Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: …and everything else

Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.

Handwriting Banned for WA Docs

...and everything else, Bioethics

When I was younger, schools used to have contests about what you were most likely to be as an adult. And, if you were like me, based on your handwriting you were voted most likely to become a doctor or a teacher. that’s no longer going to fly in Washington – at least not for doctors. Docs have to either very clearly blockprint (write) their prescriptions, or print them out.

As the article notes, this puts pharmacists in an uncomfortable position of having to decide what’s legal and what isn’t. What if the doctor happened to have a nice, strict Catholic school education like my mother, and has the world’s most perfect cursive? What if, god help them, they blockprint like I do? Or they have some smudgy in between?

Of course, the easiest thing is to simply print the prescriptions out, which is precisely what my doctor has done for a few years now; they recently even switched to printing schedule 2 drugs on a specific type of paper. All my doc has to do is print, sign, and hand over. Granted, this probably does make it slightly easier to copy, but I suspect that pharmacists would notice if you suddenly needed an awful lot of a prescription painkiller you’d never taken before. (I know that whenever I get a new pharmacist at Hall Health, I have to go through the whole explaining my medical issues, just because of the medications I receive.)

Overall, I think it’s a great move that should reduce patient death due to misfilled prescriptions. I just think it’d be best if they mandated a target date for all doc offices in the state to move to printed prescriptions – remove the ambiguity and necessity of the pharmacist playing cop. Because that’s not their job, either.

Aesthetic Death

...and everything else, Bioethics

I think that, at this time, just about everyone knows about the legal challenges to lethal injection, and the ruling that they may cause extreme pain and suffering, and thus cannot be administered without certified medical personnel there who can insure that the prisoner is first unconscious before administering further drugs. Of course, at this point no public doctor or nurse is willing to participate, feeling that although they should relieve pain and suffering, they should also not be present to involuntarily end a life. Well, today the New York Times has an article about how suffering could be significantly reduced in executions, without necessitating a medical personnel there. The problem? According to the NYTimes,

At the core of the issue is a debate about which matters more, the comfort of prisoners or that of the people who watch them die. A major obstacle to change is that alternative methods of lethal injection, though they might be easier on inmates, would almost certainly be harder on witnesses and executioners.

Now, as most of you know, I’m a relatively practicing Buddhist, and a firm pacifist. So this next bit might surprise you – but I support the death penalty in certain cases.

I do believe that too many people on death row are there falsely, with bad science or law behind them. But I also believe that there are people there who’ve admitted to their crimes, or for whom the evidence was more than overwhelming. And in general, these people are so heinous, reform appears impossible and I believe it’s in everyone’s best interest if they were humanely euthanized.

The problem I have is threefold: first, the above-mentioned issue of innocence. I would like a system where it’s near-impossible to execute the wrong person, and we don’t have that right now. Secondly, it takes entirely too long to move from sentencing to execution. This isn’t an issue for the ones who can’t be reformed, who appear the same variety of sheer evil 20 years later as they do 2 days later. But this, of course, isn’t always the case – there are murderers who do change; often, they tend to be the ones who need treatment, be it counseling or medicine. Should we then have a clause that if a shrink notes you’ve made significant progress in changing your sentence can be commuted to life in prison? I don’t know – that might place undue burden on shrinks. But we change so much in 20 years; we’re not even the same person, quite literally; our cells have died and reborn and died again almost three times over in 20 years. Multiple biological changes have occured, and that’s not even beginning to consider the mental and emotional ones. And of course, the third objection is that it very well might be inhumane and cruel, causing pain and suffering.

Some people might ask what the problem is what that; after all, the person is being executed. The thing is, I don’t think acknowledging the sometimes need to cull the herd, as it were, I don’t think that culling should be done cruelly. So of course, in a case of irony, it appears that in an effort to make it appear serene and uncruel to the witnesses, the suppposedly more humane method of execution is not necessarily so, and the method that would be more humane would be more discomforting to watch.

We, of course, opt to comfort the witness, and not the person being executed. It makes me wonder, a bit, at our attitude towards death: it’s okay, so long as it’s pretty and serene…? Is this just a manifestation of our general desire to have death be neat and tidy, a further extension of our attempt to sanitize dying? I think most likely, yes. And so the end result, in our desire for neat appearances to comfort our own visige of our death, we take the fast and cruel approach because it’s prettier – a more aesthetic death than the longer, twitchier, and more painless one.

The Blue Butterfly

...and everything else


A blue morpho.

One of the most amazing things I saw when I was in Costa Rica was the blue morpho, and absolutely divine, irridescent blue butterfly. They range in colour from this deep blue sea to sea blue that fades to sea green, all the way over to the sky light irridescence pictured above. I had a chance to walk among them in a butterfly sanctuary in the Monteverde Cloud Forest, and I’m pretty sure it’s one of those experiences that will always stick with me.




