Monday 31 October 2011

Is sea water healthy?

Presocratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus [Herra-cl-eye-tus] gave us the following fragment to consider:

Sea water is very pure and very foul, for, while to fishes it is drinkable and healthful, to men it is hurtful and unfit to drink.

What I want to draw from this fragment is that purity or foulness is not a property of the water, but a reaction of the individual towards the water.

This relates to a discussion of the definition of health and disease in the philosophy of medicine. Philosophers of medicine have invested a great deal into trying to define what disease is. Is blindness a disease, for instance. Heraclitus looked at the difference in reaction between a man and a fish. I want to extend this to looking at the difference between individual human beings.

Sea water is foul to a man because he is not biologically adjusted to it, whereas a fish is adjusted to it. In the same way, a man born blind may be perfectly well adjusted to life without sight and ought not be labelled as diseased, but a man who has had sight all his life and is blinded as the result of an accident may be called diseased since he is maladjusted to his new condition and may be wise to seek treatment.

So where philosophers of medicine have troubled to seek a definition of disease to suit all of mankind, I counsel against being so general.

I instead seek a kind of meta-definition that would compare a man's actual condition with the condition that he is adjusted to.
I am interested in looking at an individual's biological fitness and how it fluctuates on a local basis. I am examining a definition of disease that focuses on an individual's fitness reaching a certain threshold below his local average as the result of a certain event or culmination of circumstances.

The individual in the graph below is considered diseased after the time his fitness dips below the disease threshold.


Monday 24 October 2011

Volume

I have a remote for my Bose speaker system for listening to music, and when I adjust the volume, I find myself clicking the volume button multiple times in succession to achieve a large change in volume. Now the remote volume comes with a function whereby I can simply hold the volume button and the volume changes continuously.

So why don't I do this? Surely it must be more efficient? It seems that if I hold the volume button and wait to hear for the right amount of volume before releasing the volume button, there is a lag between me hearing the right moment and actually releasing the button, so the volume overshoots and the music ends up too loud or too quiet. Instead, I click the button in succession, even though this is comparatively slow.

My brainwave was this: I can work out my lag. How many 'clicks' worth do I overshoot by? By finding this number, n, I can simply hold the volume button, judge by ear and when I find it, compensate for the lag by immediately pressing the opposite volume buttons n times. Amazing! I have now spent 20 minutes thinking about and discussing how I can save a few seconds on large volume adjustments when using the remote for my Bose speaker system. Practical philosophy in action (irony intended)!