Brian's Posts

Lymphomania: Relief

2011-08-30T15:22:00.000-07:00

Doc: How are you doing?
Me: I'll let you know in a few minutes.
Doc: I think you're fine.

And with those statements, the coin lands heads up. Mark Twain once said that the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. I can't think of the right words right now, so I'm not going to try for any exposition in this one.

My hematology oncologist (the one in charge of chemo and such) said that he talked about the PET/CT results with the radiation oncologist (guess what he's in charge of), and while there was some inflammation, it was all pretty much exactly in the radiation's field, so that was to be expected, but there was no new activity or growth. Before officially labeling me “in remission”, I'll be going back for another PET scan in three months after the radiation's effects have subsided a bit more, but he thinks I'm fine.

I'll be able to enjoy the fall and hopefully hike some. On the down side, I don't have an excuse to get out of traveling for work anymore. :)

Thank God, and thank you all for your prayers and support.

Please, enjoy life.

Lymphomania: Reliance

2011-08-28T22:05:00.000-07:00

So right now it's Sunday night, and I'm a day and a night away from getting the results of last Monday's PET scan, which should tell whether or not I am in remission. A week and a day is a while to wait for something like this, but it does have its advantages. I remember when I was getting the staging done; you'll recall that it had two components: the PET scan and the bone marrow biopsy. The scan results were back first, and as I got those, I knew that the staging was contingent on the marrow results coming back clean. It would be several days later before I was back to the doctor's office, and I could have called for the marrow results before that, but I decided that it wouldn't matter. At best, the stage would remain as-is, and at worst … well, it would be worse. So I figured I'd assume the best for a few more days, since knowing sooner in this case would do absolutely nothing for me. That's kind of like how it is now. Getting the results a few days sooner or later won't make a difference health-wise, so as long as I'm not freaking out right now, it's good to have a few more days of guaranteed normality. The trick is that whole “not freaking out right now” thing.

There's a subject I've been wanting to write about for a while, but I never got around to it. Simply put, I want to talk about the the role God has played in all this for me. People these days are so hesitant to speak of such things publicly, and I'm not really sure why, even though I am one of them. It's a personal matter, but one should never mistake “personal” for “private”. Your favorite flavor of ice cream is personal, but that doesn't stop you from adamantly discussing it. For Christians, faith was never meant to be private. “No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, so that those who come in may see the light.” We are also told, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” People always tell me how well I've handled this whole process. Well, here's my small attempt to shine a little light on the reason for my hope.

I mentioned in an earlier post that when I was first diagnosed, I thought about how much we think we're owed. It would be extremely understandable, when getting news of a possibly terminal illness, to believe you're getting robbed of something, as if you're owed something in the first place. While understandable, I believe this attitude is inherently dangerous. To go around believing that something has been stolen from you simply gives rise to anger without any positive benefits. What kept me from falling into that line of thinking was a parable that Jesus told that popped into my head while I was initially getting poked and prodded. In the parable, Jesus tells of workers who are not employed for the day. A landowner goes out in the morning and hires some to work in his field in exchange for a certain amount of pay. Throughout the day, the landowner continues to hire workers. At the end of the day, all the workers are paid the amount that was agreed upon for the first workers. The workers that started earlier in the day are upset because the later ones got the same pay for doing less work, to which the landowner replies that they got what was agreed upon, and what is it to them if he wants to be generous to the others? When I thought about this parable, I had to admit that I was never promised anything, and if I am given a certain amount of life, who am I to get upset that I didn't have more or that others get more. I have already had more than some, and no matter when I die, I will have had less than someone else. Of what exactly am I being robbed? Did I have to be given anything at all? After you stop feeling that something's been taken from you, it's a lot harder to feel mad.

Another thing that really helped was to focus not on the negative aspects of the situation, but the blessings that God had given me. When something like this happens, one response is to rage against God for the bad He has put in your life, but I think that's taking a very narrow view. When I looked at how I was entering into the situation, what I saw was how stacked in my favor the circumstances were. Other than the cancer, I was healthy. I wasn't too old to handle the treatment well, and I wasn't a young child that didn't understand how filling my body with poison was going to hopefully make me better in the end. I wasn't a young child who was only going to get a few short years at life if the treatments didn't work. I had a great job that allowed me the time needed to get treatments and insurance to pay for it. I had a good place of treatment that was just a few minutes from home and work. The cancer hadn't spread throughout my entire body. I didn't have one of those cancers where you only get 3-6 months after diagnosis with almost no chance of recovery; instead, if you look at the raw numbers, they were actually in my favor – more patients survive than not. I had family and a great network of friends close by. I got cancer and things could have been so much worse. I thank God for all that He has given me.

Finally, there was the actual possibility of a death that would come sooner rather than later. I have tried to keep a good balance of optimism and realism, so while I do not dwell on the worst, I must acknowledge that it is a possibility. To help me there, I recalled a comment that a friend of mine once said. A couple of friends and I had been hiking about three years ago, and somehow we got on the subject of dying while still relatively young. The only thing I remember from that conversation was my friend's attitude about it. “I wouldn't care. It just means I get to go home sooner.” I liked that. A couple of years before that, my uncle had asked if I knew how to get to Heaven. I squirmed a bit, but my answer was basically to follow the Ten Commandments and hope that in the end you were good enough. I have since learned that that is not right, though. You can never, ever be saved by merit. For a Christian, the answer is by accepting Christ as your savior. You rely not on hope that your actions are good enough (because they never will be), but on faith that your debt to God was paid by Jesus, and with that, you do not need to guess or fear. I was (and am) confident of where I will end up, be it sooner or later, so when it inevitably does happen, I will simply be going home. It's really not so much “death” as “moving”. The process may be none too pleasant, but that is temporary. I will not say that I haven't had my moments of fear here and there, and I of course have a preference of how I hope it turns out, but in the immortal words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.” So we needn't really worry about that too much. ;)

So after all that rambling, we come back to where I am now – waiting while a coin flips over and over in the air to see on which side it will land. OK, it's really more like a six or eight sided die with two bad sides, you you get the picture. It's starting to get a little weird knowing that in a bit over a day I'll get news and either be done for a while or have to do more chemo. The up side is that right now I'm not going to get any “you're SOL” news – I think the worst that it could be at this point is more treatment, which I'll handle. Still, it's been weird to, for the first time, really know that I am ultimately powerless. I can take the drugs and keep a good attitude, but it's not in my hands. Fortunately, the one in whose hands the outcome does reside are not only powerful, but good. That has a comforting feel. When Daniel's three friends were about to be thrown into the furnace by Nebuchadnezzar, they told him how God could save them, but (and this is extremely important) then continued, “But even if he does not...” We do not know God's will, and that leaves open the possibility that things will not go as we would wish. However, that is no reason to hold anything against Him. If we believe that He is who He says He is, then we must trust how things turn out. In the end, we must realize that we don't know as much as we think we do, and we are not as powerful as we think we are, and we cannot control the world as much as we try to. But it's good that someone is there on whom you can rely, and if you trust in that, then even though the world may not be peaceful, your heart still can be.

Lymphomania: Fun With Particle Accelerators

2011-08-04T13:53:00.000-07:00

When we last left our intrepid hero, he had just finished chemotherapy! And now – the next exciting installment!

Shortly after my last chemo treatment, I was sent to a radiation oncologist, who is basically another cancer doctor that specializes in radiation treatments. My first appointment was for a consultation. They put in all my medical history (that I'd given to other doctors before... not sure why all that stuff isn't linked together...), and then I had a long talk with the doc where he explained all about the process. Now, this guy is as big of a nerd as I am, so at the end, he told me that he went into a lot more detail with me than he usually does, but he figured I'd appreciate it, which was a correct judgment. :) [an aside: Does anyone else think that “judgment” should have an “e” between the “g” and “m”? Either that, or “judge” should not have an “e” at all. In fact, it should be spelled “judj”. No need for all this “soft 'g'” business!]

So to pass along one of the more interesting pieces of information, he told me how the radiation actually kills the cancer cells. X-rays of a certain frequency are shot through your body. At lower frequencies, your body is transparent to them, but bone is not, which is why you can get x-ray images of bone and internal structure. If we increase the frequency of the x-rays (which is synonymous with increasing the energy when we talk about radiation), bone becomes transparent as well. The rays end up interacting with particles in your cells in ways that can break the cells' DNA. Now, your DNA is rather resilient, and it can normally repair itself, but if the cell is in the process of dividing, then the DNA, which is normally in the structure of a ladder, is in an “unzipped” state (picture halving a ladder by breaking all the steps on it), and breaks while it is in this state cannot be repaired. If the DNA can't be repaired, the cell dies. So basically, the radiation has a higher probability of killing cells that are dividing, and since cancer cells divide at a higher rate, they have a higher probability of being in that vulnerable state. You actually use the high rate of division against it. Neat! That of course means that the radiation can still affect healthy cells that have a high division rate, but just not to the same extent, so it's just like chemo in that way.

With regard to my specific case, he went over the pros and cons of treatment, since I could actually opt not to have it. (My thinking there is that the docs know more about it than me, so if they suggest it, I'm doing it!) The radiation is there to clean up what the chemo didn't get. This isn't always the case since sometimes it's used to shrink tumors before surgery. He said that the particular location and the bulkiness when it was found both increase the risk of recurrence, so he was in favor of the treatment. I'll admit, it felt weird going over that stuff again, even though it wasn't anything that I hadn't heard before. I just had to keep telling myself that that increased risk he talked about was already taken into account when I got my original prognosis. Otherwise, you can start feeling pessimistic about it. He also mentioned that the radiation they used wasn't very good at causing cancer, and that usually when people get cancer from radiation, it's because radioactive sources themselves have collected inside the person for some reason, and those sources cause constant exposure. The chances that the radiation treatment I got would cause problems down the line were on the order of 1/1000 – 1/10,000, but seeing as how the probability that the cancer is not in remission now is 1/4 – 1/3, I'll take those odds. On the up side, lymphomas in general are one of the more responsive cancers to radiation, so instead of needing a higher intensity dose for a shorter duration, they could use a lower intensity dose for a longer duration. The dosage is measured in “gray” (Gy), and the usual dose is 1.8 – 2.0 Gy, but for lymphomas, they can get away with 1.6. The doc said that higher energies wouldn't really do anything extra, and it'd just be like shooting a guy with two bullets instead of one when the one would kill him just as dead. Side effects depend on where the treatment is targeted, but generally include some fatigue. Since my treatment was to the chest, the other main possible side effect would be irritation to the esophagus, since the esophageal lining (and gut in general) is made of rapidly dividing cells.

After the consultation, there was a planning session, although this wasn't for another couple of weeks. The planning required another PET/CT scan so the oncologist would know exactly what areas to target. I got the idea that radiation treatment is very much an art as well as a science; he said that after he got the images, it would take him a few days to decide exactly what the best course of action was. It turned out that the scans didn't show as much detail as they wanted, so I had to do another CT scan with contrast (where they put the dye in your blood to make things show up better), but that wasn't a big deal. The up side of getting the PET scan was an update on how the cancer was doing. The bottom line from the hematology oncologist was that he thought we were still “on track”. Even though there was still a little bit of above-average uptake and a newer spot on the sternum showing, the doc said that at this point the images are very open to interpretation, and some of it could be from the drug they give me to stimulate the marrow into replacing lost blood cells. He did say that the most important and telling thing at this point was that the tumor was still shrinking, so I'm just holding on to that “still on track”.

So when the radiation doc gets the images and decides what to do, they basically use the scans to build at 3D model of the inside of my body, and they write a program that tells the radiation source where and how long to shoot the beam. The rooms with the scanners and treatment machines all have lasers in the wall that shoot fans of laser light along three axises: across the front of my body, down the front of my body, and down the side. Marks are placed on me along those axises where the lasers land, and they are covered with tape to keep them from coming off (although they have to be redrawn every few days; I thought at first they were using some special ink, but the first time they were redrawn, I saw that it was just a Sharpie). Also, small dots are tattooed (yes, the permanent kind) on those marks just in case; I have three: one on the center of my chest, and two on either side of my body. They stopped putting ink marks where the tattoos were, but still required a mark lower down on the sternum. I kind of wish they'd just have put a dot there as well so I didn't have to worry about it coming off throughout the whole treatment. Now, every time I went in to get zapped, my body was aligned with those lasers, then they used x-rays to fine-tune the position of my body to match where the machine thought I should be. Then the machine could move its x-ray source around me and administer the radiation according to its internal model, which matched up with my actual body position on the table. A couple of times in the treatment room I saw a plastic mesh mold of someone's head and top of the torso which the patient would lie under. I asked if that was for someone being treated in the head, which is was; you really have to be in the same position every time.

