Mushing my way out of depression...
Oct. 2nd, 2005 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpI managed to finish the translation due tomorrow, and I mean finish it: spell-check, edit equations, and review. I'll likely send it off right after making this post, and send the invoice tomorrow or Tuesday.
The CT scan showed nothing in my mom's GI tract, which is a good thing, I suppose. She still has a low-grade fever, which was supposed to be addressed earlier today in the afternoon. My own assessment of my mom's condition is that she looks worse day by day. Today, for example, she had a couple of coughing fits while we were at her bedside.
My dad is making noise along the lines of my moving in with him for a while, though it's not clear whether he means while my mom is sick or afterward as well. Frankly, I'm not enthusiastic about the idea. (It would make a lot of sense, on the one hand, for him to pick up and move out to Colorado, though I shrink at the thought of unleashing him on what amounts to a brand new culture. The man has developed a set of particular likes and dislikes over the years, and seems to have aligned his life, e.g., favorite stores, newsstands, pizza parlors, in a very set manner.)
Enough about what is starting to feel like my own personal soap opera.
I ran across a puzzle in the New York Post called a "sudoku" (I don't know why, but I kept calling them "dusoku" for a while, there.) To setup a dusoku, divide a square into a 3x3 grid, and then subdivide each constituent square into its own 3x3 grid. The result is a 9x9 square with heavy lines delineating the higher-level 3x3 grid.
It turns out you can position the digits within this layout in such a way that the digits 1 though 9 appear exactly once in each column, row, and 3x3 square, but that's not the solver's task, as it would appear to be fairly easy. Instead, the solver is provided with a layout that is partially filled in, and the task is to use logic to fill in the rest.
This is supposed to be some kind of wildly popular fad, similar to the Rubik's Cube of a couple of decades ago, I don't know. At any rate, it took me a while to figure out the puzzle in the Post, and besides the shallow feeling of accomplishment I experienced upon successfully solving the thing, I am sure it provided a workout for my synapses.
Which brings me, indirectly, to something that's been bothering me about my mom's condition: is her mental deterioration the result of nature or nurture? Is it something that I need to worry about should Providence see fit to grant me a long life?
You see, I had always thought of my mom as the epitome of the mentally active person, though as I walk through the house I don't see as much evidence of that as I might have hoped to. It strikes me that perhaps her forte was in reinforcing the same mental pathways by staying focused on a fairly small and invariable set of interests. (So much for getting away from the soap opera. Sigh.)
The previous paragraph probably betrays a gut feeling of mine, to the effect that the more you use your brain, the less likely it is that its performance will degrade in old age, and vice versa, the so-called "if you use it, you won't lose it" theory. (Forgive my bid to be the poster child for the tin hat brigade in this matter, but I cannot help but think that the mental passivity cultivated by our 40-year-old-plus TV culture is somehow related to the explosive growth of Alzheimer's patients, though I fully realize that, with an ever-greater number of people achieving old age, an ever-greater number of folks will concomitantly exhibit degraded mental processes.)
I should probably do some reading in this area. If my recent experience with my mom has taught me anything, it's that I really don't want to check out of this life as a mental (or any other kind of) vegetable.
Cheers...
The CT scan showed nothing in my mom's GI tract, which is a good thing, I suppose. She still has a low-grade fever, which was supposed to be addressed earlier today in the afternoon. My own assessment of my mom's condition is that she looks worse day by day. Today, for example, she had a couple of coughing fits while we were at her bedside.
My dad is making noise along the lines of my moving in with him for a while, though it's not clear whether he means while my mom is sick or afterward as well. Frankly, I'm not enthusiastic about the idea. (It would make a lot of sense, on the one hand, for him to pick up and move out to Colorado, though I shrink at the thought of unleashing him on what amounts to a brand new culture. The man has developed a set of particular likes and dislikes over the years, and seems to have aligned his life, e.g., favorite stores, newsstands, pizza parlors, in a very set manner.)
Enough about what is starting to feel like my own personal soap opera.
I ran across a puzzle in the New York Post called a "sudoku" (I don't know why, but I kept calling them "dusoku" for a while, there.) To setup a dusoku, divide a square into a 3x3 grid, and then subdivide each constituent square into its own 3x3 grid. The result is a 9x9 square with heavy lines delineating the higher-level 3x3 grid.
It turns out you can position the digits within this layout in such a way that the digits 1 though 9 appear exactly once in each column, row, and 3x3 square, but that's not the solver's task, as it would appear to be fairly easy. Instead, the solver is provided with a layout that is partially filled in, and the task is to use logic to fill in the rest.
This is supposed to be some kind of wildly popular fad, similar to the Rubik's Cube of a couple of decades ago, I don't know. At any rate, it took me a while to figure out the puzzle in the Post, and besides the shallow feeling of accomplishment I experienced upon successfully solving the thing, I am sure it provided a workout for my synapses.
Which brings me, indirectly, to something that's been bothering me about my mom's condition: is her mental deterioration the result of nature or nurture? Is it something that I need to worry about should Providence see fit to grant me a long life?
You see, I had always thought of my mom as the epitome of the mentally active person, though as I walk through the house I don't see as much evidence of that as I might have hoped to. It strikes me that perhaps her forte was in reinforcing the same mental pathways by staying focused on a fairly small and invariable set of interests. (So much for getting away from the soap opera. Sigh.)
The previous paragraph probably betrays a gut feeling of mine, to the effect that the more you use your brain, the less likely it is that its performance will degrade in old age, and vice versa, the so-called "if you use it, you won't lose it" theory. (Forgive my bid to be the poster child for the tin hat brigade in this matter, but I cannot help but think that the mental passivity cultivated by our 40-year-old-plus TV culture is somehow related to the explosive growth of Alzheimer's patients, though I fully realize that, with an ever-greater number of people achieving old age, an ever-greater number of folks will concomitantly exhibit degraded mental processes.)
I should probably do some reading in this area. If my recent experience with my mom has taught me anything, it's that I really don't want to check out of this life as a mental (or any other kind of) vegetable.
Cheers...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Other Sudoku Resources
Date: 2005-10-03 02:18 am (UTC)http://www.sudokufun.com provides new random puzzles throughout the day.
http://www.sudokusan.com provides 4 puzzles per day, of varying difficulty.
http://www.scss.com.au/family/andrew/pdas/palm/myprogs/sudoku/ a great Palm application. Lets you quickly enter puzzles, or generates random ones, for you to work on your palm pilot.
There's also a great article about the puzzles at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudoku
Take care!
no subject
Date: 2005-10-03 04:54 am (UTC)There are also 2*3 (total square 6*6) format Sudoku that besides rows and columns, also should have unique numbers on the diagonals. Plus, most of Sudoku here have also a "rating" attached to them, - easy, medium, ... to the hardest which are a real challenge to solve.
Like in Rubik's Cube, there are techniques that solve Sudoku. The first ones are really easy, the advanced ones take some time to understand.
What relates to mental activity/passivity and their influence on people's brains, I tend to agree with your viewpoint. Judging by an example of my (sadly, deceased 20 years ago) Granny, who lived up to 86 years and stayed mentally active all this time (read newspapers, held discussions and watched all the news trying to catch up with them) without a sign of mental deterioration -- there sure are things we can do to prevent spending our last years as mental vegetables.