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Pharmacy / APPRECIATING ANDRES INIESTA, MIDFIELDER, BARCELONA

« on: April 30, 2018, 02:24:49 PM »

Because life is so elusive, we’re busy living it instead of appreciating it. So the various honoraria, lifetime achievement awards, belated prizes and the like, are really an acknowledgement not as much that we screwed up as that we often don’t have personal la pausa. Accolades are raining from the heavens for the performance of Andres Iniesta at this current edition of the Euros. And to be sure, he has been magnificent, which would lead longtime culers to answer, sharply enough, “Where have you all been?”

Like awards that come too late, that miss a player or entertainer’s prime period, often periods of acclaim are attended by a bit of guilt that we didn’t see this before, that how could we not have when it’s so abundantly plain. But it isn’t.

Messi is a superstar, a comet that streaks across the Stygian skies but doesn’t really want to be seen. Iniesta doesn’t mind being seen, but the way in which he works is like a moon compared to a comet — he’s just there, doing what he does.

The oft-cited quote from Pep Guardiola about Iniesta while speaking to Xavi, that “he will retire us both,” was prescient, obvious and in the 20/20 hindsight of the present, worth a look.

One of my favorite football voices, Michael Cox, said today that Iniesta plays better for Spain than Barça. He took some stick, because that is how Twitter operates. Say something people disagree with and you’re stupid, etc. But few took the time to unpack that statement, which is correct in the Iniesta context as well as the needs of each team.

Many of us call Iniesta “modified Xavi.” It’s true, even as he is something more because he possesses gifts that Xavi never had. Xavi controlled a match with metronomic precision, using the pass to rule the world. He knew what was about to happen and where the ball needed to be. All the player had to do was move to the correct spot. As Xavi diminished and became a bit more controllable through physical pressure and jumping passing lanes, the template needed to adapt. This is where Iniesta enters the frame.

Luis Enrique assumed the helm at Barça, and the system changed. The talk of Iniesta being past it accelerated. What we know now is that a great player was adapting to the demands of a different system, becoming better through change. Luis Enrique made Iniesta a better player, and Spain is also reaping the benefits, just as it did when Guardiola helped make Xavi sparkle.

People have adapted in how they play Spain and Barça. So the metronomic precision of a Xavi now needs something different, a player who, as Miguel Delaney puts it in this lovely paean, is mercury rolling. Defenders have him. They know they have him. He’s pinned against the sideline with the ball, and there are two men there. Then something happens, and Iniesta is scampering away with the ball. It is a completely destabilizing thing because not only are two defenders out of position, but the most dangerous player on the pitch with the ball at his feet now has time to do the right thing.

There have been misguided comparisons to Zidane in this renaissance of Iniesta appreciation. What is correct of both, however, is that their ball control allowed them to extend time, to focus on the moment because the thing that normal players have to worry about just happens naturally for them. Iniesta slides or spins to avert a defender, and the ball is right there. Logically a defender should be able to get at it, but he can’t. Sometimes they just kick Iniesta. Who wouldn’t? Xavi stood there with the ball at his feet, surveying his world. Iniesta slides, glides and jiggles, still influencing but in a very different way, one closer to Messi than Xavi in reality.

But Iniesta is “better” for Spain than Barça because his roles are very different, even as both are perfect adaptations of the modified Xavi. For Spain, he is closer to Xavi, dictating play for a faster, more open Spain, an engine that runs like its pilot. It is a very specific need for a team that found its fullest flower playing a certain way but now has to change as opponents have shifted to meet the challenge that it presents.

This is also true of Barça. The difference is that the Catalans have an MSN, so Iniesta’s role is augmentative rather than a driver of play. He can kill with the same incisive kind of pass, but he plays with the three best attackers in the game which of necessity changes his role. The Spain Iniesta is indeed the “best” version because it is pure. You can bet your house that Xavi watches Spain play from behind a massive grin, because the Maestro understands how Spain and its midfield needed to adapt, and Iniesta is the perfect player to take the team to that next phase.

Barça Iniesta is, however, no less lustrous. The difference is that he is sitting deeper. He will work some magic to get loose and then feed Neymar, who will do what Iniesta used to do when he was playing off Xavi. His more advanced role for Spain means that players such as Morata and Nolito are direct beneficiaries of his capricious largesse. In many ways, the less exceptional the attackers, the more sublime Iniesta becomes. He is a player who, like mercury, adapts to his surroundings, always flowing but at the same time, going pretty much where he likes.