My first day of actual radiation, I soooo wanted to take in a spider or a popcorn kernel and put it on my chest. Just in case. ;) [The popcorn kernel of course would have purely been a joke, as microwaves and x-rays are way far apart on the spectrum.] Everything after I actually started the radiation was pretty rote. I had to have twenty-seven treatments, where I'd get one every week day, so it took five weeks and two days. (Well, actually, five weeks and three days since I didn't get treated on the 4th of July since that was a holiday, so that one just got tacked on to the end.) Once a week I'd meet with the doc, and they'd get my weight, temperature, and blood pressure, ask how I was doing, and then look at my back and chest (the exposure areas) to make sure my skin wasn't getting all funky or anything. The radiation basically reddens the skin, akin to a mild sunburn, and then it fades to brown for a few weeks, like a tan. The actual treatment just took a few minutes. After I went into the room, I laid down on the table with “the machine” looming over me. They'd line me up with the lasers, leave, and then line me up with x-ray images, then do the actual exposure, which was about eight seconds from the front and back (maybe nine or ten on the front; I was having to just count in my head), so sixteen to eighteen seconds' worth in all. If nobody was ahead of me, I was in-and-out in ten or fifteen minutes. I started on June 6 and ended July 13. Not too bad at all.

The side effects for me were actually really mild. I had a little fatigue at first, but that faded, and around treatment ten, I could feel some sensitivity in my esophagus, like it was clenching up a little when I ate sometimes, but it never got any worse, for which I am very thankful.

So right now I'm just waiting. I have a follow-up with radiation doc on August 11, which will probably just be a routine, “How are you feeling? [Fine.] Any lingering side effects? [No.] OK, lets get your temperature, weight, and blood pressure,”-type thing. After that, I have a PET scan scheduled for August 22 with an appointment with the hematology doc on the 30th to get the actual results. I guess he just wants to let the suspense build. :) Until then, I'm just enjoying some time where I don't have to think about it and live normally for a while. If it's ini remission when I get checked again, awesome! If not, then it's back to different chemo treatments. We'll see.

There's a comic I read called XKCD. His fiance was diagnosed with breast cancer about a month before I got my news, so shortly after I was diagnosed, he started putting out the occasional cancer-related comic. I liked one of his more recent ones a lot because it has a really good answer to the, “Did the treatment work?” question [Short answer: don't know] and gives a good idea of the cancer treatment cycle. It's at http://xkcd.com/931/, and after you read it, you should hover the mouse pointer over the image. The one that's two before that (http://xkcd.com/933/) is also good.

Lymphomania: Playing Catch-Up

2011-07-05T17:28:00.000-07:00

OK, so it's been a while. I know this. Sorry. :) When one first starts going through the whole "cancer" thing, it's pretty overwhelming. After a while, though, the novelty wears off, in more ways than one. Everything that's happening actually becomes routine; what was once unusual becomes day-to day. I guess the simplest way to put it is that things seems less news-worthy, so posts start to get more spread out. Second, usually those closest to me – family and friends – more or less know what's going on, they're going to get used to it, and as the shock wears off and they see I'm living more or less normally, I don't feel the need to inundate them with every little thing. So again, the urgency to post wanes. There's one other reason, as well. You start living in two worlds. In one, right after treatment, you're too tired to write or do much that requires much mental effort (more on that a little later). In the other, you're taking full advantage of not being in that first state. Playing games, getting caught up on work, dancing... anything that seems normal and doesn't require thoughts of the disease – not necessarily because those thoughts are depressing or bad, but just because those thoughts get so old, and any break is welcome. But when your dad calls and tells you that he went to the dentist, and the first thing they asked was when I was going to update the blog... well... how can I keep disappointing my adoring fans? ;) So I'll try to catch everyone up, even if it's in a somewhat disjoint manner, although it may take a couple of posts just to keep them at reasonable lengths. We'll see.

On May 3, I got my LAST chemo treatment of this (and hopefully only) series. I think that I was the most impatient through that one. You know how you can need to go to the bathroom badly for a while but not have the opportunity, and then right when you know you're about to be able to, the urgency suddenly increases? It's like when you know you're not going to need to hold it much longer, your body starts to let down its guard – it's all a mental thing. My last round of chemo, I knew that it was my last round; I knew I only had to take it for a few more days, and I think that I began to let my guard down mentally. Most of the six months I was OK because I had the attitude of, “This is my life right now. This is happening.” At the end, though, you start to think again about a life without it, and the contrast can begin to weigh on you. It was interesting to observer.

Another interesting thing to see was how a lack of energy affected my attitude. I found that in the latter half of treatment, I simply wasn't as cheerful in the days following infusion. It wasn't depression or melancholy or anything – just a very “meh” feeling. I discovered then that attitude does have a physiological component. Right after a treatment, I was just tired of the whole process; it had just gotten old, but by the third week – what I liked to call “normal week” – I was pretty much cheerfully ready for the docs to bring on the next treatment. I've heard about people dismissing treatment of depression and such with medication, implying that the person just needed to suck it up and snap out of it. That may be true in some cases, but I know now that yes, there can be a physiological basis for one's mood. The experience made me think about the idea that I believe most of us have that we have a consciousness that simply resides in our bodies, but we must remember that our bodies give rise to our consciousnesses. If the body gets messed up, it's going to affect the mind. The two are kinda linked.

On a totally different note: hair. My sister had told me that my hair may begin to come back before I was done with chemo, and that's what happened. When it first came out, I would not have been 100% bald without shaving; there were some hairs that hung on for dear life so that I had to periodically run a razor over my head and face. It gradually began to thicken to the point that right before my sixth treatment (if I remember correctly), I shaved it for the last time. After that I decided that it was thick enough to let go. There were a couple of instances of weirdness, though. First, the last two chemo cycles each caused beard hair to fall out, but just in the mustache and mouth area – not the cheeks or sideburns. Also, I had a little hair fall-out from the last cycle, which hadn't happened since the first cycle. So right now I do have hair on my head again, but it's finer than it was and also looks lighter – more brown instead of black. Mom said that that's what it was like when I was a baby. Who knows if it'll thicken back up? But what's really cool is that you can look at a single hair and see the effects of the chemo. The end of the strand starts out thin and slowly thickens, then suddenly gets really thin again coinciding with the next treatment, then slowly thickens up again. Kind of like tree rings, but different. You can see it in the hairs below that fell out during the last round.

Body hair also started regrowing about this time, too. Now, I hadn't mentioned anything about body hair before because it wasn't until the last half of treatment that I noticed anything. It didn't all fall out, but it did stop growing. Now, you have a natural shed rate, so what happened was that I lost body hair at what was probably a natural rate, but it wasn't being replaced, so over the course of treatment I kept getting barer and barer. I finally realized that I was getting some growth back when I noticed that I couldn't see where they had shaved my chest from the IV port implantation months earlier.

Well, I think this is actually a good place to start to wrap up. That ends chemo, and the next post will be about radiation. Last November, six months of chemo seemed like forever... half a year... My diagnosis weighed on me like few things ever have. Now, that part of it is done, and although I still think about the cancer daily, it doesn't pervade my thoughts as it did before. (It's interesting that the image that comes to mind that I am trying to describe when I say, “pervade my thoughts” isn't so different from what the disease, if left unchecked, would actually physically do to my body.)

On my last day, when I was checking out of the infusion room for the last time, as I reveled in the idea that the moment had finally come, a woman was being shown in and given the tour because she was about to start treatment. You could tell that the whole thing was still kind of unreal to her. You could see fear. Thankfully, she wasn't alone; she had another woman there with her who was taking in all the information. I talked to them a little, and she asked if the nurses were nice there, and I was able to truthfully say that they were – that they were all good people. But I can still see her in my mind. And when I picture her, I know what she was feeling then. And I know what she was about to have to endure, and it pisses me off to no end. It's funny... I don't really mind so much what I went through. Yeah, it sucked, but I'm not mad about it. I'm mad that it's happening to her. When I had my bone marrow biopsy, I saw a woman there who I had known a little over ten years ago when co-oping in another lab at GTRI, where she still worked, and I found out that she had been fighting breast cancer for the past five years. Thoughts of what she had gone through (a mutual friend told me her story) kept away any inkling of complaint on my part. She lost her fight as I was nearing completion. One of my best friends dad passed about that same time. I just heard about the six year old nephew of a guy I went to grade school with being diagnosed and going through preparation to start chemo. Those things piss me off. I can deal with this stuff happening to me; I can take what comes. But these others shouldn't have to. It makes me want to kill it. All of it. I feel more helpless toward others in that regard than toward myself, and that's really not something I expected. Maybe one day some researcher will need a piece of software that will help. Until then, I've just gotta live. To skip ahead a little, I'm almost done with radiation, but while I'm optimistic and feel perfectly healthy, I don't know that I'll be out of the woods. But right now – today – I am alive.

Lymphomania: Treatment 5 and PET Results

2011-03-12T12:36:00.000-08:00

Well people, it's been a while. I wanted to get this update up sooner since it had interesting test results, but I was a bit too constantly-sleepy the first few days after treatment, and since then I've just been busy. Today, however, I've got nothing on the agenda and it's nice out, so I decided to take my laptop outside the condo (still inside a Starbucks, though) and do a little writing.

[An aside: It turns out there's an anime convention going on here, so everyone is walking around in costume. I always like people watching at events like this (conventions, renaissance fairs, etc.), not only for the dress, but especially just to see the group in general. Everybody are friends. It's like a bunch of people who weren't quite made for mainstream culture have finally found who they're supposed to be with. It's exquisite to see...]

First things first: test results. The "skip to the end" version is that the doc seems pleased with the results and thinks we'll end up finishing the series of eight treatments (only three more to go!) with follow-up radiation to the chest, and hopefully that should be that. Now, for the details...

Below are the latest images from the PET/CT scan.

As you can see, they are a lot less glowy (I think that's the medical term) than the originals. I was expecting intensity the same as the originals, but just shrunk down to a smaller area, but that's not exactly how it works. The amount of glowiness actually represents a value called "SUV", which stands for "standard uptake value", which measures the amount of radioactive glucose (the stuff they inject you with before the scan) that has been absorbed by a mass. The scale goes from 0 to 15, where 1 is baseline normal and 2.5 means there's definitely some malignancy going on. In addition to tumor shrinkage, as the cancerous cells are killed, it also converts over to scar tissue, meaning that you can't just go by tumor size. So originally there was one main tumor and several smaller secondary tumors. Almost all of the secondary tumors have fully resolved -- they're no longer there at all. There is one remaining secondary mass that was originally 2.7 x 1.6 cm with an SUV of 8 and is now 1.3 x 1.0 cm with an SUV of 0.8, so I think that means it's purely scar tissue. (While the doc was giving me the results, I didn't have a lot of time to absorb and come up with clarifications and questions, so what you're getting here is an amalgamation of what the doc said, what the actual radiologist's report says, and a little Googling I've done since then. When I go in for the next treatment, I plan to have a few questions now that I've had time to process.) The main mass that originally measured 10 x 10 cm and had an SUV of 15 (woo-hoo! I pegged the scale!) now measures 5 x 3 cm and has an SUV of 4. The doc's summary of that was that the tumor had shrunk by more than half, and the measured activity was getting to be borderline normal, meaning that a lot of the tumor was now scar tissue.

So now two questions for the doc are: 1) whether the scar tissue will go away with time, and 2) whether or not these results affect the original prognosis -- I'm not sure how these results compare to other comparable cases ("compare to comparable"... that sounds redundant... but the cases are comparable, and the results compare, so I think that's right...). Another thing I'm curious about is the third dimension on the masses. Reduced by "over half" is a bit too "rough-estimate" for me... Keep in mind that reducing a square by half on all sides results in a square that's 1/4 the original area, but doing the same thing to a cube results in a volume that's 1/8 of the original, so that third dimension can make a big difference.

So that's it result-wise. Everything seems to be on course, and I continue to pray that God will continue to heal me. Side-effect wise, I'm still not doing badly. It does take a little longer to recover energy-wise, and my stomach feels funny for a little longer, but intensity hasn't gotten any worse. This is still much better than I expected to be doing, and I only have three more to go, so I'm not complaining!

Alright... I think that's everything. Peace out!

Lymphomania: Half Way!

2011-02-13T13:48:00.000-08:00

Howdy, everybody! I know it's been a few weeks, but I'm finally getting around to making another update. I've successfully completed treatments 3 and 4, which means that I'm officially half way done with this (hopefully only) series. Physically I'm still doing well; side effects are still mild and haven't seemed to be getting worse. While I'm taking this as a good sign, it does make for less interesting reading. Thankfully, in this case, I think less interesting is preferred. :) This entry will be a bit ... disjoint. Right now there isn't a really cohesive narrative to the story; there are just bits and pieces of ideas that pop up in my head and (possibly) develop. There are still some more in there, and I'll get them down eventually, but I'll just give you what I have for now.

