bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • The invisible hand.

    Some time ago I quit the treadmill and started running around the indoor track that circles the upper half of the basketball court at the Y.

    I’m not sure why I suddenly got so tired of the treadmill. Maybe because it is impossible to escape the television completely. Maybe it was the demoralizing effect of the digits slowly ticking away the miles or time elapsed; I found myself always wishing I’d brought a sticky-note to cover up my progress. Maybe it was all the people around that I couldn’t quite tune out. Or maybe it was the view through the window — not a bad view, of a residential cross-street — but a view that rarely changed, except for the snow cover giving way to foliage and later taking over again. Or perhaps, after having a taste of running outside, around the lakes, I just couldn’t stand running in place anymore, and running around a bare room seemed like an improvement.

    At first I took my iPod with me, and had five different running playlists cued up all ready to go. But after a while I stopped taking that, too. I don’t want to hear music; I want to hear my footfalls, so I can work on correcting them. I want to hear my own breathing and feel the goosebumps from the air-conditioned chill give way to warmth, flushing, sweat. I think I am tired of trying to distract myself from the running. I am trying to be fully present in it instead, to feel the aching muscles, to force my mind to deal with the urge to stop instead of just wishing it away and pretending it isn’t there.

    Sometimes i have no choice but to think about running. But occasionally I get a surprising pay off.

    This evening I was running laps and using my swimming lap counter — it’s a one-button, finger-ring style — to check my speed on each lap. In the previous two weeks I had swum 5 times, but not gone for a run at all, and I was feeling rusty — and the times showed it. Each lap around the gym is 1/18 of a mile, and my training pace on a treadmill is around 9:50, so I like to see times between 30 and 33 seconds. I was seeing 35–37-second laps. Not so good.

    As I chugged along, endlessly circling, I thought back to the running clinic I attended in December 2010, the one where I learned forefoot running. I tried to remember what I learned from watching the before-and-after videos of myself. One of the form corrections that comes along with the switch from a heel strike to a forefoot or midfoot strike is in lean — runners with a heel strike tend to lean back as they run, while runs with a forefoot strike tend to be straight-backed or lean forward. The more you lean forward when you have a forefoot strike, the faster you tend to go. It doesn’t work that way with a heel strike.

    If you have never learned forefoot running (sometimes called the pose method), here is something you can try to give you an idea of how the leaning thing works. Stand up, either barefoot or in running shoes. If you are indoors face a direction that gives you enough room to take several steps without tripping over something or walking into a wall. Now start jogging gently in place. If you are a fairly normal person, you will find that you naturally choose a forefoot-strike to do this: the first part of your foot to touch the ground is somewhere in the front half of your foot. Your heel might come down and “kiss” the ground at the end of its descent, or it might not. But you are certainly not hitting the ground with your heel and using your heel to absorb the impact of your weight coming down on the floor, the way you do when you walk, or the way many people do when they run in cushiony running shoes.

    Still jogging? Okay, here is the second part of the demonstration. While you’re jogging in place, lean your body slightly forward. What happened?

    What happened to me, when the instructor in my running clinic taught me to do this, is that I rocketed forward — running a few steps (before hitting the wall) with a natural forefoot strike. You don’t have to work to bring your legs far forward of your body and to push against the ground; you just have to let gravity pull you down and allow your legs to prevent you from tipping all the way over. It is a very natural and instinctive motion.

    Although It does take reprogramming and practice to adopt forefoot striking as a training stride, that short demonstration gets across how leaning forward is related to speed. The more you lean, the faster you go. I you lean so far that your legs can’t keep up, you fall, of course, so it isn’t a magic formula or anything. You still need to be strong and move your legs fast. But it is kind of a form check.

    As I remembered this, I noticed that as I ran around the gym, I tended to focus my eyes on the wall across from me. The track is a rounded-off rectangle, so I’d be staring at the telephone pole through the window… then turn and stare at the water fountain… then turn and stare at the church steeple through the oth window… then the banner with donors’ names… then the telephone pole again.

    I tried keeping my neck and back aligned and tipping my body ever so slightly forward. Now I was focusing on the floor a few yards ahead of my toes. I concentrated on that moving point, dancing away from me along the seam in the flooring, and ran one lap, and checked my lap counter: 30 seconds.

    Really? I checked it again: 30. I ran another lap: 31. And another: 29. I almost couldn’t believe it. Before this, it had taken real effort to push myself to go faster, if I wanted to see lap times consistently under 34 seconds. This didn’t feel more tiring at all. I just had to remember to tip ever so slightly forward.

