Sunday, June 20, 2010
Ich habe eine Frau
Two years now, and it no longer startles me to realize it. Sometimes I shake my head ruefully, sometimes in bewilderment at my good fortune, and sometimes out of sheer confusion, but I am no longer taken aback by the notion itself. In this regard, novelty has not so much worn off as it has worn in; I understand with greater acuity as our relationship progresses what people mean when they say their spouse is their foundation in life, and it is an apt metaphor. Upon this solid thing, we do build a home, a family, and a life together. As in all things, it requires maintenance - this year, indeed, we purchased a not-so-metaphoric house as well, and the similarity is again, striking: things happen. Paint must be touched up, work must be done, and not all surprises are pleasant...but it is always worth the investment.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Dear Apne / Nice Shime-Waza, Wanna Fuck?
As Bill Burroughs once remarked, "People often ask me if I have any words of advice for young people."
Today's Question: how risky is choking or strangling a person?
Short Answer:
Whether engaging in erotic asphyxia or applying a "constriction-technique" in martial arts (絞技, etc), you can reduce or negate most of the risks of gross physical damage (like crushing the hyoid, trachea, or larynx) or accidental death due to gross physical injury with proper technique. Strangulation (cutting off blood) is generally regarded as "safer" than asphyxiation (cutting off air) because it is less likely to result in fractures of the structures mentioned above, and a rapid, controlled strangulation that causes unconsciousness quickly is much safer than a protracted event that causes a person to slowly lose consciousness over a period of struggling.
Regardless of technique or intentions, the two cardinal rules are to apply force with a "fail-safe" rather than "fail-secure" mechanism (i.e. constriction ceases when no longer deliberately induced), and don't apply any more force than is required to achieve the desired effect. Roughly 250 mmHg for 10 - 20 seconds is normally sufficient. This also means you don't hang yourself or anybody else, and you don't compress things until they turn purple unless your intention is to cause grave bodily injury. Accidents happen; accidents like this will have dire consequences, but you can reduce these kinds of risks to levels you may find acceptable by being responsible and respectful.
What you can't prevent are the body's systemic responses to ischemia (loss of blood flow) and ischemic hypoxia and hypercapnia (not enough oxygen and too much carbon dioxide in the blood); you will never be "responsible enough" to dictate involuntary biological functions in yourself or others, so no matter how much you practice your particular craft there will always be significant risk in this sort of activity.
Long Answer (an introduction to the unmitigated risks):
The primary risks of strangulation or choking not associated with gross physical damage are the restriction of blood or oxygen to the brain and heart, and related side-effects. Ischemia alone can cause stress to the heart, blood pressure spikes, and stroke, but the majority of the risk comes from the hypoxic and hypercapnic effects that follow ischemia.
Hypoxia can cause things like ectopic (premature) ventricular contraction (your heart "skips" a beat), and if that occurs at the wrong time in your sinus rhythm (during a normal t-wave, for instance) you could have a heart attack. No preamble, no warning signs, just sudden ventricular fibrillation caused by an unfortunate collision of two events, one of which you could have prevented from occurring. Every time a "PVC over T" occurs the likelihood of it repeating increases, and multiple PVC over T events in a chain will stop the heart. Even cardiologists can't always detect individual PVC over T events in the wild without the assistance of an EKG, so it is absurd to think that even with training you can tell by looking at someone's eyes, taking their pulse manually, watching their breathing, etc you are "informed" of their cardiovascular state beyond being able to see obvious signs of a heart attack or loss of consciousness. By the time these problems are observable, CPR isn't nearly as effective as you might imagine (about a 10% success rate, statistically). Incidentally, a person's overall cardiac health and fitness play a very small role in this risk; just like strong swimmers and divers can have a shallow-water blackout without warning, even athletes can have sudden fibrillation or tachycardia.
Hypoxia also causes metabolic acidosis by starving a glycolysis process in which glucose breaks down into pyruvate and creates a particularly useful little nucleotide called Adenosine-5-triphosphate, which is the transport mechanism for chemical energy within cells. Normally, pyruvate recombines with oxygen to produce more ATP, but if there isn't enough O2 to metabolize the pyruvate it turns into lactic acid instead, which being a form of metabolic acidosis decreases your blood pH.