One notable event that will be coming up in almost two weeks is my second PET scan. It's scheduled for Feb 25th and will be my first chance to get a good look at what's been going on inside of me. While visually the tumor has shrunk pretty dramatically, and I can't feel it anywhere in my neck anymore, the fact remains that the majority of the mass is totally unseen, so I'm pretty anxious to see the difference. I'm constantly trying to build models of how the tumor may shrink and how a change in one part may be indicative of the rest, but there's no real way for me to tell if one is any more valid than the other. For instance, lets say one part of the tumor started out a little over 2 cm across and then shrunk on all sides by 1 cm. That means that that part is almost gone. Does that mean a larger portion of the tumor somewhere else has shrunk by the same percentage or just by the same 1 cm on all sides? The two models will give very different answers to the final size of that larger portion of the tumor, but I have no clue as to which one (if either) is more correct. In the end, it's purely a game of wait-and-see.

Mentally... I think the best way to sum it up is that the novelty has worn off. It's so very odd to see how my treatments and the whole process have just kind of become routine. When everything started, it was such a huge deal; every little detail stood out in such stark contrast to the rest of life. Now, it's just simply the norm. That is not at all to say that I've begun to downplay what's going on, but when I compare how much I thought of it then to how much I think of it now... I guess one's mind just isn't really made to stay revved up to such levels constantly. I still think about what's going on every day, but it was a relief when I got to the point when I could just forget about it for a while.

Right now I'm really learning to appreciate "normal". When I was first diagnosed, I thought a lot about how we believe we're owed so much. We think we're owed 70 or 80 years to live, and anything less that that is robbing us of something. But that's not really the case, is it? Instead, we are owed precisely zero, and every day we are given is a something extra. It works the same with everything else in life. To not feel tired all day is wondrous. To not have some weird aftertaste in your mouth all day and instead have food taste like it should is a joy. To say that we take these things for granted seems at this point such a childish cliche that I'm loath to write it out, but I can't really think of a better way to express it. There's a part of me now that views the idea of complaining about everyday circumstances (or my own current circumstances, in light of what I know others end up going through) as profane -- as an affront to the blessings that we are all given. There's just too much good in the world for that.

Fun fact: the possibility of chemotherapy as a means to treat cancer was first discovered as a result of people getting exposed to mustard gas in WWII.

Lymphomania: Treatment 2 Is Through

2010-12-30T13:59:00.000-08:00

Well, two down, six to go. So far this one hasn't been too bad. I've been chillin' at my folks' place, so maybe it's the home cooking. :) The infusion took about an hour less than I thought it would, which I guess is a good sign. I asked the doc if it's normal for the tumor to swell during treatment, and he said it was; so far I haven't seen it happen this time, though, but it didn't happen immediately last time. I'm not too concerned about that, though. As long as it's not a bad sign, I'm good with it. One cool thing is that I can barely feel the tumor in my neck. Honestly, if I didn't know that it was there and exactly where to feel, I wouldn't notice anything out of the ordinary.

On the subject of hair, I now have none on my head except eyebrows. The day after Christmas (still at the parents' place), I went outside on the porch before taking a shower to brush off as much loose hair as I could to keep from clogging the drain. After a while, I just got tired of brushing. I came in and looked in the mirror and saw that I'd actually rubbed a bald spot on my head, so I figured it was time to take it all off. A day or so later, the beard started coming out, so now that's shaved, too. Hopefully the eyebrows will stay. :)

Lymphomania: Crazy Cancer Christmas

2010-12-26T09:53:00.001-08:00

First, I hope everyone out there had a great Christmas! It's the day after Christmas here, and it ended up snowing enough to have over an inch of accumulation for the first time since 1882. I don't really count it as a white Christmas, though, since it snowed at night after it was already dark. Still, it's pretty insane to see this stuff at this time of year.

But I can't sit around talking about the weather all day. In my last post, I mentioned that the size of my tumors hadn't really decreased visibly. That is no longer the case. Right now, the tumor in my neck is no longer visible (very cool!), although I can still feel it with my fingers, and the one on my chest looks a little smaller. Looking back, the size changes were a little weird. After the first couple of days, I thought I noticed a size decrease, but over the next several days, both tumors seemed to swell back up to at least their original size, and my shoulder started hurting again, which concerned me. Over the next few days, however, it went down to below the original size, and the shoulder pain dulled to almost nothing. Seems odd, and it'll be something to ask the doc about in a couple of days when I go in for treatment #2 (or as my sister calls it, "plug-n-chug"), but I guess as long as the end result is that the tumor is shrinking, I don't really care how it gets there!

The other thing to report is: I have now started shedding. Last Tuesday I finally got around to getting a haircut. Why would I get a haircut if my hair could start falling out? Well, if you had ever seen it all bushed out and sticking up all over the place, you would understand why I couldn't just let it go while waiting for it to start disappearing. Anyway, the very next day I started seeing a few hairs here and there, like on my desk at work. By that night, I could hang my head over the sink and start rubbing my head, and LOTS of little hairs would shower down. When I took a shower the next day and opened my eyes after rinsing my hair, my shoulders and arms were covered with hairs from my head, and water had actually started backing up in the drain! I used a plunger on the drain, and clumps of hair came up. Keep in mind the length of the hairs, so that'll give you an idea of the number of hairs that had to come out. Also, I can pull the hair on a random place on my head and come away with a tuft of hairs in my fingers. It doesn't hurt, as they are already pretty much detached, and there are no roots on the ends. Right now my hair is visibly thinner, and I'm assuming it will only get more so, so by the time you see me next, I may have already shaved it all off. Luckily, a couple of ladies have already said I'd look good bald, which, lets face it, is the primary thing guys worry about, so no worries! :-)

Lymphomania: Staging and Checkup

2010-12-18T17:33:00.000-08:00

So Thursday I went to the doc for a post-treatment checkup. It was pretty uneventful and mostly consisted of me giving the doc info about what side effects I'd had. They drew blood to check my counts and make sure they weren't too low; some were still below normal, but not to the point of concern, and they should continue to recover until my next treatment, at which point they will test again. I did receive two pieces of information that were noteworthy to me, though. First, to refresh, as I mentioned in my last post, I had not seen a visible decrease in the tumor, even though the doc had said that it could react fast enough to visibly shrink within one to two days. I asked if that should be cause for concern, and the answer was no, which set me at ease some. Second, I got the bone marrow results back, and they came back normal! When the PET scan results came back and set the cancer at Stage 2, that was kind of pending the results of marrow biopsy. That the marrow is normal means the stage gets to stay at 2 instead of going higher, which is awesome!

And speaking of PET scan results, I thought I'd give you all a little treat. I got copies of the actual images, so you all get to see a picture of my insides where the tumors are!

There were lots of images, but these were two that I thought most representative of the situation. PET scans work by first injecting radioactive glucose (sugar) into the blood. Most of your body gets rid of it relatively quickly, but tumor cells process it slower, so if we take pictures of where the radiation is coming from, we can see where the tumor cells are. The first image shows a slice of my body going long-ways from my head down to about the middle of my stomach. Of most obvious note is the large glowing mass in my upper chest. (Does this remind anyone else of ET?) Everyone, meet my tumor ... tumor, meet everyone. You can see how it creeps up into the lymph node on the left side of my neck, and also visible is a tumor under my right arm. Additionally, although not shown in this particular picture, there are tumor cells in the lymph node on the right side of my neck.

If you look at the second picture, you'll see a slice going down through my body at the top of the chest. This shows the depth of the main tumor; you can see it wrapped around the breast bone at the top and protruding fully half-way down through my body. You can also see the one under my right arm on the left side of the image, giving a frame of reference for exactly where the slice was taken if you compare with where that smaller tumor is in the top image. So now you've seen my tumors... impressive indeed! I'd always heard the dimensions of tumors in other people and wondered how they could fit, and now I find myself wondering the same thing of the tumor inside me. I mean... isn't all that space pretty much spoken for? I just don't see how you can fit that inside and not cause serious problems. Bodies are weird. The most important thing that these images show is that there is nothing below the diaphragm; that would have bumped it up to Stage 3. Even though it's big and spread to a couple other areas, it's still localized only to the top part of my body, which is a great thing.

You'll probably also notice a couple of other areas that are lit up in the top image -- mainly the heart and brain. Those are not due to cancerous cells, but are just place where the radioactive glucose is still hanging around. In the brain's case, it's because of how the brain uses sugar; the doctor said that because of this, you can't use PET scans to image brain tumors. I'm not sure why it hangs around the heart, though. And while they're not shown here, other images have the kidneys and bladder lit up since the kidneys are the ones filtering the glucose and then sending it to the bladder. (Neat!)

It still blows my mind that we are able to do this -- to make these images. Without one cut or invasive procedure, we have pictures of all the tumors in my body. When I first got them a week and a half or so ago, I thought they were fascinating (I still do) and wanted to post them pretty quickly. I spent a lot of time going back and forth through them, looking at the different slices and views of my body; there's also a series of CT scan slices (they use the CT data to help build the final images) to look at. However, later in the day, it was like a switch flipped... I guess when the novelty wore off, it really hit me as to what I was looking at, and I suddenly didn't want to see any more. That's pretty much worn off now as well, but it was an unexpected reaction and the reason why I drug my feet putting them up. But they're up now -- for everyone's viewing pleasure. Until next time. Peace.

Lymphomania: Treatment 1 is Done

2010-12-12T19:50:00.000-08:00

So last Monday I started Treatment #1. All of the treatments after this will be done on a single day, but for this one, they split it up into two. If I'm not mistaken, this was to first make sure I didn't have a bad reaction to the Rituxan I got on day 1. Since a reaction was possible, my mom was there in case I couldn't drive afterward. Fortunately, there were no adverse reactions from the drug. Usual infusion time is 4-6 hours for this stuff, and they said I'd probably take the whole six hours the first time, then the day of, they said they'd probably take five hours. However, since they never had to slow the infusion rate, I got done in four (nice!). As an aside, my mom being there also gave one of the nurses the opportunity to inform my mom that she wanted to set her (the nurse's) daughter up with me.

Since I was going to be back in the next day, they just left the needle "plugged into" my port overnight, so I got to go around with a little tube coming out from behind a dressing on my collar.

The next day was only an hour and a half's worth of infusion time, so I was only there until lunch. This was good because I wasn't there for very long, but bad because I had enough time to go to work after that. The side effects were thankfully minor for this round. I had about three days of my stomach feeling "not quite right", but I wouldn't say it went so far as nausea. The second through fourth days after, my energy level was really low, but that just means more excuses to take a nap. :D My esophagus/larynx area was a little sore when I'd swallow liquid, but again, mostly just enough to be annoying. Finally, my taste changed some. Sweet stuff tasted really muted, and ... you know that feeling you get in your jaw when you first put something really tangy in your mouth? I get that with a lot of non-tangy foods.

It's now five days after treatment, and I'm feeling pretty much back to normal. I will say that I can't really tell a difference in the tumors in my neck and chest, which is honestly a little distressing since it was supposed to react pretty fast, and the doc said it was possible that a visible difference would be noticeable in one or two days. Now, I can't really draw any conclusions from this since I don't know how these things react, and it's very possible that this is normal. Still... it's noteworthy to me. Next appointment is Thursday. We'll see what he says.

Lymphomania: Self-Preservation

2010-12-06T13:42:00.000-08:00

I almost wasn't going to write about this, but there were a couple of funny things that I just had to share... One of the side effects of the chemo is a small (about 20%) chance of infertility (that's not the funny part; I'm just introducing), so the doctors point out that if you ever want to have kids, it may behoove you to put some of your boys on ice for later. Now, this was kind of a weird thought for me, but given the fact that a pretty major door could shut forever after this, and after hearing about a friend of a friend who ended up as one of those statistics but was still able to have a kid because he stored, I decided the prudent thing to do would be to get over it and make a deposit.

First funny thing: when I get there and enter the waiting area, this is the piece of art I see hanging on the wall.

I mean... really? I asked one of the women there if that was supposed to be what I think it was supposed to be, and I think it's only supposed to be a representation of cells in general, but she agreed with me what specific type they look like.

The second funny thing arises from the fact that this place accepts anonymous donations. I noticed that on Friday afternoon there is a steady stream of college students coming in to get their weekend beer money. What really got me, though, is that you could tell these people were regulars, because they walk right in, know the receptionist by name, and just start chatting it up. And this isn't just being friendly; the woman I was talking to in an office heard on of the guys and knew that he worked at a Chick-fil-A! (I'll let you try to guess which one. ;) ) These people knew each other! I mean... I knew that college kids did that from time to time, but I never thought of it as a regular source of income.

Finally, the process of anonymous donation is a little more streamlined than what I was there for, and the final step involves punching some stuff into a computer in the waiting area. I snapped this picture of the computer.