    As I circled around and around, though, it did start to wear on me mentally. I found that if I stopped concentrating on the slight forward lean, it went away. I really had to keep it front and center in my attention, carefully hold it, so it would not slip. After a while I started to feel as if there was an invisible hand between my shoulder blades, pressing slightly but firmly, and always just at the threshold of knocking me off balance. I found that if I vividly imagined that there really was a hand pressing me, it was easier to maintain my pace.

    It wasn’t that I actually had the sensation of a physical pressure on my back in that spot. It was more that I started to feel irritated by it. After awhile I wanted to turn around and snap, “WILL you STOP pushing me?!” to the owner of the invisible hand invading my personal space.

    But of course there was no one but me, running all by myself in the upper half of the gym, my peripheral vision only occasionally interrupted by a lone basketball rebounding off the backboards just below the track.

    I discovered something today. It is possible to make a gain in training that cannot be taken away even by weeks of inactivity. This is something I learned with my brain, you know, from information I picked up back in my running clinic. I think I will remember it: tip a little forward, gain a little efficient speed. It can be hard to keep all the different form tweaks active in mind at the same time, of course; practice can move that kind of skill out of the brain and into the muscles. But still, the understanding remains, and can’t be lost — if I take pains to write about it, that is.

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    (disclaimer: do not switch abruptly from heel striking to forefoot running without doing some research to avoid injury, and consider working with a personal trainer. I do not think the lean-forward tip will work for runners who use a heel-striking stride instead of a forefoot-striking stride.)

     

     

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  • Beer for beginners, part V: Fruity stuff and saison.

    (part I, part II, part III, part IV)

    Before I get into this, I need to tell you that my drinking has spiralled out of control. Which is to say that I am, in fact, already breaking into the cases of Belgian witbier (aka bière blanche, if you’re dealing with the Frenchy sort of Belgium), which is the next thing I want to write about, and I am even starting to attack the oatmeal stout, which is, like, three styles ahead. And I am just now sitting down to write about the Belgian fruited lambic and saison. And I still have one bottle of raspberry lambic in my basement.

    Also, I recently discovered gin and tonic. Seriously losing focus here, and I am pretty sure it is not because my eyes are crossing.

    So let me just knock this bit out, and then I can get on with the witbier in peace.

    +++

    Belgian saison is where my opinions and the opinions of Garrett Oliver, author of The Brewmaster’s Table, part company. He is really into them. They are “one of the world’s most refreshing and enigmatic beer styles,” “light, brisk, refreshing, and sustaining,” “some of Belgium’s most exciting beers,” “truly glorious and endlessly interesting,” and “[w]ith food… beyond versatile… virtually invincible.”

    The style is interesting in that they are traditional farmhouse ales, unfiltered and artisanal, and varying from bottle to bottle. As Belgian beers are wont to do, they carry flavors of spices and citrus peel. They often are sold in Champagne-style bottles complete with cork — so they might be a fun alternative to expensive French bubbly for your next celebration.

    But I don’t know — our bottle of Saison Dupont failed to impress either me or Mark. Maybe I just got a bad bottle, or maybe I didn’t match it well, or maybe Mr. Oliver just set up my expectations too high. I just remember finding it kind of boring, and it wasn’t cheap either. The people at Beer Advocate like it fine, so maybe I should give it another chance. I almost feel embarrassed saying that I didn’t like the stuff, at least not at the $11 price point.

    +++

    Fortunately for my perception of Belgium, the next bottle we tried was also from Belgium and not boring in the least. It left me wondering aloud, “This? This counts as a beer? Impossible!”

    What left me so incredulous was Brouwerij Lindemans Framboise. This is a sweet fruited lambic beer. Lambics are not always fruited, by the way; they are a traditional style that is fermented with wild yeast and bacteria, sort of like old-fashioned sourdough bread. I don’t know what they taste like, I still haven’t had any plain lambic yet. I have not seen any in the beer store.

    But I did see the Lindemans Framboise, and carried it home along with some kriek. The fruited lambics get a secondary fermentation on cherries or raspberries — sometimes whole fruit, sometimes purée or juice. Oliver writes, “The result was a stronger, transformed beverage that sat squarely on the border between wine and beer.”

    We poured the framboise into champagne flutes and admired its beautiful rosy color. It tasted jammy and sweet and tart at the same time. It tasted kind of crazy, to be frank. Soda-pop, with an alcoholic kick.

