Neti Pot Day 1

So I tried a neti pot this morning. If you’ve ever gotten pool water up your nose–don’t worry. It’s maybe 1/10 as bad as that, so not bad at all. And for the first half of the day I did breathe easier. I’m going to use it once or twice daily for a few weeks and see if it works any magic.

Donut Theory

Yesterday Sensei explained his donut theory of martial arts. There is a circle around an individual that describes the arc of their attack. If you’re inside or outside the donut you don’t get the full force. If you’re on the donut, look out.

I nodded and translated this to my mind’s eye, and then we went back to practicing a counter to round-house kick. A few minutes later Sensei looked at me and said “You’re on the donut.”

Damn.

Aikido Reminders to Self

This is a list I have been adding to ever since I started aikido. It’s idiosyncratic. You’re eavesdropping on my mind, and I might not be able to explain what I mean by a particular line. But what are blogs for? If other aikidoka have such reminder lists, please post or link!

every time

• obtain and re-obtain a signal – relax/pay attention until you get one
• continuous breathing
• upright posture, comfortably standing, centered
• retain sword posture and extension/readiness
• imagine center in motion, often below ground, as on tightrope
• imagine circular saw with gyroscope at its center
• zanshin 360 (observe, interpret, relax, be attentive, see without looking)
• whole body/mind ready
• when time to act, no mind
• when finished, leave nothing behind
• ready to guard your center
• ready to move center in any direction
• blending, you disappear, then assert, like water undermining earth
• if you know the technique well, add ki flow, i.e., smoothness of motion, fluidity, natural reaction and compensation for uke’s micromovements

rising from the mat

• should be centered, easy, solid architecture, quick, with zanshin

simple sequence
zanshin – ma’ai – invite/hiss – blend, shift, blend, shift, … – break balance – keep off balance to ground – pin – release – zanshin

first contact

• unless it is a block, should be soft and stealthy, matching speed and rotation with the attack, contacting and hijacking uke’s momentum more than half way through its natural movement, when it is too late for uke to effectively resist
• first contact can be entering–with assertion of space via arm/ki/hara/atemi

atemi

• focus briefly and intently on the target of atemi – so that warning bells go off in uke’s mind
• occasionally go slow and actually hit uke if uke is not responding (are you not convincing or is uke not paying attention?)
• with rapid small shifts, find paths of no resistance and start coaxing toward ground
• try blend with vector, then shift it perpendicular along z-x plane, then downward along y-?, etc., in wave motion
• working backward from anticipated kazushi point, intend to resist along uke’s strong axis so that uke unconsciously feels and resists, then curve vector while gradually intensifying ‘push’ to spiral into kazushi point.
• ghost atemi: you can give off an atemi without actually initiating an attack (uke will stiffen or change posture slightly as reaction); play with how much of a feint it takes

balance-taking

• occupy the good angles
• incremental variable-speed conveyor belt carrying away uke’s balance
• turn hips in direction you want to channel uke’s momentum
• let hips lead your movements
• guide uke to kazushi points
• weight is dynamic, with multiple centers, vectors, rotations
• your weight can come down via uke
• rear kazushi points are generally more effective
• incorporate ki-flow (willow/water)

pins

• knee should come down to mat with inner shoulder
• heels together, up on toes
• wrap and control at elbow
• capture hand palm up in crook of elbow
• pressure and torque can be applied in either direction along path from shoulder to head (rotational perpendicular to that axis and generally with a feeling of into the ground)
• across and uptown is usually good
• think of what you are going to do next to set up the next attack/response

after pin

• move laterally into uke’s blind spot
• initiate the next attack/response; no downtime

physicality

• arms whiplike energy (dynamic tension, but with no tension)
• hands relaxed but awake
• grip like magnetic glue, not vise, starting with pinky
• wrists and forearms like 20′ sword/searchlights
• shoulders relaxed
• cat-like, but a big cat

ukemi

• punch/strike straight with first two knuckles
• keep eyes on nage amap, even when falling/rolling
• prolong the relationship
• bend
• use nage for support in slow ukemi
• ready to protect from / avoid atemi
• bend head toward nage in shiho nage
• turn head away in irimi nage
• tuck inner leg under
• how to fall softer
• relax as much as possible into pins
• follow nage with your center, staying upright
• attack intelligently — you are practicing your strikes and ability to seize opportunity

jiyu waza

• take time with each throw
• keep moving
• keep observing attackers
• keep all attackers in view AMAP
• throw each uke at attackers
• protect attackers
• pick and attack attackers
• split attackers
• learn direction of throw that follows from each technique, starting with the atemi

