The Pu dao survey is live

Tags

forks, kwan dao, pu dao, survey

For readers, if you know or teach one or more Pu dao sets, there’s a long survey about the weapon at http://www.silverwolfwushu.com/WeaponsPuDao.html – click the text with the yellow background above the image. I will publish tallies – probably in late autumn.

A couple more weapon surveys coming – Kwan dao, forks, and some specialty sabers to start.

 

Advertisements

Rule Number One

Tags

ataxia, Baoding balls, overheating, Pain, porcupine balls, seizures, tachycardia, tai chi bar

For our teachers and aides and support staff

If  you see, feel, smell, hear, taste or otherwise sense  something that you do not like or are pretty sure your child would not like – COMPLAIN.

It is more or less a universal adage in Tai Chi Chuan and Qigong training that if there is pain you are doing something wrong. That would be distinguished from effort.

One of the things we do is have students wear smart garments – sensors the size of shirt buttons are embedded and report things like location and temperature. It turns out one can assert that surges (up or down) in temperature are really pain. We were surprised to discover that there is a fair amount of pain that occurs in the sole of the foot. This does not seem to have been reported in the scientific literature or folklore as far as we can tell. There’s been no attention paid to preventing or treating the pain. We are working on it – mostly Tai Chi bar and porcupine balls for feet and Baoding balls for hands

We still use temperature changes as warning signs of seizures, tachycardia and

overheating for all of our students.  Our sample size for ataxia students is too small to encourage responsible statistics, but we observe the following in lower legs and arms:

1. there are flashes of pain far in excess of the energy one might use to kick, stomp or punch. Some of these are repeatable (happens at the same movement in the set over multiple days) and some are not. They happen quickly and do not usually persist very long. We call them peaks (look like a letter ‘v’ upside down when we chart them).

2. there are also radical drops in temperature which happen at the same time as an arm involuntarily tucks in against the ribs or a foot turns inward and the knee flexes in as well, We don’t know what is going on here, and they do not usually last very long. We call them valleys (look like a letter ‘v’).

3. There is something of an ebb and flow of energy levels in many Tai Chi Chuan sets. That would be in contrast to the ‘go go go’ seen in Shaolin sets, for example. A third effect we observe is a student expends increasingly more energy for twenty to thirty seconds then more or less reverts back to usual levels. We lack a snappy name for this effect

4. There are issues with head sway – how far your head moves, at what angle and at what speed. This is the most reliable predictor of falls and is sometimes a good

indicator of a looming seizures

The energy gap by weapon

Tags

fork, kwan dao, spear

Garments these days can be made smart by attaching sensors the size of shirt buttons. Using such garments we can more or less measure the amount of energy each student exerts doing the movements of a set. There are some challenges with medical problems like seizures but despite that and most students not being able to speak, with enough sensors we can  discover how much pain a student is feeling. We were alarmed to find that it takes a great deal more energy to do the kwan dao set than the spear set. A great deal of that has to do with the length, weight and balance of the kwan dao. Worse, many of the students are very attracted to the heaviest versions of the kwan dao. That meant pain ahead for them.

However, when we executed a statistical technique called cluster analysis it indicated that teaching a class of weapons called forks after spear and before kwan dao was a good idea at least for our students. Both Wing Lam Enterprises and Kung Fu Direct have several types of forks in stock. Alas, no one (so far) has ever heard of a commercially recording of a fork set in any martial art or style.

May the Fork Be With You

Tags

Chan Tai San, dragon whisker fork, fork, Sijo Abdul Mutakabbir, trident

Some preliminary webpages about forks and a renegade trident or two are at

http://www.silverwolfwushu.com/WeaponsForks.html

so far, the only wushu fork video I have located is a short on YouTube

It features the dragon whisker fork – long xu cha as performed by

Sijo Abdul Mutakabbir a student of the famed Sifu Chan Tai San.

 

 

For the well-equipped Chinese martial arts school

 

 

I have emailed in English and traditional Chinese characters to ask which weapons are in the ensemble and whether they can throw in a rack or two. I think I own 4 of these and recognize five others. Any clues, dear readers, for names, arts and recordings? 

An old photo

Tags

Bagua Zhang, Dong Haichuan, Double Snake rings, Li Ziming, Liang Zhenpu, Zi Wu Xian, Zi Wu Xien

This is  Li Ziming (李子鳴). He lived from June 25 1902 to January 23, 1993.  For the photo sorry – no location or date. I would guess near Beijing and sometime between 1970 and 1993. The double snake rings are at least from Bagua Zhang – his primary teacher was Liang Zhenpu (梁振蒲) who lived from 1863 to 1932. Both men are buried next to Dong Haichuan’s tomb. It looks to me like there are flags or ribbons attached to the rings. WLE.com still sells this weapon ( W267) as well as a version with a straight bar and crescents inside the ring (W336). I am unclear if this weapon has remained in the various Bagua styles (Yin, Cheng, Liang, Gao, Jiang, Shi and Song). 

