Too late for a midlife crisis

Like joining the Procrastinator’s Club, I never got around to having a midlife crisis. I always was a late bloomer.

Now I’m old, so it’s too late…but I can combine a midlife crisis with an old age crisis – so I’m making some big changes today.

Out go all of my bikes, to be replaced with a Lamborghini. Granted, it’s a 1967 Lamborghini Miura, the car I wanted as a teen, so it’s older than any of the bikes. That makes it okay.

Image from MUDETEC Museo Della Tecnologie

Out go the canoe and the kayak – too much work for an old guy. I’m replacing them with a Chris Craft, the boat that my father taught me to covet in my youth. Again, it’s older than the boats it’s replacing, so it’s still okay. All of that beautiful mahogany…

The espresso machine will go, to be replaced by a giant coffee urn, so I can brew that horrible church basement coffee where the water keeps circulating through the grounds until it takes like burnt mud. I’ll drink many cups every day in my old English bone china cups. (Now, bone china, that’s another story. See my friend Roy’s blog “About Bone” for that. Actually, I guess it’s in one of his books, as I didn’t find it in a blog search. Suffice to say it is made with real bones. You can read Roy’s blog anyway.)

The kids are grown so the minivan will be replaced by a Morgan Plus Four. The Morgan is hand-built on an oak subframe. The retro bikers say, “Steel is real.” I say “Wood is good.”

Of course my wife has to go. Since the theme here is “Out with the old, in with the older”, I don’t plan to take up with a Hollywood starlet as so many old men do. I can’t afford to be a sugar daddy. I’m now dating Helen Mirren. She can afford to keep me better than vice versa.

I’ve been reading a lot about micro-dosing. Psychedelics scare me, so I’m going with Rogaine. What do you think so far? Maybe Grecian Formula next? Or Carter’s Little Liver Pills? Geritol? Possibly Serutan. (“Remember, ‘Serutan’ spelled backward spells ‘Natures’.”)

It may be time to turn in the smart phone. I’m not sure what’s next. Possibly a rotary phone, though in this digital world I can only receive, not make, calls; and no one calls me except telemarketers. I thought about a tin can telephone with branches to connect the homes of all of the stalwarts of the half-fast cycling club. A telegraph key might do the trick. I can brush up on my Morse Code and the signal will travel lightning fast over fiber optics.

Image from SpecialtyAnsweringService.net

Father William

“You are old, father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head —
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

“In my youth,” father William replied to his son,
“I feared it would injure the brain;
But now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door —
Pray, what is the reason of that?”

“In my youth,” said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
“I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment — one shilling the box —
Allow me to sell you a couple.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak —
Pray, how did you manage to do it?”

“In my youth,” said his father, “I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life.”

“You are old,” said the youth; one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose —
What made you so awfully clever?”

“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”
Said his father; “don’t give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I’ll kick you down stairs!”

“That is not said right,” said the Caterpillar.
“Not quite right, I’m afraid,” said Alice timidly;
“some of the words have got altered.”
“It is wrong from beginning to end,”
said the Caterpillar decidedly, and
there was silence for some minutes.
Lewis Carroll

What would SCUBA do?

Bicycle is to car as SCUBA is to snorkel.

In a car I can see the world through a windshield, as though watching it on TV as I zoom through it. On a bike I can be in and of that world.

I will never forget my first snorkeling experience. I was on the island of San Andrés (a Colombian territory off the coast of Nicaragua) at a place called “La Piscina Natural” (The Natural Swimming Pool). The bottom was about 30 feet below, and that’s where the action was. Floating on the surface, looking down through my mask, was watching another world. For the brief moments I could stay that deep on a breath of air, it was being in another world. I spent an afternoon going up and down. I knew I had to find a way into that world.

Jacques Cousteau (the co-inventor of the AquaLung, the means of getting into that world) said “the best way to observe a fish is to become a fish” (National Geographic, 1952). I knew I had to become a fish.

Several years later I was preparing for a trip to Australia to visit an old friend – the friend with whom I had gone to Colombia, though he hadn’t joined me for the underwater portion of the journey. Another friend said “You’re going to dive the Great Barrier Reef, right?” I said I didn’t know how to dive. She reminded me I had plenty of time to learn, so I found a PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) 5 star diving school and got certified. As part of our introductions, the instructor asked each of us why we were learning to dive. His response to me was “I hate you.” Twenty years of diving and he had never seen the Great Barrier Reef. It was going to be my first dive destination. He reminded me of my awesome responsibility. It was in that reef that I was introduced to my favorite life form – the nudibranch.

