Living with plantar fasciitis is like living with a two-legged dog: walks in the park are never the same.  It started two years ago, in Bangkok, when I felt like walking everywhere, every day, until my feet ached with exhaustion.  I thought it would go away but months before I had completed a training regimen where I gained 12 pounds of muscle — and that’s when my feet started planning their revenge.

Basically, it’s like this: it feels as if someone has driven a nail into the bottom of my foot.  And it’s there all the time, every day.  Over the last two years, the left foot has improved greatly, while the right foot has gotten progressively worse.  And that kind of pain, it should be known, leads one to consider things only hippies and hipsters would dare consider, things like barefoot running:

And wear shoes old women and small children would consider ridiculous:

I spend most weekends listening to Chrissi rant about String Theory and the horrors of advanced particle physics.  Sometimes, when I catch myself paying attention, I learn something.  One thing he’s turned me onto recently is Columbia physicist (and fellow Stuyvesant alum) Brian Greene.  Greene is one of individuals who are very obviously good at what they do.

String Theory is one of those things only a handful of minds in the world can grasp with depth and Greene, in the following clip, hints at just how massive his must be:

And, if there’s any remaining doubt about Greene’s awesomeness, let it be known that he did Letterman.

Also in this week’s NEJM: a discussion of Nintendo-related injuries.

Nintendinitis.  More interesting: Wiitis.

A healthy 29-year-old medical resident awoke one Sunday morning with intense pain in the right shoulder. He did not recall any recent injuries or trauma and had not participated in any sports or physical exercise recently. He consulted a rheumatology colleague. The Patte’s test was positive, consistent with acute tendonitis isolated to the right infraspinatus.

After further review of his activities during the previous 24 hours, the patient recalled that he had bought a new Nintendo Wii (pronounced “wee”) video-game system and had spent several hours playing the tennis video game. With the Wii system, the player faces a video screen and moves a handheld controller (approximately 14.5 cm by 3.0 cm by 3.0 cm, with a weight of approximately 200 g) containing solid-state accelerometers and gyroscopes that sense three-dimensional spatial movements. In the tennis video game, the player makes the same arm movements as in a real game of tennis. If a player gets too engrossed, he may “play tennis” on the video screen for many hours. Unlike in the real sport, physical strength and endurance are not limiting factors.

The final diagnosis for the isolated right shoulder pain was Nintendinitis. However, the variant in this patient can be labeled more specifically as “Wiiitis.” The treatment consisted of ibuprofen for 1 week, as well as complete abstinence from playing Wii video games. The patient recovered fully.

There’s a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine that’s causing a stir.  54 patients, all suffering from severe disorders of consciousness (”persistent vegetative state”), were scanned using fMRI while asked questions that generally involve cognition localized to specific areas of the brain.  From the LA Times:

Several times when Subject 23 was asked to imagine playing tennis, Monti said, the region of the brain most closely associated with complex motor planning became highly active, and stayed active for 30 seconds after researchers prompted such imagery by saying “tennis.”

Similarly, when researchers asked the patient to imagine walking through the house where he grew up and then said the word “navigate,” Subject No. 23 responded with bursts of activity in the region of the brain involved in constructing and navigating a mental map.

The young, French-speaking man was the only subject who was then trained to answer simple yes or no questions — whether his father’s name was Paul (yes) or Alexander (no), whether he had siblings and how many — using the imagery technique he had already learned.

Checking the patient’s responses for accuracy and comparing them to the yes-no brain responses of a group of healthy volunteers, researchers discerned that Subject No. 23 was not only still “in there,” but capable of purposeful thought and communication.

Clever… in more ways than one.

Finally.  It used to be that gentlemen knew the value of hand-sewn lapels and boots made from a model of your foot.  No longer:

Sometimes the designer item can be a safer bet. The very growth of customization has eroded several terms crucial to knowing what you are getting. “Customized” and “made to order” refer to a stock item ordered in a different color or with, say, a different finish. “Made to measure” means making something new from a stock pattern in a stock fabric, but altered to a man’s measurements; a “custom-made” item is designed to one’s measurements and specifications from the ground up. But the terms are often used indiscriminately, leading to confusion.

No mention of Vogel, sadly.

But nods to Langlitz, John Lobb, and Michael Andrews.  Ostensibly sensible, these choices belie their expertise: men who wear bespoke clothing know the best suits can be made in South Korea or Hong Kong just as well as they can be in New York (leather, admittedly, cannot: Langlitz is indeed very good at what they do) and for a fraction of the price — enough to cover the airfare and hotel.  Can’t make the trip?  There’s a fine tailor in Chinatown, just off the Bowery, that makes beautiful suits using fine Italian cloth — cheap — but you need to know what you’re talking about to have known that.

