Off to uncharted lands!

I sent out letters to everyone and their goldfish asking for help to go on a dental mission during spring break. I got a great response and want to thank those of you reading this who could help out. But for those of you who didn't get the letter, or I don't like enough to send one (seriously, you'd have to be on my hate-for-all-eternity list to not get one... or it got lost in the mail or something, no worries), here's the haps:

Groups of students get together and plan dental mission trips during school breaks. They're not school sponsored, but most are through an external charity organization of some kind. Some of the trips are vacations with a couple days of service, others are intense week-long slave labor clinics (the group that went to Jamaica worked 10 hours/day for 6 days or something, but did get to stay in a Sandals resort at night with all-included restaurants and stuff), so when I saw the itinerary for this trip to the Dominican Republic, I got excited. Arrive Saturday, work Monday through Thursday, spend Friday doing "cultural" things like visiting a nearby national park or large market, and fly home Saturday. And it's a third cheaper than the more popular vacation-y trips. It's through Orphanage Outreach, who arranges for volunteers of all kinds to come and help out. It's in the small town of Monte Cristi on the northwest coast of the DR and we'll be spending a lot of time in the open-air clinic helping the workers/families living on the banana/sugarcane plantations. There will be about 18 in our group and some other dentists from other places coming next week. Since it fills up our break, most in the group wanted to get there a day early and just hang out/relax, so we're leaving today, immediately after our last final. (Like, get out of the final and run to the school's housing 10 blocks away to leave at 12:15).

I'm excited about going, but I don't travel much and am more nervous about the traveling than anything. I've left the continent once, to Hawaii, and only left the country to Canada and just inside Mexico, so this is a bigger jump for me. We will be in New York for about 8 hours, in the middle of the night, and we have no plans to fill that time (sleeping in JFK airport does not get good reviews) so I've got a bunch of audiobooks and movies on my ipod to kill time in between naps. I've got lots of bugspray and sunscreen, as well as my own pair of Vibram Five Fingers (for the adventures and fun stuff), and my very first official pair of scrubs (pants at least, they give us shirts to wear while there). I just realized I don't have a hat or sunglasses. Dang it.

I've got the camera and will try to take LOTS of pictures. As for the rest of the family, they're in Utah at Emily's parents. Today, Grace is going skiing for the first time.

True Believer or Fake Imposter?

This guy from Vermont spent 5 years immersing himself into extreme Muslim society in Yemen and Saudi Arabia in order to get to know the culture better. Hopefully, close exposure would remove so many of the fears Westerners have in radical Muslims. Turns out, it didn't. Close exposure only made him more worried. If I were this guy, I'd hire full-time body guards for the rest of my life.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/worldview/100308/al-qaeda-yemen-islam-convert

Knock me out like a ton of bricks

In our pharmacology class we've been learning the basics of general anesthesias. To start off this section we watched this episode of NOVA made in the 1970's on the history of anesthesia. Pretty crazy. What impressed me most were the lives lost or ruined by and during the development of anesthetics. Not just patients, but the doctors and scientists who experimented mostly on themselves, often becoming addicted to the substances or worse. And since addiction was not understood really at all yet, they often faced severe consequences for their research. A classmate found the video online and shared it with the class. I thought it was fascinating and some of you might like it too. It's about an hour long, but the first 11 minutes give a nice backdrop to the story. It was the two dentists portrayed here in the beginning that separately discover the first two general anesthesias. Their stories are pretty interesting as well.

There is no charge for awesomeness

I shall direct your attention to my sister in-law who was an exciting story to share with you all.

http://talesofanordinaryhousewife.blogspot.com/2010/02/resistance.html

Now, I shall get back to my exciting Friday evening of scrounging for Futurama episodes online. Good night.

If anyone sees this tonight, feel free to give me a call, I'll probably be up late. Life is delightfully boring when Emily and the kids are out of town (helping my sister with her newborn and stuff). Serio, delightfully boring. That's the perfect description.