Now I knew I was in another world. After diving in a different part of the reef every day for a week, I went on to see a few more places in Australia before a stopover in Fiji on the way home. In Australia, we were on a dive boat with a divemaster who told us what to expect at each spot. In Fiji we were in a tiny aluminum fishing boat whose driver just asked, “How deep do you want to dive?” When we reached our spot, he merely tossed the anchor over the side and looked at us. We were on our own. We were parked at a wall which started about 8 feet below us and dropped to a sandy bottom 60 feet down.

We went over the side. As I descended the wall, I was Alice going down the rabbit hole.

Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labelled “ORANGE MARMALADE”, but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody underneath, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.
From Chapter 1, “Down the Rabbit Hole” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

I made my way slowly down the wall, noting little plants and animals in niches on the way, noting the changes in flora and fauna as I went deeper. We checked out the world at the bottom, then slowly made our way back up another section of wall.

For our second dive we were taken to a canyon. Imagine that, instead of standing at the top of a canyon, or climbing to the bottom, you could fly through it, going up or down at will. That is the experience of an underwater canyon and SCUBA – the gift of flight.

In SCUBA you seek a state of neutral buoyancy – neither heavier nor lighter than the atmosphere that surrounds you. Take a deep breath and you rise subtly. Exhale and you descend. You are floating, weightless. You are in another world. As Cousteau said, you have “become a fish.”

And that is why I rode a bike across the country. And why I continue to ride. After seeing another world, I became more appreciative of this one. I ride to be in and of the world, not just passing through it. (10)

Don’t go quoting research to me…

unless you actually read it. And I don’t mean an article about it in the popular or the propaganda press. Those articles were clickbait even before the term came into existence. If it’s sensational and it’s new, it gets press. If it’s later debunked by half a dozen other researchers, it gets much less.

Remember cold fusion? (Fleischmann and Pons, 1989, Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry) A great scientific breakthrough, until it wasn’t.

We should all know the great autism/vaccine hoax. It was first proposed that autism was caused by the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine. (Wakefield, The Lancet, 1997 – later retracted). When that was debunked, it was proposed that it wasn’t the MMR vaccine but thimerosal in vaccines that caused autism.

While it is true that mercury (thimerosal is metabolized to ethylmercury and thiosalicylate) is toxic (mercury was used in the production of felt for hats -hence the term “mad as a hatter” and the character The Mad Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), autism continued even after thimerosal was eliminated from many vaccines.

Then it was proposed that vaccines in general cause autism, and the rise in the autism diagnosis was posited to parallel the rise in mass vaccination in the 1950s and ’60s. Somehow that was proposed as proof. Conveniently left out of that argument is that the first treatment center for autism was established in 1953 and the first epidemiological study of autism was published in 1966 (The Foundations of Autism, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2014). The reason the diagnosis increased in the 50s and 60s is that it was accepted as a diagnosis and studied beginning at that time. (Also see Publichealth.org “Vaccine Myths Debunked”)

I could argue with equal fervor that autism was caused by the Cold War. I could construct a compelling argument that the childhood fears brought on by “duck and cover” drills and the fear of nuclear annihilation caused mass psychosis that we came to know as autism, but it would be a waste of my time and yours because, no matter how compelling, I just made it up. Correlation does not equal causation, and two things happening in similar times don’t have to have anything to do with each other.

So no, reading an article about an article, and one intended to sell ads, is not reading or understanding science.

And I don’t mean that if you read the abstract you know what you’re talking about. The British Medical Journal published “Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials” (2003). The abstract indicates that no randomised [the article uses the British spelling] controlled trials were found. Their literature review found that “The perception that parachutes are a successful intervention is based largely on anecdotal evidence. Observational data have shown that their use is associated with morbidity and mortality, due to both failure of the intervention^1,2 and iatrogenic complications.³ In addition, “natural history” studies of free fall indicate that failure to take or deploy a parachute does not inevitably result in an adverse outcome.⁴” [Look at all those citations! It must be credible!]

In plain English: we think parachutes work because we’ve heard they work, but in our literature review we found that some people who use parachutes die and some people who don’t use parachutes survive.

As a result, a randomized controlled trial was undertaken. In 2018, the same journal published “Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial” (Yeh, et al BMJ, 2018). [For some reason, these authors used the American spelling.] From the abstract:

“Intervention: Jumping from an aircraft (airplane or helicopter) with a parachute versus an empty backpack (unblinded).