    I think I would rather have it than almost any dessert wine that I can afford to buy regularly (I have had luxurious ports and eisweins and muscats and the like, sure, but I think of them as special-occasion wines, not something to keep always on hand). The book says it goes well with cheesecake, and I had managed to procure some for the occasion — indeed it did. On another occasion we tried the kriek. It was also fruity, tart and sweet.

    I would recommend trying one of these to anyone. They are just so over-the-top — and they don’t taste very much like beer. They taste more like sweet bubbly fruity wine. I don’t want to think too much about whether it proves that I don’t know much about beer, that I liked this frothy sweet stuff. I bet it isn’t for everyone. But you won’t know until you try it.

    I still have one bottle left to try, of an American kriek — Wisconsin brewery New Glarus’s Wisconsin Belgian Red, which proclaims that each 750 mL bottle contains one pound of Montmorency cherries. I am waiting for an evening in which we can kill a bottle without regretting it in the morning.

     

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  • The Amish population.

    Do you think of the Amish as leading an “endangered” lifestyle? Maybe it’s that we associate them with being old-fashioned, so to speak, but I confess that when I have considered them — whether when teaching my kids about the impact of Wisconsin v. Yoder or buying preserves from a farm stand — it has been with a sort of wistfulness. Surely they won’t be able to hold out forever against the encroachment of the wider world around them.

    Not so: in fact the Amish are one of the fastest-growing religious groups in the country, according to an Ohio State University census:

    The study, released July 27 at the annual meeting of the Rural Sociological Society, suggests a new community sprouting every three and a half weeks.

    Nearly 250,000 Amish live in the U.S. and Canada, and the population is expected to exceed 1 million around 2050.

    The growth may not be visible outside Amish country, but the rural settlements definitely see the boom.

    “This place has grown,” said Daniel Miller, 52, who has spent his life on an Amish settlement here. “It’s because all of the kids.”

    …The Amish double their population about every 22 years, said Joseph Donnermeyer, the Ohio State professor who led the census project as part of the recent 2010 U.S. Religion Census.

    Interesting, no?

     

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  • Anosmia.

    I loved this short film about anosmia — lack of a sense of smell — at the NYT website.

    It almost brought me to tears, actually! What did you think, if you watched it?

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  • Entertaining Wikipedia article (unless you’re afraid to fly).

    Often, when our family takes a road trip, I bring along something to read aloud to Mark — usually a nonfiction book. I like books that spur conversation between us, particularly pop-science books that we can argue about and analyze. This is fun even when the book is really bad. On the way down from Minneapolis to Ohio last week, we read The Psychopath Test, which turned out to be perfect road-trip reading — entertaining, not entirely convincing (meaning that we had a chance to argue about it) and also, in general, food for thought.

    I didn’t have a book for the way back up, so I made do by following trails of links in Wikipedia to articles about things we didn’t know. We started from an article about the Mars robot that landed earlier, and from there to previous Mars lander missions, including the one that famously failed because somebody forgot to convert newtons to pounds-force — a mistake roundly mocked by everyone EXCEPT former engineering students because deep down, we all know THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GO I. If my life had been only a little bit different, I too might have broken NASA.

    Anyway, from there we went to a list of disasters caused by metrication errors, and that led us to what must be (since I love engineering failure stories) the most entertaining Wikipedia article I have ever read in my life: the story of the “Gimli Glider.”

    It is only entertaining if you know how the story ends, so let me give you the spoiler first. EVERYBODY SURVIVED, NO MAJOR INJURIES. There you go. Now the teaser: this is the story of an airliner that ran out of gas at 41,000 feet because Canadians had just started converting to the metric system. Now you can read and enjoy.

    I read this aloud to Mark, and we agreed that it could never have been made into a true-life disaster movie because no one would believe the chain of events. The aircraft was nearly uncontrollable — but by a remarkable coincidence, the captain was an experienced glider pilot. The first officer proposed landing at the nearest runway, which happened to be at a nearby closed air force base — which he knew well because he had once served there as a Canadian air force pilot. But he didn’t know that the air force base had been converted to a race track complex. Or that there was a race going on (think NASCAR, but Canadian) and the runway area was full of cars and campers. Also that there were cars racing on the runway.

    Anyway, if you thought the “Sully in the river” story was gripping, I think you should try this one.

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  • A different image of women’s fitness.

    Pausing on my long drive back from Ohio to Minneapolis to share a link: Check out this inspiring and interesting article on Olympic powerlifter Holly Mangold.

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  • Considering the method of protest, and setting aside the cause..

    I thought this was a good deconstruction of the notion of a “kiss-in” protest. It comes from Ann Althouse, who is on the record as a supporter of same-sex marriage. The title of the post is “A kiss-in should be a love-in or it shouldn’t be done at all.”

