Rusty's Blog

Prison

I ask at times, “What makes a prison?” A prison is not four walls with a
door that someone else holds the key for.

Prison is exile. It is a means of requireing someone who has been
convicted of a crime of doing penance for that crime. In the U.S. legal
system, we use buildings or structures of some sort to take one of these
people and separate them from what we think of as our society. We put
these people there with the thought that by doing so, we make it safe
for other people to live their lives without fear.

As an observation, the system has some serious flaws, though we keep on
using it. I’m not going to try to suggest that we can correct that here
though. No, this is a story about a prison, and someone discovering that
it is not the place, but the person.

–

Don’t ask me how I got here. It was supposed to be a joke. No property
was lost, or people killed or maimed. No animals were injured. But then
we all say that. Even if it’s true.

When you first get here the first thing you notice is the wall. It isn’t
exactly featureless. There are grooves every 3 meters or so. And it has
that marbled look you might see on some counter tops, or the ‘stone’
like stalls in some public restrooms. Corean or something like that. It
looks a bit like Marble, but at the same time you know that it is not a
naturally occuring metamorphic rock.

About the only strange thing is that you are asked to let people know
when you like a particular segment of wall. It’s going to be ‘yours’
people say. The grooves are interesting of course. They are about 1
meter across, and come to what looks like a 90 degree corner at the
bottom. That seems to carry into the floor leading out from the wall as
well.

Everyone is working on the wall, the floor, or what looks like a ledge
on top of the wall. The wall is about 10 meters tall, which is also the
distance the floor extends out from the wall. Oh, and it’s a good idea
to jump across the grooves. They are 1 meter wide, and half that deep.
Easy to twist an ankle in.

I started out working on floors. I guess you could say that I have an in
depth knowledge about them. That groove may only be half a meter deep,
but that’s on top of something far deeper. We start by making a level
surface about 5 meters below what will be the surface of the floor. For
the most part we just shovel or grade out a path abotu 15 meters out.

Next we lay down 2 meters of asphalt. Yep, gravel and tar, compacted and
set. It has a number of advantages over just a bed of gravel. First of
all it’s permiable. Meaning that if rain water, or other substances get
past the layers above, or spill out from them, it can seep into the
water table. I understand that not all that much gets back into the
water table, but then it’s humans we’re dealing with here. We never
seemed to care on earth, why should we care here?

On top of the asphalt, we end up putting in a drainage system. It’s a 20
cm thick layer of ceramic about 3 meters wide, and about a meter away
from the existing floor, in parallel with it. Every meter there’s a 30 cm
round pillar about 50 cm tall. As we’re putting it in, we put in a wall
across the drain every 20 meters that gets taken out as the top stones
are being put on the drain. The top is another 20 cm of ceramic, tiles
this time, and one tile, about a meter from where the cross wall was has
a slot in it, about 10 centemeters by 40 cm. The rest of this layer is
filled in with asphalt as well, to be level with the top of the drain.

Next they pour the floor. 2 and a half meters of what looks like plastic
as it is being poured in, but which cures almost as hard as diamond.
Having worked on it, I know how many people step on every square
dicimeter of it. how much heavy equipment rolls over it over the years.
Yet as I look at my part, it’s as smooth and scratch free as the day it
was poured.

The frames we set this stuff up in are a bit interesting. When they are
laying on the asphalt before they are set up, it looks like a square
wave, with a leading 45 degree bevel. There really are four  ‘forms.
The first one to get put in is the drain form. It looks a bit like a
funnel. There’s a bit of a ledge or lip on one side, and the bottom fits
cleanly to the slot in the top of the drain. I suppose that’s a good
thing. If any of what they pour for a floor next were to start filling
the drain we put in earlier, I guess it wouldn’t be much of a drain. Eh?

The edge forms come next. Those are those square wave looking things.
One end actually has a complete ‘V’ in it that sits in the edge of the
floor over towards the wall. That sort of holds that part in place for
now. Two long V chanels fit along the edges of the parts of the floor
that were already poured, and the outside edge piece gets put in and
bolted to the other pieces. Part of the form fits into the square ladder
edges on the floor that was poured earlier.