ma’ai

• forced commit (if uke tries to creep forward gets attacked)
• subvert uke’s next obvious move, and the next, and the next
• jam up uke’s fighting mechanism
• prevent uke’s natural rotation
• augment uke’s natural rotation
• reestablish presence in blind spot, just within or outside of uke’s peripheral vision

principles

• keep center
• relax and smile genuinely
• continuous 360 awareness
• rotation on multiple axes
• force begets force
• elbows in and down
• invite with open palm
• occasionally do the unpredicted and observe reactions
• snake hand
• one scoop
• if too fast, ratchet back the speed and seek more details
• half speed is close to the maximum you need for daily training
• move as if holding katana, or a medicine ball, or a pack
• move as if wearing a skirt
• lose the ego
• it’s a practice, not a contest, not a performance
• keep your attention constantly moving, internally and externally

my approach

• pragmatic
• simplified
• direct and crisp
• out of the blue – no tells
• anything could happen
• highly targeted atemi
• without ornament
• based on natural analogs (climbing, drinking, catching)

the best students are thieves

If GINA Is Signed into Law

You may have noticed that GINA, The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, S358, passed the Senate on April 24, 2008. It goes back to the House for approval (though they already passed it last year). President Bush will probably sign it into law within a few weeks. Many headlines are crowing that the soon-to-be law will stop genetic discrimination. Senator Kennedy went so far as to say that this was the first time they had passed a law to stop discrimination before it started happening. Neither of these assertions are true. Although this is a hugely significant event to which we should all pay attention, the press for the most part is getting it wrong.

Misperceptions
Part of the problem is that no one really understands the significance of genetic information. We don’t know to what extent our genes determine who we are or what diseases we will contract. Famous scientists like James Watson (of Watson and Crick) would like us to believe our genes are our destiny; that simple equations may be drawn between our genetic makeup and what will happen in the future. As a result, common wisdom is that genes are an accurate predictor of disease and behavior. Scientists who are active today in disease research will tell you that this is not the case. Genes at best provide a predictive statistic, and in most cases, except the most blatant and well-known mutations, nothing is certain.

An Example
A disease like Cystic Fibrosis, for example, is actually rather loosely defined. It affects different organs, and even identical twins can manifest it differently. Currently there are about 1000 known mutations that can contribute to an individual contracting the disease. Say you have one of them. No disease. Say you have two. Ask a CF researcher if you’ll get the disease. “Which two mutations?” they will ask. You tell them. “We still don’t know,” they will answer, “but we can assign a rough likelihood, based on small amounts of patient data currently available. Preventive care is crucial, and with this foreknowledge of susceptibility, we can almost guarantee that you will never suffer the full effects of the disease.” Not the sort of answer that easily fits into a sound bite or American consciousness.

Lofty Ideals vs. Pragmatic Cynicism
The legislation itself states that it aims to encourage people to have genetic testing done so that more data can be accumulated and preventive care given, thereby reducing health care costs. This is a huge benefit. Millions of people will be able to live essentially normal lives because their genetic conditions can be managed early. Moreover, their reproductive choices will be better informed. However, this benefit is still contingent on intangibles that are difficult to legislate: trust and security. The reality is that we will always need to guard our genetic data for one reason or another. And the simplest way to do that in the present day is not to get tested at all. That way, the data simply doesn’t exist in the health care system. In the same way you won’t give your credit card to an online merchant you don’t trust, you won’t give your genetic data to a company you don’t trust.

The Rub
In a few decades though, the data available for research will have ballooned, and personal genome sequencing will be cheap. These events are right on the horizon, but GINA does not fully address them. Let’s take them one at a time.

Information Becomes Knowledge

With huge data sets will eventually come more knowledge about the relationship between genes and disease, as well as behavior. There will be much less uncertainty about effects. The temptation, nay the demand, from private health insurance, will be for a way to count genetic information as a pre-existing condition. If we continue to keep medicine fully private in this country, you should expect to see proposed amendments to GINA that weaken it’s provisions in cases where it has been shown that certain combinations of genetic markers have a greater than, say, 90% chance of manifesting a costly disease.

Technological Development is Accelerating
Cheap personal genome sequencing will obliterate security. If you drink from a glass in a restaurant, there will be enough information on the rim of that glass to sequence your genome. Anyone who wants your genome will be able to get it.

More Knowledge, Less Security
So we will have increased knowledge and decreased security. The problem is that it starts to become very difficult to prove someone has used a particular piece of information against you. All an employer or insurance company needs is an excuse for terminating you or dropping your coverage. Technicalities abound. Your employer and insurance will either have your genetic information or be able to infer it from other sources, and nothing can stop them from using this information in their overall picture of your value to them. Section 210 of GINA expressly allows them to use non-genetic medical information even if it relates to a genetic condition. So even if you are managing a genetic condition in a way that keeps your overall health costs down by a factor of 1000, an unscrupulous employer or insurance company may find a way to legally dump you.