Iniesta should be as famous as Messi. Like the Argentine, and like the Catalan he succeeds in running the Spanish midfield, he is a once-in-a-lifetime player. And dependent upon your view of divinity and its role in crafting hunks of mortal flesh, it’s easy to imagine some deity making Iniesta, smiling and shattering the mold. The truest beauty of Iniesta is that he is whatever the world needs him to be. He’s calm, kind, goofy and unassuming, a superstar who always places the team first and foremost. His game sparkles, but not in a way that will bring him the kinds of accolades that others get. This would be true even if he could score goals, because he isn’t that kind of player. He will score and then look for a teammate to hug, because that is Iniesta, an essential player who values the team so much that it becomes everything to him.

At the most massive moments, after the most massive goals, he never seems to know what to do, almost as if he himself hasn’t come to grips with what he is. The Chelsea goal, he just ran and ran until affection overtook him, until he found a home in front of the Barça away supporters. Everything for you. The World Cup goal and again, he just ran, hopping up and down like the nerdy kid who is unaccustomed to celebrating big moments.

He’s frustrating because he always says the right thing, always does the right thing. His smile is modest, almost shy. He talks of winning awards and wanting to split it into eleven pieces. We don’t have a clue how a footballer might be in real life, but with Iniesta, it’s easy to imagine, to be assured that he is the same way. His mien is essential to shaping the player that he is. He heard about a family with a sick child, struggling to pay expenses and sent them a pair of his boots for auction. He helped his boyhood club. He’s selfless, and it’s that quality that contributes to making him Iniesta instead of, say, Banega.

It’s lovely that everyone is appreciating Iniesta. It’s also a safe bet that he thinks it’s lovely, but will tell you that there are other players who everyone should be paying attention to. Because that’s Iniesta. He’s a player who melted hearts and bitterness with a hand-scrawled tribute to a late player for Barça’s bitter crosstown rival — just because they were friends. Did Iniesta know that he would score the goal that would allow him fullest flower of that gesture? Unlikely, which makes the moment almost indescribably beautiful, that he was content to just play the match with that hand-written base layer close to his heart, playing in memory of a man that he loved. Completely, utterly selfless, something that, even with all of the flicks, spins, tricks and bits of magic, is the most wonderful thing about the man we call Don Andres.

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Pharmacy / Roger Federer, the greatest icon

« on: July 17, 2017, 10:00:25 AM »

Roger Federer is now the oldest man to win Wimbledon. At 35 years and 11 months, Roger Federer has become the oldest man to win a Wimbledon tennis title in the modern era. Federer won his eighth title against Croatian Marin Čilić in straight sets, 6-3, 6-1, 6-4. Čilić took a medical timeout between the second and third sets for what appears to have been a foot injury. Halfway through the second set he was visibly distraught and had to be calmed down by his team. In the third set, Čilić was given pills by his medical team, likely anti-inflammatories for his foot. Although Federer’s playing style has been described as “poetry in motion,” today’s match will not likely go down as the most memorable of Major finals: The two players had 31 unforced errors between them, and Čilić’s foot injury was clearly weighing heavily on his mind as he played. But still, Federer dispatched Čilić with relative simplicity, winning in under two hours. The previous oldest man to win the UK’s premier tennis tournament was was 31-year-old American Arthur Ashe in 1975. Federer, who turns 36 on August 8, won his 18th tennis Major title when he beat Rafael Nadal in January at the Australian Open.
Partially because of his concerns about the inevitable passage of time and its effects on his body, Federer decided to skip the more physically demanding clay courts of the French Open to focus on Wimbledon. And it seems to have paid off, as the Swiss won his 19th title. Federer already held the record for the most men’s Major titles previous to today’s victory, with Nadal sitting in second with 15 titles. Federer is also the only man to ever win eight Wimbledon men’s singles titles.
The US Open starts 20 days after Federer turns 36, where he could continue his dominance into his late-30s at the stadium named after Arthur Ashe.

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Allied Health Science / Intuitive Knowledge & Cognitive Skills

« on: May 18, 2017, 05:54:39 PM »

In I and Thou (1923), existentialist philosopher and scholar Martin Buber wrote, “It is simply not the case that the child first perceives an object, then, as it were, puts himself in relation to it. But the effort to establish relation comes first… In the beginning is relation – as category of being, readiness, grasping form, mould for the soul; it is the a priori of relation, the inborn Thou. The inborn Thou is realized in the lived relations with that which meets it” (p.27). This a priori (that is, existing prior to learnt experience) relation to the world forms the basis for the intuitive knowledge we have of the world. Intuitive thought then emerges from one’s total engagement with the world, through one’s whole being.

