Runester

A lot has happened, since my last Blog entry. Here’s some of it.

The father of one of my best friends, died of congenital heart disease. I did not know him, closely, but I knew him through his son for many years. To me, he was the quiet, steady presence that ferried us around when we were kids or tried to stay out of our way when we were having one of our endless debates / discussions on the nature of life, history, and the universe. I am saddened by his passing. Having spoken with my friend, he reports that had a chance to speak with his father just days before. I think about that, especially as I live 700 miles away from my family, in Michigan.

In fact, another friend just recently lost his grandfather, in Michigan, and returned recently for the service. It’s saddening that two friends have lost someone in their families.

I’ll be visiting my own family, and some friends, in Michigan next week. It’s nice to be able to take time off work and it’ll be good to see them in person, again. The last time was Thanksgiving. I have multiple motives for traveling to Michigan though, not the least of which is my decision to return there, this year. Massachusetts has been good to me, but I want to be family and friends and that means returning to Michigan. The job market isn’t great, but then I don’t need thousands or hundreds of thousands of jobs, I just need the one. So, when I can secure a source of income, I’ll be packing up and moving.

My gf’s aunt, Polly, is back in the nursing home. She was doing well, her speech was greatly improved and she could mostly care for herself. But, about two months ago, she became very depressed and started talking about killing herself. So, her sister sent her to the hospital, and they sent her on to a psychiatric hospital for observation. Once they were through and prescribed some antidepressants, they sent her back to the nursing home for further care and observation. Her case is complex, because of the damage done to her brain during the aneurism.

Where before, she couldn’t speak or understand anyone, then she could but her “word find skills” were damaged and she spoke a kind of word-hash, now she understands and speaks very well. But, she has very limited short term memory. A side effect, is no correct sense of the passing of time. If she is left for one hour, she thinks she’s spent all day by herself. When I last saw her, she had only been in the nursing home for six days, and thought she’d been abandoned for months. Further, even though she is visited four or five times a week, if you ask her she’ll say no one comes to see her. What can be confusing, is that during your visit, she seems lucid and quite normal.

The difficult decision her sister has to make, is what is better for Polly. When Polly was at the hospital, all she wanted was to come home. When she came home, all she wanted was to get back into the nursing home, and now that she is back, all she wants to do is come home again. She is not happy in any of these places, but does not remember being unhappy in the other. I tried explaining it to her, “you weren’t happy at home, and when you said scary things about ending your own life, you were sent here.” That’s not how she remembers it, she remembers being lucid and clear and doing quite well for herself while she was home - which is not how it was. From what I’ve seen of her life in both places, I think she is better off in the nursing home. She is making friends there, this time, and has structure and varied activities to participate in. When she was home, there was little for her to do but watch TV, and her sister could not be there 24 hours a day to care for her.

My hope for her, is that her family will stay supportive and visit her and that she will make a life for herself with people and activities in the nursing home.

My gf and I went to church two weekend’s ago and were both surprised to hear a sermon heavy on the politics. The theme was respect for the elderly (related to Chinese New Year) and this was brought around to the current discussion of Social Security reform. I’m not that comfortable with this level of politics, from the pulpit. Especially as it’s very one sided. There was no discussion about what options are possible, or whether or not there is an issue with SS that needs to be addressed. Instead the minister equated the presidents proposal with being mean to old people - and that was that. What worries me is that, though I knew my political views were different from those of the majority of the church, I didn’t think it would be a problem since politics seldom comes up in church. Now that I’ve heard multiple sermons either directly or indirectly address political policies - and I don’t even attend that often - I realize how much my opinions and viewpoints are outlier in this community.

If the church really wanted to discuss this, fine … but instead of discussion it’s more like a “we all think this way, which is completely correct.” Hey, what if someone doesn’t?

I’ve come up with an elegant way to couple Artificial Neural Networks with Particle Swarm Optimization, something that I’ve been thinking about and experimenting with for years. I’ve just been too busy to code it up and see it work. It’s in my nogen, though … so one of these days I’m going to have a working, learning, adapting pattern matcher of my very own. Oh yes, I will …

I’ve been experimenting with Perl’s GD module, which lets me draw and output PNG format graphics. It reminds me of the old days of drawing on the screen with GWBASIC … only now I can collect the drawings as graphics. Here is one of my doodles, based on a Rorschach ink blot. It demonstrates the inhuman beauty possible with algorithmic art and a good random number generator. Enjoy!

Here’s a different algorithm, I call it Blue Mandala