    Protests express opposition and therefore usually anger. Expressing love is inconsistent with anger. So if you’re going to use a gesture of love for protest, you’ve got a special problem. Appropriating an expression of love for hostile purposes is a dangerous matter…

    I’m looking at pictures from the Chick-fil-A kiss-in. These were people who wanted to demonstrate support for same-sex marriage. (I agree with them on that issue, by the way.) As their form of protest, they chose kissing — individuals of the same sex, kissing in restaurants that are associated with opposition to same-sex marriage. So the idea was, go where you think you are not loved — even though there’s no evidence that Chick-fil-A treats gay customers with less respect and friendliness than straight customers — and do something you think will upset them.

    Now, restaurants generally don’t want anybody making out, so you’ve chosen behavior that would be disruptive to a restaurant’s business whether the kissing couples are same or opposite sex. The form of expression is offensive and not like the old civil rights demonstrations where black people sat at lunch counters and were not served. They simply acted like customers — good customers — and the only reason it worked as a demonstration was that the store only served food to white people, the policy the protesters very successfully demonstrated was wrong. Kissing at Chick-fil-A does nothing to show what’s wrong about anything Chick-fil-A is doing. It’s just displaying hostility to the place.

    And it’s displaying hostility with kissing. So what have they done? They’ve perverted kissing, which should be an expression of love. Ironic, considering that the gay rights movement seeks to dispel the belief that homosexuality is perverted.

    It’s a challenge to protest with gestures of love. It can be done, but it can’t be done with hate or love is not love.

    This is a very important insight, and it is one that political and social activists of all kinds ought to take to heart. It can’t be done with hate or love is not love.

    In fact, we don’t even have to be talking about outright “hate” for the principle to apply. John Paul II famously wrote that the opposite of loving a person isn’t hating him, it’s using him. So it can’t be done to use someone, either, or love is not love. Even using him for something quite small and inconsequential destroys whatever traces of love there might be in the act of use.

    I am reminded a little bit of how, in an argument between a Christian and some other person, occasionally you’ll hear the Christian end the argument with something along the lines of “I’ll pray for you.” Quite possibly it’s a sincere statement, but the context leaves it tainted. To pray for someone is an act of love, true; normally to express an intention to pray for someone is an expression of love; but you get the feeling that this particular expression is primarily an attempt to score a rhetorical point. If that’s so, then this love is not love. It’s a kind of use: using the deity, invoking God’s name and the Christian’s intimate relationship with Him, as a way of saying “You are soooo wrong that only God has any hope of rescuing you from your benightedness.”

    Now, you may say that there is nothing illicit about praying for someone who is misguided, and therefore there can be nothing wrong with announcing your intention to do so. Perhaps there is nothing inherently wrong with making such an announcement, but you’d better be quite certain your intentions are pure as the driven snow — and consider what is the point of announcing that you’re about to take part in a charitable act, instead of just quietly going away and doing it, with the door shut.

    The lessons here apply to all kinds of protests, including the kind that you or I might make. If you’re using love to make a point, tread carefully… because love is the opposite of use. So it is pretty hard to “use” it and allow it to remain real love.

     

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  • Exercise can make you fat. So what?

    This Daily Mail article has been getting around — it’s a popular-press take on the theme “exercise can make you fat.”

    I am always kind of interested in how this particular idea gets reported in the popular press, because it strikes me that the tone is very important. Too much emphasis on the difficulty of losing weight through exercise alone, and the article can come across as saying “Why even bother increasing your activity when it is going to make weight loss harder?”

    And if the article suggests tips for encouraging weight loss while exercising, it runs the risk of making exercise seem even more complicated by introducing extra “rules” to worry about. The Daily Mail article, for example, suggests

    • Choosing “fairly vigorous aerobic exercise, such as running or cycling,” over weight training
    • Fasting for two to four hours before a workout
    • Instead of energy bars or energy drinks, consume “a bowl of porridge a couple of hours before a workout” and drink a half-liter (think two glasses, folks) of water with a tiny pinch of salt an hour before and during exercise. (Well, being Brits, the Mail also suggested drinking “squash” as an alternative to water. This confused me momentarily, but Wikipedia is here to help you.)
    • Choose intense, 20- to 30-minute workouts over longer, more leisurely ones.

    There is not a whole lot here, but I think the article could have been a little more helpful by repackaging it to counteract some of the most-often-perceived barriers to exercise.

