Letter To A Former Boss

Note: Names have been changed to protect identities (but I guess these are obvious anyway). Just a bit of explanation. What follows is a letter I sent to someone during the last day of my stay in a company; it was a practice of catharsis and closure since I didn't want to leave without at least trying to make things better for those who would be replacing me. I've posted it here in my blog on the 30th of March, 2014, after almost a year since the date I wrote it (although my initial intention was really to keep it between me and her and one other person). The abrupt decision is merely for the sake of permanence. This is part of who I was before and I didn't want to lose this piece of prose if my laptop crashed. I also am confident this isn't going to be discovered by anyone else (unless I become extremely popular). It's going to take a serious stalker to comb through dozens of posts just to arrive here. For you who are about to read this though, let's just keep this between you and me, shall we?

Electricity From Sidewalks

Imagine that all our walkways and our roads generate electricity. Imagine that by simply clicking your remote control, you're supplying it the electricity it needs to work. Imagine if we could harness all our daily motions into energy, with clothes that charge our cellphones every time we move. That's amazing, right?

Here's a link to some inventions harnessing piezoelectricity:

Energy-harvesting Street Tiles
Battery-less Remote Controls
Electricity-generating Clothes

3D Printing

 Imagine a future in which a device connected to a computer can print a solid object. A future in which we can have tangible goods as well as intangible services delivered to our desktops or highstreet shops over the Internet. And a future in which the everyday "atomization" of virtual objects into hard reality has turned the mass pre-production and stock-holding of a wide range of goods and spare parts into no more than an historical legacy.

Such a future may sound like it is being plucked from the worlds of Star Trek. However, while transporter devices that can instantaneously deliver us to remote locations may remain a fantasy, 3D printers capable of outputting physical objects have been in development for over two decades and are starting to present a whole host of new digital manufacturing capabilities. 3D printing may therefore soon do for manufacturing what computers and the Internet have already done for the creation, processing and storage of information.

- From ExplainingTheFuture.com

This is amazing. I can't wait for this technology to become cheap, accessible, and widespread. But then again, there's a word of caution for those who are still lavishing in the euphoria of this suddenly-real technology's potential:

Everyone's now aware of 3D printing — they’ve read about it in the papers, on blogs or seen it on TV. The mentality now seems to be that, in the future, we'll be able to download our products or make them ourselves with CAD programs, apps and 3D scanners, then just print them out, either at home, or in localised print shops. Which in turn will supposedly decentralize manufacturing, bringing it back to the West. But like the cupcake, Daft Punk’s latest album, or goji berries, 3D printing is severely overhyped — and I should know, because it’s what I do for a living.

- Nick Allen, Founder of 3D Print UK

Crush

I remember my classmate in college who really had a huge crush on another classmate, Donna. 

It was a sad case of unrequited love infatuation and our class had a lot of memories at the guy's expense. One time he, out of frustration, almost leaped off the sixth floor of the Finster building if it hadn't been for Dave and Nathaniel who held him back. Another time we teased at the idea of a love team in the making even though Donna didn't want to have anything to do with him. But the most enduring memory I've had of my classmate was him sitting on one of the benches of the D-Building, crying his eyes out. That's because he really was in love with Donna but knew he won't get any love back.

Having a crush sucks. Big time.

Of course, he has probably outgrown his feelings for Donna today but I'm pretty sure he's a fan of the song Pangarap Lang Kita by Parokya ni Edgar:

At kahit mahal kita

Wala akong magagawa

Tanggap ko na aking sinta

Pangarap lang kita

 

I bet we guys can sympathize with this unfortunate classmate of mine because we've been there before. At one point of our lives (or probably more), we've pined for a girl, knowing that she's forever going to be beyond our reach. It sucks. It really does.

Geektyrant

I love this site.

Tale Of Two Parents

Sometimes, the only time you get to appreciate your blessings is if you know other people's misery. That statement isn't politically correct but it is quite true.

I had a conversation with a colleague of mine, who is entertaining the thought of resigning, and it started with him asking me if my parents went berserk over knowing that I was leaving the company.

I said no and I got curious enough to ask if his parents did. My hunch was correct because he said they went ballistic. They were quite proud that their son was working in the company and couldn't probably fathom the idea of him leaving such a stable job.

I knew the reasons why he was leaving. I also knew that, given his knowledge and background, he can do so much if he were working in another company more suited to his course.

After that exchange, I said a prayer of thanks that my parents didn't overreact to my decision. It's something to be thankful for in the long run.

Last Outing

Picture is courtesy of Aissa Flores
From left: Ahl, Yotz, Grace, Aissa, Vyn, Nuelle, J-Lo, Sam, Sir Ramy, Me

Yup. That's right. That was my last outing as a BPI employee and I got to enjoy it together with friends.

Actually, it was supposed to be just Aissa's despedida. But since three from the company were leaving (me, her, and Jude, who unfortunately didn't show up that day), it became intended for the three of us instead (joiner ko. Hehe).

As usual, the day started with none of us arriving on time on the designated assembly area, Magsaysay Park. We all had our excuses and I also realized, for the nth time, that giving alms to the poor isn't worth it (more on that in another post later).

Maxima was the venue and it was my second time to be there. Coincidentally, they had this Maxima Bodybuilding contest in the afternoon and I got to wonder if I'll ever be joining that kind of contest later on. We'll see.

Dinner was in Grace' humble abode in Babak where we had the best native chicken tinola in the world.

Then, it was time to go home and, even now, I couldn't fathom how I got to spend over an hour commuting from Sasa back to our home in Matina.

Good night.

