blueskyplans

Which type of stroke?

2011-10-02T18:39:00.000-07:00

The blood supply to the brain is a web encased in a rigid box. I'd not expect the blood vessels to be able to expand much--between brain tissue and other fluid around them, there's not much to compress and no room to go thanks to the skull. But there should be a little elasticity to the blood vessels, and there are so many that the effect should add up.

With each heart beat we have a more or less predictable pressure wave going into the network, and so there should be a consistent pressure wave coming out. It can't be exactly the same shape, because in different parts of the network blood travels different distances facing different impedances, but it should be consistent.

Now suppose some major vessel has broken and there is bleeding in the brain. If the blood loss is significant I'd expect there to be a change in the wave shape. In particular, blood would leak out of the broken vessel and slowly reenter, giving the output pulse a longer tail.

So the obvious questions are:

Are the output pulse shapes (maybe convoluted with the input pulse if need be) consistent enough between people that we can use differences for diagnosis?
Is the tail from a leaky vessel discernible in the output pulse, and if so at what level?
Are there other things that would mimic this?

You have to measure the input also, since a long tail on the input is quite possible, and you'd need to correct for that.

If it is possible to distinguish a leaky vessel-brain from a normal one, it would be possible to distinguish a broken blood vessel stroke from a clot blockage stroke. (The instrumentation shouldn't be very expensive--transducers and some ADCs and a small processor to compare the results--a display if you want to get some human input.) Since you don't want to use blood thinners to treat someone with a broken blood vessel stroke, and since getting treatment fast is vital, this might be useful in an ER.

I don't think it would be possible to positively ID a blockage this way, since that would merely appear as larger impedance, and without some prior measurements you wouldn't know if this was normal or not--brains are different.

Font Directories

2011-01-11T20:06:00.000-08:00

Eldest Son told me that the printing programs he is learning lock out most fonts so that the user isn't swamped with pages upon pages of fonts. The "book" classifies them as text, dingbats, symbols, script, and a few other things.

That doesn't make any sense. I don't know enough about fonts to devise a scheme myself, but just from inspection you can make general categories. My untutored eye says there are blocky fonts, and shaded fonts, and fonts that are good for tiny print, and such like things. A given font may wind up in several different categories--which seems harmless.

Suppose one imposes a directory structure on the fonts, and uses links to insert them in multiple places as needed. For example, if you want to search alphabetically, there's a "B" directory that contains links to all the fonts with names that start with "B". If you want German Black Letter, there's a directory for German fonts, as a subdirectory of the NonEnglish directory. The icon for the directory has not one (as Windows uses now) but multiple images of the letter A illustrating some of the directory's contents: or from subdirectories if the directory contains nothing but subdirectories.

It'd take some work to devise the scheme and implement it, but searching that would be a lot easier than scrolling down a few hundred options.

Aspergers and theater revisited

2010-10-01T19:43:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I mused about the possibility of teaching roles and how to detect them using theater. We were not able to schedule any kind of formal therapy along these lines. There was a local person who was interested in this sort of thing, but unfortunately she/he had some personal issues and went transsexual--and, though she had been given no introduction or description, our daughter was weirded out just meeting him/her/whatever. That did not seem a good match. It was encouraging to think that even with Aspergers our daughter could instantly detect that something was seriously different, and probably wrong. But that group wasn't going to work for her. We encouraged our youngest daughter to join a theater group in high school, partly to help her with finding a role in the chaotic mess and partly to help with learning about role-playing and detecting roles as described earlier. She found it frustrating at times, but learned to enjoy it. It is nice to have clear-cut lines and roles, and she did well at that. She loves opera and the great romantic/tragic characters, but opera doesn't always have the most realistic dialog and roles... I wish I could say there were breakthroughs, but this has been and still is an incremental process.

DJs for children's play

2009-12-31T20:18:00.000-08:00

The athletic club's family new years' night had one gym full of "bouncy" toys, with the usual castles and cage of plastic balls to flounder in--and a DJ playing amusing songs at full volume.

But what do the kids really like? Do they like loud music, or soft, or something else entirely?

This is a job for the psychology department: a student project!

Every week for a couple of semesters hold a kid's fun Saturday afternoon in a gym. Put the same play equipment on both sides, in the same positions. In the middle put chairs for the parents (who are told what the study is about, and asked not to lead the kids one way or another) facing in, and a large "hanging strands" curtain in between. The "curtain" will be fun for kids to run back and forth through, which will randomize the side they eventually wind up on.

On one side put a DJ (one of the psych students) with a sound system angled to put the loudest sound on one side of the room. In other words, one side of the room has the music (or whatever) and the other has much less music volume.

Every ten minutes count the number of kids playing on the "bouncy" equipment on the music and the "quiet" side of the room. Repeat this for several Saturdays, and then change the type of music.

We can't put two kinds of music in the same room without dissonance, and can't separate the rooms because the kids will want to be with their parents. Therefore we can only study degree of loudness preference for various types of music.

