Sphygmomanometer

This is possibly the best thing I have learned all semester.

A sphygmomanometer is the device used for measuring blood pressure.

We've all seen and used them countless times, without ever being told what an incredible name they have. Sure, I had fun playing with them in toy doctor's kits as a kid, but I would have had so much more fun if someone had just come up and told me I was playing with a sphygmomanometer. I also feel kind of ripped off that I did UIL Spelling and Vocabulary, and had to memorize 1500 weird words, and did Word of the Day for years, and never once encounter this... Sphygmomanometer

Just think about it. Say it out loud. Over. And over. And over again. Isn't it beautiful?

Does it sound mildly familiar?

Does it sound like this?

(Or, for those of you who prefer pink fluffy monsters over LOTR, like this?)

Sphygmomanometer is now quite possibly my favorite word ever. It's now on my bucket list to play it at least once in Scrabble or Quiddler, or some word game.

There is an important observation to make about sphygmomanometers though. Sphygmomanometers are used for measuring blood pressure, and are an easy way to screen for risk of cardiovascular disease. Now, you would think it would be important to try to prevent cardiovascular disease, as it one of the top causes of mortality in both young and old age groups. And sphygmomanometers are inexpensive, so it shouldn't be too hard to make them available to the developing world. Yet it was discovered that in places like Nigeria, only 10% of primary healthcare clinics have access to sphygmomanometers.

I can understand that it's difficult to get advanced technology like the Da Vinci robot to developing countries. But something as inexpensive as a sphygmomanometer shouldn't be that hard to circulate. So much of medical funding goes into researching the newest technologies, that can provide high-tech, innovative ways to use the latest scientific developments to treat medical conditions more effectively. But these cutting edge treatments are only available to the highest tiers of the economic ladder, and provide a minimal gain in life for such high costs. So much more focus needs to be given to the medical treatments for the billions suffering on the bottom, who just need access to the same devices that we've had for over a century (see Wikipedia).

So, next time you see a sphygmomanometer (or just feel like saying the word), think about people who are suffering from lacking the same objects that we take for granted. (Even if we take them for granted without ever knowing that they have such awesome names)

Skeeter the Squirrel

Yesterday, Michelle and I met the boldest squirrel I have ever seen at Rice. We were walking out towards Hermann Park, when a squirrel walked straight up the sidewalk towards us. I resisted the urge to chase him, and he apparently resisted all normal survival instincts to flee in terror. I reached out to get his attention, and he just walked right over to my hand and checked it out for food.

Fortunately, we had a loaf of bread for sandwiches, which definitely caught his attention.

Why hello there!

What? Is that bread? o.O

Can I have some? Can I have it PLEASE?

Nom nom nom...

We decided to name him Skeeter, after the MASSIVE SWARMS OF ANNOYING BUGS TAKING OVER CAMPUS! :P

Quite the entertaining start to a wonderful evening.

Kinda Sketchy

Oh, the things that happen when I'm accused of being less interesting than Organic Chemistry...

While loitering at the circulation desk of Fondren like this, determinedly being entertaining with my Sketchiness manual and creeper pick-up lines, I bumped into someone who I hadn't seen since Assassins.

Of course, when she had last seen me, I had been dressed as a girl in order to evade my attacker. Naturally, she was highly entertained to see me being so unconventional again. Though amused, as she was leaving she insisted "Don't follow me!"

Now whyever would I do that? :D

MC party time! (In the library [with the candlestick])

For those of you who haven't seen this or this, I want you to know, the Agape MC likes going a little crazy sometimes with videos. This week was one of those times.

For no explainable reason, we decided that instead of our usual MC game, we'd make a music video from scratch. Megan can sing, DMac can rap, and we all can be surprisingly nerdy or gangster if we want to.

So after a night of Fondren filming, and another night of Fondren editing, we ended up with this-

Fun times... :) Much better than actually studying too!

Silence

Someone recently pointed out that my blog has not been updated for a while now. The truth is, I have been conducting an experiment measuring the sound of silence in electronic media.

Just kidding, I was mostly just procrastinating.

Rather than waiting for time to appear in my schedule of 15 hours work days to write an in-depth description of the rest of fall break, which has been slowing me down, I'm going to auto-summarize and move on.

So, in short- stuff happened.

