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.