The Time Has Come The Walrus Said…

July 22, 2009 by Bill.

In Lewis Carroll’s famous 1872 poem The Walrus and The Carpenter there is quite a stanza:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”

In this missive I don’t intend to argue the merits of what Carroll was trying to say in his poem, I’m merely fixated on the notion that he succinctly sums up what we must all be talking about at this point in 2009 and beyond:   The myriad things inadvertently swirling together that are bringing about worldwide chaos, perhaps even deep monetary depression.

The time has come for people to be paying serious attention to what their Congresspersons and Senators and POTUS are up to in Washington, because  the decisions being made there are setting up nearly every American for a drastic decrease in lifestyle, one we have never observed before in this country. As much as people hate talking about doom and gloom predictions, there are a lot of these predictions out there and we simply cannot like ostriches put our heads in the sand hoping they’ll go away. I would steer you to this YouTube video as one compelling example.

The stimulus package is not working, and I for one have serious reservations a second package will somehow, like a drop or two of penetrating oil, ratchet loose the spending logjam. Americans are not spending, they’re saving. This is a good thing, and it hearkens back to post-Depression-era American ideals. But as happy as that is, there are big problems.

One issue is that between housing, various loans and leases, and credit-card debt, not to mention the dramatic losses in our retirement savings accounts (the 401-K became the 201-K overnight) Americans are in serious debt. This was not the case in the Depression. It wasn’t very long ago that a person had to pay cash for a car–there simply weren’t any financing mechanisms available. And that 20% down a person had to have in order to purchase a house could not somehow be merged into the financing package: One had to literally have 20% of the house’s purchase price in the bank in order to make the transaction.

But today there are all sorts of first-time buyer plans. People who shouldn’t be able to buy a house do so anyway, even though they cannot afford them. This creates a huge problem because once people decide they cannot go on living in their house, they simply bail out on the loan, allowing the house to go into foreclosure. If there were only a handful of such houses, there would be no crises, the banks would merely carry the notes on their books as bad debt until the houses were sold. But if there are hundreds of thousands of these houses on the market, as there are now, that is quite another issue.

The Federal government now owns the majority of private housing in America. Fannie-Mae and Freddie-Mac, both overseen by their chief benefactor, Senator Barney Frank, own 56% of American private property, foreclosed upon or not. This came about through loose legislation in the last part of the 20th century (thanks Bill Clinton), allowing for very creative mortgage loans such as loaning 120% of value (so dad could buy that speedboat he’d had his eye on), covering the 20% down spoken of earlier in a second mortgage and so on. These loose fiscal policies allowed almost anyone who was breathing and could sign his name to be able to buy a house.

This is the ships and sealing wax element of American society. We now have a double-whammy in which Americans have defaulted on a dramatic number of properties (causing a huge slow-down in new construction), resulting in the majority ownership of American property by our own wonderful government.

Additionally, the Federal government is now in the business of controlling American corporations. Instead of letting big companies like AIG and General Motors fail, as they would probably have in the mid-20th century,  and as is properly mandated by supply-side economics, the Federal government saw them as “too big to fail” and came up with an elaborate bail-out scheme. This resulted in the Feds being able to tell corporate leaders how to run their businesses, and in some cases even led to one leader being replaced by another who may or may not know anything about the business. Let’s talk of shoes and ships, shall we? The two do not go together, anymore than private corporations and the Federal government are supposed to. And yet, here we are, trying to jam a ship into a shoe. Ouch!

Then there’s the great health care plan of ‘09. Health care is too expensive, we’re told. Not everyone is getting adequate health care. What we need is a unified plan, one in which every person has the right to affordable health care.

The problem with this is that the Federal government is again a big element of the equation. Anyone who knows anything about the Veteran’s hospital system and health care for our soldiers understands that the Federal government does a piss-poor job of providing any kind of health care. (I have my own story to tell about that, but will reserve it for another time.) Suffice to say that waiting times in clinics are very long and people who need expensive tests or procedures may be forced to wait months or years for treatment, ala the Canadian, French and English health care systems. The government has done a good job of putting out propaganda artists who pooh-pooh the suggestion that other countries’ health care systems are this way, that they’re a dream of efficiency and fiscal responsibility, but this is not the truth.

We need look no further than so-called “RomneyCare” in Massacheusetts or “TennCare” in Tennessee to find out how enormously expensive and ineffectual these state-mandated unified health care plans are. Mitt Romney is running around the country proclaiming how successful his brainchild was in Massacheusetts, but the truth is that the system is so expensive state lawmakers are looking at $1 B in excess spending on the program for this year alone and have recently gone so far as to remove 30,000 legal immigrants from the list of those eligible to receive “unified” health care. Guess it’s time for the legal immigrants in this country to start going back to the emergency rooms like they were before RomneyCare. I thought unified health care meant everyone had access, but I was wrong.

The push for a national health care policy is a classic case of saying that pigs have wings, that the Federal government can properly handle the doling out of benefits for all Americans (it can’t: anyone who doubts merely needs to look at the $56 T projected deficit for Social Security).

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently went to India (as a part of the Obama Apology Tour of ‘09) to admit that we Americans have been flawed in previous times in our reluctance to deal with CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, and to ask Indians to cooperate in the plan to set a worldwide limitation level for said emissions.

You see, the sea is boiling hot, and we have to do something about our CO2 emissions before most of Europe and all of Florida are flooded. And we see the Indians as the country that will one day soon overtake us as the owners of the bad habit of pushing billions of tons of the gas into the atmosphere, hastening the day when all the ice-caps melt, the seas rise, and Phoenix becomes a bonfire.

