my lap as if we were standing still. Suppose we have two gliders of equal mass gliding frictionlessly (on a physics lab air trough) toward each other at the same velocity. What happens when they collide (assuming it's not an elastic collision)? By symmetry, they should stop, and experimentally they do. Makes sense. Now suppose that, using the same two gliders, one is traveling at v and the other is at rest. What velocity should we expect when they collide and slide off together? We can use what we already know. Imagine we are traveling at the speed v/2 and observing what's going on. Then the first glider appears to be moving at the speed v/2 and the second appears to be moving at the speed -v/2. Since they are of the same mass we know that when they collide, they should stop. And they do, or so it appears to us; their actually post-collision speed is the same as ours, v/2. Gallilean relativity.

There is some discussion of elastic collisions, billiard ball type stuff, and then an interesting little remark about rocket propulsion. When a rocket engine ignites, it ejects a small mass m, with a very high velocity V. After this, by Newton's third law, the rocket, with mass R, should be moving at a speed of v. This velocity is simply v = Vm/M. "Rocket propulsion is essentially the same as the recoil of a gun: there is no need for any air to push against."

Finally, our first hint of relativity, Einstein's relativity, that is. In Newton's universe, mass is constant; in our universe, we have the following equation m = m,o / [(1 - v^2/c^2)^1/2], where m,o (m sub o) is the mass of the object at rest, v is the velocity, and c is the speed of light. For slow speeds, the actual mass is very close to that of the object at rest. But as we approach the speed of light, the mass blows up. The implications for the theory in this chapter are straightforward: we just replace our original m with the above equation.

2003-11-29T14:40:00.000-06:00

recently read: Proust

Today I completed the 3rd volume of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Le Côté de Guermantes. I would be lying if I said that I loved it. I enjoyed the previous volume, A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs, far more. The protagonist is back in Paris (for the most part) and immersed in the strange world that is pre-WWI, aristo-Parisien salon life. You are either for Dreyfuss, or you are against him. Here is a very nice excerpt:

Is it because we relive our past years not in their continuous sequence, day by day, but in a memory focused upon the coolness or sunshine of some morning or afternoon suffused with the shade of some isolated and enclosed setting, immovable, arrested, lost, remote from all the rest, and thus the changes gradually wrought not only in the world outside but in our dreams and our evolving character (changes which have imperceptibly carried us through life from one time to another, wholly different) are eliminated, that, if we relive another memory taken from a different year, we find between the two, thanks to lacunae, to vast stretches of oblivon, as it were the gulf of a difference in altitude or the incompatibility of two divergent qualities of breathed atmosphere and surrounding coloration? But between the memories that had now come to me in turn of Combray, of Doncières and of Rivebelle, I was conscious at that moment of much more than a distance in time, of the distance that there would be between two separate universes whose substance was not the same.

I thought my rusty French would continue to improve as I read, but Guermantes was no easier for me in terms of language than Jeunes Filles. Nevertheless, I'm glad I stuck with it. I am left with a vague and heavy awareness of what happened in the book; as much a sense of the "atmosphere"--physical, social, and psychological--as knowledge of the 'events' that took place.

2003-11-28T13:47:00.000-06:00

Feynman 1.9: Newton's Laws of Dynamics

This was a wonderful lecture. It gives me a much better perspective on Newton's immense contribution to science:

Before Newton's time, the motions of things like the planets were a mystery, but after Newton there was complete understanding. Even the slightest deviations from Kepler's laws, due to the perturbations of the planets, were computable. The motions of pendulums, oscillators with springs and weights in them, and so on, could all be analyzed completely after Newton's laws were enunciated. So it is with this chapter...

Newton's first law is a restatement of Galileo's principle of inertia. Here is Newton's second law: "the time-rate-of-change of a quantity called momentum is proportional to the force". Momentum is, of course, mass times velocity. Mass, it is important to remember, is not the same thing as weight. The weight of a person would vary according to whether they were on earth or some other planet, but the mass would remain the same. Mass is a measurement of inertia; as Feynman writes, it is the amount of force required to keep a body in a circle as we swing it around on a string at a certain speed. In physics, velocity is different from speed. Velocity is a vector, which has a magnitude and a direction, while speed is simply the magnitude of this vector. Acceleration is also a vector. A more familiar way to state Newton's second law is force equals mass times acceleration.

Feynman outlines a technique which uses Newton's second law to describe simple motions. Suppose we want to describe the motion of a planet around the sun. If the planet is located at a distance r from the sun, then the force acting on the planet is equal to GMm/r^2, where G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the sun, and m is the mass of the earth. From Newton's second law we know that this force is equal to ma. In a two-dimensional plane with the sun at (0,0) and the planet at (x,y) we can resolve the equation into its two components, F,x (F sub x) and F,y, and similarly into a,x and a,y,. We want to find these accelerations in terms of x and y or, equivalently, x,y and r. So F is a vector pointing toward (0,0) from (x,y); F,x and F,y point toward the y and x axes, respectively. Using the properties of similar triangles, F,x/F! (F! is the magnitude of F) = x/r. F! is simply GMm/r^2. Which yields F,x = -GMmx/r^3, and symmetrically, F,y = -GMmy/r^3. Also note that r = (x^2 + y^2)^(1/2). Now, returning to Newton's second law, we know that a,x = -GMx/r^3 and a,y = -GMy/r^3. Using these three equations and the initial position and velocity of the planet we can, numerically, describe the planet's motion.