Hypercapnia causes respiratory acidosis; basically, your body keeps CO2 in equilibrium with water as carbonic acid (H2O + CO2 -> H2CO3), which deteriorates into bicarbonate and an acidic hydrogen ion (HCO3- and H+). If breathing is restricted, hypercapnia (too much CO2) leads to a shitload of acidic hydrogen as your body attempts to balance things according to the above formula which, like metabolic acidosis caused by hypoxia, decreases your blood pH. If you hyperventilate, you'll instead get rid of too much CO2 at once and the process will re-balance in the other direction, raising your pH (respiratory alkalosis). Your bood pH is roughly 7.35 to 7.45 normally; the survivable range (for any mammal) is a pH of about 6.8 to 7.8. Anything outside of that range causes death at a cellular level very quickly, and since the impacted areas are a person's heart and brain, just a little taste of that problem is quickly fatal.
Assuming you do not experience one of the problems above, repeated cerebral hypoxic events will also likely cause vascular lesions that eventually result in a condition known as multi-infarct dementia, which is similar to Alzheimer's Disease.
Ironically, all things being equal a proper controlled strangulation is less risky than being knocked out.
Today's Question: how risky is choking or strangling a person?
Short Answer:
Whether engaging in erotic asphyxia or applying a "constriction-technique" in martial arts (絞技, etc), you can reduce or negate most of the risks of gross physical damage (like crushing the hyoid, trachea, or larynx) or accidental death due to gross physical injury with proper technique. Strangulation (cutting off blood) is generally regarded as "safer" than asphyxiation (cutting off air) because it is less likely to result in fractures of the structures mentioned above, and a rapid, controlled strangulation that causes unconsciousness quickly is much safer than a protracted event that causes a person to slowly lose consciousness over a period of struggling.
Regardless of technique or intentions, the two cardinal rules are to apply force with a "fail-safe" rather than "fail-secure" mechanism (i.e. constriction ceases when no longer deliberately induced), and don't apply any more force than is required to achieve the desired effect. Roughly 250 mmHg for 10 - 20 seconds is normally sufficient. This also means you don't hang yourself or anybody else, and you don't compress things until they turn purple unless your intention is to cause grave bodily injury. Accidents happen; accidents like this will have dire consequences, but you can reduce these kinds of risks to levels you may find acceptable by being responsible and respectful.
What you can't prevent are the body's systemic responses to ischemia (loss of blood flow) and ischemic hypoxia and hypercapnia (not enough oxygen and too much carbon dioxide in the blood); you will never be "responsible enough" to dictate involuntary biological functions in yourself or others, so no matter how much you practice your particular craft there will always be significant risk in this sort of activity.
Long Answer (an introduction to the unmitigated risks):
The primary risks of strangulation or choking not associated with gross physical damage are the restriction of blood or oxygen to the brain and heart, and related side-effects. Ischemia alone can cause stress to the heart, blood pressure spikes, and stroke, but the majority of the risk comes from the hypoxic and hypercapnic effects that follow ischemia.
Hypoxia can cause things like ectopic (premature) ventricular contraction (your heart "skips" a beat), and if that occurs at the wrong time in your sinus rhythm (during a normal t-wave, for instance) you could have a heart attack. No preamble, no warning signs, just sudden ventricular fibrillation caused by an unfortunate collision of two events, one of which you could have prevented from occurring. Every time a "PVC over T" occurs the likelihood of it repeating increases, and multiple PVC over T events in a chain will stop the heart. Even cardiologists can't always detect individual PVC over T events in the wild without the assistance of an EKG, so it is absurd to think that even with training you can tell by looking at someone's eyes, taking their pulse manually, watching their breathing, etc you are "informed" of their cardiovascular state beyond being able to see obvious signs of a heart attack or loss of consciousness. By the time these problems are observable, CPR isn't nearly as effective as you might imagine (about a 10% success rate, statistically). Incidentally, a person's overall cardiac health and fitness play a very small role in this risk; just like strong swimmers and divers can have a shallow-water blackout without warning, even athletes can have sudden fibrillation or tachycardia.
Hypoxia also causes metabolic acidosis by starving a glycolysis process in which glucose breaks down into pyruvate and creates a particularly useful little nucleotide called Adenosine-5-triphosphate, which is the transport mechanism for chemical energy within cells. Normally, pyruvate recombines with oxygen to produce more ATP, but if there isn't enough O2 to metabolize the pyruvate it turns into lactic acid instead, which being a form of metabolic acidosis decreases your blood pH.