But (and this is a big but) we’re willing to pay the Chinese carbon tax so they can keep emitting (China has recently overtaken America as the chief CO2 depositor in the world). Why? Because we need the stuff they manufacture for us! We can obtain Chinese goods much cheaper than we can make them ourselves right here in the US (which would mean jobs for out of work Americans), but in order to do that the stodgy Chinese, who absolutely refuse to come to the worldwide Cap-and-Trade table to talk about so-called “carbon offset credits,” must be able to continue manufacturing and spewing out their nasty CO2. Readers can surely see we’re in a quite the conundrum. It’s like buying cigarettes for your mom, even though she has COPD, because you know she loves you and will give you good things.

But it’s more laughable than that because we will be borrowing the money to pay the carbon credits for the Chinese. And who will we likely borrow this money from? The Chinese, of course, the only ones today with any money to spend.

There are a variety of other smaller issues that come to mind: The Gitmo detention center closure, the cigarette tax (if we tax cigarettes deeply, people will stop smoking, but then our revenue stream will dry up and we’ll be asking Camel to put out ads to entice kids to start smoking), and runaway spending on pork projects included in virtual every 1,000+ page bill that is thrust in front of Congresspersons and Senators with the demand that the vote come as early as tomorrow, never mind that lawmakers have not yet had a chance to read these bills. Oh, and there’s that nasty 9.5% unemployment rate that’s really 11.5% once you take into account that a lot of Americans’ average work-weeks have declined to 33 hours (e.g. they’ve moved from full-time to part-time).

And of course, there’s the power grab by the Executive branch–what with 27 and counting so-called “czars.”

I’m having a hard time deciding what our country is becoming, but I think it’s slowly sliding down a slippery slope toward a socialist, communist, fascist oligarchy. I can tell you it is not the country Jefferson and Adams envisioned.

Some think we have a king that’s really a cabbage. I leave that determination up to you.

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Prolotherapy: The Miracle Treatment You’ve Never Heard Of

June 17, 2009 by Bill.

Over the years, the right side of my neck has become very sore. I’m not actually sure why: probably a combination of factors such as leaning over to look into computer screens for years and years, improper posture when weightlifting, excessive chiropractic treatments, maybe even too much ibuprofen.

At any rate, during the last couple of years I had gotten to the point where I was experiencing tremendously bad headaches, manifesting themselves either at the top of my head, or at the base of my skull, where the muscles attach, often resulting in a tight headache band that wrapped my entire head in pain. The headaches were almost always on the right-hand side, seldom the left. Some of my headaches were so debilitating my toes quaked, and I could not perform any sort of movement without excruciating pain. Some were so terrible I spent the night fighting them and had to call in sick at work the following day. My headaches were so bad I was resorting to prayer: “Please God, take this headache away from me!”

Thanks to a previous injury–a minor back sprain–I had discovered ibuprofen, which my doctor at the time called a “miracle drug.” So to partially counteract my headaches, I would take ibuprofen at the least little sign of a headache coming on. I did not know ibuprofen is good for taking down inflammation and swelling. I just knew that it worked on my headaches. One of my doctors at Kaiser Permanente told me I could take three ibuprofen (200mg tabs) every six hours. That’s what I did.

I also found that pseudoephedrine (Sudafed) was also helpful. One doctor prescribed Imatrix for me–a well-known and popular migraine headache drug–but it did not even faze my headaches. When I came down with a barn-burner of a headache, I would take aspirin, ibuprofen, the Walgreens clone of Sudafed, and anything else I thought would work. After the headache had subsided (several hours later) I would have a stubborn residual ache, and would just generally feel like crap for a complete day following.

Interestingly, I also noted that my headaches would often come around when there was a barometric pressure change, from high to low. You would think that the opposite would be the case, that I’d get headaches when a high pressure system came bearing down on me. But no, my headaches came when high pressure was moving out and the low was coming in. Doesn’t make sense from a physics point of view, but that is the way it seems to happen. I’ve never noticed if my headaches come on when there isn’t anything unusual happening weather-wise, so I can’t comment.

I do know that excess wine (especially wine with sulphides in them) and beer can bring them on. Because of that and other reasons, I’ve really cut back on alcohol consumption, typically only drinking a glass of wine, or a beer on the weekends.

Because the headaches were getting worse, I was starting to become afraid that I had brain tumors or other equally horrible disease. So I went to the Kaiser Permanente doctor, explained my case and he prescribed an MRI and a CAT scan of my neck and head. The CAT scan revealed that I had arthritis in my neck, some bone spurs and a slight bulge between C2 and C3 (the upper bones in your vertebrae). My doctor pooh-poohed the notion of brain tumors.

The conversation then went to topics like seeing a physical therapist, taking a muscle relaxant (Flexiril) and a mild narcotic (Tramodol) and if things didn’t get better, perhaps even paying a visit to the neurologist.

One visit to the physical therapist told me I wouldn’t get anywhere with those people. We talked about things like proper workplace ergonomics and other stuff to which I’d already been paying attention. The therapist also performed an ultrasound on the area, which felt wonderful but did nothing for the pain. She noted that I tended to lean slightly to the right. While I took away some good stretching exercises, I knew for sure my healing wasn’t going to come about by PT.

It’s important to note that years earlier I had started visiting a chiropractor regularly for the pain, and continued visiting him on a semi-monthly basis.

Because my doctor wanted me to try a full course of PT before he’d refer me to the neuro folks, I felt I was out of options with respect to Kaiser. And besides, I wasn’t sure how crazy I was to have neurosurgeons fusing neck vertebrae. Sounds dangerous. I would much prefer a naturopathic approach if possible.

So I tried accupuncture, which did truly help, but did not completely alleviate the pain. I’m now a big believer in accupuncture’s powers and will continue to see an accupuncturist when I feel they are the best choice for what ails me.

Headaches unabated, in desperation I turned to the web. I began an Internet search: surely there must be others out there who were having the same kinds of problems. And there were.

