Archive for December, 2013

INTEGRATING LOG X

December 16, 2013

On an autumn day 15 years ago in Las Cruces, New Mexico, I sat in a Math Stats graduate class.  The teacher was discussing some function and came to the part where he said, “Oh, now we have to get the integral of log x.  I can’t remember what that is.”

With that question, my stats teacher had just opened a life changing door that neither he nor I knew existed.  The class, mostly in their 20s and early 30s, was silent.  I was the oldest person in the room, even having four years on the professor.  I quietly said,

“It’s xlog x – x”.  I continued, “you integrate it by parts.”  My classmates and professor looked at me as if Einstein had been reincarnated.

The class moved on to other subjects that day, about which I knew nothing:  moments of functions, and other aspects of beginning graduate level statistics.  I would have many difficulties in the coming 20 months, but that day changed my life, and my teacher’s, too.

He later became my advisor, and said when I left NMSU that it had been a long time since he had enjoyed a graduate student as much as he had enjoyed working with me.  I had a very difficult two years at New Mexico State, but I did pass with a 3.89.  I took graduate level statistics starting at age 49, and I got through the program in two years.  The last semester wasn’t pretty, but I finished it.  My advisor helped me finish in two years, when many stayed longer to finish their thesis.  I was grateful to him for that.

My advisor told me that the day I knew the integral of log x was the day he realized I was for real.  He did not give out praise often.  When I determined the mean and variance for a godawful hypergeometric function using a technique that I was frankly quite surprised I figured out, I showed it to him.  He agreed, and as I walked out the door, called to me: “That was a slick piece of work.”  I remember that as one of the top 5 compliments I got in grad school.

Chance occurrences one might say.  Perhaps.  I have, however  been amazed at how often supposedly “chance occurrences” appear.  I was volunteering in a calculus class when limits of the function: y= x squared, was discussed, when x was 0.999999.  The teacher said, “I need a calculator for that,.   From the back, I stated “no you don’t,” and gave the answer, exactly, to 12 decimal places.  The year before, I had seen that problem, wondered if there were a pattern to squaring numbers that were all 9, found it, and happened to be in the class the following year.

Or the day in a quality improvement course in Salt Lake City, where the discussion centered upon diseases common in “the three Scandinavian countries.”  Without thinking, a major flaw I have, I blurted out, “There are four.”  The teacher looked at me and said, “Name them.”  There was no problem with Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, I suddenly realized Finland wasn’t one, and somewhere from the recesses of my brain, I dredged up “Iceland.”

Why?  Am I unusually intelligent?  No, I am not.  Plenty of people are a lot smarter at many things than I, including math.  What I have learned over the years are two fundamental facts about learning:

  1. If you learn something really, really well, you will eventually forget it if you do not use it.  But if you ever need it again in the future, with a little reading, it will come back quickly.  It doesn’t matter if it is math or playing the piano.  I  had to relearn calculus after 30 years of never seeing a derivative or an integral.  One day, I happened to see the integral of log x, and for whatever reason, it stayed with me.
  1. Know your learning style, which is how you learn best.  Do NOT let teachers tell you,”You don’t have to write this down,” if you feel you should.  Write it down.  Do not let people say that we learn like children or “adult learning theory says…..”  We are not children, and adults have different learning styles, too.  Mine is very different from most adults, and I have struggled a good share of life until I understood what my learning style was.

I am a slow processor.   When a financial advisor explains a trust, a company’s prospectus, or a host of other issues, I cannot understand what they are saying.  I need time.  I understand numbers quickly; finance is a different matter.  I was also an average medical student in gross anatomy.

Being a slow processor, however, comes with a big, big advantage.  Once I learn something well, I keep it forever.  The first time I knew that was in my clinical rotation in surgery when somebody asked me where the nerve that eventually caused tearing left the skull.  “The hiatus of the facial canal,” I stated, and the expression on the surgeon’s face was priceless.  Nobody had answered that question right the whole year.  In anatomy, I was average; the following year, I had the same knowledge I had before, but the fast learners had forgotten it faster.  Both groups have advantages and disadvantages.  It isn’t only fast or slow processing, either.  It is a matter of vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell–our senses–that help us learn, too.  Some are primarily one, other a combination.  It is useful to know what works for oneself; no, it is more than just useful.  It is essential.\

Education is never wasted, said Moira Gunn, when she was once told that a woman engineer from Purdue should not host a radio show about technology and science.  Today, her “Technation” show is arguably the best show-podcast for science information.  She knew how to interview people, and her life took a direction I don’t think she ever dreamed it would.

