Blessed by the Potato

I normally try very hard to resist the urge to plaster pictures of adorable Blueberry all over the internet, but this was so cute I just couldn’t resist.

I had put the skeleton in her wagon thinking it would make a neat, creepy prop. She’s never before had any interest in pulling her wagon, only riding in it. But with a new friend in there who needed a ride she just grabbed the handle and was off! Wayfare says she was at it for nearly half an hour. Then at the end, she went up and gave the skeleton a kiss. Awww.

Anyway, hope you all have a wonderful Halloween.

Just got this in the old work email:

Colleagues,

October is Ultrasound Awareness Month and I would like to take this opportunity to recognize our Ultrasound Technologists (Sonographers) for their contribution and efforts to the organization over the past year.

Nope. That is it. First it was a proliferation of ridiculous days, the pinnacle of which was the self-parodying Talk Like A Pirate Day. Then some things started getting months: Prostate Cancer took November after Breast Cancer grabbed October. Kind of a dickish move: there are only 12 months and December is totally Christmas’ bitch so there’s really only 11 for all the causes in the world to play with. Cancer is kind of big so sure, it can take a month (at least Ovarian decided to share October with Breast), though 2 is really pushing it.

But Ultrasound Awareness Month? Nope, no it isn’t. That is not a thing. Not even if you try to slip it in when the month is almost over and get it to share with Breast Cancer, Halloween, and changing leaves. I don’t even think ultrasound merits a day: let’s give them 35 seconds of ultrasonic screeching at lunch and get on with our lives. Come on, ultrasonographers get to take pictures of people’s babies. How much more recognition, appreciation, and job satisfaction do you need than a weepy mom-to-be finding out the sex of their bundle-of-joy-in-progress?

I mean, there’s trying to get recognition for a group of people who likely deserve it, which is great. But a month for ultrasonographers is just so far beyond the pale. It’s gone way beyond standing up to tout accomplishments, sharing stories of determination, and being recognized for hard work and contributions to being a dickhead braggart “hey look at me I’m totally better than all of you! Appreciate me! For a whole month!” Yes ultrasound helps deliver more effective health care, but nurses only get a day and they have to clean up shit* and injure their backs lifting people. Do you think you’re better than nurses — 31 times better than nurses? Moms, dads, secretaries, the entire organized labour movement, and motherfucking veterans only get one day each. Get over yourselves, god.

Damn those cocky sonographers and their ridiculous professional association’s ambitions.

Seriously, at what point do we get to say “nope, no it isn’t” when someone tells us it’s X appreciation/awareness month? At what point do we have a moral responsibility to stand up to a self-interested trade association trying to take over a whole month? Of course, Prostate Cancer Awareness Month (November) is also shared with Alzheimer’s, Lung Cancer, Diabetes, COPD (yes, lung gets two entries), Financial Literacy, and an insane approach to novel writing, which kind of underlines my point that it can’t be all of these things so this notion of a month dedicated to awareness is a little ridiculous. Let’s also consider what foolishness a dedicated month of something gets us: if it weren’t for Julius and Augustus Caesar awareness months, September through December would still be the seventh through tenth months of the year, and their names would make sense.

* – By which I mean actual human feces, but also urine, blood, pus, and other sundry smelly fluids.

My mom and my aunts were quite concerned with my grandfather’s mental state as he aged. It was becoming clear that he was suffering from the onset of dementia and cognitive impairment (Alzheimer’s specifically), but nobody knew what to do. Most of the time he was fine: dementia isn’t a one-way slide into a mental fog, it’s got its good days and its bad. And living out in the country, just him and my grandmother, driving was an essential part of their lives. Yet clearly ensuring a 3,000 lbs guided missile was always safely operated was a priority for the safety of him and everyone else on the roads. Any discussion of selling the car or turning in his license was a major fight though, with nothing but hurt feelings all around as the girls found themselves up against an immovable object time and again, and not really being sure themselves how essential it was to “ground” him. Then one day while driving he merrily crossed to the other side of the road and sped along, completely oblivious to the fact that he was going the wrong way. Fortunately the lack of traffic on a PEI rural highway meant no one got hurt, and that incident galvanized my aunts and they made him give up his license. Since then, the issue of people being competent to drive has entered more prominently into the national consciousness, and Ontario for one changed its licensing so that seniors had to take regular renewal exams, and made it easier for physicians and family members to report a potentially dangerous driver.

Driving is so contentious because it’s so closely linked with a person’s sense of freedom and mobility; many even view it as a right. Yet it is also visible: you can tell when your parents are uncomfortable heading out at night or in the rain, and you might be in the car when you notice them run a red light, take long enough to get going at a green light that the queue behind them is honking angry, or cross over to drive on the left. Some new technologies like lane keep assist can help improve the margin of safety and keep them driving longer, but you know that one day the decision will have to be made.