If you can't make it out, the sign says, "STOP. PLEASE USE HAND SANITIZER BEFORE TOUCHING THE KEYBOARD." There are sooo many comments that pop into my head from this, but out of a rare sense of common decency, I think I'll just let the image speak for itself.

Lymphomania: Who's Got Two Thumbs and Cancer? THIS Guy!!

2010-12-02T21:04:00.000-08:00

OK, I'll admit -- that's a cheesy opening, and you may not get it if you've never watched The Office, but trust me -- it's funny, and somehow it just seemed right. I've decided to start a new series of posts because I was recently diagnosed with lymphoma. I decided to name the series "Lymphomania" because adding "mania" to the end of anything makes it sound cool and extreme. I kind of went back and forth on whether or not to write all this out, but in the end decided to go for it because: 1) it could give me a way to answer any common questions, 2) it'll be a way for people to keep up with me without me spamming everyone I know all the time, and 3) writing stuff can help me get it out of my head. Also, funny and/or interesting stuff might happen, and this way I can share it with everyone.

This first post might be a bit longer than usual because I'm trying to play catch-up. The first part will be answering the common question I get, "How did I find out?", and the second part will be a (hopefully brief) synopsis of events so far. General thoughts and what I've started to learn will come a little later.

The Road To Diagnosis

So how did I find out? It started in the summer. I began feeling a lot of sharp pain in my chest around my sternum -- specifically if felt like it was in the connective tissue between the sternum and the ribs. It wasn't really a muscle thing. After some Googling, I found out about a condition called costochondritis, which seemed to explain my symptoms exactly, but it's benign and usually goes away by itself and can last several weeks, so I didn't worry about it. After several weeks, the pain had indeed begun to fade, but it moved up into my shoulders. At this point, I was thinking that it may be an infection of some sort that maybe attacks the cartilage, but as the chest pain was fading, I figured the shoulder pain would as well. Eventually, it did indeed begin to fade, almost to nothing. Almost. It was also at this time that I noticed a swollen lymph node, but I didn't think much of it since -- hey -- that's what lymph nodes do when you have an infection. I also noticed that there was a prominence on my chest where my collar bones come together. You can see it easily if you're looking for it, but if you're not, it was subtle. I wondered if the infection had built up scar tissue or something. Point is, I could always rationalize it away into something not-too-bad. Eventually, though, I had to concede that even though the pain was very faint, it was still there and didn't seem to be getting any better, so at that point I decided to go get a physical, which I'd been saying for years that I needed to do.

The doc pretty much gave me a clean bill of health as far as he could tell except for the lymph node and chest prominence, so he ordered an x-ray and referred me to a surgeon to look into it more. The surgeon was concerned about the lymph node and said the x-ray showed a mass in my chest, but it was in an unusual spot, so he took a needle biopsy of the lymph node that day and ordered a CT scan of my chest and neck. The biopsy came back benign (we can only assume now that the sample was too small or something), but they wanted a CT-guided biopsy of the chest mass. Those results came back as a lymphoma, at which point I was sent to an oncologist. The specific type is a diffuse large B-cell lymphoma situated primarily in a tumor that started behind my breast bone and then wrapped around to the front. Dimensions are 12.5 x 10 x 7 cm. It has also spread to the lymph nodes in my neck.

Treatment

Treatment is going to be chemo and probably some follow-up radiation. The chemo regiment is called R-CHOP, which is an acronym for the drugs used. (Fun fact: The 'R' stands for Rituxan, which is not actually a chemo drug, but a chimeric protein, part of which is of mouse origin.) The drugs will be administered the first day of 8 21-day cycles. The drugs start to work very fast, and a visible difference in tumor size can usually be observed within the first couple of days. In the case of the Rituxan, part of the possible side effects that may occur during infusion actually arise from your body not being able to get rid of the dead tissue fast enough, and so they may have to slow the infusion speed.

After the chemo, I'll probably have radiation to the chest to help kill off anything remaining.

Since Diagnosis

I was at the oncologist the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and that's when he laid out the specific type of lymphoma and the treatment. This week has pretty much been a whirlwind of prep work. Monday I had an echo cardiogram -- basically an ultrasound of my heart. This was to help assess my heart's current strength (kind of a "before" picture), as chemo can weaken it, so this was a baseline. It was actually pretty cool -- I could see valves opening and closing and such. It was much clearer than those bogus ultrasound images expectant parents show you when they try to convince you there's a baby somewhere in all that static.

Tuesday was a PET/CT scan. Basically they shoot you up with radioactive sugar water which hangs around in tumor cells so they can then get a picture of where all the bad stuff is. The nurse brought it in in a syringe that was setting inside a thick, hollow, metal tube. I asked if the tube was made of lead, and she said that stuff could go through lead, and that the metal was tungsten. She then proceeded to inject it into my body and inform me that she couldn't be around me anymore. This has not yet resulted in super powers, but every day I try to move things with my mind ... one can only hope... After 45 minutes in a "quiet room" where I just had to sit while it worked its way through and out of all the good cells, they sent me through two big doughnuts for about 15 minutes to take pictures. (I was actually in there a good bit longer, because a couple of minutes after they started the first run, they had to take me out and basically reboot the machine, which took about as long as the scan. Running Windows, anyone?) Luckily, when I got the results back, it only showed tumors where we already knew about them (chest and neck), so pending the bone marrow biopsy, it should just be at stage 2.

Wednesday, I had an IV port implanted under the skin just under my right collar bone. For this procedure, I had to go into gremlin-mode, meaning that I was not allowed to eat or drink anything after midnight the night before. I got through it pretty well with the help of a nifty drug called Versed. This stuff is cool -- it doesn't necessarily put you to sleep (although it might), but you're very relaxed, and you don't remember what happened. They had to shave the top part of my chest, but they did it all slanted -- they couldn't even make it symmetrical. Oh well... at least I'm not a man-o-lantern. Also, I had this orange stuff all over my neck and chest that made it look like someone had attempted a spray-on tan and failed miserably.

Thursday (today) was the bone marrow biopsy. Not too much to say about that except that it's a literal pain in the butt. I got more Versed, so I don't remember the procedure aside from some pressure on my hip just to the left of my tail bone, but I was evidently at least partially conscious, as I was told that when they mentioned something about putting soap on the area, I asked if it was orange.

Well, it's pretty late now, and I think this is enough for the time being, so no snazzy conclusions. I think I'll just say cut it off here and say, "To be continued..."

'Night everybody!

Brain Musings Part 3: Same Place, Different Worlds

2010-09-19T17:06:00.000-07:00

This post is somewhat of a continuation from the last one. To briefly recap, I meandered on the idea that our brains categorized input as quickly and generally as possible – only looking at finer details when absolutely necessary, and because of that, different people can sense the same input and yet perceive different things. I’d like to do a quick follow-up with another result of brain laziness and then talk about the consequences of said laziness.

Before I get into the main idea, I’d like to throw out that up until now the discussion has been about the brain’s reactions to sensory input, like what the eye sees or the ear hears. I think these same arguments can be applied to higher level concepts. Every concept that we contain, I believe, simply builds on lower level ones. Just as we build simple ideas of leaves, twigs, and trunks into trees, even our most high-level, abstract ideas, like ethics, are at their core complicated amalgamations of our lifelong internal and external experiences. So when we speak of categorizations and perceptions and beliefs, we can apply our arguments to the full gamut – from low-level concrete features to high-level abstract ideas. And now that that’s taken care of…

Have you ever noticed that if you learn some new concept, then you view everything that comes after through the lens of that concept? Usually, the world is consistent, and finding that consistency is important if we’re going to live in the world. After we learn something, we assume it to be true, and if we get a new piece of information that can be interpreted in two ways, one of which is aligned with what we already know and one of which isn’t, we’re going to interpret it in the way in which it is most consistent with respect to our existing beliefs. Every time your brain gets new input, it is not going to break down everything it knows, re-examine it all to see how it best fits together, and then rebuild a new model of the world. Instead, it assumes that it is already in a nice, consistent state, and anything new had better fit into it. Just like with categorization, your brain has been trained to expect certain things, and once it knows about them, it sees them more often. This is why when you learn a new word, you suddenly hear it used more often, or why people claim to see Jesus in a piece of toast (since our brains are very attuned to recognizing faces). You see what you expect to see, even if your brain has to fudge the input a little, and that ends up reinforcing the expectation. This is why it’s so hard to unlearn something. Again, just like with basic categorization, much of this is done subconsciously (although it can move into the conscious realm, which is why people will keep arguing even after they have been shown wrong to a reasonable extent).

The culmination of these ideas is something that, on the surface, is extremely obvious to us all: people are affected by their history. However, I think this idea gets glossed over. Most people would take that to mean only that people’s preferences and conscious beliefs are molded by their history, but I don’t think that goes deep enough. Instead, we should consider the idea that at any given moment, we basically have a representation of the world in our heads, and that representation, or model, is a result of what perceptions we have gleaned, and if we all perceive differently based on our history and what we have learned, then we are not all working with the same models of the world in our heads. It is not enough to say that we are viewing the same world and simply making different choices; we are making choices based on (possibly radically) different views of the world, even if we are standing in the same place.

This kind of stuff can take a while to sink in, but wrestling with it has value if for only one reason: understanding. I want to be able to understand people. Through understanding, we can empathize with, learn from, and grow closer to others. I think that to truly understand another person, you have to make an attempt to see the world as they do; you have to put yourself in their place. You cannot do this if you constantly assume the other person has the same model of the world that you do. When you know the world in which a person lives, then you may know the person. Plus, the idea is fascinating to me in and of itself. :)

Brain Musings Part 2: Brains are Lazy

2010-09-12T21:18:00.000-07:00

When I was younger, I first heard the racial slur, “they all look alike,” with respect to black people. I knew it was supposed to be an insult, but honestly, I didn’t get it. To me, they were just as distinguishable as whites. I could tell that the phrase was insulting, but who would come up with that? I mean, if you wanted to insult someone, I’m sure you could think of something better. I chalked it up to people being stupid and filed it away in my head. Fast-forward several years later – first quarter of college. There was an Indian guy on my hall who would buy alcohol with using an ID that belonged to his older brother. Someone asked him if the person at the convenience store ever noticed that the picture wasn’t of him, and he laughed and replied that, “We all look the same to them.” (I’ve since forgotten who “them” referred to.) It was then that I started to learn that the “look alike” phenomenon happened with other races as well, although I still couldn’t figure it out. Later, I actually caught it happening with myself when I realized that I was having trouble recalling certain Asian faces that I had been in contact with. I’m not saying that I thought they looked alike; I just noticed an inability to recall defining characteristics. This troubled me, but I didn’t really know what to do about it, so I just had to file that away as well.

Now fast-forward one more time. I’m reading an article on a study about people’s ability to differentiate sounds (yes, I’m a nerd, deal with it!). This study focused on sounds from two different languages (Japanese and English, I think). Now, many of the sounds people can make are used in both languages, but there are some sounds that are only used in one language and some that are only used in the other. Scientists found that if there were two very similar sounds that came from the overlapping region, speakers of both languages could differentiate them, but if the sounds came from only one of the languages, only speakers of that language could tell the difference between the sounds. The speakers of the other language could not tell the difference! And then everything began falling into place.

I know that was a round-about lead-in, but sometimes how one reaches a conclusion is as important as the conclusion itself. I’ll write more on that later. For now, the simplest way to start is to state the following: the brain recognizes and categorizes patterns. With respect to our cognitive capability, that really sums it up. To put it another way, the brain recognizes input. The main idea that I want to convey here is that the brain, while very good at this job, can also be very lazy – it only does as much work as it has to. When the brain gets some input, the first thing it tries to do is recognize it. Imagine that your brain has lots of buckets for all of the stuff it has experienced in life. This bucket is for John; that bucket is for Sally. The bucket over here is for couches. You get the idea. When the brain gets input, if there’s some feature it is unfamiliar with, that feature stands out greatly and is much more likely to be used as the defining characteristic used to decide in what bucket to place the input, because the obvious defining characteristic overshadows the less obvious ones. The consequence of this is that if you only get a few examples of something that has the same general features, the brain will put all of those in the same bucket. It’s like if you were tasked with categorizing 100 marbles that were all varying shades of red, but three of them were different shades of blue. While you may have several categories for slightly different shades of red, you’ll probably just lump the three blue marbles together, even though they may be as different from each other as the red categories are from each other. It will not be until you see many blue marbles that you decide to split them up into different categories as well. In the same way, it is not until your brain sees many examples of input with that general feature that it needs to categorize more subtly. In effect, your brain becomes accustomed to the more obvious feature, and it is only then that it perceives the other less obvious features.