We start at time 0 and proceed in 0.1 second (or whatever) chunks of time. At time 0 we have the initial conditions. The x-position at time 0.1 will be (approximately) the x-position at time 0 plus 0.1 times the x-velocity at... we could use the x-velocity at time 0.1, but it would be a better approximation to use the x-velocity at the midpoint of the interval. So, the position at time 0.1 will be (approximately) the x-position at time 0 plus 0.1 times the x-velocity at time 0.5. The x-velocity at time 0.5 will be the x-velocity at time -0.5 plus 0.1 times the x-acceleration at time 0.5. Time -0.5? To get things started we need to cheat a bit and let v,x(0.5) = v,x(0) + 0.1a,x(0); after the first step we can use the formula v,x(t+.5)=v,x(t-.5)+0.1a,x(t). And of course, the same goes for the y-dimension. By proceeding in this way we can describe the motion of the planet around the sun to any desired degree of accuracy.

Now let's do all nine planets. Well, no, but it's the same idea. We just need to develop the dynamic equations for each planet, find the initial conditions, specify the special-case-velocities (the v,x(0.5)'s) and let her rip. A typical planet will experience gravitational attractions of the GMm/r^2 variety from each of the other eight planets and the sun. The force acting on the planet is simply the sum of these forces. Maybe I'll try to do this on Matlab someday. In any event, there it is. We can now describe the motion of the planets, complete with minor perturbations. Thank Isaac Newton.

2003-11-28T09:22:00.000-06:00

better Baghdad than Midland

So Bush spent a couple of hours at Baghdad airport yesterday. Like Brad Delong, I think it was a good move. Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan is in raptures. How very little we've come to expect from this president. For some perspective on Bush's Thanksgiving, do read Juan Cole's very informed comment.

2003-11-27T16:55:00.000-06:00

recently read: Vidal

One reason for my especially heretical mood of late is that I've been enjoying Gore Vidal's historical novel, Julian. Well, today I finished it up, and I must say, it's now my favorite Vidal novel that I've read so far. Last year I discovered Vidal and scorched through almost all of the American Chronicle series, Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, Washington D.C., and then part of The Golden Age. I also immensely enjoyed Creation. To top it all off, I even read Vidal's United States--a collection of 114 essays written from 1952-1992--in a very short period of time. This was probably a little much. By the time I got to The Golden Age, the last book during this stretch, I was completely Vidaled out. It is also his weakest effort, in my opinion.

Julian was Roman Emperor from 361-363. This was not a particularly happy time to be emperor, especially if you're hell-bent on turning back the rising tide of intolerant, Constantine-emboldened Christians. All in all, this was a delightful book. I will quote just one short passage. Julian describes Paris (p. 226):

Of the cities of Gaul, I like Paris the best and I spent three contented winters there. The town is on a small island in the River Seine. Wooden bridges connect it to both banks where the townspeople cultivate the land. It is lovely green country where almost anything will grow, even fig trees. My first winter I set out a dozen (jacketed in straw) and all but one survived. Of course the Paris winters are not as cold as those at Sens or Vienne because the nearness of the ocean warms the air. As a result, the Seine seldom freezes over; and its water--as anyone knows who has ever visited there--is remarkably sweet and good to drink. The town is built of wood and brick, with a fair sized prefect's palace which I used as headquarters. From my second-floor study, I could see the water as it divided at the island's sharp tip, like the sea breaking on a ship's prow. In fact, if one stares hard enough at that point in the river one has a curious sense of movement, of indeed being on a ship in full sail, the green shore rushing past.

My five-month stay in Paris was easily the happiest period of my life. Reading Vidal's description of the ancient Isle de la Cite brought back my own memories. Magical.

If you only read one Vidal novel, read Julian. If you can manage three, I would recommend Julian, Lincoln, and Creation.

2003-11-27T08:57:00.000-06:00

what it's all about

There is more to Thanksgiving than just huge birds and crowded airports. Max Sawicky explains.

2003-11-26T21:31:00.000-06:00

Mickey schmickey

Yesterday I noticed this "50 Places to See Before You Die" page over on the BBC (kind of a morbid title, isn't it; are they taunting me?). No, Nashville, Tennessee did not make the list. It was apparently compiled from BBC reader (listener, viewer, surfer?) votes over the last year. The top spot goes to the Grand Canyon. Fine. Number 2: The Great Barrier Reef. Alright. I wouldn't put it that high, but then again, I don't scuba dive. Number 3: Florida. Florida!? Yes we still have plenty of wonders of the world to get through and yet already there is Florida. I'm thinking to myself, "What is it, the beaches? Miami? swamps? old people? what?" So I click on Florida and, to my horror, I discover that when they say Florida, they mean Disney. A freakin' amusement park? You gotta be kidding me. Orlando would be number three on my list of "50 places you really don't need to see before you die", right after Dollywood and the state of Mississippi. Strike Florida from the list and the Brits have decent taste in travel. I shudder to think what monstrosities a similar CNN-generated list would churn up.