Options would include

Loud rock
Quieter rock
Loud pop
Quieter pop
Loud "kid's music"
Quieter "kid's music"
Playground noise (kids playing)
Lullaby music

If the gym holds about 60 kids at a time and you run the experiment for 5 Saturdays (and we ignore the fact that some kids will come repeatedly) we get 300 measurements. You'd expect some fraction to be with their parents or running through the curtain--so say 200 are in the bouncy play areas. An even split would be 100 on each side (if they have no preference), so you should be able to measure preferences at the 10% level or better.

I'm not sure how much this would cost: gym space plus equipment rental plus fabricating the curtain plus music fees...

Multi-touch screen sound mixers

2008-09-02T19:41:00.000-07:00

I think that Band in a Box is missing something, if I've read their documentation correctly. They provide all sorts of sounds, but not mixer consoles. If you create a set of instrument sounds, you will want to adjust their relative volume, probably on a dynamic basis, and the obvious way to do that is with some variety of multi-touch screen interface to the computer. You could drag-and-drop to assemble and connect the board to the instrument sources you've created, and use virtual sliders to adjust their relative volumes--recording that information as well for later playback. I assume that frequing the signal is done at the instrument level and not the mixer board level, which simplifies the board layout somewhat.

It wouldn't be as easy to use as a real mixer without touch feedback, but the possibility of easily recording and later revising the changes would seem to make up for it for the novice without the bucks for a full system--which is one of Band in a Box's markets.

Scent of a human

2007-07-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

Has anybody tried to get a thorough collection of all the chemicals we exude/exhale? We all know about CO2 and H2O, and methane; and some of us know of a few others: chemicals from the bacteria in the armpits, and so on.

Suppose you took clean (or at least thoroughly analysed) O2/N2/CO2/H2O, chilling it down to nearly liqufaction to get rid of impurities and then heating it back to room temperature. This is the input air for a sealed (baked out) bare room with a recently bathed naked man standing in it. The output air is also chilled to condense out the water and then super-chilled to condense out the other chemicals he has exhaled or exuded from his skin, letting only the O2/N2/CO2 escape.

We already know about the relative rates of exalation of water and CO2. What else is in that puddle we'd condense out of the used air? (Trying to understand the shed skin cells is probably too huge a task.)

I don't know how good we are at "figure out what's in here" chemical searches; though we can figure out ways of detecting known chemicals very well. But there's bound to be a lot of different chemicals present. They may vary by time of day; they almost certainly vary from men to women, and there's a hint that they may very with a woman's menstrual cycle.

Something's there. I wonder what it is? Too bad dogs can't talk.

UPDATE Some people look for things like benzene or chloroform in the breath to measure uptake of contaminants, but these are specific searches. I'm thinking of more basic research. A systematic search using many subjects in many states of health might be useful in finding new diagnostic techniques. How much does your body chemistry change when you get such-and-such a disease? Can you "smell" the difference? Once you know what to look for, it might be easy.

Also, chromatography is a very powerful tool, and can separate out chemicals in several different ways.

Drawing with a mouse wheel

2006-12-06T12:49:00.000-08:00

I like the Mac approach to selecting icons: they sort of scroll under a "magnifier." I dislike trying to draw with a mouse: I have to click on "box," move to draw the box, move to click on "arrow," move to draw the arrow, move to click on "text," then type the text and repeat. I also have a mouse with a scroll button.

So let's put all those together. If the mouse has a scroll button, you can click on the class of items you want to switch between (in my case, boxes, arrows, ellipses, text). Then you scroll to the box, with the (translucent) menu appearing in that nice Mac magnifier strip view, draw the box, scroll to the arrow, draw the arrow, etc. Of course you have to move your hands to type text, and when you want to change modes you have to find the menu item at the side of the page, but the rest of the time you just look at your work and don't waste time and attention racing the mouse around the screen trying to land on the tiny buttons.

Maybe this exists already, but I haven't seen it and Google didn't show it quickly.

Laptop lanyard

2006-02-14T18:31:00.000-08:00

I watched the fellow beside me working on his laptop as we rode the bus, and a sudden stop made me realize how precarious his tool was. A laptop should have a stiff outer ring in its case, and a lanyard projecting from that. Just hanging onto plastic is fraught, hence the stiff ring. You then use a short elastic cord: one end attached to your belt, the other to the lanyard. If the laptop does fall, the impact will be less. Of course the elastic band has to be slightly adjustable.

Language Learning Feedback

2005-12-25T09:11:00.000-08:00

Problem: It is very hard to get the accents right in a foreign language. Although some of the consonants can be tough, vowels seem to be even harder to get right.

Observation: We can easily take a Fourier spectrum of a word and identify the sounds of the various letters in it. That technology is many decades old. Current technology has evolved to allow "training" of voice recognition, so that the computer can identify the individual accents of the user.

Question 1: Can we extend this so that the program can recognize the patterns an individual applies to the underlying sounds? A woman's voice will differ somewhat in timbre from a man's, for example. Can we isolate the effect of that timbre?