Jay Anderson was a Winnipeg meteorologist whose interest in solar eclipses and weather were melded into a climatology page for very solar eclipse.  Every “chaser,” and the number is increasing, knows who he is.  His page is free; the information astoundingly good.  He never would have believed he would be a household name in the eclipse chasing community.  I will be doing ground views of the eclipse path in Oregon the next three years, before the 2017 eclipse. I never thought I would chase solar eclipses; now I am helping a little with the climatology for the next one to cross North America.

Integral of log x? Something odd that you learned that you think is worthless?  Perhaps. Maybe, however, it will be life changing.  Keep your mind open to opportunities.  You can sometimes log a few more than you thought.

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CREATIVITY: MUSIC, ART, CHEMISTRY, AND THE ABILITY TO SQUARE A NUMBER MENTALLY THAT NO COMPUTER ON EARTH CAN DO.

December 14, 2013

The other day, I went to a Christmas party held by a financial group who helps me deal with the morass of American finance.  One of the people in the group was a member of The New Christy Minstrals, a group that goes back to “my era.”  I was impressed.  He has entertained in each of the 50 states.

The party was held at an auditorium, and I had no idea what to expect.  I had a 1300 mile drive ahead of me the next 2 days, and I didn’t plan on staying more than a few minutes.

I stayed more than an hour.  Members of the group had made a band, and other employees danced when asked to appear.  It was wonderful.  My advisor was one of the musicians, and he knew the history of jazz and American music from a century ago.  I learned that “Barbecue” was once slang for “pretty woman”.  I didn’t know that.  When I open my mind, I learn a lot of things, which help me become smarter.  A lot of people call me young, but at 65, I am old.  I happen to keep my mind tuned to new things and try not to disparage or remove them from thought because of my preconceptions.

I listened, and I enjoyed.  I listened, and I started writing, in my head kind of writing, things that the music evoked in me.  What I was seeing on the stage did not evoke an article at all.  It just made me think. Five days later, what I saw on stage became, in five minutes, an article.

Writing is a lot like music in that regard.  Musicians sometimes “get a song” in their head and start to write and polish it.  Sometimes, they have jam sessions, feeding off one another.  A solitary writer like me can’t do the latter, but I feed off of what I see, almost never at the time, but days later, when I didn’t even know the initial moment was special.  I happened to see a video on Facebook that showed South American children making instruments from stuff in a landfill.  That reminded me of music,  the advisor  playing it, how I admired his creativity, and I started to write. There is a story in a lot of things in life; sometimes, it takes another story or an incident to trigger them.

I write.  That is creative.  Oh, it doesn’t bring people to the blog very often, but it allows me an outlet, just as much as the guy who plays on a city corner JUST FOR THE SAKE OF CELEBRATING LIFE BY PLAYING MUSIC.  I write for the sake of celebrating life by combining words and punctuation in ways they have never been combined before.

I never looked at myself as creative, because society often defines creativity as music and art.  That is wrong.  Every writer is an artist, and every artist a writer.  Both are creative.  So are mathematicians, statisticians and chemists, too.  Society calls mathematicians nerds, and it is acceptable not to be good at math.  Statisticians ask the right questions and help design (read: create) studies, and chemists create new compounds.  In 1970, I created ortho-phenyl benzhydryl chloride.  It never existed before, except in theory.  I made it.

Tell me, is it not creative to be able to multiply any pair of two digit numbers in my head faster than a calculator?  Is not the ability to do this in three different ways creative?  Is not my ability to have discovered arithmetical tricks that I have never seen in books creative?  Is the fact that I found the pattern for MENTALLY, NO CALCULATOR NEEDED squaring any number that is all 9s*, that no calculator on Earth can do, because it doesn’t have the space?  Or that I can square any three digit number ending in 5, as well, faster than anybody can with a calculator?