After we make sure everyone is out of the forms, we pour in the mix. It
cures over night. The next day the forms get pulled, and repositioned
for the next day’s pour.

_Walls_

After a while you realize there’s more to this than the floor. One by
one, or about as many as new people show up in a day, you move on to the
wall. Or Walls.

There really are 2 walls that are built. The first wall gives you what
looks like a stall. 10 meters deep, 2 meters wide. The wall itself is a
meter thick. They lay out a sheet of smooth plastic that can support a
person, even over those grooves in the floor. Well, actually that’s in
part because they have filled in the groves where you work on the wall
segments for additional support. Not that the stuff really needs all
that much support. 20 people can move the wall segment that’s 10 meters
by 10 meters, by a meter thick. It’s solid stuff, but not as dense as
you might think. Really it doesn’t need to be.

For this pour the forms are just ‘V’s that get arranged in a square,
with the ‘edge’ of the ‘V’ to the outside. There’s a bead that the edges
of the form rest against that the plastic fits around so that the wall
material doesn’t flow out from under the forms. It seems to work well
enough I guess. We never had a problem with sections adhearing to the
floor or anything under it anyway. So you lay all this out, fasten it
all together, and along comes the mix and it fills the form.

I never figured out how they knew how much to mix up. I mean, OK, it’s
not like they have to be right down to the liter. And the forms all end
up with the same volume for the part they are working on, regardless of
where it ends up, but I’ve never seen them over fill a form. Zero
spillage. I know some people back on earth who would like that kind of a
set of tollerances.

The wall segment cures overnight, and after breakfast the next morning
the crew of 40 go to work. First we pop off the forms. Then ten of us
per edge come along and set the segment next to the old wall, with one
edge about 3 meters from yesterday’s wall segment. 10 of us practically
sit on this edge, while 20 of us get along the far edge, and start
lifting.

The remaining 10 people are standing in what will become the stall,
interspersed with the sitting people, and ready to keep the wall from
toppling against yesterday’s segment. That’s happened a few times, and
while nothing gets damaged of course, it’s a bit of an annoyance as you
have to go back and check the alignment of that segment again.
Once the segment is vertical, everone takes these suction cup things,
sets them where they can get a good grip, and we fit the edge that is up
against the long wall, into the groove there.

I understand that over the next few weeks the material bonds to the old
stuff, and not even a thousand strong men could move one of the stall
dividers that’s been there for that long, though I don’t know. I never
saw that many men in one place during construction.

_Roof_

You can’t call a place ‘Home’ unless you have a roof over your head.
Right? Well, our roof covers about half the stall. I understand it’s
designed to keep people dry in the very infrequent rain storms that we
get here. Of course these roofs do a bit more. They are also the piping
system for the water. Every stall has that drain I mentioned earlier.
And the lip of that drain is direcly under an opening in the roof where
water poors constantly. Hot and cold running watter. Well, depending on
the time of day, and the day of the year. The planet isn’t particularily
seasonal, but there are times when it is a bit warmer, and other times
cooler. It never really gets cold here, though I suppose that if we had
to experience the wind we saw on stormy days when I worked on the
construction team, I might think a bit differently.

The roof extends over the stall about 4 meters from the older wall. It
has those grooves under it which allow it to rest on top of the walls
that were put in earlier, and there’s about a meter of overlap over the
old wall. Besides water, there is the equipment for delivering food to
each stall. That happens on the other side of the stall from the water
delivery system. Just a narrow slot in the roof, and you want to be near
the slot when the food is delivered. The containers are water soluable,
and will be protected from the elements, and can withstand the drop to
the floor. 10 meters that it may be, but it’s not a lot of food, and
well, it’s good to eat.

I’m not sure where the food comes from. or the water for that matter.
They would need a huge pump to deliver as much as I see every day to all
of the stalls, but somehow they do it. When I was working on the roof, I
saw mountains off towards where the sun sets, but nothing but scrub
grass anywhere away from the wall.

If you look down the wall, you see that even though it seems straight,
it bends just a bit to the left as you look south, and a bit to the
right as you look to the north. There are stories the old timers on the
crew tell about how the people who were on the crew when they started
would talk about even earlier crews talking about how the wall is one
long spiral. They say it’s been being built since the planet was
commissioned, with one central cylinder about a thousand meters across.
I don’t know. That was centuries before I got here. And yes I told some
of those stories too.

