Monthly Archives: September 2011

Literacies!

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Yes you should! Read them all, even if you have to jump to reach the ones at the top shelf! ^_^

If you read this journal, you are obviously not illiterate. But how literate are you? Well, if you read my previous entry about walking, it was worthy of 9th grade according to this handy readability calculator. Hopefully you graduated from there at some point and haven’t lost too much of your skills…

I am pleasantly surprised that my latest entries seem to be this readable. I suppose if I went into the really esoteric material, it would be harder to read. Certainly that seems to be the case with most of the books I have bought lately, mostly on topics of religion and value philosophies.  With the notable exception of Ryuho Okawa, it seems people feel the urge to use strange words when speaking about such topics, or else use common words in new ways. I guess this can be useful to keep things exact. The more clearly you understand something, the more exact you can be. And if something is very valuable to you, you want others to see it exactly as it is.

But if you see something in the distance, it is only natural that it is hazy. So if I try to explain something to people who are still far away from it, I should probably keep it simple. Should you really need college education to understand how the body works, or the mind, or the Heavenly Realm of Light? Perhaps, if you want to get all the details. But I don’t even have all the details myself. And in any case, I wouldn’t write for experts in a place like this.

***

Even so, there are many 9th graders who can’t read at a 9th grade level, as I am sure you have noticed. For that matter, there are many adults who can’t.  I guess it is more of an ideal than a requirement?

There are many reasons why people can’t read well. It could just be that they are stupid, as we used to say in an simpler age: They don’t have much processing power in their brain, compared to others. Whether we like it or not, this is a resource that is not given equally to all. And reading is not a function you need to survive in the wild, so it is not an instinct in humans. Perhaps if we were to live in civilization for millions of years, speech and reading and writing might become full instincts? If I write a science fiction story about such a species, I may consider it. But in the real world, reading is not the first thing your brain will devote itself to.

But even if you are smart, there could be specific problems with a small part of your mind, or your eyes, or even the muscles that control the small movements of your eyes; any of these could make it hard to read well, even if you are a fast thinker. For instance, I can read while standing up, or sitting in a bus on a bumpy road, or even while walking. This is not due to superior thinking but the tiny muscles that control my eyes. Of course it helps to be able to guess things from context so you don’t have to move your eyes so often, but without good control of those tiny muscles it gets much harder to read. Someone who is not blessed with good eye muscles will have a hard time reading unless he is sitting at a table or some such ideal place.

There are many people who can read well, if you ask them to read a text out loud. But if you ask them later to explain it in their own words, they cannot. They may be able to mention names or numbers from the text, but they cannot tell you what they learned and how it connects to other things they know. This could be because they learned to read as an outward skill, and were graded or praised based on whether they could read fluently, or remember names and numbers. They may not be stupid, but they never got into the habit of thinking about what they read while reading. Unless your mind is on the content, rather than the performance of the skill, you will have a hard time understanding and keeping what you have read. This is particularly important in textbooks and articles. The human mind is naturally good at stories, so it is easier to get something out of these even if you are not used to bind your text to you with thoughts or steadfast observation.

Reading tends to make you better at reading. It will not magically solve any medical conditions that make reading hard, of course. But within your potential, you can grow with practice. (As in all other things, I guess.) You may think that reading fantasy novels will do more harm than good to your future understanding of college textbooks, but that is not so (unless perhaps you are already an intellectual).

In fact, the example is taken from my own life. English is my third language. I learned the basics in school, but it was reading paperbacks that gave me a larger active vocabulary than most Americans. In particular authors who loved the English language, such as Piers Anthony, Stephen Donaldson and later Edgar Rice Burroughs.  They extended, expanded and enhanced my vocabulary and grammar. Now when I meet a rare word or an old-fashioned turn of phrase, I don’t need to break my concentration to figure it out.

Be that as it may, I am still not the grandmaster of literacy. Reading English more than a century old or so, for instance, slows me down. And there are people who write such flowery and convoluted language, it gives even me pause. Sometimes it is beautiful, sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes, I suspect, it is just their way of thinking.

But as for my own writing, I do not aim it at the barely literate. I may write for them if asked to, but I have no faith that they would find my journal in the forest of blinking and colorful advertising that the Internet has now become. So I write for those who read, enjoy reading, and keep reading. And for them, I hope my words shall be readable enough. For some of the things of which I write are not so simple to believe, since we have been taught otherwise from an early age.  But that is not for today. For now, let this be enough.

