Posts in Category: Uncategorized
More Transfusions
Another transfusion appointment went well today in Manchester — my hemoglobin was 7.6, platelets were 6, and my ANC was 20, so I had transfusions of the first two, and won’t be going out in public much this week, if it can be avoided. I’ll find out again, either Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday.
It has me wondering how much a platelet (or blood for that matter) boosts those measurements, since I think I was 16 for the platelets on last Thursday, when I had a transfusion last, but it still dropped to 6, just 4 days later. But we can only sample it so often — sampling before and after a transfusion seems wasteful and impractical. If I can remember I’ll ask if the doctors know on Friday.
As far as work goes, I’m back to working on another old toy/jewelry design in Blender, this one based on hypocycloids. I got pretty far on it originally but it was never clear I could get it to stay aligned, and I wasn’t looking forward to iteratively determining what was feasible, but since Collin has a 3D printer handy it seems more feasible to give it another try.
Back at Home for a Few Weeks
I got back home again last night, and am doing well. Feeling plenty
Russell’s Teapot Necklace
The Celestial Teapot
The eminent British philosopher Bertrand Russell used an analogy to illustrate the concept of the burden of proof and how it applies to religious claims, now often referred to as Russell’s Teapot, (also known as the celestial teapot, and cosmic teapot).
Russell explains that if he were to claim that a china teapot were orbiting the Sun between Earth and Mars, and that this teapot is too small to be detected by our technology (as it would be), then the burden of proof would lie on him to provide evidence of the teapot, not on disbelievers to prove the absence of the teapot.
shiny beads space the eight meteoroids
two styles of teapots, “top handle” and “back handle”The meteoroids are generated algorithmically, and since they’re 3D printed in stainless steel, each necklace can contain a perfectly unique set of meteoroids. In these photos the teapots were printed in stainless steel with a polished nickel finish, while the meteoroids are the basic stainless steel material.
Coleoidea Hypoxyphilia
This brass octopus pendant was inspired by a friend’s recounting of a dream in which an octopus was crawling up her leg — the next day she woke up with a cramp in her calf — in this case the creature is trying to heave it’s way up the owner’s chain, grasping it and collecting it together in it’s many appendages.
Each sucker carefully handcrafted…
It’s available for sale on my Shapeways page, where you can also see more pictures and a video of it. I like how much detail it captured, but I think some of the legs are unnatural looking, which irks me a bit.
It was manufactured — 3D printed and then cast — by Shapeways. A chain can be woven through six of the eight legs, with the top and center two legs forming a heart shape.
Working Out the Kinks
Thanks to Collin for helping me get a domain name, some webspace, and for installing WordPress here — and for helping me work out all sorts of other html issues in the past.
I’ve managed to embed a model of a fungus that is growing on a tree stump outside my brother’s house — in the vicinity of 50,000 polygons, this model has been reduced to about a tenth of what the original model was in order save bandwidth. (Expand this post to view it.)
Next up: figuring out how to integrate Etsy listings!
