Pursuing praxis

Well, close.

I have the awesomest lab and labmates. My natural inclination (with anyone) is to decline social invitations to lunch, dinner, etc. in order to "get work done." Which may or may not happen as envisioned. But still, the drive to work is very seductive, especially when I’ve made the resolution to leave blocks of time - whole days, in fact - to "focus on my research."

But, for the price of an enchillada, I learned the basics of how to procure, maintain, and use a dermestid beetle colony, at home or at work. Dermestids are the beetles used to clean up carcasses and leave a nice clean skeleton. I also learned about some rather ignoble people and practices surrounding institutional colonies, mainly resulting from a staggering degree of irresponsibility and failure to be considerate. And I learned that the dermestid beetle colony housed at the Smithsonian has been reproducing in isolation for so long that those beetles now can’t breed with non-Smithsonian dermestid beetles. Evolution in a test tube, I’m telling you. Or bathtub or cardboard box or other container, context depending.
 

I’ve had several people ask me if I was ever scared or in danger during my trip in Africa. The short answer is obvious: I made it home and never saw the inside of so much as a medical clinic. Which doesn’t mean I didn’t ever feel my adrenaline spike. Here’s the second-best candidate story, and the first significant such experience, excerpted from a much longer, more rambling post I put up back in March, shortly after said adventure. Plus, I finally up-loaded the promised pic, which is my real motivation for posting now :o).

— 

I got a campsite about 11km from the main gate (the closest campsite available), dropped my driver there with plans to meet at 6am and get an early start for kudu. In the receding evening light I passed a small group of cow and calf elephants roadside, though obscured by the thick bush, and watched a weak and watery sun descend beneath the escarpment in the disance. 

The campground was deserted save two dik-diks dicking around, and some impala. THere appeared to be a one-horse stall/shed built next to the bathrooms, with hatched doors and all the rest. The toilet was a porcelain hole in the ground, but the taps were functional so I called it a success. Given the "man-eating lions of Tsavo" and the very sane park rules of "don’t get out of your car" while driving around, I opted to "camp" in the backseat. Lions, mosquitoes, cold, dew and dirt (and my greatest concern - the wiley Homo sapiens) more than sealed the deal. I sucked down a melted chocolate bar and had some crackers and water and called it good. 

ALthough I reasoned they wouldn’t clear a campsite and allow people to buy camping spots if it wasn’t relatively safe, I made some provisions for what-if scenarios, apart from not leaving my sushi-like body laying on the ground at night. I locked the doors (despite the heat), put the keys in the ignition and the gear in first, and kept the front seat clear in case I needed to make a speedy getaway, be it elephant, buffalo, lion, or human threatening my wellbeing.

It’s funny how being alone makes you more wary of people in general than if you’re accompanied by another human. A truck passed by on the bumpy road, and the instant I heard it I switched off my flashlight and my eyes and ears felt twice their size. I decided taking my daily notes was not feasible with my adrenaline levels as they were, so I sat and watched stars. Yeah, I know, they don’t move very fast, but they really do twinkle, and I watched what was either the ISS or a satelite pass relatively quickly by. I’m not any astronomy buff by any stretch of the imagination, but I"m pretty sure there was a planet out - maybe Venus? it was very bright and beautiful - and I kept my rational faculty going full tilt as I tried to make sense of a twinkling, non-moving light showing through the bushes by the bathroom. Probably just a very bright star low on the horizon, I reasoned.

Soon, a second vehicle bumped down the road, headlights bobbing with the potholes and ruts, and bobbed right into the campground and straight for yours truly parked under a tree. It was a big white pickup, and pulled up unhurredly next to me. Doors slammed, and a couple people piled out. I caught a glimpse of a KWS decal on the side of the truck, but my red flags were flying high and skepticism and caution were the foremost attitudes governing my mind. But, knowing that polite friendliness and humor grease a helluva lot of wheels in Kenya (while suspicion, reticence, and rudeness will raise everyone’s eyes and guard) I unlocked and opened my door (but just that one), without getting out of the truck. The fellas standing there weren’t too near, and had non-threatening "just doing my job" body language, but were most alarmingly wearing camo and sporting automatic guns at parade rest.

The driver, whose face I could not see with the headlights on, greeted me with a friendly tone and asked if I was alone. No, I said, I have a driver. Is he here? he wanted to know. Yes, I said. Where? he wanted to know. Why, in the accomodation for drivers outside the gate, I said. So you are alone, he concluded. No, I insisted, I have a driver and we spent all day in the park.