In my research I found out about a type of treatment called prolotherapy. Here’s the idea: You experience some kind of injury, then begin to suffer chronic pain as a result. The reason for the pain has to do with your muscles and ligaments not being able to adequately repair themselves. It’s not a bone problem, it’s a muscle problem. Which is why chiropractic visits helped some, because an adjustment would take some of the pressure off of the muscles, giving them a chance to recover somewhat. But, as soon as my bones began working their way out of adjustment, the muscles would again become the ones who paid the ticket. The trick was in fixing the muscles, not the bones.

Upon visiting my prolotherapy doctor (Dr. Jo Douglas)  I learned that my top of head and neck headaches were related. The pain would start in my neck, then traverse its way up a path to the top of my head. In 15 seconds she opened a prolotherapy book she had and turned to the drawings of various pathways like this in the human body, showing me the neck/top of head relationship. It was very easy to see, even from a layperson’s perspective, that there was a causal relationship. She asked if I occasionally had an ache in my eye socket, which I did.

She felt the muscles and ligaments in my shoulders and neck, and was quickly able to put her finger on the exact spot where I was feeling the most pain. If she pushed on it and then turned my head, I could hear a clicking sound. She noted that this was not a healthy situation. She showed me on a skeleton she had in the office how the bones, joints, muscles, tendons and ligaments connect, how chiropractors perform their adjustment, and why prolotherapy would help me with my pain.

She then went on to explain what prolotherapy is and how it works. The idea is very straightforward: Your muscles, ligaments and tendons can become worn down due to an injury and never getting a chance to properly heal. But the miracle of prolotherapy is that if you inject a liquid into the injured tissue, it will be “like sending it to the gym for a rigorous three-hour workout” (in Dr. Douglas’s words). Over the course of 3 - 6 treatments, these injections give the tissue a chance to regenerate and build back up.  She uses a naturopathic solution manufactured in Italy which, I believe, consists primarily of dextrose and glycerin (look here for more detailed information).

The science behind prolotherapy is this: If inflammation is purposely introduced to the offending area, this causes regeneration and healing. That’s why ibuprofen isn’t allowed during prolotherapy, because it cuts down on inflammation, precisely the thing I wanted happening during my healing.

Here’s the thing: The procedure hurts.  Though the doctor rubbed my skin with a local anasthetic, she actually had to insert the needle into my muscle/ligament/tendon and inject the solution in there. And, she had to do it in several places, so there were several sticks. So it’s not a walk in the park. But it’s not that bad either. No pain, no gain, as they say.

Repeat procedures must be spaced out several weeks so the healing has a chance to work. During that time, I was not allowed to have any ibuprofen - only Tylenol, aspirin, or Tramadol. (Side note: Evidently, there’s more to the ibuprofen story than we’re being told, as Dr. Douglas’s office was pretty solid on staying off it for good. Sounds to me like ibuprofen may not be the best thing in the world to use for fighting pain. So now I’m curious about that and will have to do some more research.)

Here’s the great news: Prolotherapy works! After going through four treatments, I felt much better in my neck area. I was able to get up and move around without having to first resort to pain medications.  My headaches stopped, and I was able to sleep better. If I did experience a minor ache or pain, standard off the shelf medications like apirin and Tylenol would help.

The procedures are expensive ($400/session) and medical insurance typically does not cover them (go figure).

In between procedures, the doctor put me on a daily whey protein drink (which was yummy) and collagen I & II. I’ve since stopped the whey protein, but continue to take collagen tables twice a day.  Dr. Douglas is also quite intrigued with the role that amino acids play in keeping one’s body from aging. Though not by her recommendation, I’d begun taking L-Arginine and L-Ornithine supplements as a part of a cleanse I’ve been going through. When I asked her about them she said they were good, well-known amino acids, and evidence showed that they were best taken separately, as opposed to the combination tablets one can buy at Natural Grocers.

If you are suffering from chronic pain, and (short of becoming addicted to oxycodon) you’re quickly running out of options, I think prolotherapy is so worth the money. The procedures are expensive yes. But what price do you put on your happiness in life?

There’s a good story about the guy who invented Cortisone and the doctor who perfected prolotherapy both going to an AMA conference at the same time one year. Guess which therapy got the nod from the AMA? The one that causes pain and introduces inflammation to the muscle in order to permanently heal it? Doubtful! But that hasn’t stopped the AMA and pharmeceutical companies from venturing headlong into the practice of shooting Cortisone into people for short-term relief. The Journal of Prolotherapy recently published an article that discusses the findings that too many corticosteroid injections actually contribute to arthritis, which seems consistent anytime there is a story in which pharmeceutical companies are involved. Here’s an abstractof the article.

I’ve learned several lessons from this experience:

1) Don’t go to the chiropractor as often as I had been going. While I value the work chiropractors do, they can actually contribute to a muscle’s injury by working the skeletal structure around during an adjustment. It’s best to keep chiropractic treatments few and far between.

2) Slow way down on the use of ibuprofen, select other medications instead.

3)Trust my naturopathic instincts and do my research before going along willy-nilly with whatever an MD tells me. It’s not wise to trust everything a doctor says as the truth, partially because doctors, like everyone else, have natural biases, and partly because of the indoctrination by pharmeceutical companies which doctors routinely undergo.

One of the bigger players in the field of prolotherapy is Ross Hauser, who maintains several different web sites devoted to the subject, and was the author of the prolotherapy book mentioned above. Here’s the place to start when researching Dr. Hauser.

Posted in Medical | 1 Comment »

Interesting International Ideas Invite Investigation

June 8, 2009 by Bill.

A couple of articles I’ve read recently have made me think about how international policies are doing relative to our own US economy. As a regular reader of the UK Economist magazine and other online sites, I like to keep in touch with what is happening internationally, for starters because I don’t believe everything the mainstream US media elitists are telling us, and secondly, because it’s good to get a variety of opinions in order to more readily facilitate one of your own. If you’re merely parroting what CBS, NBC, ABC and yes, even Fox, are telling you, then you don’t have a keen grasp on what’s really happening in the world. And, as my students will tell you, what’s new in the world is extremely important.

