Olly Olly Oxen Free

If you played hide and seek as a kid, you probably heard the chant, "Olly Olly oxen free if you don't come out you'll be I T."  No one has traced the origin of this phrase or any of it's variations back to anything cool. There never were a group of heretics hiding from a Greek god, Hidensekius, who cried out to all his oxen to join his manhunt. The boring truth is that kids simply augment the way in which they declare hide and seek truces. Some yahoo answers state, the chant was originally worded as,"All come in, all are free". Well, who wants to yell out that mouthful of mediocrity? Kids are always outdoing one another, and you know that out there somewhere, is a kid who quit cleverly rhymed the word free with pee. As is "Olly Olly oxen free, Steve went inside to take a pee." Ok that was me, and let me tell you, it killed, I didn't have to be it for a year after that!

I suppose this morphing phrase can show us how languages can evolve in the absence of a written standard. This is a game passed on from generation to generation without the need for any rule book, because it is so simple, the trade off is it's simple variations. I never moved during my childhood so I don't know how the game was played outside of my tri block area, but once I visited my cousins in another state, and they had incorporated a can that you could kick! This one small change completely revolutionized the game for my entire elementary school.

Kids aren't the only ones who hide and seek though. As you are all innocently unaware, there are ninjas, spies, aliens, and other secrete magical creatures hiding in our midst. Some are hiding in plain site, as you can see with this vending machine soda pop ninja... possibly turtle.

If I were this guy, I'd at least have "an out of service" sign taped me. You know some jaded costumer is gonna start whaling on you sooner or later. I guess as a ninja you could take a beating for the cause, which I suppose in this case would be...market research?

The one variation of hide and seek I enjoyed most as youth was called beckony. If I recall the rules correctly, the seeker must find and call out each hidden one's name. They didn't have to tag you, but once called, you are sent to front porch prison where you could be rescued by another hidden person by grabbing their hand and running them to hide again, but if the seeker caught you doing this they could call out both your names. So it was risky. The game got it's name because, when on porch prison, you would yell out "beckony, please save me." Many childhood romances were formed and dissolved during the course of these games. Kids would refuse to save their brand new girlfriends and you could say Olly Olly oxen free to that budding relationship.

  

Autism

Right after I graduated high school, I got a job at a group assisted living home with 6 men with various neurological disorders including autism. It was a very difficult job, emotionally. It forced me to see the world in a new light. I had just gotten out of high school, where my day to day worries included preparing for college, and stressing over all the girls who were fighting over me. I had no consciousness of this whole other world where day to day struggles included avoiding seizures, or arguments caused by missed social queues at fast food restaurants. The job was difficult at first, but the payoff was invaluable. These men shared a genuine glow, and an unbelievable level of trust and loyalty. And what was most admirable was that they didn't seem to care how the world saw them, which to me seemed so liberating.

I admit I only knew a very limited group of individuals with Autism, and that was also compounded with other neurological disorders. I guess one conclusion I can draw though, is that my prejudices were completely shattered, the way I saw the world changed forever in the most positive way, and I'm grateful for the time I worked with those men.

While researching autism spectral disorder (ASD), one of the first questions I asked was, what causes it? I was a little surprised to discover how much more work there was left to be done on answering this question. According to the website, clearing the fog about autism.org 

"Scientists aren’t certain about what causes ASD, but it’s likely that both genetics and environment play a role. Researchers have identified a number of genes associated with the disorder. Studies of people with ASD have found irregularities in several regions of the brain. Other studies suggest that people with ASD have abnormal levels of serotonin or other neurotransmitters in the brain. These abnormalities suggest that ASD could result from the disruption of normal brain development early in fetal development caused by defects in genes that control brain growth and that regulate how brain cells communicate with each other, possibly due to the influence of environmental factors on gene function. While these findings are intriguing, they are preliminary and require further study. The theory that parental practices are responsible for ASD has long been disproved. "

This was interesting to me, because I had heard that Autsim spectral disorder was possibly related to tourette's syndrome, a condition I dealt with in my early years. They may be similar in at least one respect. As treatment of tourette's syndrome, my doctor gave me medication to increase my serotonin, which helped make my twitches subside. Years later I'm off the meds and the luckily twitches have stayed away, but I still have low serotonin which causes some depression which I now self medicate with doing or watching stand up comedy or watching star trek.