As you might have gleaned from the above, I don't much care for the whole Disney thing; it's a shame that it has become such a major part of America's identity. I'm a classic Looney Tunes kind of guy myself. At least Bugs had wit. Oh yes, since it is a bloody list, I might as well reveal how many of the 50 I have actually seen: eight, or nine if you include Florida. The others: Grand Canyon, New York, Venice, Yosemite National Park, Paris, Alaska, Rome, and San Francisco. Not bad for a 26-year-old American. Given my health, I'm especially glad I decided to: a) take that road trip across the American west when I was twenty (I could have worked and saved money); b) "study" abroad in Paris for a semester when I was 21-22 (thanks Mom and Dad), and c) after Paris, do a six week road trip through Europe with my then-girlfriend (I could have saved a lot of money and interned somewhere that summer gaining valuable experience). Seize the day, I say: travel when you're young, especially if it's the irresponsible thing to do.

2003-11-25T21:58:00.000-06:00

wowza

GDP growth last quarter was revised up to 8.2% from 7.2%. Expect a piddlin' 3.5% for the current quarter, or so says the economist forecaster in the Times article.

2003-11-25T21:42:00.000-06:00

Feynman 1.8: Motion

I'm not going to spend much time on this relatively simple chapter. Nutshell: velocity is the derivative of distance; acceleration is the derivative of velocity; velocity is the integral of acceleration; distance is the integral of velocity. Most of the chapter is spent baby steppin' our way through basic calculus in one dimension, and then at the end, there's a brief flurry of formulae in three dimensions and we're done. Sorry, I guess that's all the time we have, good day. Oh okay, one token Feynmanism:

Some changes are more difficult to describe than the motion of a point on a solid object, for example the speed of drift of a cloud that is drifting very slowly, but rapidly forming or evaporating, or the change of a woman's mind.

Stop.

2003-11-25T00:11:00.000-06:00

the priests, the lawyers, and the lawyer-victims

It's amazing that this guy even worked to defend the Church in the first place. Thank Apollo he finally came around (NY Times):

For five years, Robert P. Scamardo defended the Roman Catholic Diocese of Galveston-Houston against lawsuits by people who claimed to have been sexually abused by priests.

As general counsel, he vigorously resisted accusers, he said, fending off their lawsuits and collaborating with church officials to send them away quietly, with as little money as possible.

He said he felt good about his job until one negotiating session with a gray-haired woman who said, through tears, that the molesting she suffered long ago was still causing her depression, marital strife and sexual problems. "You can't possibly understand," she insisted.

Mr. Scamardo said he desperately wanted to tell her, "Yes, I do."

Of the thousands of people who have fought the church over sexual abuse charges, Mr. Scamardo is the only one known to have fought from both sides.

While representing the church as a trusted insider, Mr. Scamardo said, he was secretly struggling to cope with his own sexual abuse as a teenager by a priest and a lay youth minister. The conflict between his inner and outer selves brought anguish, thoughts of suicide and finally a confrontation with the diocese. When he sought compensation from the church as an abuse victim this year, he came up against a bishop and lawyers aggressively guarding church assets.

In an interview in Houston, Mr. Scamardo provided a window into how church lawyers worked to deter lawsuits, minimize the church's payouts, limit coverage for therapy and keep any settlements secret...

You should read the whole thing. Non-Catholics and especially the non-religious-from-birth probably can't appreciate how terrible this whole pedophile-priest thing really is. If you could pick a subset of the population that would suffer most from being sexually abused, it's precisely adolescent Catholic boys. As someone who was once both young and Catholic, I can assure you that, had this happened to me when I was, say, 15-years-old, I probably would have killed myself. I was so fucked up mentally about sexual matters--being a nice, trusting, Catholic kid who liked to believe that what my elders drilled into my head wasn't complete bullshit--that having a priest come onto me in the absolute worst damn-you-to-hell sort of way would have destroyed me. I would not have told anyone. I simply would have killed myself. Or worse, I would have joined a seminary.

2003-11-24T23:12:00.000-06:00

read it and weep...literally

From Brad DeLong:

The High Water Mark of Free Trade?

The high-water mark of free trade in the old days was reached in the first decade of the twentieth century: the years from 1905-1935 or so saw a steady retreat from free trade toward various forms of protection, with damaging effects on the world economy (although no one is really sure how damaging).

Now Stephen Roach fears that we have reached the high-water mark of free trade for this cycle of globalization:
Morgan Stanley: The first is a new and powerful global labor arbitrage that has led to accelerating transfer of high-wage jobs from the developed world to lower-wage workforces in the developing world. Enabled by the Internet and the maturation of vast offshore outsourcing platforms in goods and services alike, labor has become more "fungible"? than ever. In a world without pricing leverage, the unrelenting push for cost control gives a sudden urgency to this cross-border arbitrage. The outcome is a new and potentially lasting bias toward jobless recoveries in the high-wage developed world. That brings the second major force into play -- a political backlash against the trade liberalization that allows such cross-border job shifts to occur. It is the politics of this trend that disturb me the most as I peer into the future.