The first article came from the Drudge Report which subsequently pointed me to Yahoo News. In this article we discover that there seems to be a trend away from “center-left” politics in the EU toward center-right, as per the findings of the recent elections for EU commissioners. I find this interesting because some countries in Europe have served as a bellwether for the “socialism experiment,” namely the UK and France, among others. As US leaders watch whether these countries are successful in their trending away from capitalism and movement toward more socialistic tendencies, even going so far as to implement Sharia law for their Muslim inhabitants, I find it interesting that some European leaders seem to be slowly moving away from these now-entrenched policies back toward more conservative ideals. French prime-minister Sarkozy is a notable example. He has had more than his share of trouble in managing such a diverse and complicated nation. And Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkl, who has been the president of the EU in times past, is also a strong conservative leader. Even Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi has encountered high numbers over  his center-left opponent, despite corruption charges, a “deep recession,” and a fling with a model.

Looking askance at the leaders themselves and more at the notion of conservatism over liberalism (I don’t favor the so-called “progressive” tag liberals like to put on themselves) it appears that people may be getting fed up with paying so many taxes for so much bureaucracy and big-government initiatives, coupled with political double-speak, lying and corruption. We must never forget that the Beatles left the UK in favor of the US partially because they wanted to escape the 90% tax rate for millionaires.

Nor should we forget, to the disdain of our liberal brethern, that we in the US have a Constitution, which was deliberately and precisely written to constrict the advent of big government.

At the end of the day, it is firstly about peoples’ wallets, and after that it’s about ethical, judicial, legal, moral and social sensibility. It may be that people in Europe are fed up with the wild swing left and are looking for a simpler lifestyle.

On the other hand, I found this article in the Sunday, June 7, 2009, print edition of The Denver Post to be quite informative. In this article, a clinical psychologist living in Castle Rock, Colorado–one Rhonda Hackett–had some insights and “facts” to share regarding how well the Canadian health care system performs relative to the US system. We’ve see the TV commercials and heard the rumors about Canadian citizens coming to the US for health care because they can’t get it in Canada. She addresses that “myth” and others in the article, which I found quite compelling.

My wife, without reading the ariticle, had this to say about that: “Well, I can tell you that if it works out like Army health care,” (she was an Army brat), “people will wind up waiting months to get an appointment, standing in line for hours when they finally do get one, and not receiving adequate care upon seeing the doctor.”

May be. But our psychologist friend Hackett claims that in Canada it is independent doctors who manage their client base, not government, which pokes a stick in the eye of my wife’s theory because in the Army it is Army brass who decide what Army doctors will and will not do.

Hackett goes on to cite a table of some interesting medical statistics, such as Canadian average life expectancy of 80.4 years versus the US 77.8, though she does not say where these numbers came from.

The problem with articles like these are that they have an internet feel to them. They sound official and actual and important, but they may just be someone’s ranting and raving with regard to something they’re passionate about. If there is anything the internet has desensitized in all of us, it is the importance comparing and contrasting so-called “facts” with what others are saying. One person cites it, it’s all good and we run with it. The internet has done a great job of moving urban myths onto the global stage.

On the other hand, as I said, Hackett makes a compelling argument, one that’s worth more investigation. If indeed Canadian health care is as she says it is, then maybe it won’t be so bad.

Who knows?

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David Gilmour Is My Hero

May 23, 2009 by Bill.

So it’s late May of 2009 and I’m sitting here watching the HD channel Palladia. The show is called “David Gilmour Live in Gdansk,” a concert filmed in HD in the Polish shipyards in 2006. Let me tell you something: This concert is phenomenal. Gilmour’s playing the usual Pink Floyd stuff like “Comfortably Numb” along with some of his own material. There’s like a million-piece symphony orchestra accompanying him, along with a raft of incredibly great musicians: a bassist, couple of keyboards, the luckiest drummer in the world, and a couple of rhythm guitar players. I think one of the keyboardists is Richard Wright, but I’m not sure.

OK, just checked the Richard Wright thing and, sure enough, it was him. Turns out that Wright died of cancer just two years later (2008), God rest his soul.

While I write this, I have to glance up occasionally just to look at this amazing man Gilmour: the poise, the expressions on his face, the dedication to his craft. I love the way he dresses - so comfortable. I love his seriousness on stage. I love to watch this man manage these incredibly ornate, psychologically satisfying guitar solos-taking us into depths only Floyd can adequately express. Watching a Pink Floyd concert allows me to scratch a psychological itch I have, one that periodically needs to be re-scratched, and then scratched anew.

My God, when Gilmour and the rest of Pink Floyd recorded “Pulse” back in 1994, he looked slightly aged then, but now he looks a little the worse for wear. There are some bowls under his eyes, and he has age spots on his face and arms where he did not have them before. He was born in ‘46, so that makes him, what, 63 today? When he’s simply concentrating on playing and not giving the other musicians alongside him that great smile of his, he looks a little older. But when he smiles, or when he scrunches his face up in that great Gilmour “I’m going to smack you over the head with this guitar solo” look, he looks wonderful.

His age doesn’t detract from the fact that he’s one of the greatest rock guitarists that has ever lived, a far better singer now than Eric Clapton or Robert Plant is today and possessing much more self-control, finesse and character than Mick Jagger. The only person I can think of who comes close to Gilmour in terms of someone people could aspire to be like might be Pete Townsend of the Who, or perhaps Alex Leifson of Rush, although it appears Leifson has had a run-in or two with the law.

You should see the young Polish kids worshiping this man as he plays. They get it. They know the power of this man, as do I.

