Life, Particle Physics, and Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease (with a picture of Twilight showing how to hold a pen)

New Particle Gadgeteering post: Life, Particle Physics, and Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease, in which I talk about one of the complications of being a non-hoofed creature - specifically the medical condition I live with - and combining it with building particle detectors.

Comments

[Super Trampoline]

This was enjoyable and encouraging. I’m glad you enjoy your job and are still able to do it. Thanks for helping expand our knowledge of the universe.

[mylittleeconomy]

If I could go back in time and find my eight-year-old self, shivering on the edge of the playing field, and told him how he would, in due course, work with international teams of scientists building instruments to probe the structure of matter and search for new scientific phenomena, and travel throughout Europe and the US to do it, I doubt he would have believed me. But I would probably have been able to convince him to pay no attention to that idiot football instructor.

As long as you are interfering with causality in order to give your younger self an encouraging message, you might also give him a pony doll.

[mastermenthe]

once i dreamed of maintaining ego&id&superego-continuity from childhood through adulthood, just in case of timetravel requiring me to communicate with my past self, so that understanding would be had, deep enough to counteract time travel paranoia.

though the timetravel never happened, i DID pull off the internal continuity for about 20 years before circumstances forced me to realize just what sort of maladaptive damage i had been committing against myself and everyone around me

i can no longer simulate my childhood self, and many memories are lost, but hey, im maturing a functioning member of society, slowly and painfully.

moral of the story: don't use conceptual neural blocks to reinforce your sense of self, and especially don't design them with self-feedback loops that hook into a network of similarly designed neural blocks. It's exactly as effective and as permanent as barbed wire in cheap concrete.

[horizon]

I had never heard of CMT myself. Thank you for being willing to share, and for the great work that you've done (disease or no).

It's amazing how far we've come in even 40 years. (And, sometimes, how far we haven't come; but inertia is kind of the default state of civilization in the same way that entropy is the default state of matter, so the real shock is when progress manages to push so far, so fast.) It's like they say: the past is a foreign country.

[Pineta]

4680524

As long as you are interfering with causality in order to give your younger self an encouraging message, you might also give him a pony doll.

That's a lovely idea. But what pony? And that was days of G1 ponies. Then, with such inspiration, I might have spent my time inventing stories with my pony dolls, and decided to become a writer/artist/animator, and go on to develop my own version of My Little Pony, and who knows where causality would end up.