Main outcome measures: Composite of death or major traumatic injury (defined by an Injury Severity Score over 15) upon impact with the ground measured immediately after landing.

Results: Parachute use did not significantly reduce death or major injury (0% for parachute v 0% for control; P>0.9). This finding was consistent across multiple subgroups.

Conclusions: Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention.” [Yeh, et al, 2018]

I could write a sensational article based on that abstract. Or I could read farther: “However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps.”

The article isn’t merely a joke […though as a joke, it is great. I recommend the article to anyone who reads scientific literature on a regular basis. It uses all the lingo you’re accustomed to and includes statistical analysis of the findings. It analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the trial in apparent seriousness. If you like British humour, read it. Available at pubmed.org without a subscription. Search by title. I didn’t link to it, in order to make you do some work.]. It warns that: “When beliefs regarding the effectiveness of an intervention exist in the community, randomized trials might selectively enroll individuals with a lower perceived likelihood of benefit, thus diminishing the applicability of the results to clinical practice.”

The crux of the issue: “The PARACHUTE trial satirically highlights some of the limitations of randomized controlled trials. Nevertheless, we believe that such trials remain the gold standard for the evaluation of most new treatments. The PARACHUTE trial does suggest, however, that their accurate interpretation requires more than a cursory reading of the abstract. Rather, interpretation requires a complete and critical appraisal of the study.” (Yeh, et al, 2018) (Emphasis added)

Note: Any relationship between this posting and current COVID-19 hoax and conspiracy claims is purely intentional. Be careful out there!

“Sentence first – verdict afterwards.”

And so the Red Queen announced the sentence, “Off with her head!” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I thought this was absurdity or satire, not news, when I read it.

The news is at least as absurd. On Tuesday night, our only president announced his victory in the election before the votes were counted. He tweeted “Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed” – not that anyone was trying to cast ballots after the polls had closed, but they were attempting to count ballots after the polls are closed – that’s sorta the way it works. It appears that he considers counting the votes to be STEALing the election. He announced that his leads were “magically” disappearing as “surprise ballot dumps were counted”; which appears to mean that he didn’t want the absentee ballots to be counted, or maybe there were just certain counties whose ballots he didn’t want counted.

I’ve never really understood election results watching as a spectator sport. It seems like watching a sporting event in which all you can see is the scoreboard. The excitement, such as it is, is to watch the numbers change, not to watch the athletes at work. Co-workers stayed up late, or woke up in the middle of the night due to anxiety, turning on the TV to see what was happening.

As this is being written, the score is either 248-214 or 253-214, depending on which scoreboard you’re looking at. (One of them just changed – during proofreading – to 264-214; the other is still at 248-214.) It appears to be the ninth inning, the 4th quarter, or the third period if you’re a hockey fan. The trouble with this sport is that after the game is over the score could still change. Points could be transferred from one to the other because the final score isn’t really final for over a month, even though we all want to wake up to a final score on Wednesday morning, or stay up to see it Tuesday night. We could go into overtime, only to have the Supreme Court suddenly declare Game Over. The way it looks right now, if each wins all of the states in which he is considered to be leading, it is a Biden victory 270-268. The trouble with that is that Biden’s leads are slim and Trump’s leads (particularly in PA, the biggest prize remaining) are larger. Not to mention that there will certainly be demands for a recount, especially if Mr. Trump loses – he is already demanding recounts and hasn’t lost yet.

I see three possible scenarios: 1) Trump wins and we have 4 more years of this madness; 2) Trump loses and has almost 12 weeks in which to metaphorically torch everything on his way out (or, for another metaphor, the Trump administration is like a rock band that has already been paid and trashes the hotel suite on the last night); or 3) the Supreme Court hands him the election in a replay of 2000. I’m not really sure which is worst.

My fantasy is that he loses and refuses to abdicate. Biden is sworn in and the Secret Service forcefully evicts the former president on January 21. Maybe the sheriff could toss his belongings to the curb. Maybe we could see a perp walk to a waiting squad car, hands cuffed behind his back. The charges? Criminal trespass, impersonating the President. (18 U.S. Code § 912)

Then the indictments begin. The RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act seems ideally suited for this. Then we have tax evasion (like Al Capone), fraud charges for the funds he diverted from his charitable organization, the Emoluments Clause, and various state charges. Who gets to extradite him first? Or can we pronounce the “sentence first – verdict later”?

As spectator sports go, I gotta admit I’m enjoying the NBC Extended Highlights of La Vuelta a España much more than this presidential race. They don’t go online until late afternoon but they’re worth waiting for.