Okay, maybe that's too short. In semi-short shortness, we went out to an island that looked like this:

And ran around being Robinson Crusoes for 27 hours and looking like this.

Yup, that's pretty much it.

You can probably expect some more pictures and more meaningful statements later, but I just wanted this post out of the way so I could start writing about other awesome stuff.

Fall Breaking Part 2: Austin Adventures

I woke up the next morning to the following text messages:

...

That's right.

They cancelled the race.

They cancelled a mud run BECAUSE IT WAS RAINING...

Safety liabilities are stupid.

The silver lining to these rain clouds is that I'm getting free admission to the Texas Super Spartan race and the Houston Tough Mudder in January.

Since I was not going to be running around in the mud that morning, our party decided to get a taste of Texas culture in nearby Austin.

The first stop on the list was Roundrock Doughnuts! It's such a beautiful decision to take "Everything's bigger in Texas" and apply it to doughnuts.

That's right, doughnuts larger than your entire head. Thank you Texas! Loaded up with this nutritious breakfast, we toured the Texas history museum, the LBJ library, and UT campus (without vandalizing anything with Rice logos).

There are SO many Lone Stars in Austin.

Yes, Jeremy displayed his archie spacial skills and solved the entire maze cow.

With the weather slightly better, we drove straight for the coast, reaching Seadrift, Tx at nightfall. Rather than trying to find a boat out to our island in the dark, we stopped as soon as we found an empty beach, and just pulled out the tent and sleeping bags. We slept under the stars on the shores of the gulf, with a dinner of pizza, gatorade, and nutella. I don't know why I haven't done this more often. :)

Fall Breaking, Part 1: McKinney Falls

With just a solitary post-it note of addresses to guide us, our adventuresome trio set out for some total fall break epicness. The first stop was 160 miles away at McKinney Falls State Park. I had needed a place to camp near the Tough Mudder race the next day, and the website boasted "primitive" campsites, waterfalls, and rock climbing...

There is a significant difference in the interpretation of "primitive" based on prior camping experiences. My standard for primitive is based on hacking a spot for a tent out of the side of a glacier, digging a latrine with a shovel, and trying not to get killed by rocks falling off the mountain in the morning.

Their idea of primitive... Well, they didn't have a laundromat, I'll give them that. And the rough wood finish of the picnic tables really added to the rustic atmosphere of the campsite.

Other than that, the location was great. Because of the drought, the waterfalls had become waterdrips, but this expanded the amount of rock faces we had to climb and jump on.

That may not look like much, but the amount of psychological effort it takes to jump across a 15 foot deep chasm is surprising.

Our rock adventures were soon turned into water adventures because:

1) we wanted to go swimming

2) it started raining so hard, that if we hadn't wanted to go swimming, we still would not have had the option of remaining dry.

Eventually, we retired to the tent for shelter and a very muddy dinner (Us being the muddy ones, not the dinner). When it stopped raining, we decided to take the fly off to see if we could have more ventilation for the night. Naturally, this provoked the rain to pour non-stop for the next 10 hours.

Get Ready!

This is it. The breath before the plunge. Getting ready and taking a deep breath before jumping into a freezing cold mountain lake.

Yeah, I couldn't resist.

I'm not actually jumping into mountain lakes this week, though that would be AWESOME! No, I'm getting ready for some serious real life craziness.

Crazy plan #1- FALL BREAK!

Tents. Food. Guys. Wilderness. Enough said.

Over the next few days I'll be driving across parts of Texas and camping out. Where? I'll let you know. To quote what is pretty much the best movie ever-

Miguel: "We don't have a map."

Tulio: "We don't have a plan."

Chel: "That's what makes it interesting"

Crazy plan #2- TOUGH MUDDER!

10 miles of mud, barbed wire, flames, and potentially deadly obstacles. So easy, I'm debating doing it in a hula skirt. :) (Only seriously)

Crazy plan #3- VOLUNTEERING!

So many choices, I'm trying to find the best group to get involved with on a weekly basis

-Rice's Community Involvement Center

-1st Presbyterian's Service program

- The Nehemiah Center

- Texas Children's Hospital

Or somewhere else that I haven't looked at yet. I'm not sitting on a lot of extra free time, but this seems like something important enough to get involved in.