 

 

Another walky day

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Now these points of data make a beautiful line. And we’re out of beta, we’re releasing on time! So I’m glad I got burned, think of all the things we learned – for the people who are still alive!

(Lyrics from “Still alive” by Jonathan Coulton. Picture from VG Cats.)

Today I did not feel like taking a walk at all. My legs were stiff and tired, my gums were sore and I had a bit too little sleep last night. It was the obvious day to stay home and relax.

But since when has that stopped any of us? So I walked for two hours, burning 1200 calories. It seemed like the right thing to do. (We do what we must because we can?) Anyway, 1200 calories is 300 gram of pure carbs, for instance sugar. It is also about half a day of sedentary life, the way modern men live.

I did not climb steep hills this time, only very gentle ones, and basically walked briskly for an hour, then turned and walked back the same way (or nearly so – I took a detour as I found myself moving faster on the way back. See my previous discovery of the force of familiarigravity.)

My pulse did not pick up all that much even on the way home, but from about an hour and a half, I could notice that it was 10 beats or so above what it had been on the first stretch. This makes sense since I have walked mostly an hour and a quarter for the last couple weeks, so the body probably has a small margin beyond that. At about one hour 40 minutes I could feel a gentle pressure on my chest, no more than when immersed in water to the neck. My legs grew rapidly more stiff and tired, and at 1:45 I sat down for a minute or two. This solved the problem.

There seems to be no connection between the stiff and tired feeling in the legs and actual depletion of energy / glycogen. Rather, I suspect the feeling comes from the posture muscles being locked in a static stance, and would have been the same (or worse) if I had just been standing around for the same length of time. Luckily, even a short break did a great deal to help with this.

After I came home, my pulse while sitting was about 90, against 65-70 before I started. However, even without eating, the pulse returned to near normal values after 20 minutes. So there seems to have been very little forced recharging of the muscles. My guess would be that the muscles absorbed glucose from the blood during this period, and the liver released a similar amount. I doubt my blood sugar was much reduced, but it is hard to say without actually measuring it. In any case, I drank some juice and ate some sweet snacks afterwards, so the muscles should be able to rebuild their reserves more fully during my sleep.

Speaking of which, it is past midnight again.  I should have been in bed an hour ago.

 

Eating and walking

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Today, somewhat delayed because of rain, was the eat & walk experiment.

Background: Muscles “store energy” in the form of glycogen, as stated by respected websites on the topic. Glycogen still needs oxygen to release energy, but nothing more. The pulse therefore remains fairly low during moderate exercise. Once glycogen reserves fall below a threshold level, muscles request nourishment from elsewhere in the body, and the pulse increases. If the glycogen is further depleted, an emergency recharging takes place after exercise, and the pulse remains elevated until glycogen reaches an acceptable (for the muscles) level.

After a carbohydrate-rich meal, blood sugar rises. Body releases insulin, which orders muscles (and liver) to absorb sugar and convert it into glycogen.  This continues until blood sugar reaches normal level or glycogen storage is full.

Hypothesis: By walking briskly after eating, the insulin should flood the leg muscles with glucose, which they can burn instead of depleting glycogen during exercise and replace it later. The body should secrete less insulin and there should be no spike in blood sugar.

Observation: My pulse increased early to above 120, against normal 110 at this phase. This is to be expected, since the heart would have to supply plenty of blood to digestive tract, liver and muscles all at once.

I walked for one hour and 25 minutes, ten minutes longer than normal for the last couple weeks. The pulse was still in the 125 range at the end of the trip. Energy use was calculated by my pulse watch to 900 calories. This is in a similar range as the meal eaten.

Pulse after exercise was slightly higher than after inactivity. This could be a sign of moderate recharging of muscles, or of delayed digestion. Inconclusive.

Sleepiness and lethargy that is often experienced after a meal was not present during the walk.

Subjective experience of stiffness and tiredness in leg muscles was consistent with a 900 calorie activity. It would seem that the stiffness of muscles after activity is NOT caused by depletion of glycogen reserves. Cause still unknown. The effect seems incompatible with intelligent design if we assume unlimited access to food. Otherwise, incentives to restrict unaccustomed activity in adults may have been useful in the past.

Conclusion: The experiment was slightly unpleasant and did not bring a clear conclusion as to whether light exercise causes less blood sugar spike / insulin production, although the lack of drowsiness may imply this.

Recharging muscles?