I beat around the bush long enough to see what the reactions were, and where the line of questioning was going, and nobody made any moves, or peered into the car, or got impatient. He asked if I had any protection against the animals, and I said I was sleeping in my car, and my foremost weapon was an active brain. They laughed easily, and I said I was more worried about being visited by armed men in the night than being attacked in a locked car by a lion, and gave the guys standing nearby a direct and toothy smile. They laughed again, and after another round of phraseology-challenged questions indicated they were from Kenya Wildlife Services, and their mission was not just to check up on me, but to have a couple rangers guard me through the night.

At this point in my stay in Kenya I am pretty accustomed to the differences between Kenya Wildlife Services and the (comparatively humble) Park Service back home, with their military dress, replete with automatic rifles (for people or animals, I’m still not entirely clear), berets, camo, and pants-tucked-into-combat-boots look. I asserted that they’d better be ready to sleep under the stars, because they weren’t staying in the truck with me (more laughs, as was my aim, though my tone told them I was quite serious about it), and I did they have any badges or IDs I could see? As is the Kenyan habit, it seems, they assured me everything was ok, they were for real, I could trust them. I played the I’m-a-foreigner card and asked to see their IDs again.

By this time I had been introduced to two of the guys, Peter and Haron, and Haron produced, at length, a rather worn looking KWS ID card that looked quite legit to my eyes. Peter had evidently forgotten his, so I bantered about a bit more trying to get a better feel for their intentions, attitudes, and expectations. They didn’t move an inch from their first spot on the ground, I saw no prying eyes, or leering smiles, or really anything to indicate this wasn’t a run-of-the-mill operation for them, yet another camper to watch, whose exact identity and circumstances were neither part of the job description nor particularly interesting, for that matter.

Finally I consented, shook Peter and Haron’s hands again (shaking hands is a cultural staple here), and watched the other couple men get back in the truck and pull away just as they had come. I promptly closed and locked my door and watched my watchers set up camp next to the big tree trunk. It was a minimalist affair, with white-blue headlamps illustrating their few movements. Soon they were settled, and I heard some low and relaxed conversation, a couple chuckles, then all was quiet and dark. I heard nothing, saw nothing, and slowly my adrenaline was re-uptaked by the appropriate ligands, and I laid down in the backseat to battle the heat instead of my worries.

In truth, I really did sleep easier with a couple good humans nearby, though still quite lightly (and with the keys in the ignition) and I stopped thinking about dextrous lions and rabid elephants and Jurassic Park, and passed the night one handful of minutes at a time, instead of one second at a time.

I awoke at 5:40 am relatively well-slept, and greeted the guys with a cheerful good morning - because it’s always easier to be cheerful in the morning after potential danger has passed. They goodmorning’ed in return, and in 10 minutes all our stuff was in the back of the truck. I gave them a lift to park headquarters, just a few km down the road, thanked them for their services, requested a pic, and bid them goodbye. The pic’s blurry because it was 6am. The guys looked a lot better than I did.

The estimable Matus-1976 posted an interesting article on the use of temperature-cooling in current medical treatments, and the implications for the development of viable cryogenic technologies for human use. Here are my comments on that.

—

I must say I disagree that the move from cooling bodies and parts for short periods for medical treatment, to cryogenic suspension, is a ‘tiny conceptual leap’ - at least, in terms of having justification in reality. Conceptually it’s easy to imagine, but I don’t think evidence to date supports a near-nth degree extrapolation. What is true at one timescale, one level of biological organization, does not necessarily carry forth to all degrees. Looking at evidence to date, from temperature-related physiology in humans to the evolution of freeze-tolerance in other animals, there is reason to think that the story is multi-faceted and complexly hierarchical.

Specifically, I’m thinking of specific properties of the cells of other organisms that DO let them effectively cryo-suspend longer and more easily than humans - and those are very different cell properties than those that make cooling hearts and brains a good idea for treating injuries in humans. It’s a different beast, in my judgment, even though both cryopreservation and cold-treatments involve and rely on the slowing of molecular motion. Given how little we understand of aging - not just human aging, but things like why you don’t find 43-year-old mice, or rhinos breeding before the age of 25 or so - the existence of what amount to biological clocks should be a real concern. Some cells and organisms track time more or less faithfully, and in ways we don’t currently understand, and I’m sure it involves much more than molecular motion, but also crucially molecular *action* of specific kinds, at specific rates.  