There will be follow up pictures and maybe videos of all this stuff in the coming week!

Focused Insanity

There are quite a few benefits to being crazy and random. Recent benefits have included-

- Landing a role in the Hanszen play, thanks to acting (?) like a crazy Frenchman

- Chasing squirrels (Great stress relief! And it's good for the environment!)

- Finding random places in buildings to study in the middle of the night (Shhh... It's a secret)

- Meeting lots of new people (albeit, under unusual circumstances)

This is all great and fun. However, intentionally trying to be crazy does have some side effects by rubbing off on "normal life" in some weird ways. These negative effects have shown themselves a couple of different ways.

- Sneaking into the Employee section of Fondren is NOT a good idea. (sorry)

- Listing "death" as one of the most dangerous complications of malaria on a test is not an acceptable answer. (Death still ranks pretty high on the dangers list in my book)

- Having to give justification for why you're behaving the way you are all the time is pretty tiring.

- Getting the urge to go do something crazy every time I sit down to do work.

Also, getting used to ignoring social norms can sometimes cause you to miss certain social cues. I picked up supplies at the bookstore today, and walked all the way out of RMC before I realized that I hadn't paid for them. When I went back and bought them, the lady said she had seen me walking out, I was just apparently being oblivious to her reaction. :P

So, I find it difficult now to support living with behavioral patterns of breaking comfort zones simply for the sake of being different or expressive. I think my post Civilized Unconformity was heading the right direction. Sometimes, our comfort zones lead us to overlook local or global problems. We get caught up in our lives, and keep focusing on ourselves. This ends up with time, money, and attention all going towards the wrong ends. That is where I need to be stepping out, waking people up to what needs to be happening. It's great if I get people to act differently just to have a little more fun, but it's a whole lot greater if I get them to act differently about social justice.

This obviously is going to lead to some changes in the type of craziness that goes on here on 4 Walls Broken. Trust me, it'll still be interesting, and I'll still spice it up with some very entertaining activities. But putting meaning behind the effort for change is going to help the focus of these projects a lot.

The other changes that go along with that apply just to my major. I'm in the process of creating my own major, addressing many of the same issues that I've just mentioned. I had a late night planning session in my secret lab recently, using a system of notecards, embroidery floss, duct tape, and loud music to plot out the course of my studies, and the rest of my life.

If you're going to try to figure out your whole life, you might as well make it look complex and fascinating, right?

The Agape Auto-Social

Some days I have to intentionally start something crazy. Other days, craziness happens all by itself.

All we wanted to do was go bowling after Agape large group. That was it. I knew my car battery was dead (see Wednesday's post) so I asked Megan to come jump start it. Of course, when she arrived, we noticed her car had a flat tire. So we had an auto-repair party, where we all pooled knowledge of how to jump start cars and change tires so that we could actually leave. Once both vehicles were functional again, we were able to head out, a good half hour later than planned.

Bowling itself is fun, but probably not a bloggable activity. (Even if you do use the modifications of moonwalk bowling, or spinning on the floor as a group after strikes) However, that was not the end of the excitement for the night (Thanks, Shelby!). On the way out, my car wouldn't start again, and even jumper cables wouldn't help.

Awesome.

Fortunately, Megan had acquired the number of a mechanic from an RUPD officer, and she was able to get ahold of him. He said he had a battery that should work and could come by to install it (Extremely helpful, as it was already midnight). Since he had Megan's number, we all played cell phone shuffle, then the other car left to pick up late night food, while Michelle and I waited for the mechanic

Our hero arrived after only 20 minutes, with a new (used) battery!

He was able to confirm that the old battery was kaput, and removed it. The new battery, however, was a wee bit bigger than the old one. So, he reverted to the number 1 rule of car repair.

Rules of Car Repair:

1. If something doesn't work... Hit it with a hammer.

2. Blame the carburetor.

There was in fact a metal plate that just needed to move out of the way a little, so he just bent it out with a hammer, and the battery fit right in! Круто!

With that, Shelby was functional again, and we were able to get back to Rice! While things didn't work out quite like we had planned, the night was much more interesting this way. Lots of learning about car repair, lots more conversation time, and a much better story! Plus, I could get Shelby fixed just a few miles from Rice, rather than out at a rock the middle of nowhere (my fall break location of choice).

