There's an old joke about two blind men who, having never before encountered an elephant, are asked to describe it based on what they can touch of it. The one man, brought to the elephant's trunk, has a completely different description from the other, who was brought to its hind leg.

There's a famous experiment, proposed as a test for artificial intelligence, in which a person queries two entities about themselves and tries to determine which of the two is a man, and which is a machine.

And then there's the famous "black box" which, in theory, creates solutions from inputs, without any single entity knowing what it does to "create order from chaos". The black box is, in other words, magick.

Each of these requires that someone (or some thing) create a definition and a solution to a problem based on insufficient, empirical data.

  (READ MORE)

I think he's just about had enough.

If I went through what he goes through, I suppose I would too.

Two days of low ketones that wouldn't go away no matter how hard we prayed for mercy. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. Two days home from school. Maybe a third tomorrow. High blood sugars and ketones that proved to be an omen for one hell of a nasty cold.

He's had enough of the long, sharp needles in his ass and the tiny sharp needles in his fingers. Our constant handling of his pump like he's some sort of appliance. Out of defiance yesterday, he wouldn't let me near his pump because he couldn't eat what he wanted to eat. He took a stand against the injustice.

  (READ MORE)

I don't believe in vaccines. Perhaps it was the family that I grew up in. Or the disease that I've lived with every day since a series of regular, routine vaccines when I was 4 years old. Maybe it's just my own understanding of health and traditional thinking.

But I don't believe in them. However controversial that might be and however many of you might hate/ban/harass me for it, I cannot bring myself to believe in them. And trust me, I have done my research.

When I was 4 years old, my mother took me in for all the regular vaccines. The most memorable for both of us is the MMR because it has since been linked to autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes. Almost immediately, my mom noticed a change in me. I was sick, unlike myself, and in ill health.

  (READ MORE)

It happened quickly: one day I was dealing with a cold, another day I realized I was fighting allergies, and between the time I woke up on Monday and drove to work my throat was so sore and my ear hurt so bad that I called the doctor.

You wouldn't think that in such a dry climate we'd have to deal with allergies, but allergens can actually be pretty bad here in the spring. So I'm sure that between the cold and the allergies my body just couldn't fight any more and my tonsils got infected. Not bad enough that they need to come out, but bad enough for a seven-day course of antibiotics.

And with antibiotics -- not to mention an infection -- comes a whole host of diabetes considerations. First, just the nature of having diabetes makes it more difficult to fight an infection. Diabetes + infection = high blood sugar. Or at least it can. On top of that, antibiotics can cause high blood sugar.

  (READ MORE)

I feel a shift taking place in the world today.  Its happening as we speak, and I feel it happening within me, on this site and others, before the world.  Slowly, more and more people are realizing the power of their minds.  The power to be at peace with life and whatever happens in it, the power of the ability to watch our thoughts and to not be affected by them completely.  I watched another documentary recently called, “The New Medicine”.  It touches on this very point.  More and more, people who fall ill to various things are finding the healing benefits of their own thoughts and states of consciousness while enduring the sicknesses their experiencing.  (READ MORE)

Thanks to En Vogue for those lyrics. We got back from vacation late Friday night but I'm still feeling my way back to my "new normal".

10 days in New Mexico in a travel trailer with kids (ages 4 & 1) - it went really well!  Yes, that's shock you see in my punctuation!  We went places and saw people and ran, ran, ran.  The weather was beautiful, highs hovering around 80.  They have gotten a lot of rain and some Dolly-effect flooding this summer, so it was quite lush by New Mexico standards.

Unfortunately, I didn't replace my workouts as I had hoped I would.  Read that as "hoped, but didn't make definite plans for ahead of time." I need to remember that for the future.  On the plus side, I was much more active than usual.

  (READ MORE)