Medicine, Cooking, and Magnetism

The view from the Costco parking lot the other day as I looked at the hospital across the street:

A picture of the bottom of our most oft-used pots in our kitchen:

If you had told me when I was a kid that there would be brand new technology to looking inside your body or that there would be a new way to cook food in my lifetime, I would have thought you were crazy.  

People have actually assumed that our pots are either new or we don't use them because they are so bright and shiny. Actually they have been in daily use since 2013 but they have only ever been used on our induction stove.

I believe that huge cylinder being placed into the hospital near my local Costco is an MRI machine. (now you know they don't assemble them on site, but ship them whole!)

Induction stoves work by flipping the natural magnetic moments in the metals of the pans themselves.  They stay nice and shiny because heat is not transferred into them, they generate the heat from within as those magnetic domains are flipped over and over by the coils in the stove.

MRI devices image the location of hydrogen atoms in your body by flipping the magnetic moment of the single protons in their nucleus using the coils in the machine. Your body is not exposed to any ionizing radiation or radioactive substances at all during the process.

Alls I'm saying is: Magnets are pretty cool.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

Another Origin Story

1970 picture from Florida where I was born.  I am seated on my father's father's lap.  My Dad is on the left and on the right is my grandmother's father.  He and I only overlapped for a short time and I never got to know him except through the family stories.

He was raised near Manchester, New Hampshire.  His father died when he was a toddler and he was obliged to quit school when he was 13 or so in order to work full time in the local mill.   He wanted to continue his education so he would go to the local library in his precious free time and taught himself as much as he could, eventually putting himself through business school. He learned to be a plumber and started a business with his best friend ("Eckhardt and Johnson, Heating and Plumbing").  His Swedish friend, Jimmy Johnson, had a beautiful sister who worked as a telephone operator.  They got married and had one child, my grandmother. As he earned money, he began to buy apartments and rent them out.  Little by little he lifted his small family out of poverty and into a comfortable middle class lifestyle.  My grandmother can remember fresh milk being delivered by a horse drawn carriage in an actual ice box.  When the Great Depression hit and his tenants couldn't make rent, he lost everything to the banks. He started back over from zero afterwards and built up new properties all over again until he could afford a second home in Florida and he and my great-grandmother would spend half the year in New Hampshire and half in Florida.

He was my Dad's favorite relative growing up.  He loved to go and spend time visiting his grandparents and to this day can recite limericks and funny aphorisms he learned from his grandfather.  My grandmother adored and worshiped her father for his humor and warmth.  If I had a penny for every time I heard her tell the tale of how he wouldn't just knock on a door but would rap out a melody with his knuckles, I'd be a rich man.  I regret never getting to know him, but, despite only having one child himself, now he has five great grandchildren and (as of this writing) four great-great grandchildren.

Final Days at Viscotek

    After living in Texas for a few years, I felt my time there was over and I gave my resignation letter to my boss at Viscotek in late spring/early summer of 1998.  I had been working on this big project for them though at the time and I promised to see it through to completion.  I was going to fly to France and make wine with my uncle again and then try my hand at importing the wine.  As soon as I came back from France, I was to pack up my few belongings in a small U-Haul and drive to Georgia to stay with my parents while I started up my importation business.  My brother flew down to help with the move and to drive my car for me while I drove the U-haul.  As I was making those travel plans, I heard about my High School’s 10-year reunion.  Normally not the type to go to a reunion, I decided it would be an easy and interesting stop since it was on the same weekend as my moving plans, so I made sure Phil and I would make a pit-stop in Huntsville on the way.  It was fitting in a way, because everyone was catching up: “Are you married?  Do you have kids?  What do you do for a living?” And I was like, nope – none of that – no wife, no kids, and no job.  They looked at me and were like “Weren’t you class valedictorian?” Heh heh – I kind of enjoyed their puzzlement because I was actually feeling pretty good about taking my life into my own hands and trying something new!

 

    However, what I wanted to share in this post was the last job I did for my employer before I went to France.  I had been working for months to get this robotic arm to automatically prepare these PET (A type of plastic) samples for the company’s viscometer and share out the results electronically such that hardly any human was needed.  The company didn’t really have anyone else qualified to do the install on short notice and I wanted to see it through to completion so we agreed that would be my last day of work.  The installation was for Wellman’s PET processing facility in Bay St Louis, Mississippi:

 

 

    I flew into the New Orleans airport and drove out to their facility on a Wednesday only to find that the new lab that was to house our automatic quality control system was still under construction.  There was no power even, but they had all seven crates of equipment neatly arranged around a lab bench.  I uncrated everything and did as much as I could to make sure everything was in good shape and ready to go.  I was thinking hard about the fact that I had a ticket to France out of Houston the following week and the installation takes 2 or 3 solid days of work.  I remember the feeling of my mind just going through all the possibilities and I turned to the plant manager who was being super-nice to me and showing me around and being apologetic about not having everything ready to go and I said:

 

“Listen, here’s the deal.  I’m pretty much the only one at my company that can easily get this thing up and running, but I’ll be honest with you, this is my last job for them and I’m flying to France next week.  So, I want to do this job and I know you want this job done.  Here’s my idea:  I’ll take my weekend early:  tomorrow and the next day.  You use that time to get power and running water to this part of the lab. If you do that, I will work night and day to get this thing working and train your guys before I go to France.”

 

    The plant manager looked me kind of dumbfounded and slightly in awe and said “Well, Ken, I guess that makes sense.”  I went to New Orleans for a couple of days and when I came back, they had everything ready to go for me.  The manager was so impressed with me, he invited me over to his house for dinner one night and introduced me to his daughter.  I finished the job and flew to France the following week and that was the end of my Viscotek adventures.