I write, because if I write well, I read it over and over again.  Not all my posts are that way, but some are.  Some of my words are so powerful to me, that I tear up when I read them.  That happens with music, and it happens with writing.

Inside all of us is some streak of creativity.  I hated it when somebody said, “We are all musicians.”  No we aren’t.  He was, but I was not.  What he needed to say was, “We are all creative, should we look deep inside ourselves.”  That is true.  We may not make a living at the creativity; my finance guy makes his living dealing with finance, but he makes his life, I would bet, from music.  It defines him, and it shows his celebration of life, just as my writing celebrates part of my life, just as an orthopedic surgeon’s work mending a broken hip celebrates hers, a trucker who knows how to back an 18-wheeler into a small space efficiently celebrates his, or a horse trainer who can without anybody seeing anything being done make a horse do a flying change and a half pass.

These manifestations of creativity have to be seen to be appreciated. I discover that my creativity sometimes lies in areas that I least expect.  I never expected to become a decent writer; I became one.  I never expected to do some of the things I do, such as canoeing all over the North American wilderness.  The ability to maneuver a canoe, to shoot rapids, to put it on one’s head and portage it, making it look so easy that anybody thinks they could do it, ah, that is creativity and the celebration of life.  It’s not a competition, it is a celebration.

Very blessed are those who can make a living from their creativity.  Very human are those who make their lives from their creativity.

9*9=81

99*99=9801    A nine, an eight, a zero, and a one

999*999=998001   Two nines, an eight, two zeros, and a one.

9999*9999=99980001

9 (n times) * 9 (n times)= 9 (n-1 times) 8 0(n-1 times) 1

I found playing the piano difficult.  I found this pattern in about 2 minutes.  Do I make a living from this?  No.  Do I celebrate life from it?  Oh yes I do.

 

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DEAR BUSUU, LIVEMOCHA, ROSETTA STONE, DUOLINGO, AND PIMSLEUR: THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH

December 8, 2013

Quite by accident, I started to learn German while with many Germans on an eclipse trip in 2010 to Patagonia, Argentina.  They were nice, and two women became–and still are–good friends. I promised them if they came over for the 2012 annular eclipse in Arizona, I’d learn a little German.  They didn’t come, but I started learning German–at 61. 

I started with Rosetta Stone (RS).  I saw the ads, I talked to a person in Sea-Tac, where I tried a few words, and I thought this would help.  I was so motivated, that after I finished Part 1, I decided to repeat it.  In 3 months, I went through all 5 parts.  That is motivation. RS has good voice recognition software, and that is its strong point.  One will be able to say words reasonably well enough they might be understandable.  For a short trip to Hungary, RS would be great.  Unfortunately, RS failed to discuss grammar, which would have been easy, nor did it discuss the importance of learning gender and plural with each German noun, which is both essential and easy to do.  German children know the noun genders by 5; those who learn the language must memorize each noun’s gender and plural.  I learned verb in second position gradually, and placement of the verb at the end of a subordinate clause, but these could should have been discussed, rather than having my noticing where they were.

I wonder whether independent and dependent clauses have gone out of fashion in language teaching.  I am a believer in language for communication, but there is also a place for understanding basic grammar, including adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions.   If people aren’t interested in these, then they aren’t interested in learning the language.

I want to be clear: one may learn to speak some words in a language, but I do not consider a person fluent, until one can speak, understand, read and write anything in that language.  With a 500 word vocabulary, one can speak a few phrases.  That is not fluent.  I have learned nearly 1000 German adjectives, 1500 nouns and at least that many verbs.  These are essential in every language, and without knowing them, one will not be able to piece together a conversation.  Every word I learn may be a key piece of a conversational puzzle.

I bought several German grammar books, which were difficult and failed to explain what to me many subtleties I needed to know.  Incredibly, for a year neither one person nor any book explained why “Ich bin einen Mann” was wrong and “Ich bin ein Mann” is correct.  The first is wrong because “to be” takes nominative case in German, as does English, and “ein” is nominative, and einen “accusative,” or objective case for a masculine noun, which Mann is (incidentally, the fact that girl, das Mädchen, is neuter, was never discussed, and one learning the language might be curious as to why “girl” is neuter.  Hint: it is the ending).  In English, we say: “It’s me,” for example, rather than the proper “It’s I.”.  In German, nominative case is always used after “to be”.  This is basic, easy to understand, and yet many native speakers could not explain it to me.  I discovered the explanation one day while running, which by the way, is how I learn, which brings me to my next point.