     

    • You need less time than you might think for a good workout. A 20-minute, vigorous workout might be as effective as a much longer one.
    • You don’t need to have eaten anything just before a workout.
    • Skip the energy bars and energy drinks. Drink water.

     

    Anyway, it seems a good enough time for me to reiterate my personal advice regarding the interaction of exercise with nutritional behavior.

     

    • Don’t start an exercise program and a food-restriction program at the same time. Pick one and spend a few months on it before adding the other.
    • I recommend starting with exercise. If you’re starting from sedentary, begin with either two 20-minute sessions a week, or 5 minutes every day — whichever makes more sense depending on what you are doing and what fits into your schedule. Work up gradually from there. “Gradually” means “slowly enough to give your life a chance to remold around the exercise sessions as a permanent feature of your schedule.”
    • Evaluate your progress in the fitness program based on performance, not loss of weight or inches. You are not allowed to quit or change your fitness program because of any observations whatsoever about weight gain/loss.
    • The first metric of performance is “Did I show up for my scheduled session or not?” Once you have “showing up” pretty well down pat, you can move on to the second metric, which is “Did I finish my session?” After that is established, then you can work on lengthening the sessions, up to some sustainable, schedule-able level that allows enough time to work on performance. (Say, 45 minutes twice a week, or 20 minutes 5 days a week.) Then you can start increasing intensity.
    • Expect that adding exercise to your life will disrupt your appetite, but don’t worry about it — except, maybe, to repeat to yourself affirmations like “Energy bars are just expensive candy, and energy drinks are just expensive soda.”
    • A few months of showing up to your sessions and finishing your sessions, maybe even having worked them up to longer sessions and started to improve your performance, will have put you in a very different frame of mind. You don’t anymore regard exercise as a bizarre anomaly of the schedule that gives you license to have a bunch of extra snacks just because you exercised today. When you get to that point — when exercising really feels normal, whether you do it every day or only a few days a week — that is a good time to add in some kind of attentive nutrition program. Hold steady on the exercise habit, and begin.
    • If your exercise habit slips, back off on the food restriction. Also vice versa. Change one thing at a time.

    It isn’t terribly scientific, but I can’t see how it can hurt, considering that exercise has so many known benefits going for it even without weight loss, and (unlike diet-induced weight loss) exercise-induced performance improvement is something much closer to your direct control.

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  • “He answers all our needs.”

    Last Sunday, to accompany the story of the feeding of the five thousand, we heard Psalm 145. The antiphon was

    The hand of the Lord feeds us; he answers all our needs.

    Isn’t that a remarkable thing to say? He answers all our needs. How, exactly, are we to understand this to be true?

    Because — I am sure there are a lot of people in the pews who could say, honestly, “No — I am not getting all my needs addressed. I don’t get what I need. Or I haven’t got it yet, and don’t see a way to expect it.”

    Accepting this strongly probable assertion makes the antiphon more than a little disturbing — stained by association, maybe, with the heresy of the prosperity gospel. The hand of the Lord feeds us and he answers all our needs — so if you remain hungry, needy, you aren’t one of us. Something’s wrong with you. Or else, it opens the singer to mockery: some Lord, eh? He didn’t answer when your needs came knocking, did He now?

    So let’s consider some plausible alternative interpretations of the line, other than “we never perceive a need because God favors us.” Because there’s some serious issues with certain attitudes that go with that interpretation.

    I’ll restrict myself to the English antiphon as it appeared in Sunday’s psalm, and not fiddle with translation issues here. In other words, I am just going to assume good faith and accuracy on the part of the translator.

    Possibility #1: the psalmist is confined to a particular community at a particular time of spiritual fruitfulness and material prosperity. When it was written, it could truly be said “He answers all our needs,” even if it is not so here and now.

    This might make the reader wonder, “If that’s so, then why sing it here and now?” but I think this possibility seems stronger the more experience one has praying the psalms in regular rotation as one does with the Liturgy of the Hours (or, indeed, with the Mass). It is said that whatever your situation, there is a psalm to fit it, but the corollary to this is that at any given time there are many psalms that don’t fit at all. You may be feeling on top of the world and wanting to express gratefulness to God for His abundant blessings, but if it’s Friday of Week III, you’re stuck with “Let my eyes stream with tears day and night, without rest, over the great destruction,” and so on. At first it is jarring, but eventually you figure out how to go with the flow, remembering always that this is the prayer of the Church, not the prayer of me, and someone’s life somewhere is intimately fed by this psalm, and we can all join in it whatever our situation.

    So we can understand this as: God answers someone’s needs somewhere, and we can join in acknowledging it.