Of all my rock idols, I most respect David Gilmour. It’s clear he could be pretty angry if he wanted to be. Or seriously somber, maybe? What I’m getting at is there is a hint of anger in his poise, though just a hint. And I’ve read about the problems Floyd has had as a band in the 90’s and beyond. I think I remember reading something about Gilmour commenting on what an arrogant ass Roger Waters is–which is why Floyd doesn’t tour anymore.

Here’s the thing: When I was a youngster in the era in which Pink Floyd was getting its start, I had friends that raved about them, but I just never got into their music. I was completely into Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin. I didn’t have time for small-time groups like Pink Floyd. Now I wish I’d paid more attention. Pink Floyd had something important to say. And of course, there was that amazing psychological element to their music.

But what I’d really like to do some day is sit down across from David Gilmour and have a long conversation with him about his experiences in Pink Floyd and beyond. Preferably with a pint of good dark beer and some fish and chips. I’d ask Gilmour about where he lives: I suspect he has a farm and that really loves to be there. I have these ideas about what his farm looks like. Maybe he lives in a loft in London for all I know? I wonder what his wife looks like: she must be a good woman. I think Gilmour has the kind of character it takes to pick a really great woman for himself, not some floozy who wants to get in on the action a rock star can bring.

I guess that’s the thing I like most about Gilmour, he’s a rock star that doesn’t act like one. He comes across as just another ordinary guy who happens to be pretty good at guitar playing and singing.

I remember on the Pulse video how Gilmour would occasionally play his steel guitar like a lead guitar. You know, the kind of guitar the country and western bands have, where the guy sits at the guitar and uses a tube to move up and down the twin fretboards? Gilmour used the steel guitar like a very, very cool lead guitar. and he still uses his Heil Talk-Box. The Heil thing is a tube you put in your mouth, allowing you to modify the sound output of your instrument. I’ve noticed camera persons are quite genteel when it comes to not showing a musician putting the tube into his/her mouth, as some people would probably be put off by the whole prospect. But the Heil Talk Box was definitely a very cool invention in 1973, and I’m glad to see it’s still in use (along with the wah-wah pedal).

So listen David: If you’re reading this, we’re going to be in London June 9th for a day or two. Please email me and let’s get together chat. I’d love to learn more about you. You are definitely one of my heros.

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Nebuchadnezzar Didn’t Know

April 19, 2009 by admin.

Lately I’ve gotten interested in end-times prophecy again. I had taken a small hiatus from it, but the recent financial melt-down, subsequent efforts to fix it, and other world-wide events that have been going on got me interested again.

In theology, the topic of end-times prophecy and end-times prophetic events is called eschatology. As you might imagine, there are tons of different views on the topic of eschatology. For the record, I believe Jesus is going to come to the earth again in an event called the “rapture,” I am premillenial–that is, I believe the 1,000 year millenium in which Christ rules and reigns on the earth happens sometime after a 7-year event called The Tribulation (also known as The Day of the Lord), and I believe it’s possible that Christians may well have to go through at least 1/2 of the Tribulation and can do so without violating any of the timing events that Revelation and other books speak of.

Yes, I seriously believe this is going to happen.

Here’s what’s interesting though: I began going through the book of Daniel again because there is quite a bit of eschatological prophecy in the book, it had been awhile since I’d read it, and I wanted to refresh my knowledge.

I began by buying a book on Daniel by H.A. Ironside. Ironside is a famous Bible commentator who wrote the bulk of his expositionary work in the early 1900’s. His commentary on the book of Daniel was written in 1920. Ironside died in 1950. Like another Bible commentary hero of mine, J. Vernon McGee, Ironside has a way of taking very difficult passages, making them plain and easily understandable.

The first chapter of Daniel went fine for me. I reread about Daniel (in Aramaic, Belthashazzar) and his three friends (known in Aramaic as Meschach, Shadrach and Abednego) and the fact that Daniel and his buddies would not allow themselves to eat the same kind of food the Babylonians were eating. The reason? Because the Babylonians worshiped all kinds of gods and Daniel and his friends did not want to exhibit even a hint of disrespect for their God–Yahweh.

But in chapter 2 of Daniel, I learned something quite new. Ironside notes that the Bible says Nebuchadnezzar had a dream and wanted the wise men of the land to tell him what it was and interpret it for him. I knew that from before. But here’s the new thing: According to Ironside, Nebuchadnezzar couldn’t remember the dream! Have you ever had that happen? You dream a vivid, compelling dream, but 10 minutes after you wake up you can’t remember it, even though you knew when you were in the heat of it that it was important? I’ve had this happen dozens of times.

According to Ironside, Nebuchadnezzar not only wanted his wise men to tell him what the dream was, and interpret it for him: he wanted them to do so because he couldn’t remember what the heck he’d dreamed!

What’s extremely interesting about this is that some Bibles don’t say it this way. They imply that Nebuchadnezzar knew what the dream was. Here are some examples of the scripture in question - Daniel 2:5 - (taken from BlueLetterBible.org):

King James Version
The king answered and said to the Chaldeans, The thing is gone from me: if ye will not make known unto me the dream, with the interpretation thereof, ye shall be cut in pieces, and your houses shall be made a dunghill.

American Standard Version
The king answered and said to the Chaldeans, The thing is gone from me: if ye make not known unto me the dream and the interpretation thereof, ye shall be cut in pieces, and your houses shall be made a dunghill.

New American Standard
The king replied to the Chaldeans, “The command from me is firm: if you do not make known to me the dream and its interpretation, you will be torn limb from limb and your houses will be made a rubbish heap.

New Living Translation
But the king said to the astrologers, “I am serious about this. If you don’t tell me what my dream was and what it means, you will be torn limb from limb, and your houses will be demolished into heaps of rubble!

Here’s the takeaway for serious Bible students: Look verses up in more than one version of the Bible! Just because the Bible says something one way in one version does not mean you have the whole story!

