My dad embraced science in his healthcare and in his life

In the last 5 years of his life, my dad experienced a lot of complicated health challenges.

In December 2020, my dad contracted COVID-19. This was during the Delta Variant times of the pandemic. The Delta variant was infamous for being just as deadly as the original virus while being much more contagious. That was certainly the case for my father, who had been fanatically careful for the first 11 months of the pandemic and yet somehow fell ill just before New Year's Eve.

Dad was living 450 miles away from me at the time, so we talked about his situation over the phone. (During those days, traveling outside of your county of residence was technically illegal in California, though surely I could have traveled safely.) I managed to order an oximeter online and I taught my dad how he could monitor his blood oxygen levels. On the third day of feeling poorly, he told me that his oxygen level was 82, and I sent him straight to the emergency room. Happily, they were living just down the block from a very fine hospital, and he was immediately admitted and started on a 5 day course of remdesivir. Happily, he tolerated the medicine very well and was soon discharged, still on oxygen, to rebuild his damaged lungs at home.

During this recovery, dad was just as painstaking and detail-oriented as he ever was. He filled page after page in his journals with daily observations of vital information, now augmented with measurements of lung strength taken from a hand-held breathing measurement device that the hospital gave him.

Making notes like this was something he'd been doing for years, as he daily monitored his blood sugar levels to keep an eye out for the diabetes that had killed my aunt at a too-young age.

As the years continued to pass, and my dad battled first Lymphoma, then Brachycardia, then Leukemia, the number of different types of measurements grew and his daily note-taking grew with them. He (and I) became familiar with many new ways that modern medicine can monitor changes in the human body. Some of them were rather tedious, such as getting routine blood draws to look at various measurements of compounds in the blood; others were rather remarkable, such as when he had a small heart monitor taped to his chest for a few weeks while the monitor quietly and painlessly recorded its measurements for later analysis by the cardiologists.

In the end, when the mutated bone marrow cells in his body began to flood his system with damaged blood cells, he knew even before he got the results of the tests; he was just that attuned to his health.

This level of interest in modern medicine was nothing new to my family. When I was very, very young, my parents were at the front of the line to get me vaccinated with brand-new vaccines for polio and smallpox, horrific diseases that had ravaged both of their families in previous generations. They instilled in me a fascination with science and data and rational thinking that has stuck with me though my own lifetime.

I've been thinking a lot about science recently, of course, as it's suddenly forefront on the national agenda. The head of the health division of the national government has said that "vaccinating children is unethical," and the government appears to be moving with breakneck speed to eliminate all science from the federal government.

To be replaced by, ... what? It isn't clear, exactly. I don't know why all these elected leaders fear science and want to abolish it, dumping a hundred years of systematic improvement in the lives of humans around the world into the trash bin for apparently no reason whatsoever.

I know what my father would have thought.

He would have thought they were wrong, and he would have continued taking his measurements and studying his data.

My dad loved to read manuals

My dad loved to read manuals.

As far back as I can remember, whenever we got a new appliance, or a new tool, or a board game, or just about anything that came in a box, my dad would painstakingly start by reading the manual first.

And I do mean reading! The new gizmo would be sitting there in its box, and he would take the manual over to his chair, and sit down, and read the entire thing, cover to cover, before he'd do anything else. Only then would he approach the box again, lift the whatchamacallit out of its box, turn it this way and that way, and try to line it up in his mind with what he had just read in the manual.

In his mind, I think that the manual was the true essence of the thing; the thing itself was just an artifact.

At the holidays, when I ripped off the wrapping paper, I would wonder whether I'd been given something simple enough that I could just start playing with it, or whether my gift was something that came in a box, with a manual, in which case he'd make sure that I found the manual first, and sat down and looked at it, before I could proceed to get to the actual toy itself.

Model ships, Lego kits, even Frisbees or skateboards: "Wait! Read the manual first."

It was a different place and time, I suppose.

People don't read manuals now. If there even is a manual! Usually, at best there is a little slip of paper with a QR code that sends you to a YouTube video.

People don't read the manual; they watch the manual on YouTube.

Or they just take the thing out of the box and plug it in and start pushing buttons.

This change greatly disturbed my dad, and I perhaps noticed it most clearly when he would buy a new videogame for his computer. He loved videogames, and was always looking for a new one to try.

But somewhere along the line, videogames stopped having manuals. Instead, every videogame designer, in some sort of lemming-like mass migration, switched from having a manual to explain how to play their game, to instead having the manual built in to the game itself.

With a modern video game, you just install it and fire it up and start playing. But of course you don't know anything. So the game is carefully designed to start with a series of tutorials, carefully designed so that you think you are playing the game, while in fact you are just progressing through the tutorials.

