I hate the American Medical System (but love jewelry!)

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

For the last week or so my daughter, who’s currently spending some time with her mom (Rachel) in Virgina, has been having a sore belly on and off and throwing up. She didn’t have any other symptoms but we figured it was prudent to go see a doctor — and it’s good that we did because the initial assessment is troubling and they have to do some further xrays with tracer chemicals and so on. If the bills keep climbing then she’ll be back here sooner than expected since healthcare here is single-payer/public (ie. paid for with taxes rather than privately)… And it’s nuts. With just a few doctors and a few tests, the bills have already approached $5000 (for a variety of reasons insurance didn’t/couldn’t happen this past while). It’s insane and offensive. Luckily I have the money to be able to pay for this — although I wouldn’t if the numbers got much higher — but I know there are many people choosing between the health of their family and the health of their finances.

And what really gets me is that overall, the American public seems to think this is a good idea… And what’s worse, even if they didn’t, there doesn’t seem to be any political way to convert America to a single-payer public system. Who could someone even vote for to make this happen? It makes me incredibly mad and incredibly sad at the same time, and now that I’m actually caught up and victimized by it, it’s really upsetting personally as well. That said, I also have a minimum of $500 a month in prescription fees for my own medical problems… I know that’s not much, but it still has to be paid, because for some bizarre reason that I can’t figure out, in Canada prescriptions — which are legitimate and unavoidable medical costs, right? — are not covered (neither are eye appointments, glasses, or dental appointments, but that’s a whole new debate).

Anyway, more positively, I was able to pay these bills quickly to a large extent because of sales from my Etsy store giving me a small fluid float of cash that I was able to quickly send down to Rachel to appease the doctors. One of the thing that makes it all even more offensive to me is that the hospital was refusing to do potentially life-saving scans without 80% of the fees being paid up-front. I know that almost every American I know can tell me a horror story that’s a million times worse than what I’ve just described, but still, this should not happen in a so-called “first world nation”.

Thank you again to everyone who has supported my Etsy shop. And it may surprise you to hear me say this but thank you as well to everyone who has continued to support BME after I left since ultimately that money does at least partially support my daughter. But I wanted to mention, in positive news, that I made some very cool new additions to my Etsy shop (especially in the zombie rings category because I’ve improved some old designs with new stone-mounting skills I’ve learned) that I wanted to mention here. As always, my “PAY WHAT YOU CAN” policy remains in place, where you can optionally apply up to a 50% discount if you need it. As much as it’s important to me to make money to, among other things, pay medical bills, it’s also important to me as an artist to get my work into (or “onto” in the case of rings!) the hands of people who appreciate it.

Click the pictures to jump to the relevant shop page:


Blue Zombie Eye Ring
Whoever heard of a blue-eyed zombie? Made using a chrysocolla.


Moonstone Zombie Eye Ring
That’s more like it… looks like an ethereal cataract!


Mummified Zombie Ring
This gaunt character has a pair of pyrite (fool’s gold) eyes.


The Brainiac Maniac Zombie
Caitlin’s exact words: “THAT RING IS PSYCHO!!!”


Half-Head Zombie Ring
I’ve used a pair of glossy 8mm black onyx cabochons as eyes.


Malachite Jester’s Mask Ring
This itsy-bitsy ring is for the daintiest fingers I make stuff for.


Lego minifig with Star Ruby
Since people keep asking, I made another one…

That’s all I added today, but I actually made much more than that because I had some commission work and orders to put a final polish on as well, so it was a busy but successful day. I think I’m pretty good at channeling stress into productive labor, and I can’t imagine a bigger thing to worry about than the well-being of my daughter.