In the case of Daniel 2:5, there is a significant difference between Nebuchadnezzar not remembering what he had dreamed and demanding the wise people of the land to tell him what he dreamed and interpret the dream, versus Nebuchadnezzar knowing what he dreamed, but seeking to make sure his wise men were exactly that–wise men.

Finally, it’s important to note that Daniel did not take credit for the accomplishment. He was quick to tell Nebuchadnezzar that he, nor anyone else can tell a man what he dreamed. This work is up to God. Daniel made sure God got the credit for this work.

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Computers are Dead. Long live Computers.

February 25, 2009 by admin.

Daniel Pink, a bestselling author of business and technological books has announced in his latest book, A Whole New Mind, that the Information Age is dead. It has been replaced with what Pink calls “The Conceptual Age.”

The idea is this:  The simplest Information Technology (IT) activities have been outsourced to Bangalore, India, China, El Salvadore, the Philippines, and even Viet Nam. And rightly so. Why pay someone $60K annually to write elementary code a machine could be taught to write? In fact in the book Pink mentions a company, Appligenics, that has come up with a system that can write in one second the amount of code a developer would take all day to write (about 400 lines).

So there’s really no need for the kind of coder we had in the 80’s and 90’s. Been there, done that.

What Pink is driving at is much more interesting, and a space that I’ve lived in for a long, long time. He talks about people who think with both their right and left brains. Coders, engineers and bean-counters are highly left-brained: analytical, systematic, project-management oriented. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s only half of the equation, heck, maybe only one-quarter of it.

But that’s not where the innovation lives! Innovation is when, like in the 1939 movie Babes In Arms Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, desperate for extra money to help their parents, note that an empty barn would be a great place to hold a (paid admission) song and dance show. “Hey!” Rooney cries, “We’ve got the barn, we could have a show!”

Imagine a smelly old horse barn. Straw, horse puckies, mud, buckets, tack, run-down wooden stalls. Could you look into a barn and imagine a throng of people dressed in their evening finest, listening to a full big-band and the Rooney/Garland powerhouse belting out songs? Um, probably not.

But that’s exactly what Pink is talking about. What is needed today are people who can see connections and syntax. You Tube is a great example. Someone had a digital camcorder, shot some film and said “Hey, we’ve got this here barn, we could have a show!” (Translate: “Hey, this thing is pretty cool! Wouldn’t it be great if we could set up a web site and allow anyone who wants to the ability to upload videos? We’ll probably get some amazing content!”

And they did. In a short time they sold the whole thing to Google for tons of cash, and retired.

The problem is there aren’t many people who seem to have the ability to look at a barn and see a show. I blame this on the state of education in America. It has to do with the complete lack of training people have been given in this area. It’s the direct result of really crappy educational practices that are linear and myopic, not holistic at all.

Unfortunately, until this situation is rectified, the innovation will occur only by the lone wolves of the world: The Mickey Rooney’s of today, if you will. Those who dare to throw the friggin’ box away–to hell with thinking outside of it!

Pink goes on to enumerate what he calls “the six high-concept high-touch senses [that] can help develop the whole new mind this era demands:”

• Not just function, but also design
• Not just argument but also story
• Not just focus but also symphony
• Not just logic, but also empathy
• Not just seriousness but also play
• Not just accumulation but also meaning

People who live in that space where design and technology meet, those who take risks, who see blends and mixes, who understand how two (or more) things connect when others may not be able to see–these are the people who will be wildly successful.

I have a lot of students in my classes who operate almost entirely out of their left brain, or their right, but very few who are able to transcend left- or right-brain-ness and operate within the nexus of conceptuality. I really try to work on my students to understand and value the notion that we’re done with the Information Age, and we’re moving into a completely, radically, new place.

I guess the place to start with that is 1939 and then move forward from there.

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The Name that Cannot be Named

December 27, 2008 by admin.

I’ve gotten interested in Chinese medicine of late. I’ve been reading an excellent book on the subject:  Between Heaven and Earth: A Guide to Chinese Medicine by Harriet Beinfield and Efrem Korngold. My accupuncturist recommended this book, and another: Tao Te Ching by Stephen Mitchell (actually by Lao Tzu, and translated by Mr. Mitchell).

In my reading I came across something very interesting: In the book Tao Te Ching (translated Book of the Way) the very first chapter says this:

The tao that can be told

is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named

is not the eternal Name.(emphasis mine)

This is interesting because religious Jews will not say the name of God. They say Ha Shem (the name) or Yahweh (sometimes written as YHWH, which means “Jehovah,” “The Lord,” or “Adonai”) but they never actually say or write the word God. Instead they’ll write G-d, leaving the vowel out of His name, in respect to Him.

I don’t know how many other cultures have such a tradition, but I find it fascinating that the Chinese and the Jews–two decidedly different cultures–share this belief in common.

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TV Has Changed

December 16, 2008 by admin.

We bought a Tivo box several months ago and really like it. Our Tivo box goes way beyond the standard cable Digital Video Recorder (DVR) box you get from your cable or satellite supplier.

Our Tivo can connect to Amazon and Netflix movies–a huge plus. The other night we discovered various web downloads we could obtain as well–from a host of odd providers (such as Revision3) where you can get a variety of interesting Internet TV shows such as ScamHow and Burt Monroy’s Photoshop show.

We had a blast playing different You-Tube videos with my granddaughters the other night. There are so many different interesting, untapped videos to watch, complete with synapses, viewer votes (like in the tens of millions) and other valuable elements.

Now that Boston Legal has gone off the air, I think TV has permanently changed. What about you?

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Plastics The Big Problem?

August 5, 2008 by Bill.

Last night we were watching a superb HD show on the National Geographic (”NatGeo”) channel called “LA Hard Hats“. This show is all about how construction workers build high-rise buildings: the various challenges they go through with respect to the cement work, plumbing wiring, flood and earthquake control, and so forth.