With the marble analogy, you are making a conscious decision to separate categories or not, but you do not have this same conscious control over what your brain does. To be perfectly blunt, you are at the mercy of the categories that it chooses. If your brain decides to put two different things in the same bucket, you perceive them as being the same thing, just as the brains of English speakers categorized similar sounds from the Japanese language as being the same sound. Even though two things are different, you will perceive them to be the same thing. This is why, when you hear your first few examples of a new genre of music, the samples all sound the same, but later, after you have listened a while, you can pick out subtleties you did not hear before. This is why a new culture’s food may all taste alike the first time. And this is why faces of another ethnicity can all look alike if you are unpracticed at differentiating them. Additionally, from this we can tell why someone who is very practiced can differentiate and notice small features that most others overlook; their brains have learned not to pay attention to the more obvious features that overwhelm the smaller features for the non-practiced. Essentially, after enough practice, it’s like you are seeing through a filter – much like how we may look at the sun through filters to remove most of the light so that the finer details can be viewed. With practice, fine details stand out as much as the general details used to.

I’ll end this entry here and continue on with some consequences of this stuff next time, but first I want to throw out the general idea to which all this has been building: even though we may all look at the same world, we actually perceive it in different ways. Put two people in the same place at the same time, and they will see, hear, smell, taste, and feel different things. If the world, to us, is defined by what we perceive, then to an extent, we all live in different worlds. That’s an absolutely fascinating idea to me, and I’ll leave you to mull it over for a while.

Us and Stuff We Don’t Like

2010-08-29T22:07:00.000-07:00

I am sitting on a plane as I type this. Before we left for the airport, the topic came up about how some people would wear pajama-like clothing to airports for flights. One of the viewpoints was that this act was wrong because it was a breach in etiquette. Now, those of you who know me know that I am no fan of etiquette. I will concede that some of it is useful in that having certain customs helps a society get along more smoothly; in dealing with others, it helps to have somewhat of an expectation of what the other person will do. What one wears to the airport, however, does not fall into this category. Instead, I believe that it falls into another category of etiquette that we label “fashion”. Fashion is a much more arbitrary beast – basically nothing more than a collective preference, and it frustrates me to this day.

I’ve got no problem with people wearing what they think looks nice. Instead, what really frustrates me about fashion is people’s (including myself) response to it. I can comprehend why people like what is currently in style. If a person becomes very familiar with something, then they acquire a taste for it – the same as with food. If many people are wearing the same style, you grow accustomed to it and like it. At this point, you have an entire group of people for which a large percentage all likes a similar style. If it ended here, I’d be fine with that, but people take it one step farther; they believe that their preference (for that’s all it is, and we must never forget that) is right, like in a more absolute sense. They believe that there is something intrinsically right about the fashion and intrinsically wrong from deviating from it. It is at this point that people begin to judge, and when people begin to judge others based on arbitrary preferences, bad things start to occur. People look down on each other; gulfs can form; it may be something as simple as just not being comfortable with each other.

A little later, at the airport, I saw this woman checking in. She was of the “granola” variety – her face and figure honestly were pretty good, but she had these huge, long dreds and more body hair in certain areas than I do. My first thought was that she needed to shave; she needed to change that look. Then I thought that women did not always shave legs and pits, so this used to be the norm, and during that time, did all the guys go around thinking, “Man, all that hair is gross,”? No, they would have liked it just fine. Right now, smooth legs are simply a majority preference. I can still have my preference, and that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean that she needs to change anything. She is who she is. And I end up judging just like everyone else. My frustration stems not only from what I see it causing others to do, but what I see it causing myself to do as well.

Now, the takeaway from all this for me (and this is stuff that’s been running through my head for years) is that we must be extremely careful with our knee-jerk reactions. We see things we don’t like, and that naturally causes a negative response within us, and the natural response to negative emotions within us is to project a label of “bad” or “wrong” on the cause of those emotions. While that may be something useful for surviving in the jungle, to apply it to other people is not always the most appropriate response. In cases of fashion, our negative response is not caused by anything they did, but by our own preference for the familiar. We see someone who is different and automatically believe that our dislike for what we see says something about them. In actuality, that dislike and how we react to it say less about the other person and more about ourselves. It’s our own problem, not theirs.

Brain Musings Part 1: You Don’t Always Know What You Know

2010-08-20T17:08:00.000-07:00

I’m always thinking about how our brains work – how they give rise to perception, memory, decision making, etc. While I’ve wanted to write about some of this for a long time (i.e. several years), I’ve always been a bit daunted by the task because of the scope to which it can lead. While the brain may be a specific starting place, I always end up connecting it to other, more encompassing ideas – behavior, culture, the general behavior of large systems, problem solving, and on and on. I want to bring those ideas in, but it all becomes unwieldy, and overall structure suffers. So I decided to do this in parts. I’ll do one part that seems somewhat self-contained and perhaps try to link it back to earlier parts, and perhaps as time goes on, a somewhat coherent picture will start to emerge (useful knowledge gleaned from unconnected or loosely connected ideas is actually a topic that may come up later). If not, well maybe the individual pieces will at least be interesting. These are just musings that wander in my head from time to time. So without further ado, this will be my first post in this thread. It seemed like the simplest and most self-contained, so I thought it would be a good starting place. Here we go…

I heard from someone once that there are four stages of knowledge: you don’t know what you don’t know, you know what you don’t know, you know what you know, and you don’t know what you know. This seemed a great expression, and I absolutely agreed, but I think the stages may require a bit of explanation – especially that last one. For our purposes here, we’ll restrict our discussion to knowledge of a specific area, such as math, although the idea is equally applicable not only to scholastic subjects, but to anything that has to be learned.

The first stage is relatively straight-forward. You don’t know what you don’t know. This is true before you even know that the subject is there to be learned. A three-year-old does not know about math. Someone who has never been exposed to computing machinery does not know about computer programming. There is knowledge that the person does not have, and they are ignorant not only of what the subject comprises, but even the presence of the subject. There is knowledge that you don’t have, and you don’t know that you don’t have it.

The second stage occurs when you learn of the existence of the knowledge of which you were previously ignorant. Here, you know math exists, but you don’t yet know how it works or how to use it. It’s there, and you know it’s there, and you know that you don’t know the subject.

When you have become somewhat knowledgeable in a subject, you have entered the third stage: you know what you know. In general, knowledge about a craft or art or subject has certain facts or rules. To solve an equation, you follow steps one, two, and three. To design a certain structure, you take into account X, Y, and Z. Not only are you able to arrive at a solution but you can tell how and why you arrived there. To put it another way, not only do you have knowledge of the subject (able to arrive at a solution), but you have knowledge of your knowledge (are conscious of and able to express your reasoning about your application of the knowledge). Ideally, I think that this should be descriptive of our highest level of knowledge, but realistically that is not the case since our brains don’t always work that way. There is still one more level above this one.

When someone attains mastery at a certain skill or subject, they often reach what I consider to be the most interesting stage: you don’t know what you know. To put it succinctly, you have knowledge of which you are unaware, you cannot express, or about which you cannot reason. This phenomenon occurs when you are so familiar with a subject that you begin to apply that which you have not necessarily been taught explicitly, but instead gleaned unconsciously from a large amount of experience. A mathematician may look at an equation and know the steps to solve it without having to figure out or remember what steps they may be; a craftsman may apply just the exact right amount of pressure with his tools to make a piece being fashioned from wood come out perfectly; a software designer may be able to come up with a robust and simple architecture for a large system. When asked how they were able to solve the problem, many times their answer is simply “practice” or “experience”. Even though they know or are able to carry out the correct answers, they will not be able to retrace their steps. They don’t know how they know, but they do, and they are right. Any sort of muscle memory falls into this category, as does anything people do without thought. If you think about it, driving a car is done mostly reactively. I remember how much I had to consciously pay attention when I first learned to drive, but now it is second nature. This ability of our brains – that we can collect skills and knowledge of which we are not consciously aware – truly fascinates me. One would think (or at least I would) that as you gained more knowledge and experience about something, you would always be able to reason about the knowledge you have, but the fact of the matter is that as we become more adept at something – as our brains become more used to it – it can handle things more and more automatically before we become consciously aware of it, and if we are not consciously aware of it, then we cannot reason about it. More goes on in our heads than we are aware of, and we do not get to choose that of which we are aware. It kind of makes you wonder about how much of yourself consists of your conscious self. Is your conscious self most of you, or is it just a little tacked-on piece of you that has the privilege of being passed a small fraction of the totality of what is going on in your head?

Masks

2008-09-08T15:02:00.000-07:00

I just got done watching the first season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. There was this great voiceover by Sarah Connor:

We all wear masks. They can be worn out of love and the desire to remain close to those around us; to spare them from the complicated reality of our frayed psyches. We trade honesty for companionship, and in the process never truly know the hearts closest to us.

Very cool.

A New Way to Read the Bible

2008-03-18T17:58:00.000-07:00

I have two things going against me when it comes to reading the Bible. The first is that I never had to study much in school. I’d write down the notes the teacher put on the chalk board or the overhead projector, and I’d read. I actually didn’t do that much reading of text books – usually only what was required for the homework. Consequently, I never took notes out of a book. The second thing is that I read a lot of novels growing up, and novels aren’t books you study too much (or, at least, they weren’t books that I ever studied too much). I read something through, whatever soaks into my brain soaks in, and that’s it.

The Bible, however, is a different beast altogether. You have to study it. You have to pay attention to it. Yes, there are parts that read like a novel (the life of David comes to mind), and there are parts that are very obvious (Jesus spells out the meaning of many of His parables), but you can’t get by simply on that. Much of the text can be quite repetitive and seemingly obvious, and this induces one to start to skim. “Yes, God is mad at Israel again here for idol worship, He’s threatening them again, yadda, yadda, yadda.” For someone like me, skimming is exactly what starts to occur, but there are gems buried there that one misses when reading like that. When you start to glaze over, you forget that there is an awesome entity here trying desperately to tell you something important. You miss the subtler things, like when God is speaking of Israel as an adulterer. It is very easy to keep the surrounding tone of anger instead of picking up on the switch to the tone of a hurt, pleading husband. The Bible is much too meaty to read like a novel, and much more valuable than any homework you had in school.

I kept reading it like I had read everything else, though. I knew it wasn’t quite sufficient, but what was I to do? I had never taught myself this kind of stuff. And besides, I figured if I missed something this time around, I’d pick it up on another reading. No prob.

I’d considered myself in the “still a beginner” phase of Christianity for a long time. After all, that’s where we all start, and it never occurred to me that I was moving out of it. Because of this, how much real Bible knowledge I had wasn’t always of utmost importance to me. I couldn’t quote or apply a lot of passages from scripture, but that was OK. A child learning multiplication doesn’t worry so much that he doesn’t know calculus yet.

But I was having my quiet time a while back when I had a realization: I am going to have to teach someday. I’m not a beginner anymore. Someday I’m going to have to start passing this stuff along. Maybe it will be as a group leader of some sort – maybe it will just be mentoring another beginner Christian. Maybe I’ll have a wife and kids someday, and as the man, the responsibility of my family’s spirituality will rest on my shoulders. Some day, I will have to teach.

That realization gave me a kick in the pants that I really needed to actually study more. But how? It had been on my mind lately anyway. There had been a message at church about a way to study, and I had read about it again in a book my small group was reading. I wasn’t quite satisfied with any of those methods, though. But God doesn’t give up. That realization – the one that convinced me the most of my need for study – also provided the means by which I could get more out of the Bible. Trying to convince me of what I needed from the Bible wasn’t motivation enough. If I was reading for me, I could convince myself of all sorts of ways to cut corners since it only affected me. I had to know that I was also reading the Bible for others. If I slack off and it only affects me, well, that’s my problem, but I can’t take that attitude with others. If I’m reading for me, I can skim over a chapter and tell myself that I know it. If I read it with the attitude that I have to not just know it, but teach it to someone else, then I’d better really have it. And that’s how I can read it now. I can take notes not of what I want to remember, but of what I think I should tell someone else. And in preparing for someone else, I improve on what I get as well.

I just started, so I don’t think I’m as affective as I could be (is anyone ever?), but I feel like I’m a lot closer than I was. I like this. I don’t feel like I’m taking the easy way out or reading just to say I’ve read. It’s more work, but it’s better. This feels a lot more right. Thank God.