Update: Please, stop calling me, I can't keep up with the ringing phone! (No, I'm not adding this just to make me look popular and compensate for my loneliness)

2nd Update: Ima just gonna keep updating this through the evening. Here's a great site, if you're confused at all by the other episodes, start at the beginning:

http://www.piggymoo.com/futurama/?episode=01x01

My mind was just blown

I'm up late working on a research paper assigned to our class. My topic is on Low level laser therapy and wound healing. It's actually pretty fascinating. I've had to sort through gobs of research on the topic and I'm trying to gather a big picture. It's all broken down into specifics of laser type, wavelengths, energies and stuff as well as it's effects on various tissues and wounds (or lack thereof). When it comes to powerful radiation it's the more destructive, ionizing, free-radical creating bands like UV and X-ray that take top spots. Even Infrared gets a lot of credit for the perception of heat we get from it. Visible light has some nifty effects, but outside of vision it doesn't get much credit for molecular effects. As I am finding out, visible light does some pretty crazy stuff, like regulating which genes get turned on and regulating all sorts of biochemical stuffs, the vast most of it apparently beneficial and supportive of life. The most common frequencies I'm coming across in these studies are in the range of 632nm or 830nm, which happen to be the frequencies made by convenient Helium Neon lasers and the like.

This may seem way out there and Doc Brown-ish (Jumping Gigawatts!), but I got curious, what color is 632nm? It's orange-red. That's peculiar. Why would that have such crazy benefits to us and our tissues? Oh wait, what wavelength is strongest from the sun? Right about the color put out by Hydrogen at 650nm but it puts out the most of its energy in that general range of orange. Woa!

We're floating around this universe that's flooded with all sorts of radiations. X-Rays are generally destructive in appreciable amounts. UV rays send electrons flying about. Infrared rays tend to speed up the movement of whole molecules, speeding up molecular reactions. Too much infrared (too hot) and biological systems as we know them quit working or work so fast that it can't be properly controlled or used. So there's our Sun. A nice medium-sized star that puts out the majority of it's radiation within the visible spectrum. A nice middle range for life to flourish. And under this unique spectrum flourish it does! And our systems are SOOOO adapted to it that our primary source of information comes from the visible spectrum, our systems are put together in such a way that the peak of this visible light we get is beneficial to us-- even dependent on it--, and our planet is put together so perfectly to filter out most of the destructive other radiation.

This may still not make much sense, but the gist of it to me is that this universe was created for life to thrive. Life is not some niche that has squeezed its tiny foothold into the universe, but the sole purpose of this universe is to support life by properly supporting the atomic properties conducive to life. Of course it can be argued the other way, but my own personal experiences and research, backed up by theindependent experiences, studies and research of millions of others show that there is a God and that he loves us and that his greatest work is to bestow life into this universe.

Now back to my paper. I want to get this thing done tonight even if I have to stay up all night. I don't have much demanding my energies tomorrow so I'll be ok and it'll be really nice to have it out of the way and still have a day to refine it before Friday morning. Wish me luck.

Update (5 min after original posting): The burning of organic material (wood, wax, oil, etc) tends to burn at 1000 to 1100 degrees Celsius which also happens to give off mostly deep orange light!

I just felt like running

I came across this article and later this one a few weeks ago and showed it to Emily along with this blog, and suddenly we're hooked on the idea. She instantly bought the bible of barefoot running and read it in a couple of days. If I took the time to run more, I'd do it, but as of now I've only done 3 1-mile loops around our neighborhood barefoot, but we did find some returned Vibram Five Fingers at REI and I've jogged just a little bit in them and wear them around. For some reason now, I run barefoot to and from the dumpster when I take out the garbage. I gotsa say, I like it and will let you know if my knee starts hurting. My best recommendation: like they say, start slow, don't run on your toes, and don't start on wet, freshly-rained pavement (learned all those in one shot).

The rationality of emotion

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I was laying in bed pondering about the role of Logic and Reason in our lives. I don't do this often, but sometimes when I get thinking, it really goes off.

I was musing about the tremendous importance of these things and are they the most important objects to allow to govern our lives? What about emotion? What about the delight in chaos and disorder? I think logic, rationality, and reason still trump them all and I will try to expound but will probably trip myself up along the way.

This was sparked by a documentary we watched this evening on an aspect of alternative medicine. It was a terribly unscientific and unprofessionally done film. Not that it didn't try to promote a valuable treatment that showed promise, but it constantly cried out against "the establishment" keeping this treatment down. I had to admit, if I were "the establishment" and could so readily find flaws in their statistics, their logical reasoning, I'd dismiss it too. Not out of greed, but out of lack of concrete reason. Emily and I discussed the science and decided to check out what Pubmed had on this treatment. Quickly we found some statistics that did promote this treatment as beneficial to cancer patients vs. no treatment. Not a perfect treatment by any means, some of the survival rates for severely metastisized cancers were 39% 5-year survival using the prescribed method vs. 6% 5-year survival for no treatment. Sounds great. But what are the 5-year survival rates of the same cancers using conventional medicine? We didn't bother to look it up, it was late. But such an important set of stats as this would change everything, yet the movie hadn't used it at all. It spoke anecdotally to only survivors. They could find lots of them who'd used this method, but somehow couldn't similarly interview those who'd died. Nor did they compare numbers against conventional (i.e. "the establishment's") treatments. To me, it doesn't really matter at this point, because the treatment involved such modalities as eating a plant-based diet (they actually advertised veganism, but that discussion I'll save for another time) and everything I've ever learned agrees with this, so it's a moot point in my life, but the evening was a stimulating exercise of logic and reasoning.