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Mars Post Update

Monday, May 14, 2012

I woke up at about 5AM this morning with a terrible headache and feeling very “tired but not tired” and realized within a minute, by luck or by nature, that I wasn’t breathing. Forced myself to do for for about ten minutes before it seemed to kick in on its own. So many nights lately I feel like I’m really rolling the dice, and even when I’m awake I know something’s not quite right. On one hand I feel like I’m oxygenated, and yes, I realize that my medical problem is that I can’t always sense CO2 levels in my blood, so maybe that doesn’t mean anything, but it’s not as if I’m getting dizzy or feeling tired out when I do things, other than from the muscle damage of course. But everything I’ve read says that it’s very abnormal to have a breath rate of four to six bpm. Maybe I’m just second guessing myself out of paranoia because I have no frame of refernece — it’s not like we’re ever taught how to breathe, short of yoga and martial arts of course — but I feel like when you breathe out there should be some natural instinct to breathe in again fairly quickly, but I’m not feeling that happen. Of course, as soon as you start thinking about your breathe, it completely changes because it switches off the autonomic system and moves over to conscious control. So it’s almost impossible to self-monitor it accurately anyway. I just really want to make it through the summer though. To be honest I am surprised to have made it this far, but I really want to make it through the summer…

Anyway, I managed to find a copy of Discovery’s incredible “Race to Mars” (aka “Mars Rising”) six part series (there is a barely-alive torrent and the DVD is for sale on their website) and it’s been absolutely wonderful to watch and very on topic with my latest post about the planning of Mars missions up to 1967. That said, one of the problems with having so thoroughly educated myself on the history of various proposals is that I noticed a number of minor historical errors in an otherwise well-researched documentary series — for example using footage of Ernst Stuhlinger’s US Army Ballistic Missile Agency solar-electric mission presented to the public by Disney (the ten ships carring two hundred people were very pretty, looking like giant mechanical flowers) but describing it as von Braun’s equally preposterously massive 70 person, multi-ship mission imagined in the 40s. But wow did I enjoy it and so will anyone who dreams of humans breaking free of the Earth and colonizing another world (…and then another, and another, and another…).

I have in the past complained that I think Elon Musk charges too much for Falcon 9 launches at $54 million, due to my support for “big dumb boosters”, low tech mega-rockets. But in some ways I am revealed as being too hasty when I read about his “Red Dragon” proposal and other Mars ideas. But I want to introduce some thoughts before I discuss them.

When you ask Americans what NASA’s budget is, the average response is that it’s about $750 billion (which they believe is too high). The reality is that NASA is massively underfunded, currently at $18 billion, and as a percentage of the budget it has dropped every year. Additionally, they are cursed with a repeating fiasco of one President scrapping all of NASA’s current plans and announcing his own “bold” (or in Obama’s case, decidedly not bold) vision, only to have it again scrapped and replaced by the next President. The end result is that not only do the scientists and engineers and astronauts live with a constant cloud of disappointment, it also results in massive amounts of wasted money. That said, it is very important to point out that NASA is one of the few US agencies that actually operates at a huge profit because of the technology they develop and inject into the private sector, to say nothing of secondary benefits like keeping high tech jobs in America. Most studies have shown that every dollar invested in NASA pays off in the long term by an order of 5:1 or more. But it seems like nothing is changing and any politician who has the appearance of being a “fan” of space development — Newt Gingritch comes to mind — is teased mercilessly for it. America’s aggressive pro-stupidity prejudice against intelligence is deeply ingrained.

But perhaps this new phenonmena that has been discussed a lot in the media lately of financially successful nerds of the tech sector lining up to invest in the tech sector will change things. Paypal, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google executives (and many others) are all pouring them money into space startups, with Paypal’s SpaceX being perhaps the farthest ahead. I just described Obama’s space policy as “decidedly not bold”, and that’s because it’s incredibly slow, expensive, and cautious. The long slog he proposes to get us to Mars will take thirty plus years and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It’s ridiculous. But as I mentioned in the previous entry, the smallest Mars mission that NASA has ever proposed came in at about $30 billion. The private sector though, which seems to be the future of the space industry, believes it can do better.

The Red Dragon mission (pictured above) that I mentioned earlier is an unmanned mission to Mars by SpaceX. It uses their Dragon capsule, which is capable of carrying astronautics, but for this mission is run roboticly. Elon Musk is telling NASA that he can do this mission for a scant $400 million, plus another $150-$200 million for the launch (using his Falcon Heavy, which is about half the size of a Saturn V). It’s an exciting mission because not only is it cheap enough to make funding very likely, but it will not only be searching for life, but also assessing surface habitability, research the ground ice (which is not just interesting for researching the climate history, but also essential in colonizing Mars), test many systems required for manned landing and do research on in-situ resource utilization. It’s the first Mars mission that’s a big step toward a real manned mission. So I was very excited to read the artical about Elon Musk in the December 17, 2012 New Scientist:

“Must would like to be the person who takes humankind to Mars.