Trying to think mechanistically, some clocks may be counting-up clocks, where activities that effectively track time can be suspended, and I suspect this is what people are thinking of - exclusively. But other clocks can be the counting-down kinds, where a crucial structure, process or relationship needs maintenance or other activity in order to be viable. And while I think knowledge of such things is more than possible, I’m telling you we know something like 1% of how a generic cell works, and humans have something like 200+ cell types in their bodies. The human body has circa 25,000 genes, which crank out hundreds of thousands of RNA products (which are far more active and important than previously thought, and constitute something of a RNA-revolution in molecular biology right now), which in turn lead to well over a million protein products. And untold numbers of RNA and protein products have more than one action, which can be simultaneous or context-dependent.

Even an inkling of combinatorics, combined with the surprising specificity yet flexibility of some cells  - much less tissues, organs and organisms - gives some indication of the task ahead, the machinery that must be manipulated with the precision, sensitivity and knowledge of … I can’t even think of an example that begins to capture this. I was going to say a Formula One driver, but the engines and computers and dynamics involved are simple compared to cells. Perhaps the guy who wrote and maintains Linux. Times like a million.

All this to say: we might have a good grasp of the nature of human beings at the conceptual level, at the organismal level, and others - but I don’t think we have sufficient grasp of the functional essence human cellular anatomy and physiology to say what is and is not possible to do to cryogenically. There may be real, and major, obstacles of an entirely different kind that are not detectable at our current state of knowledge. And even if we grant the assumption that where there’s a will, technology will find a way, I don’t think it follows that human cryogenics will and must and should happen. The nature of the biological obstacles may be such that it costs so much (in money, resources, time or effort) that, when put in the context of other goals and concerns, there is insufficient demand to sustain the technology and industry necessary to make cryogenics implementable beyond textbooks. Biology aside, the physical world of the earth and solar system will continue presenting steep challenges to humanity’s survival and flourishing for a very, very long time to come.

And cryogenics isn’t likely to be a tinkering-in-your-garage kind of enterprise. Until it is a streamlined EZ-Bake kind of technology, it will require massive investment of time, money, personnel and high-quality thought in many fields of research leading up to cryogenics. As free-markets and industrialization struggle under sustained moral attack, as economies struggle and the quality of education in general - not just science - continues to erode, the cost- and time-to-production for cryogenics spiral into oblivion, and bring to mind priorities closer at hand.

As it is, in this biologist’s judgment, we will see "intelligent" cures to both cancer in total and AIDS (i.e. cures based on knowledge of the nature of each individual’s disease, rather than the present birdshot-at-a-barnwall approach to treatment, especially cancer treatment) long before we achieve successful human cryopreservation. Or, should I say, cryo-revival, since that’s the verification test for it, and the only aspect that truly matters to someone considering The Big Freeze. And, in my slightly-better-than-amateur knowledge of cancer biology, we will be lucky to see a cure for one common cancer in our present lifetimes.

—-
Round Two:

I’m not philosophically opposed to cryogenics; for the record, I think that people who say one must die in order for anything to have value are mistaken; one must simply be able to die, no matter how long he or she lives. And that’s not at issue here. I sincerely doubt one could ever be reconstituted after being vaporized or pulverized or countless other horrific demises. Nor do I think the inherent difficulty in vitrifying humans is necessarily a show-stopper for arguments for cryopreservation ever.

I do think vitrification is problematic and a reasonable show-stopper now because we don’t know what we’re aiming for. Prior to a knowledge of what cells, tissues, organs and organisms *need* in order to be successfully thawed, present methods are little better than a stab in the dark to try and successfully vitrify people now. Yes, there’s loads of good science that can be done this way, but presumably people who are preserved in liquid nitrogen now are not contributing substantially or purposefully for that research (else they would risk, if not ensure, their own permanent demise). I think it’s a waste of energy, money, space and hope to be freezing vats of people with no idea how or when to unthaw them. Issues of storage, ethics, experimentation, "re-patriation", and legal continuity are separate, less-essential issues to this discussion, but all bear on the reasonableness of choosing to cryopreserve oneself.

It’s like stocking your house with a year’s worth of canned food "just in case." Unless you can rationally (not rationalistically) and realistically answer "in case of what?" there is no reason *not* to stock your house with a hundred years’ worth of food, or live in a titanium bunker a mile underground. On the premise that one’s life is so important that one doesn’t want to be caught unawares and unprepared, having a worry in place of a constructive purpose drains one of the value one seeks to protect: a productive, constructive, positive life of achievement (however one concretizes that).

