Unspent Thoughts

I am writing a science fiction novel about creatures I call Quantum Demons. They are clouds of particles entangled across many universes. There are simpler forms I call sprites, elves and imps. They're all programmable to perform complex operations and the Demons can merge with human brains.

So, how do you program something with no eyes, ears, nose or physical body?

To help me visualize the problem, I have been playing with little Arduino boards. They can easily be configured to read and analyze temperatures or light levels, to detect the presence of people in a room, to rotate wheels and many other things. And there is a new toy device available, a cute little robot named Sparki. Well, it will be available about October of 2013. It is a Kickstarter project that is trying to gain funding, through pledges, until the end of May. The pledge amount that gets you a Sparki robot, fully constructed and operational, is $99. Last year I pledged $50 to Ardusat, the Arduino satellite project and am still waiting for its launch, which should happen on October.

Sparki has two driver wheels, a gripper, a display and a large set of sensors. It can be controlled with an infrared controller, similar to a television remote, or, for $20 more, by Bluetooth. You can read on Kickstarter's Web page.

I have less than two weeks to decide whether to invest or not and at what level.

There is a commercial showing now about a little robot called Mint. I don't know what it costs but it sweeps or mops floors with Swiffer pads. Roomba is a similar small robot that vacuums floors. Robots are becoming cheap and popular. And in my case, they represent a special way of thinking about the universe.

Delia left San Diego for Beijing yesterday morning. I had to get up at 03:00 to wake Delia and Stella; Cathy got up on her own. Everything was packed, ready to throw in the truck for the trip to the airport. I wasn't invited, so I was able to return to bed by 05:00. I then slept until nearly 11:00. I don't do well when my sleep is disturbed like this, so I felt miserable all day despite a ninety minute nap. For the next three weeks, Delia will be touring China and out of touch.

I didn't make any coffee yesterday, which shows how bad I was feeling. I have no clear memory of anything that happened yesterday after Delia left. Cathy was gone almost all day, so I was alone except for the dog. I'm sure I ate something but it's hard to remember exactly what. I do remember throwing some breakfast sausages into my new cast iron pot and I must have eaten them. I probably had a salad and some fruit, too. I don't think I left the house.

Today is clearer. I had my usual egg and nuts for breakfast. I made a pot of coffee. I chopped two large, softball-sized onions and heated them in the pot until they browned. Later I chopped a small head of Romaine lettuce into narrow ribbons, added about a tablespoon of olive oil to the onions, threw the hot onions onto the lettuce and mixed them in. I didn't add salt or anything else. That was my lunch. Later, for a snack, I cooked up five strips of bacon, which I ate with a banana and two oranges. I have spent my day either on the computer or watching television. Or taking care of Rocky, Cathy's dog.

Today hasn't been very different from most of my days. But with Delia out of touch, my day seems longer than usual.

Four feet two inches, corner to corner. It was on sale for the same price as forty inches.

Our old television was dying: the colors were wrong, the brightness too low, the sound uncontrollably variable, everything unstable. It was an analog color set we purchased in Panama three or four decades ago. It weighed a ton. It had served us well.

I had been researching new digital televisions for over half a year but had been able to keep the old set running. Delia didn't want anything really big, but I wanted something around forty inches so I could read stuff on the screen. Cathy thought we should get something in the thirty-two to thirty-six inch range. Even that would have been bigger than the old set. Not even I considered fifty inches until we saw the sale price.

The set dominates our living room. We will have to buy a new, shorter table to put it on.

At first, we couldn't get a signal. Cathy couldn't find her spare HDMI cable, so we had to use the old analog cable and adjust the set to use it. Cathy got our DVD player connected right away, so we could watch movies from our DVD collection, but we had to wait several hours while Cathy was at work, before she figured out how to access the manual and set up the cable connection.