A few more items to keep in mind:

• GINA’s provisions only go into effect 18 months after enactment. So employers and insurance companies still have about a year and half to openly discriminate if state law is weaker than GINA.
• The Secretaries of Labor, Heath and Human Services, and Treasury, still need to issue final regulations to guide the interpretation of the law in “an accessible format.”
• The law severely limits awards. So insurance companies can use math to decide whether to honor the law.
• Section 208(b) of the bill provides for a review 6 years after the date of enactment. In my view this is too long to wait.
• Family history shall count as genetic information. This is a great start, but it is only the tip of the iceberg of ways to infer genetic information about an individual. This aspect will need to be broadened.
• If previous civil rights legislation is any indication, this certainly will not prevent all discrimination. There will be many court cases, and there will be many people whose rights are violated who either don’t know they could win a lawsuit or don’t have the means to pursue one.
• Insurance companies will rightfully perceive this law as a curtailment of their ability to measure risk, and they will find workarounds.
• Most states already have laws on the books. Why has it taken Washington so long?

Links

• Text of GINA: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s110-358
• Table of state genetics laws relating to health insurance: http://www.ncsl.org/programs/health/genetics/ndishlth.htm
• Table of state genetics laws relating to employment: http://www.ncsl.org/programs/health/genetics/ndiscrim.htm

Razors in Fog

“A millimeter can determine who lives and who dies,” one of my teachers points out every so often.

The dojo is a riot of glare and shadow. Morning sunlight blasts through the wide open warehouse door, an empty promise of heat in the chill air. A gaggle of middle-aged jedi, we strike at each other with wooden swords called bokkens, our cold feet shuffling across frigid mats. Our teacher’s words give meaning to the practice, letting us know that swordsmanship is not about flourish or going through the motions. It is exacting. In a real fight steel flies faster than thought.

Her words bespeak our own fates and the fates of countless others. Seen through the lens of time, our motions are palimpsests of lessons learned in dojos and on battlefields centuries ago, endlessly repeated and varied. Thousands, perhaps millions of people have died due to mistakes in sword technique, and their surviving comrades have sometimes noted the mistakes and incorporated them into their art. This advice has been passed down by teachers who train their students to do things this way, not that way. The past is remembered and yet mutated by the inherent failures of transmission.

Sometimes we cannot grasp the meaning of the advice. Why should it be this way? Mimicking the motion feels robotic and empty. Other times you feel that you see the kinesthetic meaning instantly, and the advice passes into your personal repertoire without effort. Ironically, you may be stepping in a certain manner or holding the bokken in a certain way for entirely the wrong reasons. The teacher cannot know. She sees you doing it “right” or “wrong” and reacts accordingly. That is her role.

Does anyone do it “right”? I don’t think so. That is why it is an art. At best our teacher can help us to internalize her own high standards.

Rightness in an art is subjective, and pure transmission of technique is impossible. Whether we are hopeless dilettantes or dedicated, long-suffering students of an art, we are never perfect. A recent study of how the body learns motion showed that the brain simply does not store the full motion. Our minds and bodies improvise our movements every single time. It is actually impossible for a human being to repeat a motion in exactly the same manner.

It gets better though. Your eyes do not transmit actual images to your brain. Rather, they send a kind of multi-channel sketch, sort of the way an image can be separated into red, green, and blue,, except that there are more than ten channels with complex interactions between the different signals. The brain reads shorthand and from these signals, then imagines reality. Our other senses probably work in similar ways. The data directly from reality is compressed and abbreviated to optimize its transmission along the nerves. Then, like a game of telephone, your brain weaves a story. The philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests that you might not even be capable of voluntary actions, but that your massively parallel brain tells a sequential story of your actions right after you perform them.

Whether we have free will or are essentially a herd of so many zombies, lots of significant things in life do come down to minutes, millimeters, or other small, unforgiving increments. This is the nightmare of the neurotic. Every action counts, every decision could have irrevocable consequences. There are a number of moments, daily for some people (soldiers, politicians, surgeons, police officers), that carry razor-like significance. Of course, in our cushioned modern world, this is usually not the case for the individual, which makes those moments even more difficult to spot.