As you put in one of these roof components, you finally get to decide
which stall will be yours. Actually you may have decided that some time
ago. But now you have to commit. Once you do, you are asked to step into
the foreman’s trailer. Depending upon how long you’ve been working on
the crews, you get a different collection of packages to choose from.
Oh, no diamond encrusted, furniture, or tools, but if you are handy with
tools, you might get some tools to work with. Of course that does imply
that you’ve been working.

Every once in a while one of the new arrivals doesn’t work out well.
Starts crying, or trying to get people to not work, or picking fights.
Well, ok, everyone does some crying. After all, back home your family
has already had your funeral. Presuming you had a family to begin with.

In any case, every once in a while one of these people shows up who it
turns out is more trouble than help. After about 2 weeks, he’s sent to
the next group, and so on. Ultimately he passes the group where you get
to select your packages, but he never get’s that opportunity. A couple
of weeks later he’s gone.

Oh, I suppose he Could be in the next stall over, but I doubt it. We
make more stalls than there are of us cycling through this process. From
what I can tell it’s about 20 stalls per person at this point. I’m not
really sure why we make that many. Well, I suppose the planet’s name
might have something to do with it. It’s not like we’ll be able to work
on things with each other.

_Cell_

After we select our package, we get to work on the final portion of the
stall. The outside walls. This one is a little bit different fromt the
others. First of all there are grooves that end up on this wall running
from top to bottom. It’s also 2 meters thick rather than the 1 meter
thick that the side walls were. The grooves are used for bringing in
your packages, and any raw materials you need for your craft, and taking
out any product you create. If you would rather have books to read, or
stuff to study, all of that gets handled by the equipment that makes use
of the grooves. Lastly there’s a bit of a lip on one side that you
discover is to hook it over one of the inside walls to fix it in place
until they get the row of roof on the next row of stalls.

All along you’ve been building our cells. And yes there are some people
on the crews who never figure that out. Most of us know by the time we
get to working on the drain crew. If we didn’t know already. I suspect
that reason most people might take some time to figure out what’s going
on is that at one level or another, we all volunteered for this. Some
because it’s the legal system’s resolution for what we did, and we did
it any way. Others because they thought they were coming here to ‘help
out’ the less fortunate. I gather that some of these people end up in
the foreman’s jobs, but from what I saw, even those people got replaced
every year or so. And, well, none of them seemed to be looking forward
to going home or even talked about where they were from.

I think they knew better.

I never became a foreman. Several reasons I suppose, but the biggest
would have to be that I learned before I even came here that while I can
work well with others, I’m not a great leader. Abismal even.

Yeah, it was supposed to be a joke. Might even have been sarcasm
involved. Oh, someone did get hurt. Though I had nothing to do with it.
I was asked if I would stand in a lineup with some suspects, sort of the
control subject if you will. I said “Sure, why not?” Then the victim’s
family ‘fingered’ me, and before I knew it I was before a judge. I was
kind of down at that point and muttered ‘Yeah right, send me to
Solitary.’ Or so my attourny says that’s what the judge heard.

He obliged. And here I am. And will spend the rest of my life.
Personally, I think I would rather be playing Klondike. Perhaps even
Freecell. But this is no card game.

I’m on, and in, Solitary.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I am diabetic. I have type II diabetes. On it’s own, it probably won’t kill me, though it will probably contribute to my death. Whenever that happens. In a review of what my life has been like, and what my personality is, I have no doubt that I will end up dying of something preventable. I’ve no interest in suicide, but that is far from the only ‘preventable’ cause of death. It would not surprise me to find I die in a car accident, or from doing something that I should know better than to do.

Some things that I’m pretty sure will not kill me are alcohol related events (on my part) and I doubt strongly that I will die directly of smoking related conditions, though indirect exposure may have an impact.

Pretty heavy so far eh? Sorry about that, it will get a bit easier along the way.