Delia doesn't like the 16:9 aspect ratio, preferring the old analog 4:3 aspect ratio. She is right that the analog cable connection degrades the picture, but an inexpensive HDMI cable will fix that problem. She is unaware we can download content directly from the Internet, much for free. I have made no attempt to set up Internet access. Yet. And there's no point in adjusting color, contrast, brightness, sharpness or tint until we're operating completely digitally. She is ready to return the set to the store.

I like the set. Its size seems perfect for my old eyes and it has the potential to serve as long as the old set did, much longer than I'll be able to appreciate it. It feels comfortable. It feels right.

For many years, people have been warning against eating fatty meats, just as they used to warn that eating eggs would increase cholesterol levels dangerously, despite copious evidence to the contrary. I see that now the medical industry says they were wrong about eggs all of those decades, that eggs are actually good for you and a cheap source of protein, as I have been saying ever since they started warning about eggs. Now it is becoming difficult to find a piece of meat with any fat in it ... now that I'm seeing a naturopathic doctor who says my body isn't getting enough fat to support fat-soluble vitamins. About the only fatty meats available to me are bacon, pork shoulder and beef chuck.

So pork shoulder has become my favorite meat.

I usually just toss chunks of meat into my little crock pot and let them cook until I'm ready to eat, which requires some planning. A small amount of meat can cook in a couple of hours on the high setting and as large a chunk as will fit the pot can cook for days on the medium setting. The meat tastes best with a minimum of stuff on it, so I mostly just use a sprinkle of Bragg's Aminos, a soy sauce substitute. Yesterday I had a package of crimini mushrooms that I had gotten to fry up. Delia wanted to add one or two to her salad, so I told her to take as many as she wanted, then I took a dozen or so, washed them up and tossed them into the crock pot on top of the pork shoulder that was already cooking.

The mushrooms didn't fare that well. They shrunk and got a bit leathery. But what they did to the broth forming from the slow cooking pork was wonderful. Nothing but pork, mushrooms and a few drops of aminos -- no salt, no water, no anything else -- produced nearly a cup of a jus I felt I could drink a gallon of.

I have been confined to the house for over a week because of diarrhea. Yesterday, I took large amounts of probiotic. My normal probiotic capsule is rated at 10 billion live organisms; the one my doctor sent me is rated at 80 billion live organisms. Between the two, I consumed about 280 billion live organisms, bacteria known to protect the body. Today, for the first time since the diarrhea started, I'm going to venture forth from my sanctuary to have my toenails trimmed.

The diarrhea hasn't stopped but it has slowed down. I get enough warning now to make it to the toilet in time to avoid making a mess. Other good things have happened:

• My blood sugar dropped from an average of 150 to 92;


• The swelling in my right leg has disappeared;


• The inflammation in my legs has diminished from dark red to a rosy tan and the skin is no longer hot to the touch;


• I feel better.

In addition to the probiotic, I have been taking vitamin C. Its acidity should help the probiotic to thrive and I recently learned that vitamin C helps the adrenals; my adrenals need all of the help they can get. I suspended all of my regular supplements, to keep from inflaming my intestine, except that I took one magnesium capsule yesterday.

There is a battle going on in my gut. I want the good bugs to win.

A few (or many) days ago, somebody on the television show "The Chew" commented that people who prepare their own food live forty percent longer than those who purchase food that somebody else has prepared for them. I am one of those strange people who would like to live forever. Failing that, I would like to reach twice my current age, a gross of years. This no longer seems quite so impossible. Nothing more was said on the subject and I have no way of knowing if the numbers were invented or the result of research.

I have survived a number of adverse predictions. In the 1970s a doctor predicted that I would die of a stroke within ten years. Thankfully, he was wrong. They say that the odds of a forty-year-old man reaching fifty are much lower that those of a fifty-year-old man reaching seventy. Well, I got past the forty / fifty trap. I've reached 72 while the oldest man / woman / person in the world has reached something like 110 to 115. I would like to continue to be healthy when I become the oldest person in the world. Another prediction I've heard that intrigues me is that the first person to reach the age of 150 will be born very close to the birth time of the first person to live to 1,000 years. The time is nearing when somebody will live for a very long time. Why not me?