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Still not sure about the muscles and energy thing. After I came home on Saturday, my pulse remained 10-15 beats above normal for at least a couple hours. I was also warmer than normal. According to the “muscles store energy” theory, this probably came from my leg muscles recharging, drawing energy from elsewhere in the body. But as I said, Wikipedia and a couple more pages of highly respected websites don’t believe that muscles can store energy like a battery, just a substance known as glycogen, basically very densely packed glucose (the simplest form of sugar).

If that is the case, then presumably my leg muscles were storing up glycogen by drawing glucose from the blood (where there seems to be no shortage of it, based on recent blood tests – I am not diabetic, but the blood sugar is at or just over the upper boundary of normal). There must have been rather a shortage of glycogen if the mucles had to increase the flow of blood to get enough sugar. You’d think since the heart is beating anyway, the muscles could just pick up sugar as it passed.

Yesterday it rained like a bathroom shower, and my jogging shoes soon became soaked all the way through. They are not going to last long if I use them for wading, so I returned home after only about half an hour. That put an end to my plan to check whether the energy reserves had regenerated fully.

Today I took a 1.25 hour walk. I carried my umbrella, even though I only needed it for a short while. I am not sure if carrying something had an effect, but my heart rate was somewhat higher and I burned more calories than on the first trip Saturday, although less than the second. I guess it may count that I also jogged down the other side of the hill and a few other places where my pulse started getting too low to count as training. Burned about 800 calories (kcal), which is pretty decent for that length.

However, I did not trigger a forced recharge this time. There must have been some reserves left, because my pulse almost immediately fell back to normal range. So evidently if I don’t discharge past a certain point, recharge will happen entirely in the background. That is what I thought, since I normally don’t experience any disruption of heart rate or breathing after I took up the habit of walking briskly for an hour.

Then again, according to what I learned before, the body should be burning mostly fat during so moderate exercise. OK, I guess climbing those hills might need some faster energy, but still. In theory the body should use mostly fat, and I have enough of that to walk for weeks.

I wish I had meters in my body so I can see what it is doing. It would be cool to be able to monitor my blood sugar, blood fat, remaining sugar storage and fat storage. Clearly the body does know these things, because it adjusts to them on the fly. But unless I take things to extremes, I cannot actually feel the variations. Then again, thanks to the glucose syrup tests, I seem to have achieved the ability to feel my blood sugar being higher than necessary. It is a kind of acute “fed” feeling, if that makes sense. It is different from the long-term “fed” feeling that comes from having my fat stores reasonably filled. (I am still not fat, thanks for asking, but I have more than I realistically need in peacetime.) So perhaps with the right experience, I may become able to feel other statuses in my body too. If I live that long… Just to be safe, I don’t think I will be running any marathons anytime soon!

***

Edit to add: Found it! The answer from nycgirl here is loaded with useful facts about glycogen.  Evidently even a walker like me has several hundred grams of the stuff, and it is always used in the beginning of any exercise (thus the low pulse during the first quarter, I guess). With slow and steady exercise, fat is burned but together with glycogen. This is probably which happens after I am fully warmed up.  I still don’t know what the trigger threshold is that causes my pulse to rise to the next level (after an hour or so, in my case). I also don’t know where the trigger is for the forced “recharge” after exercise.  Saturday I spent 1300 calories, and did get the recharge effect. Today 800 and nothing.  So more studies are in order.

 

Remedies

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To quote the main character in the movie The Golden Laws: “I guess… time is really God’s great river of love.” This is just something I connect on my own, it is not endorsed by Sakamoto, as far as I know.

Continuing to think back, I listen to a beautiful Japanese song I have found: “Remedy” by Maaya Sakamoto. (YouTube.) I guess you need to have grown at least a little bit accustomed to Japanese pop to appreciate the beauty of it to the fullest, for they have a less regular structure than western popular music. Lines that are shorter or longer, or occasionally transition from one to the other without a clear break. And they usually don’t have a chorus or refrain, although elements from one verse is often found in another.

Be that as it may, the music is beautiful to me and it evokes memories from my own life. It is almost shocking how I manage to find myself in the first lines. (The translation is a bit creative, but I think it conveys the feeling quite well, so I just quote it straight from the video.)

When I gazed out from over the top of the hill
I was moved to tears by the nostalgia.
The memories I wanted to forget were gleaming back at me.
They are beginning to change;
Even though it is still frightening, I am watching over them.
I will always, always carry into my future
the scars on my heart that cannot be erased,
so that someday
the day will come when I can directly face them…
Touch them and laugh.