The show we watched was filmed at a new LA high-rise called “Evo”. If you’re into engineering this show is a must-see for several reasons. It’s beautifully filmed in HD and displays well in 1080p. You’re right in there with the workers as they put up this big behemoth of a structure–all the pitfalls they encounter. An added plus is the show’s producers visit various commodity producers who provide the building supplies such as pipe and concrete. You get to see how Kohler toilets and faucets are made, and so on.

Which is why I’m writing this blog. On a radio show I was listening to the other day–don’t ask me which, I can’t remember, but I think it was the “Caplis & Silverman” show on 630 KHOW–they said that about 25% of the oil we use in America goes into the creation of plastics.

Twenty-five percent? That’s a big number! A lot of oil.

Here’s the connection to the LA Hard Hats show: The episode we watched was all about the building’s plumbing. The waste pipe the construction workers put in–big 6″ and 8″ piping that would drain all of the building’s 2500 waste connections–was made of cast iron, the various parts connected together by rubber sleeves and pipe clamps. Cast iron pipe, instead of thick black plastic.

The show’s narrator said that the last cast iron factory in America happens to be in LA. They visited the factory and filmed the workers as they made cast iron pipe. Here’s the cool thing: Cast iron is made from recycled parts that come from such things as automobile brakes and other throwaways. Sure, you have to have great hot cauldrons that melt the iron in order to recast it into pipe, which doubtless consumes some fuel.

But in order to make plastic, you not only have to heat up the ingredients to pour them into the forms you’ve devised for your plastic parts, the very ingredients for the plastics themselves are largely petroleum-based–a double whammy.

I guess one advantage with plastic waste pipe is that it might endure an earthquake more readily. But I’m not so sure about even that. When you connect cast iron together with the rubber connectors and pipe clamps they used, there’s quite a bit of give in the joints. Seems to me in an earthquake, the pipes could move around a little and the joints wouldn’t be any the worse for wear. But glued-together plastic joints? I’m thinking an earthquake could easily tear some of them apart. Not sure. Guess we’ll have to wait and see where things flow when granny gets rid of those prunes she’s been faithfully consuming.

Anyway, the point is that we seem to be majoring in the minors. We’re concentrating on recycling–a great thing–and alternative energy resources–an even greater thing–but then we continue to build structures and inumerable other things with plastics. And package our stuff in great unwieldy packaging made from plastics. When you buy nearly any produce these days, the fruits and vegetables ship in these so-called “clamshell” packages. Made from plastic. Yes, you can recycle them, but the bigger question is this: Why even have this clamshell stuff in the first place? Isn’t there a less oil-consumptive, more environmentally friendly way of shipping goods to consumers so there is still little loss, and the freshness stays the same? We buy our eggs at Costco in paperboard containers. And they’re fresh and yummy, with little breakage.

And our automobiles are largely made from plastics. As is our playground equipment, and nearly any other thing you utilize today.

Will we continue to use petroleum to manufacture plastics, even when we’re driving hydrogen-based fuel-cell cars?

Guess I’m confused about the message.

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Can Games Help Kids Learn?

July 18, 2008 by Bill.

For the last few weeks I’ve been involved in an excellent Professional Development (PD) program for teachers called Teacher Game Institute (TGI). The program is managed by several professors at the University of Denver (DU) with the aid of their amazingly capable and helpful graduate research assistants (GRAs). I believe TGI is at least partially underwritten by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The program is dubbed P4Games. The four Ps stand for Programming, Pixels(art), Pedagogy, and Play (designing and play-testing games).

The idea is at once straightforward and yet profound in its potential to dramatically affect the way that teachers teach and kids learn when they’re at school. Prior to coming to TGI for the first week we were given a text to read: How Computer Games Help Children Learn, by David Williamson Shaffer, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, ISBN 13-978-1-4039-7505-8. Shaffer eloquently dialogs about the things I’ve been thinking about public education ever since I began (my third career) teaching Computer Science at a Colorado high school three years ago. Personally I believe much of contemporary education (including lots of today’s educational philosophy as pushed by post-secondary institutions) is sooooo 20th century and very broken. Classes are generally not terribly hands-on.

Students enter the classroom, obtain a textbook, go through some sort of a content delivery process (I hate the word “lecture”), are given a worksheet or homework or both to help augment the learning, and dismissed after 55 minutes of class time to go on to their next session. Students are expected to sit up, pay attention, listen carefully to what’s being said, take notes, and make every effort to contribute as much as they can to their educational process. It is, after all, their education. Students are tested, tested, tested and then tested some more because somewhere in the goofy No Child Left Behind (NCLB) philosophy, bean-counters have decided that unless we objectively see numbers, we have no way of knowing if a kid’s learning what we’re teaching. (While there’s some merit to this, and I’m a believer in formative and summative assessments, I think we’ve gone overboard in the testing process and are now actually doing our children a disservice by assessing them so much.)

The problem is this: Today’s kids don’t fit this mold very well. First of all there are way too many things competing for their attention: boyfriends and girlfriends and friends in general, family members, both parents working, single parent households, poverty, affluence, video games, drugs, and sports not to mention the whole universe that makes up the school’s ecosystem - “stoners”, “skaters”, “jocks”, and so forth: in other words the school’s cliques.  Not to mention all of the flash and advertising they get from media content in all its forms. My guess is there is hardly a place kids can go that lacks the pizzazz of living in media-driven America. (Think church is the one sanctuary? Guess again. In most larger churches, there are coffee-shops and with them the various banners and buzz associated with the church’s programs. Churches actually have customized coffee cozies that look like Starbucks, but advertise the church’s program(s) du jour.