Insecure and scared workers tend take out their fears and frustrations on incumbent politicians. To the extent that the IT-enabled global labor arbitrage represents a new and lasting threat to job security in the developed world, this political backlash is understandable -- albeit deplorable. This backlash has now taken on a life of its own -- giving rise to what I believe is a "perfect storm" in global trade policy. This storm is an outgrowth of five major setbacks on the global trade front -- the first and most worrisome being the breakdown in the WTO ministerial negotiations last September in Cancun, Mexico. Tensions between poor developing countries and the wealthy industrial world came out in the open on such long-standing issues of agricultural subsidies, competitiveness and investment rules, and financial market transparency. This failure is on a par with the WTO fiasco in Seattle in 1999 and all but rules out successful completion of the so-called Doha Round of multilateral trade liberalization originally slated for 2004.

The second is the mounting risk of a global trade war over steel. Motivated largely by domestic political considerations, the Bush administration raised tariffs on selected steel imports by up to 30% in March 2002, drawing justification from the WTO's so-called Safeguard Agreement. The WTO has since found these measures to be illegal and has given the United States until December 15 to rescind them. The European Union has warned of the imposition of $2.2 billion in retaliatory measures should that not occur. Others, including most recently, Japan and Norway, have announced that they will follow suit.

Third, China bashing has taken an ominous turn for the worse. The Japanese fired the first rhetorical salvos in this trade battle well over a year ago, accusing China of exporting deflation and hollowing out the Japanese economy. America has taken the blame game to a new level. The Bush administration has just imposed quotas on imports of selected Chinese textile products, and legislation has been introduced in both houses of the Congress that would impose huge tariffs on all Chinese imports into the US -- 27.5% in the case of the Senate version and most likely even a higher tax in the House version. The most worrisome aspect of these legislative threats is the broad bipartisan and ideological support they enjoy in the Congress. Moreover, there is no effective political counterweight to America's onslaught of China bashing. The White House has put its protectionist cards on the table by actions on steel and Chinese textiles. Nor have trade-intensive US multinationals spoken up -- hardly surprising in this post-Enron climate of political vindictiveness.

Fourth, trans-Atlantic trade tensions between the United States and Europeseem to have taken on a life of their own. It's not just steel. It's also disputes over genetically modified beef and other food products, agricultural subsidies, and a broad array of services. Particularly contentious is America's Foreign Sales Corporation tax law (FSC), some $4-5 billion annually of export tax subsidies. The WTO has also ruled the FSC arrangements illegal, granting the EU up to $4 billion in remedial damages if these measures are not lifted by the start of 2004. Cross-border US-European trade currently amounts to some US$400 billion annually, hardly a trivial mater. With Europe and the US both facing intensified structural pressures on the job front, one of the pillars of the world trading system is at risk of crumbling.

Fifth, a darkening outlook for multilateral trade breakthroughs is being compounded by deteriorating prospects for less ambitious bilateral and regional agreements. The just-concluded negotiations in Miami for the Free Trade Association of the Americas are a case in point. The meetings adjourned with nothing of great substance accomplished other than an agreement to meet again next year. The same snail-like progress has been evident with respect to the US-Central America Free Trade Agreement, as well as one with Australia. In a jobless recovery that is now moving into the full force of the election cycle, the US Congress seems to have little appetite for either the large or the small milestones on the road to trade liberalization.

We all know the dark lessons of protectionism. The odds of falling into that abyss remain low, in my view. But support at the other end of the spectrum -- accelerated trade liberalization -- is slipping rapidly...

After reading the comments thread after this post, my emotions are strong enough to fuel 3000 words of ranting incoherence; but instead I will be brief. If half of the population of DeLong's highly educated readers do not understand the sense in which backlash to IT driven productivity gains is "deplorable" then there is little hope for the politicians and the people they represent. How much of this is xenophobia? How much of this is just left-wing economic idiocy? But wait, the right now acts like the left in economic matters, while the left still acts like the left. Result? We're screwed.

2003-11-22T21:53:00.000-06:00

Why do we have eyebrows?

Stupid MSN article that caught my attention while checking Hotmail:

Dear Martha,

Why do we have eyebrows?

- 7-year-old boy

Dear 7,

Eyebrows are so trendy these days. That TV-makeover show for men made itself famous for curing a man of his unibrow. And you can't pick up a fashion magazine that doesn't instruct women on the do's and don'ts of eyebrow grooming.

With all that fashion focus, you'd think eyebrows were a mere accessory, designed to make us look good.

The truth is, they are an accessory. But unlike something purely decorative, like an eyebrow piercing, eyebrows are also useful, like umbrellas. They keep the rain out of your eyes. They keep the sweat out, too, which makes them even better than an umbrella, and certainly less goofy looking than the Björn Borg headband thing that was all the rage when your parents were kids.