That moment may be closer than anyone thinks. Musk declared recently that he could put a human on Mars in 10 to 20 years’ time. It is a remarkable claim, yet even more astonishing Musk tells me that he could do it for $5 billion, and possibly as little as $2 billion — a snip when you consider that the International Space Station (ISS) has cost at least $100 billion to build and operate, or that $2 billion is roughly the cost of launching four space shuttle missions.

Musk doesn’t just want to stop at one human. In his Heinlein prize acceptance speech, he said he wants to put 10,000 people on Mars. Musk rarely makes public statements merely for effect but a call for 10,000 would-be Martians is extraordinary, even by his standards. When I query him on this point, he pauses. Is he reconsidering? Yes… byt as with so much else about Musk, not in a predictable way. “Ultimately we don’t really want 10,000 people on Mars,” he says, after letting the pause linger a few seconds more. “We want millions.”

If he really can do it for that small an amount of money, I really hope they give him a shot. And if NASA won’t, maybe the private sector will. Whoever gets there first effectively owns the planet. He also goes on in the article to point out that on his launches, only 3% of the cost is fuel. He wants to see “rapid reusability”, whereas I’ve voted for extremely cheap rockets, but he makes the important point that when you’re talking about Mars, reusable (read: durable) technology is extremely important, since it’s not like Earth where you have highly accessible and long-refined raw materials and an established manufacturing sector. The Falcon Heavy, his new vehicle, has more emphasis on rapid reusability than anything he’s built yet.

Of course as much as I said I just want to make it through the summer at the start of this entry, I would really much rather make it long enough to see humans on Mars.

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Do you worry you’ll regret those tattoos?

Saturday, May 12, 2012

I had a nice visit earlier today from someone local who’d bought a ring and needed it resized, but it turned out that instead of a resize we just swapped it out for the Transmetropolitan-inspired Spider Jerusalem ring. That reminded me that I recently read a comic I wanted to mention here.

There’s a wonderful and award winning series called Locke & Key (published by IDW — you can also find them on Amazon, and I wouldn’t mention that if I didn’t think they were worth paying for) about a group of kids whose New England mansion has a bunch of keys with various supernatural powers, from doorways that can take you anywhere, to keys that can flip your gender and keys that open your head so you can rearrange your — or someone else’s — mind, to locks that protect us from a demon filled world desperate to spill into ours. I really can’t recommend it highly enough. I’ve read every issue and anxiously await the next. I should mention that it’s not suitable for children though.

To my great surprise, in the fourth series (out of five so far) — Clockworks — issue three contains a touching commentary on tattoos and self-harm. The main comic is written by Joe Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez, but occasionally they run a short mini-comic at the end called “Kinsey’s Komic Korner!”, Kinsey being one of the characters in the main story. That said, it’s all totally unrelated to the main storyline of Locke & Key so I think what’s going on is the authors are simply fans (perhaps I should say Kinsey is a fan) — these mini-comics are done by Kate Leth of Kate or Die, and you’ll also find this comic — and many more wonderful short illustrated stories — in her comics archive at KateOrDieComics.com (including some others about tattoos that all of us will find familiar).


(CLICK AND ZOOM IN)

By the way, Kate Leth mentions that it “scared the living hell out of me to put on the internet”, so I wanted to give her a lot of credit for doing so, and sharing something that makes one feel very alone even though it is an extremely common issue.

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More Time: Clocks Mechanical and Biological

Friday, May 11, 2012

I realized recently as I was cleaning up around my workspace that I never (at least I don’t think I did) took pictures of this little clock that I made. I actually bought these terrible tasting candies just because I liked the container and knew it would make a good clock! The innards are a standard battery powered clock mechanism, and I cut down the hands that came with it to better fit. The raised numbers are hand sculpted out of polymer clay and glued in space.