Life is good.

Civilized Unconformity

It takes a lot of work to be crazy and unpredictable. Too much of one thing, and people say "oh, that again." Case in point: shaving-cream covered naked people running across campus, Sammy the Owl chasing a gorilla, live action role playing costumes, and so many other things are just norms now at Rice.

An easy way to keep from falling into a rut of "normal" craziness is to mix things up a little. What's the most unexpected thing I could do? How about being formal and responsible, and spend the evening listening to a public policy discussion?

With this new project in mind, I selected yet another costume and donned it. Ah yes, the pensive, intellectual college student, fully engaged in the material (complete with clipboard for notes...)

In this "character" I set out for Baker Institute. The speaker for the night was Rev. Jim Wallis, president and CEO of Sojourners. I was indeed breaking some social norms just by being there. Due to the importance of the speaker, and that many students are still taking midterms, I was one of the few undergraduates actually present. I'd estimate that the mean age of everyone in the room was over 45, and I was the only person on my row who was not either grey haired, or balding. (One nice old lady even sat in the seat next to me, looked at my mohawk, then scooted away down the row...)

While I was more of an outlier at the event, I was very glad I did attend. Jim Wallis spent a lot of time discussing connections between social justice and religion, arguing that Christians should be concerned with matters of national poverty. He shared how the injustice of poverty was a cause to be fought for, like slavery in the time of William Wilberforce, or Civil Rights at the time of MLK.

Throughout this, he emphasized how important it was that the new, younger generations be the driving force behind this change. Now there's a crazy thought for you.

So yes, I've been running around doing weird things, trying to break social barriers that inhibit people from expressing their creativity. Maybe those aren't the only walls that need to be broken.

We live in a nation of perceived wealth, yet over 46 million people in this country live under the poverty line. The serverys at Rice have 75 pounds of food waste a day, while there are starving people just a few blocks away (I don't even have to mention Africa). Rice students spend massive amounts of time and money on extravagant parties, while there are populations in Africa suffering from medical problems that students like us could solve with that same investment of time and money (just take a look at the Global Health Technologies classes).

So much more can be changed than just people's perspectives on unconventionality, and I can do more than just entertain people. While I'm still going to attempt many things theatrical and ridiculous, maybe I should be aiming for goals of social justice as well.

Aaand of course, ideally, I just might try to do both at the same time.

Of mice and men.

Sooo, singing in the academic quad today would have been great. Only I have a cough that is activated whenever I hit certain notes, which tends to hinder the singing process.

No problem. I'll just drive to a craft store, and get the supplies to start on my next crazy project. Only when I got to West Lot, my car wouldn't start. (It's either the battery, or a poltergeist, so I'm going to either need a jumper cable or Ghostbusters). So that kind of killed the plan for driving anywhere.

Life is still fantastic. Plans just had to be changed/postponed a little. To compensate for my lack of interesting content, please accept the following as a substitute-

Fashion Sense II and Non-Standardized Testing

The disaster shirt continues! A good number of people have paid attention to it now, or commented on it. Funny how a normal t-shirt can attract as much attention as a full costume.

The shirt now also includes marks of

- napalm

- a motorcycle accident

- being backstabbed by a friend

- random punctures from me testing every potential stabbing weapon in my room on it (forks, pens, staplers...).

- friction burns from my wall

The front now reads "Bad Day? Mine's Worse" thanks to a suggestion from Michelle. I rather think I'll wear it whenever I'm in high-stress test-taking environments, to remind people that it could always be worse. :)

Speaking of testing situations, I got to fulfill another longtime goal today. I had a test for Psyc 339, but due to the fact that I am no longer majoring in Psyc, I decided to drop the class. (What? I don't want to do statistics for fun?!?). I dropped the class over lunch, and did a little research before the start of the exam. I came up with this list, that I was well familiar with. I went to the exam, wrote a note to the professor on the cover sheet explaining that I had dropped the class, that I really loved his teaching, that I meant no disrespect to his test, and that I hoped he would be entertained. I then proceeded to take the funnest test of the year.

