I've been watching hurricane Dean make its trek across the Carribean. It's a monster storm, but thankfully it looks like it will miss most heavily populated areas. We've suffered through the worst drought in memory here where I live. Crops have turned to stubble, fires spring up almost unprovoked, the air is harsh and dusty. In other parts of the country, floods have done terrible damage.

The human race will enter a new era when we are able to control the weather globally. Several thousand years ago, we learned to cultivate. We are now able to cause the plants we select to start growing in the locations we choose. However, the pitiful truth is that, for the most part, we have no way to guarantee that they will actually grow. Couple this with the life and property loss due to flooding and other weather effects, and you have a very good case for global weather management.

Ahh, you say, but it can't be done.... the amount of energy required is far beyond our capability to deploy and control. Well, maybe not. We know a lot about chaos theory. One instance is the so-called "butterfly effect," which purports that the wing-flap of a butterfly is enough to start a chain reaction that can lead to the development of a hurricane. The mathematical underpinnings are well-understood. The bottom line is that there are events of such complexity (like weather) that tiny changes in the initial conditions will cause completely different final outcomes. On one day, stomping your foot on a snow-covered mountain might do nothing. The next day, it might cause an avalanche. For weather prediction, this is usually seen in a negative light. After all, how can we possibly predict the formation of a hurricane, or when it will rain, if it depends so critically on so many parameters? Seemingly even more remote is the ability to control these events.

My optimistic alter-ego predicts that eventually, we will not only be able to predict such events, but control them. The very fact that the weather is chaotic gives us the "hook" we need to gain control. As our understanding of chaos theory improves, I suspect we will learn that there are certain points in the development of chaotic behavior (e.g., the formation of a rainstorm) that respond predictably to small energy inputs. This might be in the form of an acoustic impulse, a flash of laser light, or something else. I suspect that we will also learn that the pattern of control input can be tailored to produce the desired outputs (amount of rain, etc.). We might design large-scale arrays of stimulators (imagine dozens of sound generators spaced several kilometers apart in strategic global locations) that, under computer control, maintain some measure of control over the daily global weather patterns. Hmmm. But who gets to choose the weather...

Wild Summer / Health Care pain

It's been a wild summer. My students and I have been working on a robot project. We're trying to get six robots to communicate with each other as they search through a building to find a target. Since the robots are relatively dumb and have few sensors, this is a real challenge. The more I work on robots, the more I'm amazed by humans, dogs, cockroaches, ..in fact, anything alive.

We have spent countless hours at the city pool. Sara loves to swim anywhere we can find water. This was the summer of learning to dive, snorkel, surf on Dad's back, and wear a bikini. The latter I could have waited for. Sara will be six soon (Sept. 3), which hardly seems possible. Her mind is an astoundingly complex labyrinth, and fathoming it is becoming more and more of a challenge. Fortunately, it is quite beautiful for the most part, and seems to have very little of deviousness and purposeful rebellion.

So - now we can get down to brass tacks. Something is horribly wrong with our medical care system. I've watched and listened as my Mother has had to fight her way through a completely debilitating morass of paper, people, and institutionalized ignorance to get help for her comparatively minor medical problems. The frustration has occassionally moved her to tears. My sister has taken significant time from work (thanks to the Family Medical Leave Act) to help, but it's daunting nevertheless.

I've had my own such experiences, and from them I've learned that you absolutely must take complete charge of your own medical care. You simply cannot expect the system to provide any continuity of information. Minutes before I was sedated for my recent colonoscopy, I spoke with the doctor to remind him of exactly why he had scheduled my procedure and what he was looking for. He told me he appreciated that, since he didn't have a record of our conversation from six weeks prior, and he was trying to remember why he was doing this! Is this incompetence? Not by today's standards - it's normal now.

This nation's health care information infrastructure is in shambles, just as the transportation system is in shambles. This is largely due to population growth, but both problems are fairly easy to solve from a technical point of view. Public attitudes, especially from suspicious liberals, are the great hindrance. There is such an outcry about privacy violation and big-brother-ism every time systemic fixes, such as a national medical database and automated highway systems (the road drives your car in metro areas), are brought up. I think we are just going to have to swallow some of those bitter pills lest we choke on the alternatives.