Question 2: Can we identify a "pure vowel sound" from a particular accent?

Question 3: Can we then combine the two to predict how an individual ought to pronounce a word in a particular accent or language?

Proposal: Using an interactive sound booth, with microphone and headphones, the student speaks the specified words into the microphone. The computer compares the sound the student has produced with the ideal (or the predicted) sound of the word, and rebroadcasts these back to the student's headphones with some feedback mechanism. I suggest that the feedback be volume: the closer the student reproduces the correct tone, the louder the sound in the headphones. The setup could be: left ear is student, right ear is correct sound.

This way the student gets not just practice speaking the language, but instant (and private) feedback on how well he is getting the accent right.

Music search engine

2005-09-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

Many times I have had a fragment of a tune run through my mind, and wondered what it came from. Sometimes I've found the same fragment appear in two different melodies--with a slight change in a note.

Suppose you could type in (with sound, so you can hear what you've put in and make sure it is what you want) a string of notes, and then ask the search engine to find all works where this was part of the melody (or part of the viola part, and so on). You could use this to find the tune that you wanted to use but couldn't remember the name of, or to find out if the song you composed was invented or remembered, or look for similar motifs to research influences among composers.

Suppose one were to scan or otherwise incorporate the various musical lines for a given work into a searchable database, so that you could look for works that matched a given fragment. A work might consist of one musical line (a simple tune) or many (the voices for each instrument in a symphony), together with any lyrics involved. It would not be hard to define a search for a string of notes. (A rest is a note for this purpose.)

What would be hard is optimizing the search. The text search engines search for word matches. Words are nicely separated (by spaces, commas, end-of-line, etc), and there are only a finite set of them. Unfortunately there aren't always neat divisions, and the blocks of notes are quite long. You could try arbitrarily partitioning a musical line into chunks all the same size, and using a pre-indexing that lists all the different such chunks that were used. This might get rather big, but I don't have a good feel for how big Google's indexing system is, so I've no way to guess how feasible it is.

After getting the base search engine running, the obvious next step is implementing fuzzy searches, where one or two of the notes aren't exact; and shaped searches, where the key is arbitrary. This would make is useful to the rest of us who aren't musical pros or academics.

Of course you need to have some standard descriptions of notes and formats for downloading musical directions and standards for associating musical lines into a single work, but I'd think these would be fairly straightforward to devise.

Displaying photographs with lighting contrasts

2005-09-15T08:40:00.000-07:00

You can find musings about how to use dynamic lighting in photographs.

I've taken pictures of a beautiful scene only to discover later that a great part of its beauty lay in the contrasts not of color but of light. The human eye is amazingly dynamic, able to flick from one part of the view to another with 10 times the light in a fraction of a second. Unfortunately the developed picture can only use reflected light, and you do not get the same dynamic range of intensities that we see every day. But suppose a picture were displayed not by reflected but by transmitted light. Imagine a picture (a slide) illuminated from behind by light that is not uniform. It would not be terribly hard to hand make masks for a particular slide using filters and a very bright light source. It seems quite hard to do this automatically. Even digital images, which use the CRT to generate different light intensities, have a certain flatness. Can we make a CRT (or LED-based system) with a greater range of brilliancy, and will the intrinsic coarseness of resolution for the light source interfere with the fine resolution of the picture itself?

It turns out there's been some interesting work that might easily have a bearing on this. In the September 2005 NASA Tech Briefs on page 70 is a report about work done by Kevin Yu on "Sol-Gel Glass Holographic Light-Shaping Diffusers." The idea is to use holographic light diffusers to spread the light around in a light table to be where you want it to be, and Yu's teams' contribution is to include sol-gel optical glass.

OK, cool. The missing link between their work and my ideas is how to make a holographic plate given some kind of pixelated light meter. I think that's just a matter of some calculations to generate the holographic mapping. I dunno if sol-gel is substantially better than other material for the somewhat less severe requirements of a photo display box (they write of being able to withstand temperatures of 1000 degrees C).

Shaving in a nursing home

2005-08-14T19:17:00.000-07:00

It is easier to keep a man clean if he's clean-shaven, so it makes good sense to try to shave him if he'll let you. One nursing home I know of uses disposable razors to keep from spreading infections around--which also seems to make sense.

But an ill old man's face can be very craggy, and it isn't easy to avoid nicking him--and the staff sometimes do nick his face.

Suppose you use an electric razor instead, with a supply of a dozen heads and blades. After shaving one man, remove the head and blades and soak them in peroxide or ColdSpor. Or you could autoclave them, though I don't know how long they'd last.

If the noise bothers the man, you can try to mask it with music, but if that doesn't help you'll probably have to go back to using regular razors.

Galactic cluster models

2005-06-29T11:49:00.000-07:00

I haven't seen models of the local universe. Pictures, yes. Stereographs, yes. Honest-to-goodness hold-in-your-hand models, no.