Speaking of time, since that seems to be the theme today what with birthdays and chronovisors and clocks, I think it’s pretty cool that devices like the iPhone can be hacked to act as remarkably accurate heartbeat monitors. I have two apps on my phone using two different techniques to achieve this. The first has you hold your finger over the lense of the camera, and then turns on the camera’s flash/light which causes the finger to illuminate. The phone then watches for the subtle changes in colour as the blood pulses through your finger to measure your heartbeat. The other app is analogous, but instead of using your finger just watches your face, which apparently pulses and fluctuates in tone enough with each beat of your heart that the little camera chip in the phone can actually detect your heartbeat, and from my testing it appears to be very accurate, which I have to admit surprised me. I’m guessing then that there are many animals capable of seeing this in humans and other critters.

My heartbeat is generally a healthy mentronome-like 60 BPM or just slightly below. About a two years ago it was slower, about 45 BPM, but I think it might have been my previous medication artificially slowing it down. Anyway, I actually installed this software because I was curious what effect my central apnea had on my heartrate, if any, since I assume they’re both part of the autonomic nervous system. I was somewhat disturbed to see that when I am having an issue with central apnea, my heart rate becomes highly errattic, fluctuating wildly and quickly and chaotically between 30 BPM and 100 BPM for a few minutes, and then settling back to its normal clock-synchronized tick-tocking… I have so much stuff I still want to do and see, so I really hope I don’t die in my sleep (or while I’m awake) some day soon, although I have to admit there have been many nights where I feel extremely off-balance in terms of my basic bodily functions and worry about it. I’m not at all afraid of dying and I have had a wonderful life, but I’d really rather have quite a bit more of it! (That said, ask me during my most painful periods and I think I might be more inclined to give you a “just let it end NOW” answer, haha).

Anyway, I just shipped all my pending Etsy shop orders and now it’s time to get cleaned up so I’m ready to go out for birthday sushi with Caitlin. I am, as almost always, covered in manufacturing grime and in dirty clothes, and I’m also a little more dirty than usual from getting Caitlin’s 1973 Mach I Mustang (a previous birthday present) ready for summer driving — although she is considering trading it in for something smaller, more modern, and more practical.

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How close are we to a “time viewer”?

Friday, May 11, 2012

As you know, I have a soft spot for modern mythology of the sci-fi sort. I enjoy it much more than mythology of the supernatural sort because unlike stories about gods and ghosts that are simply impossible, it is possible to at least believe that the stories in sci-fi myths are at least possible to some extent. And I think that makes the stories a great deal more compelling and gives one much more to think about — and of course it also means that even if the myth is false, similar events could easily unfold in the future.

In addition to things like a secret mission to Mars that I talked about yesterday, a tale I enjoy is that of the Chronovisor, a time-viewer said to be capable of tuning in to lingering electromagnetic radiation and displaying any point in time on a television-like screen.

The story of the Chronovisor (if you speak Italian you can watch what appears to be a show about it here on YouTube) was first publicized by Roman Catholic priest Francois Brune, who had interviewed its alleged creator, scientist and fellow priest Father Pellegrino Maria Ernetti. Ernetti had a legitimate academic career as a respected expert in ancient music — so he had a lot to lose academically for telling crazy tales — and was also a prominent exorcist for the Vatican — so on the other hand, maybe crazy tales and Ernetti had always gone hand in hand. In any case, one day while working with Father Agostino Gemelli at the Catholic University of Milan working on hardware to filter harmonics out of Gregorian Chants, they thought they heard the voice of Gemelli’s father coming out of the device. Theorizing that just like a telescope allows you to “look into the past” by showing you light that was created many years earlier, or a “live” television broadcast may actually be showing you something that is not happening at that moment but seconds in the past because of delays in the electromagnetic signal reaching the viewer, that somehow their device had accidentally picked up on an “echo” of an event from the past, Ernetti began investigating the possibility of applying this phenomena in a more dramatic fashion. He claimed that he assembled a team of a dozen scientists and engineers including Wernher von Braun (presumably due to his alleged experience with the “Nazi Bell” machine, particle accelerator meets dimensional gateway generator, that some believe jumped through space and time from 1945 Germany to 1965 Pennsylvania) and Enrico Fermi (the Italian physicist central in developing the first nuclear reactor) to create the device, which worked as designed. However, the Vatican and the science team felt that the machine’s ability to completely eliminate privacy and to tune into any moment and any place put the world at far to much risk and dismantled it.