So how is Autism treated? The same website goes on to say,

"There is no cure for ASD. Therapies and behavioral interventions are designed to remedy specific symptoms and can bring about substantial improvement. The ideal treatment plan coordinates therapies and interventions that meet the specific needs of individual children."

Like our guest Steven Yates (Green Circle Award Winner and loving father!) said, no two cases are exactly alike. As was the case with my tourette's syndrome, what worked to cure me probably would not have worked on another kid. It was a long process finding out which neural transmitters were low on, and my case was relatively mild. And other doctors told my parents that their treatment for me would have been completely differently so no one seems to agree on how to treat the brain!

Lastly, we touched on the aspect of prodigy-ism and autism. We tried to show the clip about the math wiz named Jake, which can be seen at professorblastoff.com. I realized a few days later that I had made a short film a few years back about a guy who was overcome with jealousy over his brother, who was a child prodigy. So I hope this is useful in some way. It took some digging.

Romantic Relationships

Al Gore, having invented online dating, has changed the dynamics of budding relationships forever. What did humans do before they had the safety of a digital firewall and the ability to Photoshop away 20 years from their profile pictures? I remember the day where you had to call a girl's home phone and pray her dad didn't pick up first. Now day's you don't even have to ask a father's permission to marry his daughter, but back then you had win her father's approval just so he'd hand her the phone just so you could ask her is if she was still mad at you about the joke you told during gym.

When I went to college, they told me that the western concept of romantic relationships was relatively new. There have been many different variables throughout history that have influenced the dynamic of relationship. They have been cultural, economical, sociological, religious, political, level of health...ical, you name it. Romance, in literature, has been around for centuries. The deep human desire for love and chivalry was there, but there was also a conflicting desire to keep the blood line in tact. As this clip explains. (The accents in this clip are a bit thick)

I feel rather privileged that my relationship was not forged out of a trade for farm land or a deal to strengthen family ties. I wonder how relationships will continue to evolve. Our digitized society has shaped how we approach romantic relationships in a unprecedented way. If you prefer face to face contact more than texting, you may get left behind. People you work with, that you thought about dating, may already know a lot about you from Facebook. Your online profile now serves as a sort of relationship resume, if you like the wrong political party, or worse, the TV show, you don't even have a chance to lie about it on a first date.

This brings me to a point I have made several times on the podcast. I love wife!

We had a short courtship, and we were both young, according to modern day standards, but we both had long laundry lists of love and our personalities, goals, and many other aspects matched up so miraculously and mathematically, that we really had no choice. I would write it all out in the form of first order differential equations and walk you through all the variables to prove that it was meant to be, but I don't want to bore you. I will say, the lightning in a bottle moment for me was a date where she caught me accidentally feeding her lasagna off a dirty plate, and she still stayed for dessert... Now that I think of it, maybe she just really really likes ice cream. However, the kicker was, we both agreed that the best seasons of the Simpsons were the ones with Conan as a staff writer, and when ever we have a fight we just pop in a Simpsons dvd.

Fast forward four years and we are still going strong, in fact we have grown so confident in our relationship that we have toned down our PDA in vacation photos considerably!

Fame

When I was a kid my best friend explained fame to me. He said famous people have been sprinkled with pixie dust, and if you get close to them a little bit of their pixie dust rubs off on you.

As an adult I think of fame more as a numbers game. If you were to wash up on a deserted island, you would be the most famous person on that island. So who is the most famous person in the multiverse? Well I did some research on this. I had to call in a lot of favors to my buddies up in the 5th dimension, but I found the guy, well 8 billion quantum copies of the same guy. His name is Norm and he's famous for his vegan tuna casserole.

"Tuna Casserole, big deal!", you might say, but Norm is much more famous than anyone including the Beatles, not because of his charisma or even his contributions to the culinary arts, but because of simple calculus. As the sum of all universes that include a cable cooking show featuring Norm, approaches infinity, his level of fame also approaches infinity. Therefore his fame is limitless, if my application of limits is correct.