I'm thinking of a simple plastic sphere with the local galaxies in their correct sizes and orientations. If you cast a small "model-on-a-stick" for each galaxy, and then cast them all into the bigger ball, it might work.

A model-on-a-stick is a model of a galaxy, made of whatever looks realistic enough, cast in clear plastic and with a thin rod of clear plastic connected to it. Assemble these, and cast the whole lot in clear plastic (do we have to evacuate the air to prevent bubbles?), and you get your local cluster model.

How far out should we go? Andromeda, surely. There are a few globular clusters in the near vicinity too. If you go too far the globe starts to look pretty empty and the galaxies pretty small.

Digital music stands

2005-05-23T17:04:00.000-07:00

Suppose instead of black sheet metal, the music stand back was an LCD, and you displayed the current music. I notice that some people like to have three sheets worth visible at a time, and suspect that that would probably be a good size to use. (Hundreds of years of human interface experience here . ..) This centralizes the page-turner's job: one for an orchestra.

The image of each instrument's music is displayed, three pages worth at a time, with an overlaid image (in a different color) representing the annotations the musician wants to have on his copy. That suggests that a stylus and sensitive screen would be useful additions. And in another color, the conductor's notes?

Do you move the music abruptly, or smoothly scroll the images to the left? That might be a matter of taste--selectable.

This scheme has a few obvious advantages: no problems with lighting, no page turning problems, no dropped papers, changing music is easy, and so on.

It doesn't necessarily remove the need for sheet music, for when the artist has to practice by himself, though if the price of these drops far enough he might have one of his own.

These stands are obviously more expensive (and orchestras don't need a lot of new expenses), but if the price of flat screens drops enough they might be affordable. The stands need cabling, and a server, and a new person to coordinate with the conductor. Still . . .

Cellphone keypads

2005-02-16T08:17:00.000-08:00

Miniaturization is wonderful for portability, but lousy for the human interface. The keypads I've seen on cellphones are not made for human fingers.

So what can we make them easier to use?

One obvious approach is to unfold stiff wings with the keys on them. We understand how to make these, and they'd be not much less robust than the current designs. For the cost of slightly little more complex connections and a thicker package you get room for bigger keys, clearer labels, and a bigger screen.

The downside is that the wings have to be supported somehow. Think of trying to press buttons on a surface that wobbles from side to side. The user has to hold the phone with his hand open much wider--but that means the grip on the phone center is less secure. Try it on your own hand and see what I mean.

The wobble effect doesn't have to be a showstopper--with a little clever case molding you can probably make the phone fairly stable in your hand. And if you separate the dialing keys from the function keys you will probably make it easier to remember how everything works.

Another possibility for really miniaturized devices, requires that the number of virtual buttons be small. You access them by sliding a central button up and down and side-to-side. Small detents give you tactile feedback when the slider reaches a new digit, and the screen could show which virtual button you are about to push.

Using moving parts is less robust than ordinary buttons, of course, but you have a very simple layout: the slider/dialer and a few additional buttons beside it for other functions. I suspect that using it would be much quicker than punching buttons.

Navigation will be confusing if you have more than 3x4 or 4x3 virtual buttons, and the mechanics will be more complex and delicate. And the phone will be less water resistant. But it could be pretty doggone small.

Heating and cooling with ceilings

2005-01-09T15:33:00.000-08:00

High ceilinged rooms feel cooler in the summer. Low ceilinged ones are easier to heat in the winter. For those of us in the "temperate" zone have both scorchers and chill--we generally choose low ceilings and endure the heat. But maybe there's a low-tech way to have our cake and eat it too. Suppose the room was built with a high ceiling and with light fixtures that dangle down to or are attached at the usual 8 foot level. In summer the high ceiling keeps you cool with a relative minimum of A/C: ceiling fans alone can keep you cool enough through surprisingly high outdoor temperatures. In late fall, you install a lowered ceiling, with some well-insulated material. If you use something like boards lifted into place, you have to have mounting brackets installed, and installation can get rather awkward when there's furniture around. In addition, the mounting brackets would be unsightly if permanent, and quite hard to install/remove if they weren't permanent. And you need to have some place to store and easy way to bring the boards into the room. (Perhaps shelving on the walls above the 8 foot height? Perhaps you could use roll-up partitions that sit in the wall and can be pulled across the air to latch into the far wall. This requires some railguides across the room, which might also be considered unsightly unless they could do dual duty as mounts for track lighting or some such thing. Another problem with roll-up partitions is that they are inevitably thinner than insulated boards would be, and not as good at insulating. Given that there is already insulation between the house and the outdoors this isn't a showstopper. Supporting the weight of the subceiling gets more awkward as the room size increases. But I don't know of many applications for such a design. I think this works best for small rooms in relatively small houses: bedrooms, bathrooms, and so on.

Better "Universal Remotes"

2004-12-29T17:39:00.000-08:00

I've had to use universal remotes, and so far they suffer from a few universal complaints.

