A Man And His Ideas

Efficient Thinking Efficient generally refers to performance with the least amount of waste or sometimes the ability to avoid waste. The term efficient is very subjective to context and observations regarding use.  Two of the subjective measurements are the consumption of resources and the use of resources to meet a goal. Each are perceptions on the same consideration, one view is from the producer and the other from the customer.  Efficient thinking in mind and the brain is similar. The neurobiology of the brain produces thoughts, and the neurocognition of the mind consumes the thoughts. Waste has some negative connotations, e.g. trash, but a wastebasket is very efficient for collecting trash. In production companies, the consumption of resources manufactures a product. In manufacturing, quality is an efficiency statement that appears to be a perception measurement about resource depilation that occurred to make the finished goods. Customers who purchase the goods make ...

Think Outside the Box HERO: The word hero is an acronym that means,  H elp  E veryone,  R espect  O thers. You show respect by giving your time, your talent, your treasure, and most importantly, your tenacity. Never quit until we find the cure for MS. Thank you for coming, each of you is my hero. The current dialog on MS has two principal author perspectives. The clinical view and the MSer self-view, or the "them" or the "me" perspective. When I talk about MS From the Insider-Out, I try to have the "us" perspective.  I just look at MS magazines, the principal authors were from the clinical view. Sometimes, the magazine will have an MSer personal story as the me-too story.   The them pronoun can be a logical context  syllogism when referring to  people with MS as the object of the article. Them, you, us and me are just perspectives of the MS box. The clinical views, them and you, see the MS box from the outside. The MSer views, us and me, is f...

DRAFT: What are your opinions on bullying by tribes? As members of society we all live in tribes. Tribe examples include family, work, church, city, sports teams, gangs, cliques, organizations, income, discrimination profiles, political parties, military, demographics, national pride, etc. When my daughter was in middle school, the in-girls clique bullying was terrible. When I was in grade school we lived on the wrong side of tracks and we were poor. The kids from the "the north side of Colfax" did name-calling, shoving, ridiculed, and ostracized  my brother, my sisters, and me. We were not the only school kids who the bullies attacked. Colfax was a label of convenience, rather, in reflection, we were poor, but not in poverty. I suspect other branding like patched clothes,  paper bags not lunch boxes, heritage, grammar, size, clicks, and family advertised labels for bully aggression. I remind myself, the sins of youth are not the sins of adults. Years later, afte...

Feature: Dirty Doubles Stud Poker  I n 1998, when a few of us got together is to play nickel, dime, quarter poker, I invented the dirty doubles poker game. Many card games use partners as part of the gameplay. 5 card stud poker intrigued me as an oppunitity to devise a partner type game for poker.  Dirty Doubles is a stud poker game in which each player has the possibility to gamble with 6 up cards in a hand 1-6-1. The deal remains 1-3-1, but by random selection each player has a partner where both partners share the other partner’s up cards. Each betting player can use a combination from 5, 6, 7, or 8 cards to make a 5-card poker hand. The hand should be played with and even number of players, preferably 6, however, a variation can be played with an odd number of players. The Game: Each player has a partner. The stud up cards are shared between each partner in thus increasing the possible winning hand combinations. For example, in 1-3-1 five-card stud, the p...

Veteran: First Principles of Veteran Benefits Anytime an area of interest transforms into another area of interest, the process of transformation requires three steps. The first step is accepting the original area of interest, the last step is generating the intended area of interest. In between are the transformation rules. The rules act as a catalyst where the meaning of the original can become intended. The process of information transformation happens everywhere. As you read these words, the eyes scan the symbols and transform the words into thought. In between are the multiple transforms where each transformation rules contribute to the eventual intended area of interest. In arithmetic, the predicates, add, subtract, equal are the rules for transforming numerical values. First-principles is another name for the intermediate rules. Each principle is a valid test for both the original and the intended area of interest.    For veterans' benefits, the Law is the origin...

About Me: My MS Story My name is Joseph. In 1989, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Since then, my MSer story has traveled many roads. Today, I will share the story of some of my adventures. I want to thank each of you for being here. Whenever we can come together to hear and discuss MS, I believe each of us receives energy to continue the adventure.  Almost every story has a hero. My story has many. I was born in a small town in central Nebraska. We lived on the old family homestead farm without indoor plumbing or running water; three years later, when we moved to the big house, my mother told my dad she wanted an indoor toilet and water in the house. I can still see dad’s solution: a 50-gallon drum on the roof with a hose piping water from the well and electric cord attached to the stock tank heater keeping the drum’s water from freezing. By the time I was seven, I had three sisters and a brother, and we left the farm and moved to Denver.  Life with MS is like f...

MS fatigue is an MSer's best friend. Connecting to fatigue is one of the hardest MSer challenges. Often without warning, MS fatigue invades activities. Even with life skill management and avoidance techniques, the fatigue monster can find a way to hack into any activity.  This interloper action provides many reasons to consider the fatigue invader an enemy. In systems design, anything that causes a breach in system security is an interloper. As good as any system can possibly be, an interloper demonstrates an opportunity for improving security. An interloper that penetrates enough to cause damage means recovery actions.  While the interloper attack is cursed, the attack triggers  opportunities to make a better system by  improving security and recovery plans. MS fatigue is an interloper attack on our body’s systems. We curse its existence as an enemy to our health. But if we step back and look a   the attack as defining a breached area in the bran due to t...