Hypercapnia causes respiratory acidosis; basically, your body keeps CO2 in equilibrium with water as carbonic acid (H2O + CO2 -> H2CO3), which deteriorates into bicarbonate and an acidic hydrogen ion (HCO3- and H+). If breathing is restricted, hypercapnia (too much CO2) leads to a shitload of acidic hydrogen as your body attempts to balance things according to the above formula which, like metabolic acidosis caused by hypoxia, decreases your blood pH. If you hyperventilate, you'll instead get rid of too much CO2 at once and the process will re-balance in the other direction, raising your pH (respiratory alkalosis). Your bood pH is roughly 7.35 to 7.45 normally; the survivable range (for any mammal) is a pH of about 6.8 to 7.8. Anything outside of that range causes death at a cellular level very quickly, and since the impacted areas are a person's heart and brain, just a little taste of that problem is quickly fatal.
Assuming you do not experience one of the problems above, repeated cerebral hypoxic events will also likely cause vascular lesions that eventually result in a condition known as multi-infarct dementia, which is similar to Alzheimer's Disease.
Ironically, all things being equal a proper controlled strangulation is less risky than being knocked out.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Maturity, Despotism, Perspective
When I was young I dallied with the idea that it was better to burn out than to fade away; I fully expected some savage, fiery end with a raised finger or a heroic exit at the hands of unfathomable doom. As the man said "hope I die before I get old"; he wasn't talking about *my* generation, but it still resonated. Later in life I realized that there are many stages to existence, each with their own priorities and accomplishments; you just have to acknowledge them as such and spend your time appropriately.
Youth is for innocence and wonder, naive nobility, nightmares, insolence, and a series of remarkable, memorable firsts.
Youth is for innocence and wonder, naive nobility, nightmares, insolence, and a series of remarkable, memorable firsts.
Should you manage to live past puberty (hopefully retaining some of that magic), adolescence is for nihilism and reckless abandon, sexual and recreational experimentation, fast travel, emotionally scarring relationships, and cruel lessons.
Should you survive adolescence, adulthood is for labor, real love, family, and maturity; a time to focus on goals, establish yourself in the world, and solidify some kind of legacy in the form of descendants, empire, or body of works.
And if you should live so long, old age is for carefully orchestrated indulgence. Old age is that point when you hope to have the money and the means to dominate your children and spoil your grandchildren, to ruin your enemies, seduce their descendants, demolish their empires, and then rail up and snort the ashes in front of them. Old age is for going to a lifelong enemy's funeral in a red dress or a dapper suit, and winking at the bereaved spouse during the service in hopes of finding the next ex mister or misses you. Old age is best spent fabulously wealthy in a very tall building, surrounded by people you love, and with a pleasantly distant but clear view of the people you've ruined.
That's how I want to go out: 120+ years old, regarded in the minds of my fellows as somewhere between a beatific old saint and a tyrannical mummified bastard, finally succumbing after a valiant effort to a lifelong case of being terminally awesome.
And if you should live so long, old age is for carefully orchestrated indulgence. Old age is that point when you hope to have the money and the means to dominate your children and spoil your grandchildren, to ruin your enemies, seduce their descendants, demolish their empires, and then rail up and snort the ashes in front of them. Old age is for going to a lifelong enemy's funeral in a red dress or a dapper suit, and winking at the bereaved spouse during the service in hopes of finding the next ex mister or misses you. Old age is best spent fabulously wealthy in a very tall building, surrounded by people you love, and with a pleasantly distant but clear view of the people you've ruined.
That's how I want to go out: 120+ years old, regarded in the minds of my fellows as somewhere between a beatific old saint and a tyrannical mummified bastard, finally succumbing after a valiant effort to a lifelong case of being terminally awesome.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Random Detritus / Temporal Anomaly
A number of drafts, random drunken ramblings, false-starts, and half-ideas were apparently sucked into some form of Blogger Oubliette over time; I have salvaged the ones that made any sort of sense, finished the incomplete as well as could be expected, and consigned the others to the ignominy of a permanent purge.
Of course, the goddamned things published to their original draft dates, so they are scattered backwards through the archive like the bones of little dead time travelers and if you want to read them you'll have to peruse the whole collection again looking for new titles.
Enjoy.
Pareto, Phi, and Politics
The 80:20 rule is a lot like the Golden Ratio, in that it is easy to confuse coincidence with causality. Maybe the fact that bosons that are freezing their metaphoric asses off tend to collapse roughly 80% of the time by volume is indicative of some unfathomable force at work in the universe, but the fact that the ratio of genus to species classification follows this rule is probably more a function of enforced simplicity than metaphysical mystery. By the same token, things that follow a normative, expected aesthetic proportion that is encountered throughout nature as a fundamental standard will undoubtedly be somewhat pleasing by default...but that doesn't mean your lotto ticket will be more likely to pay out if you use a Fibonacci sequence to pick your numbers.