The MUTE button is far too small. It is the button I use most frequently when watching TV: I use it whenever commercials come on.

They use buttons to select which device to talk to, but there is no way for the hapless user to tell which was actually selected.

So you can add a great deal of value to the remote by

Put the MUTE button close to the bottom for easier thumbing, and make it bigger: 1cm or bigger in diameter.
Use a 3-position sliding switch to select the device. This lets you see immediately which machine you are trying to talk to. The additional component cost won't be more than a few cents. If you want to simultaneously add a battery check and offer more feedback for people with poor vision, add three LEDs across the top of the remote--one for each device type. Punch any command and the LED for that device lights up briefly if the batteries are still good.

Bus Stop Bus Monitoring

2004-12-29T17:38:00.000-08:00

Bus stops on State Street have route maps and local schedules. By local schedule I mean a list of the times the bus is supposed to be at that stop, assuming all goes well at the previous time point. (All time points are bus stops, but most bus stops are not time points.)

Suppose each bus had a GPS and ID, which the central routing system mapped into a position on the street. One could estimate the corrected arrival time for a bus all along its route and display the info at simple computer displays at each bus stop. Most of the time this would be close enough to the estimated one that it would make no difference, but in bad weather (think 8 inches of snow) I'd find it helpful to know whether the bus I was waiting for was canceled or merely late. (Do I take the other bus and make different connections, or wait another 20 minutes?)

Of course, it would be really fun to have a dynamic city bus map, showing where all the buses were.

Of course, I can burst my own bubble here. I know what happens to bus shelters: they get plastered with Grateful Dead stickers and gang slogans, and perhaps vandalized with lighters. A computer display would simply be a more attractive target for the lowlifes who love destruction.

New Foods Research

2004-10-11T21:47:00.000-07:00

Our climate is going to change. Never mind whether the change will be human-induced or random. We know enough about the past ten thousand years to know that the western plains are going to dry up again sometime, and there isn't anything we can do to stop it. Some places will get far less rain and without care will become deserts. Some will become warmer, some colder, some get more rain, and so on.

That in itself isn't particularly shocking, or frightening. What is frightening is the discovery that dramatic climate changes can take as little as a few decades. We are not ready to adapt on that kind of time scale. And we'll need to adapt. Our crops are pretty versatile, but wheat yields are bound to fall by quite a bit when the Great Plains start getting 2 inches of rain a year.

I assert that we need to develop a variety of fall-back plants to replace existing strains and species, and some plans of what to do if we wind up with another dust bowl decade.

Great Plains Desert

As a for-instance, take the case of the Great Plains drying out again. The symptoms are what you expect: no rain, crops fail over a wide area, lots of farmers going broke; repeat for 8 or 9 years. Modern plowing practices should help keep the dust down relative to the mess we had last century, but sooner or later we're going to have dunes moving again. Sucking up the aquifer is a losing proposition, and we're already headed for deep trouble (pun intended).

Before that happens, somebody needs to give up on wheat and plant soil-retaining cover. There's no profit in mere ground cover; not in the short term (10 years or more when you talk about climate changes). If we can get the soil to stay put we can think about trying some desert crops: amaranth, etc. The yields have got to be substantially lower in terms of total weight of crop--you need the water to make the carbohydrates. Farming can still be worthwhile if the crop is high protein and low maintenance (and where harvesting doesn't trash the ground cover).

Unfortunately several of the needed actions aren't going to net farmers or bankers any money. We need a government plan for specifying at-risk land, taking custody of it when needed, and instituting emergency conservation plans. A bank is not going to think about needing the soil a hundred years from now, but a government may. We can hope.

You may object that this disposseses farmers, and so it does. I think it possible that we could allow ownership but not control, but I'll grant that ownership of a chunk of desert farm may not be a particularly valuable commodity during a century of custody. (Would you want to take a chance on the drought breaking in your lifetime?) You may object that this opens the door to corruption, and so it may. Safeguards may not work. But what good is desert going to be to a farmer?

Cold Idaho

Suppose we have substantially colder weather, with relatively adequate rainfall. The long-forgotten developers of the potato didn't just develop one strain. I'm told there are several hundred varieties, suitable for different altitudes. If ever a situation begged for botanical research, this is it. Let's find out what those varieties are good for, and see if we can improve them. Without knowing anything else about them, you can guess that there'd be different flavors and textures--there might even be a market today, let alone after a climate change.

Summary

We need some contingency plans for reasonably probable climate or other semi-permanent natural disasters (think about the inevitable flooding of the site where we now have New Orleans). Part of this planning is ecological, part legal, and part is purely food research. I think we can agree pretty easily on the value of new foods research. Deciding what to do when Mt Hood decides to dump a dozen feet of ash on Portland is a bit of a knottier problem: somebody is going to win and somebody lose, and that's always contentious.