Second, near as I can tell, kids don’t read anymore. I don’t mean they never pick up a book, magazine or newspaper and read a snippet or two. Of course that goes on. But I believe the notion of actively reading the printed page to gain information isn’t within the purview of most American students. Of course there are exceptions. I’m not saying all students are this way. I’m just saying that as a general educational trend, students don’t get their information from books and periodicals. They’re much more inclined to go to the Internet for their information, or obtain it second-hand from friends or other sources. Urban myths abound in this communication system, and kids believe nearly anything.

 Thirdly, and probably most importantly, it appears that students are as comfortable or maybe even much more comfortable in the virtual world than they are in the physical. For example, there is a sense of empowerment and usefulness that comes with the World of Warcraft (WOW) universe which students may have a very hard time duplicating in their regular lives. I’m just a 16-year-old high-school student by day, but in the privacy of my bedroom I become a warlock, priest, warrior or other important person in the virtual world. I actually mean something to somebody and can be of productive assistance.

This, I believe, is the most important differentiation between us adults and our kids. If you and I escape into a golf game or run away to a Cancun all-inclusive for a few days, we’re still connected to the world around us. But kids who immerse themselves into WOW aren’t. They’ve disconnected and they’re deep into a new world that we don’t understand. They’re at play, yes. But they’re also engaged with virtual others in a completely new and different universe, where roles and goals are quite different from the mundane today. I can appreciate that this is terribly satisfying. Who among us would not like to completely get away from our world for an extended period of time? Truly, does this not explain adults’ need for happy hour during the week?

My point here isn’t to  trash WOW, though I’m not a big fan, or praise alcohol, which I imbibe in moderation. Blizzard Entertainment, WOW’s owner, is amazingly successful with millions of users paying $20/month to participate in the WOW universe.

I want to make a far bigger point: Games, especially video games in all their forms (online, PC, Nintendo Wii or DS, Sony Playstation, Microsoft Xbox, etc.) are the happy hour for kids. It is their escape mechanism. The games are fun, stimulating, challenging, entertaining, enlightening, sometimes even educational (it is this sometimes part we need to work on). They take kids’ mind off of things. They teach kids how to quickly react to complex situations. (Don’t believe me? Try playing a simple game like Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii, then we’ll talk.) They encourage kids to explore and discover. They get kids connected, talking, and working in teams.

Moreover, I think games have the ability to really teach kids the things they need to know.

Even more importantly, if playing the games is so useful, wouldn’t learning how to build them be even more fun and productive?

It is this mindset in which we were immersed in our TGI workshop. Most of the first two weeks’ of the workshop were spent the same way: 2 hours of programming instruction (using a cool open source game programming product called Greenfoot), 2 more hours of learning how to draw and use another really great open source product called Inkscape,  2 hours of pedagogy around teaching kids how to build games, and another 2 hours talking about game design, actually designing our own games and then “play-testing” them.

The second two weeks we were charged with writing our own game, and developing curriculum we could use in our classrooms. At the same time, the P4Games team was going through the same educational process they’d just taught us with a group of middle-school girls. The professors came in and announced: since we’re in the middle of heated political season with the presidential elections coming up and all, we should make a game around the election. This instruction went out to both teachers and students.

What I really, really liked about the TGI program was the cohesiveness of the subject matter. For example, the art professor was very gifted at helping us understand basic things about drawing such as perspective, shapes and color. We were introduced to charcoal drawing and drawing stacks of boxes to learn about how to draw perspectives, But eventually we were moved to Inkscape and with the help of a Wacom tablet we were able to move our drawings into the electronic world.

The game design professor, an extremely interesting man with a deep background in the subject, brought all kinds of new ideas to the class about what a game is and what it is not. For example, some things we think are games are actually toys, because they have no decisive finish or outcome - you simply play them.

The Computer Science (CS) professor was a bright, capable person who took some extremely technical programming ideas and principles and boiled them down so that the average person could understand them.

There were non-technical teachers in the class. You need never have ever written a line of code, or drawn even one thing to become a game developer. We learned all about coding and drawing and crafting. Two of the teachers in class were English oriented - one wanted to use games to envelop the things her kids were reading into a game so as to bring about a stronger sense of literature and meaning. Her early foray in to this area was quite good, extremely provocative, and, I suspect, will probably be a huge hit with her students. The students will read a little of the assigned book, then jump on the game to act like the protagonist for awhile.

The big point is this: The game isn’t the end-all, be-all. Getting to the game is what we’re after–it is the journey through the technical, art, design, math, science and business worlds that culminate in a satisfying game–this where the educational process really kicks in.

For example, kids have to understand the physics and math of a collision before they understand how to code one. Just getting characters to move on a 2D screen 20 pixels wide by 20 deep can be quite a challenge at first. Kids need to understand the coordinate system in 2-space, and then the commands that get their characters onto the screen. Only then can they get them moving. That said, getting your very own characters to move correctly based upon commands you gave them is quite a gratifying process.

Further, story is extremely important in games. No one wants to play a lame game with no backbone. We want strong protagonists and antagonists with sturdy plot structures, believeable environments and plot twists, and, of course, suspense, relationships and humor. So writing, coupled with a strong knowledge of literature and how to use it is a heavy requirement for successful game development.

And so on. There is almost nothing that is currently taught in a conventional high school that would not become relevant in a game programming enviornment - from music to Spanish to lacrosse - it’s all meaningful and useful. There is no subject that is not germane to game programming, and nothing that cannot become a game. For example, our game design professor instructed us one day to come up with a game all about red. Another day we had to design a game around the topic of sad.

I am very committed and motivated to helping kids understand how to write and produce games. What we need now is to develop entire curriculums and schools focused on the subject, using guided leadership and project-centric learning, funneling students through the discovery process that results in a game. Once you’ve gone through the TGI, you begin to understand the vision–how important the impact of game production can be on our students. There needs to be a switch in American education: game-centric high-schools! 

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