This is the real reason you don't want to shave your eyebrows off, or pluck the hairs out one by one. While being eyebrow-free might make you look funny, the real problem would be that you might not be able to see well if your face got wet. This could have been really bad news if you were a cave boy trying to run away from a saber-toothed cat, just as it would be bad news at recess if you were playing kickball at recess and you couldn't see home base...

Listen to Martha, 7-year-old-boy, she knows what she's talking about. My eyebrows have just about had it; only a few scattered hairs remain. Today, while exerting myself in the late-autumn heat, sweat poured down my brow. It then plowed through my remaining eyebrows and either dripped on my glasses or got in my eyes. Oh! My kingdom for some eyebrows!

2003-11-22T20:54:00.000-06:00

Feynman 1.7: The Theory of Gravitation

Pronounced [fIn' mun]. I once had a professor who mispronounced it [fAn' mun] which threw me into confusion. This chapter is kind of a survey of gravitation--a subject far too vast for one lecture. He begins with a historical overview of how the semi-modern theory of gravitation developed, i.e., Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, all the usual suspects. Then I learn about one poor underrated fellow with a particularly big idea: Tycho Brahe.

In the beginning of the fifteenth century there were great debates as to whether [the planets] really went around the sun or not. Tycho Brahe had an idea that was different from anything proposed by the ancients [the ancients knew the planets went around the sun; Copernicus rediscovered this]: his idea was that these debates about the nature of the motions of the planets would best be resolved if the actual positions of the planets in the sky were measured sufficiently accurately... This was a tremendous idea--that to find something out, it is better to perform some careful experiments than to carry on deep philosophical arguments.

Kepler used the data collected by Brahe to develop his three laws, and stole most of the immortality. This idea is so important, and so counterintuitive, and so difficult for humans to learn or remember. We prefer the glamour of the theorist or the prophet to the hard work of the empiricist. Empiricism doesn't speak to our ego the way the alternatives do. This idea is the key to modernity, science, progress, you name it. Tycho Brahe, Tycho Brahe, I will remember you Tycho Brahe.

So what are Kepler/Brahe's laws? 1) Each planet moves around the sun in an ellipse, with the sun at one focus. 2) The radius vector from the sun to the planet sweeps out equal areas in equal intervals of time. 3) The time required for a planet to go around its orbit is roughly proportional to the 3/2 power of the diameter of the orbit. While Kepler was doing his work, Galileo was talking about inertia, and then Newton came along.

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

Newton, of course, developed the general law of gravitation that holds for most practical purposes: F = G mm'/r^2; every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force which for any two bodies (m and m') is proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them. Simple enough. The planets move around the sun not because of little angels with flapping wings, as was once hypothesized, but because of the gravitational force of the sun. This force is what keeps the planets in an orbit--changing directions, instead of flying off in a straight line because of inertia. It is interesting to note that in the popular understanding of weightlessness in space (at least my 'popular' understanding) we think that astronauts are weightless because they have escaped the earth's atmosphere. This is not true. They are weightless because they are moving at a sufficiently high speed around the earth such that their spaceship is in orbit: the force of gravity is just enough to keep it falling toward the earth at about the same rate that the earth curves. If it were possible to get an airplane up to these kinds of speeds, about five miles a second, at, say, 30,000 feet, then the occupants of the plane would experience weightlessness.

What is the mechanism behind gravity? We don't know. Or at least we didn't know in 1963. As far as I know, we still don't know, but we probably have better guesses today. I believe this is the 'holy grail' of physics, unifying gravity, electromagnetism, and all the rest, but I might be mistaken. I'm content to learn 1963 physics for now.

2003-11-22T16:06:00.000-06:00

Bush and the moon god

In a serious breach of official party theology, Bush alleged that good, decent, nice, American Christians worship the same freedom-pushin' "Almighty" as those nasty Muslim types. In other words, the Lord and the ancient moon god are one and the same. Authorities on the matter, evangelical Christians, were quick to point out the President's mistake. How could the One True God be a moon god? Why that's just silly.

Evangelical Christian leaders expressed dismay yesterday over President Bush's statement that Christians and Muslims worship the same god, saying it had caused discomfort within his conservative religious base. But most predicted that the political impact would be short-lived.

At a news conference with Prime Minister Tony Blair in England on Thursday, a reporter noted that Bush has often said that freedom is a gift from "the Almighty" but questioned whether Bush believes that "Muslims worship the same Almighty" that he does.

"I do say that freedom is the Almighty's gift to every person," the president replied. "I also condition it by saying freedom is not America's gift to the world. It's much greater than that, of course. And I believe we worship the same god."

Bush's remarks sent immediate shock waves through Christian Web sites and radio broadcasts. A Baptist Press report quoted Richard D. Land, president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination, as saying that Bush "is simply mistaken."

"We should always remember that he is commander in chief, not theologian in chief," Land said in a telephone interview yesterday. "The Bible is clear on this: The one and true god is Jehovah, and his only begotten son is Jesus Christ."

The Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, also issued a statement contradicting Bush.