I am annoyed when people tell me how I learn.  I don’t learn like a child.  I think that a 5000 word vocabulary is what I need. Furthermore, adults learn in a variety of ways, and I learn in a way much less common than most American adults.  I know how I learn; indeed, my knowledge got me through graduate school, 30 years after I had last studied calculus.  Nobody can learn a language in 20 minutes a day, I can’t learn it by translating Wikipedia, and I can’t learn it, it appears, from anybody except the best teacher I know.

Myself.

Yes.  I am a natural teacher.  I have taught at least 10 different subjects.  I could tell people how to learn German, even though I am not fluent in it.  The first rule is that there is no free lunch.  Want to speak German, or any other language?  You can, but be prepared to work…..a lot, unless you are immersed in it by living in the country, and even then there are people who have trouble.  German is difficult.  The second rule is not to argue with the language, only with the speakers.  I never once asked why German adjectives have endings.  They do. Or why nouns ending in -ung are feminine, nouns that are verbs without the ending are masculine, or infinitive nouns neuter.  They are.

Occasionally I found a good grammar site.  From one, I learned how to deal with adjective endings in German, which are almost incomprehensible to understand in the dozen grammar books I read.  There, I found a way that improved my getting the right ending from about 25% to over 95%.  Do I need it?  I think I do.  I’d rather hear “He and I” in English rather than “Myself and him,” although I understand both.  If I need to learn something, I want to learn it right.

I wrote the author of the site to thank him, and he told me about LiveMocha, like Facebook for language learners, with people helping each other. I became one of the top 100 English reviewers on the site, so I was giving a lot of my own time to others.  I used an internationally known company to find a teacher for me in my city.  I did not want to take courses at a community college.  I was motivated and I was willing to work hard with a guide. Incredibly, in a city of a million, the best I could find was a woman, nice enough, but whose credentials were that she spoke German and had lived in the US 27 years.  I spent the first day trying unsuccessfully how to pronounce die Bücher, the books, in German.  During, the second meeting I learned that she had never taught German.

Over time, we ended up speaking to one another.  I learned a few phrases, but when I asked why, she replied, “That’s how we say it.”  That is not how I learn.  German, for all its difficulties, has rules.  I found nearly all on my own.  On LiveMocha, I took its free courses and did the paid Activ Deutsch in 3 months.  My comments were often grammatically wrong, and I was told how bad my accent was.  That is not how I learn, nor do I don’t believe it is how most people learn, by being strongly criticized, and I have taught everything from English to clinical neurology.  I did far more than the exercises asked for.  I wrote the maximum 1024 characters, and for the spoken part I made up stories that were far more complex than the 30 words we were asked to say.  I was motivated.  I didn’t care if I got 2 stars out of 5; I finally blew up one day and asked all reviewers whether they could understand me.  They could.  Americans are far more tolerant of non-natives who speak English than the reviewers of me whom I met on LiveMocha.

I corrected English exercises, explaining why I made the corrections I did.  I pronounced words slowly, rather than at full speed, and I wrote out the phonetics of pronunciation.  In short, I did everything that I wanted to be done for me.  I was in strong demand as an English teacher.  Sadly, my learning experience was at best sub-optimal.  I asked about zu- constructions, common in German, and got no answers.  None. I found grammar books very poor in explaining these, so I learned them on my own, by studying patterns when I saw them.

Not one grammar book I have seen discusses the importance of separable and inseparable prefix verbs, how often they change the meaning of a verb, often have multiple meanings, and how a minimum of several hundred must be memorized.  This oversight absolutely stuns me, and frankly makes me wonder whether German can be taught to non-natives who don’t live there.  I am currently testing that theory, and I have been testing it for three years.  The results are not in. I once saw discussion of 11 different prefixes to the verb lassen=to let or to leave, not ordered.  On my own, I have learned 20, 7 separable and 13 inseparable, which is how one needs to learn this.  I found the information over time, myself, and it was daunting.