But these tendencies, even if not universally applicable, can be used to model a wide variety of things. Failure distributions, root cause analysis, and even "people involved who complain" certainly seem to adhere to these rules in my own line of work, and the concept of a Pareto distribution as explained by Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" model for online businesses is demonstrably correct...so correct in fact that people are starting to utilize it deliberately now to model a strategic effort that is designed to cater to the disparate masses rather than the focused few that drive 80% of the business.
In politics, it is easy to apply the same logic; what is "big tent" politics or "coalition building" if not offering a home to the many specific special interests that occupy that long tail? Parties reach out to the multitude of weirdos on the fringe because it is easier to polarize them on very specific values and draw a distinction based on that limited argument than it would be to convince them that they all had at least something in common worth working for.
Ultimately, the problem is that in latching on to the model most adoptees have forsaken the intent of Pareto's original work in economics, which was to identify optimality.
But these tendencies, even if not universally applicable, can be used to model a wide variety of things. Failure distributions, root cause analysis, and even "people involved who complain" certainly seem to adhere to these rules in my own line of work, and the concept of a Pareto distribution as explained by Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" model for online businesses is demonstrably correct...so correct in fact that people are starting to utilize it deliberately now to model a strategic effort that is designed to cater to the disparate masses rather than the focused few that drive 80% of the business.
In politics, it is easy to apply the same logic; what is "big tent" politics or "coalition building" if not offering a home to the many specific special interests that occupy that long tail? Parties reach out to the multitude of weirdos on the fringe because it is easier to polarize them on very specific values and draw a distinction based on that limited argument than it would be to convince them that they all had at least something in common worth working for.
Ultimately, the problem is that in latching on to the model most adoptees have forsaken the intent of Pareto's original work in economics, which was to identify optimality.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Diabetic Drinking Diatribe
In light of my recent mutations (alas, still no tail) I have been forced to re-evaluate my alcohol consumption. This isn't nearly as problematic as it would have been, say, ten years ago when I was a fairly regular sot, but even in these dry times of maturity and mortality it's goddamned inconvenient. Bearing in mind that one serving of carbohydrates is approximately 15 grams, and that a one serving evening snack is a fairly normal allowance / guilty pleasure for diabetics, it's a fairly simple leap to say that - all things equal - a one carb choice nightcap is an equally allowed indulgence (at least from a blood sugar perspective). Bearing in mind that I am (a) monastic in my normal dilligence to my carb levels and (b) a big guy anyway, my endocrinologist has even suggested two carb servings aren't out of line, which is even better on paper.
But what's a carb serving of alcohol? Therein lies the rub...
12 oz of Alfred Gratien champagne or Guiness Extra Stout
6 oz of mixed daiquiri (fresh ingredients / bar recipe)
3.5 oz glass of Inniskillin Vidal icewine
2 oz of Bailey's or Carolan's
1.5 oz of Jagermeister or Drambuie
.75 oz of Kahlua or Amaretto
However...
It is worth mentioning that pure hard liquors (e.g. bourbon, brandy, cognac, gin, rum, scotch, tequila, vodka, whiskey) have absolutely no carbs whatsoever, provided nothing has been added and the fermentation wasn't arrested prematurely. They contain plenty of calories and are destined to be converted into a large amount of triglycerides, but no carbs. In the end, doing shots at the serious end of the bar carries the same risk as it always has, no more and no less.
Although, it's weird to note that that the orange juice has more chance of fucking me up now than the vodka, LOL.
But what's a carb serving of alcohol? Therein lies the rub...
12 oz of Alfred Gratien champagne or Guiness Extra Stout
6 oz of mixed daiquiri (fresh ingredients / bar recipe)
3.5 oz glass of Inniskillin Vidal icewine
2 oz of Bailey's or Carolan's
1.5 oz of Jagermeister or Drambuie
.75 oz of Kahlua or Amaretto
However...
It is worth mentioning that pure hard liquors (e.g. bourbon, brandy, cognac, gin, rum, scotch, tequila, vodka, whiskey) have absolutely no carbs whatsoever, provided nothing has been added and the fermentation wasn't arrested prematurely. They contain plenty of calories and are destined to be converted into a large amount of triglycerides, but no carbs. In the end, doing shots at the serious end of the bar carries the same risk as it always has, no more and no less.