"The Christian God encourages freedom, love, forgiveness, prosperity and health. The Muslim god appears to value the opposite. The personalities of each god are evident in the cultures, civilizations and dispositions of the peoples that serve them. Muhammad's central message was submission; Jesus' central message was love. They seem to be very different personalities," Haggard said.

But both Land and Haggard, who are frequent visitors to the White House, doubted that the remark would cost Bush votes in 2004.

"This president has earned a lot of wiggle room among evangelicals," Land said. "If he had said that Islam is on a par with Christianity, it would be a more serious case of heartburn. This is just indigestion."

Gary Bauer, president of American Values, a conservative public policy group, said it is unclear what the ultimate fallout will be. "But the one thing that's for certain is, it's not helpful to the president. Since everybody agrees he's not a theologian, he would be much better advised to punt when he gets that kind of question," Bauer said.

The Rev. Brenda Bartella Peterson, executive director of the Clergy Leadership Network, a new organization of left-leaning clergy that seeks to counter the Christian right, declined to say whether she believes Christians and Muslims worship the same god.

"I would rather you not quote my theology," she said. "But I have to say that I'm very pleased that President Bush wants to be so inclusive, and I think his inclusiveness in this particular comment speaks well for who we have been as a nation theologically. Not all of his policies and his actions have been as inclusive."

Sayyid M. Syeed, secretary general of the Islamic Society of North America, responded to Bush's statement with a single word: Alhamdullah, Thanks be to God.

"We read again and again in the Koran that our god is the god of Abraham, the god of Noah, the god of Jesus," he said. "It would not come to the mind of a Muslim that there is a different god that Abraham or Jesus or Moses was praying to."

Note to White House reporters: hammer Bush on his theology, because clearly, in the evangelical Christian universe, "you're either with us or you're against us." Well, where are you Bushy? You can't have it both ways, buddy boy.

2003-11-20T19:37:00.000-06:00

gotta love that global warming

Twas a gorgeous autumn day here in Nashville: bright blue skies, 72 degrees... Tomorrow promises more of the same. What's the date again? November 20? Whatever... I remember back when I was a kid and we used to have frosts in October, and it used to turn colder in November, and then winter would arrive. I guess I need to get with the times and move further north.

The obscenely perfect weather did provide a nice context for my 2.5 mile ritualistic traipse through the golden-wooded hills conveniently located not far from my parents' house. The body--my enemy--held up okay, aside from this annoying nerve pain in my left leg. Weird stuff, that nerve pain. Should go away soon, though. The burgeoning chemo fatigue will no doubt make this hike a lot more interesting in the coming days.

2003-11-20T14:47:00.000-06:00

Tumour Diary

I just noticed this feature, Tumour Diary, on the BBC's website. Cancer Blog, Tumour Diary... They're quite similar. Here's the story behind Tumour Diary:

BBC News Online science and technology writer Ivan Noble was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour in August 2002. Since then he has been sharing his experiences in an online diary.

Looks like he's had a rough go of it lately: he had a recurrence, another surgery, and there's not a lot of reason to think the tumor won't come back. I wish him the best. I sort of know what he's going through... Right now two months seems like two years for him.

That I have had no brain metasteses develop so far is the only way I consider myself lucky. The brain is, unfortunately, one of the more common locations for melanoma to spread, and it is how most melanoma patients eventually die. I will take my good fortune while I can. I was in a similar position to Mr. Noble this past June. Then came good news... You just have to hang on until things go your way.

2003-11-19T00:26:00.000-06:00

course four

Lots of chemo flowing through my veins right now... Course four of who knows how many is officially under way. I was not able to see my doctor since he was out of town, and so my chemo dosage was not lowered. Fine, we can see how effective this exercise business really is.

Two interesting things I learned from my trip: 1) Last night I was waiting for my order at the chaotic McDonald's in Philadelphia's 30th Street train station (I really eat well on these trips, don't I). The server yells out, "number 1, with a coke!" An ABCD* girl and I step forward to claim the meal; we both ordered the same thing. Slight confusion, and I see that the server only has the drinks. The ABCD then offers me what she thinks is one of the Big Mac meals (I'm not sure), I politely decline, and tell her to go ahead. It turns out that the bag is not a Big Mac combo, so we step back and again wait for our food. I then take a look at this girl, and see that she is a very cute young college-age girl of Indian origin (but from her accent I can tell that she's spent most, if not all, of her life in the US). So I'm standing there thinking how coincidental it is that we ordered exactly the same thing, when, finally, our food arrives. I go and sit down somewhere in the large, mostly empty restaurant. She then sits down just to the right and across from me; a very strange thing to do, indeed. This makes no sense to me. What, is she attracted to my striking, eccentric, shiny dome of a noggin; or perhaps it's that unique, malignant lump jutting out of the side of my neck. She certainly doesn't see guys like me every day. But even if she didn't notice the lump--and had a thing for bald, young, white guys--poor, disease ridden me was in no position to hit up every young girl that I run across, what with it being chemo eve and all. But the sad fact is that even in the best of times, I probably would not have spoken to her. My skin color has always been my curse. From the earliest times, I associated it with my flesh burning in the sun, ridicule from the well-tanned, and an extremely high propensity to blush; the latter, of course, has a devastating effect on any child introvert's ability to approach attractive girls. As a child I was puzzled by racism, mainly because I hated being so damn white. And now, fate's ultimate irony: I'm dying of skin cancer. Or maybe I'm dying... Or I'm supposed to be dying... Back to the cute ABCD... So we eat our Big Macs, gobble our fries, and suck on our cokes in silence until I get up and leave the train station. I even had a line: "So what do you study?" As a young ABCD, she had to be a student, either undergrad or grad. After this incident, I went through the following thought process: trying to find a girlfriend is not an option in your condition; nevertheless, you need to get over this aversion to meeting attractive women, lest you condemn yourself to only meeting unattractive women; now would be a good time to get over this aversion since the stakes are so low, i.e., all I desire out of any conversation at the moment is just the conversation itself. This evening, while waiting for the shuttle bus to my car at the Nashville airport, I noticed another young, semi-attractive desi girl. This time, conscious of last night's thought process, I decided to do something very uncharacterisic: I sat right across from her on the shuttle. Nothing came of it, of course; I had just received chemo, for Christ's sake. But I need to start doing more Albert Ellisian things like this. We can always change; it just takes a little courage now and then. But why is female beauty so paralyzing?

