Pleomorphic adenoma with neoplasm evident

[miriam_e]

I wasn't going to mention this here. I tend not to advertise my misfortunes. But it occurred to me that LiveJournal is a place where I should write about things of significance to me, and this is certainly an important event.

I'll start with a brief description, then talk more about what this means to me.

Last Wednesday I was operated upon to remove a tumor from my right salivary gland. It was benign, but growing very quickly so chances were that it "intended" to go malignant eventually. This is a very common kind of tumor that can grow benignly for years without presenting great danger, safely contained within the salivary gland, though it always has the risk of malignancy and once it crosses that threshold it can set up colonies anywhere else in the body... and, well, I prefer not to talk about that.

The operation was quick and effective. They took the grape-sized tumor out with about half my right salivary gland. The incision, while quite large (about 5 inches long) down the side of my neck in front of my ear to part way down my throat, will probably be fairly well hidden by the way I have my hair. One of the biggest (though fairly remote) risks of the surgery was possible damage to the facial nerve, but I escaped that completely. One slight hassle is that my right external ear is now almost completely numb. I don't know how much feeling I will regain there -- almost certainly not all of it. A disturbing fact is that this tumor has an annoying tendency to return. This seems pretty logical -- if a form of cancer is common it is because many of us are are routinely exposed to the cause. If someone develops it once then they have shown a sensitivity that is likely to do its nasty work again unless the cause is removed or lessened. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, nobody seems to have any idea why this particular tumor appears where it does.

What has this meant to me?

Like most of us I know that cancer is incredibly common in our society, but had not really considered that it would collect me in its vast, impersonal statistics. I tend to sail on through momentous events fairly easily so it was a surprise to me that I became somewhat ruffled on finding I had this tumor. I thought I would just handle it and move on, like I do with pretty-much everything. I mean, it is no big deal, right? I found the tumor before it was life-threatening and it was removed quickly and effectively with minimal side-effects. But it caused me to call into question my life and what I am achieving and what I am not.

I haven't reached any firm conclusions yet, but so far I can see that I haven't used my potential as much as I should. I have been on this planet for a few months short of half a century and considering the talents I was lucky enough to develop with the kindness and encouragement from others I have fallen considerably short of where I should be.

Where should I be?

• I am a passable artist. I should be making better use of that.
• I have fairly good writing skills and I should be accomplishing more there.
• I am able to articulate concepts and project them into people's minds in a way that few can. I should be using that to encourage more kids to learn.
• I am a moderately good (though pretty slack) 3d artist, and should have achieved far more with that, especially in view of my ideas on VR fiction and how VR has potential to repair most of society's and the planet's ills.
• I have an unusual breadth of knowledge because I compulsively learn almost randomly and almost constantly from a very wide range of interests. But this is not only good in that it exposes me to a plethora of stimuli, but bad in that I never really developed any ability to direct my interests, and in fact explicitly relinquished such control in favor of letting my attention wander free. My reasoning was that you can never know where important information can come from so it was best to leave myself open to as many sources as possible. I should be using this more to develop my other abilities -- drawing, writing, teaching, and VR -- by synthesising disparate facts into information that is denied others who specialise more narrowly.

So where does this lead me?

I don't know. I have to think on it more. I am tired and more than a bit sore just now.

Gonna have a nap to recharge.

Comments

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Yep, it is one of the standard POVRay pics these days cos it showcases their procedural wood textures nicely and some of the material characteristics that POVRay is so good at. But you must have seen it somewhere else because I haven't had it on my website till just yesterday. :)

Yeah, a lot of people seem to think I am much younger. Heavens! I think I am much younger. I get a real shock when I glimpse the truth from time to time. :)

It has been really interesting watching POVRay develop over the years. It is an extraordinarily capable piece of software. And I just love the fact that it is free. It is a real vindication of my belief that money will become useless sometime over the next 50 years or so. People will do things because they are good at them or because they want to learn more. For the first time in history we won't have a large part of humanity crammed into frustrating positions where they do what they do purely to earn a crust and waste most of their lives doing it. The opensource community is lighting the way. It is a matter of scarcity not being mistaken for value. Dunno if I have written about this... I guess I should. But not now... I'm going back to bed. :)

[patchworkkid.livejournal.com]

I second the age thing. No way did I think you were 50.