My Chemical Romance is a band most rare: consistent, gutsy, and well burnished.  Their musical sensibility is, at times, breathtaking.

MMA is, apparently, the new WWJD for christian enthusiasts:

“Father, we thank you for tonight,” he said. “We pray that we will be a representation of you.”

An hour later, a member of his flock who had bowed his head was now unleashing a torrent of blows on an opponent, and Mr. Renken was offering guidance that was not exactly prayerful.

“Hard punches!” he shouted from the sidelines of a martial arts event called Cage Assault. “Finish the fight! To the head! To the head!”

Abstract thinking is facilitated with kinesthetic action, the NY Times reports:

As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings, amounting to some two or three millimeters’ shift one way or the other. Nevertheless, the directionality was clear and consistent.

“When we talk about time, we often use spatial metaphors like ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you’ or ‘I’m reflecting back on the past,’ ” said Lynden K. Miles, who conducted the study with his colleagues Louise K. Nind and C. Neil Macrae. “It was pleasing to us that we could take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.”

Henrietta Lacks, the person from which HeLa cells were born, and family are the subject of a new book.

From an interview at Smithsonian with author Rebecca Skloot:

For scientists, one of the lessons is that there are human beings behind every biological sample used in the laboratory. So much of science today revolves around using human biological tissue of some kind. For scientists, cells are often just like tubes or fruit flies—they’re just inanimate tools that are always there in the lab. The people behind those samples often have their own thoughts and feelings about what should happen to their tissues, but they’re usually left out of the equation.

The NY Times also weighs in:

Which is as it should be, many scientists say, arguing that Mrs. Lacks’s immortal cells were an accident of biology, not something she created or invented, and were used to benefit countless others. Most of what is removed from people is of no value anyway, and researchers say it would be too complicated and would hinder progress if ownership of such things were assigned to patients and royalties had to be paid.

Modern footwear is causing us to change the way we move and, as a result, hurts our feet.

[New research from Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel E. Lieberman ’86] examines how runners coped with the force of collision on their feet before the introduction of the modern running shoe in the 1970s. Comparing habitually barefoot runners with shoe-wearing runners, Lieberman and his fellow researchers found that runners who run with footwear tended to land on their heels, while runners who run barefoot tended to land on the front or middle parts of their feet.

Because humans do not have rigid bodies, only a certain percentage of human body mass—called effective mass—can feel the force of an impact.

Abstract, via Nature:

Humans have engaged in endurance running for millions of years, but the modern running shoe was not invented until the 1970s. For most of human evolutionary history, runners were either barefoot or wore minimal footwear such as sandals or moccasins with smaller heels and little cushioning relative to modern running shoes. We wondered how runners coped with the impact caused by the foot colliding with the ground before the invention of the modern shoe. Here we show that habitually barefoot endurance runners often land on the fore-foot (fore-foot strike) before bringing down the heel, but they sometimes land with a flat foot (mid-foot strike) or, less often, on the heel (rear-foot strike). In contrast, habitually shod runners mostly rear-foot strike, facilitated by the elevated and cushioned heel of the modern running shoe. Kinematic and kinetic analyses show that even on hard surfaces, barefoot runners who fore-foot strike generate smaller collision forces than shod rear-foot strikers. This difference results primarily from a more plantarflexed foot at landing and more ankle compliance during impact, decreasing the effective mass of the body that collides with the ground. Fore-foot- and mid-foot-strike gaits were probably more common when humans ran barefoot or in minimal shoes, and may protect the feet and lower limbs from some of the impact-related injuries now experienced by a high percentage of runners.

John Bowe, co-writer of a lovely movie called Basquiat, put together an account of first-person experiences of love — and gets it totally wrong.

Fine, your life is ruined by some woman because you both can’t seem to make it work, and what do you do?  Blame love.  Call it faulty and confusing and utterly impenetrable.

Ostensibly, that seems fair.  But it also seems too easy.  “I’m right,” you say, and “I’m right,” she says and because you are both right, love must be wrong — easy, simple deductive reasoning.

Wrong.

Assume, for a moment, that love is simply an experience, like happiness or sadness or masturbation.  It will come and it will go, necessarily, because biology demands it.  What you have left, then, is the value of your relationship and what you are willing to sacrifice for that relationship determines said value.

