PTSD

Estimates that as many as 52,000 of the troops returning from Iraq may suffer PTSD (reference Veterans for America website). Regardless of the number, there is no doubt that many soldiers suffer from this condition.

Recent NPR reports from Daniel Zwerdling brought to light conditions at Ft. Carson Colorado, where soldiers that had PTSD were being denied treatment and harassed and mistreated if they admitted to having a problem.

One soldier fought back and won a courtmartial case they were bringing against him, and in the process, started helping other veterans that were afflicted and persecuted by the Army. He is now working for Veterans for America in Denver and his name is Andrew Pogany.

Everyone remembers the scene from the movie Patton, supposedly based on a true story, where a shell shocked soldier is slapped around by General Patton and called a coward because he wasn't really wounded. This famous example is typical of how people feel about the disease, even those that suffer through it. Certainly, the thought that men's minds can erode or snap under the pressure of combat is a terrifying thought to military strategists, trainers, and commanders. How are we to successfully conduct a war if the process disrupts the abilities of the main tool we use to fight, the soldier? In war, we use equipment and plan for the certainty that it will eventually wear out and break through repeated use without any maintenance, yet we don't treat our soldiers as if they are capable of wearing out or breaking. My analogy is ironic, because I am proposing to treat soldiers more humanely by treating them more like machines.

I was listening to a podcast about a University of Lubeck (Germany) experiment where slow wave oscillations were put into subjects heads through electrodes as they fell asleep. These waves simulate the natural waves that people's brains generate as they fall asleep. Researchers speculate that this is an indicator, or the evidence of the way the brain consolidates the activities of the day into long term memory. Many scientists have questioned the purpose of sleep, and a few have theorized that this is when the brain organizes itself and maintains its health. A recent study of a family group with an affliction robbing them of sleep showed that increasingly erratic behavior, memory problems, and eventually death resulted from a prolonged loss of sleep.

I think that this is part of combat induced PTSD. I speculate that a combination of lack of sleep, high degrees of stress from extreme survival instinct, and having to deal with a situation that is just incompatible, contradictory, and intractable would imbalance most people's minds. I believe that the sleep disruption is interrupting the proper integration of soldier's memories and thoughts into their minds. When they do sleep, the hair trigger they acquire to assist with their survival is disrupting their sleep patterns. They have a huge load of mental material to process. They think they are doing their patriotic duty for a country that doesn't appreciate them, and doesn't want them there. They are told they are in the country to help the people that are trying to kill them. They go out to do missions each day, which they cannot refuse, because they are in the military, and their instincts are telling them that this is dangerous and stupid and they should not go out there into the danger, but their sense of duty gives them no choice. They watch friends die and wonder if there is any point in their sacrifice. They listen to their training briefings about how the enemy will attack them, then they see that their threat is everywhere, or the enemy changes tactics. They are in a no-win situation. Does anyone think that a sane person can endure an insane situation long without being infected by it?

Those that come back and do seek and get help for PTSD are taught about their triggers. These triggers are sounds, smells, sights, or some kind of stimuli that puts them back in the mental situation of their distress. They often can't sleep and self medicate to escape the continued stress. Some describe feeling as if the bad situations they endured in combat will not quit happening in their mind. They keep replaying and repeating, keeping the stressors fresh in their mind. One form of treatment exposes the soldiers to their triggers in a safe environment, being told over and over that the environment is safe. Eventually, they can dismantle or decrease their own triggers. Therapy alone has helped many PTSD sufferers get some relief from their condition. Others benefit from time, which seems to erode the condition down to a less severe level. Some never really get better, and many commit suicide.

I believe that the slow wave oscillation inducer could be used in conjunction with therapy to help cure the condition. I think that the brain gets off track and cannot get back to the point where it can incorporate what is happening. With some external reinforcement, perhaps the restful, restoring sleep can be reinitiated and the soldier can begin to assimilate the things that happened and understand and accept them.

Perhaps this therapy could be used in the field. Once a soldier is removed from danger and provided adequate security during sleep, these devices could be made available to the soldier. If the use of externally boosted slow wave oscillators improves memory, as the studies indicate, it could have an additional benefit. Besides not allowing the sleep patterns to become disrupted in the first place, it could help soldiers remember and assimilate the things that happened during the day. If the mind works on the problems of the dangers it faces during the waking hours while it sleeps, perhaps the solutions of how to avoid dangers will come more naturally, and our soldiers will get better at avoiding dangers and surviving their combat experience. And maybe they can then come home, healthy and whole and enjoy the reward of a normal life that they have more than earned through their service.

Preserve What's Important

I was listening to a podcast this morning where a 9 year old girl whose parents were going through a divorce was asking for help and understanding in her difficult times.

She was asking for advice, and trying to somehow make her parents get back together. The question was, what advice would you give to her.

Without thinking, I thought "Preserve What's Important". My advice wasn't to the little girl, it was to her parents. If they have to be apart the most important thing they can preserve is their daughter's love.

Then I realized that the axiom was a simple statement of what I believe.

I consider myself an environmentalist, interested in preserving the environment in general, but also very sad to see any species go extinct. When you consider that the web of life is a rich thick tapestry with all the creatures woven into it, you don't want someone wantonly picking away at the threads. You want it preserved intact.

I want natural sites from the big and obvious like Yellowstone, to the local streams and woods left alone, unmolested by the bulldozer. Conventional wisdom from City Planners say that capitalism in the form of development is good. Communities around here are throwing money and tax breaks at already rich developers and investors to come and exploit what natural areas there are "Come here! Build! Build! Build! No restrictions!" I disagree. Those money men will come and make another pile of money off their wheelings and dealings, but they'll be gone tomorrow from our community and we'll be stuck with one less lake, one less grove of trees, and many displaced wild animals. Preserve what's important. The world before we came and trampled it and paved it.