Wish List

2008-03-02T19:24:00.000-08:00

(in no particular order)

I didn't need to sleep
I understood everyone
Everything that tasted good was actually good for you
"If you don't use it, you lose it," wasn't true
I had a better memory for what I have read
I liked water as much as Coke
I always knew exactly what should be done
There was some place in Atlanta where you could walk for five minutes in a straight line without finding something man-made
I understood everyone
I was not at all self-conscious
I was creative in writing
Magic was real, and I could do it
The stars were visible from the city
I understood everyone
I didn't have to go to work
I understood everyone

I Hate Sleep

2008-03-02T19:19:00.000-08:00

I hate sleep. To be more precise, I hate our bodies’ need for sleep. We have to go unconscious for several hours every day. I know it feels good, but honestly, I’d give it up if it meant I could do more stuff. I feel like I need to go to bed now, but I want to write and think and be aware. I don’t want my time to tick away while I lie in a bed unconscious. I guess it’s just one of those things in life we have to put up with. Like our need to eat vegetables. Yech…

On the Peaceful Coexistence of Science and Christianity

2007-04-19T23:34:00.000-07:00

1 Introduction

As I sit in my chair in front of my computer, I ask myself, “What am I doing?” While I am a Christian, I am neither a theologian nor a philosopher. While I greatly enjoy reading about science as a hobby, I am neither a physicist nor a biologist. And yet, here I am, believing, in my vanity, that I can hopefully impart a bit of wisdom in those areas. As the title suggests, the goal of this essay is to discuss simply the coexistence of science and Christianity. The goal is not to try and decide what The Truth is. I’ll go ahead and save you the suspense – I don’t have all the answers.

So who should read this, and why? When I first seriously began thinking about what I would write, I jumped to the conclusion that my target audience would be anyone and everyone, but as I began formulating what I wanted to say, I found that most of my efforts would be directed toward other Christians. Taken literally, some parts of the Bible, mostly in the book of Genesis, are incompatible with current theories of cosmology, geology, biology, and probably several other “ologies.” Because of these seemingly irreconcilable differences, many conservative Christians turn their backs on those sciences by either decrying them as nonsense or bastardizing them beyond all recognition. This leads us to the imperative question, “Who cares?” Don’t people have the right to believe what they want? Whether or not they have the right to do so, holding certain beliefs can have negative consequences. What if someone believed that it was alright to casually walk up to a random person and punch them in the nose? While some may find the notion entertaining, and perhaps even quite therapeutic after a tough day at work, one could easily see how the negative consequences of such an action could quickly out-weight the benefits. Flat-out rejecting what science tells us is detrimental to both science and Christianity.

First, such thought processes are detrimental to science because it undermines not just a few scientific theories, but the very core of science itself. Keep in mind that science is not, as some may mistakenly believe, a collection of facts or the search for truth. It is a method. Put simply, we gain knowledge about how the universe works by making observations. The method should be applied dispassionately and consistently. If well-tested theories exist that we refuse to believe, then the implication is that the scientific method is invalid. If the method is invalid, then how can we trust anything derived from its application? How can we perform any science at all? Additionally, one could make the argument that not trusting science could also be interpreted as not trusting God. Both of these points will be discussed more in depth a little later.

As stated above, the rejection of many well-tested scientific theories also has a negative impact on Christianity as a whole. There is a divide in our schools about what to teach our children, and there are those who profess knowledge that all of cosmology is a worthless fraud. Regardless of whether or not this belief is true, it gives the impression that Christians are dogmatic and uneducated, especially since those who yell the loudest get the most visibility. There are those who would respond that they do not care how they are perceived, and there are times when that attitude is appropriate. But this is not one of those times. We do not live in a bubble separate from everyone else. Christians must remember that they are supposed to be promoting the spread of Christianity – not to teach about the origins of the universe or the development of animals, but in order that others may be saved. Some may read into this discussion an implication that one should compromise their faith and beliefs in order to appear more appealing to the masses, so I will state explicitly that that is not the idea I am promoting. If one wishes, for example, to believe that the universe and Earth are only several thousand years old, that is quite alright, but it must be done so correctly.

The rest of this essay will attempt to propose a way to view the simultaneous presence of science and Christianity that is neither threatening to faith nor a corruption of science. Deciding whether or not it is the right way must be left as an exercise for the reader. I am keenly aware that this subject is a sensitive one, so right now I ask only for a little patience and a willingness to read. If you do not agree with what is written, I urge you to not to quit. Remember that one day you may be discussing faith with a nonbeliever, and ideas similar to these may be introduced. If that were to happen, you have a responsibility to your faith to attempt an honest answer, so you should start formulating a response now. We have all heard to keep your friends close but your enemies closer, and while that adage is a bit extreme for this case – I do not think of those who disagree with me as enemies – it does hold a certain appropriateness in that if one is to defend their beliefs, as it is a Christian’s responsibility to do, then that person must be well versed in arguments both for and against their beliefs.

2 No Pop Quizzes

If two peoples are not coexisting peacefully because of differing beliefs, and they wish to coexist peacefully, then there must be some compromise in the beliefs. However, for many Christians, compromise is not an option. To them, not only are opposing beliefs wrong, but the very act of having incorrect beliefs is offensive. So, for compromise to occur, attitudes must change in at least one of two ways. The first option is for people to allow their beliefs to change. Failing that, there is a second option of at least respecting opposing beliefs. The reason that making these changes can be so difficult is because some see altering their beliefs as compromising their faith. This is the first, and most crucial, wall that must be torn down.

I think that one of the most important things to accept in the study of anything, including religion, is that it is alright not to have all the answers. What do certain Bible passages mean? What really happened historically? There is not always a way to know these answers with one hundred percent accuracy. Not everything in the Bible is as plain as it looks. In The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, St. Augustine writes in the early 5^th century that, “in the case of a narrative of events, the question arises as to whether everything must be taken according to the figurative sense only, or whether it must be expounded and defended also as a faithful record of what happened. No Christian will dare say that the narrative must not be taken in a figurative sense.” Examples of both symbolism and multiple meanings can be found in the Bible, and a quintessential illustration is in Hosea 11:1: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” The obvious interpretation of this passage, especially in the context of the next few verses, speaks of Israel being called out of Egypt after their years of servitude. The symbolism of Israel as God’s child is given weight by Exodus 4:22, in which God is instructing Moses to speak to Pharaoh. He says, “This is what the LORD says: Israel is my firstborn son…” However, in Matthew 2:15, the passage from Hosea is reinterpreted to refer to Jesus. For safety, Joseph had been sent to Egypt with Mary and Jesus until Herod’s death, “And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘Out of Egypt I called my son.’” If one person were to read Hosea before Matthew, that person would believe that the son was Israel, for there is nothing in that statement alone to point toward the interpretation that the son is really the messiah. However, if a second person were to read Matthew first, then the son is obviously Jesus, and there would be no clue that the son is representative of the nation of Israel. Should the first person look down on the second because the second’s beliefs are different from the first, or vice versa? It is possible for two people to hold differing yet simultaneously correct interpretations of the scripture.

When we look at symbolism, the most prominent example comes directly from Jesus. One of his main methods of teaching was through parables, which were sometimes symbolic to the point that listeners were not able to perceive the stories’ meanings. If one is a new Christian who has accepted Christ yet is still immature in the faith, is it not reasonable that a first reading of the Bible will not impart all of the intended meaning? If that were not so, then there would be no need for those who devote their life to the study of the Bible; everyone would be experts after a cursory reading. More importantly, does the fact that someone may not have deciphered a passage affect their salvation if they have already accepted Christ?

Some believe that if one really wants to know what a Bible passage means, then God will reveal it. While I believe there is truth in this statement (“He who has ears to hear, let him hear,” Mark 4:9), it is not quite that simple. There are a multitude of Christian churches and denominations. The reason such an array exists is because of differences in belief and interpretation. It is obvious that some of these churches have opposing views; if they did not, then they would not be different denominations. So if we are to believe both that merely wanting to know the truth allows us to know it and that there is a set of churches with opposing views, then the implication is that at most one church in that set really wants to know the truth. I, however, do not think that is the case. I think that those churches really do want to know, and yet they hold different beliefs, so there must be something else going on. What that “something else” is, I cannot say for sure. So now we may have two different churches, both of which sincerely wish to know the truth, that have differing interpretations. Which one is correct? Is there a way to know for sure? And what if, like the immature Christian, one or both of the churches got the interpretation wrong? Would that affect their salvation? Remember those prizes from Cracker Jacks boxes that were little pictures that showed different images depending on your viewing angle? Two people may see two different images, and both are valid; you cannot describe what is shown without including your point of view. Perhaps God wishes to provide something that has relevant meaning for everyone since not everyone will be looking from the same vantage point.

The Bible is not a text book to be studied as if for a test. There will be no pop quizzes when we die. (Tester: “Bad news… you did pretty well overall, but this verse here… well… you thought it was a metaphor, and it should have been taken literally. You were so close, but thanks for playing, though!”) Instead, it is a guide to show us the nature of God, salvation, and how to live well. Throughout the New Testament, we are told that we are saved through grace, not by acts or knowledge. Therefore, we need not fear being wrong when we interpret the Bible (as long as the attempt is sincere). The direct result of this is that if someone else has a (perhaps radically) different view from our own, we can seriously consider it and perhaps use it to replace, or maybe incorporate into, our existing view without regard to the fallacy that doing so compromises our faith in any way. The level of our faith is not determined by which interpretations we believe. If one is truly uncomfortable with this freedom, then a second conclusion is that we can at least tolerate the other viewpoint without becoming condescending or judgmental. If the other person is a believer, then they must interpret at least in that context, and so their interpretation must not have weakened their faith. Believers look to the Bible for confirmation of their faith, not repudiation, so they obviously choose interpretations which bolster their faith as much as possible, and therefore all Christians’ interpretations should be in line at least with the core tenet of Christianity – that tenet that is “passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, [and] that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.” [1 Cor 15:3-4]. On the other hand, if the other person is not a believer, then where is the cause for anger? Would you become angry at a child for being ignorant of adult matters? (This is not to imply that unbelievers are childish or immature, simply that there are times when one is not expected to know the truth, and therefore their statements should be taken lightly.) In such cases, one’s attitude should be one in which a future faith may grow. Is anyone ever in a rush to join those who are condescending to them?

3 Science: What is it, and Why Should I Care?

There is a computer programmer named Jamie Zawinski who is well known among other programmers. He wrote a short article about how for several years he had wrist pain from typing on a keyboard so much and how he dealt with it. One of the methods he tried, with some success, was acupuncture, about which he made a very interesting observation. He writes, “It's easy for their terminology to scare you away, with talk of Qi flowing and being blocked and so on, since we know that's not really what's going on, but look at it this way: Newtonian mechanics isn't really what's going on either, but it's a model, and it works really well almost all the time.” (Newtonian mechanics is some of the first physics we learn in high school: force equals mass times acceleration, velocity equals distance over time, etc. It is basically just the equations that model the movements we deal with in every day life. Although they were superceded by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and shown to be only approximations, they still work perfectly well for almost all day-to-day uses.) He points out that Qi (also spelled “chi” and pronounced “chē”) is simply a model. More importantly, it can be a reliable model whether or not it is actually true. This idea is intricately related to science, which, as has been previously stated, is not a store of knowledge, but a method for building theories.

To refresh your memory of those grade school science projects, a simplified version of the scientific method is as follows: define the problem, form a hypothesis about the solution of the problem, perform experiments and gather data that should determine whether your hypothesis is correct, analyze the results, and form conclusions. Ideally, all experiments can be performed in controlled laboratory environments, but sometimes the scope is simply too large, and we must wait on nature to provide. For example, for a volcanologist to carry out an experiment with an actual, erupting volcano in the lab would be a bit tricky, plus the insurance premiums would be prohibitively costly! If a hypothesis is supported by the experiment, it becomes a theory. So, a theory is simply a hypothesis with the weight of some observed data behind it, and if subsequent data comes to light that contradicts the theory, said theory must be either altered to fit the new data or, if such alteration is not possible, thrown out.

Admittedly, this last statement is a bit of an oversimplification. Ideally, neither data nor its interpretation would be ambiguous. However, everything is prone to error, both human and technical. Consider the sun. We have a great wealth of evidence and observation that it rises every morning. However, if you were to wake up tomorrow morning and see that it was pitch black outside, would you immediately throw out your model? Would you assume that the sun, in fact, does not rise every day? The more reasonable conclusion would be that something else was going on. Maybe the clock is wrong, and it is still the middle of the night. Maybe someone covered your house in a giant tent. Maybe you are still asleep and simply dreaming. One could come up with a myriad of hypotheses about why it is dark out, but few of us would seriously entertain the notion that our model, which says that the sun rises every day, is broken; our model simply has the weight of too much data behind it for us to consider that it is wrong. That is why, in the real world, a well established theory is not immediately discarded because of a single contradictory observation.