So, if you let go of the relationship to resume your comfortable life, in essence you are saying that the relationship was disposable, as were your feelings of love (as are you, former lover).  Because to continue that relationship would require great sacrifice (though, presumably, not your life, though you’ve admitted it was “the love of your life”), and you weren’t willing to do that because, presumably:

“You know that idea that true love conquers all?” he said. “It can conquer a hell of a lot, but it can’t conquer everything.

That actually says something about you, not love, because love is an experience (in a way), and it’s up to you to make the most of it.  (Read: Dude, it was up to you to conquer everything.  Why?  Because you’re a man.  That’s your job.)

Run during the AFC championship game:

The NY Times Magazine published a wonderful, wonderful piece on James Patterson — a guy who apparently has no problem publishing nine hardbacks every year, at the least.

Surprising:

There are many different ways to catalog Patterson’s staggering success. Here are just a few: Since 2006, one out of every 17 novels bought in the United States was written by James Patterson. He is listed in the latest edition of “Guinness World Records,” published last fall, as the author with the most New York Times best sellers, 45, but that number is already out of date: he now has 51 — 35 of which went to No. 1.

And incisive:

Unsatisfied with publishing’s informal approach to marketing meetings, Patterson had expected corporate-style presentations, complete with comprehensive market-share data and sales trends. “A lot of authors are just grateful to be published,” Holly Parmelee, Patterson’s publicist from 1992 to 2002, told me several weeks earlier. “Not Jim. His attitude was that we were in business together, and he wanted us both to succeed, but it was not going to be fun and games.”

And revealing:

Patterson built his fan following methodically. Instead of simply going to the biggest book-buying markets, he focused his early tours and advertising efforts on cities where his books were selling best: like a politician aspiring to higher office, he was shoring up his base. From there, he began reaching out to a wider audience, often through unconventional means. When sales figures showed that he and John Grisham were running nearly neck and neck on the East Coast but that Grisham had a big lead out West, Patterson set his second thriller series, “The Women’s Murder Club,” about a group of women who solve murder mysteries, in San Francisco.

Seriously revealing:

To maintain his frenetic pace of production, Patterson now uses co-authors for nearly all of his books. He is part executive producer, part head writer, setting out the vision for each book or series and then ensuring that his writers stay the course. This kind of collaboration is second nature to Patterson from his advertising days, and it’s certainly common in other creative industries, including television. But writing a novel is not the same thing as coming up with jokes for David Letterman or plotting an episode of “24.” Books, at least in their traditional conception, are the product of one person’s imagination and sensibility, rendered in a singular, unreproducible style and voice. Some novelists have tried using co-authors, usually with limited success. Certainly none have taken collaboration to the level Patterson has, with his five regular co-authors, each one specializing in a different Patterson series or genre. “Duke Ellington said, ‘I need an orchestra, otherwise I wouldn’t know how my music sounds,’ ” Pietsch told me when I asked him about Patterson’s use of collaborators. “Jim created a process and a team that can help him hear how his music sounds.”

The way it usually works, Patterson will write a detailed outline — sometimes as long as 50 pages, triple-spaced — and one of his co-authors will draft the chapters for him to read, revise and, when necessary, rewrite. When he’s first starting to work with a new collaborator, a book will typically require numerous drafts. Over time, the process invariably becomes more efficient. Patterson pays his co-authors out of his own pocket. On the adult side, his collaborators work directly and exclusively with Patterson. On the Y.A. side, they sometimes work with Patterson’s young-adult editor, who decides when pages are ready to be passed along to Patterson.

And, at times, obvious:

Patterson’s chapters are very short, which creates a lot of half-blank pages; his books are, in a very literal sense, page-turners. He avoids description, back story and scene setting whenever possible, preferring to hurl readers into the action and establish his characters with a minimum of telegraphic details. The first chapter of “The Swimsuit,” a recent thriller with a villain who abducts women for pornographic snuff films, opens with the kidnapping of a supermodel on a beach in Hawaii:

“Kim McDaniels was barefooted and wearing a blue-and-white-striped Juicy Couture minidress when she was awoken by a thump against her hip, a bruising thump. She opened her eyes in the blackness, as questions broke the surface of her mind.

“Where was she? What the hell was going on?”

(Did you ever think someone would give up their business model so easily, so freely?)

Jennifer Schuessler, an editor at the Book Review, tackles David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, and attempts to explain, most interestingly, the importance of being bored.

A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.

Erich Segal has passed away.