The FOXP2 URL links problem

Tags

Arkady Babchenko, content management, dead links, FOXp2, Schrodinger's cat

Yahoo News had, at one time, four different entries for Arkady Babchenko that had him as either dead or alive.  This was not a case of Schrodinger’s cat. I would be hard-pressed to applaud the four URLs, but the problem is that people from all over the internet might link to one or more of those URLs. So the author or the content manager can update the original text (which said Babchenko was dead) or wedge another link in (presumably to one of the URLs that says he is alive).  There’s really no easy way to tell linkers scattered across the vast internet that the contents of the “he is dead” URL have changed dramatically. Worse, even if a linker scans his or her own webpages for dead links now the linker is stuck with tediously checking for each broken link does the website exist? If so, is there a correction?

I frequently  have a webpage or downloadable slides or a blog entry that says something like “92 genes for the arthrogryposis spectrum in 45 syndromes”. Then someone finds more, or a gene gets dropped, or moved to some other category. It’s pretty tedious to go back and find all my references – usually hoping I got the keywords correct. So I am going to e-publish pages with genes by disability category. It turns out that’s not really accurate: different mutations of a gene can be in completely different categories AND  genes influence other genes. So if someone says “Hey! I have a mutation in my FOXP2 gene. What does that mean?” the exact answer is “uhh … exactly which of the 54 currently known mutations? And FOXP2 influences almost 200 other genes – so what is going on with each of those?”

I am thankful that baseball only involves about 12 people at a time

The FOXP2 gene

Tags

CNTNAP2, CTBP1, FOXp2, gene interactions, SRPX2

Back in January the FOXP2 gene on chromosome 7 at location q31.1 was mentioned as having multiple significantly different mutations as well as deletions, translocations and disomies. The FOXP2-related speech and language disorder was mentioned in passing. From a presentation done for New Zealand: The FOXP2 gene on chromosome 7 is somewhat controversial. Part of the confusion is that it matters whether the gene has a mutation (there are at least two significantly different ones), a micro-deletion, a repeat
or is trans-located. FOXP2 is normally located in the q31.1 region – a translocation to the q22 region causes a condition known as developmental verbal dyspraxia (DVD). Both a missense mutation causing an arginine-to-histidine substitution (R553H) and a nonsense
mutation (R328X) causing a truncated protein cause speech and language difficulties. FOXP2 also regulates at least the following genes: SRPX2 (work underway); CNTNAP2  and CTBP1.  CNTNAP2 interacts with CNTN2.  CNTN2 interacts with the NFYB gene
which interacts with three more genes. Of those, CEBPZ interacts with 2 other genes, myc with 37 other genes and TBP with 27 other genes. 

CTBP1 interacts with 14 other genes. The second generation of interactions with the CTBP1 gene now includes over 160 other genes.

So far, 188 genes linked to FOXP2. 

 

Epidemiology – Ebola 2018

Tags

AIDS, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ebola, HIV, malaria

There have been nine known outbreaks of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Some persistent problems that strongly influence response:

1. this is a very large country: it has the 11th largest area; the Democratic Republic of the Congo covers 2.34 million square kilometers  = 900,000 square miles or about one fourth the size of the United States.
2. there are more than 83 million Congolese in well over 200 ethnic groups and a similar number of languages. Not all the languages have written components, and it is unclear how widespread literacy in French, an official language, is.
3. It is asserted that there are about 7500 physicians. a reasonable estimate would be that the country needed 250,000 physicians
4. It is claimed that there are 400,000 people living with HIV/AIDS and that there are 20,000 deaths per year. Our models suggest that the real prevalence is almost twice that.
5. A fair estimate would be 30 MILLION cases of malaria.
6. We would be skeptical that there are 3,000 kilometers of paved roads capable of supporting sustained medium speed (trucks going 100 kilometers per hour) transit.

According to the Congolese Ministry of Health:

• 51 cases of hemorrhagic fever
• 28 cases confirmed as Ebola
• 26 people have died

Of paramount concern is that one (1) new laboratory-confirmed case was reported on May 16 in Mbandaka, a busy port city on the Congo river with a population of more than one million. This new case is linked with the epicenter of the epidemic in Equateur province, east of Lake Tumba.

Interesting islands and national responsibilities

Tags

Comoros, France, French Polynesia, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Madagascar, Martinique, Mayotte, New Caledonia, Reunion, Saint Barthelemy, Saint Martin, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Seychelles, Vanuatu, Wallis and Futuna

Besides its continental responsibilities as part of Europe, the nation of France provides legal and social leadership to some interesting islands:

Comoros – population 808,080
French Polynesia – population 287,881
Guadeloupe – population 402,119
Haiti – population 10,646,174 (well, half of an island, making it more interesting)
Madagascar – population 25,054,161
Martinique – population 385,551
Mayotte – population 256,818
New Caledonia – population 279,070
Reunion – population 965,826
Saint Barthelemy – population 9,279
Saint Martin – population 36,286
Saint Pierre and Miquelon – population 6,080
Seychelles – population 93,290
Vanuatu – population 282,814
Wallis and Futuna – 11,899

Total: almost 40 million people and likely more than 1.5 million with disabilities of interest to Silver Wolf Wushu. However, the genetics of islands are of great interest to population biologists. We would certainly encourage DNA surveys of the various populations.