The function looks something like this   x represents one of infinitely many universes and the 2 is for how many people on average actually watch his show in all the universes. As you can see, 2 (the constant) could be any positive real number, meaning even if there were only an average of 1/10 viewers watching per universe, and there are infinitely many universes then the limit to his fame would still be infinite. Comment below if you're confused.

Norm however is an anomaly, in that he is consistently, albeit mildly, famous across every know universe in the multiverse. The point of all of this is that it is important to quantify and contextualize one's claim to any level of fame. That being said, consider John Lennon's response to the planet Earth's response to his claim that, statistically, the Beatles were more famous than Jesus. He claimed to be taken out of context. Which is ironic because not even he could "Imagine" the context or immensity of Norm's level of multiversical fame.

Even with actual footage of John Lennon's interview, his words were miss interpreted. Context is everything, but everything is hard to know, and even harder to interpret. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Now that every smart phone has a camera attached to it, we must all do our part in documenting everything. Big brother has enabled countless little brothers to record everything from paint drying to major regime changes. Unfortunately some little brothers never learned how to hold their cell phone horizontally while filming, and the aspect ratio gets thrown completely off. What's worse is when the phone glitches and you do turn it horizontally but the software doesn't know it and then you have to turn your head just to see some guy slip on a buttered floor. I also want to point out that cats haven't been this popular since agent Egypt. I predict a future cat hall of fame with golden statues of most viewed YouTube cats...perhaps a similar thing happened with the Egyptians, and cats weren't worshiped, they were just really really funny. 

This brings me to my final point, famous animal paparazzi! "Donald over here! Is it true you eat worms?"

For more on what ducks eat, click here.

Clostridium Difficile

I've been doing some research for Tig on the Infection that put her in the hospital.  It is called Clostridium Difficile, or C diff for short, and it's some pretty nasty stuff. C Diff is an aggressive bacteria that crowds out and over populates your intestines. Among other symptoms, it causes inflammation of the colon and in extreme cases removal of part of the colon or death. It kills more than 14,000 in the United States every year and affects over 300,000. You are the most susceptible to catching it if you take antibiotics. Sometimes when you take antibiotics, good bacteria that protects against infections die. This can leave you vulnerable for months.

The spores that carry the disease live for months, and you have to use bleach to kill them. Normal cleaning supplies won't do it. I got most of my info from the Center of Disease Control's website. If you watch The Walking Dead you probably know the place I'm talking about.
Here is a cheesy yet informative video that talks more about C Diff.

I recently went shopping for Tig at some random heath foods store, I cried for her a little on the inside as I realized there was no ice cream on this list. This is what a survivor eats:

• organic bananas (6 still a little green on top)
• organic pink lady apples (3)
• organic strawberries
• organic blueberries
• organic red cherries
• organic red grapes
• raw plain cashews
• brown free range large eggs (6) call me and i'll help you w/this
• organic avacado 
• amy's organic soup- lentil and lentil veg -low sodium if possible (4)
• large blue diamond almond breeze almond mild UNSWEETENED ORIGINAL (4)
• hemp milk (2)
• oat meal w/flax seeds
• kombucha- green (6)
• coconut water- (10) call me and i'll help you pick this out
• and if you have some bags in your car, use those. if not, please don't let them double bag any of this.

thanks Aaron.


On a professional note, I didn't really need to call for help about the eggs, but did anyway just to be thorough. Also I'm proud to say, non of the groceries were double bagged.

Quantum Physics

Well the most expensive game of hide and seek may finally be coming to an end. Congratulations to the scientists at CERN, who were "it", for finding the Higgs particle. It was hiding in a 5 billion dollar particle accelerator, which is exactly where I would have hidden. So what is the Higgs boson? I hear its part of a vast field of bosons that determines a particle's mass. This discovery means we could possibly travel at light speed! (Follow this link.) If I understand this correctly, and I got an A in my physics of the universe class so I'm confident I do, this discovery may lead us to an amazing new weight loss exercise routine called a Higgs Jig. A dance that would essentially eliminate our mass by manipulating the Higgs field around us. And if you make something weightless, you make it easier to accelerate. So lets just say  for fun, if you had no mass you could essentially flick someone into outer space like a bugger, unless the bugger person would just pass right through you because they had no mass. Maybe you could just kept a thin shell of mass around them...ummm here's an expert explaining the Higgs boson.