Money becoming useless? God, I'd love to believe that. I don't see how Big Business would ever permit altruism to usurp capitalism though. A lot of very wealthy people have everything vested in maintaining a very rigid status quo.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

You have put your finger on the one threat to money disappearing: the vested interests.
But I think it will still go the way of the dinosaurs. It has been very useful for a time, but I think that time will draw to a close in the next few decades.

Every time I talk to people about this people look at me funny. :)

But think about it... why do we have money? It is trading tokens to let us put a value on goods. Unfortunately that value is largely assigned by scarcity rather than intrinsic worth. That is how you get some of the crazier results of money-based systems. (Think, for example, of an artist's work suddenly becoming much more valuable after the poor bastard dies.)

Suddenly comes the information age. For the first time in history we have the ability to distribute wealth (data) free or almost free. It costs a negligible amount to duplicate data millions of times and distribute it. So far this is only so for images, text, music, and similar things. The old system has been thrown into a panic by it and tried to chain it with denunciations and laws and emotive language, but the simple fact is things have changed. Data is fundamentally different from all other commodities that went before.

People have shown how amazingly beautiful they can be when faced with such an opportunity -- the entire open source movement has grown up in such a short time it has taken my breath away. People are producing mindblowing software projects purely because they want to and giving that wealth away to humanity. Not only do they do it, but the quality of such endeavors generally seems to outshine the money-driven efforts. Who would have thought?!

But for the moment people still need money -- we still live in a world ruled by scarcity. We still need to buy food, clothes, a roof over our heads, electricity, transport... but hopefully not for long. There is work going on in various quarters to solve each of these and I expect them all to be solved not too far away in the future. I should write a piece about that. It is too much to cover here.

Hmmm...what is that saying? You can fight an army, but not a good idea when its time has come.

Re:

[patchworkkid.livejournal.com]

You really should write about it. I'd love to read more of your thoughts on the subject.

Do you think tight regulation of the internet will hamper the doing-away-with of money, preserving ownership and the like? Do you think major companies will simply target and buy out competing open source projects, ensuring the continued monopolies?

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I'll write a more detailed piece about it soon. I have been meaning to for some time.

I don't think the internet can ever be truly locked up. Some companies may have some success in creating bottlenecks but people will become so annoyed that they will always end up working out ways around that.

Thanks to the brilliant insights of Richard Stallman the GNU Public License can't be subverted by corporate interests without them breaking exactly the same copyright laws they themselves want to maintain. GPL software comes with one assurance: that the user's rights are never taken away. All GPL software must make the source code available, and any software that is built on the GPL software must make the source code available. Read some of Stallman's writings on the subject to understand more fully the ramifications of this. Here is a nice clear piece he wrote about it.

I have heard right-wing nutters rant and rave about how evil this is and that it is a communist plot. heheheh Amazing how often that happens. All you need to point out to them is that nobody forces them to use open software. They are perfectly entitled to go back into the closet of secrecy and beaver away on stuff by themselves, but if they want to use other people's sweat then they should comply with those people's requirements. That much is written in law.

It is a wonderful world when the law can actually be used to protect people from robber barons. :)

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Oops, I meant to give you a link to Richard Stallman's article in the cool book Open Sources published by OReilly http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html

Stallman's article is http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/stallman.html

Others especially worth reading there are Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond. Heck it is all good. The whole book is online. I have a paper copy if you want a lend of it... it might be a bit hard to buy these days. Though it might be possible to buy online.

Eric Raymond is a particularly eloquent exponent of open source. His work "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is a very influential piece. You can find it at http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/ along with a lot of other cool stuff.

Also I should have mentioned that all this talk of GPL and open source is why it is impossible to buy out open source projects. If you think about it for a little while you can see why. A company that tries to do so just changes itself into an open source company. A lot of companies are seeing that this actually makes good business sense and are doing just that.

Re:

[patchworkkid.livejournal.com]

Here is a nice clear piece he wrote about it.

Where? You seem to have misplaced the link. :)