My childhood home lies at the base of a mountain. Well, a field lies between the house and the foot of the actual mountain. A narrow path goes up to another, narrower ridge. Then a longer stretch of sheer cliff wall, which I did not traverse alone until puberty, I think. But it was when I was an adult for many years that I came back and climbed to the ridge above that. Behind it is a quiet, shallow valley, green and beautiful, with more mountain behind it.  And from the ridge, I could see my childhood home deep below, and to the left and right of me the village where I grew up, even to glimpse the waters of the sea. It was so beautiful, I wished I could stay there forever.

Like the steep mountains that were always around us, the memories of my childhood have cast shadows over my life, lasting for decades, as I could not see them from above. Not so much my home; it was, all things considered, one of the best I have seen or heard of. Despite the implacable hate I carried toward my oldest brother (and not entirely without reason, seen through human eyes), my home was still a refuge. School, on the other hand, was a nightmare, as were pretty much all social occasions of any kind. I went to Sunday School once, never again. OK, church service on Sunday was OK. I went with my grandmother, and she gave me chocolate when it was time to sing. I loved my grandmother for that and did not realize until after her passing that she had tried to keep me from singing with my terrible, terrible voice, disturbing the whole service. ^_^

But as I said, school was hellish. Well, purgatorial… no. Purgatory is supposed to be a place of hope. My only hope there and then was that somehow my tormentors would die, regardless of whether it was by my hand or not. In either case, I was convinced that not only I, but the world would profit greatly from their demise.

Years later, such a horrifying demise indeed took place for one of them, but I took no pleasure in it. The wounds of my heart had healed to scars, and I learned to live with them and move forward. They were still scars when I stood on that ridge, moved to tears by the beauty and sadness as I saw things from a somewhat greater height. But not high enough.

According to my brother and father, the last time I visited may have been ten years ago. Back then, I felt like a ghost, existing in a different time from everyone around me. Seeing the relationship between my nephews, I still could not emotionally separate it from the relationships of my own generation. I decided to stay away, to not haunt the place any more.

But in my heart I have stood on that ridge again and again, seen the valley of paradise and the shadows of hell.

Only now recently is it that light, bright white light, is shining out through the scars of my soul’s heart.  Only now can I touch them and smile. I know that every fear, every threat and kick and blow, was necessary to forge me into the unique person only I could become. If not for my enemies, I would likely have become socialized, become a mainstream human, and unhappy with it, for that was not my destiny. It would have taken something extraordinary for me to break out of those ruts, out of the chain gang, chained to all the other people. Those blows broke the chains while they were still as weak as wet clay, and I grew up to become free.

Thank you, everyone I feared and hated. You may know who you are, those of you who are still alive. I pray that the Eternal Light will pay you back many times for the help you have been to me, that you may enjoy happiness and brightness in this life and, if you so desire, the next. You really knew not what you did, and probably still don’t. Besides, I was an obnoxious brat, so don’t worry.

When I tried shouting loudly,
I felt the weight slightly lift from my shoulders,
like I had been completely soaked through with pure water.
Isn’t it about time to stop regretting
those things that cannot be redone?
Time will always, always continue,
surrounding and washing away everything.
With tranquility, softly, softly, with these hands
let go of the receding past.

 

Muscles store energy now?

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“I wanted to talk on the subject of science with you.”

OK, this is kind of weird. I just took a walk and this time walked up two long, steep hills, one atop the other. My pulse stayed around 120 for much of it and only reached 130 near the top of each hill.

I know this is not really international news, but there are reasons for my surprise. Only a couple weeks ago I crossed the first of these hills and slowed down to an amble because my pulse reached 135. That is around the upper limit before I trigger my lifelong exercise asthma. Also because of that asthma, I never did sports as a kid, and my lung capacity never developed fully. A couple years ago it was around 2/3 of normal for a man my age (50 years old at that time). And back in 2005, before the illness that changed me, I would stop twice in a hill shorter and less steep than this. I felt like my heart just couldn’t take the strain of climbing it all in one go.

I am so old that I have to warm up before my warm-ups. And yet for each passing month – if not week – my pulse seems to get lower and lower. That is a bit bizarre, I think.

***

Or perhaps not. After an hour’s walk, I came home and wrote the previous part, then set off again. This time my pulse was normal, and went all the way to 135 before I rounded the first hill. So it is not my heart. Somehow my muscles seem to store energy for the expected challenge, but when I then throw an unexpected challenge at them, they need the help of the rest of the body.