Back a few years ago, I realized that I weighed too much. I knew well enough that being overweight was a contributing factor to people becoming diabetic (Type II, Type I is a different set of conditions in most cases.) and in as I had lost an aunt and two uncles to the side effects of Type II Diabetes, I took action. Apparently too late. I did loose weight. I went from a high of 260 lb as I weighed myself in the morning, down to a low of 170 lb. One of the things I was hoping to see happen in the process was that I would regain some of my ability to run.

In High School I ran in cross country, and track. I wasn’t very good, but I did run. Running is also one of the things you do when you are in the Army. When I was deployed in Saudi Arabia, I started running around the towers coumpound twice a day. I had  hoped that I would continue that once I got back to the states, but ‘life’ got in the way. I did enjoy running though, and when I was running, I would weigh in the neighborhood of 160 to 170 lb.

But as I say, once I dropped down to the 170 to 180 lb, I didn’t regain my running ability. I can jog about half a block, maybe a block or two if I’m not carrying anything, but that’s about it.

Somewhere along the line, my heart lost some capacity for pumping blood. About the same time I was diagnosed as diabetic, I had an ultrasound done of my heart and caratoid arteries, and a stress test, and it turns out that my heart is functioning at about 70% efficiency. I.e. about 70% of the blood is ejected from the main ventrical every time my heart pumps. It compensates for this by pumping at about 20-30 bpm higher than the ‘normal’ resting rate of 60 bpm that most people have. If we do have a limited number of heart beats to live through, I could be said to be getting close to living on borrowed time. However that’s not one of my personal beliefs. Additionally it’s only been within the past 20 years that my heart rate has become elevated, so I should have some time to go.

When the results of the ultrasound came in, my doctor suggested that it looked like I had experienced a heart attack at some point in my life. A normal cause of loss of function for the heart is a heart attack. However after my stress test, my cardiologist (I should set up an appointment with him soon as well) noted that while it’s true that I do have reduced function, he does not see any indications in the ekg or the stress test that it was related to a heart attack. We shall see what comes up after I have a followup with him (or another cardiologist.)

One of the reasons that this is of interest, is that simply because I am diabetic, I have a 50% higher risk of dying of heart failure than people in the general population. Another reason to take interest in this is that one of the varients of one of the medications that I take for Diabtes has been linked to heart failure for people with congestive heart disorders. I am not taking that specific medication, however Actos is in the same family, and while the study did not show a strong corelation for Actos, my doctor is concerned, and I understand that concern.

When I visited my doctor about a month ago, I had been off all medication for the better part of 8 months. My fasting blood sugar reading was 280 by the finger stick test, but the lab test showed a reading of 320. Note that a ‘normal’ fasting reading is under 100 milligrams of glucose per decilitre. Just reading over 120 two times is sufficient for a diagnosis of Diabetes. I don’t think I’ve had 2 fasting readings under 120 in the past month. For the purpose of that statement a ‘fasting’ reading is a reading that is taken more than 8 hours after my last meal. A contributing factor to this situation is that when you have not eaten for some time, your liver goes into starvation mode, and starts converting fat into glucose and dropping that into your blood stream.

As most diabetics know, one of the log term indicators of good control over sugar in your diet is what is usually called an A1C test. The way this test works is that red blood cells are ‘damaged’ by excess glucose in the blood stream. Your bone marow produces red blood cells, and they have a 90 day lifespan in your blood stream after which they are filtered out by your kidneys and ‘pissed away.’ the A1C test takes a snapshot of the damage to the red blood cells in a blood sample, and assigns a ‘damage’ assesment. I am not sure how most people consider the number, but if you think of it as a loss of carrying capacity for oxyogen in a blood cell, we can work with the system. ‘Normal’ blood sugar levels will introduce some damage to the red blood cells, The value is between 5% and 7%. When I visited my doctor, the value their equipment at the clinic was able to report was >14%.

