Notes From A Bear's Journey

Somebody    We all want to be somebody.  To be remembered or respected or recognized or loved.  And it goes way back, way past the Jefferson Airplane and their singing "Don't You Want Somebody to Love."  For being somebody works both ways; what we want, others want...to be somebody, to just simply be somebody to someone.    There was a story in the Bucks County Courier Journal some years ago.  It was about somebody.  His name was Harry O'Neill. He was a pro baseball player, pitched one inning, never went to bat.  But he loved, absolutely loved baseball.  Truth is, he became the seed of a similar story, one which led to the 1989 film, Field of Dreams .  But Harry O'Neill didn't become famous, even if he was and is still just one of only two professional baseball players to have died in combat during WW II.  Says the paper's story, Harry is remembered..."in dust-covered boxes of microfilm that contain blurry replicas of ...

Medicine's Changing Face    As you all know, I am anything but a doctor or even someone who pretends to be knowledgeable about medicine.  But likely you've noticed as well as I have that medicine in general appears to be encountering a rather large technological change; within my own area's small clinic, digital film replaces X-rays, and everything from those results to prescriptions are on the various tablets making their rounds in the hands of the doctors.  Want to see your broken ankle? -- it's right here on the tablet, expanded at the specific point so I can be shown the enlarged version, making it easier to see the break.  And this is not only in my small clinic, but out in the remote areas of the world, as apps on mobile phones now take pulses, make diagnoses (yes, that's the plural of diagnosis...I had to look it up), and more importantly allow immediate contact with other doctors located in hospitals, ready to give advice on symptoms and surgeries. ...

Almost Human    The recent movie, Ex Machina , posed an interesting question of what happens when robots begin retaining so much intelligence that they can reformulate their thinking, moving beyond simple data to actually forming original thoughts.  Often termed AI or Artificial Intelligence, the author of the movie told Wired this when asked about the ethics of AI: It's a big question.  If you're talking about nonsentient AIs, then there's a lot to be concerned about.  But if you create a new consciousness in the form of a machine, that isn't significantly different from two adults creating a child.    The subject of consciousness in a robot was just one of the themes in Isaac Asimov's collection of stories from I, Robot , one story taking place on a battlefield where a robot witnesses other robots in the field being destroyed and is then told to go out and retrieve a part from a "dead" robot, almost guaranteeing the destruction of that robot as ...

What I've Learned...Continued    While eating out with my mom at her standby Chinese buffet (after being cooped up in rehab, then her home, she was anxious to get back to her old haunts), I opened my fortune cookie and saw this: One must dare to be himself, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.   It fit right in, not so much for me but for what my mom was somewhat conveying to me, this despite what I viewed as all the seeming nitpicking and following around and correcting.  It was all done out of love, one could see that; but at times, love can make one pull at one's hair.  But through it all, I think she was simply saying, "be yourself...be true to yourself."  So here's a bit of what I hope I've learned from my recent visits and stays with her...    ACCEPT:  Step one was acceptance.  This was her home, her life, and no matter what I was thinking --you know, how much better it could be or how much more organized i...

What I've Learned...     Perhaps I should have properly titled this, "what I think I've learned," or "what I hope I've learned," at least regarding that of a child now being an adult.  As you've likely noticed, there was another gap in these postings, that being the result of my again visiting my mother, helping her in her transition out of rehabilitation after her fall.  And make no mistake, my mother is a bit limited in her movements, pressured by visiting nurses and therapists to always think of BLT (not the sandwich but the moniker to not Bend, Lift, or Twist), but far from immobile.  Those movement restrictions prove rather limiting for her, as she wants to get back to driving, back to weeding, back to hanging clothes, back to her lifestyle of old.  And did I mention that she turns 90 in a month?    This is not meant to sound as if I'm whining or complaining about the visits, not by any means. Perhaps, like many of us with a parent or pa...

Nowhere...Part II    Here are some numbers for you...60 million, 800, 20k, 1800, $70,000.  Those are all numbers from 2014 to now, and all are numbers relating to refugees.  To make sense of it all, here's a tiny bit of perspective.  The first number is close to the estimated total by the United Nations, that is, the estimated total of refugees in the world today as of 2014...sixty million (half of them are children). That's a lot of people seeking escape from whatever, to wherever and whenever, but escape.  Get away!  Leave!  A drive to give up whatever home they have (or had) and go blindly into the unknown...an unknown country with unknown people and unknown languages and unknown prospects.  And likely little or no money, or at least money that can be used in this new country.    Already, nearly 2000 have perished in risking the journey to Europe by sea.  And the number 800 is the number of sea rescues made by cargo and...

Nowhere to Go    The refugee crisis is something I've also written about earlier in the posts Refuge and later, Disappearing .  But as with the earlier pieces on vitamins and hunger, this is another continuing crisis that seems to remain, and fester, and be something that for most of the world, we thought was taken care of.  But the situation is far from over, leading Time to write a piece called The Nowhere People , by Hannah Beech.    This time, the refugees were from Burma, and here's how the story began: The creaking vessel’s hold was retrofitted by human smugglers to carry more than 400 people packed so tightly together, they often sat with their arms cradling their bent knees.  Twice-daily meals were limited to a handful of gruel and a few gulps of water.  A couple of months into the trip, the captain and other gun-wielding traffickers abandoned ship, leaving the passengers to their fates.  Food–even grains of uncooked rice–...