This can be applied to businessmen. There are many temptations to do and say the thing that it would take to get that sale, close that deal, make that aquisition. What good does it do to to win today if there won't be a tomorrow because no one trusts you? Or, if you are really ruthless, and keep winning at the expense of others, what good does it do to sit alone in your house on a huge pile of money if no one loves, cares, or respects you?

Preserve what's important. For a soldier, this means your life. Do what you have to do, but get home. You can always sort it all out and learn to live with it, but if you're dead, there's no way to live with it.

Preserve what's important. For an individual in their career development, that means gray matter. You won't be able to take anything physical with you when or if the company you work for now lets you go or goes under, but you can take what you learned from your experience. So it's more important to learn than anything else you do in a job. It's the only thing you'll get to preserve later.

Preserve what's important. In your personal life, that means the love and respect of the people in your family. You have to do what it takes to keep the connections alive, insure that they have all the help they need to get through life, and make sure they know how important they are to you.

That's what is important.

Gone Fishin'

When I was a kid, my dad would take us fishing.

We lived near Lake Jacomo, built in the 50's, probably by damming up some prime farmland, and damning it to sit under a lake from then on.

We loved the lake, it had shelter houses and docks and rented out pontoon boats for fishing out away from the edge from time to time.

The lake has a great deal of land around it that was made into a park. There are no private houses on the lake, and speed boats or wave runners are allowed. This lake is an old fashioned, slow paced walk back in time.

Over the years, I've spent a lot of time out there. We went to picnics in the shelters in addition to fishing. As a teenager, I used to sneak around out there, trying not to get in trouble. I remember one time we were right next to the lake in the winter, and the lake was frozen. I was with 3 friends and we started throwing rocks on the lake ice. It made these weird eerie sounds like some demon playing the violin. I understand now that the thin ice was vibrating near some resonance frequency, but at the time, it was just an unexpected and unexplained delight.

Later, I discovered the "Hooved Animal Enclosure" where they keep Elk & Bison. Although you are not supposed to feed these animals, that's exactly what everyone does. They bring bags of carrots to stick through the chain link fence. There is something deliciously dangerous feeling about sticking a carrot into the mouth of an enormous bull elk with a rack of antlers that looks like it could shred you like cabbage.

There are great paths around the lake, complete with mud, mosquitos, and chiggers, but uncluttered with manmade things and empty of other people. One year, I discovered an old road that was blocked off with a single pole swing gate, and I decided to walk it. I found white and pink wild roses that had gone nuts, climbing up and into trees, sometimes 10 or 12 feet high. The road bed was cracked and full of weeds, but still had faint centerlines painted on it. It ran into the lake. This was a road left over from before the lake was made! How cool! Going back up the hill, I found myself about 8 feet away from a doe with 2 spotted fawns behind it. I froze, not wanting to scare it away. You never get to see deer up that close. The doe started bucking up on its hind legs, pawing at the air and stamping its hooves at me. Finally, the fawns darted away and the doe dropped down and followed, but not before I had time to wonder if the doe would actually attack me to protect the fawns. That same road yielded another find in the spring. Iris and peony beds made me stop and explore a spot beside the road. This must have been someone's yard at one time. Close inspection brought me to a pile of overgrown rubble with a bedspring still visible. So they must have bulldozed the house some time around the time the land was purchased and turned into a park. It was probably the house of someone that came here and homesteaded in the area after the Civil War.

More recently, I've taken to running the hilly roads around the lake in the park. There are plenty of droppings on the roads, showing that in an area where no humans can build, the creatures will thrive. There used to be a spot on one little gravel road where people would stop on their way to or from a day's fishing and a racoon would come out of the woods and beg at their carside. That was a few years back, and I don't know if that racoon taught her offspring the trade or not.

Last weekend while running around the lake, I saw a blue heron on the waterside across a narrow cove. I was running along a road at the water's edge and hoped the heron wouldn't notice me or care, but he finally decided that I was not someone he wanted to hang around and look at. He took off, with his 6 foot wingspan, flying just inches above the mirror smooth water. That was beautiful, but the sound he started making was less than mellifluous. Maybe it was a distress call, but it sounded discordant and alien. Not disturbing, just unexpected from a bird as graceful as that.

This fall, we plan on hiking some of the areas that are not accessible by roads. With all the development going on around here, having a wild park so near is a rare and precious thing.

Cropduster

I took a great vacation a few years ago with my brother Steve and my "kid sister" Rita. Rita is my ex-girlfriend's little sister, and a great travel companion.

We were in Colorado, going across the Alamosa County plains south of the Great Sand Dunes National Monument (why is a naturally occurring feature called a "Monument"? you're supposed to make a monument).

My brother pointed out a small yellow plane and said, "there's a crop duster." I looked over and saw this tiny plane with not much bulk to it. I couldn't see any nozzles on the wings, no piping, and no liquid tanks. Maybe I had a vision of a crop dusting plane from watching Petticoat Junction in my youth, but the plane he pointed out wasn't what I expected in a crop duster.

I said as much, which started somewhat of an eruption on my brother's part. He was mad that I doubted him, and expressed quite vehemently that he knew what he was talking about and this was a crop duster.

Rita and I found it quite hilarious. You've probably been there. At some point in your life, you will experience someone that is quite angry, yet very comical at the same time. Rita and I were laughing hysterically and when Steve wound down, we would start him up again with a simple, "I don't know...." or "I'm not so sure about that..." and it would start again. He was on a roll. He was in one of those times where "at a loss for words" is the furthest from the truth.

I don't think he was quite as furious as he sounded, because we were laughing and he kept on ranting. I think if we really offended him badly, he would have shut up and not said a word.