Before dismantling the device though, Ernetti claimed to have viewed many historical and biblical events, and when asked for proof of the device, he first provided the text of Thyestes, an unpublished play by Quintus Ennius from 169 B.C., which he said he transcribed while watching it in Latin on the Chronovisor. Most academics call this text a fraud, but it’s difficult to prove that absolutely. However, he followed this up with more dramatic proof, a photograph of the face of Jesus Christ as he was being crucified, which he said he’d created by photographing the screen of the Chronovisor!!! Of course, as an atheist, who does not even buy the notion of a non-supernatural historical Jesus, his is where the story breaks down for me. And unfortunately it also breaks down here for Ernetti, when in 1994 it was realized that the photo bore a remarkable similarity to a wooden sculpture of Christ for sale at the Sanctuary of Merciful Love in nearby Collevalenza, Italy. During his life he refused to comment on this matter, until on his deathbed — at least according to an anonymous letter sent to Brune’s publisher, from someone claiming to be Ernetti’s relative — he admitted that the photo of Christ was a hoax but that the Chronovisor was real and had worked.

Brune personally did not believe this letter, and as a devout Christian assumed that the similarity of the sculpture to the photo was due to the fact that the sculpture was said to be based on an actual vision of Christ, so “of course it looks the same, duh!”. I lean in the other direction, and my version of the conspiracy says that if the Chronovisor worked, it revealed the falsehood of the Christian religion — and of all religions — to Father Ernetti, who in a desperate attempt to hold onto his wavering faith, created the fake photo of Christ.

* * *

Because of my enjoyment of the Chronovisor story, it was with great interest that I read a recent article in Popular Science titled “In New Quantum Experiment, Effect Happens Before Cause“, referring to a brain-bending article in Nature Physics called “http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys2294.html“.

Using four photons, we can actively delay the choice of measurement—implemented through a high-speed tunable bipartite-state analyzer and a quantum random-number generator—on two of the photons into the time-like future of the registration of the other two photons. This effectively projects the two already registered photons onto one of two mutually exclusive quantum states in which the photons are either entangled (quantum correlations) or separable (classical correlations). This can also be viewed as ‘quantum steering into the past’.

In short, one team does something, and the other team checks its effect to see what they did. The brain-bender part comes in when you find out that the “results” part comes before the “doing” part, or at least appears to. There have been a few experiments that at first appeared to violate classical causality (the notion that cause must precede effect on the timeline) but were later shown to not quite be so physics-shattering. The jury is still out on whether this experiment involves actual “time travel” or at least Chronovisor-esque “time viewing” or not, but it’s possible, and every month a new experiment comes out that seems to take us closer and closer to retrocauality and viewing through time.

The part that made it really exciting to me was learning that defense contractor Lockheed Martin had patented and has been developing (with some DARPA funding) something they call Quantum radar (there’s a relatively accessible research paper you can read on it called “Remote-Sensing Quantum Hyperspace by Entangled Photon Interferometry“). As I understand it, it’s a viewing device that at a minimum allows you to instantaneously view any place — so a remote-sensing device that can over potentially massive ranges and through intermediate matter view whatever you’d like. In addition to the military applications that Lockheed Martin is investigating it is being considered for applications such as giving advanced warning of solar flares to better protect satellites and electrical grids. However, the research paper points out that using it as a geography-unlimited viewing device is only the tip of the iceberg, and that it should be possible to use it to “remote-sense distant quantum properties of past, present or even future hypersurfaces of spacetime … by exploiting causal and relativistic loopholes”. That is, it is quite literally the Chronovisor, a device that can show you any point in space and time. And Lockheed Martin wants to build it…

Oh what will the Vatican say about that?

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