I owe an explanation of why I had to be “out of action” for a while.
Well, I was diagnosed with excessive vanity and defective sense of time, so underwent an egocentr-ectomy and a chronometry implant. Neither surgery was effective, and I may have ended up more impatient than ever.
Be serious. I had a cochlear implant, an operation costing fifty grand but free to me because of Britain’s beloved National Health Service and the luck of being offered the last of ten places in a study conducted by a top surgeon (lrumee Pai, of Korean heritage) and funded by the Oticon company. Here is the most amazing moment. As two anaesthetists finished working on me, one of them told me I might feel something being withdrawn from my throat just as I returned to consciousness. Next moment, Dr Pai walked up to me and in her cheerful way asked how I felt. I said: “Fine. When do we begin?” She said: “It’s all over, done! Went well.” The operation takes up to three hours, and had taken that long in my case because I had a narrow cochlea.
The after-effect, however, of this excavation in the head is upset to the balance system, and I am recovering from that more slowly than average. In other words, you reel around nauseously when you move. So I was in hospital four days; then another few days before I could get around without Zimmer frame, go downstairs, get to my computer, go outside. I’m functioning, but decrepitly, with a vague queasiness down my middle. As you can imagine, ideas build on top of all the projects I had been impatiently in the midst of; and yet I was surprised to find myself relapsed into patience.
When I was able to resume reading some of the world’s news, it was on the nauseating side. People ordering pizza at one in the morning and hearing screams and crashing glass from the neighboring flat. That, you probably know, was the latest incident in the Boorish Boris Johnson show. I need to get back to doing an astronomical blog post when I can, but the starry picture I feel like drawing is along the lines of the cover picture for Astronomical Calendar 2015: the sky filled with stars represented by stellated polyhedrons.
But a collection of the dark stars and bright stars of the human world.
Down against a light-polluted landscape, some of the dark stars: Boor Johnson, Truculent Trump, Lictor Orban, Nazzeo Salvini, Butcher Bolsonaro. And too many more come to mind, in random order, Steve Bannon, Robert Mercer, Rupert Murdoch, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (“Tommy Robinson,” immigrant-hater), Nigel Farage, Arron Banks. And Putin and his troll farms for undermining democracies; Ramzan Kadyrov tyrant of Chechnya…
Up in the clear sky, some of the bright stars of the human world, far or near: Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus son of Joseph with his “Love your neighbor as yourself” and “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Pope Francis. And George Soros, and our warners such as James Hansen, Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, Philip Alston. And Nye Bevan founder of the health service. And Diana Proctor (but you don’t know who she is).
The trouble with any such astronomy, as with the Nobel Peace Prize, is that there is a multitude of stars whom we fail to celebrate, because they are too many and too modest – aid workers in war zones or in lonely places in Africa, rights defenders and investigative journalists often targeted by corrupt regimes and industries, nurses who work twelve-and-a-half hour shifts, others who love their neighbours better than themselves.
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
Thanks for the update. I hope you’re feeling steadier, and I hope the implant(s?) will be a great help.
Putin’s star continues to darken:
“Putin: Russian president says liberalism ‘obsolete'”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48795764
I’m glad to hear you’re recovering, but sorry to hear you needed a cochlear implant. Much better to get it in the U.K. than the U.S., I imagine. I’ve been using hearing aids for a long time, but my hearing is too good (at the moment!) to get implants. Once you’ve acclimated, I’d be interested to hear how well you’re able to localize sounds, if you’re interested in sharing. None of my business, but did you only get one? I hope your hearing is ok on the other side….
Hi Guy, I have just read your blog and was very happy to see you are back at the computer. I could think of some people to add to both lists (saints and sinners), but I especially agree about the nurses working long shifts. I love the astronomical calendar’s cover painting. I’m off to bed, but I just wanted to let you know that we are all thinking of you!
Just a simple, ‘wish you speedy and thorough recovery.’ Thank you for your bright, shining star presence still with feet firmly planted on Gaia! The rest is freely roaming!
Glad you are recovering, Guy! Your hearing may have declined (as mine has), but it’s lovely to see your brilliant and original mind going as strongly as ever …
A healthy recovery for you. Take it easy and it’s fitting that you have mastered a particular, and vast, field of science that doesn’t require an accute sense of hearing. Cheers
I love that! Yes, the rhythms of the spheres come in through the cochlea of the imagination.
Encouragement for a speedy recovery and a healthy improvement! Wish I could say the same for humanity, and yet I have hope — especially when I think of the many members of the human race working toward such goals.
Best wishes for your recovery. Oddly enough, I find your post just as I return from my niece’s wedding. She and her spouse are both fitted with cochlear implants – and there were numerous such in the wedding party. My niece, Sophie, was the youngest implantee at the time that she received her first – about 20 years ago. It had only 7 channels – and ruptured when about 3 years old – necessitating emergency replacement. In this interval the technology had improved dramatically. Her husband is on his third version. He was born profoundly deaf, she with a vestibular malformation such that her own pulse was going to destroy her hearing in the very time that speech would be learned – so she received her SSB-sounding primitive transplant pre-emptively. Both of them speak and function quite well. Even though they have faced and conquered great challenges – I am somewhat envious of their “off” switch. My own audio processing fails to gate out unimportant sounds such that normal and ubiquitous background noise and speech present a taxing load to the higher neuro-functions and drive me to exhaustion – or to avoid normal social scenes altogether. I used noise-cancelling earplugs to attend the wedding – which was ironic in the crowd I was mixing with there.
Wishing you a ‘patient’ and healthy recovery, Guy! Looking forward to your future posts! : ) I dig your commentary on the ‘dark stars and the bright stars of the human world’. Take care!
Although we can’t regrow limbs like starfish or reptiles, you’ll be surprised in a few days or a week at the progress you’ll be making. (But at the time it doesn’t always seem so!)
I’m sure that you have projects aplenty in mind … but may I suggest another one? I think that good visual explanations of many things astronomical could be aided by producing them in stereo pairs, for viewing either with a 3D viewer of without it, with a bit of training.
3D drawings were all the rage before photography, in the 1820-40s, and stereo viewings of orbits, for instance, or constellations like the Pleiades or Orion would be spectacular, and instructional as well. Just a thought …
Recover in peace.
Thank you. I did respond to an earlier comment recommending 3D illustrations – I wish I could find the comment now and my reply. Briefly: for a few years I used to do pairs of illustrations in the Astronomical Calendar, e.g. of comet orbits; they were from viewpoints 3 degrees apart in space, so that you could stare through them until they merged in a 3D picture. Quite exciting. Problem is, they had to be small so as to be close enough together. Also, there’s no way my eyes could do the merging now. Still, I’ll keep it in mind in case I think of some workaroundd.
I’m trying to set up a rig to take stereo pairs of meteors. 50-100m camera separation. We’ll see how it works out.
I believe that earlier comment was in the post, “Comments: Cato, Stereo”, published Dec. 9, 2018. Hope your recovery is stellar!
Thank you, Rick! You’re better at searching my own blog than I am. Of course, “stereo” was the key term to search for – “3D” and variants are too fuzzy. As are my eyes and brain still.
Glad I could help my professor. I don’t have a search box on my end, but I knew it was from a few months back so I clicked on Astronomy category and scrolled down and found it on page 3.
Actually, I do have a search box. On my I-Mac, I clicked on Edit / Find / Find. Never knew that.
Hope your recovery continues smoothly Guy!
We’ve entered a time when critical thinking is a rare ability.