I wonder how the muscles can store up energy like that. There are probably books about it, but I don’t even know what to look for. I know all energy in the human body comes from burning the four food groups: Sugar, fat, protein and alcohol. But I was under the impression that they have to be burned within seconds of the actual energy use, not used to “charge up” muscles in advance.

I guess this explains why I have to walk longer and longer to burn the same number of calories. My body charges up the muscles beforehand (perhaps while I sleep?) and then releases this energy during the first hour of walking. I wonder how they do that. Actually, I wondered so much that I asked Google: How do muscles store energy? It provided links to sites about ATP and glycogen, but they were pretty random. I don’t think Google really understood the question…

My best guess would be glycogen, since ATP only lasts for a few seconds at best. I know glycogen (“animal starch”) is stored in muscles and broken down to glucose during exercise. But that does not really explain it to me: Glucose still needs oxygen to burn, and that oxygen must come through the blood. But the blood already contains glucose. That is what my doctor is worried about, the 6.1 mmol of glucose that is always in my blood, even 12 hours after eating.  Why then would the muscles need to store energy in the form of something that becomes glucose?

I mean, if glucose is a scarce resource in muscles,  if it is the bottleneck and not oxygen, then diabetics should be world champions in sports. There is no sign of that, to put it mildly.

I suppose it would make sense if muscles have some bottleneck in how fast they can absorb glucose from outside. Sugar molecules are not all that big, but they are a lot bigger than oxygen, so it may be that absorbing glucose is slower. So while the supply of glycogen lasts, the muscles need only import oxygen, but afterwards they need to import both oxygen (fast) and glucose (slow). But there is no mention of that in any of the articles I have read, this time or before when I read about physiology. It is as if no one has ever asked themselves why the pulse is low during the first part of exercise. That just cannot be: Humans are too curious for their own good, much of the time. So that leaves me with the notion that the answer is totally obvious to anyone except me.

Please tell me, since Google won’t.

Dreams and life

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The last several days something has happened to my dreams. I half remember them, especially  during the weekend when I don’t have to hurry in the morning. And they are… repetitive. I mean, I dream a sequence, and then I dream it again, but with some variation. And then I dream it again, with yet another variation. If I were to sum the dream up briefly, all the replays would be the same, but they are not. They are different in detail. I don’t think they go on like that all night. These are short sequences, so all the replays take place within one dream.

In the story I am still writing, the main character spends every night in a wide awake dream. The dreamworld he returns to is persistent: His day there is the night of his birth world, and the other way around. He goes to bed in one and wakes up in the other. But the Dreamworld quickly becomes the one he feels at home in: As he says, he was born into his first world by chance (that is what he thinks), but coming to the Dreamworld was a result of his own choices and efforts.

I don’t think this will happen to me, and I also don’t think I was thrown into this world by chance. I just mention it because I write about dreams and then a change seems to be happening to my own dreams. It is not for nothing that we often use the word “dream” in a less literal meaning. Dreams extend into our waking life, and our waking life into our dreams – even when the two are very different, as they usually are for me. So also now: All three sequences this morning was about airplanes, which I haven’t ridden for decades.

I did think back to one of my rare plane rides some days ago, however: I remembered how beautiful the clouds looked from above, much more so than from below.  How do you explain that, dear orthodox Darwinist? Did we evolve from particularly high-flying birds, or on very high mountain tops? Or is it a social construct? Was I raised by angels, subtly taught the beauty of the world from on high? Well, perhaps that is not so far off…

 

Pigsty continued

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To the casual observer, it looks like nothing has changed in the east half of my living room. It still looks like a disaster zone. But in fact, each Wednesday I have filled a plastic shopping bag with old, visibly worn-out clothes and another bag with old floppy disks, CDs and DVDs, and thrown both in the garbage. On days without rain I used to carry off comic books, but there were so many rainy days that I got out of the habit. Still, somewhere around half of the comic books I brought with me are given to the used-book shop, along with some paperbacks.

There is just such a huge amount of random stuff that even if I do this each week, you can barely see it. Also, I am starting to hit the things that I still think I may read again, despite years of proof to the contrary. Perhaps I shall have to carry them into and out of yet another car before I realize that I am better off without them? That would be a pity, but it would certainly fit the pattern of my life.

Well, the important thing is that I continue to move forward.