We had a great rest of the day, trying to climb the Great Sand Dunes, and then leaping down in large loping strides. I was "Sand-tor" that day. We ended up in Taos later that evening and it was really one of those days that are almost perfect.

I can't speak for Rita, but I can say that I really did not think it was a crop duster. Despite Steve's insistence, it just didn't seem right. The plane was just so tiny. I did not doubt that Steve believed it was, I just assumed he was mistaken. Of course, there was no way to prove it, so it was one of those unresolved issues that come up from time to time.

Until we were on the way home. Somewhere out around Garden City Kansas, after looking for ghost towns and climbing the Capulin volcano earlier that day, we were making the long drive back. Suddenly, I noticed that there was one of those little yellow planes that Steve had pointed out earlier and called a crop duster. "Hey, there's one of those planes" was about all I had time to say before it dropped down, leveled out, and started spraying a field. We watched it pull up, bank steeply, and turn around for its next spraying run.

I'll be damned. It was a crop duster.

You rarely get such instant and complete vindication in your life as Steve did that day. Somehow, it wasn't enough. To Rita and I, it was still fun and funny. Steve's rant was easily in the top 3 or 4 funny things I've ever heard in my life. Maybe it's just a show, but to this day, he still gets a little mad when we bring it up. And even though I don't remember much of what he said, to this day it still makes me smile and feel like laughing.

Dangerous Curve

I live on a dangerous curve.

It's a right angle with a steep bank and a downhill grade. We also learned that it is a "compound curve" meaning it has two radii, one smaller than the other. It amounts to a setup to fling unsuspecting cars off the road.

They tell people to slow down to 25 mph, but people rarely do. I've seen so many accidents around this curve over the years that I don't pay attention anymore.

One time a truck that the police were chasing crashed here. It was spike stripped, tires blown out, and lost control and ended up on its side in our neighbor's yard. The man jumped out, like someone coming out of a tank hatch, and tried to run away into the woods. He almost made it, but fell down off the bank of our pond and was caught and dragged off by the police. My brother and I got to watch out the window as we were sitting there watching TV. Sort of like America's Most Wanted in our back yard.

Another time, I was working in the garden and heard tires squealing and looked up in time to see a yellow Corvette hit a tree head on. My first reaction was that whoever was in the car would be pretty scrambled and in dire need of medical attention, so I went inside first and called an ambulance. I came up to the car and a friend in another car had stopped next to him. I told them that I had called 911, and they were in the friend's car and out of there in no time. I suspected that they were drunk, and I wondered if there was anything incriminating in the car. The police showed up at that point, and they told me later that the man was found drunk at his house.

The most interesting crasher was a big burly tattooed biker looking guy. He managed to miss all the trees by the road and go about 100 yards down a hill before he found a tree worthy of hitting. He was so drunk, he wasn't sure what was going on. They couldn't communicate with him, so they assumed that he was hurt and strapped him to a back board. When he started fighting it, they put him in restraints. He was carried to an ambulance handcuffed and strapped down and shouting obscenities at the EMTs and police.

One night, I was watching TV with my cousins and brother. The cousins were visiting from out of town and it was winter time and cold out. A couple of drunk kids came around the curve, went off the road and took out our gas meter and utility pole. The power didn't go out immediately, but the electrical transformer that was on the pole was thrown into a tree next to the pole. The gas was coming out of the busted pipe sticking up out of the ground with a loud hiss, and 20' away, the tranformer was wedged in a tree, sparking like mad. To make matters worst, the kids had flattened all of their tires and were spinning on their hubs on the gravel drive, spewing out sparks. The feared explosion never happened, but we did get to watch all the excitement for about 3 hours. By 9 am the next morning, everything but cable TV was restored.

Most recently, we had a death on the curve. We were out of town and found out about it later. A lady spun out and hit a tree right on her drivers side door. She lived through the crash and was medevaced by helicopter from a field 5 doors down. She died about a week later after lapsing into a coma.

After that, they put a guard rail up. Kinda like locking the barn door after the horse already escaped.

Impact

Jake Brown was competing in the X-Games this week and fell 50 feet to the floor after a mishap with this skateboard. He walked away from the fall. You can check out the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBvCrSjpx9I

Apparently, the only injuries he has are a minor fracture on a vertebra, a broken bone in his wrist, and some liver damage. Watch the video, that's amazingly light damage for the fall that he took.

At the same time this week, reporters were talking about how a lot of people in the Minneapolis bridge collapse fell 65 feet and not only survived, but walked away uninjured. Many of them went to the hospital 2 or 3 days later, finally complaining about their aches and pains, but still, a 65 foot fall is supposed to be fatal.

So how did these people walk away for falls that are supposed to kill you?

Jake Brown actually had time to think about it and was able to twist around to control his landing to minimize the impact. They interviewed him and he claims he thought about the fall of a friend of his while he was falling. His friend fell from a lesser height than Jake, but broke both legs. So he probably thought it through before he was in trouble. He said in an interview after the accident that he planned to fall the way he did. I heard that Army Airborne parachutists hit with the impact of someone jumping off a 2 story building. The way they are trained to survive the fall is to hit on their feet, crumple by collapsing their legs, and roll out across their side, taking up the rest of the force. I think Jake did somthing similar to this. He hit on his feet and that probably took a great deal of the impact. I still wonder why the legs didn't snap under him.

The people that were in cars on the bridge when it fell claim that there were a series of jolts rather than one long fall. Even though the bridge looks like it drops pretty fast, it wasn't freefall, it was getting hung up on the way down, slowing the fall.

Americans used to drive around without seat belts. Car accidents used to kill around 65,000 people a year in the 60s, and I believe we're down to around 40,000 a year. That's with something like twice the total miles travelled for cars, so I'm guessing we've reduced the fatality rate to 1/4 what it was. We finally decided that enough was enough back then and started developing safety features in cars, starting with the seatbelt.