The purpose of life for humans, broadly speaking, is *not* to survive; the purpose of life is to *live*, and surviving is a necessary but *not* sufficient condition for that. Absent real, inductive evidence that cryopreservation holds real promise for actually furthering - and not hindering - one’s life here and now, it’s has the very real potential to be as draining of life as a neurotic obsession. And I mean that literally, not condescendingly. To surrender countless opportunities for *actually* living your life healthfully and happily here and now, for or because of a gargantuan What If, is degrading to what it means to be human. Absent real promise, based in observation at every turn, it represents an existential sacrifice motivated and justified by a string of deductions from seeming-proof, with a failure to ground in reality at each cognitive step.

I see this as a weaker variant of the cognitive mis-steps that characterize well-meaning, hard-thinking theists. They have epistemologically undercut themselves at one or more key points (explicitly and purposefully, or implicitly and accidentally), and so find themselves inevitably opposed to reality, to life on earth here and now. Yet they are happy because they think they are right, that they are pursuing real values and efficaciously using their minds (on the most generous interpretation). But they have sacrificed reality broadly, and their Life specifically, and don’t know it or won’t believe it, even as they find themselves arguing against this-worldly here-and-now success in favor of a trusted abstraction with delayed, unspecified pay-offs that must occur - to their trusted knowledge and faith - "somehow", "somewhere", "at some time". It’s existentially vacuous no matter how cognitively compelling.

So too, I see, with with the hype surrounding cryopreservation; the red-flag waving in my mind is the inefficient, pointless, "idealistic" socking away of resources and energies, and inversion of priorities - privately or corporately or societally - that are in defiance of existing knowledge and real challenges and known fact. In my view, the present state of knowledge doesn’t justify such action as cryopreserving bodies, and holds out a false hope of future value at the expense of present value, and in a dangerously unspecified manner.

There is no evidence that it *does* work; there is only trust and hope and expectation that it *will* work. Just a little better than heaven, I say, and that’s not good enough. I have a life to live. And it is only in people doing *that* that the idea of cryo-preservation has any hope of being a science and not science fiction. That is, I think it is irrational to even try to vitrify bodies (since we don’t know how to do it properly) prior to knowing how to unvitrify them. And by the time we know that, we’ll probably have obviated much of the motivation to vitrify our bodies in the first place. So: fans of cryopreservation should throw their hopes, interests and money into cell biology research, which *will* have pay-offs in one’s own lifetime. I can think of other perks, but I’ll leave them aside now.

And there’s one other thing motivating my nay-saying. I take issue with the Law of Accelerating Returns and with overly optimistic extrapolations in scientific progress because these types of generalizations obscure, by their presentation and thrust and application, a key ingredient that is NOT given in any human endeavor: the vagarities of human choice. The LAR treats history as if humanity were some sort bank account of knowledge that had a low but reliable compound interest rate. It appears not to acknowledge - as possibility or historical fact - the very real crash in knowledge, life-expectancy, and quality of life that accompanied the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Christian Dark Ages. Life tanked, and humans are wholly responsible for it. The facts of human nature that permitted that as an existential possibility can never, ever be glossed over.

While progress is probable, it is *not* a given. A very sober assessment of present culture is extremely necessary when considering an issue that depends *crucially* on the free choice and action of (literally) uncountable people over a truly unspecifiable period of time. Why invest now in preserving your unknown peri-death potential when you can’t say how long you’ll be frozen, how much it will cost, and whether the social and economic laws and conventions - not to mention sufficiently shared values - are likely to exist at the time when knowledge and technology reach the level of advancement desired by (an indisposed) you? What rational formula for investment is possible apart from "More, more, more?" There is no way to gauge it.

And all at what cost to you *now*, in a life and youth and health you *already* have?
 

So a couple weeks ago my ear got hurt during a Krav class. We were learning how to break out of headlocks. It’s good to practice near or on that line between go-easy-for-practice and real-world-hard. And, frankly, ears prevent your head from being essentially ball-like and hard to stabilize between flexed biceps and a ribcage. They are flexible but robust speedbumps that slow your exit from a scene you’re trying to remove yourself from.

