Hello and good morning.

I may be brief today*, because I am mentally fairly exhausted.  Yesterday was a bad day for me, pain-wise and mood-wise.  I’ve had large amounts of more than one kind of pain medicine on board, and I felt…well, I felt somewhat less pain in some places, but I’ve started to get some broader symptoms that I sometimes get when I’m taking too many NSAIDs for too long.

My thumbs and my knees and ankles and such are actually feeling wobbly and unstable as well as being generally a bit puffy and plenty sore.  This isn’t really like an inflammatory kind of swelling; that would indeed be a failure of the Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug(s) I take, would it not?  No, this feels more like a sense of having excess fluid in each joint, as well as in between them, and less tautness, less stability, and somewhat ironically, more pain, albeit of a slightly different character that usual.  It’s quite frustrating.

Also, my back and hips and shoulders don’t feel much, if any, better than usual.

I’ve been wondering lately if I might have some form of relatively mild hypermobility syndrome, which often goes along with ASD it seems (some of the causative genes are probably the same, or at least tend to travel together through the genome).

I have long had certain slightly atypical flexibility issues or attributes**.  For instance, I’ve always been able, with a bit of a pull, to put one or the other of my feet behind my head from a seated position.  I can also scratch pretty much any part of my own back, and I have always been able to do this, though I sometimes need to pull one arm a bit with the other.  Also, I have a hard time holding my head straight upright for very long at a time; it’s uncomfortable, and I need to lean it to one side or another pretty much constantly.  Maybe that’s just a weird habit, I don’t know.

Of course, hypermobility can be associated with various kinds of chronic pain, and can certainly make other things worse.  Unfortunately, it’s not something that can be cured, any more than autism can be cured (or any more than having a particular color of eyes or hair can be cured, though they can be masked, as by dyes or contact lenses).

I am far from sure about this tentative self-diagnosis, and I’m always leery of “second year med student syndrome”, but I think I am being reasonably objective here.  Genetic testing would be required to confirm something like Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, but I don’t meet the criteria for full-blown EDS***, and less full-blown syndromes may not easily (nor cheaply) be testable, or testable at all.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter much.  I do not expect my baseline previous health to be recoverable in any reasonable sense.  This is one reason I’m not too terribly worried about things like heart disease and infections and so on.  Why would I want to live a longer life of the kind I now live?  It’s like asking someone if they want the massive street construction project on their block, that’s slowing traffic and making terrible noise all day and into most nights, to be extended‒not by the workers doing more improvement, but just by working more slowly and being less efficient.

At least yesterday, in between doing payroll, processing deals on an unusually busy day, and trying to discourage my body from committing war crimes against itself, I remembered and indulged in a resource I haven’t used in a while:  I got on bioarXiv and skimmed through the abstracts of some of the more recently uploaded papers in general biology, neuroscience, genetics, molecular biology, and such like.  It can be kind of fun.

I don’t enjoy it as much as I do going to the original arXiv (hosted at my alma mater), which deals in physics, mathematics, computer science and the like.  But the bio site requires less mental effort and is simpler in many ways.  This is at least partly due to the fact that I am an MD, and I got my degree from one of the more research-oriented medical schools (we were required to do a publishable medical science research project as part of our degree) so the terminology is more or less at my fingertips.  This probably would apply even more at medrXiv, at which I spend less time than the latter two.

ArXiv, the physics/maths/CS site, has oodles of interesting articles always up‒I have, for instance, downloaded a PDF of a paper by David Deutsch from there‒but most require more mental effort than on the other sites, because I don’t have as good a handle on some of the jargon, and I often need to review the mathematics involved, or more often try to absorb it for the first time.  Still, it’s very cool, though it’s a real embarrassment of riches; it’s like being in the biggest candy store in the world,  but having only three dollars to your name, and having to choose what to buy with it.

The potential opportunity costs are staggering, but I guess that’s a good problem to have.

Speaking of reviewing mathematics, I found a nice little YouTube channel by a woman from MIT who does good reviews of basic integration and more advanced techniques like integration by parts and trig substitutions and such like.  I find her stuff much less sleep-inducing than the videos on 3Blue1Brown, though Grant has oodles of great videos, well-produced and in-depth but clear, about many topics in mathematics.  Unfortunately, his voice is if anything too calm for me, and his animations, though superb, are if anything too smooth.

I think, also, that I learn better by seeing someone writing the stuff out‒possibly this engages my mirror neurons and thus makes more of my whole brain focused on what’s happening.

Incidentally, the lady mentioned above is not officially affiliated with MIT, she just went there.  But you can actually “attend” lecture courses in various subjects in Physics, in Mathematics, in Economics, in Computer Science, and so on, from MIT at their YouTube channel.  It’s truly remarkable, and if you’re just after learning the stuff but aren’t seeking an Official Piece of Paper™, it’s a tremendous resource!  Stanford also has similar online lecture courses, as I think does CalTech.

I’m pretty sure Harvard does this also, but there’s no need for any of you to go slumming there.  Why not just watch Baby Shark or something‒and Gangnam Style is actually pretty enjoyable.  I know, I know, Steven Pinker is at Harvard, and he’s one of the most enjoyable (and thought-provoking) public thinkers in the world, but I don’t think he gives any of their online lectures.

Although, given the notorious grade inflation known to be rampant at Harvard, you might just get an official “A” from them simply by clicking on one of their videos.

Okay, I’m at the stage of taking cheap shots at Harvard (they do not deserve such disrespect, even though there really is a problem with grade inflation), so I’ll call this post to a close.  I hope you’re all having a better week, year, decade, and life than I am having.  Though, really, if you’re not reading preprint scientific papers for free online, how good can your life be?

TTFN

*I was not.  Perhaps this is analogous to the situation that led to the famous quote about not having time enough to write a short letter‒only in this case, it is not time but mental energy that limits my concision.

**Some of these things are slightly curtailed now because I am too plump, but that’s a different issue.

***No, I do not refer to Ross Perot’s old company, Electronic Data Systems.