    Possibility #2: We are to understand “needs” more restrictively here; not everything we might think is a “need” really is.

    In this case, the antiphon could even be turned around: it isn’t really a need unless God meets it. I am not particularly fond of this interpretation because I fear that it could be abused to minimize others’ real suffering. But there is some precedent for this, if you allow (first of all) that securing our salvation is the sole true goal in life, and (second) that the people of God who sing this song are aware of, and accept, the primacy of that salvation. Food, clothing, shelter, security, human kindness, can certainly help us along the path to salvation, but the Christian knows that they are not actually prerequisites. The martyrs had none of these at the point of the blade. You could say that the antiphon, interpreted this way, reminds us that the only true need is grace, and that God grants it abundantly.

    Caution, though: we should never assume that other people have no true need for food, clothing, shelter, security. The song says God answers all “our” needs. Quite possibly we can serve as the channel of grace to others in need of compassion, by helping to meet others’ physical needs. It is much easier to realize that salvation is more important than food when you are not hungry all the time.

    Possibility #3: The emphasis is on the word “He.” “It’s the hand of the Lord who feeds us; it’s He who answers all our needs.”

    I think this is the strongest candidate of all the interpretation. When our needs are met, it is God to whom we owe our thanks and praise. Whatever food we eat, our clothing, our homes, the people who care for us, the powers of our own and others that keep us safe — all of that is ultimately a gift from God. Sometimes it comes with the cooperation of others, other times without it; sometimes we ought to thank other people, too; but ultimately we owe God thanks for every good gift in our lives.

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  • Twitblegging.

    Jennifer Fulwiler wants people to explain their blogs to her — in fact to plug them! — in 140 characters or less. I thought it might be fun to turn it around. Plugs are rationales for reading, and I figure I could use about five of them, so tell me — why do you read bearing blog, in 28 characters or less?

    ___________________________

    P.S. I am just going to ignore the little voice in my head that suggests such a question is too narcissistic to be entertaining.

    P.P.S. When I typed the last sentence my iPad autocorrected “voice” to “VCR.” That’s my internal dialogue for you: rapidly declining into obsolescence, repetitive, and prone to glitches when moved rapidly between environments of different temperature and humidity.

    P.P.P.S. Link fixed: now when you click on Jen’s name, it goes to her post instead of to the Amazon page of the book The Psychopath Test. I am sure Jen will approve this change.

    So, cough, anyway. 28 characters. Go!

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  • Mad dogs and humans.

    Interesting article about rabies, which until recently was 100% fatal in symptomatic humans — maybe — and the story of the last-ditch desperate cure that seems to work — maybe.

    There is something very compelling about the narrative, in which a physician who is completely inexperienced in rabies treatment, but faced with a young doomed patient, buries his nose in the books and comes up with a Crazy Idea That Just Might Work:

    [T]oday, after millennia of futility, hospitals have an actual treatment to try. It was developed in 2004 by a pediatrician in Milwaukee named Rodney Willoughby, who, like the vast majority of American doctors, had never seen a case of rabies before. (In the US, there are usually fewer than five per year.) Yet Willoughby managed to save a young rabies patient, a girl of 15, by using drugs to induce a deep, week-long coma and then carefully bringing her out of it. It was the first documented case of a human surviving rabies without at least some vaccination before the onset of symptoms. Soon Willoughby posted his regimen online, and he worked with hospitals around the world to repeat and refine its use. Now referred to as the Milwaukee protocol, his methodology has continued to show limited success: Of 41 attempts worldwide, five more patients have pulled through…

    Even though his specialty was infectious disease, Willoughby knew almost nothing about rabies. “For the board exams,” he says, “you only needed to know one thing: that it was 100 percent fatal.” He telephoned the CDC to ask if there was any treatment somewhere in the research pipeline—some promising new therapy, perhaps, not yet published in any medical journal. The CDC had nothing. Not one person had ever been shown to survive rabies without having gotten at least partial vaccination before the virus reached the brain.

    With less than a day to formulate a plan, Willoughby attacked the problem with quick but deliberate reading, using his limited time to review the basic neuroscience of rabies.

    …Willoughby laid out a last-ditch idea, the surprising result of his day of reading and thinking. The solution, he says in retrospect, had been “hiding in plain sight.”

    A pretty exciting story, but one that still remains largely unconfirmed by fundamental research. The article details some of the objections that have been raised by researchers. Still, when you are dealing with “100% fatal,” it becomes much more attractive to try the untested.