I spent 3-6 hours a day learning German, receiving a certificate in 2011 saying I was fluent.  I wasn’t.  I went to Europe for a month, forcing myself to speak only German, no matter what was spoken to me.  I left, being advanced beginner, or A2.  I almost quit trying completely when, on a tour in Austria, I could not understand the guide at the Eishöhle, or ice caves.   I traveled to Switzerland, and can attest that every German I have met says they can barely understand Swiss German. Indeed, I’ve actually heard it translated to regular German on German TV.  Austria and Bayern have dialect, the latter  so strong that German TV often uses subtitles for many shows filmed there.  I came home discouraged and almost quit.

I wrote a few people, but correspondents in German weren’t exactly dropping out of the sky, despite the fact I was corresponding with people in at least 20 countries in English, helping them.  Bluntly, I was giving much and getting little back.  I finally realized what I needed to do was what I did throughout high school, college, medical school and graduate school.  Teach myself.

I knew it would be difficult, I would probably never be fluent, but I could learn the language reasonably well to appreciate it and the German culture. While I knew good teachers existed, I gave up finding anybody who taught the way I did, with interest, patience, explanations, and time.  I investigated the Goethe Institute, and they said (for a rather large amount of money) that my course would be 18 writing submissions.  I write German fairly well.  I needed to speak, not write.

I read German books (to the wall, so I could pronounce the words) and wrote down every word I didn’t know, looked it up, made lists, and went through the lists day after day.  I started listening to German television shows, 1-3 hours a day.  It was free, and day to day German, not child speak.  I immersed myself, and indeed, some days I hear more German than English.

Eventually, the vocabulary I learned started to help.  In 2012, I found 2200 new words and knew 2/3s of them.  Now, I estimate my vocabulary at about 3500 words, and TV shows make sense.  I have trouble with plots, but I have that trouble in English, too.  I listened; I realized that if I translated, I would miss things, so I try to get the sense of the conversation.

One day, I understood an entire show, plot and German.  It was wonderful.  It has happened since 6 other times, not often.  Shows from Bayern are difficult.  From Austria, they are not much easier.  From eastern Germany, where I am told they don’t speak clearly, I understand the most.  It just is.  From the Ostsee coast, I can understand fairly well.  The Herzkinos (romances) are clearly spoken; I understand almost all of them.

There is a blog I follow, but there is too much emphasis on flavoring particles and sounding German. I don’t want to sound German.  I want to speak German, read it, write it, and understand it.  This is what is happening to English, where more non-natives now speak it than natives.  Indeed, when I help a Russian woman with English, we often communicate in German, because we are both intermediate speakers.  I don’t get heavily criticized for not being fluent, I am understood by her and she by me.

I live in a land with a lot of diversity, many are not natives and natives often have poor grammar.  We deal with it here, because to many of us communication is more important than grammar, when it comes to a non-native speaker.  But natives who teach must understand their language’s grammar.

Will I ever become fluent?  Probably not.  I’ll get better, but it won’t be from all the great ads and new methods of learning that I hear about.

It will come the old fashioned way.  From hard work and earning it.

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PART D MEDICARE. FIRST TEST: GRADE D.

December 4, 2013

I apologize to those waiting at Wal-Mart on Wetmore for their prescriptions, while I was on the phone tying up one of the pharmacists.  I know I was inconveniencing you, because she eventually said she had a long line of people waiting, so I got off the phone, in order to give her time.

What happened?  Bad system.

Why?  Good question, and easy to answer, because in large part, nobody in Tucson listened to me when as medical director of a hospital, I said we had to fix bad systems, not punish bad people.  Since then, bad systems helped speed the demise of both my parents and affect every other member of my small family’s medical care. I’ve been through all of that in prior posts: I will stick only to the current problem.

I am on Medicare and needed to sign up for Part D drug benefits. I went online and decided to do it through Humana, which meant Wal-Mart and not CVS.  OK, no problem.  I can drive, rather than walk, to get my medications.

