[I composed this post in the wee hours of Sunday morning, December 26, 2010, but went to sleep before actually posting this post, thinking that I'd get around to adding to it later that day. I'll go ahead and post it now "as is" and will update you in my next post about why I never got around to finishing this post yesterday! Here's a hint in the form of a slightly altered Zen koan--"What is the sound of one hand typing?"]
Hard to believe a whole week has flown by since my last post! Hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas, indeed! Technically, today is "Boxing Day" on the other side of the "pond" in Jolly Old England!
Today is also a "Doomsday" for 2010, as explained in John Conway's Doomsday Algorithm, where the "Doomsday" for a given year is simply the day of the week on which the last day of February falls (February 28, 2010 was a Sunday, and was the last day of February since 2010 is not a Leap Year, not being evenly divisible by 4), which just so happens to be the same day of the week on which 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, and 12/12 fall, as well as 5/9, 9/5, 7/11, and 11/7 (which can easily be remembered by the mnemonic "I work 9 to 5 at the 7-11!"). Since the last day of February is the same as the "zeroth" day of March (3/0), 3/7, 3/14, 3/21, and 3/28 are also all Doomsdays. In non-Leap Years, January 31 ("February 0") is a Doomsday, as is January 3, whereas in Leap Years, February 1 ("January 32") is a Doomsday, as is January 4.
Using John Conway's Doomsday Algorithm, you can relatively easily calculate in your head the day of the week on which any given date (such as a birthday) in History fell (or on which any given date in the Future will fall!) and can, thus, emulate the uncanny mathematical prowess of an idiot savant! Amaze your friends! Be the life of the party!
John Conway is a fascinating character, an eminent mathematician (who has an "Official Princeton website") who dreamed up the cellular automaton The Game of Life. He also memorized the decimal expansion of the transcendental number pi (defined as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter) to 1000 decimal places and somehow managed to convince his first wife to also memorize it so that they could recite the decimal expansion of pi to each other, in chunks of 20 digits at a time, back and forth, while they were ambling along the path from Cambridge, England to nearby Grantchester when they would go there to a quaint little pub for lunch!
I strolled that very same path from Cambridge to Grantchester (for high tea) and back 31 years ago with David "Frank" Pearl when I attended Trinity College, Cambridge as the C. D. Broad Exchange Scholar from Weiss College at Rice University from 1979-1980 (the C. D. Broad Exchange Scholarship between Trinity College, Cambridge and Rice University was established by the wonderful Houston lawyer and philanthropist Frank Abraham who had cherished the opportunity he had been given as a soldier after World War II to study with and learn from the English philosopher C. D. Broad at Trinity College, Cambridge for six months before he returned to the States).
I didn't know more than a handful of the digits of pi back then, but now, in part inspired by the example of John Conway, I know more than 1300 digits of the decimal expansion of pi! Caroline, my wife, alas, has no interest in memorizing the digits of pi, but she will, on occasion, tolerate listening to me recite them to her as we are walking up and down along Belmont Street in our neighborhood in West University Place, as long as I don't speak in a voice loud enough for anyone else to overhear me!
In case you were wondering about an update on my medical condition, I now have my very own Bard PowerPort installed (implanted) just below my collar bone (clavicle), so I am all ready to start a round of chemotherapy this coming Friday afternoon, on New Year's Eve. What a way to bring in the New Year! The positron emission tomography (PET) scan I had on Monday, December 20, 2010, which shows metabolic "hot spots," such as metastasized tumors, using radioactively labeled glucose, didn't show any of the suspicious "nodules" that had shown up in the computerized tomography (CT) x-ray scan performed on Monday, December 13, 2010 at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, but did show the metabollically "hot" tumor in the appendix. Since the nodules were fairly small, most no larger than about 1 cubic centimeter (1 cc or 1 milliliter, 1 ml) or so, they might not have been large enough to have produced a signal that was detectable above the "noise" of all the other metabolic processes going on. On the other hand, the absence of a signal could mean the absence of metabolic tumors, which would be great!
To be on the safe side, of course, one must assume that the nodules could still be metastases. I'm going in on this coming Tuesday to have one more test, a needle biopsy, that may help determine what these nodules really are. I'll go in as an out-patient and, while I'm under sedation, the interventional radiologist will use a long needle to collect cell samples from one of the nodules from the CT scan so that the pathologists can determine whether the cells are from an adenocarcinoma or not. If there are tumor cells in the nodule, then there has definitely been some metastasis. Even if the biopsy turns out negative and there are no tumor cells found, it still doesn't entirely rule out the possibility of metastasis. Either way, the conservative plan of action will be to proceed with the first round of chemotherapy, anyway.
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