Men Who Breastfeed

I emailed this article to a colleague awhile back. This was a result of a conversation regarding breastfeeding (she was an expectant mother) and memory lane led me sharing about an article I read back in college about lactating men.

I didn't want to be full of empty air, trying to prove something which otherwise isn't supposed to be, so I hunted this article down and showed her.

Here's the link to the article in Scientific American:

In late 2004 the Internet Movie Database reported that Dustin Hoffman suddenly had the urge to breast-feed. Had the then-67-year-old Hoffman—who brought mainstream culture face to face with autism in Rain Man and went mano a mano with an Ebola-like filovirus in Outbreak—never quite broken character from his 1982 film Tootsie? Nope. He was just really keen to help out with his first grandchild.

Interestingly, he could have possibly lent a helping, er, breast, if he had held the suckling newborn to his nipples for a couple weeks although he could also have tried starving himself or taking a medication that would affect his brain's pituitary gland.

There have been countless literary descriptions of men miraculously breast-feeding, from The Talmud to Tolstoy, where, in Anna Karenina, there is a short anecdote of a baby suckling an Englishman for sustenance while on board a ship. The little anthropological evidence documented suggests it is possible. In the 1896 compendium Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, George Gould and Walter Pyle catalogue several instances of male nursing being observed. Among them was a South American man, observed by Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who subbed as wet nurse after his wife fell ill as well as male missionaries in Brazil that were the sole milk supply for their children because their wives had shriveled breasts. More recently, Agence France-Presse reported a short piece in 2002 on a 38-year-old man in Sri Lanka who nursed his two daughters through their infancy after his wife died during the birth of her second child.

In her 1978 book The Tender Gift: Breastfeeding, medical anthropologist Dana Raphael claimed that men could induce lactation simply by stimulating their nipples. The eminent endocrinologist Robert Greenblatt of the Medical College of Georgia concurred. But Jack Newman, a Toronto-based doctor and breast-feeding expert, insists that in order to produce milk, a hormone spike must occur. "That Tolstoy quote suggests that the father just put the baby to the breast and he would produce milk; I think that's pretty unlikely," he says. "It could be that you have this man with this pituitary tumor and he produces milk once the baby starts suckling."

Newman explains that medical disruptions involving prolactin, the hormone necessary to produce milk, have resulted in spontaneous lactation. Thorazine, a popular antipsychotic used in the mid-20th century, impacted the pituitary gland—the pea-size endocrine gland located near the base of the brain—often causing it to overproduce prolactin. If prolactin levels remained high, milk could follow. According to Newman, lactation is listed as a possible side effect of the heart medication digoxin. A pituitary tumor could also induce milk production: "It would be the same reason—increased prolactin levels&mdashin the one case drug-induced, in the other due to a tumor or some other sort of neurological problem."

In a 1995 article for Discover titled "Father's Milk," Pulitzer Prize-winning author and one-time physiologist Jared Diamond reconciles the nipple stimulation and hormone quandary, pointing out that such stimulation can release prolactin. He also notes that starvation—which inhibits the functioning of hormone-producing glands as well as the hormone-absorbing liver—can cause spontaneous lactation, as observed in survivors of Nazi concentration camps and Japanese POW camps in World War II. "The glands recover much faster than the liver when normal nutrition is resumed," he writes, "so hormone levels soar unchecked."

Males of many different mammalian species have the potential to lactate, although only one, the Dayak fruit bat of Southeast Asia, does so spontaneously. Diamond points out, however, that with the societal norm of fathers helping to rear their young, male milk production could actually be to our advantage, especially with all the career women trying to balance the demands of job and family. Why else would men still have nipples?

"Up until a certain age, boys and girls, as fetuses, are indistinguishable, really, so women retain some remnants of the vas deferens, which is the canal that sperm follows," Newman answers. "If you have no Y chromosome, then certain hormones are released that say, 'Okay, we'll set up this child's breast tissue to develop at puberty so that she will be able to produce milk.' Men didn't [secrete those hormones], so we don't usually have breast tissue."

"Actually a significant number of boys around the age of puberty do develop breasts," he continues, "so the tissue is there, but it regresses." In short, men may not have full-fledged breasts but they certainly can lactate, under extreme circumstances.

Of Breasts And Bras

The corset was used before to support the back and to achieve that hourglass waist. Unfortunately, it did so good because not only did it make women look fashionable, it also made back muscles atrophy so bad, some women couldn't stand without putting their corsets on.

I guess the same thing is going on with the brassiere. Check out this article which purports that bras are making breasts sag.

There's one question I need to ask though. Did they also do research on briefs versus boxers?

Here Comes The Rain

Nobody is immune to this. Whenever it rains, the earth exudes a certain smell. I love it. Some people don't like it at all. 

My earlier hypothesis is that all those raindrops bring with them certain volatile compounds from the sky that react with the pavement and soil causing instantaneous aromatherapy.

I was almost right with that conjecture. Here's a link to an article which both proves me right and wrong.

PETA Can Be Nasty After All

PETA kills animals. Enough said.

Here's a link to the article.

Going Paperless

Here's a nice idea.

Instead of printing all those receipts for every purchase, why don't we put these sales records online instead? Then, if the need arises, we could just print those which we really need and save ourselves the waste and clutter, not to mention the stress of looking for that elusive receipt, that's associated with this cumbersome invention of civilization?

I'm sharing to you this article by Will Hines where he talks about going paperless this time around.

As a side note, who knew thermal paper harbored a carcinogenic chemical called Bisphenol-A? Makes you think twice before handling thermal paper now, does it?