A Bracing Experience

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AnotherFairportfan
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A Bracing Experience

Post by AnotherFairportfan »

So here we have some pictures of Kate's brace - first, views of the contraption alone, second a couple shots of it in use.

As i said, to those of us from what amounts to the last polio generation*, such things were more-or-less familiar sights as we grew up.
Nowadays, less so.

You can see how it's fitted to the shoe**, and how they cut into the heel to install it.
brace.jpg
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Now a couple of shots of her wearing it, and a close view of the pivot that includes a spring mechanism that keeps her foot in the attitude that's considered best.

The spring tension is adjustable by turning the tensioning screw in the tubular section on the rear of the pivot.
brace2.jpg
brace2.jpg (197.19 KiB) Viewed 9154 times
With this brace and a hemi walker, Kate can actually {slowly and with difficulty, and not all that far, yet, it's true - but what's important is that she can} walk the forty-plus feet from her bedroom to the door to the garage when she needs to go out, rather than needing to be pushed in a wheelchair.

====================

* If you're over sixty-two years old, the Salk vaccine was introduced during your lifetime; if you're sixty-five or so or older, you may {like me} recall how much our parents worried during "polio season", particularly if you lived in a city.

** Which we provided - its one of a pair of "diabetic shoes" Kate found on Amazon
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Re: A Bracing Experience

Post by Just Old Al »

Remember these well, though not quite of the generation that worried about polio season.

I remember being vaccinated along with the rest of the herd in the school gymnasium. Realizing now how long it's been since I've seen anyone in a brace like that.

Bravo to Kate for her perseverence and determination - and to you for being there for her!

Alan
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Re: A Bracing Experience

Post by Typeminer »

Just Old Al wrote:Remember these well, though not quite of the generation that worried about polio season.

I remember being vaccinated along with the rest of the herd in the school gymnasium. Realizing now how long it's been since I've seen anyone in a brace like that.

Bravo to Kate for her perseverence and determination - and to you for being there for her!

Alan
Thanks to Albert Sabin, we lined up for sugar cubes instead of the needle. Wasn't till I was much older that it sank in what a relief the vaccine was to parents. We got all the shots you needed for school. The nuns taught us that America was the greatest country in the world because we had science, and if people thought science contradicted the Word of God, they plainly misunderstood what God said.

Go Kate, and stay strong, FPF. You got a lot of psychic support out here, anyhow.
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Re: A Bracing Experience

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Typeminer wrote:The nuns taught us that America was the greatest country in the world because we had science, and if people thought science contradicted the Word of God, they plainly misunderstood what God said.

Go Kate, and stay strong, FPF. You got a lot of psychic support out here, anyhow.
{applause}. Go Typeminer! Having their heads up their own arses might muffle and garble the Gods teachings just a bit...

Indeed, FPF. Do hang on. There will be a light at the end of the tunnel, and no it's not an oncoming train.
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Re: A Bracing Experience

Post by Catawampus »

Great to hear that she's doing better, and that you're able to get things that help her out!
Just Old Al wrote:
Typeminer wrote:The nuns taught us that America was the greatest country in the world because we had science, and if people thought science contradicted the Word of God, they plainly misunderstood what God said.

Go Kate, and stay strong, FPF. You got a lot of psychic support out here, anyhow.
{applause}. Go Typeminer! Having their heads up their own arses might muffle and garble the Gods teachings just a bit...
Back in the Middle Ages, the official position of most churches (such as the Roman Catholics) was that if Science and the Bible contradicted each other, then it was Science that was right. They figured that what we consider to be the Bible is merely our own fallible human interpretation of God's work, while the real world is the actual direct work of God and so must be correct. It's a shame that so many religious branches have strayed from that philosophy.
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Re: A Bracing Experience

Post by GlytchMeister »

What Middle Ages are you talking about?

Granted, I’m not exactly a history buff but there was this one dude called Galileo who had some problems with the whole science vs the church thing. And that’s just one dude, I thought he was just the famous case and there were all manner of clashes where the church said “nope, bible’s right, you're wrong, shut up, or I’ll excommunicate/execute/assassinate you.”
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Re: A Bracing Experience

Post by Dave »

GlytchMeister wrote:What Middle Ages are you talking about?
I think of the churchly attitudes that Catawampus describes, as having come along rather later than the Middle Ages... during the Protestant Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment. It's very much a Deist or "theistic rationalist" sort of approach: that the way for humans to know the nature of God is via reason, and not by looking for miracles and other forms of supernatural intervention.
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Re: A Bracing Experience

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GlytchMeister wrote:What Middle Ages are you talking about?