    On the same topic: I heard on NPR a week or two ago that there is a new nonfiction book out on rabies, called Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus. It sounded good, but I have to get in line for a copy at the library. The authors are a husband-and-wife team (he’s a journalist, she’s a veterinarian). I am looking forward to it, when I move to the head of the line.

    I am really in the mood to read something fluffy and light, which for me means “almost anything nonfiction.” I just barely managed to finish Kristin Lavransdatter in time to return it to the library before it went overdue, and while I enjoyed the book, it exhausted me as epic multigenerational literature tends to do. If it were not for the patronymics I would never have been able to keep track of everyone, but at least since I always had a clue as to whose daughter or son everybody was (Kristin is Lavrans’s daughter, get it?), I didn’t fall very far behind.

    Anyway, after having struggled through Kristin (a book which, at least, got better and more gripping the deeper I got into it), I polished off the deeply weird nonfiction book The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson in a matter of hours. This is part nonfiction and part introspection, a book about psychopathology and mental illness — or maybe it is more about the author’s investigation into psychopathology, since Ronson injects all kinds of commentary about his interviewees and his own reactions to them throughout the book. The style is mildly self-deprecating, and Ronson depicts himself as sort of star-struck by the people he is interviewing — he is forever being amazed that he has managed to score the interviews with this eminent researcher or that institutionalized criminal or this other possibly psychopathic CEO — and somewhere in the middle of the book I began to be convinced that the style was really just an act meant to guide the reader to conclusions about the interviewees. (Namely, that maybe the psychiatrists who study psychopathology are sometimes themselves psychopaths.)

    I think I will stop here before anyone draws any conclusions about the fact that I suggested books about rabies and psychopaths as beach reads. Ahem.

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    5 comments on Mad dogs and humans.

  • Catholic geeks.

    Yesterday, SF author and blogger John Scalzi wrote a piece  entitled, "Who Gets To Be a Geek?  Anyone Who Wants To Be" that delighted me.  

    (The piece was in response to an article at CNN by Joe Peacock, believe it or not, disparaging — for not being genuine geeks — pretty, sexily-dressed women who come to events like ComicCon, including the ones who are hired by sponsors to work at the booths.  I am not the sort of geek who goes to that sort of convention, so I really can't judge the Peacock piece on the merits of its claims.)

    But I loved John Scalzi's response, because of the way he encapsulated geekdom:

    Geekdom is a nation with open borders. There are many affiliations and many doors into it. There are lit geeks, media geeks, comics geeks, anime and manga geeks. There are LARPers, cosplayers, furries, filkers, crafters, gamers and tabletoppers. There are goths and horror geeks and steampunkers and academics. There are nerd rockers and writers and artists and actors and fans. Some people love only one thing. Some people flit between fandoms. Some people are positively poly in their geek enthusiasms. Some people have been in geekdom since before they knew they were geeks. Some people are n00bs, trying out an aspect of geekdom to see if it fits. If it does, great. If it doesn’t then at least they tried it.

    Many people believe geekdom is defined by a love of a thing, but I think — and my experience of geekdom bears on this thinking — that the true sign of a geek is a delight in sharing a thing. It’s the major difference between a geek and a hipster, you know: When a hipster sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say “Oh, crap, now the wrong people like the thing I love.” When a geek sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say “ZOMG YOU LOVE WHAT I LOVE COME WITH ME AND LET US LOVE IT TOGETHER.”

    Any jerk can love a thing. It’s the sharing that makes geekdom awesome.

    This is wonderful.  I mean, really wonderful.  

    For one thing, it neatly skewers the notion that being a geek is really all about being an outcast because The Greater World doesn't understand the stuff the geeks do understand.  If that were so, it would be impossible to be a geek about anything that happens to be, at the moment, popular.  The boundaries of geekdom would shift with the winds of popular culture.

    But you know, and I know, that being a geek is something about who you are, not about who accepts you or even about who accepts your interests.

    The reason that the world stereotypes socially inept outcasts as geeks, and geeks as socially inept outcasts, is because — these days, anyway — the world considers it socially inept to betray a deep interest in any subject.  To care about an idea, or a subject, and to care about getting the details right more than caring about what other people think.  

    Some people have the sort of charismatic personality or way with words — or other sort of attractiveness — that makes them perfectly able to publicly express enthusiasm in a way that infects others.  Not all geeks have this gift, because the world is mostly turned off by people who don't have the habit of disparaging deep interest.  The habit of cool — figuratively, being at most lukewarm about everything and everyone, because warmth betrays caring. 

    Geek and cool are opposites by nature.  And "cool" is highly prized today.  Fortunately, there are other ways of standing out — society's not so far gone that it doesn't sometimes appreciate the not-cool.  And so geekdom and outcasts are not identical sets.