So let's agree to expand our food research programs with an eye to contingencies and likely new climates. That means more archaeology, testing and developing foodstuffs from around the world, archiving and maintaining the results, and it means government funding. I can't see a private firm taking those kinds of risks. And think of the possible side effect: some of these fallback plants might be desireable now. Just maybe something new could show up on your table a few years from now. And pretty certainly some of the research would help third-world farmers living in marginal areas.

2004-09-15T13:34:00.000-07:00

Wakeful baby nightlight

We used this scheme for many years. It worked for us.

When the baby wakes up in the middle of the night, I want to see where I'm going. The problem is that turning lights on wakes up my wife, really wakes up the baby, maybe the other kids as well, and wrecks my night vision for 10 minutes.

The solution was a desk lamp with a 5 watt red bulb. We used to use a lower wattage standard size bulb, but we can't find them any more. So I had to kludge up an interface to one of those little 5-watt bulb holders.

You need one of those outlet interfaces that screws into a standard bulb socket. Screw it into the bulb socket of the lamp. Then plug a night-light holder into one of the outlets. (If the 5-watt red night light is too bright for you, paint part of the bulb. It's only 5 watts, it won't get hot.)

The result is an easy-to-turn-on dim light that lets me see my way in the dark without waking everybody up.

Aspergers and Theater

2004-07-16T21:59:00.000-07:00

Asperger's Syndrome is usually classified as a kind of high-functioning autism. The person is often quite intelligent, but is unable to understand other people's emotions. Most of us learn as infants how to read other people's faces and tell their emotions, but the AS child seems to use a different part of the brain, and has a lot of trouble piecing out what other people really mean.

Stop and think how much of the meaning of an ordinary conversation is contained in the tone and body language you employ. And how do you decipher this often dreaded exchange?

He: "Is something wrong?"
She: "No, everything is just fine."

Depending on her tone of voice and which way her eyes are looking, this could be a tender moment or the overture to a dish-slinging serenade. Imagine not being able to tell which was about to happen!

Since studies suggest that the AS child uses a different part of the brain (a part related to mathematical skills), you can't teach him to "read people" in quite the same way as you could somebody else. You can already find programs to try to teach you how to recognize and interpret different facial expressions: and books, card games, and computer programs to go with these. I cannot easily evaluate these, except to authoritatively state that they aren't quick solutions. (In fact, the children involved were bored out of their gourds: probably because they couldn't understand the game.)

Even if you train a child to recognize emotions in others, he still faces the problem of communicating his own emotions in socially acceptable ways. In "social stories" the teacher devises a concrete situation based on some incidents the child has encountered, and the teacher and child step through the story deciding what should be the next response and why. (These have proved very useful.) During the course of the lesson the two may work out a number of different protocols: "If the bully says X you can say Y." Of course, the child finds that putting the lessons into practice is harder than talking them out with the teacher.

In an extension of this, the child and teacher spend time acting out the scenes. This is labor-intensive, but seems to be helpful.

Suppose we give the child not just social stories, but more detailed theatrical training. "Stand here. Point your head towards him. Open your eyes wider. Say the last part of that sentence a bit more slowly. When you want somebody to think you are interested in them, don't just look at them, turn your torso to face them."

Some people already use a theatrical model to teach more severely handicapped children their social stories, but this is a little different. I propose that we try to teach them body language and tone as well as their scripts.

An actor has to be intentional about how his body looks and his voice sounds. That is just the ticket for an Asperger's child. And the theater gives you scripts. Unfortunately most of the interesting plays don't have scripts that fit an ordinary day. "Alas, poor Yorick!" I believe we could find a wide enough sample, though, and make sure these are carefully practiced.

The act of shaping your own face to express some emotion ought to help you recognize that same shaping in someone else. (Mirrors help the acting instructor here: the child sees himself and the instructor making faces.) Having the expressions in context helps a lot in remembering their interpretations.

The context of the play lets you show explicitly how meanings change with body language.

At least in theory this sort of training gives the Asberger's child most of what he needs to learn about emoting and recognizing emotions and their contributions to conversation.

So we need

Acting instructors who can deal with children, and are very patient. Everything has to be spelled out.
Somebody to teach the acting instructors how to deal with Asperger's children. Teaching the teachers will be a big part of the job.
Plays that are interesting but still have some ordinary conversation. I don't think writing our own is a great idea, unless we have some hidden Shakespeare handy.
Other actors who are not AS children, so the instructors can focus on only the child's part in the play. Perhaps these could be other parents? If so, the parents need some acting instruction too.

There are a few issues that need attention:

Most conversation in plays and movies is actually stylized, and not quite like real conversations. Real conversations have a lot of redundancy and subtle breaks to allow turn-taking.
How many AS children can a single instructor deal with at a time? (One is obviously best, but very expensive. Maybe several instructors in the same room with several children?)
How many AS children can you have on a single set? How wide can the age range be? (This matters a lot for selecting the plays!)
By construction, this is not one-on-one training, but two-on-one: the teacher and the other actor(s) together with the child. It is obviously quite labor-intensive.
The degree of movement and facial expression suitable for the stage, where you have to convey emotion to the back rows, is not so suitable for ordinary conversation. Is movie acting different from stage acting?