Poor ears. It’s been a good 3 weeks and I still don’t like to sleep on my left side and mash my ear cartilage. I was wondering why it was taking so long to heal, which took me down the mental path of ear anatomy. And it’s kinda interesting.

As you probably know, there are no bones in the external ear on the outside of your head (called the pinna, plural pinnae). Like your nose, it’s held up and given shape by cartilage. Unlike your nose, though, ears have elastic cartilage, which is a bit different from hyaline cartilage, which is in your nose and is the most common kind in your body. For example, hyaline cartilage covers the ends of all the bones in your limbs, and the top and bottom of all the vertebrae in your back. There is a third kind of cartilage - fibrocartilage - that makes up the intervertebral discs in the spine, and the free-floating cartilage pads in your knee joints. It’s fibrous and tough, as you might have guessed.

Anyway, back to ears. Although the cartilage of your nose is softer than bone, it doesn’t like to bend very much. Contrast this with your ears. Fold that sucker in half. Fold it in half in the other direction. Bend it inside out. Let it spring back. This is elastic cartilage. Throw on a network of blood vessels, and some skin more or less closely attached, and you’ve got a pinna. There are some cool modifications to the hair follicles inside your ears, and I could discuss muscle attachment points and the ability to wiggle your ears, but let’s stay on cartilage.

Why so long to heal? I think it is explained by the nature of cartilage as a tissue. Unlike most tissue, cartilage has relatively few cells in it. The cartilage cells (literally Latin-ized into chondrocytes) are comparatively large and widely scattered. They sit in a matrix of cartilage, so they don’t get out much, so to speak. They are responsible for building, maintaining and (presumably) assisting in repair of damaged cartilage. They most usually (I won’t say always, because I don’t know) are produced by chondroblasts (cells whose job is to produce more cartilage cells, which mature into chondrocytes). Perhaps chondroblasts don’t produce chondrocytes as quickly as in growing tissue, or they are relatively rare in mature tissue.

In any case, the non-cellular part of cartilage is mostly composed of collagen fibers, glycoproteins (sugar-coated proteins that attract and bind to a lot of water), water, various ions, and elastic fibers. All of these are outside cells, so if they get damaged, they just sit there until cells come by and fix things up. Hmm… bone is about equally low on cells and high on matrix (although bone is quite a bit different than cartilage), and you know how long it takes a bone to heal, even just a little fracture. Detection of damage, mobilization of repair processes, repair, and return to equilibrium are all pretty slow processes in bone as compared to, say, muscle or skin (very cellular tissues).

Pictures:
Here’s a picture of the tissue of the ear. The cartilage is the darker band in the middle with big cells. They are wierdly big and bubbley in appearance; very typical of chondrocytes. The darkness of the cartilage comes from the elastic fibers; they stain more darkly than other types of tissue with this kind of staining technique (but they are too small to see individually at this magnification). (Here’s a closeup of the elastic cartilage).

In the first picture, you can see the circular blood vessels in the lower half of the slide. The big pink one in the lower middle is an artery; the big pink band around it is the smooth muscle of the arterial wall. Arteries have more muscles than veins, which are weak, wimpy and passive by comparison. The two smaller vessels to the left of the artery are veins. At this magnification, I can’t tell whether the other vessels in the picture are arterioles (small arteries) or venules (small veins); they get a bit harder to tell apart as they get smaller. At the top you can see the numerous, compact layers of cells forming the outer-most layer of skin: the epidermis. Below that is a lot of loose, less-organized connective tissue that helps connect the skin to the cartilage and provide a bit of padding. I don’t know what that dark horizontal streak is in the top half of the slide.

If you’re still with me … contrast this with hyaline cartilage (good side-by-side comparisons at this site). More space between the chondrocytes, no dark elastin fibers. And finally, fibrocartilage is characterized by a rather wavy appearance, due to all the collagen fibers in the matrix. They are usually oriented relative to the plane of strain.

More complicated, but more beautiful, pictures of cartilage:
Hyaline cartilage from the trachea (those bumps in your throat are C-shaped rings of cartilage that keep your windpipe propped open).
Fibrocartilage from - I think - the pubic symphysis. The stacks of bubbley chondrocytes are probably hyaline cartilage that lines the pubic bones (I don’t know for sure though); the mature fibrocartilage cells are very dispersed in the wavy fibrocartilage matrix. But it’s supercool how that matrix appears to extend, by interlaced filaments, to the actual bone. Makes sense. The pubic symphysis cartilage isn’t a distinct object like the discs in your back or in your knees. The job of the symphysis is to bind together the two pubic bones so you have an intact, bowl-like pelvis that doesn’t wiggle around when you move. You wouldn’t be able to run if your pelvis flopped about (it’s got 6 bones and a sacrum that make it up, afterall).