Obviously, I spelled things out with the multiple choice answers. I also added new options to the multiple choice answers, such as 50 digits of Pi, or logical paradoxes, and picked those. I used Russian and Greek letters, imaginary numbers, and sarcastic comments for multiple choice answers. Instead of True and False, I answered with "Lies!", "Debatable" "Eh, probably" and "Why not?". I correctly worked out the math for a bunch of the questions, only using roman numerals instead of normal numbers. (IV^II is so much cooler looking than 4^2). Oh, and I wrote all these answers with multicolored crayons...

For the last problem, in which I had to draw out a box plot and label various elements, I portrayed all the statistical terms with basic pictionary style doodles, and duly labeled them. You get an idea of it from the picture below-
I then turned the exam in, and left the room 45 minutes before everyone else. On my way out, I muttered "Boy, that was easy!"

I'm sure some of them still hate me.

Totally worth it.

The Tipping Point

Nothing bloggable happened today until dinner. You could almost call the day "normal" if your standard for normal includes ballet, squirrel chasing, and parody video filming. Which, if you go to Rice, it just might.

At dinner, my desire for mildly ridiculous circumstances got restless. I got very close to asking the man chopping meat behind the counter if the flank steak was actually "Hand Carved" as the sign said. But in the end I decided that asking pointedly ridiculous questions to men holding butcher knives is not the wisest life strategy.

As I was eating dinner, I noticed two girls outside, jumping from line to line on the sidewalk. It wasn't too remarkable of an activity, but it looked pretty fun. Naturally, I dashed outside to join them, and soon there were multiple sets of goals and parameters for line jumping. Josh, who I had been having dinner with, also joined me.

Initially, it had just been two friends having fun being goofy. People noticed, but didn't react much. After it became four people, all engaged in the activity, the social attraction to it grew proportionately. Almost every single person who walked by decided to try it, and those who didn't commented and made jokes about it. The social boundary of making a ridiculous activity acceptable had been broken.

Now, this only lasted about 5 minutes and didn't have much of a lasting impact on anybody. But I couldn't help finding a message to take away. All my undertakings so far have involved one guy doing something socially abnormal, hoping that people would notice. But one guy is not much of a social force, unless he soon gains company. The more people involved in activities, the more successful they will be in getting people to participate or play along. Maybe it's time to start expanding projects to include multiple people...

Look for updates on the Disaster Shirt tomorrow, and on public singing (possibly in Russian) on Wednesday!

Flipping Out!

For no good reason, (other than that it was Friday) I decided to try doing a backflip inside of every building at Rice that I had access to! I plotted out my first route the night before-Some of these locations turned out to be off-limits, so I ended up with a total of 56 locations across campus, then set out on my flippant quest. (Haha...)

This was crazy in a whole different way, but it worked! Yes, I trekked across campus for 2.5 hours to do it, and did goodness knows what to my knees, but I'm fairly certain that I am the first person at Rice to have ever accomplished this! Success!

Lab Experiment Gone Wrong

Snazzy intro video-

With this energetic start, I headed off to the engineering quad.

Of course, it would turn out that the first person I talked to was actually working in a nanotechnology lab. That killed my story really fast... You can bluff knowing certain things in life by just reading the wikipedia article. Nanoscience is not one of those things. (Ryan Leigon referred me to an excellent example of which subjects are best for pretending: http://xkcd.com/451/ )

After having my story about nanobots thoroughly shut down by a Rice science whiz, and after receiving several concerned looks from professors in the physics buildings, I decided my efforts should be relocated to less scientifically inclined areas of campus.

Sooo, back to Fondren. On the way, I managed to show a campus tour some of the more eccentric side of Rice. I also saw two girls whisper about me, and I'm pretty sure they took pictures of me on their phones. Sadly, they didn't ask me to pose, or I definitely would have (just ask the 3 people who took pictures with me on Cow Appreciation Day).

Fondren once again provided some great literature for my character. I couldn't find Pyrotechnical Chemistry for Dummies, but there was a section on Testing for Explosivity in "Safety Assessment for Chemical Processes".

I carried this book around for a while- to Brochstein, to dinner, on the inner loop bus. Sadly, the only people who commented on the combination of the book and costume were friends.

"Now why didn't I read this *before* the experiment?"

I did notice a few people staring at me, as my costume was at least a little more believable for Rice. Two acquaintances expressed mild concern about me having actually blown myself up. A few astute strangers also asked what the costume was for, correctly deducing that explosions near faces actually tend to send people to hospitals, not wandering around campus. The bus again yielded very few results, except for wonderful Son, the bus driver, who asked all about my attire and was very interested in the whole 4 Walls Broken process.