On the Web site where I went, it asked for what year.  I checked 2014, since I wasn’t interested in 2013.  I MADE A MISTAKE.  Or did I?  I was born in December, so I went on Medicare on 1 December.  I needed to sign up for a 2013 plan (December), then sign up for a 2014 plan.  I am quite certain this was not made clear.  The broker whom I used for my supplemental did not make this clear at all.  I am certain of that.  I was told it would be “easy to do”.  What I was not told was, “You have to take care of 2013 before you do 2014.”

Watch what happened.

I signed up for 2014, and I got a lot of paper with an ID card for my 2014 plan.  In the paper, which I try to read,  I learned my drug plan began 1/1/2014, so I said, “Uh oh.  I need coverage for December.”  I could have just paid for it on my own, since I take very few prescription medicines, but that assumes I stay healthy in December and not need a lot of high powered drugs for a ruptured bowel, a traffic accident when I drive to Oregon, or a host of other possibilities.

I called Humana.  I was transferred four times, the fourth back to the original person.  I finally had to explain to them clearly that I was a first time user and not changing my plan.  This is a problem I find far too often in this country.  There is an implicit assumption made, whether it is your car getting fixed or having major surgery, that each person innately understands the key vocabulary.  I did not say the right words, which were, “I am NEW to Medicare.”  That cost me about 20 of the 66 minutes I would spend on the phone.  I explained diagnoses to people.  I explained treatments.  Whether people listened was another matter.  Back then, there were a lot of complaints about how long doctors let patients talk (18 seconds) before interrupting.  I never heard how long patients let ME talk, before interrupting (5-10 seconds).

The next 25 minutes were spent giving out all my personal information, which at least was easy to do.  That led to the last 21 minutes, which was a “phone signature,” which I had never done before.  I have seen 14 total solar eclipses, traveled to 48 countries, published 60 articles, and am well on my way to being bilingual, but I do not know what a phone signature is.  Eventually, that was explained, and I hoped that the telephone system would not crash the whole time I heard a lot of words and had to remember to say “yes” after the prompt.  Starting over was not an option.  I then was accepted, and got the 2013 paperwork, which I added to the 2014 paperwork.

Later, I got another call, this time from Cincinnati, Humana’s headquarters.  Because I had signed up for 2013, now my 2014 plan was invalid, so I had to reapply for 2014.  That was easy, since I had done it before.  The one good thing was that I had a telephone number to call if I had trouble.  I had no trouble.  Why I kept the phone number, I don’t know, but I often save things, although I have trouble finding them later.  Again, I will be sent the same volume of 2014 paper coming, because I originally signed up for it.  This country runs on paper.

On the first of December, I took to the pharmacy the letter that later arrived from Humana, which explicitly stated I had coverage.  The pharmacist at Wal-Mart was efficient, and I inconvenienced virtually nobody.  I was set to get my first Medicare prescription on the sixth.

On the third, I got a call from Wal-Mart, saying my prescription was not ready, for I was not in the system.

I didn’t get incensed.  I was mostly disappointed in that I couldn’t find all the necessary pieces of paper. I thought computerization was going to do away with paper; it has increased it vastly, until recently, when with great fanfare companies send electronic prospectuses and tout how many trees they are saving. I think a prospectus ought to be limited to the following: “we can take all your money, and there is nothing you can do about it.”  But back to Wal-Mart, where I’m keeping people waiting.

I gave all the numbers I needed to, but there was still a problem.  As I saw it, once I cancelled 2014, somewhere in the system 2013 was cancelled, too.  At that point, the pharmacist begged off to serve other people.  I didn’t blame her.  Had I been waiting, I would have been annoyed, too.  Sorry, folks.

Somewhere, in the pile of paper, I got lucky and \found the number in Cincinnati.  I called the woman, told her my problem, and she said I was in the system.  So, I can only think that Wal-Mart hadn’t called.  I can’t think of another reason.  I called Wal-Mart back and gave them the number in Cincinnati.  This at least will save the pharmacist time, since the person (1) will know about me and (2) will assure her that I am in the system.

I have to hope the two of them don’t comment on what a bastard I was to deal with over the phone, a retired physician, whom nobody listened to when he discussed broken systems, a bitter old man, but one who WAS ultimately right, who ONCE again had to find the short term fix.

Welcome to American medicine.  Part D, by the way, is not Mr. Obama’s fault.

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