chimeralhalfmanandcuttingedgetech

Carl Sagan is one of the people I've most admired in my life. The Cosmos series helped instill in me, and so many others, an appreciation for the wonders of science, and an understanding of science as a method for approaching Nature, rather than what schools too often beat down to a list of approved answers to be repeated. Sagan eventually developed a blood cancer, myelodysplastic syndrome, for which he received blood stem cell transplants. In 'Billions and Billions', he muses in one of the essays about how receiving a stem cell transplant from his sister means that for his life afterward, part of his body would be from hers, and genetically female. I now share this life step with him.

If, for some pointless reason, you went back to the earliest entries of this blog, you'd find a few made from the 8th floor BMT unit at LDS Hospital in Utah. That was about six years ago, and in many ways my life since has been focused on not coming back here. But here I am.

In 2008 I was here for relapsed Hodgkins lymphoma, a disease where the first-line standard treatment is usually effective enough, meaning relatively less research was put into second-line treatments. The medically standard next step after a relapse was autologous stem cell transplant (if your own bone marrow is still clear of the disease) or allogeneic stem cell transplant (if you're marrow's not clear or if you've already had an auto). I was here for an auto, and typed some things into this blog.

My Hodgkins is refractory, it doesn't ever go away forever. When I relapsed a year later, the next-line standard treatment was an allogeneic transplant, but I looked at the life survival numbers they had and decided no way. Through my oncologist and clinicaltrials.gov, and with help from my mom who's skilled at researching things, I found some clinical trials for current cutting edge drugs for Hodgkins, and got into one for what's now called Brintuximab (always be SGN35 to me).

That set up a life pattern for the following years. Always a salvage treatment or a clinical trial to try to contain the cancer, maintainig a relatively normal life for many years throug various chemos and some radiation. That lasted until December 2013. My oncologist and I had put one chemo to an end because the last scan showed only mixed results, some shrink some growth. We'd figured to try another chemo for containment, or look what was on the clinical trial horizon, but there was a problem that my blood numbers were falling even without the chemo. I had a bone marrow biopsy and on the 9th they called me with an alarming new development: Leukemia.

Leukemia changes the situation tremendously. Hodgkins I know, I can deal with in various ways (including a few nutritional/herbal things I've come to trust --my standard is if someone with actual medical credentials is researching it somewhere, and I've also had reliable results from Chinese nutritional and herbal medicines). Even if I gave up and did nothing about Hodgkins, it would probably take a year and a half to actually kill me. Leukemia will kill in weeks, or a couple months at most. Now the allogeneic transplant I'd been avoiding seemed the likeliest option.

It turns out I'd made the right choice in avoiding the allo transplant five years ago (and the team leaders here had been subtly encouraging me to avoid it). In recent years, they've developed a new standard of donor transplant using haplo donors --relatives exactly half-matched. Hodgkin's patients do worse than other cancer patients at allogeneic transplants, but haplo transplant seems to be giving Hodgkins history patients good odds. It's still very new, so there aren't long-term results to compare. But the horizon looks hopeful.

It's been a difficult process. I was checked in days after diagnosis, started standard Leukemia induction treatment the 16th of December. After that the expectation was watch the blood numbers and plan for the transplant treatment. It took them awhile to decide exactly how to treat (Hodgkins and Leukemia together make a rare and challenging combination), then to get my health provider to approve. I'm now Day 7 post haplo, and the worst is over for now. I've been in the hospital far too long and hopefully can be out in a couple weeks.

scottyneedslesspower

The future might be like Star Trek after all.

Actually if you read the thing, "more feasible" means instead of needing a large planet's worth of hypothetical exotic matter they've never detected, they'd only need 30kg. And "working on building one" means trying to detect the hypothetical phenomenon on extremely small scales.

I'd mostly written off FTL, but hey if they think it's worth a shot, go for it. Solving the "infinite energy to accellerate to c" thing doesn't solve the time paradox thing where FTL would allow information to be sent to the past. Let's-try-it-and-see-if-causality-itself-breaks might be a most recklessly awesome future experiment.

Of course, FTL is one of the things that might make the aliens step in and say, "okay, NOW you people might be a problem."
klaatu barrada nikto

Saganday(belated)

Yesterday was, or would have been, Carl Sagan's birthday. I think church never really had a chance with me because "Cosmos" plus some illustrated science books had sparked a sense of wonder that the stark walls and bad music at the local Mormon ward could never hope to match. (Who knows what the interplay would have been had our family gone to a more aesthetically evocative church?)

