Phoenix Living

How to Remake Life — this is super cool; in an alternate dimension I stuck with genetics as a major and am working on this sort of thing in that world right now.

In my new quest for healthy and sex-positive male adolescent literature (leave your suggestions in comments if you know of good books or websites!), this was a clever article I ran across: To Slide or to Slice? Finding A Positive Sexual Metaphor

Oh those wacky MIT folk — Self-Assembling Solar Cells

A cancer link — more info related to my specific cancer type (genetic BRAC1 mutation).  Ladies, you don’t have to have breast cancer in the family already to have this gene.  Consider getting tested!  Many insurances will cover it no charge, esp. if there are family members with breast cancer.

I was idly thinking about how it might be nice to have a monthly pedicure routine start up with a friend or two, as part of the “reclaiming the body beautiful” process (also the foot bath and massage chair would be genuinely therapeutic for where I’m at in recovery), when I was struck by another set of thoughts.

Breast cancer is a “modern era” illness, showing up in vastly higher percentages in developed, industrialized nations. The best guess so far as to why is a genetic predisposed tendency towards it plus exposure to chemical and other environmental toxins in the environment.

I am strongly disinclined to become the sort of paranoid that worries and obsesses over every chemical exposure in my environment. I live in a modern, industrialized nation. I eat food purchased at a supermarket. I live in a home where cleaning products are used at least biweekly. The life changes necessary to remove most or all of those contaminants would be extreme and not very sustainable given my current needs — not to mention that I can go as far out to the country and grow all my own food as I want, and I still have to breathe the chemically-contaminated air in the atmosphere, worry about the water table, and etc and so on.

On the other hand, I don’t have a problem at all examining my life and minimizing my exposure to unnecessary chemical and other potential contaminants in an effort to make it as easy as possible for my immune system to stay on top of preventing any future problems. And I realized that you can certainly absorb things through your nailbeds, and that nail polish is pretty much all chemicals.

So what do the readers think? Is this the sort of minimal exposure, only happens every couple of months sort of chemical question to not worry about? Or are painted toes the type of “not worth the risk” simple thing to eliminate from my life since it wasn’t a hugely established routine anyway? Are there less-toxic nail polish options that actually work similarly? (If the “more natural” polish only stays on a couple of days it’s not worth the effort involved, compared to a month or more of the traditional polish’s duration.) More general thoughts?

Over 100 years of Popular Science issues have been digitized and made available for free on the internet!

A good article for anyone interested in the cutting edge of neuroscience and how it connects to story.

And I’m thinking about attending the World Fantasy Convention this year in Columbus, Ohio. I have extended family living in a suburb of Columbus, and it seems like it would be fun to have the DreamCafé and my mom and brother along for the trip. With this many months to plan it, we might even make it happen! Any feedback from the readers on this convention, if you’ve previously attended?

One of the very common ways we humans learn things, from infanthood on, is an “engineering mindset”: we first break things down into enough component parts that we can gain a measure of understanding about the parts and how they work, then the cycle moves to the phase of putting the pieces back together to see what they now make (which is never quite the same as what it was, of course), then testing and studying and learning from the more complex concept. Physical, mental, emotional, even philosophical learnings can all follow this path of knowledge acquisition (not the only path available, but the one we’re discussing here).

Since the explosion of scientific progress from the Renaissance onward, it seems as if scientists have been engaged on a nice little run of reductionist scientific methods. This is not being criticized in and of itself; as anyone can see, we’ve exponentially increased our knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the world and universe we inhabit, in numerous different knowledge areas. My theory is that we are at or incredibly near the point where in order to make further large leaps in greater understanding we need a long period of interdisciplinary scientific explorations, where multi-discipline groups aren’t just allowed but actively encouraged, and a trend of larger-picture learnings is actively sought (and funded).

I think there are already the first signs of this trend now visible in some of the scientifically and technologically innovative research fields. I hope the rest of the 21st century brings the start of the synergistic renaissance. What do you think?