Interestingly, the symphysis changes during child labor (that is, the end of pregnancy, not kids working in coal mines). The hormone oxytocin acts to degrade the symphysis so that the pubic bones can pull apart a bit more and make room for the baby passing through. I can’t say that sounds like fun. But hey, I’m here, and I came into the world by the normal route, so I know it works.

These are essentially 2D images. The somewhat 3D appearance of the fibrocartilage slides is a very cool optical illusion. 

Other random, cool slide photo: the pyramidal cells (neurons) of the cortex of the brain. They are specially dyed to show up, to the exclusion of the myriad supportive cells surrounding them. I also read that for some unknown reason, only about 1 in 10 pyramidal cells actually stains. There are about 100 billion neurons in the adult brain, and about one trillion support cells. I’ve read that a normal, healthy adult loses anywhere between 9,000 and 80,000 brain cells a day. Just estimates. Not my area of research, either. Still: take care of your brain! Encourage it to grow (yes, physically, by exercising it mentally), and you’ll have scads more brains (literally) by the age of 85 than if you neglect or abuse your brain!

Other cool YouTube links du jour:

Impossible Is Nothing.

House-jumping with an RC car

The London Underground is not a political movement. Hell yeah :o)

—-

Added 8/23

How the Scottish invented Golf, by Robin Williams 

Fascinating, beautiful, intriguing - and a silent commentary on the disintegration of technique in modern art. Very cool.

"Steam-what?" you say?

Steampunk!

It’s modern technology meets steam-engine era techno-esthetics. Did you see the movie Wild Wild West? All that crazy technology on… steam trains in the… wild west? That’s steampunk.

And this cool guy I ‘friended’ on myspace a year or two ago got interviewed for Wall Street Journal Online. I knew that he builds stuff all the time, but … I didn’t know it was that cool. A decorative sword is one thing (and not so much up my alley); a flat-bed scanner that looks like the Gutenberg Bible is another!

Anyway, his website is thus: Datamancer.net. And the WSJ piece is here.

Oh, and I came across this great animated short the other week, called A Gentleman’s Duel, on the Brassgoggles blog. Hilarious.

Michael’s got a great post on nuclear power, and the (surprising) stance of one of Environmentalism’s founders on nuclear power. Short and well-written. Check it out.

Here are a few pics from my trip that I’ve finally gotten around to uploading.

Firstly, and crucially, the proto-three-horned greater kudu specimen, mounted on a wall for posterity. Yep, that little nodule in the place of a 3rd eye is really a 3rd horn. Super-cool. And relevant for the post on making unicorns.  

Next, in the "Ew! Gross!" Category we have the misshapen, malformed, and malignant:

A gemsbok with a growth on its horn
Some antelope hoof with a HUGE osteosarcoma-like explosion of a growth on the leg
Curling iron gone awry: A gemsbok with one horn up, one curled in
The wall o’ wacky things smaller than a head
A little to the right… a little farther… a little farther
It’s all fun and games till someone gets their eye poked out

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
09/13/1830 - 03/12/1916
Austrian/Moravian novelist

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

What delights us in visible beauty is the invisible.

Little evil would be done in the world if evil never could be done in the name of good.

Krav Maga is kicking my ass. Still. As expected. I’ve never bruised an ear before, or the lower point of my shoulderblade, or the ball of my right pinky finger. And I have some very intriguing scratch marks and fingerprint shaped bruises on my arms. I haven’t been that exhausted from a workout in a very long time. Useless arms, useless brain, headache, and (yes) damn near cried from sheer exertion, frustration and exhaustion at the end of a burnout drill at the end of class. And a 12oz glass of half-strength lemon juice last night doesn’t appear to have delayed the influx of lactic acid into most muscles of my upper body.

Still a good class, though hand wraps and more cardio classes are on my to-do list. And a whole lotta push-ups and sit-ups.

9/8 (two days later): Broke a blood vessel in my thumb 15 minutes into class, had to quit for the day. Pretty pissed, but what can I do? At least my thumb is only 3/4 blue and purple, instead of entirely like last time. And it appears I won’t have a bum hand for a week this time, just a couple days. Glove gloves gloves… and ice. I hate having to quit, especially when I busted my butt to get there on time, and was revved up for class. Argh.