A few months ago I missed one and have been living with the consequences. The fallout has been truly educational, though I have not enjoyed the lessons. It has taken months to pull things back together. I do believe that the lessons of basic ukemi and jiyu waza practice helped keep me sane during that time, but ultimately these are just a set of strategies. Under actual “attack,” you don’t have time to think. You just do. Curiously, this has not been an occasion for regrets or much self-recrimination. When I play back the sequence of events, I cannot see how things might have unfolded differently. We were dealing with a new baby and were thoroughly distracted. Yet it did come down to minute differences in timing. A few millimeters of bad luck, essentially.

So, imprecise, involuntary, possible-zombie denizens of our easy, mediated world, learn to pay attention. Little things do count.

The cold sunlight stabs my eyes, hiding my partner’s bokken. I have to reach out with all my senses. He carries out the prescribed attack, the and crack of wood and sense of martial balance at play feels absolutely real and crisp. I know that what my brain has put together is not real, but I’ll embrace it anyway. Somewhere, very very close, all of this did happen. For real.

Inadvertent Activation

Although my ballooning sleep deficit has finally leveled off, I feel like the asymptotic curve is trawling the bottom Lake Baikal.

The other day I came home, tossed my jacket onto our feeble, secondhand coat rack, keys into the key dish, and bent down to untie my shoes. A moment later, a leather-jacketed thug fell upon me from nowhere.

My reaction was so swift and fierce that the attacker (the coat rack) made no further moves. I found my self standing edge-on, knees slightly bent, well centered and ready to fight, chin down, shoulders forward a bit, one hand extended to throat level, hand blade outward, the other in a nice guard position, ready to block or deliver a counterpunch.

Happily, there were no witnesses.

Newborn Sleep Deficit

According to my highly inaccurate recollection and arbitrarily constructed data, I will be operating on something approaching a 140-hour sleep deficit for the foreseeable future. Note the asymptotic curve.

12 Metatasks for the Clueless Father-To-Be

1. Get your calendar, to-do lists, cell phone, and other ‘coordinating’ tools under control and in constant use.
If you’re like me you don’t always have a very full schedule, and so your calendar and to-do lists may be rather scattered and ad-hoc. Expect that you will probably lose 50 IQ points for the first month or more. Construct your calendar and lists for a person who is that challenged. That person will be you.

2. Watch videos — there are many aspects of baby care you just need to see rather than read about.
I’m very verbal and tend to get my information from books. I’m also impatient with stupid instructional videos. I should have just rented every video in the library. Thing is, you can practically turn off the sound. Just watch how people handle and interact with their babies. It’s informative.

3. Get your insurance straightened out and mark your calendar to follow-up on the newborn’s insurance.
Most personal insurance covers the baby for 30 days after birth. Insurance companies are ruthless if there is a preexisting condition. Need I say more?

4. Clear your schedule for 3 weeks on either side of the due date.
You can cancel, postpone, and float tasks. Tell relatives to go away unless they pledge to change diapers. Seriously. “So you’ll change her diapers and watch her so that we can sleep” is a good reply to “We’re all coming to see the new baby!”, followed by “Please only one relative at a time (who is willing to change diapers). Otherwise we’ll be overwhelmed.”

5. Try all means of education early so you can see what works for you.
Go to classes, read books, watch videos, etc., but do it EARLY. By about month 7 you’ll both start to run out of time to get ready.

6. Be über-social – hang out with friends who have babies, enjoy couplehood, observe real parents in the wild.

7. Be healthy (so it’s easier for wife to do so).

8. Be understanding (you’re going to need the practice).

9. Be communicative.
Lots of guys are not very communicative. After you have a child, your ability to communicate with your partner may well determine whether or not you get divorced in a few years. Practice while it’s easy.

10. Practice the following skills (napping, doing everything one-handed, multitasking, all while your helpful partner blasts one of those miniature bullhorns in your ear).
Somewhat joking. Don’t hurt your ears.

11. Finish all preparation 1 month before due date.
I’m convinced our due date was off by at least a week. If you read up on how due dates are calculated, you can understand how arbitrary they are. Although she was technically two weeks early (though to term), our baby had super-high APGAR scores and was fully baked. Most babies arrive before the due date, the assigned due dates are guesses at best, and slightly pre-term arrivals are quite common–so at 8 months your time’s up, buddy. Of course you might still have to wait six weeks. Think of it as an arbitrarily wide finish line that you’re crossing in the dark and you’ll know you’ve reached the end when the ground disappears from beneath you.

12. Buy or otherwise obtain the gear you’ll need, or know exactly which items you want and where you’re going to get them.
It’s prudent to not buy absolutely everything, as you rightly don’t know how the pregnancy will turn out, but don’t let that stop you from shopping. Again, after the IQ point drop, everything is difficult.