The way the seatbelt works is by making you part of the car. Before seatbelts, accidents were a series of 2 collisions. Your car hit an object and then you flew forward in the car and hit the windshield or steering column. The second little mini collision between the person and the car is what injures the people inside. When you strap yourself in, you become a part of the car, and it takes the brunt of the impact.

A moving object requires energy to stop. In a collision, that energy is used to deform the car. Think of crushing a soda can with your foot. In an accident the car gets hurt, not the person. When engineers started understanding this, they started designing "crumple zones" into the car. Those are places that the car is designed to smash down safely and not smash the people inside. In most cases, this is the frame in the front, below the engine. They also reinforced the cab so that the area where the people are is less likely to crumple. Two other features they designed were a seat that supported your head and airbags to cushion your forward motion. This impact is supposed to be like being smashed between pillows.

In the case of the Minneapolis bridge collapse, the cars are falling straight down while upright. This is not the way a car is designed to impact, but it is the way a car, and the driver in the car, are designed to be supported. I suspect that many of the cars on the bridge would have flat tires (quite a cushion there, like 4 air bags)and probably snapped axles. That would take a lot of the energy out, and then the people are sitting upright in cushioned seats that would take up the rest.

That's just my theory. This is not something you ever want to really test.

Bridging the Gap

The news in Minneapolis this week was unreal. A highway bridge collapsed over the Mississippi during rush hour with vehicles going over the bridge. This tragedy is a rare event that is making many people think about bridges and wonder about how you know if they are safe.

I started doing this in college. My sophomore curriculum in Mechanical Engineering included a Statics course. This is where you learn about the forces in structures, how things want to bend, and how weights and levers affect bodies at rest. The Statics textbook authors loved to use little bridges to illustrate the principles it was teaching. I loved the little bridge designs. The ME's would go on to take this information and use it to design tools and machines. The Civil (Structural) Engineers would actually design bridges. Every freshman engineer is taught about a phenomenon called resonance with the example of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a structure that tore itself to pieces because of wind induced harmonics. You want engineers in training to be very worried about the consequences of failure.

After school I entered the Army, in their Corps of Engineers. Some of the things we were supposed to know was how to inspect and rate existing bridges, how to design and construct bridges, and how to destroy them. Can you guess why we needed to know this? Army Engineers are there to make sure that the rest of the forces can get where they need to get and that the bad guys can't. A river is called a "water obstacle" and the thinking is to either erect that line as an obstacle for the enemies movement and at the same time, to breach that line to facilitate your own movement. So we learn about the breach points, the bridges.

Demolitions of bridges was a fascinating study. You learn that it is surprisingly hard to knock most bridges down. The trick is to find the weak key point and blast away at it, hoping it would take down the rest of the bridge. There are examples of people that drop a center span of a bridge, but not the approaches, so you could easily rebuild the gap and restore the bridge. There are lots of examples of artillery cutting the wires out to the charges and the demolition failing, or charges badly placed that did nothing. Most bridges have a lot of redundancy built into them. Another note about bridge failure, again involving resonance. We were taught that when large formations of soldiers cross bridges, you go to "route step", which is a marching term meaning you break step, or stop having everyone slam their foot down at the exact same time. Supposedly, the combined force of all those footfalls happening simultaneously is enough to sometimes collapse a bridge.

We also had to inspect bridges and rate their load carrying capability and their integrity. This was surprisingly hard to do, because most of the bridges I looked at were made of wood, and most of the guide was about steel bridges. We had to make sure that bridges could handle heavy construction equipment, and most of the guides rated bridges in terms of main battle tanks. I guess a bulldozer is pretty close. This process of inspecting bridges always bothered me. We learned in materials that steel fails by a mechanism called cyclic fatigue. This is like when you bend a metal hanger enough times and eventually it breaks. You can't see cyclic fatigue, usually. The other mechanism that occurs is stress fracture propagation. Many people believe that tiny cracks on the surface of the metal eventually propagate into the center of the structure and widen, weakening the metal. The problem is that you don't know to what degree metal has weakened, and it's not often evident from a visual inspection. You could see these fractures and indications of fatigue with x-rays, but you can't x-ray a whole bridge. So often, we'd inspect and rate a bridge and I would wonder if we missed something or if our estimate was even in the ball park. One time, I was driving with 2 surveyors in the back country in Panama and we came to a tiny sagging suspension bridge in the country. I didn't think we would ever be able to put a pickup truck across it without breaking the bridge. I barely trusted it for foot traffic. The driver insisted, and as I got out and watched from the safety of the road, he slowly drove over the bridge. Stopping in the middle, he looked up and made eye contact with me, smiling, and started bouncing up and down in his seat. It was very funny. He made it across, but I still wonder how that nasty little bridge held him. Another bridge I remember was an ancient suspension bridge 100' over a river in Ecuador. The wooden floor of the bridge was very old and crumbling and several boards were missing. The first time I went over it, my knees were shaking so bad, I could barely walk. After watching a man drive a herd of cattle over the bridge one day, I stopped worrying about it as much. Later, I always stopped in the middle and got the bridge swaying, because by then it was like a fun amusement park ride.

By far, the most fun was building bridges. At school, they always get students to make a span with popsicle sticks or toothpicks, then add weight until it failed. Calvin and Hobbes had a great cartoon where the father explains to Calvin that the way they made highway bridges in a similar way, overloading and breaking it first and then rebuilding it. The Army uses a bridge called the Bailey bridge, which is the tinker toy method of constructing bridges. You use these truss panel sections, and just stack them up differently for different lengths and weight classes. It was in a manual like a book of recipes for bridges. I got to work on building two of them and also found a few already in place that had been in service for years.