Back to this idea of emotion. How does it play into the progress and improvement of life? Or better yet, how does it improve our existence? Sadly, I think it safe to say that the incredible majority of problems in this world arise because of abused, uncontrolled, or unchecked emotions. Yet it is checked emotions, properly controlled by reason and logic, that provide almost all production and improvement on this planet. What is emotion? I define it to be the set of physical and mental reactions which our immeasurably complex environment and our collected set of memories and intelligence exert on us. Sounds robotic, dry, and lifeless, but let me give an example: there is a windy stretch of road near our home. Close to the side of the road is a steep and high cliff dropping to the beach and ocean below. The road itself is fairly steep and the sharp corners can be hazardous at high speeds. The scenery is reminiscent of romantic views of Mediterranean vistas. The ruggedness of the terrain is unusual for any city of comparable size. I get an amazing rush of pleasure riding my bicycle as fast as I can down this street. Enough of a rush that if I have the time, the energy, and the weather on my side, I'll ride an extra 100 feet uphill and a mile out of the way to barrel down on my way home from school. I have occasionally passed cars doing this. This creates even more of a rush.

This ride produces strong and temporary emotions. Thinking about it, that emotion is created partly by the amazing scenery, the stimlulation of wind on my face, the forces pulling on me as I speed around the corners, and a great deal because of the slight loss of predictability of my outcome. I let go a little bit of the control I have over my life. It is scary. When I don't die or get hurt (which has been every time, knock on wood), I feel terrific. That additional bit of chance I throw into my life sparks emotion.

The possibility of disorder or lack of control is what creates emotions. When an outcome goes against our predictions we become sad or angry. When it unexpectedly goes right, we become ecstatic. When we enter into a relationship with another person our emotions become tied to their actions as we give up control of some portion of our life to them. This creates very strong emotions.

As we learn about our emotions, we become more rational and logical, and in maintaining control over them we are able to produce, to create.

So, thinking eternally, how does God experience emotion? He knows everything, can do everything, and in perfection would never knowingly endanger his position or give up any of his control to anyone else? How does our eternal Father have any room for emotion? If he wanted the rush of a risky activity, he would give up attributes and qualities that make him God such as perfect logic, rationality, and reason. If he didn't know the outcome of everything, he wouldn't be God. His emotions are intimately and eternally tied to us, his children. He has achieved perfection and glory. The risk and chance he takes are the risks and chances we take on ourselves. We are disordered and chaotic. We are learning and growing. We choose our eternal futures. Some of us will choose to model him, will receive ability and power, and thus achieve glory, adding it to his and giving him a source of pleasure and joy in achieving the desired outcome. Others of us will not and squander their positions, properties, and abilities, and fail to retain our own control over ourselves. The desired outcome is not achieved and sadness for us is felt in him.

This seems like a perfect spot to be in. Relinquishing no control he didn't previously have (the exercise of our will) and completely avoiding endangerment to himself (he loses nothing of his own since our free will was never his to begin with) he is able to experience all realms of emotion in his control over this amazing universe. Managing the complexity of innumerable planets of billions of his children, trillions of life forms, and uncountable interactions of matter and energy all while having the capacity to monitor and care for each one should provide a ready source of physical and mental stimulation along with all accompanying emotions to keep someone like our Heavenly Father working and doing for an eternity. To cease acting would create a loss of these emotions and so in selflessly working to produce to give us power and control, he is rewarded by us. Enough desirable emotion that he would continue to do it.

This makes him an integral part of the universe. Always maintaining the ability to cease, but in never doing so he becomes everlasting and eternal. Not even matter and packets of energy can tout these qualities and yet he is infinitely more complex than the universe and life in their entireties.

Thinking this way provided some relief to a troubled spot in my mind: What would you do with all of that time and ability after a couple of eternities have passed? I admit, I don't feel satisfied with the written explanation I've given, but it worked out better in my head an hour ago when my emotions were running stronger and before I had to sift out the rational parts that fit into simple text.