Week 12 Assignment

I thought the articles examining how technology is now able to create artificial limbs that function via a person's thoughts were really interesting. There is not much doubt in my mind that using design and technology to help people gain more mobility is a positive thing. However, I'm not sure if we can design our way out of all of our health challenges. It seems that every month, there is some major drug that was initially presented as a miracle drug for a certain condition, that after further study and use, resulted in terrible side effects and get pulled off the market. Some new technologies do concern me and we see everyday the health impacts of, for example, prolonged use of computers and smart phones resulting in carpel tunnel syndrome, tendonitis, etc. At the same time, I think about how there were similar fears and doubts that accompanied "new" technologies such as the printing press, the television, etc, and how much new technologies have improved access to eduction for large segments of the population.

I also found the article on mediation appropriate for the class, but as a whole, I wish that meditation in the U.S. and Europe, especially amongst new practitioners, could eventually become less focused on benefits to individuals, and travel more towards meditation as taught within the Buddhist framework, which is geared very much towards using meditation as a basis for taking action and creating social change.

Week 11 Assignment

1. Acupuncture is very effective energy medicine if we think of energy as that which enables transformation and movement in the body. Acupuncture is especially effective for moving qi throughout the body, dealing with blockages, and generally "excess" conditions of qi stagnation and heat.

2. I thought aura photography mainly captured thermal/heat but the article we read explained that ti's much more complicated. The use of high-voltage electrical fields for this type of photography makes me wonder if the same science behind it can be used to explain and describe the effect of different crystal on health.

3. I think human intent can play a critical role in health since so much of our health is controlled by our nervous system (e.g. cardiovascular rhythms, digestive system).

Biophysics: Week 10

I was reading an article in the New Yorker recently titled "Germs are us" which talked about how we are inhabited by ten thousand species of bacteria, which in total outnumber what we normally consider "our" cells by 10 to 1. All together, they weigh 3 pounds, the same as our brain. And we would not be able to function without them. So yes, I think all humans are living organism hosting our own special ecosystem that can't be seen to the naked eye.

Biophysics, the use of physics to study biology is related to Chinese medicine in that much of Chinese medicine is about the movement of qi and blood throughout the body. In some ways, we can say that the fluid dynamics we study in Chinese medicine is very related to theories of physics, and being that it's applied to the biological functions, it is related to the field of biophysics.

Week #8 Assignment

1. I find Newton's 3 laws interesting since I play a lot of sports, and so much of these sports (tennis, basketball) depends on force to change a ball's velocity and acceleration. It's fascinating to "feel" the physics of how hard I have to swing my racket to hit a ball at a certain speed, or how hard I have to toss the ball to get it to the net.

2. What I find sometimes disturbing about energy efficiency in our country is that often, studies show that when something is more energy efficient (for example, a hybrid car), we then feel okay to use it more (e.g. drive more) so that in the end, we are not saving energy at all!

3. I didn't realize until now how much Descartes and his Cartesian coordinate system had influenced my life. I spent several years in my early twenties studying economics, specifically microeconomics. Thinking back on those days, the first things that comes to mind are all the problems sets involving what I now know as Cartesian coordinates, which become the basis of multivariate calculate, which in turn was the foundation of microeconomics!