I pretty much have to prepare my own food anyway. Nobody else in the family has the same dietary limitations I do and none of them understand what I can or cannot consume safely. I want to be able to eat the things I used to, but I can tell that they harm me. Hell, even the raw salads I eat are not as good for me as they would be cooked. Despite a number of experiments that I've done on myself, my body refuses to thrive on grains or legumes, even when soaked for long periods to destroy the phythates they contain. I have to severely limit my consumption of foods high in carbohydrates because I've shown that eating them makes my blood sugar (and probably my blood pressure) go wild for several days. I need fats and I need organ meats (even though I take a couple of supplements to provide similar nutrients).

How long do people who frequently eat at fast food places live? I don't know. Nor do I know the expected life spans of those who frequently eat out or those who purchase prepared foods. So far as I know, those statistics don't get reported. So I don't know what my base line is. If it is sixty years, +40% would be 84; if it is seventy, 98.

I've said before that I'll stop experimenting on myself. I won't. Every day is part of an experiment in living longer.

I hope to keep experimenting for a long time to come.

Perhaps forever.

Because of my diabetes, I go in every six months (it used to be every four months) to have my retinas scanned for signs of diabetic retinopathy. Once, several years ago, the doctor found damage, which he fixed with a laser device. I have managed to avoid further damage for several years now by controlling my blood sugar levels. But going back every few months makes changes stand out.

One change affected all eye exams, replacing a series of projectors and mirrors that project the combinations of letters they use to judge your ability to see with computer monitors. The projectors and mirrors had a single purpose, projecting those letter combinations in a variety of sizes. The computer screens can be used for several things, including showing the patient what damage is taking place in the retina.

The actual retinal scan is still being done manually using a very bright light source and hand-held lenses. The doctor dictates what he sees to an assistant, who writes it to the computer record manually. But they also started photographing the retina, for later reference, over a year ago. They have had a major upgrade to their retinal camera systems with the new devices producing a much more detailed result. Today they showed me the pictures of my retinas taken a year ago and tried to explain what the picture showed. I couldn't see many of the things they tried to point out to me. I expect that when I return in August they will have images that more clearly show what is happening.

Basically, the doctor today confirmed that what he saw with his bright light and hand lens looked pretty much the same as the images taken a year ago. I have to take his word for it. I didn't see what he saw, either through the lenses or in the displayed images. I could see the scars from the laser treatment a few years ago and I could see the end of the optic nerve and the various blood vessels but I couldn't make out the blobs of blood that the doctor said were there. I must also take his word for there being no cloud of blood or other stuff floating around the inside of my eyes; it was all too murky. I also didn't see a proliferation of new blood vessels that weren't there, signs of developing problems. It's hard to see that something isn't there.

What I did see was a doctor very happy with his new toys, the devices that may make his ability to peer within patients' eyes much easier. He was proud of the new imaging system and he let it show. Perhaps he suffers as much as I do when he shines the bright light into my eyes and looks at the interior of my eyeballs through his hand-held lenses. The red glow that persists several minutes after the light is shut off probably happens to him, too. He did comment on it. The camera, on the other hand, didn't cause me any difficulty or aftereffects and the images go into the computer record of my eye health for future reference. Perhaps he will continue to use his bright light and lenses for several more years, but I'm sure that future imaging devices will make them obsolete and pointless. And the doctor will be able to continue to provide superior care without them.

By the way, my vision is still 20-20 or better and there seems to be little risk of future problems if I continue to control my blood sugars. And I saw that new technology is making care of my eyes easier and better.

Forty little flashlights for under $8.00 total; how could I pass up such a deal? There were roughly equal numbers of red, white, blue and green flashlights, the light from each the color of the case. All forty seem to work although the switch on some is a bit difficult to move. One was turned on when it arrived and was still producing a bright light.