The Blue Butterfly

So it’s no surprise that the cover for the movie The Blue Butterfly jumped out at me when I was at the rental store the other night. Intrigued enough to stop, I picked it up and read the description, and as is the marketing addage, once I had picked it up, I didn’t put it back down. I watched the movie this afternoon.

So what is it about? Quite simple, the movie is about a terminally ill ten year old boy who’s fascinated by insects, his mother, and a famous entomologist who is persuaded to take the boy to the Costa Rican rain forest to capture his own blue morpho before he dies. The entomologist carries the boy through the rain forest in an effort to catch the beautiful blue butterfly. The adventure ends joyously; on his return from the rain forest, his cancer has miraculously gone into remission until it disappears completely.




William Hurt and Marc Donato

Sound improbable? I thought so, too… until I noticed that it was based on a true story. was diagnosed with cancer at 6 years old, in 1987. It was aggressive and terminal brain cancer, and in 1988 the Children’s Wish Foundation famed entomologist Georges Brossard to take David to Mexico to catch his own blue morpho.


At age 18, David stopped taking his medications, and today is both cancer and medication free. Today he’s an inspirational lecturer at hospitals and schools, as well as having his own butterfly house. In 2002, he visited the set of The Blue Butterfly, and caught another blue morpho – on his own two legs.

I was in a really bad mood today. I’ve not been practicing Buddhism or yoga or tai chi. I’ve been tense since moving in with my parents, and my stress levels shot through the roof when I was informed that my home department has yet to submit a necessary grade, and if the university doesn’t receive that grade in the next week, I will not be granted graduating status. This would be bad, to say the very least – my admission to graduate school is completely contigent upon that spring graduation. I called the department and left a terse message, which in itself makes me sad and frustrated.

So sitting down to the movie, I wasn’t in the best headspace, and the movie didn’t really help. It was, to say the least, slow. A very quiet and slow buildup, with lots of long shots and tight close-ups of gorgeous bugs and greenery. I found myself constantly looking at the time for the first 40 minutes of the movie, wondering how long it was, should I get up to check the box, how long could they drag this idea out, and so forth.

And then something happened. My breathing slowed, the tension drained from my neck, my shoulders dropped and rounded, my hands unclenched. I began to breathe with the gentle music playing, and drink in the gorgeous scenery, the amazing bugs, and relax into the story being told. An hour flowed by without my looking up from the screen or shifting in my seat. I was, in a word, enchanted, and it was an enchantment I badly needed.

Of course, the movie is well over, my parents have come home, my brother has thundered through a few times, one of the cats has taken a swat at the dog, and the stress levels in the environment are rising again. But I feel at least a little more centered and able to be relaxed, and at least for a little bit, I found peace.


Magnetic Precipitation Tipping Point

...and everything else

How cool; magnets, rain and tipping points. It’s sounds like your basic power law, but basically it sounds like you can understand rain patterns by studying magnets!

Ole Peters, a 27-year-old physicist with expertise in “critical phenomena” and “self organized criticality” — which he acknowledges is “a bit of a rogue field” — doesn’t sound the least bit crazy.

In the June issue of the respected journal Nature Physics, he and J. David Neelin, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, report that the onset of intense tropical rain and magnetism share the same underlying physics.

“We studied properties of that relationship that are also observed in equivalent quantities for systems with ‘continuous-phase transitions’ like magnets,” said Peters, a research scientist with UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and a visiting scientist at the Santa Fe Institute.

“The atmosphere has a tendency to move to a critical point in water vapor where the likelihood of rain dramatically increases. The system reaches a point where it’s just about to rain; it’s highly susceptible. Any additional water vapor can produce a large response.”

“Our study showed that absolutely everything we dreamed of finding was actually there,” Peters said. “The predictions from critical phenomena showed up in the data. This is a huge step forward in self-organized criticality and critical phenomena. There really is a critical point. We observed the system in a whole range of different water vapors. This is the strongest evidence for any physical self-organized critical system to really have a critical point.”

How does a critical threshold point work?

Consider a pile of rice, Peters said. You can add a single grain of rice and measure its effect on the pile. After slowly adding rice grains, at some point you eventually trigger an avalanche; the release is very fast. A similar principle is behind the coin machines you can find in casinos, where it looks as if dropping in one or two quarters will create an avalanche of coins that will come crashing down for you. In fact, it is much more likely that it only looks like the system is at a critical point; you are more likely to lose your quarter.

Imagine that you add one raindrop into a cloud. Like the pile of rice, where adding a single grain can produce an avalanche or nothing at all, or like the coin machine, the one additional raindrop could trigger a huge downpour, but most of the time produces nothing. You can heat a magnet to a point where it loses its magnetization; it no longer has a north and south direction.

“When a magnet is near the critical temperature, a slight perturbation can cause it to switch north and south,” Peters said. “When the system reaches the critical point and is so susceptible, a slight change — one more grain of rice, one more coin — can produce a massive response of the system. This phenomenon can be studied using statistical mechanics and critical phenomena.”