I think I broke the vessel while playing freeze-tag. It was an exercise in peripheral awareness and touch-sparring combined with sprinting. Pretty cool. 

If you couldn’t tell by the banners in the margins of this page, I subscribe to The Objective Standard journal. The articles are very good, some more directly impinging upon my interests, both professional and personal, than others. I haven’t read them all yet, though. A few of the articles, mostly having to do with politics of some sort, are available in full for free online. If you’re interested, here’s a list of the links.

Introducing The Objective Standard by Craig Biddle

Religion vs. Free Speech by Craig Biddle

The Morality of Moneylending: A Short History by Yaron Brook 

The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism by C. Bradley Thompson

The Forward Strategy for Failure by Yaron Brook and Elan Journo

‘No Substitute for Victory’: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism by John David Lewis

‘Just War Theory’ vs. American Self-Defense by Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein 

The False Promise of a Classical Education by Lisa VanDamme 

I don’t think I used the word "brilliant" enough in the last post.

Here’s a brilliant article by Christopher Hitchens from Slate on the hypocritical one-way street of tolerance regarding the demands and sensibilities of Muslims. The argument applies to any group demanding "respect" at the price of other group’s respect or any individual’s rights; the religion of Islam is simply among the more current brandishers of this flawed logic and emotionalism. The sad and dangerous thing is that until about the 20th century, this argument would have been rejected from political and intellectual discussions as an example of the kind of childist, petulant threats of violence that the Modern Era explicitly left behind.

See also from the Principles in Practice blog:

The Rushdie Fatwa and ‘Religion vs. Free Speech’
America’s Sanction of Its Enemies
US Should Shut Down Al Hurra TV
Don’t Extend the ‘Hate-Crime’ Law - Abolish It
The UN Human Rights Council’s War on Human Rights
UCLA Penalizes Student Group’s Exercise of Free Speech
Iran Sponsors Terrorism, US Seeks ‘Dialogue’
US Negotiates with Iran, Iran wins
The Real Disgrace: Washington’s Battlefield ‘Ethics’
Study of Troops’ Mental Health, Ethics Indicts Bush’s Selfless War
Diplomacy Only Encourages North Korea’s Belligerance
Speaking In (and of) Tongues

Here’s some stuff I’ve come across lately. I’m low on post-inspiration today.

Unbelievable: Pride and Prejudice not good enough to be published today. I suspect more publishers sniffed a problem and, like the last agency quoted, chose not to stir up emotions and simply be done with the "author" - though it’s still damning, because cracking open the first page of that book would have revealed much more than close ’similarities’, so that’s negative points on intellectual integrity for them.

Way believable, and way cool. A beautiful … music video?? … of the 17-year cicadas and their life cycle, set to music by Enya. Funny how the right music can make one favorably regard a classic pest. The time-lapse photography showing them crawling out of their nymph shells and unfurling their wings is really neat. 

And, along with my purchase of HP7 at Fry’s Electronics this weekend, I strolled past the first book (Vol. 1, Issue 114, No. 247, I think) in the Haggis-on-Whey World of Unbelievable Brilliance Series. Yes, it’s as good as it sounds. I was torn between my two academic loves: things with split hooves and four stomachs, and human anatomy. Ultimately I chose Giraffes? Giraffes! over Your Disgusting Head: The Darkest, Most Offensive and Moist Secrets of Your Ears, Mouth and Nose. You know, lunch reading material at work.

Oh, and if you think the cosmology of Scientology is some of the best fodder for stand-up comedy (Dave), you should check out the book on giraffes. I suspect Tom Cruise would have some choice words for the giraffe population of Terre Haute, Indiana, but I think their belief system stands up just as well as that devised by L. Ron Hubbard. Really, he should check them out. I think it’s healthier to fixate on giraffes and Neptune than be a scientologist, anyway. Plus, L. Ron Hubbard never got a doctorate. So Dr. (and Mr.) Doris Haggis-On-Whey must have it right.

I’m sorely tempted to go get that second one and lobby for using one of their figures as part of an extra credit question for the anatomy lab final. Only eight bucks at Fry’s (hardcover, new, and only a buck more expensive than the cheapest ones on Amazon). Think I can hold out? Yeah, me either.

Well, inspiration problem solved. And I think I should have titled this post ‘Believability".