Tips on Sleeping while Caring for a Newborn

1. Don’t blog. It’s an enormous waste of time. You should be sleeping.

2. Accept that you are not going to get much sleep. You are going to be so tired you feel a new kind of physical pain.

3. Nap. Oh, you don’t nap? If you don’t know how, just pretend. It’ll happen soon enough. You’ll know you’ve napped when the baby wakes you up.

4. Learn to distinguish distress sounds from annoying noises. In the beginning, just about any noise from your bundle of joy will send a jolt down your spine. After a few weeks, you’ll be able to take a bullhorn in the ear without wincing. Keep in mind that if you get it wrong and ignore distress, you’ll have that bullhorn in your ear for a while.

5. In the evening, set up your sleep area and the baby’s sleep area at the same time. You might be exhausted by the time you get her to sleep, and you won’t be capable of searching for a blanket or glass of water. You probably won’t get to sleep much, but having a nicely aranged sleep area is soothing and gives you a feeling of distant hope.

6. Learn what it takes to put your baby into a deep sleep mode. Babies have a light sleep mode that comes before deep sleep. If you put them down in light sleep mode, they are restless for most of the hour or two they could have been soundly sleeping. If you fail, remember that there will be many, many more opportunities to fail.

7. Snack, but not too much. My theory is that you’re burning extra calories by staying awake. Might as well snack on good stuff like pop tarts and twinkies. Wash down with milk. Nap while standing.

8. Change the baby when she is fed, not when hungry. This leads to the problem of additional waste elimination during changing. However, if you use the new-diaper-under-old-diaper trick, this is relatively easy to deal with compared to the pissed off how-dare-you-try-to-change-me-when-all-I-want-is-FOOD-NOW meltdown you get when changing a hungry baby. A calm baby might remain calm and be easier to get to sleep.

9. Learn to sleep when you don’t really feel like sleeping. Then do it.

10. Whenever you put the baby down and she is out like a light, say to yourself, “I could be sleeping right now.” Eventually it will sink in.

11. See #2.

The Singularity, Transhumanity, and Poop

I’m reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near between diaper changes, naps, and feedings. He’s very fond of his logarithmic curves and exponential change. His ideas are essentially mathematically based projections and predictions that easily extrapolate into the absurd. One of those ideas is that we will upload our brains to computers and live forever.

It’s hard to think about uploading your brain to a computer when you’re dealing with a newborn. It’s not just hard, it’s downright impossible. What if a baby crawled over the carbon nanotube chip with your brain in it and dropped a load of yellow turd? What would all that oddly colored poop do to your circuits? Heck, what if she ate it? Adios immortality. Ah, but if we’re all uploaded, I guess there would be copies of ourselves backed up somewhere and there wouldn’t be any of these baby things to care for. Now I’m mad at him for implying my flesh and blood baby isn’t a wonderful gift.

There are a lot of worthwhile things about being human. Reading Kurzweil, I get the impression that before the end of the 21st century it will be quaint to remain only human, sort of like being in SCA. Transhumanist Utopians–I’ll call them transhummers–will remark that if you want to remain human why not run that messy reality as a simulation, sort of like in the Matrix? I may very well become augmented some day, upload my brain to a rice grain of carbon nanotubes and live forever. But somehow the prospect seems more macabre than tempting. The Gothic creatures of Anne Rice novels and campy tv shows are more appealing than cold circuits.

Being human, like art, is about working with and overcoming imperfection, adversity, mortality. Life is tough at times, and there’s a time limit. No do-overs. I can’t help but think that many transhummers are just escapists and intellectual gamers, trying to get away from themselves and their lives. Some are probably angry at the world for all of the personal shortcomings it bestowed upon them. And I’ll admit that the possibility of endless exploration sounds tempting.

Reality is a harsh and beautiful. I want my child to know beauty. I want her to respect the harshness of the wild god of this world (something three young men teasing a tiger at the San Francisco Zoo this Christmas did not, and one of them died). I want her to know how to interact with people better than most people do today. I fear that it will be difficult for her to learn these things. You cannot learn them in the safety of a virtual world. Most of the world we live it today is padded, shielded, disneyfied, or otherwise not real. When reality does intrude, lawyers swarm to blame someone. There should be a “reality” defense.

Kurzweil’s vision includes blinding cognitive speed as well. But efficiency, speed, and bandwidth are not equivalent to quality. So what if you can think a million times faster than a human and live forever? Somehow I don’t think it necessarily results in better quality as a person or even in terms of lived experience. Being human is something you have to do as a human, and not as some hyperaugmented digitized creature. Virtual mortality is not the same as mortality, unless you trick yourself into thinking you’re not living in a simulation.

Come to think of it . . .