2) Traveling and especially the use of public transportation can fight misanthropy. During this very short trip I had three opportunities to help out, in a small way, some stranger. The first time, I was again waiting for a shuttle bus, this time at the Baltimore airport. This black woman wheels up to the curb with this cart full of luggage and bags. Her bus pulls up (not mine) and she begins frantically loading the stuff on the bus. Now I chose not to help her, since it wasn't my bus. But some guy on the bus did start helping her load all the stuff, and seeing him do this lifted my heart a little bit. Ping, a chip off my big block of misanthropy. The second incident occured on the train back to Baltimore today. I still don't have this Amtrak thing mastered yet, but I could have sworn that when a conductor comes by and removes your ticket from above your seat that means you're getting off at the next stop. There was an old Jewish couple sitting in front of me. They were obviously from New York and probably going to DC. In fact, I knew they were going to DC: why would they take a train from NY to Baltimore airport? I noticed that the old guy was hard of hearing; whenever an announcement came over the intercom, the wife would loudly repeat it in his ear. So we're approaching Baltimore airport and the conductor guy comes by and takes my ticket and those of the old couple. Oh, I say to myself, they're getting off at BWI too. We pull up to the station and I notice that both of them are asleep. Reflecting back on yesterday's missed opportunity at the shuttle stop, I nudge the guy's shoulder and semi-shout "BWI! BWI!". Somewhat confused, he asks "DC? DC?". After a couple of exchanges like this, I realize that he is, in fact, going to DC and profusely apologize before jumping off the train. I was a little embarrased for disturbing the old fellow for nothing, but then decided that my intentions were pure and that I would do it again. Ping. I did learn that sometimes the conductor takes away the ticket prematurely. Third incident: right after leaving the train and the old couple I head over to the shuttle stop to go to Baltimore airport. The shuttle arrives and this woman who is leaving drags her heavy rolling bag down the stairs of the bus. One bag that had been balanced on top of the rolling bag falls to the ground. I then go out of my way to pick it up and put it back on top; she thanks me and I get on the shuttle. Ping again. The point is that in a very short period of time, I had three opportunities to make a very small difference in someone else's life, whereas, if I had driven, I would not have had these opportunities. Now, I know, I know... If you live in New York, you'll tell me that the very reason why you're such a friggin' misanthope is because you have to deal with all these friggin' people all over the place. But deep down, I think you know you like it. You prefer it to the suburbs and the SUVs. Now cars, the roads, that's where misanthropy spreads like wildfire. As a pedestrian, the absentmindedness of another pedestrian can be at worst, a harmless collision; at best, an opportunity for you to help out and brighten both of your days. But absentmindedness by the driver of a Ford Expedition results in at best, severe annoyance; at worst, death of innocents. Perhaps the autofication of America is one factor driving its increasing misanthropism/conservativism/fear.

Anyway, that's what I learned on my trip.

* ABCD = American Born Confused Desi

2003-11-18T22:54:00.000-06:00

Feynman 1.6: Probability

"The true logic of this world is in the calculus of probabilities."

James Clark Maxwell

What? Just six chapters in, and we have an entire chapter on probability? Yes, and a good one at that. For the record, I learned from the foreward that the 5th and 6th lectures were written not by Feynman, who was out of town that week, but by Stanford professor, Matthew Sands. Hence the absence of rhetorical flourish in the post on lecture 5 and probably 6. I will not discuss most of this chapter, except to say that I wish I had read it during my first course on probability. The basic concepts of probability are introduced with the standard coin flip, and before we know it, we're talking about random walks. I also like how the first bit of calculus, the integral, is introduced in an intuitive, probabilistic context. One thing I hope to gain from my study of Feynman's Lectures is a much stronger intuitive grasp of mathematics. Then, at the end of the lecture, more about the mysterious uncertainty principle...

