Oh, the Stories They Know

   Bill Nye's told this tale when he joined Sundstrand Data Control as an engineer designing accelerometers: ...ultrasensitive devices that measure small pushes and pulls.  When I say "ultrasensitive," I mean ultra ultra.  Even back then, the accelerometers were so precise that they could measure the Moon's gravity from the surface of the Earth; that's a pull of about 30 micro-gees of acceleration.  To put that in more concrete terms, my home scale says that my weight on the surface of our planet is a mean 70 kilograms.  When the Moon passes overhead, its gravity pulls me slightly and I weigh a bit less.  Precisely speaking, if I weighed 70 kilograms on the scale before, my weight decreases by 30 parts per million to read 69.99979 kilograms...No, you cannot notice a tiny tug like that, but the ultrasensitive autopilot in a jet airliner most definitely can.  Instead of measuring the Moon, the accelerometers in autopilots sense the effects of the pulls and pushes of the airlplane's motion in what we call "inertial space." 

    If that all sounds a bit technical or detailed, trust me that it was a bit for me as well; but the gist of the tale was that his team was asked to design something similar for new underground oil drills, drills that needed extremely tight tolerances.  Nye's thoughts: "You can do that?  Aren't alignments like that beyond the capability of our instruments?"  That was my thinking at the time, but only because of the constraints of my own knowledge -- not because there was no solution.  For Bill Nye (known worldwide as Bill Nye, the Science Guy), he went on to relay these doubts to  his design coworker, Jack Morrow: He didn't know the right approach, either, but he knew how to know.  He told me, "Go ask the guys in the shop."  Jack was referring to the machinists, the guys who cut metal using large, elaborate machines capable of turning out virtually any part you could imagine..."Everyone you'll ever meet, ever, knows something you don't"...What I realized in that machine shop years later was that a lot of the time the people who have the best knowledge are not so obvious.  In this case, they were just steps away, but I didn't realize that.

   Life is like that, isn't it?  A friend or your dad or coworker will be doing something with ease and it'll be something that appears totally foreign to you.  My friend can change out water heaters as easily as me putting gas in the car; it's not even a second thought, even as gas lines and water lines are turned off and on.  Same with another friend who cooks meals far beyond my capabilities, making leftovers and ingredients appear as tasty and professional as a restaurant, all without a moment's hesitation.  The irony for me --or perhaps the word discovery is a better term-- is that I've also found this within the walls of both my mother's place in memory care, as well as the independent living facility where my wife's mother just moved.  Trapped in a wheelchair or walking around freely, and in their 80s or 90s, many of the people in both places are spitfires full of tales; from rock & roll history (one guy was wearing a Jimi Hendrix tee shirt...because he attended that young-Hendrix concert!) to English literature, the people I've briefly spoken to and their stories were indeed "just steps away."  It was another label, people cast away and shoved behind closed or locked doors, their minds (in our minds) going and thus their memories...or so we imagine.  Who knows what knowledge or experiences are buried there, waiting to be discovered.  As my wife's dad used to say when she asked him why he never talked of his times in the British navy (WWII), "No one ever asked."  It's easy to do in the halls of such facilities, even hospitals and perhaps homes -- just nod politely and feel a tinge of pity that "these" people are at the point in their lives where the goal now is to just make them comfortable.  But what is really rusting away as the days go by?  What songs and ideas and old tricks of the trade are vanishing because no one is asking?  My dad used to tell me that during the ultra-cold winters of Korea during the Korean War, they would fix the leaky radiators of jeeps by pouring course ground pepper into them, the pepper eventually swelling and sealing the leaks...it worked like a charm, he said.  Ignoring such tales and experiences is easy...don't even ask.  But what about those in comas or in a vegetative state, a point where nothing seems to respond, not even brain activity...is anybody there?  Enter the fNIRS.

    An article in Discover told of neuroscientist Adrian Owen treating a teenager found brain dead after passing out face down while intoxicated.  After two months at the hospital he was declared "to be in a persistence vegetative state."  fMRIs (functional MRI) and EEGs (electroencephlogram) both showed no brain activity...he was sent home to be cared for by his family.  But then, the teen began to recover; further testing as he regained consciousness found that he remembered vivid details of rooms he was in and people who had worked on him, all despite no signs of brain activity appearing on the imaging screens during those times.  Oxygen deprivation damages brain areas randomly.  A person mught sustain slight damage to the motor cortex and end up paralyzed on one side.  Another person might endure damage to areas of the brain that connect the motor cortex with the thalamus, which we know regulate consciousness, and results in a vegetative state.  The new fNIRS (functional near infrared spectroscopy) device measures oxygenation activity in the blood...and is portable.  Says the article: Eventually fNIRS could be used in patients' homes so they can communicate with family member...Recently the device was used in the ICU of a Canadian hospital to ease communication between a patient and his doctors.

Photo of Sigiriya: Nora de Angelli, National Geographic Traveler

   The trapped patient in a hospital might be similar to the trapped person in a care facility.  With few visitors and even fewer asking questions the lives they lived are spiraling away out of their control, unable to be reigned in.  Even in our own lives, think of how few are the times in which you are asked in-depth questions.  How did you grow up?  How do you feel about that?  What was it like working?  What stories do you have buried and why don't you share them?  Probably, no one is asking.  I think that in one sense reading keeps me wondering and keeps showing me how much is still left to discover.  Tying knots, which I'm terrible at, went far beyond sailors and Gordius to become a system of communication and record keeping for a civilization of millions (and according to Discover, is still unable to be deciphered).  Or Sigiriya, cited by National Geographic Traveler as one of the must-see adventures of the world (I'd never heard of it)...imagine that if those intricately-carved lion's feet are all that remains of that mound of granite what the original palace must have looked like!  Or from John McPhee's recent book on writing, telling about the All-American Futurity horse race held each year in Ruidoso, New Mexico (I know little about horses or horse racing)...it is so revered in the racing world that it pays out more than the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes (the famous Triple Crown) combined.  I had never heard of that race.  Or this, a "supermassive" black hole some 8 billion light years away from us, but traveling at a speed of 5 million miles per hour;  or that some mosquitoes' wings beat at 800 times per second (both numbers are too difficult to comprehend).  Or this question asked by a recent podcast from the partnership of The Atlantic and Fidelity Investments: Would you trust a robot to care for your aging parents?

Part of my cactus collection...

    I just moved my cactus collection in for the winter; they're tropical so they can't take the cold temperatures of winter and instead head into hibernation once inside...no need to water or trim or care for them.  In the summer, I move them back out and they resume their growth.  The majority of them began as tiny 4-inch transplants, although many of them have grown too tall to move inside and have broken off over and over, leading to more and more cacti as I replant the pieces and watch them grow and grow until they too break off during the ins and outs of the seasons; some are in their 4th generation of sibling offshoots.  I've given many batches away, barrels of them, but still, they are plentiful.  And each time I move them, there is no mercy.  As careful as I am, they prod and poke whenever there is an opening in my gloves or my thick jacket, which I pretend is my armor.  I mentioned some of this to the woman who sits with my mother, a bright and talkative person who's been in memory care far longer than my mother and who always seems to be sitting with a book in hand.  Having overheard me talking about my cactus, I showed her a picture then told her about all the years I've grown them and that they still continue to jab me with their needles.  She looked at me matter-of-factly and said, "That's just their form of affection."  After all these years, it took someone in a lock-down facility to show me what I was missing...how exciting and lucky for me!