I don’t expect to be getting an A1C evaluation done when I visit the doctor this time. If I do, I do not know if it would be meaningful. Oh, it might show a reading of 12 or 13%, which might back up the testing that I have been doing for myself, but it is not a given. The damage to blood cells over the period of the 2 months prior to my last visit doesn’t ‘improve’, though it should be ‘lesser’. The problem with that sort of an assessment is that it took about 2 weeks for me to get what I would call my daily average under 200. And I still spike over 200 after meals. That may improve depending on the medication that I start taking, but the most promising medications are some that I very likely won’t be getting, as they are the most expensive, and their long term side effects are still unknown. One of those may help with my overnight blood sugar rise, as it basicly tells the liver to hold off on the conversion of fat to glucose. It appears to be doing wonders for the son of a co-worker of mine.

I do wonder at times if having liposuction would help. The logic behind that is that one of the reasons that people become type II diabetic is that fat cells appear to be doing what they can to stay in shape. (I.e. stay filled with fats.) They do this by increasing the bodies resistance to Insulin. (Called obviously enough insulin resistance.) The question becomes if someone looses half a liter or so of fat cells via liposuction, (that’s about a lb of weight, but a quarter of the volume of a 2 liter bottle) does their resistance to insulin go down noticably. The supporting question would be what varieties of fat or other body cells increases the resistance of the body to insulin. If the predominate variety of these cells is those around the abdomen and legs, then a reduction in the number of these cells fhrough liposuction may have a positive influence. On the other hand if it is the variety of fat cells that are within the muscles of the body, then while the total fat cell volume goes down, the percentage of fat cells increasing insulin resistance goes up. I don’t think this would have a specifically negative result, however not having a positive effect would tend to be disheartening to many people.

Am I ‘getting better?’ Well that depends upon what you consider to be ‘getting better.’ I am not expecting science to come up with a magic bullet to cure type II diabetes. The best that I can hope for there is to ‘control’ my blood sugar levels and over the long term hopefully the damage to my body will be reduced. Some of the side effects of diabetes includes taking longer to heal damage to the body. Some damage will not ‘heal’ of course. If you tear a tendon off of it’s bone or muscle, it doesn’t self correct. The best you can hope for is that you get surgury done to reattach the tendon with stitches. However some of the other side effects of normal ‘wear and tear’ to the body do ‘self repair.’

As an example, when you work out at the gym, walk or run, one of the side effects of the workout is that in burning the sugar in your blood, your muscles generate lactic acid. This acid ‘damages’ the muscles, which is why a day or two after a heavy workout, your muscles get sore. Likewise most of use experience scrapes and cuts from day to day that scab over and we go on, and a week or so later the scab falls off and we have a light scar there. The effect of Diabetes is that your body’s repair system does not work well in a high sugar environment. So a diabetic with an uncontrolled blood sugar level will spend more than a couple of days with those sore muscles, it may be weeks or longer. Likewise scratchs may never seem to heal up.

One of the first thing that people who have been living with uncontrolled diabetes discover after getting their blood sugar under control is that the scabs that just wouldn’t go away finally do. Doctors and nurses who were working with me when I was first diagnosed with diabetes said that I was going to feel much better. In part this would have been due to muscles finally repairing, but also joints swell as the body works to get the excess sugar out of the blood stream into other places.

My first obvious experience was that I didn’t have to ‘pee’ all the time. But I never really felt bad when I was first diagnosed with Diabetes. At least not in the muscle aches, back aches, joint problems varieties. This time, and a few other times when I know my blood sugar had been elevated for some time, I felt it in my lower back, and I am still feeling issues with one of my arms that I’m expecting to see some improvement over the next month with. Though I will discuss it with my doctor tomorrow.

In the sense of not feeling that pain, yes I am getting better. Still some ways to go, but that is likely to be the case for some time. So my response is ‘Yes, I am getting better.’

I hope you are too.

…What a horible sentence.

There’s a joke in there, but you have to be ready for a bit of thinking. For most of us, the phrase ‘Life on Earth.” is sort of a basic premise. Well yes there’s life on earth, and some of us happen to think we’re intelligent as well. I’m not about to argue the intelligent aspect, I’ve read suggestions that bacteria moving away from a hot surface is an indication of intelligence. And I’ve read the suggestions that there are no signs of intelligent life on Earth comming from as deep thinking of an authority as Stephen Hawking. In sort, the question of intelligence is not something I think is worth my involvement in at this time.