So if observations can be erroneous, is there any reason to trust them at all? If one is a Christian, then there is a very good reason to trust the observations of the universe on which science is built: the belief that the universe was created by God. In Romans 1:20, Paul writes, “For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made…” If we cannot trust observations about the physical universe, then we cannot use them as reliable sources of information about God’s qualities, but that is exactly what Paul is telling us to do. If we are to believe that we should look to the universe to see God’s qualities, then we must accept it as a reliable source of information. This is exactly what science also tells us. No matter how mundane or outlandish a scientific theory, the final say about whether or not it is a good, sound theory is whether or not it accurately reflects observations about the physical universe. So the faithful study of science is not simply a way to accrue trivial facts, but a way to delve into the works and qualities of God which were meant to be discovered by investigation.

One should never assume that theories are simply ideas that someone thought up and became accepted as truth simply because people thought that person was pretty smart at the time. Neither are they decrees handed down from on high by men in white lab coats. New ideas are treated very skeptically, and when those that are especially profound are introduced, decades may pass before a sufficient portion of the scientific community accepts them enough for them to be considered generally reliable. Sometimes competing theories must first be proven wrong; sometimes more evidence must be gathered to bolster the original theory. In the end, though, if a theory survives, it is because it has been supported not by wishful thinking or reputation, but by evidence from the world itself. This process is the same for all branches of science. If we are to trust tested theories at all, we must trust the method by which they are developed, and if we trust the method, we must trust all of its theories as models of how the universe works. We cannot simply pick and choose.

So, to put it simply, we care about science because it gives us theories, or models, about how stuff works, whether it is in economics, cosmology, psychology, or biology. Additionally, although no theory is ever considered to be proven one hundred percent correct, the lack of faith in the absolute correctness of theories does not stop them from being useful. As previously mentioned, Newtonian mechanics, strictly speaking, is false, but it is still extremely useful. This means that we need not equate utility with truth. Even if a model is thought to be an inaccurate representation of how the world really is, if it nevertheless has utility within a certain context, it can safely be used when appropriate. However, before one may use a theory, what the theory says must be known. Therefore, it is wise for one to learn science faithfully regardless of one’s faith in the truth of science.

4 The Straight Dope

Prominent areas of contention between science and Christianity are cosmology and evolution. Cosmology states that the universe is somewhere between 10 and 20 billion years old, with current consensus being around 13.7 billion years [Wikipedia entry for “Age of the universe”]. Evolutionary theory states that organisms change over time to become more adapted to their environment, and over billions of years this process has given rise to the abundance of different species, including humans, on the planet. These theories conflict with those who interpret Genesis to mean that God created the entire universe and life upon the Earth in the span of six literal twenty-four hour days several thousand years ago. This section is not here to debate which of these views is correct, what really happened, but to describe the current models of these two areas which have been built by science.

I will again urge the reader to be patient if he or she does not believe in the truth of these theories. For most sciences, knowledge of underlying theories need not be a requisite to one’s life; one doesn’t have to know exactly how a microwave works in order to heat a meal. Although knowledge in general is beneficial, no one will have the inclination or time to study everything, so there will always be fields in which one is ignorant. However, because of the contention between cosmology and evolution, those fields are consistently discussed, or at least derided by, many Christians. If one is to discuss (or deride) some subject sensibly, one must have a basic knowledge of said subject. Therefore, it is a Christian’s responsibility to study areas of contention.

I will also reiterate that I am not an expert in these fields, although I do believe that I know more than the average layman – at least in the United States. Unfortunately, these subjects are sorely underrepresented in high school science classes, and so in order to gain any insight, one must actively seek out texts, which few are inclined to do. These next paragraphs will attempt to give a brief, but correct overview of cosmology and evolution according to current theories, although I may be underestimating the difficulty of this task. After all, entire books have been written on these subjects, and brief, watered-down layman summaries are actually the sources of many people’s inaccurate ideas about the fields. But in the end, my two choices are to either give it a try or give up, and I don’t much feel like giving up. So at the very least I can attempt to try and keep your eyes from glazing over as you read on.

4.1 Cosmology

Current cosmology states that there was a beginning to our universe, some 13.7 billion years ago, in the big bang. Ironically, the idea that there was a beginning at all was originally very distressful to the scientific community. Originally, most scientists believed that the universe was static and infinite, but in 1929, Edwin Hubble (for whom the Hubble Space Telescope is named) observed that, generally, galaxies are getting farther apart. This led to the discovery that the universe is in fact expanding. This does not mean simply that galaxies are moving through space away from each other; instead, galaxies are moving relatively little through space, but the space between them is expanding. Matter is not simply spreading out; the universe itself is getting larger. So, if the universe is getting larger as we look forward in time, then it is becoming smaller as we look backward in time. The farther we go back, the smaller the universe, until it comes to a point. This point was the beginning. Again, this does not mean that the universe existed as vast empty space with all the matter in a very small point-like region. The universe itself was that small. This event is the starting point for the existence of all energy, space, and time (matter did not exist yet). One naturally begins to ask about what happened before the big bang, but the question really has no meaning. The big bang was when time itself started (for our universe, at least); there was no “before”. As a clarification, the big bang theory does not say anything about what happened at the moment of the beginning. When that first starting instance, where time equals zero, is reached, all of the equations we use to model the universe break down. Science does not tell us why the big bang occurred.

Just after the big bang, the early universe was pure energy. Lots of energy. Einstein’s theories of relativity show that matter and energy can switch back and forth between each other; that is, they are simply different forms of each other. We see the effects of matter transforming into energy all the time – it is what allows the sun to shine. Incidentally, it is also what allows nuclear weapons to explode with such force. In the early universe, the abundance of energy and high temperatures allowed the transition to move in the reverse direction. As the universe cooled, the energy was able to transform into matter – specifically protons, neutrons and electrons. Eventually, these clumped together to form hydrogen, helium, and lithium – the first three elements on the periodic table. From these humble beginnings, everything else formed.

As time went on, gravity pulled the primordial gases, composed mostly of hydrogen, into large clouds. As the clouds got larger and condensed further, pressure started building on the interior from the weight of all of the hydrogen. Eventually, the pressure increased to the point that the hydrogen atoms at the center were actually pressed and fused together into helium. Upon the initiation of fusion, the first stars were formed.

After there is no longer sufficient hydrogen in the star to sustain hydrogen-to-helium fusion, the process temporarily comes to a halt. With no fusion, there is no outward energy from the interior of the star to balance the gravity which is trying to pull the star inward, and so the star begins to collapse. This process again increases the internal pressure, and once it passes a certain threshold, the star may begin fusing hydrogen and helium into heavier elements. The newly instantiated fusion generates huge amounts of energy with nowhere to go but outward, and the star explodes, or goes nova, spreading much of its material throughout the space around it. With what is left of the star, the process may repeat multiple times, each time making successively heavier elements. Every atom in the universe heavier than lithium was formed inside the cosmic crucible of a star. (Strictly speaking, other heavier atoms have been formed artificially in the lab, but for the purposes of this essay we will speak only of naturally made atoms.)

Eventually, the universe was seeded with enough of the heavier elements created by the first generation of stars that Earth-like planets were able to form. Thankfully for us, they did just that. Gravity continues to do its work pulling together new hydrogen clouds, which can also attract the now-available heavier elements around it. Those heavier materials coalesce to form planets and, if certain conditions are met (i.e. the make-up of the planet, its distance from the central star, etc.), set the stage for life.

4.2 Evolution

There is a common misconception that the theory of evolution defines a process. An organism exists, some new feature would benefit that organism, and so it has offspring with that feature. There’s some sort of “pull” that changes a species into something more complex – something somehow “better.” These ideas, however, are simplified metaphors that convey a sort of mysticism about the whole process. If this was all one ever heard about evolution, then it would indeed take much faith to put any merit in the theory.

Evolution is not so much a process as a result, and it is not confined to biological systems. For instance, it is possible to evolve a computer program, but to keep the scope of the discussion reasonable we will limit ourselves to biological evolution here. Evolution of a biological system arises from two factors: 1) imperfect reproduction of an organism and 2) environmental favoritism that increases the probability that one specific subset of a population will successfully reproduce.

Imagine an animal with a fur coat for warmth. Over time, this animal has spread over an entire continent. Now, it is quite common for variation to occur within an animal species. No offspring are exactly like the parent. Some are bigger, some are smaller. Some may be lighter while others are darker. Some may have a thicker coat while some have a thinner one. Now what if there were periodic cold snaps in the northern part of the continent and heat waves in the southern part. Is it not reasonable that the animals with thicker coats will have a greater chance at surviving the cold snaps in the north while those with thinner coats are more likely to survive the heat waves in the south? And is it also unreasonable to believe that, after successive applications of temperature extremes, the thick-coat variety will be more abundant in the north and the thin-coat variety will be more abundant in the south? We would then have two varieties, much like we have different varieties of dogs. Now, it is very easy to give purpose to this process in our minds, because it can appear to be intelligent – a species spreads to different climates, and then it changes to deal with the new circumstances. However, it is crucial that we do not take this point of view. According to evolution, there is no purpose. An animal cannot “decide” to grow more fur, and the environment cannot cause an animal to give birth to an offspring with a thinner coat. There was only the variation that naturally occurs in a population and an environment that killed those who were less fit and left those who were more fit. This is where we get the phrases “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest.”

While the previous example is a very simple one, it does illustrate the basics of the underlying theory, which is a testament to the simplicity and elegance of the theory itself. One objection to this example is that is only shows microevolution, or evolution within the species, of which there are numerous examples in nature. (You know those stories about how bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics? That’s evolution.) While it is true that this example does not illustrate macroevolution, or evolution from one species into another, there is really no fundamental difference between the two. Macroevolution is simply a long series of microevolutionary changes; the only difference between the two is time and scale. A cat will never give birth to a dog, but a common ancestor of the two, through many, many, many intermediate steps, gave rise to both of them.

Opponents of evolution use several arguments against evolutionary theory, but most of them rise from a lack of knowledge about evolutionary theory. Unfortunately, since evolution is not sufficiently taught in schools, most people’s ideas come from layman articles that water down the theory too much. While glossing over the details of a theory for a layman is usually necessary, the problem with doing so for evolution stems from a desire in many people not to believe it. If one reads an analogical description of an idea which is not controversial, then the person takes it for the analogy it is, but if the reader is an opponent of the idea, then the inadequate models presented in layman’s terms become straw man arguments that may easily be attacked. I am of course aware that this section itself includes a layman’s introduction to evolution. Honestly, I am not quite sure how to persuade you that this description is any better than the others; I can only say that the description seems to me to be a fair synopsis of what evolution actually says.

“There are no fossils showing transitional forms!” First, the fossil record can be admittedly sparse, and second, yes, we do have them. To name a few examples: we have many fossils showing a transition from apes to humans; a fossil was recently discovered (in 2006) that appears to be a cross between a fish and a crocodile; we have fossils of animals that appear to show land mammals becoming more aquatic and sharing traits with sea mammals such as whales. We may never have the full history, but holes are in fact being slowly filled in.

“If one piece of a biological system that contains many parts is missing, the whole system fails, so it couldn’t have slowly evolved! Everything had to be there at once!” The idea that all the parts have to be present at the same time is called “irreducible complexity,” but it need not be a hindrance. Sometimes parts can work only half finished. A primitive, lens-less eye that can only detect light and dark is better than no eye at all. Also, parts of a complex system do not necessarily first arise as part of the system; they may have other functions initially, and this allows building blocks to form that may be incorporated into a larger, more complex system later. For instance, a bee’s stinger was originally an ovipositor for laying eggs. Studies with simulated evolutionary systems in computer science (where computer programs were developed through evolutionary methods) have shown that seemingly irreducibly complex systems can in fact be evolved given sufficient rewards for intermediate steps.

“Then why aren’t we still evolving?” Evolution takes a long time. If it took millions of years to get from apes to humans, should we expect extra arms overnight because it might be helpful? It is very likely that at any snapshot in history, the species will look static. Also, humans have become a special case where physical fitness does not necessarily equate to survivability. Because of modern medicine, we keep alive those who would not have been able to reproduce before, not to mention the possibility that we may begin directly altering our genes in the not-to-distant future.

“If evolution is true, then that means that we all came from apes!” Yes. Yes, it does. But that is not an argument, it is an outburst based on pride, and in the end it has no relevance at all on the truth evolutionary theory.

“If apes evolved into humans, then why are there still apes?” Evolution does not state that everything has to evolve. Suppose an animal species gets split into two groups for some reason. Maybe one area can no longer support the entire population, and a small part of the population ends up being pushed to a separate, possibly different ecosystem. If the population in the new environment becomes isolated from the old population, then evolution may occur only in the smaller population. If the old population is well suited to their environment, there is no pressure for them to evolve; any change may actually make them less fit. However, the new population in the new environment may indeed change and eventually become a different variety of the species. If enough change occurs, they may become unable to breed with the old population at all, and at that point they have effectively become a different species altogether.