Each little plastic flashlight has a single LED, three battery cells, a switch and a rubber band that will hold the flashlight on your finger. You can't replace the battery, which doesn't matter with such cheap things. They may be sold as toys but they are useful.

I had a small red flashlight that I bought several years ago. It had nine LED lights and used three AAA cells. It got dropped once too often and now the base, which contains the toggle switch, won't stay in place. Delia and I both used it frequently.

I was looking for a replacement for the little red flashlight on Amazon when I found the little multicolored lights being sold for toys, for finger lights to delight the kiddies in the evenings when they get together and boredom sets in. As usual, I looked at the user comments and was surprised to see so many good reports, both as cheap toys and as something useful. Even the person who received six defective flashlights in his shipment was happy with the lights. There was one person who found two defectives and everybody else seems to have received 100% good lights. My shipment seems to be 100% good, too.

It appears that the lights have been sold for a long time, long enough for the price to drop from under fifty cents each to under twenty cents. I doubt you can buy the batteries that cheaply.

I also ordered a little solar-powered lantern. It looks like a cheap drinking tumbler with a red lid. It has an indicator light on the body to show when it's charging, and room light seems adequate to keep it charged. I intend to keep it outside the closet where my cable modem and wireless router sit. I always have problems resetting the modem and router because I can't see what I'm doing. I expect to use it a couple of times each week because the wireless is forever going out. The light it produces seems adequate for my purpose … and any light is an improvement over trying to reset switchless equipment in a dark closet.

Amazon also lists a flashlight that appears identical to the one that got broken but I didn't bother ordering it. I'll wait until I use up all of the tiny flashlights I got. Then I may just order another forty little lights.

When I was in my teens, I used to save the bones from every meal in plastic bags in the freezer. When I had enough bones -- turkey, chicken, beef and pork, mostly -- I would toss them in a pot, add a cup or so of vinegar and let them simmer for two or three days, then strain the milky liquid off of the remains of the bones. When only slightly older, I got a pressure cooker, which cut the cooking time to a quarter day with the solid remains so completely disintegrated they appeared like coarse sand. I mostly used an eight quart pot, so I called the soup I made from the stock "Eight Gallon Soup in a Two Gallon Pot".

I added meat and vegetables to the stock to make soup. I kept adding vegetables each day for about five days, the vegetable for the last day being either turnips or rutabagas. The soup gets sour if you keep going after adding either of these two roots. The second day soup was usually the best.

I just did something similar on a smaller scale. I used my small slow cooker to boil up the bones from a single roast chicken, with half a cup of white vinegar for maximum extraction of minerals from the bones, allowing the bones to simmer for about twenty hours before straining and making soup. It took about four hours for the bones to get up to simmering temperature, so the cooking time on the bone stock was about sixteen hours. To make the soup, I added one onion, two carrots, about twenty brussels sprouts, about two inches of fresh ginger root and a single squirt of Bragg's Aminos. No salt or other spices were used.

I now use a ceramic knife to slice vegetables, so the carrots, onion and ginger were sliced very, very thin. I let the soup cook for just ten minutes, then served myself almost half of it. It was sweet and good but the ginger still had a kick to it. When I got a second serving, the ginger was less potent and the soup tasted better. Ginger goes well with carrots. Both onion and carrot contributed to the pronounced sweetness of the soup.

My current version of the bone stock soup was just as satisfying as that I used to produce fifty-some years ago.

The other morning I woke with the phrase "The hours turn to minutes and swiftly they are gone" rattling in my brain. I thought they might have come from the song "Windmills of Your Mind" from the Steve McQueen movie "The Thomas Crown Affair". I've been looking at several versions of the lyrics, watching clips from the movie, and listening to a variety of renditions of the song and that phrase doesn't appear in any of them. I used to like Windmills a lot but haven't thought about it for years.

If anybody recognizes the phrase and can direct me to its source, I would greatly appreciate it.