Although, it's weird to note that that the orange juice has more chance of fucking me up now than the vodka, LOL.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Coulomb, Avogadro, Faraday, Newton, & Jesus
Charge is measured in a unit called "coulombs", so named for the French physicist who defined electrostatic attraction and repulsion (Coulomb's Law). There are 6.02214e23 electrons per mole of electrons (Avogadro's number); further, there are 1.602177e-19 coulombs of charge per electron, so that means there are 9.64853e4 coulombs of charge per mole of electrons (Faraday's constant). Back to Coulomb's Law, any two point charges (nice, tidy, mathematically simple massless "points in space" that are easier to deal with than electrons, or nuclei, or Buicks) placed one meter apart and each having a +1C charge will repel one another with a force of 9 billion Newtons. That's the same force that 900,000 metric tons of weight exerts on this planet due to gravity - about 100 Eiffel Towers, to bring things back full circle to France.
A 1 gallon jug of water is about 4000 grams of H20, which at 18 grams per mole means that the water in that jug has about 210 million coulombs of charge, and if you placed another similar jug one meter away each would be exerting 4.1e26 N of force on the other. The scale of that is so fucked that the only comparable explanation of weight I can offer is that if you weighed the Earth itself on another Earth-like planet, it would be exerting less force due to gravity than the nuclei in one of those jugs of water.
Fortunately, the electrons in one jug have an equally strong attraction to the nuclei in the other, which cancels the incredible force of repulsion. It is an important distinction that both the attraction and repulsion forces are still present and still just as tremendously strong as we've described, they're just balanced so perfectly that the effects of those forces are diminished to nothing.
So what happens when some irresponsible ass turns the water in one of those jugs into wine (Jesus's First Sign)? Kind of a dick move, really. Being only 85-90% water, the rest of that shit has a completely different molar mass. Hell, ethanol (the majority of the difference) works out to slightly more than 46 g/mol instead of the 18 g/mol of water. The anecdote is clear: the water turned to wine, so I can only assume that if one can pull off such feats of alchemy they can do so with enough precision that I don't have to fuck around with estimating the amount and composition of all of the adulterants, dirt, and other shit floating around in that jug. So the water is water, and then it is not, and in that change there is no point for the universe in which all of this takes place to catch up to that fact; the electromagnetic force, infinite in range and ludicrous in potency, is not granted a reprieve from duty or a do-over - it simply continues to apply itself the entire time.
But along a given timeline those forces must at some point be particulate; either there is a point in this occurrence where the water is, from the perspective of the universe, not water and not yet wine, or there is a point where the change interrupts the constant force. In either case, the delicate balance of attraction and repulsion is broken.
At least the guys at CERN put a little more thought into whether to fuck with reality than having a snit with their mom about whether or not they would help.
A 1 gallon jug of water is about 4000 grams of H20, which at 18 grams per mole means that the water in that jug has about 210 million coulombs of charge, and if you placed another similar jug one meter away each would be exerting 4.1e26 N of force on the other. The scale of that is so fucked that the only comparable explanation of weight I can offer is that if you weighed the Earth itself on another Earth-like planet, it would be exerting less force due to gravity than the nuclei in one of those jugs of water.
Fortunately, the electrons in one jug have an equally strong attraction to the nuclei in the other, which cancels the incredible force of repulsion. It is an important distinction that both the attraction and repulsion forces are still present and still just as tremendously strong as we've described, they're just balanced so perfectly that the effects of those forces are diminished to nothing.
So what happens when some irresponsible ass turns the water in one of those jugs into wine (Jesus's First Sign)? Kind of a dick move, really. Being only 85-90% water, the rest of that shit has a completely different molar mass. Hell, ethanol (the majority of the difference) works out to slightly more than 46 g/mol instead of the 18 g/mol of water. The anecdote is clear: the water turned to wine, so I can only assume that if one can pull off such feats of alchemy they can do so with enough precision that I don't have to fuck around with estimating the amount and composition of all of the adulterants, dirt, and other shit floating around in that jug. So the water is water, and then it is not, and in that change there is no point for the universe in which all of this takes place to catch up to that fact; the electromagnetic force, infinite in range and ludicrous in potency, is not granted a reprieve from duty or a do-over - it simply continues to apply itself the entire time.
But along a given timeline those forces must at some point be particulate; either there is a point in this occurrence where the water is, from the perspective of the universe, not water and not yet wine, or there is a point where the change interrupts the constant force. In either case, the delicate balance of attraction and repulsion is broken.
At least the guys at CERN put a little more thought into whether to fuck with reality than having a snit with their mom about whether or not they would help.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)