When probability was first applied to such problems [describing the behavior of molecules in a sample of gas], it was considered to be a convenience--a way of dealing with very complex situations. We now believe that the ideas of probability are essential to a description of atomic happenings.

Here is a more precise statement of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: [Δx][Δv] ≥ h/m. Notice the mass thing tossed in the denominator on the right hand side. This explains my pre-Feynman understanding of the uncertainty principle. The less massive an object, the greater the quantity we get when we multiply the standard deviation associated with the probability density of the object's position with that of its velocity; the less we're able to pin it down. So, way back when, I learned that the nucleus is basically static while the electron is more like a cloud. Well, now I know that a nucleus is not perfectly static, but it is a lot more static than the much smaller electron, and so my old intuition is still of some use.

2003-11-18T20:40:00.000-06:00

the longest article

After scarfing down a tasty regular Lucky Dog brand hot dog (not that cajun creole crap) in Baltimore's airport this afternoon, I picked up a hot-off-the-presses copy of the New Yorker. Now it is a New Yorker general rule that article quality is proportional to article length. If this rule holds true, then I just read, on the flight back to Nashville this evening, the finest New Yorker article ever. What's the article, you ask? "War After the War," by George Packer. Most New Yorker articles on Iraq have focused on trying to figure out what the hell the Bush Administration/Defense department is up to; that is, they have been top-down. This one is decidedly not top-down; but it is certainly not a mere collection of anecdotal human interest stories. Rather, it is, what I would call, middle-up. Packer picks out several interesting Iraqi vantage points from which to illustrate the enormous challenges that the Iraqi people and the American occupiers face, many of which are exacerbated by the policies of the Defense Department. Here are a few of the vantage points: we learn about a Harvard PhD in charge of Iraqi education; a US Marine captain in charge of an Iraqi district who is simultaneously trying to get the sewage going and trying to track down lingering Fedayeen; a scheming, slimy Shiite cleric working the C.P.A (Coalition Provisional Authority) for funds; a young wishing-to-be-Westernized Iraqi female student and her marginalized secular family, even Paul Bremer himself. So set aside some time this week and read "War After the War". Since it's practically the entire magazine, they couldn't put it on-line, but at least they have this NY Times style slide show teaser. If the article bores you, stop reading it; but I'm pretty sure that won't be a problem. I can almost guarantee that upon completion of this article you will have a more accurate picture of the current and possible future states of Iraq than our president. Yes, I find that to be a very sad state of affairs, and no, the picture doesn't look good.

Update (10/30/03): It's now on-line.

2003-11-17T11:07:00.000-06:00

just high enough

Platelet count du jour: 108,000. Still rather low, but high enough... My doctor might decide to lower the chemo dose. In any event, a friend in St. Louis convinced me of the importance of exercise a few days ago, and I'm going to try a little experiment with this next round: I will exercise regularly, something of which I didn't do nearly enough the last few weeks. We'll see how the platelets respond... Of course, if my doctor lowers the chemo dose then it won't be as clear whether the exercise works or not.

I had a nice trip to St. Louis and made two discoveries: Global Foods Market and Nachomamas. The first is a very good international grocery store (a friend and I bought and prepared a silver pomfret, definitely a first for me), and the second is a good, but cheap, Mexican restaurant. Now for my quick pop up to Philly for chemo...

2003-11-13T11:12:00.000-06:00

my sentiments exactly

There's about to be some serious nested blockquoting going on... From Brad DeLong:

Matthew Yglesias takes the blame for everything that goes wrong in Iraq:
Matthew Yglesias: I Told Myself So: ...The shame of the Iraq situation is that it could've been done better -- by a more honest, more competent, more moral administration, but it likely won't be. The big thing to look forward to, however, will be the recriminations. Do we blame liberal hawks and idealistic neocons for being duped by a gang of ruthless Rumsfeldites, or to they blame war skeptics for fostering an atmosphere of hopelessness that led the administration to abandon serious efforts?

As a dupe-turned-skeptic, of course, I'll get the blame either way.
Me too. I thought last winter that the Bush administration would not be doing this without *hard* evidence of serious nuclear weapons programs. I--hard as this may be for some of you to believe--trusted them. No more.

That's what it comes down to for me as well, a betrayal of trust. I'm still somewhat astonished by the fact that the "intelligence" the US relied on to justify this splendid little war was so blatantly manipulated. I'm also quite astonished by the extent to which the British, usually so much saner than the rest of the world, enabled the Bushies. Blair's seconding of the Bush pre-war rhetoric is what convinced me that the usual UN inspections were probably not sufficient to deal with Saddam's WMDs. I still didn't think regime change was the best way to deal with them, but, hey, it sure was a way to deal with them. Again I say, oh well...

2003-11-13T10:33:00.000-06:00

oh well...

Platelet count du jour: 63,000. So I'm off to St. Louis for the weekend; let's see if my Acura has another 650 miles left in it. I'll be back to have my blood drawn first thing Monday morning, and then (hold my thumbs) start round 4 on Tuesday.