    + + +

    Although once my husband called me "nerdy-cool."  Which is just about the most romantic thing I can imagine.

    + + +

    Here's another place I found the term "geek," or sometimes its almost-interchangeable synonym "nerd," is useful.  

    A few weeks ago when Bearing Blog Epidemiologist ChristyP was in town for a conference, she introduced me to a colleague, whose name I knew well because he has published numerous articles about natural family planning and about the bioethics of reproductive health.  

    He asked me, "How is it that you found out about NFP?"  

    I started with "Well, I'm Catholic –"

    He said, quite correctly, "That isn't a sufficient answer."

    I paused and said slowly: "I'm kind of a Catholic nerd."  Turned and looked to ChristyP — "That kind of sums it up, doesn't it?"  – and she indicated that it would do, at least for the purposes of that brief conversation!

    Thinking back on it, I believe it does suffice.  (I used "nerd" because I wasn't sure whether "geek" has too recent a vintage to mean something to this gentleman — indeed the usage frequency of "geek" has lagged about 8 years behind that of "nerd" since about 1980.  But I meant something exactly like the "geek" of Scalzi's piece.)   

    I mean, I think most of us who intend to live Catholic doctrine as if we really believed it, as written, to be correct sometimes use shorthand like "orthodox Catholic" to refer to others who decline to dissent in any way from Church teaching, but that term doesn't satisfy.  For one thing, it's easily confused with "Orthodox Christian" which is a distinct ecclesiastical community, or it may be construed as some weird kind of shorthand for Eastern Rite Catholics.  

    For another thing, it's often used as if it were the opposite of terms like "progressive Catholic" or "liberal Catholic" or "social justice Catholic", when that's really not so.  One can adhere to every bit of what's in the catechism and yet feel more affinity with liberal or progressive politics (remember:  we operate in every country in the world) or perceive that one's particular evangelistic calling is centered around topics that get classified as "social justice."  

    For a third thing, although it's useful shorthand in private conversation with others you agree with, I doubt that "orthodox" is understood the same way by the wider culture of English-speaking Catholics.   Self-identified Catholics dissent for a lot of reasons — many are intellectually honest, informed, and deliberate, many "own" their position, but others are lashing out in anger and hurt, while still others oppose a strawman.  I haven't taken a survey, but it strikes me that a large number of those people would take some umbrage at us toe-the-line types for claiming the term "orthodox."  And terms are no good in discourse unless you agree on the meaning.

    For a fourth thing, and I mean no disrespect — I don't think all the "orthodox Catholics" are also "Catholic geeks."  (And likely as not there are Catholic geek dissenters.) 

    But "Catholic nerd," though, or "geek," seems to fit the bill pretty well, and more precisely than just "orthodox" — at least for me.  With that term, I'm trying to get across that I'm interested  in Catholic theology, liturgy, and moral life.  I'm interested in getting it right, in being able to split hairs, because ZOMG I LOVE IT PLEASE COME WITH ME AND LOVE IT TOO. 

    It implies, I hope, not just that I wish to toe the line, but that I have, in fact, drunk the Kool-Aid.  TASTE AND SEE.

    In many ways a geek is a geek.  Others call us hairsplitting or even jesuitical (Jesuits:  Perhaps the original Catholic geek organization, regardless of where they find themselves today), but it's no less fun to pick apart difficult moral questions than it is to have passionate arguments about, say, literature or physics.  

    I mean, really:  there's a certain affinity among these:

    • having a passionate argument using fluxes and mass balances about the question "Does running in the rain make you wetter or dryer than walking?"  (real example I remember from the lunch table in graduate school)
    •  having a detailed email discussion on the question  "If a woman has suffered multiple ectopic pregnancies, is it licit for her to request surgical removal of the Fallopian tubes, because of a reasonable suspicion that there is something wrong with them, on the grounds that it is generally permissible to remove a 'diseased body part' and that the consequent sterilization is a secondary, undesired effect that is nevertheless permitted under the principle of double effect?  Or does double effect not apply, because in fact the directly desired effect is prevention of all pregnancies, this being the means by which the prevention of a specific disease in the Fallopian tube  is to be brought about?"
    • insisting that it's a vital blow to the preservation of American film culture that George Lucas whitewashed the fact HAN SOLO TOTALLY SHOT FIRST?

    All of these are the kinds of questions that only true geeks care about, at least deeply enough to argue about it at length instead of doing what other people might call "getting on with their lives."

    —

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    3 comments on Catholic geeks.

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