Fitness (or lack thereof)
FridayAug 28, 2026
I used to play tennis in high school. In my senior year, I played varsity doubles. Though I was decent, my partner was far more consistent and often carried the team in clutch situations. Singles was always harder as I always felt I had low endurance and low lung capacity. I think it had to do with growing up in LA in the 70's and 80's. I recall that the smog was so dense that during recess I couldn't see across the playground. On days after playing basketball in that brown haze, it hurt to breathe. Also my father, may he rest in peace, was a smoker when I was young. I believe my mother made him quit when they noticed I was suffering with symptoms of asthma. To his credit, he did.
I didn't play much tennis at all during college, medical school, and residency training. The one time I did play during fellowship training, 14 years after high school, I tried to knock out a 100 mph serve like I did in the old days. Well, I pulled something in my shoulder and that was that. I had even just bought a Head Radical Flexpoint in honor of Andre Agassi's retirement... he was a childhood hero to all on the men's tennis team. That racquet played like a dream, after having only used cheap-o racquets when I was younger... they were all I could afford back then.
After my shoulder injury, I took a break from tennis and began playing table tennis, which didn't require any overhead swings. Around the pandemic, I got a VR device (the Oculus II), and got into virtual table tennis for a while (ElevenTT). This game was fantastic, it felt very, very real and they matched you with players all over the world at your skill level. I got to a pretty high ranking after a while! I had some seriously physically demanding sessions which would drench me in sweat. But wouldn't you know it... after swinging the controller around vigorously my frickin' shoulder started to act up! I had to give it up. I might be the only one who sustained a sports injury from a virtual sport, sheesh.
So fast forward to now... I've had zero physical activity and horrible sleep (maybe averaging 5.5 hours / night for the past couple of years) while working a ton. And I was definitely feeling changes and accumulating vascular risk factors. So I booked an online tennis lesson with a coach, thinking to ease back into exercise. I had my first lesson today, but damn, it's worse than I thought. He had me start with a bunch of core exercises. 10 minutes in, and I was thoroughly winded, ready for a 15 minute break. At that point, I hadn't even hit the ball yet. And when I did get to hitting the ball, it was different from playing with friends. With casual play, there'd be natural breaks between hitting, and walking over to pick up balls before starting the next rally. The coach had a crate full of balls and was just feeding them to me one after the other. My forehand wasn't embarrassing (most of the time), but it wasn't great either. Not only was I fighting atrophied skills, but I was just exhausted. Unfortunately my Apple Watch has been giving me little indicators that my cardiovascular health is "low". Not "below average"... just "low". I suspect it has something to do with my sleep deprivation and my poor lung capacity. I haven't been able to use my CPAP as work has been horrendous. Unfortunately, my symptoms sounded suspiciously like the beginnings of COPD. Man, it sucks getting old. And this is just at the beginning.
Dreams
SundayAug 09, 2026
I'm going to try to document my dreams from here, in a new section of this website. I will try to make it a habit of writing my dreams down before they fade from memory. While dreaming, our memory networks must be offline, operating functionally like the patient H.M. (Henry Molaison), a widely known case study in neuroscience who suffered permanent anterograde amnesia after having undergone bilateral mesial temporal lobectomies for intractable epilepsy.
That makes me wonder. Perhaps the reason why our dreams are so hard to remember, is that they are in fact not meant to be remembered in the first place. Though I've heard that REM sleep and dreaming are important for memory consolidation, recalling the dreams themselves might pollute genuine memories. On that note, I've heard that the act of recall itself will degrade the memory in some ways... perhaps like repeatedly saving an image through a lossy compression algorithm.
I wonder if we can draw an analogy between remembering our dreams, and AI models training on synthetic data that has been produced by a generative AI model. This cannabalistic training method will apparently promote "model collapse" whereby the AI becomes progressively erratic and inaccurate. Perhaps the analogous human outcome would be mental instability and psychosis, which literally features the inability to distinguish between reality and internally-generated hallucinations.
Perhaps it is because certain aspects of dreams can be at times traumatizing, at times compelling... even intoxicating... that nature has found it useful to diminish their memories, lest we become paralyzed in our waking lives by mere visions... because, I know that under the right circumstances, I would choose the blue pill.
Resurrection
ThursdayAug 06, 2026
HOOOOLY SHIT. The website lives again. It's been 16 FREAKING YEARS since the last update. Last you heard from me, I was a young and ambitious neurologist with a toddler. Now I am counting the years until an early retirement and funding that same toddler's lavish college lifestyle. Day-um time flies!
The website initially went belly up after a software update crashed my code, and I was too preoccupied with the career to fix it. Then I was forced to migrate webhosting companies after my old one (Webfaction) went out of business. After migrating, my new forward-facing site was the "hello world" WordPress default for a few years. Until today!
This site was running back in the day on Python 2.5 and Django 1.0. Now it's running on Python 3.13 and Django 6.0. While Python is still basically the same, it's the random little bits that have changed that drive you nuts trying to figure out what little piece of code broke the entire site! But OMFG, Gemini is scary good at debugging. I've spent the last decade forgetting my Python. There is no way I would have been able to update the code... but with the AI it took less than a day! If I think this is impressive, I can't even begin to fathom how the frontier models are able to prove new mathematical theorems. Wow. WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE!
This site is a time capsule from the earlier internet, a more innocent age. Lots of links are broken! I have to update the whole thing stylistically! It's gonna be a bit archaic and wonky for a little while!