Less discussed is what happens to a person’s finances. Even aside from being capable, do they have the interest in rebalancing funds in a passive portfolio? Are all the bills getting paid on time, or are some slipping through the cracks? It’s a much tougher nut to crack: we face significant societal taboos to not discuss finances or mental health, and unlike driving there are no innocent bystanders being run down nor are the problems visible. Also unlike driving, finances can be handled at your own pace, and you can wait until you’re having a good day to deal with them (and for the most complex investing decisions, one day per year may suffice).

Still, the major question is: when should you get help? A DIY approach saves fees and doesn’t require a ton of specialized knowledge, cat-like reflexes, or time invested. The right approach (keeping things simple, following evidence-based best approximations, controlling what you can and letting the market do the rest) can be successful and easy. But it still requires some attention, some decision-making, and some knowledge — and does leave you open for losses if mistakes are made. There will quite likely come a time when some help is needed.

I think a formal, painful process is the way to go. Decide, years in advance while tempers are cool and minds are sharp, what will be the criteria for needing help (family meeting, majority rules? Professional assessment*?). Identify what form that help will take (complete control, advice, double-checking) and who it will come from (relative/friend, professional advisory firm). Perhaps see a lawyer about a conditional power of attorney (IANAL). Yes, it will suck all the fun out of Christmas dinner this year, so maybe combine it with your other painful but necessary family talks that you’ve been putting off (organ donation: take ’em all; life support: trust the EEG and don’t save a vegetable; toilet paper: goes over the top).

While investing seems like the bigger risk — so unfamiliar and rarely encountered — regular monthly bills, credit cards, and chequing accounts can potentially be bigger sources of losses if ignored or mishandled. Systematic withdrawal plans can also simplify and remove execution risk on the investing side (as can automated bill payments on the household management side). Reducing leverage and transitioning to less-active styles are also good ideas (if you used those in the first place).

It’s also a helpful process to go through so you consider what will happen if you die. In that case I think it’s easier** — your non-DIY-investing spouse may need a plan or annuity to help them cope, but at least the situation is a little more cut and dry: you don’t start off arguing about whether or not you’re dead and capable of continuing to manage your affairs, and everyone will know to swoop in and offer to help in that case (and you’ll have a capable executor named to help out, right?).

Not that I’ve actually done any of that with my parents, but I keep meaning to.

* – Note that this is not likely to happen promptly (avoiding the doctor, visiting on a good day, reticence on the part of the clinician to diagnose cognitive impairments)
** – Yes it sounds wrong.

I have — quite by accident, as one does — achieved something truly incredible. In just a few short days I have completely destroyed a fundamental behavioural reflex that is shared by all the mammals I’ve ever shared a house with: yawning. I didn’t use pain or taste conditioning, no electrodes or supra-threshold induced currents with TMS. I didn’t use dopamine agonists, opioids, or GABA inhibitors — I didn’t inject anything at all.

What happened was that I was exhausted and a little silly from playing with Blueberry. Wayfare was going off to bed and yawning quite a lot. So I mimicked her: as she yawned, I opened my mouth. I didn’t have a sympathy yawn, I didn’t mimick the movement in my eyes or the tilt of my head: all I did was open my mouth wide until she was done yawning. And that cognitive dissonance of a not-quite-a-sympathetic-yawn made her laugh. So I did it again. Over the course of 2-3 days I did it maybe 5 or 6 times, that’s it. Now — completely untaught by me — Blueberry is doing it to her too.

And now she can’t yawn in front of either of us without laughing. “It’s so frustrating, I can’t satisfy my urge to yawn,” she says, leaving the room to get a good yawn in.

Beyond the fact that this is so hilarious that I pretty much give myself an asthma attack laughing at her tragic yet ultimately trivial problem, it is completely fascinating. Yawning is a hard reflex to suppress (though to be fair “broken” is not the same as suppressed), so I’m surprised that a few bouts of giggling is all it took. Fair warning to you all: I may be trying this out on the next few people I catch yawning.

[Spoilers throughout]

Just watched both Pacific Rim and Man of Steel, and they both bothered the physicist part of me in a common way: a needless fuckton of punching.

In Pacific Rim they have these giant robots fighting giant monsters that swim up from a dimensional portal at the bottom of the ocean. Ok, a cool premise and consider my disbelief suspended — I’ve got my brain dialed all the way down to 1 for this, let’s have some fun.