The ‘horible sentence’ part might clue a few people in. There’s arguments all over the place showing that the death penalty is effective, or isn’t effective, that there are flaws in our judicial system that let innocent men be imprisioned and executed for crimes that others are guilty of.  Some think that imprisioning has an advantage over execution in that if later on we discover that the person was not the person who commited the crime, we can take them out of prison.

Perhaps. The problem is that even if you do that the person has had as significant of a disruption to their life as can be had. It’s nearly impossible to go back to living the way they did before. Even if you discount the time spent in prision, everyone that he or she worked with up until they were incarcerated will harbor thoughts that perhaps the original conviction was right. Or other people have taken up where they left off and the opening is no longer there. Someone else now owns what was their home. All their personal property was confiscated and sold by the govornment. etc. I strongly suspect that many people who were wrongly convicted have wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to be executed, as they struggle to put their lives back together.

For another interesting view on the subject, I would recommend reading “The NORP Think Factor,” Staige Productions (Winona, MN)(1994) by judge Dennis A. Challeen

As an observation, several crimanl justice systems over the centuries have come up with alternatives to imprisonment and execution for serious crimes. While we tend to think of execution as the death penalty, I would include such acts as judicial decisions to remove limbs or body parts in response to theft or casteration for sex related crimes to be part of the execution family of responses. Outside of these two responses we have had a history of alternatives. Young men were often offered the opportunity to join the military as an alternative to going to jail. And both the US and Australia have been penal colonies (or at least parts of each have been) in the 17th and 18th centuries. Along the penal colony line of thinking, Amercan Indians would kick out tribal members who committed acts that the tribe considered unacceptable to the tribe. This may not seem like as significant of a response as imprisonment, but at the time any person traveling alone was looked upon with great suspicion. The advantage was that a capable person could make a new life for themselves. Also along this line has been the requirement that people do community service of some sort, often picking up trash along the highway, but other types as well, including hard labor.

Some variations on the theme have been proposed. Wall off New York and make the entire city a prison. Or LA. Islands of Death, where no-one leaves alive. In the Science Fiction universe, the Moon, Marse, Venus, Ganimeed, space stations, colony ships, etc. have all been considered for prison colonies at one time or another. For some reason most people are treating Earth as the place that people ‘want’ to be. And for the moment, it’s the only place we’ve got that’s reasonably close to being self sustaining. Granted we seem to be pretty good at changing the self sustaining part of that statement, but I’m personally more interested in changing the ‘only place we’ve got’ portion.

In the long run, I’m inclined to believe that should we figure out how to get off this rock in a sustainable way, that we’ll see two phases of criminal handling. The first will be to set up penal colonies on remote worlds. The second will be to take away the criminal’s opportunity to profit from space and comit them to ‘Life, on Earth.” And as a result, eventually Earth will be abandoned. Which will probably do the human race great favors, but we’ll see some significant loss as well.

But that’s my thoughts on the matter. For the moment, I’m stuck here with most of the rest of you.

Since I started blogging with word pad, I have been somewhat currious as to how many times my page is being read. Surely I’m not the only one. Well, apparently as far as the WP people and community is concerned, it’s not all that important. So today I added a couple of functions to my users.php include to be used by my template’s footer.php file to display a rudimentary hit count. And when I say rudimentary, it’s pretty basic. No bouncing balls with the number, no per article counts, etc. All it does is display and update a bit of text you will see at the bottom of most of the pages here in my blog.

It’s not something I am going to advertise all that much. First of all the counter file is written into the function which means it is not easily re-configurable. It also means that it will probably be broken the next update I do to the blogging software. Variations on the theme include referencing a record in a database, keying off the story title in the requested URL to give article specific counters.

If I were doing this in python rather than php, I would probably just have one function. The process is open a file for read and write. read the content of the file. (which should be a number.) display the number. (which may include additional text wrapped around it, such as ‘Viewed :” “times.”) increment the number, and write it back into the file. I might be able to do that within php all as one function, but I figured that if I used an existing pair of functions, it would simplify things a bit. Additionally I can write a script at a later date to reference the write function and reset the counter to 0 at any time. Say perhaps any time I add a blog entry.

Well, time to get some cleaning and re-aranging done.

-Rusty