End of physical therapy, for now

Tonight ended up not being a physical therapy session atfter all, but a re-evaluation prior to my next appointment with my orthopedist next week.  We ended up cancelling the two additional appointments that I already have scheduled for next week, because the physical therapist's evaluation was that aside from strengthening exercises that I can do here at home, I'm not benefiting from physical therapy.  They did not get one additional degree of movement out of my ankle (a fact that does not surprise me), nor significantly reduce the pain level in either my foot or my knees.  The PT did specifically note in her evaluation report that she believes there is a bone-on-bone obstruction in my ankle, something I've been saying for, oh .... six and a half years now?  Maybe this time, someone will believe it and investigate.

My last session was, at least, a good one.  I maxed out the load springs on the reformer, first with both legs together, then with my right leg alone, but had to drop back to three reds for my left leg.  (The machine has five springs -- one green, three red, one blue, from heaviest to lightest.)  Then again, three reds is where they started me out for both legs together.  I also got up to 60 reps at 60 pounds on the hamstring curl machine, without a break.

I also saw the podiatrist today.  My foot's healed up well enough where it split open that he thinks I'm done for now, though I'm supposed to see him again in a couple of months for a long-term followup.  His staff is working on getting me a specific authorization number from Harvard Pilgrim for the molded orthotic he wants me to have, since Harvard Pilgrim has repeatedly said it's covered but the oprthotics place is so sure it won't be covered that they won't do anything without an authorization number.

Tomorrow, I have an appointment to see my doctor about my right wrist, which I seem to have injured somehow, possibly some variety of sprain.  It isn't painful right now or when not doing anything, but lifting a milk jug with that hand is sufficient to cause pain.  Then next week, as mentioned above, I go back to the orthopedist again with my physical therapy evaluation, and we'll talk about knee surgery.

When modelling is not simulation

The most recent edition of New Scientist (or maybe it was Scientific American, at this precise moment in time I'm not certain) Discover¹ magazine carried a story which mentioned a researcher who was "simulating the tobacco mosaic virus in unprecedented detail to find out how it reproduces".

Um, no he wasn't.  Pardon me, but I'm going to be a little bit pedantic here.:  There's a difference betweem simulation and modelling, and they're not interchangeable.  Specifically, you cannot find out how something works by simulating it, because to accurately simulate it, you have to know how it works.  What he's doing is modelling the virus, and tuning his model until it matches as closely as possible the behavior of the real tobacco mosaic virus, then trying to draw inferences from the model about how the real virus does what it does.  This can be a valid technique, if you then take the mechanisms that you believe from your model to exist and check to see whether they do in fact exist, and work the way your model seems to indicate, in the real world.

But you can't use a simulation to figure out a mechanism, because you can't simulate an unknown mechanism.  You can only simulate what you already know.

OK, before anyone says it, "What about space-combat simulation games that simulate technologies we don't have yet?  How can that be a known mechanism?"  Answer:  That's not simulating an unknown.  That's simulating something where the game designers sat down and said, "OK, we're going to have this technology in the game, and it's going to work like this."  It's still a "known" mechanism ... it's just a made-up known mechanism, defined for the purposes of the simulation to work in a certain way.

[1] My memory came through eventually.

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(Crossposted to snobss)

Oh yeah ....

....in other news, State Farm finally managed to get payment out of Ontario's state insurance system for the claim from when cymrullewes got rear-ended by a Canadian driver last July.  Which means we finally got our deductible back.