flexagon | Imperfect machine

Physical therapy this morning was really interesting. I've never actually been to PT before. I found out a lot about all the ways I'm asymmetrical: it seems my right leg is longer than my left, and my pelvis is held in a twisted position (tipped forward on the right and back on the left... I guess that makes sense with my left splits being the better side) and I turn my right foot out a little when I walk. Argh... I really liked the therapist but he had me feeling like a circus freak. I swear, I don't look all weird and twisted.

Then he used ultrasound on the muscle for a while, massaged it (he said he could feel little Rice Krispies things popping... thank goodness, I couldn't), gave me a bunch of stretches to do twice a day and let me go. I guess this will be my life for the next few weeks. The good news is that, as long as I don't do high-impact things or stretch hard, or do hamstring curls, I can still go to gymnastics and work out.

I haven't talked much about my hardware studies, but I mentioned we're revving up for a book club at work in which we'll study how computers are built, from logic gates on up to compilers. I never studied this in college, so I'm reading quickly through a lighter book that covers a lot of the same material, in an attempt to be hitting the concepts for the second time in the book club. So, for the first time I understand why regular, static RAM requires power in order to retain its memory... some types like DRAM are even flakier, having to be refreshed often or the stored memory just fades out. And I wonder if human memory has anything in common with that. If so, all the cryo people are wrong, and it won't ever be possible to freeze a person and bring them back, because the electrical power in the brain will have been cut in the meantime, and all our little transistors / relays / quantum doohickeys will have reverted to their base state.

Memory is a spooky thing.