Then they fight, and not only do the giant robots wade waist-deep into the ocean to fight (rather than staying on land where they might have an advantage), they fight with their fists. Millennia of human technological development have brought us a wealth of options better than a closed fist (even a robot fist) for damage. The whole time I was going “Get a sword! You idiots, stop punching, it’s doing next to nothing! Get a sword! There, that shipping container — stomp on it and get a make-shift giant shiv!” Go to the local comic book store and check out the giant robots and you are going to find that all of them have giant swords or giant guns: Gundam, Heavy Gear, Voltron, even some Transformers (who generally get giant guns). There’s a good reason for that: swords work. A cutting edge lets you do more damage than a punch, and the length lets you swing it for more leverage, speed, and attack range.

Then right near the end, the main characters are like “We’re totally boned.” “No, we have one option left — deploy sword!” And I just lost my cool. “You assholes had a sword the whole time? What the hell? The sword should be your first option, not your last one! Aaaaarrggghh!!”

On top of that were the scenes where the monsters pick up and throw the giant robots around like toys. Look, I hate to have to bring physics into it, but even if the monsters were totally strong aliens and all, they were still shown to be flesh and bone and roughly neutrally-bouyant in seawater. The robots on the other hand were metal. Heavy, dense metal. Trying to pick one up should have just resulted in the monster climbing up/hanging off. Though they were roughly the same size, the robots would have been something like 5X heavier.

Overall, Pacific Rim had some neat robot-fighting-monster visual action, but there were so many things so very wrong with it that I just couldn’t turn my brain down low enough to achieve the required level of suspended disbelief. And that’s not even talking about the mind meld/two-pilot neurointerface nonsense. I just accepted that the brain is hard and they were going to get a bunch of that wrong. But how did they not get that steel/titanium/unalloyed iron (???) is heavy or that “deploy sword” should be higher up on the Jaeger pilot checklist? This is basic late show “will it float” level science we’re talking here.

Man of Steel also featured a lot of punching. Ok, Superman movies are tough to do because he’s too powerful — it’s a challenge to create some credible suspense or danger around him. It usually boils down to trying to outsmart him, put someone he cares about in danger (but then Lois always ends up looking like a tool), or throwing another ultimate baddy at him (in this case, other Kryptonians).

So the Kryptonians show up, Superman starts to fight, and throws punches (and cars, and trucks, and a train, and then more punches). You’d think eventually he’d realize that the punching thing just isn’t working: neither of them are getting hurt. But he never does. Yes, the movie has cool destruction physics, blasting around punching each other and destroying all kinds of property and civilian lives in the process. But I got bored watching the whole thing; it was a stalemate that they just wouldn’t move away from.

There were even pockets of the world where the Kryptonians lost their powers (e.g., on the ship, near the world engine), yet the writers never came across the idea of taking advantage of that (smash Zod until he lands within a zone where he’s weak, then fly in with momentum to knock him out and break Superman’s hand, or zap him with heat vision from outside where powers do work, or something). Another oddity was that in this one there were no fragments of Kryptonite to weaken Superman (another incredibly common plot point because it’s really hard to make a story without weakening Superman somehow — he’s too powerful to be really interesting in a conventional superhero way), but instead his powers seemed to be due to a combination of “earth’s yellow sun” as well as the atmosphere, so reverting those inside the Kryptonian ship is what weakened him. But that atmosphere condition on his power should have suggested that flying to space was not going to be possible, yet he goes and does it a bunch anyway (and in ways that are not even relevant to the plot, just as a visual homage to the times he did it before).

I haven’t read the comics, so perhaps these elements are already out there, but I think a good Superman movie should:

• Revise the canon so that Superman is tough but not invincible. Then the fight with Zod et al. could have some progress, and some point to continuing past the first ineffectual punch and thrown car, if they sported bloody noses or something.
• Focus on the world Superman inhabits, but not necessarily him. At this point we can probably take as a given that for the really big, world-changing crises Superman is going to show up and save the day. But what about a run-of-the-mill mugging, will he show up, or will your screams go unanswered? Is there a cult that worships him?
• Move away from the ultimate peril trope. The parts of Man of Steel that were interesting were where he was drifting around, trying to balance his desire to stay hidden and his temper with wanting to touch the world and not retreat entirely. Superman can still do neat things and maybe have some kind of story without a supervillain threatening the whole world.

I’m still kind of amazed at how much effort movie creators will go to in their CGI, with intense physics/particle modelling to create cool/realistic visuals, but they won’t spring a few hundred bucks to have a scientist (or someone with a modicum of common sense) check their plot devices for believability. Far too much time spent on questions like “how would it look if this building collapsed and fell into this building with a hole punched through it from an alien being thrown through?” and not enough on “should this fight really be happening here, like this?”