What always stuck in my head as the "Cosmos music" isn't actually the main theme of the show, and first turns up in episode 2 (youtube excerpt that starts partway in with that music, embedding's not quite the style here). This episode has what is still one of the best popular science explanations of evolution available. (If you prefer your explanations from books, I'd suggest Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale or Greg Graffin's Anarchy Evolution which pulls double time as a punk rock biography.)

granddesign

The Grand Design by Stephen W. Hawking

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a good explanation of general relativity and quantum theory for the layman. However, I can see it becoming the standard recommended text for a bunch of fuzzy-thinking newage religions accompanied by their misleading interpretations to show how "scientific" they are. Also, it may not be clear that Hawking in fact represents particular 'sides' of a few approaches and theories that remain in dispute.

I find myself wondering how much of the style is Hawking's and how much Mlodinow's. The cynical rule is that most of the work was done by the less-famous author. Still, it's kind of fun to imagine the text as being all in Hawking's computer-voice.

As I said, the explanations of gravity, quantum theory, and the standard model are very good, including curvature of space, multiple quantum histories contributing to measured results, and particle bestiaries, but M-Theory, the purported theme of the whole book that's supposed to unite them all, gets fairly brisk and vague explanation. They compare it to a set of overlapping maps that all agree where they overlap, but none of which could ever be extended to a single accurate map of the whole globe. They speak of 10^500 possible universes in quantum superstate, one of which we experience, and take the reader through the anthropomorphic principle to show the fact of our existence places restrictions/selections on which possible universes we can experience.

Unfortunately, that M-Theory is the final theory comes across more as a final assertion than as the logical conclusion of the whole book. As does the idea (however interesting) that the universe can emerge from nothing because on a universal scale, the negative energy of gravity precisely balances the positive energy of matter so that the whole energy of the universe is zero, which is also abruptly dropped on the reader at the end.

I'd recommend this as one of several layman's introductions to science, but not as one to stand alone for physics and cosmology.



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thisisapost

This blog is not dead, just neglected as per usual.
I'd composed an essay on the Park51 issue, which may not be timely anymore. I'll at least put it here, but parts of it can be worked into another essay I've been composing on First Amendment issues in general, which I plan to send to a few newspapers as well as put online. It works in honor of the upcoming 90th Anniversary of the ACLU's beginning, and in the spirit of "now that the election circus is over, real work can begin." Whatever change ought to be, it won't be achieved through elected officials, but by affecting and effecting the cognitive and moral landscape of society.

I've been maintaining the Utah Freethought Society's activity, however minimal, with the goal of promoting skepticism, science literacy, and open discussion. Our latest topic discussion of Israel/Palestine has attracted more interest than we've had in recent weeks, so I hope a good turnout comes of it. I've also met with the local Coffee Party a bit. They're planning an endrun push for the Disclose Act before the congressional changeover, Then the Utah bunch will try to help the local Fair Boundaries anti-gerrymandering push.

My ancient desktop has been choking on software and had network access problems. Not having the patience to fix it the right way, I'm running off a Crunchbang Statler live CD right now. I think I'll have the monetary flexibility to complete a new desktop soon, then the question of whether to include a Windows partition for the first time in a couple years will be upon me. I may do so just because I've been jonesing to run through the Thief series again, but there's little other reason to run Windows.

Meanwhile, some recent recent thoughts pulled from FB, though I've been trying to reduce my time spent there:

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Re: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2010/11/louisiana_panel_votes_in_favor.html

The matter isn't with evolution being a theory. No duh, so is gravity. The matter is that "intelligent design" isn't. (Nor any other prettified version of creationism)
"Theory" is as good as it gets in real science, and ID plain hasn't done the work to qualify as such. It isn't an explanatory model, just a handwave, and it makes no predictions for what future discoveries might be on the horizon, what future tests might yield new knowledge. It's a worthless security blanket for those unwilling to reconcile their faith with the empirical realities of the world.

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Re: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/20/cindy-mccain-noh8-photo-m_n_430004.html

Cindy McCain actually provoked a lot of ire in conservative circles for this; claims she shouldn't go against her husband and that it was a "hateful" attack on conservative Christians and their values.
Of course in 15 years or so when nearly every U.S. State has gay marriage and adoption, conservative politicians of the future will point to her as proof that equal rights for gays was always a conservative goal.

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