As a final note on evolutionary theory, it shares an attribute with big bang cosmology in that just as the big bang theory does not describe how the universe came into existence, evolutionary theory does not describe how life actually started. Evolution only models how existing systems that imperfectly reproduce themselves may become more adapted to their environments, and it requires an existing reproducing system to work. Therefore, it cannot shed light on how the reproducing system, in this case life itself, initially arose.

5 Door #1 or Door #2

So what are our reasonable choices with respect to what a Christian should believe? There are currently three general categories of belief of which I am aware. The first is that the universe was created several thousand years ago with the Earth appearing roughly as we see it today. The second is that the Earth and universe are billions of years old and that Genesis is meant to be interpreted symbolically. The third is a hybridization of the two, where the universe is several thousand years old, and the evidence that we find of an old Earth is reinterpreted and squeezed into that abbreviated time frame. Only the first and second options are reasonable, though.

We will examine the third option first and discuss why it is unreasonable. Put simply, the pieces do not fit. Proponents of this viewpoint would argue that fossils are left over from animals that really lived, the Grand Canyon was carved from a river (or the flood from Genesis), and that dinosaurs may have indeed roamed the Earth. If one is to believe this viewpoint, then the implication is that some observations may be trusted and others cannot. Geological observations stating that now-extinct organisms once existed are believed, but other observations, which are equally valid from a scientific viewpoint, that state when those organisms lived are not. How, then do we decide what observations are trustworthy, since all observations come from the same place? Can we sincerely trust any observation of the natural world if we take this view?

Also, the evidence that some would try to squeeze into a few thousand years cannot reasonably be packed so tightly. Fossils of sea creatures exist within mountaintops; there is evidence that Africa and South America were once connected; we see light that should have been traveling billions of years through space to get to Earth now. If we wish to believe in science, then we must accept its consequences, and if we do so, then in a few thousand years, seas do not rise to mountainous heights, continents do not move an ocean apart, and light does not speed up, slow down, or hop, skip, and jump through space. Although arguments along these lines do exist, and are loudly professed by some, they rely on a twisting and selective acceptance of our knowledge. Because scientific terminology is used when these ideas are presented, laypersons can easily be fooled simply because they do not have the background with which to refute the false arguments. If this option actually happened, then our current understanding of most of science would be invalidated, but science itself is being used to back this view. So, if one trusts science, then this view is inaccurate. Conversely, if one does not trust science, then this view has no basis. Therefore, a young-Earth hybrid of science and Genesis should be an unreasonable viewpoint for anyone.

So we are left with the two reasonable options: either the universe is young or old, where “young” is several thousand years old, and “old” is several billion years old.

I have tried to show that belief in an old universe is not unreasonable with respect to Christianity. In The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, St. Augustine argues that Genesis can be interpreted as a framework for creation as opposed to a literal, historical account of events. If one takes this point of view, then the incompatibilities between science and the Bible are greatly reduced, one can trust that what we see from the natural world is really the truth, and there is no reason to believe that the models that science builds differ greatly from what actually happened in the past.

Some people will not wish to abandon an absolutely literal interpretation of Genesis, though. As previously stated, a literal interpretation is perfectly acceptable. However, if one is to hold this view, then one should hold it correctly. That is, one should not modify scientific models in order to do so. Furthermore, one need not reject scientific theory in order to do so. If we believe in an all-powerful God, then we must believe in a God who can create the universe in any way He pleases. It must therefore be possible that the universe was created roughly in the form it is today. The consequence of this belief, though, is that God created the universe in such a way as to appear to be old. If the world is young, then dinosaurs never existed, but we have fossils. The continents were created as they are today, but we have geological observations that state they were once one. Light was created between the Earth and distant galaxies at the precise place and moving in the exact direction as to reach Earth now and give the appearance of traveling for billions of year through space. This approach requires the belief that God created a young Earth that contained evidence for an old Earth.

So why does this view not invalidate science? While it invalidates scientific models as being what actually happened, it does not invalidate their usefulness. As long as the universe was created in a state reflected by scientific models, then the models can still teach us about the universe. As long as the models accurately predict what we currently see, they can then be used to predict what we will see. As long as a model is useful within a certain context, what it states outside of that context is not necessarily relevant. Therefore, if one believes in a young universe, that belief should not hinder the study of science that points to an old universe.

6 OK, So Now What?

So what can we take away from this? That depends a great deal on the extent to which one agrees with the arguments presented here. If one reads this and thinks, “Rubbish!” … well, at least I tried. Hopefully, readers will at least be left with the realization that we need not bicker amongst ourselves. This, of course, should not imply that we should never debate our ideas; healthy debate is a prime method of spreading ideas and fighting stagnation, but there is a difference between healthy debate and simply arguing. To abstain from actively arguing, however, is not quite enough; to do so would mean that all the tensions are still present, and we simply ignore them as best we can. While there may be times when this is a necessity, it should only be used as a last resort since, if the tensions are still present, they still may fuel arguments. As an example, simply consider the current situation in our schools concerning whether or not evolution or the big bang should be taught.

A more optimal solution, in my opinion, is to consider that the Bible may be more encompassing and flexible than we originally thought. We have already seen examples of Biblical passages containing multiple valid interpretations, and so we should never be absolutely sure that any interpretation that we currently hold is the only correct one. St. Augustine himself advocated the use of knowledge of the physical world to continually update our understanding of Scripture. This one small concession – this admission that even Christians are not all-knowing, even with respect to the Bible – has the possibility to do so much at no real cost. It is possible to keep our faith and at the same time safely explore other ideas. We can look out and see a grander world. We can, in fact, have our cake and eat it, too. And I like that, because cake is good.

Rules of the Road

2006-11-01T15:35:00.000-08:00

Those who know me know that I fully intend to one day take over the world. Have no fear, though, for I shall be a benevolent ruler. For the most part. I do, however, have a list of a few new rules that people will have to learn. If you use common sense in life, these won’t affect you too much; they’re mostly to compensate for much of the idiocy I see in the world around me. This post is dedicated to a subset of those rules that pertain to driving and roads.

Rule #1: All road names must be unique.

I live in Atlanta. In Atlanta, approximately every third street is named “Peachtree”. Peachtree St, Peachtree St NE, Peachtree St NW, W Peachtree St, Peachtree Rd, Peachtree Blvd, Peachtree Dunwoody, Peachtree Industrial, and about five hundred thousand other examples. I find that this happens a lot. Especially in subdivisions. Do you ever notice that? Go into a subdivision or relatively self-contained neighborhood, and you’ll see that most roads have the same name. The post-fixes may be different, but the main portion of the name always matches. This just defies all common sense. Road names mean the most to people who don’t know the neighborhood well and are following directions, and when driving around in unfamiliar territory, the driver doesn’t need to be driving around at half the speed limit because you have to pay special attention to the tiny-print postfix of the road name on the signs. Ideally, the postfix shouldn’t even be necessary (and many times isn’t given in directions). Anyone who gives road names more than a half a second of thought should realize that road names are meant to unambiguously label the roads and that the most important part of a road name – the part that people pay most attention to – is the main part, not the postfix. Therefore, for a road name to do its job, the main part must be unique. Can there be two Main Streets? Sure. But they had better damn well be in different cities.

Rule #2: The same road may not have two names.

Assume you’re on a road. Let’s call it “Brian St”. At some point, you have turned onto Brian St and begun to drive down it. After five minutes of driving without turning off of that road, what’s the name of the road you’re on? Common sense tells you that it’s Brian St. Why? Simple: common sense tells you that a road is a single entity, and if an entity is given a name, then the name belongs to the whole thing. I see evidence to the contrary all the time, though. I often get directions of the form, “Turn onto X St. Go 5 miles, and it will turn into Y St.” I don’t think so. It’s not two roads. It’s one road. One road should have one name. Sometimes one road starts off as two roads, and at some point in the past they were connected. To them, I say, “Tough luck”. When two streets are joined end-to-end, they become one street, and they should therefore have one name. It can be either of the two original names or a whole new name. I don’t care how, but the newly created longer road must have exactly one single name. I know it may cause a little confusion for a little while, but that’s better than causing confusion for years and years to come. Sometimes we just have to grit our teeth and bare it.

Rule #3: No Street Parking.

The presence of street parking really confounds me. To think that you can be driving along in the right lane of a road, pull a little farther over to the right a few feet, stop the car, get out, and leave it there absolutely defies all common sense. To be clear, I’m not against parking in designated, marked spaces for parallel parking that are made onto the road. Those are spaces and do not belong to the driving lane. However, driving in Atlanta, I have many times been driving in the right hand lane (or left hand lane on one-way streets) only to have to slam on the brakes and switch lanes because there’s an unoccupied car in front of me. To me, the reasoning for this rule is so obvious that I can’t think of a way to explain why it’s needed. If fact, it shouldn’t be needed. Roads are for driving on. Each lane should be drivable. You’re not supposed to just stop your car in the road and get out, even if it is the lane on the end. And yet, people do it. Constantly. And they don’t get it trouble for it. Entire lanes are persistently blocked off because people leave their cars in them. I’ve even seen this on two-lane roads! Two-lane roads are reduced to a single lane with traffic going both ways. These people shouldn’t get away with it, but they shouldn’t get tickets. They should get rear-ended by a semi, and it should be treated as their fault because they stopped in the road!

Rule #4: No bicycles in the road within city limits.

There will be a lot of people that don’t like this rule, but it’s needed just the same. To put it another way, bicycles should be treated as people, not as automobiles. I’ve heard the commercials on the radio that, to paraphrase, say that you shouldn’t get mad at bicyclers on the road because they have the same rights as cars do. Well, that may be true legally, but what is legal and what is right are two totally different things. It may be legal for cars and bicycles to share the road, but it shouldn’t be. Why? Because cars and bicycles are in two very different classes. A bicycle/rider combo can weight around 200 lbs. and go anywhere from 0 to 30 mph. during normal use. A car can weigh 2.5 to 3 tons and go anywhere from 0 to 80 mph. Now, honestly, should those two things go together on the road? Honestly? Of course not. First, the bicyclist is moving significantly slower than the flow of traffic, and that’s going to cause problems by either: a) slowing down the rest of traffic, or b) forcing cars to go around them – probably impatiently and therefore dangerously. Second, the consequences of a car hitting the cyclist carry serious risk of bodily damage to the cyclist. While a cyclist on the sidewalk may hit people, I’d much rather see a pedestrian hit by a cyclist than a cyclist hit by a car. Third, if people can fit into places and dart around to get somewhere faster, they will. Bicycles are much more maneuverable than cars and can go places the cars can’t. We’ve all seen videos of messengers in places like New York weaving between cars in traffic. While cyclists may get where they’re going faster, they also create hazards for both themselves and those around them. Cyclists need to restrict themselves to where they belong. As a side note, this is restricted to city limits due to the fact that outside the city, sidewalks may not be available (see rule #5), and the traffic density is significantly lower. If a sidewalk is available outside city limits, cyclists would still be required to stay on it.

Rule #5: All roads within city limits must have a sidewalk.

Something that frustrates me when trying to get from here to there without a car is when there’s no sidewalk. This leaves you with two options: walking in the street and walking on the shoulder. Walking in the street in the city isn’t too smart, for obvious reasons. Walking on the shoulder isn’t always easy, either. Sometimes roads are cut into banks or have ditches beside them. Sometimes they’re overgrown; sometimes they’re muddy. Basically, the shoulder isn’t always an option. So what is one to do? You’re forced to drive places that are within walking or biking distance (and remember that sidewalks are required for bikes now, too, as per Rule #4). I’m restricting this to city limits because cities are more densely packed than rural areas. While it would be nice to have sidewalks everywhere, the cost/benefit ratio is probably too large. Some special cases may exist. For example if the traffic density is above a certain amount, the sidewalk may be required even outside the city.

So these are my rules relating to roads. That wasn’t so bad, was it? These things are just common sense. Different roads have different names, the same road has only one name, don’t park in the road, don’t mix bicycles and cars, and build sidewalks. By submitting to my rule and following a few simple steps, we can all help make the world a better place … or at least a not-so-bad place to drive.

Hello, world!

2006-09-08T22:10:00.000-07:00

Well, I've finally gone and done it. I started a blog. I know it's taken a while, but I'm actually a pretty late adopter of things like this, which I realize is ironic since I am a self-admited geek who does software development for a living. This isn't really going to be a blog in the traditional sense. That is, it's not really going to be a web-based log of my life -- it'll be more like a series of posts only loosely bound together (if at all) outside of the fact that they all originated somewhere in my head, and if the impetus for a post is something I saw or read, even that last part is debatable. I can't guarantee that posting will be a regular occurrence, and I haven't the slightest clue as to how many people will end up seeing any of this, but I figure this is a good way to get out all those thoughts that crop up every now and again, even if only for myself. So I think I'll end the intro post here and see where all this goes. If it crashes and burns, all I've lost is a little time...