That's all for now! The project for hopefully Friday is still in the works, so no teaser for that.

Awesome self-appointed bonus points- several people have asked where I got my robes, saying that they'd want to try studying in robes. Success!

Fashion Sense

On my off day, I decided to have a little fun with fashion. Meet disaster shirt 1.0, currently equipped with signs of

- a zombie bite

- stab wounds

- a drive by shooting

- an anti zombie-virus injection (after the bite, of course)

- and a tiger attack

More destruction to follow. And you thought *your* day was bad.

On top of this, it was McMurtry's Masquerade night at pub. I showed up for free food, and of course I brought my mask.
Am I classy or what?

A Tribute to Scholars, Part I

Naturally, I would have to study for my first major test on Monday. Typical Rice schedule. Any plans involving lab coats and facepaint have been bumped to Wednesday. Today is dedicated studying...

Not to say I didn't do anything. Rather, I decided to acknowledge the long-standing tradition, started by monks, of studying while wearing a cowl. While long robes are less necessary in the Houston heat than in dank European monasteries, I still feel that it helps the learning process somehow. Plus it's a lot of fun. :)

I got a few double takes just on the way over to Fondren, which was encouraging. However, once inside, I got very few reactions. Given that silence is recommended in libraries, I really shouldn't have been surprised. Also, I noticed that even people I knew weren't saying anything. (People actually focus on their work sometimes, who knew??) I figured that I could have probably walked up to half the studiers in there while wearing a gorilla suit, and they still wouldn't have noticed. Yes, I will try this if people get me a gorilla suit.

I checked to see how people reacted to being in an elevator in Fondren with a monk. Apparently, the protocol is just to ignore monks. It took me six tries before a person actually asked me if it was a costume.

I monked the 6th floor for 1/2 an hour while studying, but ultimately decided Fondren was too serious to yield many results. As I left, I checked out a few books that I thought seemed appropriate. Sadly, the librarian did not even comment about the fact that a guy dressed as a monk was checking out books on medieval warfare...

I moved on to Coffeehouse, where the staff and a few customers were entertained by my costume and choice of literature. I explained to a Junior from Martel how it kind of made since for college students to dress as monks, considering they were equivalent scholars from their age. He was quick to point out, though, that while his studies might be the same, his weekend activities varied drastically from those of monks.

I finished off the day by riding the entire inner loop on the bus and observing people as they got onboard. Most of them just took one look at me, then tried to pretend like nothing was out of the ordinary. I did catch one football player looking back at me 5 times during the one stop that he took the bus. Considering that "normal" Daniel gets maaaybe one look, I considered this an accomplishment.

Overall, the first experiment was effective, but did not generate much feedback. Most of the people I explained myself to were friends. And even then, a lot of my friends weren't surprised. I think Marie summed it up best when she walked by and said "Hey Daniel! Being a monk again?"

...

Yeah, apparently I need to step things up a notch.

And so it begins!

Greetings ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to 4 Walls Broken, a social experiment starting at Rice University. The goal of the project is to expose the population of Rice to whole new levels of unconventionality and observe the reactions.

The name 4 Walls Broken comes from the theater term of "breaking the 4th wall" which refers to direct interactions with the audience through the imaginary fourth wall of the room visible on stage. My goal is to take that interaction one step further, transforming the audience and their environment into the stage, putting them in constant interaction with the actors.

The cast of this new performance is one man- me. Not because I am limiting this to a performance of one individual. On the contrary, it will be fantastic if others join me. The cast is one man because that is all that I have control over. Starting Monday, I will be spontaneously altering my style of dress, behavior, and speech at random times, so that I can see and comment on how Rice reacts. On top of this, I will be staging a variety of bizarre and, I hope, entertaining performances all across campus. What will they be? My costume closet and I can wait until Monday to find out, so I suppose you can as well.

For an endeavor like this, I suppose I need some qualifications. So, while you wait, here's some evidence supporting why I think I can pull this off:

Title- "Let's Go Crazy!"

Alternative title- "Why Daniel Burns should not be given sugar."

All footage was taken from random videos from the past year, completely unassociated with this project.