When I got to Panama, I got to see one of the coolest bridges in the world, the Bridge of the Americas. This structure, shown in the picture above, spans the mouth of the Panama canal. It is beautiful, but has a strange feature. There are 4 lanes on the bridge. You go up to and over the bridge on two lanes, then it necks down to one lane. So there's only 3 lanes on the approaches (the ones that are still on the bridge, just not the central span). It's harrowing during rush hour traffic, because you rush across the bridge, speeding for placement at the other end, and then you merge dangerously before the lanes come together, honking your horn the whole time. That was the way you drove in Panama. I crossed the bridge every day to go to work.

Sharon, one of my coworkers, read that people's fear of crossing bridges is second only to public speaking of the biggest fears there are. This week's collapse in Minneapolis is probably not going to help that.

First Car

This is close to what my first car looked like. Somehow, this doesn't look quite right. OK, I remember. Mine was a 4 door hatchback. The grill may have been a little different, too

It was a Chevy Chevette, I think from 1980. My dad bought it for me when I went to college. I remember that I didn't get it until after the 2nd or 3rd week I was up at school. I'm not sure how I got around campus before that.

I loved that car in some ways, hated it in others. It was a cheap car, not cool or sporty or racy. I think Dad paid about $2,500 for it. He bought it used. It had no FM radio, no AC, and no power steering. It really needed floor vents on the summer, the area around your feet would get really hot. On the plus side, it was light (easy to push), easy to fix, got good gas mileage, and it didn't cost me anything. You could fit a lot of cargo in it, surprisingly, in the deceptive spacious hatchback. An unexpected bonus was that it was pretty good off-road. It's short wheel base meant that it had pretty good clearance. I took it on some really rocky and rutted country & farm roads while I was in college.

I had a battery problem for most of one year, so I parked it on hills and roll started it. It was fun learning that trick. I would start the car by getting it up to speed and popping the clutch. I had to replace that clutch cable once, it was a $29 part and I put it on myself. The shocks were shot for the last year or two I had it. The piston on the hatch failed at some point and I used a vice grip on the piston rod to hold it up.

One time, I drove it with a friend up to Bluemont Hill in Manhattan Kansas, and it slid sideways on the rough road and put a foot long dent in the driver's door. I got out, inspected the damage, and smacked it with the heels of my hands at either end of the crease. The metal popped back into shape like it had never been dented.

When school was winding down, I figured that I was going out into the world and going to be getting paid and that I would get a serious car. So I bought my first Jeep, which turned out to be a lemon (until I replaced a lot of parts on it). I took that fuel injected new Jeep overseas to Panama when I was in the Army. They only had leaded fuel down there, which fouled and plugged the Jeep's fuel injectors. I realized that if I had just kept the cheap little Chevette, I would have been better off.

It was my college car, so in some ways it holds a lot of special memories. I think my dad's attitude was that a teenager doesn't need, deserve, or appreciate an expensive vehicle and it's crazy to go into debt just to get them a fancy car. I think he was right about that. It was a measure of comfort to know that if I did screw up my car, it would not cost a lot to fix or replace. But I took really good care of it and it took me anywhere I wanted to go in return.

The summer after basic training (for ROTC officers, it was called Summer Camp), I loaded up the Chevette and took it to Colorado with my 12 or 13 year old little brother. I had taught him how to drive, possibly before that time, and I believe he kept asking if he could drive (this may have been the next summer). He was so excited to be going on this trip that he babbled the whole way out to Colorado and was driving me crazy. At one point, I stuck my head out of the window and yelled at the top of my lungs. It was funny. Overall, we had a great time.

I wonder how long the old car lasted before it finally died? Knowing my old cars, it's probably still out there, still going. At least it is in my memories.

Showered

I've read about it, I knew about the danger, I thought about it, I believed the statistics, but I never thought I'd fall down in the shower.

I didn't get hurt, and I got off easy.

But I was really stupid. I soaped down, then stepped out with one foot to reach for something, and on the way back in it happened.

When my soapy foot in the shower started to go out from under me, I knew it was happening. They say these things happen in slow motion, and they are right. It's both slow motion and it's over before you know it.

I had something in each hand, and just refused to believe it was happening to me, so I didn't drop them, and I didn't try to stop myself. I just went from standing to sitting, to lying on my back with my feet up the front wall of the shower.

I've got one of those bathtub showers, so I was lying on my back in the tub. How in the world my legs got up the wall, I'll never understand. But what did happen was my flailing legs closed the drain on the tub and shut off the hot water on the way to their final resting place.

You've probably never tried to get in the position I was in, so it might not occur to you what kind of mess I was in. I was below the edge of the tub with my arms on the bottom. I was really in a low spot, and it took a while to struggle up to the point that I could even get my arms on the side of the tub and pull myself off.

All this while the tub filled with cold water and the frigid shower kept me nice and cool.

So I end up thankful for two things. One, that I didn't get hurt. Two, that I didn't have a web cam in my shower. I don't know if I could stand watching it.

House 3

The subject that just doesn't want to die: what's going on next door?

It's still a fiasco.

I ran into the guys that were going to do the rework next door. They had to clean up the yard, redo all the interior, and finish connecting the main house with a "photography studio" by a breezeway. This is the infamous maneuver that will "add 2500 square feet to the main floor and increase the value of the house by $500,000" according the the genius behind the plan.

By the way, they are still saying that it's 4 acres, which it is not. It's 2½ acres.

The house reworkers told me that they were going to redo the house by July 24th. That was on July 9th or 10th. They had what looked like a tricycle to mow the yard with. 2½ acres of yard should not be mowed by a tricycle from 1956 with a 24" cut. Especially when the lawn is 24" tall. They took 3 days to mow the front yard and then took a week off. The net effect was to mostly kill the front yard, which was at least green before, and to make the pile on the driveway larger.