I think it can be done. I don't see any show-stoppers yet.

Revisiting marriage policies

2004-07-03T19:46:00.000-07:00

Questions about marriage policy are hot topics lately, but most of the debate seems to miss the point.

Some things we learn from simple observation:

The institution of the family predates every government or ideology.
Everybody is part of a family. Some of the members may currently be dead, but they were family once.
Governments exist to support people and families, not vice versa. I'll grant that this isn't perfectly obvious. This notion was pretty revolutionary when it was introduced, and megalomaniacs in halls of state and halls of academe the world over still reject it.
Left to their own devices, people tend to form families.
Left to their own devices, people often try to get the benefits of relationships without meeting all the obligations. (And so they duck child support, "Why buy the cow...", etc). This is both unjust to the other individuals and bad for society as a whole.
Culture is not codified, but is usually more potent than laws for determining behavior. Chesterton once said that an English gentleman would rather commit any crime than walk down the street without his pants. Times and customs change, but the force of custom doesn't.
Laws can modify culture over time. We went through a long and deliberate effort to demolish racist laws and racist customs, and have had substantial success. There's still racism, but much less (just read the history if you doubt it) and the force of custom represses expression of racism.
It is easier to make things worse than make them better. Always.
There are always unintended consequences for any law. That doesn't mean you don't need the law, but it does mean that you have to be alert for problems and for loopholes. It was never the intent of the Great Society policy-makers to discourage welfare recipients from marrying or to keep them from getting part-time jobs or to create a culture of dependency; but they did all three. It took us an unconscionably long time to start trying to tune the laws to fix the problems.
The nuclear family of husband and wife and children is only part of the family. A family also has brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and cousins of various degrees.
A marriage not only unites a man and woman, but also links two families.
Although children are dependent when young, all other family relationships involve obligations of mutual support. The degree of support is greater the closer the relationship, but brother and sister, grown child and parent, cousins, etc have varying obligations to help each other. This is recognized around the world, but we usually neglect it in popular culture and in law here in the US.
You pick your spouse, but not the other members of your family. That does not excuse you from your obligations to them. You are not free to abandon your family, like them or not.
Your obligation to live honestly outweighs family obligations. A criminal must not be sheltered just because he is family. I'll grant that this is not a universally accepted principle. In some cultures family ties are more important than any law of man or God. I'm going to stipulate that they are wrong, at least insofar as the laws of God go.
Family obligations are huge. As Maggie Gallagher pointed out, the duties of parent to child or the duties of taking care of a sick spouse demand a degree of commitment that cannot be enforced by laws. Only love supported by custom proves adequate to motivate the sacrifices required. In traditional families it is normal to find parents working extra jobs, giving up luxuries, and so on to provide good educations for their children. What kind of law can you enforce to make a father work a second job to pay for a better school for his children?

The obvious objection to my sketch of the "big picture" of families is that it doesn't reflect the situation on the ground. The idealized lily-white suburb is peopled with nuclear and sub-nuclear families who send Christmas cards to their cousins; and the black enclave may have few marriages of any description and a lot of grandparents caring for children.

Perhaps this "situation on the ground" describes the people you know. Nevertheless we're still a nation of immigrants, and the recent immigrants still have and respect the normal human family structure: the "extended" family.

It seems self-evident that our customs and laws ought to support family structures and obligations of the usual "extended" type, and not just the nuclear family. At the moment we seem to disparage it.

Even if we set aside the obligation of government to provide the mechanisms that recognize and encourage families, the social and economic benefits of "extended" families seem clear enough:

Fallback support for nuclear families when someone loses a job or gets sick. You can have targetted support, with no administrative overhead. We would potentially have fewer who needed welfare (The last time I checked, most welfare recipiants only needed support for a few months.)
Encouragement and training for new parents. Parenting skills don't come automatically. Experienced relatives are a great boon. Those of you who've been parents: imagine a sister or cousin taking a few days "family maternity leave" to help out when your first was born.
The increased security and stability for children has immense payoffs: children of divorces, with little other family support, are far more likely to be unsupportive of their own children, and far more likely to be criminals. The social cost of uncared-for children is very high.
There are some economies of scale when families try to afford housing, for instance. If your objective is to sell as many houses as you can, encouraging people to buy large houses as a family is bad; but if your objective is to have people housed, then its a good thing if several income-earners chip in.

Tax law doesn't recognize any kind of family mutual support obligations besides that between spouses, and no other kind of support except that of "dependent." Tax law doesn't recognize what you and your three siblings each contribute to your widowed mother's support unless one of you gives over 50% of the total.

Insurance rules are similarly restricted.

When we tried to suppress racism, we used a combination of laws and moral arguments to change actions and attitudes. If we decide that we ought to support the "extended" family we will likewise need to change not just the laws but the attitudes. That's not easy, but as we've seen already we can deliberately change the culture.