Think of the start of Skyrim, when you find yourself riding in the back of a wooden cart, being taken down to the town square to be tried in front of the local magistrate. Bit by bit, the game teaches you how to move your character around, to walk and run, to find items and experimentally figure out what they are good for, to engage in dialogue with other characters, to build or buy weapons and armor and equip them, and so forth.

You might spend hours playing the game, when in fact you are still just reading the manual.

This drove my dad crazy! He wanted to read the manual!

Sometimes, he would find that the game included a "help" system, where there was a sort of mini-encyclopedia of short descriptions of the important elements of the game. These help systems were often extensive, with hundreds of individual articles covering all sorts of aspects of the game. They were of course never designed to be a manual, but rather to be a simple in-game reference tool, useful if you'd put the game aside for a few months and were now returning to it, trying to remember the difference between a poleaxe and a halberd, or whatever.

But my dad, if he found such a help system in his new game, would immediately stop playing the initial tutorials. Instead, he would painstakingly go through the entire help system, one article at a time, clicking on each topic. Then he'd copy-and-paste the text (or screenshot it, whatever), and put them all into a Word document, and then he'd print out the entire Word document, often dozens or even hundreds of pages long at this point.

And he'd take the printout, and go sit down in his chair, and read the entire thing, front to back.

How do keelboats sail upwind?

I was pretty sure I understood the basic principles.

Happily, Randall Munroe has clarified them for me!

Construction Physics on shipbuilding

Here's the sort of article that I used to send to my dad. And then we would discuss it when we were together. Improving Naval Ship Acquisition

My dad spent a bunch of his professional career working in the Armed Forces on analytic topics. He worked for several years for the Coast Guard working on logistics and operations problems. And then he worked for close to 20 years for the Navy on operations research problems. He spent a lot of time thinking about the details of why the military does things the way they do.

It's a deep, complex topic, and not easily accessible to outsiders like me.

But still, it was always interesting to get my dad's perspective on issues such as the ones in this essay:

Many of the US Navy’s recent ship designs are large, complex multi-role ships. The Navy expects the same ship to hunt pirates, counter ballistic missiles, track submarines, and more. Also common are high-end features unnecessary for a ship’s mission. These complex ships have many negative consequences on the ability to design ships, increase production throughput, and meet budget and schedule targets.

I really enjoy the Construction Physics newsletter. I have no idea how Brian Potter manages to write so many amazing articles so often, but they're great reading.

My dad and the new pope

I think my dad would have been happy that Leo XIV was a math major.

I think my dad might have liked this puzzle…

... although not because he liked Find-a-Word puzzles

Actually he much preferred cryptic crosswords when it came to puzzles.

He would watch me doing a Sudoku or a KenKen with some interest, but he never really enjoyed those either.

Although he had fun trying to work out the mathematics of Sudoku!

Anyway, i think he would have liked this puzzle because the theme was railroad trains and each word to be found was a type of train car.

One less commenter

My dad was the person who most often commented on my blog posts.

(I mean, besides the automated sparm marketing robots.)

I still have one or two long-time friends who occasionally comment on my posts.

But it's going to be a lot quieter in the comments section now.

Can you inherit interests?

Somehow, along the way, I came to find myself sharing certain interests with my father. I'm not exactly sure how this came to be, but it's something that I find I still have, even after he's gone>

The desert. When I was nine years old we moved from Lousiana to California, and came to live in a suburb of Los Angeles. But my dad wasn't really all that thrilled with the suburbs of Los Angeles. Instead, it came to be that he grew to love the desert. When we were young, he would take us on weekend trips into the high desert of inland California, and we would wander around its empty spaces, finding odd things to see and do.

Stamp collecting. I really have no idea how my dad came to be interested in collecting stamps, but I remember that when I was young, he would let me sit in his den with him, as we did things like soaking old envelopes to separate the stamp from the envelope, examining the resulting stamps under magnifying glasses, and looking up each stamp in a specialty catalog to learn more about whether this was a special and interesting stamp, in which case we would happily mount the stamp into its position in the album.

Cryptic crosswords. I came to this rather late, rather than as a child, when at some point I visited my parents and they had a cryptic crossword open on the breakfast table. Cryptics feature a blend of word play and puzzles that is quite hard to explain unless you've tried them. I'm really not very good at them, but I love to try to solve them, and when I got stuck I would just ask my dad and he would explain the answer.

The United States Coast Guard. Most Americans, I'd say, have pretty much no idea what the USCG is, and what it does, but my father was a career coastie, eventually rising to and retiring as a Captain in the Coast Guard Reserve. He helped me understand what the Coast Guard does, and why it is so unusual among all the US armed forces.