I did learn some interesting things from them, though. This guy Chris Powell that drove a red truck and used to work there was a real piece of work. This is the guy that used to rev up his big truck, squeal the tires every time he left, and go into the yard, making ruts. He used to bring a four-runner ATV with him and go around in circles in the back yard, making muddy ruts everywhere while his dog chased him. This is also the guy that supposedly brought the machine gun out and was shooting it wildly around the back yard. He is supposed to be the guy that was dumping debris from other jobs on the driveway including the dirty diapers. He is suspected to be the guy that stole the dishwasher, refrigerator, and hot water heater. We were told that he took a bunch of the money he was paid to work on this house and used it on other jobs, in effect ripping them off. That's most of what we heard about Chris.

What about the fate of the house as told by the new workers? We were told that the Chiefs bought the house for $1.2 million and that they were going to move the parents of someone they just signed into the house. They had until the 24th.

My old neighbor that used to live in the house heard about this and gave the realtor a call. Besides being asked if he wanted to sign a contract over & over again, he was told that it was going to be finished on July 24th (no mention that it was already sold - which turned out not to be the case) and that it had been appraised for $1.2 million. He asked her how they could appraise the property for what was going to be done to it in the future, but they assured him that it was all on the up & up. I don't think they said "those figures are right, all ready" like in Fargo. It was such preposterous BS that he finally asked them if this was some kind of scam. "Do you want to argue or do you want to hear more about the house?" was the answer.

The 24th has come and past. I can't tell if anything other than mowing the front yard and ripping up the flooring on the first floor was done. A few days ago, a truck with a front end loader appeared on the driveway and is still just sitting there. Not much was going on until yesterday, when someone knocked on the front door of our house. It was the guy they "hired" to do the drywall next door (hired is in quotes because if they don't pay him then technically, he volunteered). He needed some water in a 5 gallon bucket from our hose. My wife asked him, "don't you have the water on next door?" Apparently, not. I would think a simple thing like a $40 a month water bill would not be that hard to maintain when you have a $1.2 million dollar house. They are obviously out of money if turning off the water is part of the plan.

There are clouds of mosquitos coming out of the pool and huge bullfrogs live there now. The weeds are really starting to take over and wildlife is the most active element around the house. It somehow reminds me of hopes and dreams that have faded away. There's no telling what the next chapter will bring, but I wonder how much the house would bring in at auction now? Certainly not $1.2 million.

The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty

I made myself "read" this book, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, which I finished this last weekend. Do you get to say "read" when you listen to an audiobook on your ipod? I say that I made myself read it because it wasn't very interesting, you just have to force yourself to keep plowing through it.

This was a favorable, but not blatantly biased (until that last chapter) portrait of the Bush family and their history. I don't know anything about the authors, Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, or what their connection or motivation for the book was, but they had access to family members.

In the interest of fair disclosure, I have to admit that last summer I read Kitty Kelley's The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. That book was distractingly biased. After reading it, I assumed that the details were probably not accurate, as it felt too much like a smear job. One thing that Ms. Kelley made clear was that the Bushes were very secretive and that none of them would talk to her. That was one of the few things that stuck in my head.

In this book, the authors had some access, but still, it's not like they got to sit down with 41 or 43 and actually chat.

And it wasn't all flattering, I guess. They kept emphasizing how the Bushes would weep whenever anything emotional happened. I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing, I'm not sure I'd want that known about me, even if it was true.

I don't like George W. Bush, either personally or how he has run his campaigns or the country. I think he's the worst President this country has ever seen, and maybe will ever see. I think he's against science and dangerous to our security and standing in the world. I've wondered how in the hell anyone could still be driving around with "W '04" bumper stickers on their cars, you'd think they would be embarrassed. However, this book has done more to make me understand where Bush supporters are coming from than anything else.

I can see how they would think that the media is biased against them, but that is also somewhat sour grapes and thin skin. I do appreciate, on one hand, that each member of the family has gone out and made their own money, through their own efforts, but they did get a lot of investment capital from the family, too. So either side can be said to be right, the "It was all handed to them" vs. the "They made all their own money".

The thing that leaves me bothered is that 41 & 43 wanted to be President for no real reason. They didn't have some great vision for the country or understand what direction they wanted the country to go in, they just wanted to be President. Like it was their right. That's not good for the country. We need people that have a real vision, not a "vision thing".

The other thing that really irritates me is the emphasis on connections and friends. On one hand, that's great. I can see how they forge tight relationships and have and extend a lot of loyalty, but on the other hand, it's a peerage system. Not merit, but friendships. That's no way to run a country.

Burnett's Mound

If you go through Topeka Kansas on the I-470 southern bypass, you will pass by this distinct hill. It's called Burnett's Mound, I recently learned.

A tornado hit Topeka on June 8, 1966. It was rated as an F5 and said to be the 5th most costliest tornado in U.S. history.

I would have been 3½ at the time. My father liked to go back to K-State, his alma mater, in Manhattan Kansas, so we were always driving down this stretch of road. His mother was a housemother at the Tri-Delt house at K-State, and we went back for football games and the spring Open House. We had just been down this stretch in April or May when Open House was scheduled, so we saw the route just before the tornado. I don't remember when we went down the road after the tornado, but it could have been in October, when football started back. I still remember what the hill looked like, it was decimated. This is one of my earliest memories, and some of the worst destruction you will ever see from a tornado. Each year, I remembered the spot where the tornado had struck, long after they rebuilt apartments on the hill.