Children aren’t the only ones who have a total engagement with the world. Artists, for example, rely on the knowledge that originates from a total engagement and openness, to which they give expression through their art. But for many people, intuitive knowledge is gradually replaced by the structures of thinking we are taught. Logic then comes to replace immediate experience, although experience is infinitely more complex than reason can behold. And where reason fails us, many turn to religion.

We always have the capacity to retain some form of an intuitive understanding of the world, yet too often it is replaced by the cognitive skills we develop in school. As a result, our cognitive skills are often developed as it were in a vacuum, disassociated from our being. This disassociation creates a dependency on others with authority, or on status, or on following trends and fads. If we cannot self-regulate our thinking, we depend on others who will do it for us. This dependency robs people of their ability to enter into interdependent relationships, where their inborn relationship with the world and with themselves is intact. In his article, ‘The Impact of Philosophy for Children in a High School English Class’ (available at inter-disciplinary.net), Chad Miller says, “The continued irrelevance and disregard of the students’ experiences, questions and ideas by schools, has too often left them with the inability to think responsibly for themselves; the school has told them what to think and why to think it.” Philosophy for children on the contrary honors the inborn relationship children have with the world around them. It helps them to cultivate their inner authority, be self-critical, to self-regulate, and indeed truly be in charge of their own thinking and decisions.

Because young children have not yet developed the cognitive skills to express themselves, they use imagination, and they rely on it to convey their understanding of the world. Imagination is the language of intuitive knowledge, borne out of our unlearnt relationship with the world. If we rob children of their intuitive knowledge and imagination in order to develop their cognitive skills as rapidly as possible, we essentially rob them of this inborn relationship with the world. Thus we try to reestablish their relationship with the world and with themselves through developing their cognitive skills at the expense of that very relationship! We can train people to be very smart and knowledgeable, but at the expense of their inborn intelligence, which is rooted in a natural relationship with the world. They thus become disconnected from the world, from other people, and from themselves. And all the therapy in the world cannot make up for the inborn relationship we had at the beginning of life and have now lost. The loss also leads to dangerous consequences. Disassociated logic can allow us to do the most horrible things to the environment, other life forms, and other people, and provide justifications for it. Integrity and character may also become empty concepts, because, as Buber would say, we have replaced the ‘inborn Thou’ with the ‘It’. The I-It relationship is strictly instrumental in nature and serves the individual’s needs at the expense of the relationship they have with the world (I and Thou, p.23).

As an example, David Brooks says in his article ‘The Power of Altruism’, “When you introduce a financial incentive you prompt people to see their situation through an economic lens. Instead of following their natural bias toward reciprocity, service and cooperation, you encourage people to do a selfish cost-benefit calculation. They begin to ask, ‘What’s in it for me?’… the institutions that arouse the moral lens have withered away while the institutions that manipulate incentives – the market and the state – have expanded. Now economic, utilitarian thinking has become the normal way we do social analysis and see the world” (New York Times, July 8, 2016). And Chad Miller found that when he administered a survey on the first day of class to examine his students’ reasoning skills, they answered that they “believed school was boring, but necessary to go to college and ‘make a lot of money’” (p.2). Essentially, we have replaced a life rich in meaning for a meaningless life of riches. In the name of progress, we end up working against our own interests, increasing distrust and hostility. Buber describes the world as one in which there is a “constant swinging back and forth” of the I-It and I-Thou relationships. Yet if we are disconnected from our I-Thou relationship and only the I-It relationship determines our interactions and relations with the world and other people, no amount of ‘religion’ can make up for that loss.

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Pharmacy / The rise of drug resistance

« on: April 20, 2017, 01:38:53 PM »

On September 21st in New York, all 193 UN member states agreed to tackle the growing resistance of microbes to antibiotics. Drug-resistant infections now kill more than 700,000 people a year. On current trends, that number may reach 10m by 2050.

One measure of the problem is the Drug Resistance Index, developed by the Centre for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP), a think-tank. The index runs from zero, meaning that antibiotics are fully effective, to 100, which means pathogens are fully resistant to them. The index accounts for differences by country in the mix of drugs used and how often they fail to work. In 27 mostly European countries CDDEP has calculated the index at least twice between 2000 and 2014; four to 14 years separate the first and last year for which data required for the calculation were available in any given country. According to the index, the effectiveness of antibiotics has declined in 22 of these 27 countries. Only in Germany and Sweden have things got markedly better. In India, the poorest country in the group, the index suggests that the antibiotics used to treat most bacterial infections fail to work. The pledge of world leaders to go after the problem cannot be timelier.