Richard Karpinski

Morgan and Arthur

My wife, Deirdre McGrath's daughter married Scott Pennington and had the two boys, Morgan and Arthur Penngrath. When they were divorced while the boys were five and two, we made a home for them with a grandpa and two grandmas. It was a stable environment for five or six years. Then Scott had returned to his birth name and remarried so he was ready to take on the boys again. Still, they needed a bigger house and we wanted to move out of Oakland, so we rented them our house. The boys got to stay in the house they knew and I got to tell friends the we just left the boys with the new tenants.

After spending several years trying to bring known cancer cures to a clinic near you, I found two other problems that occur in our food supply. One is in principle easy to fix.

Aspartame releases ten percent of its weight in methanol which humans, unique among the normal test animals, convert into formaldehyde. This has led to a hundred TIMES as many cases of Alzheimer's disease since aspartame was approved for use in diet sodas in 1983. It also led to multipliers between two and twenty five for a dozen other cancers and diseases such as multiple sclerosis birth defects including autism. These can be prevented in the future by withdrawing FDA approval for aspartame. Can we do it? See WhileScienceSleeps.com for details.

Even tougher is that the wonderful ten fold improvement in yield for wheat that characterizes Norman Borlaug's work crossing ordinary wheat with dwarf wheat. It got him the Nobel Peace Prize and made him the famous Father of the Green Revolution. While it's not strictly a GMO, since only cross breeding wheat varieties is involved, it has created many molecules never before in human diets. One of them fits into the morphine receptor in our brains. This happens to make wheat addictive and seems to encourage us to eat an extra 4-500 calories per day. Thus in addition to turning India from a food importer into a food exporter, it seems to underly the world wide epidemic of obesity. But how can we fix this without using genetic modification to eliminate that new molecule? Not very attractive. See WheatBellyBlog.com for more.

Now I'm telling everyone about the astonishing effectiveness of a powerful cancer cure that you can read about at GcMAF.EU or read the scientific papers themselves at Scholar.Google.com by asking about GcMAF oleic acid.
And for less than a thousand dollars you can get eight doses even if your doctor refuses to become involved. Since we make it in our own bodies, GcMAF is a mere supplement so it's easy to import.

Write me if any of these things raise questions in your mind.
DickKarpinski@gmail.com

I am a nitpicker; I am prone to notice and comment on small flaws in people's writings. For that matter I am sometimes supine I actually developed that aspect of my attention even before it stood me in good stead as a working programmer. We primates often pick louse eggs, nits, from each other's fur as a way of paying friendly attention to a neighbor. My own version is somewhat more metaphorical.

I'm 73 this year and haven't been programming much since about 1996. I had then spent thirty years at UCSF helping students, professors, and research staff use the computer center machines to get their work done. I became the person who explained error messages to programmers and the guy who reported flaws in compilers and other vendor supplied software to IBM and other vendors. That fostered my attention to detail.

After being laid off there, I looked around for something useful to do and found Jef Raskin. He's the guy who started the Macintosh project at Apple, but also wrote the amazing book about human interface issues, The Humane Interface. I actually helped him finish the book, and learned a lot in the process. Now I hope to learn how to do work in the modern, largely World Wide Web centric world.

If I succeed in that, perhaps I can demonstrate a better way to accumulate comments to a web page or blog posting by providing a relatively easy way to move them into an argumentation system so that readers can find the parts that interest them and can extend the discussion themselves. What I have in mind is a system based on IBIS, the Issue Based Information System. One feature of that is that before you can insert an idea, also known as a position or a claim, you must show the question to which your statement is an answer. Turns out that knowing the question clarifies the answer. Jeff Conklin of CogNexus.com wrote "Dialogue Mapping" which discusses this approach in some detail. He has some introductory YouTube videos on the subject which are easy to find.

Whatever I say, I hope to encourage feedback, especially feedback intended to change my opinion. Sometimes it does. We could talk about it. Here are some small issues with the usual forum or comment mechanism:
a. How can I most conveniently proceed to read the "next" forum or even the "next" forum entry?
b. Will I be able to correct or repair what I write, or not? How can I tell?
c. How about a link to wiki and FAQ or user manual?
d. Can we have a FEEDBACK button on every web page?

What if the FEEDBACK button opened a window on the same page, instantly, with the Message box FIRST and ready to type into. Then one would not be distracted from one's thought by waiting for a page to load, or by having first to fill in routine demographic information. It's not that hard to arrange if you take care one time and build it into the page skeletons in the first place. I'm happy to review documents and software in nitpicking detail if you like. Some authors appreciate the service. (Publish the result so other people can use on their web pages.)