I looked into the site and visited it, and found an interesting story. The hill was called Burnett's Mound by the white men, but the Indians had a legend about the mound. They said that the mound protected the area from tornados. Ironically, the tornado entered Topeka by coming in right across the mound. Maybe the old Indian Medicine Man foresaw the event, but just had it backwards. Or maybe they were suckering the White Man into a kill box.

The site used to have a big cross on the top. I looked on a map and saw that there was a road called Skyline Drive that went right up to it. The article said that the cross was moved to a nearby cemetery when people going up the hill to party repeatedly vandalized it. I wanted to go see for myself, so I drove up there on the way home from a trip.

Skyline Drive was paved at one time, you can still see sections of craked asphalt in some places. Now it is all gravel with huge limestone boulders ringing its perimeter, probably to prevent cars from dropping off the sides. When you get about 3/4 the way out to the point, there is a big metal swing gate across the road. The road continues up to a large circular parking lot, which you can tell used to be the destination for people to come up, it still has a ring of protective boulders around it. The day I visited, there was a large spent fireworks pack in the middle of the old parking lot, so you can tell that someone celebrated the 4th up there in style. I'll bet the fireworks from the top were visible a long way off.

At the end of the lot is a stairway, an old stone one flanked by a crumbling concrete one with a bent hand rail. Graffiti is on every surface. The little stair leads up to a distinct mount on the point of the ridge, very small compared to the entire hill, but a perfect little dome at the end of the ridge. I found a surveyors bench mark by the remnant of the trail, but nothing else to mark the significance of the site. Wildflowers and a stunted little tree were all that remained. I was expecting a monument or a historical plaque, but the vandals surely destroyed that long ago.

The view from the mound is fantastic. I've always thought of Topeka as an uninteresting looking town, but from the mound, the downtown skyline with the capitol is actually very pretty. There is a huge water tank (the reservoir kind, not the tower kind) on the front side of the mound, it's visible from the highway. There is a road leading back to it and a tall chain link fence with barbed wire on top surrounding it. The trees have littered down debris on top of the tank, and it looks like something that nature is trying to reclaim, despite the highway-sign yellow it's painted in.

The place has a eerie feel, even without knowing the tornadic history. I kept wondering if it was an Indian mound in the classical sense, a place where they buried and honored their dead. Even with all the neglect and vandalism, I guess it still is.

Reality Check

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term which describes the uncomfortable tension that may result from having two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with one's beliefs.

That's straight from Wikipedia, but it is almost word for word the description given in last week's Science Friday episode where guest Elliot Aronson talked about his new book, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me).

The phenomenon of believing something so strongly that any proof to the contrary is simply ignored is easy to see in other people, hard to see in yourself.

He talked about people that had been convicted and sent to prison and then were later exonerated by DNA evidence and how prosecutors were reluctant to reopen these cases and sometimes insisted that they were still correct. This is an excellent example. Of course you aren't going to admit that you are putting innocent people in jail, that would make you a monster and everything you worked so hard for wrong and bad. No wonder people have elaborate mechanisms to support their denial.

Aronson used President Bush's going to war in Iraq as a huge public example of cognitive dissonance. And I have to agree, it fits perfectly. The original reasons have long since been abandoned, and a series of shifting reasons have cropped up as each reason falls apart by its own inherent weakness and incompatibility with reality. You see people on TV talking about what a great success this war is, and the banner moment of cognitive dissonance for this war when the President posed in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner 3 stories tall. The problem with this sense of Presidential disconnect is how many people still buy into it. They want to believe, despite all that has happened since.

The more I think about it, the more I think that conservatives and Republicans are the poster children for cognitive dissonance. And they have their chief Kool-Aid dispenser, Rupert Murdoch and his flagship propaganda platform, Fox News. I guess, "We Make Things Up, You Keep Believing!" doesn't have the ring of "We Report, You Decide." Although "We Distort, You Deride!" is pretty close.

Look at Nixon. He never admitted that he did anything wrong and history judges him as the most corrupt President we've ever had. Clinton eventually admitted his wrongdoing and is now looked back on fondly as a very popular President.

Republicans respect Bush for his "Stay the Course" strength and steadfastness, and they hate Clinton for his wishy washiness. Yet, if you're making a mistake, isn't it better to figure that out and stop it? Who on Earth is not going to make mistakes sometimes? I'd rather have a leader that recognized that his approach wasn't working and corrected himself. That's not indecision, that's a firm grasp of reality.

I found a truly baffling blog called Willisms when I was casting about for some additional material for this posting. It's strange, because it points to the overwhelming success of the Iraq invasion and how Democracy is spreading like wildfire across the Middle East. It says that everyone that supported Bush was right and the rest of the world is suffering from Cognitive Dissonance. Like Jon Stewart said on Bill Moyer's show "we can't even agree on what reality is".

One part of the Science Friday discussion that I thought was very interesting was about Abraham Lincoln. There's a book called Team of Rivals, a recent biography of Lincoln (that I bought and have not yet read) that talks about the fact that many of his cabinet were bitter political rivals that disagreed with him violently. There was a caller to the show that talked about contrition, and how it is the opposite of cognitive dissonance, and how powerful contrition can be at healing the problems caused by stubborn denial. I think Lincoln's power was constantly being in the presence of those that disagreed with him so he was constantly forced to reevaluate his positions. Lincoln struggled with some of the worst conditions a person could ever be expected to see, and yet persisted and triumphed in the end. He changed his mind about things, for instance Slavery. Initially, he was not going to free the slaves, but he eventually came around. He changed positions on many things, yet one thing he never did was give up on the Union. Despite 4 years of horrendous bloody conflict, military failures, and growing dissatisfaction with the war, he persisted and won. He changed his tactics many times over the course of that war, yet we remember him today as someone that stayed the course and finished what he started.

Does anyone believe our President and this situation is analogous to those times?

