I had an idea a couple months ago about taking a chopstick or other pointer and attaching an LED circuit with a push button to make a more interesting pointer for reading. It turns out that the dollar store and the interventions of the grandparents did this for me by getting my son a bunch of cheap key chain light sabers, although it took me about a month to realize their true potential. Using this yesterday he was pointing at the words and read a book pretty much entirely himself (a Biscuit book, which are pretty simple and a lot of them he has partially memorized). This was a somewhat arbitrary step that I had been waiting for. He has no problem sounding out new words if they are on a card but when he looks at sentences he has a tendency to say "this is too hard, you read it". With the light saber he is able to focus more easily on the word at hand.
In programming news, I can't remember if I already mentioned this in the last post but I was trying to make a physiologically accurate simulation of a person. The problem is that this is too complex and I'm stuck with a basic model that can't even get oxygen delivery (DO2) correctly modeled compared to real experimental data. Plus after discussing via email with the author of some renal physiology papers (thank you Dr. Bengt Redfors) there are still too many unknowns on what even causes something as "simple" as hypoperfusion related AKI.
Currently I am just working on better understanding the basics of flask, so that I can apply this to a project in the future.
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
Friday, July 1, 2016
New Child
A month and a half since my last post and a couple of notable events.
In May I worked 3 out of the four months, including 14 nights straight. A new record that actually wasn't too terrible. The switch back to days was the same as with any other week of work.
About one week after the above workload we had a new addition to the family. I am now a parent with two children. This is a girl so as my wife noted we have officially replaced ourselves. I added that evolutionarily (perhaps not the best term) we have fulfilled our purpose in life, though statistically the number of children needed for population replacement is slightly higher due. I guess we will need at least one more.
My project of teaching my son to read continues to be going well. He likes the "Flesch" cards now and we play with them usually every day. The way he likes to play is to have the cards "attack" him by running across the table and he has to read the card before it gets him or his food. He also likes to play our version of "Munchkin" which I've detailed in older posts.
I was actually working on a programming project as well. It originated as trying to come up with "Dwarf Hospital" (you can easily assume the influence). It started as two independent projects. One was doing the libtcod python tutorial to make a rogue like. At this point I have made a turn based map with a character and I was going to try and make patients that you would see.
The second prong was trying to come up with as accurate a physiological model of the human body as possible. After diving in I quickly realized that there are hundreds if not thousands of PhD's around the world who devote their life to making just one model of, say, the kidney's response to ischemic acute kidney injury. So far I have model that is two organs, the kidney and "other" (represents rest of the body). The heart is really just a continuous flow rate, only systemic circulation (no lungs yet, just an SaO2 value). I'm running into issues getting the correct predicted oxygen delivery values (only off by about 50%) so I'm troubleshooting it still. Not sure where this will go. A fun side effect is that I've been reading more renal physiology.
In May I worked 3 out of the four months, including 14 nights straight. A new record that actually wasn't too terrible. The switch back to days was the same as with any other week of work.
About one week after the above workload we had a new addition to the family. I am now a parent with two children. This is a girl so as my wife noted we have officially replaced ourselves. I added that evolutionarily (perhaps not the best term) we have fulfilled our purpose in life, though statistically the number of children needed for population replacement is slightly higher due. I guess we will need at least one more.
My project of teaching my son to read continues to be going well. He likes the "Flesch" cards now and we play with them usually every day. The way he likes to play is to have the cards "attack" him by running across the table and he has to read the card before it gets him or his food. He also likes to play our version of "Munchkin" which I've detailed in older posts.
I was actually working on a programming project as well. It originated as trying to come up with "Dwarf Hospital" (you can easily assume the influence). It started as two independent projects. One was doing the libtcod python tutorial to make a rogue like. At this point I have made a turn based map with a character and I was going to try and make patients that you would see.
The second prong was trying to come up with as accurate a physiological model of the human body as possible. After diving in I quickly realized that there are hundreds if not thousands of PhD's around the world who devote their life to making just one model of, say, the kidney's response to ischemic acute kidney injury. So far I have model that is two organs, the kidney and "other" (represents rest of the body). The heart is really just a continuous flow rate, only systemic circulation (no lungs yet, just an SaO2 value). I'm running into issues getting the correct predicted oxygen delivery values (only off by about 50%) so I'm troubleshooting it still. Not sure where this will go. A fun side effect is that I've been reading more renal physiology.
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