OK so he said the Higgs field is like snow, and the top quark is like a snow boots guy who falls deep into the snow. Does that help? Because if it doesn't, in the last week I've heard 9 or 10 different analogies explaining the Higgs field. All the different analogies only made me more confused. One guy said the Higgs field is like a ping pong table and some balls (particles) bounce as higher than others, another guy said the Higgs field was like his fathers acceptance which was given freely to one son but withheld it from the other, and another man explained the Higgs field using a multi variable calculus equation, which of course was the analogy that finally drove it home for me. 

Moving on to my favorite form of research, TV. Watching Star Trek is how I first became interested in quantum physics. Well Quarks anyway.

I noticed Star Trek liked to pay homage to science by naming characters after cool sounding sciencey stuff like Data, Rom, Quark and uh Bones I guess. In turn, science has paid homage to Star Trek by leading us to devolop Star Trek technology, like automatic doors at grocery stores, iPads and maybe someday a transporter. Transporter is not a very cool sounding sciencey name for a device that beams you one particle at a time from one place to another at light speed, maybe it will be called something like a Particle Shatner. For more transporter stuff read this.


Lastly, the discovery of the Higgs boson might help to explain what all that dark matter is in the universe. I only bring up dark matter to say this. If dark matter tastes anything like dark chocolate, I say no thank you sir, unless there are almonds in it, then maybe... look, quantum physics jokes are never easy to pull off. I was tempted to end on a boson the clown bit or a two massless particles walk through a bar joke, but I wont. Your welcome.  

Human Energy

I would love to prove the existence of a human energy field using the scientific method, but I just don't have the resources or the patience. I can only speak to my own experiences where I have applied trail and error in establishing a belief system, which is as unique to me as the experiences that shaped me. I admit, believing in the ability to heal someone by the use of prayer or Chi is a tough pill to swallow, and I am not one who dismisses the proven effectiveness of modern medicine or even horse pills. I only suggest that my own experiences have shown me strong evidence that having faith or a positive attitude can help the body heal a lot more efficiently. I also know that people without health insurance are much more likely to pray, because it is much less expensive, unless you are on a pay per pray program, and in that case I would recommend upgrading your service provider.

I think we are all skeptical in various degrees when it comes to things like human energy fields, Chi, or anything spiritual. The ideal for me is somewhere in the balance between skepticism and open mindedness. No one likes being taken advantage of, but there is a certain point where we have to put our trust in something beyond our comfort zone. The first time I ate a bagel and creme cheese for example, my siblings promised me it would taste delicious but I was very skeptical, probably because a week earlier they had poured pickle juice into my Kool-Aide. This gave me severe trust issues, but after a good amount of therapy from my mom I tasted a bagel for the first time and found that it was good.


Acupuncture is definitely one of those things that remain far outside my comfort zone, especially after hearing of people being left in a room for hours fully pinned and forgotten. I would much rather take neurotransmitter uptake inhibitors than lie in a bed face down and let a stranger poke needles in me. And not knowing how it would affect my nervous system worries me even more than having a rogue needle poking me in the face.

How do you measure Chi? In this clip we see a evidence of the Chi energy field. Men who have trained for years, display their ability to focus this energy. 

I've heard a lot of skepticism coming from the outside looking in on Chi, but it's interesting to see how DJ became skeptical of these journalists and how he cut them off for showing off his footage. To him, it must have felt like they poured pickle juice in his Chi, they betrayed his trust, but after a long wait and two years of deep meditation he was ready to open up to them again.


As someone who has benefited from modern medicine, meditation, and prayer, I feel like there can be a balance between them all. I think that modern medicine deals more with external modifiers that have been vigorously tested by an overwhelmingly large scientific community. But mastery of Chi, human energy, or the spirit seem to require vigorous internal and personal reflection. And prayer, even if it never reaches it's targeted deity, is at the very least a good way to focus your thoughts, desires, and gratitude. And by the way, people who pray out loud in public know full well that they look like their talking to themselves, some try to hide it by using a Bluetooth, but I think it's even weirder to look like you've reached your deity on your cell phone.