Stellar Formation

I was wondering how stars and planets form.

I sent the following email to The Naked Scientist, Nature, Science Talk, and Science podcasts:

"Why is north north? I'm guessing it's arbitrary and that East is actually just a word for Spinward, while West is just a word for Anti-Spinward, and North is the right-hand rule pole, while South is what is left. I'm also guessing that North is shown as up simply because most writing and science/history was developed in the Northern Hemisphere.

"This simple question lead me to the following question: Do all planets spin the same direction, and does the solar system spin (the direction of planetary orbits) the same way the planets spin?

"Do solar systems spin the same direction & orientation of the way the galaxy spins?

"Do galaxy clusters align in a plane and spin in similar directions?

"Why does a disk always develop out of the stardust, regardless of the size of the body?"

Then I kept thinking about it. I can see what the answer could be.

Imagine a huge cloud of interstellar gas. It's following the laws of gravity and momentum. If you follow a single particle in the cloud imagine how it behaves. It is going to be attracted to the center of mass of the gas cloud. So it starts to fall toward the center. But the gas cloud is attracted to the center of the galaxy, so it's not just sitting there, it's moving, too. Since it's moving, it's center of mass is moving. So it's falling continuously toward a moving target.

It's in orbit.

So the masses swirl in orbit around the center of gravity. Eventually, masses actually start to come together and they form little local pockets of gravity that orbit the big center and other smaller bodies are attracted to them and fall into their orbits. So you see how it happens. Satellites swirl around planets, which swirl around stars and form solar systems that swirl around in galaxies.

I wonder if it really is that simple.

Good Sport Cherokee

That's my car.

It's a 1995 Jeep Cherokee Sport with 320,000 miles on it.

Obviously, I believe in driving a car into the ground.

I may have just done that. It died on July 11th on a long trip back from Phillipsburg Kansas. It died in Topeka under a bridge under the Interstate of clutch failure.

It sounds like I'm writing a eulogy on the car, but it's not death, more like the final straw in deciding on retirement. For the first time, I'm considering getting a new car.

I'm getting it fixed, but it's really expensive. It started being some little clutch thing, and then grew to be a replacement input shaft, then encompassed a cracked transmission housing.

I had already authorized repairs, so each new thing added to the bill and was necessary in light of what had already been done.

I told the guy I was travelling with that it's sort of a family tradition to drive cars into the grave. Our old 1973 Buick Estate Wagon was the family car for years and finally died on the driveway of our house. This social embarrassement took us on most of our family vacations growing up. It had a 4 barrel 454 and survived though our high school days to be one of the first cars we drove. It was a mixed curse and blessing, as Dad was not reluctant to let us use it and we were not eager to be seen in it. But I remember my brother driving it 120 mph down the road, a very exciting time when I was 15. It was swamped and died one time in a flooded Buffalo River in Arkansas, but we pushed it out and started it up and it spat a geyser of water 30' out of the tailpipe and kept on going.

The next family car was a 1983 Dodge Prospecter Van. We thought it was really cool. Dad got it when my older brother and I were in college, so my younger brother is really the one that spent the most time in it. After Dad died, I drove it occasionally. By then it was old and had some quirks. I think it had about 140,000 miles on it around that time. I took it to Colorado once, slept in it even. It wouldn't start one time in Rocky Mountain National Park, so I opened the engine compartment (it's between the front seats), popped off the air cleaner cover and stuck a screwdriver in the intake and fired it right up. It sat just off the gravel drive under some pine trees for about a year with very little use and it wouldn't start. Rather than towing it off and letting it die, I told a friend that was on hard times that if he could get it started, he could have it. After fiddling with it for a week, he replaced the cables going to the battery for 93 cents and had a new car. They used to take it to ski vacations in Colorado and to Chiefs games as a tailgating party on wheels. This was an echo to my Dad bringing it up to K-State football games and having the most extravagent tailgate spreads you ever saw including Tippins pies. I used to have a picture of it in the parking lot of my college apartment with huge inner tubes tied to the top of it when Dad was going to Colorado for a summer vacation. I think my friend got over 250,000 miles out of it and sold it to someone who kept it going after that.

My first Jeep (the second car I owned) was purchased new after I graduated from College. I entered the Army and took my Jeep to Panama for 3 years. It had been from Colorado to South Carolina, as well as overseas. I sold it to my mechanic when it had about 175,000 miles on it. He drove it for another 8 years after that and just recently sold it to a guy that apparently gettoed it up, but still drives it around. That Jeep was stuck in a mud puddle up over the bottom of the doors when it was 3 weeks old. It lost several clutches, water pumps, and other major parts, but I always fixed it and kept it going. I used to say that it never left me stranded, which was stretching it, but one time it died in the Grandview Triangle during rush hour. It blew a radiator hose and ran up into the red before I pulled it over and shut it down. I had a knife with a screwdriver and other tools on it. I walked down the highway and found a 2 liter bottle and a 5 gallon bucket on the side of the road. I hopped a guy's back fence and asked to get some water out of the hose in his back yard. Walking these things back to the car, I went to work. I sliced the end off the hose and reattached it. Then I cut the bottom off the 2 liter bottle and made a funnel. Then I poured the water back into the radiator and filled it back up. It fired right up and took me home without any problems.

But this Jeep I love the most. It's only the third car I've ever had. I want to take it to Yellowstone this summer with me. It's hard to explain. It's like a brother to me. It's been there for so many times in my life, it's like a touchstone that I can't give up. I've seen the world though my Jeep and I can't just give up on it. After Yellowstone, I'll get a new car, and put this one into service as the haul around car. Maybe I can keep it for another 4 or 5 years. But no more long trips. I may never make 400,000 with it. It'll be like that old racehorse that now just hangs around munching grass and taking it easy.