There are consequences of this sort of effort. Emphasizing family obligations means that divorce should be very hard if there are children to be supported. We would be deprecating the irresponsible drift from sex partner to sex partner that young men find so popular. For a substantial fraction of the country, we would be reminding them that they have obligations to people they haven't seen in years. We probably wouldn't get the right model of joint ownership on the first try. And if we try to shoehorn civil unions into this we'll wind up with a dog's breakfast of a mess. Civil unions focus on adults, not children.

Prayer Tables

2004-07-02T21:21:00.000-07:00

If we are a "holy priesthood," for whom do we intercede? Only each other, or non-Christians as well? If we intercede for others, how do we do so?

With a public prayer table?

There are 3 types of prayer tables: In church, at Christian venues (like concerts), and at secular venues (like fairs or block parties).

Many churches have a prayer box, where you can drop in a prayer request. Some also have a prayer room, where you can go to pray with someone.

A prayer table at a secular venue is like that at a Christian venue, but with stronger accountability controls, more training for outreach, and more training for the servers for dealing with hecklers and pranksters.

So consider the prayer table at a Christian venue.

At Christian concerts, you find sales tables and information tables.

Set up a table with 3 or 4 people to sit taking prayer requests and praying with people. The servers commit to praying for these requests for a week. A large sign tells what we do (pray for your requests) and who is sponsoring it (a church must sponsor tables to make sure that we have accountability, and don't have charlatans or gossips manning the table).

People can leave prayer cards in a jar, which the servers will pray for for a week. No names are required.

Remember Mark 11:24, Mark 11:25-26, and Matthew 6:7-8.

Some people will want answers to questions about God or doctrine. Keep a Bible (maybe some freebies too) and gospel tracts handy. Servers should admit their ignorance about subtle details, but be able to explain the gospel. DO NOT deprecate ANY Christian denomination. That is not the way of service here. It is probably not a good idea to strongly deprecate non-Christian groups either (atheists, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc) because that's not what we're trying to do.

Some non-believers and immature people will make fun or propose rediculous petitions. Politely decline.

Don't get involved in any politics--local, national, or international.

Some people will want to sit and talk. We need polite ways to cut to a specific request if a line forms.

Some people will need counseling. We need a list of clergy or other counselors--counseling is not our job.

Some prayers will need a bit of clarification or generalizing. For example, needing money is pretty non-specific. Does the person need a job, or need money for something (rent, etc)? Try as much as possible to avoid changing the central request. If there are issues that need expansion, talk about them (ask "Is this . . ." questions) before praying.

Some people will want to confess sins. Our servers must be very discreet. We don't offer cheap confessionals. The servers must refer back to the petitioner's preacher/priest, remind them of the command to "go and be reconciled to your brother" and emphasize that only God forgives. If we allow confessions at all, they must be private and follow the rules that apply to counselors and priests. No records.

Beware of carrom prayer requests: gossiping or bad-mouthing someone in the guise of asking prayer for that person.

Sample: Pray that God will forgive X; thank God that He does forgive; pray that X will stand firm in repentence and fill his/her life with good work instead of the sin; and that X will be reconciled with whoever he/she may have offended with this sin.

Again: Remember Mark 11:24, Mark 11:25-26, and Matthew 6:7-8.

Church Alternatives to Halloween Parties

2004-07-02T20:18:00.000-07:00

Whether or not we think Halloween satanic (I don't), it is indisputable that the costumes and themes are now amazingly vile, expensive, and without any redeeming entertainment value. Yet Trick-or-Treat seems to be so firmly imbedded in our culture that children feel deprived if not allowed to participate.

We can bite the bullet and refuse to participate, or we can try to modify the celebrations to serve benign ends.

Children like candy and parties, like dressing up, and like being a bit weird. We can accomodate them.

Imagine a church party celebrating the saints and martyrs of history. Different aged children have different parties, of course. The youngest kids get “bathrobe and prop” costumes and act out scenes like David and Goliath (whiffle-ball slingshot?) or Samson with the jawbone of an ass or Gideon. (I grant there might be an issue finding volunteers to be Philistines, who only get to be defeated.) The altar faceoff between Elijah and the priests of Baal could get nice and noisy.

Do we have enough women? Most don't seem to have distinctive enough costumes. This may well prove a show-stopper.

Older children could pick from the saints and martyrs, and tell their stories when called on. St. Sebastian would be nice and popular (stuck full of arrows), but costumes might prove a bit undistinctive in general. This requires a greater emphasis on the stories—can we work on story-telling skills here?

What is this for?

2004-07-02T08:49:00.000-07:00

In blue-sky planning, you devise a scheme for solving a problem. You then try to flesh it out. In the process you discover all sorts of side effects and collateral problems; and usually the scheme is impractical, if not impossible. But often the scheme morphs into something humbler and more practical, and every now and then even workable.

So don't laugh too hard. Follow up and fix it!