Granted, I’m not exactly a history buff but there was this one dude called Galileo who had some problems with the whole science vs the church thing. And that’s just one dude, I thought he was just the famous case and there were all manner of clashes where the church said “nope, bible’s right, you're wrong, shut up, or I’ll excommunicate/execute/assassinate you.”
He was making a humorous reference to the time when he and I were young - and NO, that was NOT the Middle Ages. I recall similar statements from Da Nuns...who disdained the creationist literal nonsense. The term 'parable' was used to explain the whole God-screwed-around-for-six-days-then-pulled-an-all-nighter.

Heck, how else can you explain the duckbill platypus, or the avocado? Leftover parts.
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Re: A Bracing Experience

Post by AnotherFairportfan »

GlytchMeister wrote:What Middle Ages are you talking about?

Granted, I’m not exactly a history buff but there was this one dude called Galileo who had some problems with the whole science vs the church thing. And that’s just one dude, I thought he was just the famous case and there were all manner of clashes where the church said “nope, bible’s right, you're wrong, shut up, or I’ll excommunicate/execute/assassinate you.”
Actually, Galileo was rather later than what i think is considered the "Middle Ages" {Seventeenth Century} and it wasn't so much his doctrines he got in trouble for, it was being a contentious asshole who stirred up trouble by publicly attacking other "natural philosophers" with whom he disagreed.

I can't point you to primary sources, but the basic situation is an important plot element in one of Eric Flint's "Ring of Fire" novels.

Flint's {and other contributors to the series's} books are, of course, science fiction ... but the historical research involved in setting the scene and the portrayal of historical characters and their actions {where not altered by the intrusion of a Twenty-First Century USAian city into the middle of the Thirty Years War} seem to be correctly stated.
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Re: A Bracing Experience

Post by Typeminer »

That's my understanding about Galileo, too. It was political. The church knew damn well that he was right, but heliocentrism had lately become a political cudgel. The church was the law (and corrupt), and they wanted to control the discussion and not appear to be soft on heretics. Galileo either goaded the Pope or was set up by the Inquisition, and was sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. I think they didn't stop him from conducting further research, but it wasn't published in Italy.
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Re: A Bracing Experience

Post by AnotherFairportfan »

Typeminer wrote:That's my understanding about Galileo, too. It was political. The church knew damn well that he was right, but heliocentrism had lately become a political cudgel. The church was the law (and corrupt), and they wanted to control the discussion and not appear to be soft on heretics. Galileo either goaded the Pope or was set up by the Inquisition, and was sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. I think they didn't stop him from conducting further research, but it wasn't published in Italy.
According to Flint and his co-author, Galileo was actually friendly with Pope Urban from the days before his elevation, and Urban tried to keep the Inquisition off of him, but he kept shooting off his mouth and making enemies, both secular and clerical.
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Re: A Bracing Experience

Post by Warrl »

Yeah, Galileo was busted basically for claiming that the heliocentric theory was proven true (it wasn't - he didn't have a sufficient quantity of sufficiently precise data to do so, and neither did anyone else), and for having a very-thinly-disguised caricature of a prominent bishop who still held to the geocentric theory - said caricature being named "Idiot".

We continue to use the geocentric model for certain purposes. Because, for those purposes, it's simpler math and comes up with sufficiently-correct answers.

A logical analysis of the Theory of Relativity says that the geocentric model is just as valid as the heliocentric model. Of course, it makes the most sense to use the model that gives correct answers with simpler math. And the geocentric math starts getting hairy somewhere between LEO and the moon... (I don't recall if they ever did come up with a good long-term formula for epicycles...)
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Re: A Bracing Experience

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GlytchMeister wrote:What Middle Ages are you talking about?

Granted, I’m not exactly a history buff but there was this one dude called Galileo who had some problems with the whole science vs the church thing. And that’s just one dude, I thought he was just the famous case and there were all manner of clashes where the church said “nope, bible’s right, you're wrong, shut up, or I’ll excommunicate/execute/assassinate you.”
The relationship between science and religion has always been rather complex (to put it mildly). There have been many, many times when, for example, the Roman Catholic Church (or at least individual officials in it) moved to block certain avenues of scientific inquiry. They'd also decree that declaring specific ideas as facts were big no-no's (such as the University of Paris' list of proscribed beliefs published in 1277), and that you could get in serious trouble for trying to spread those ideas as truths.

But at the same time as it was controlling and filtering it, the Roman Catholic Church was also the main supporter and spreader of scientific inquiry in Western Europe. The Church provided funding, established schools, and copied manuscripts. In general terms, it was believed that science was a tool that would help the Church. For one thing, it could lead to new ideas and inventions that would make life easier.

Also, a basic knowledge of how the universe works is essential for identifying miracles and debunking false ones. Miracles, by definition, go against the natural laws. If you don't know what the natural laws are, then how can you recognise a miracle when it happened? All cynicism aside, most of these people truly did believe in their religion, and this sort of thing was important to them.

There's also the matter that, according to their beliefs, God created the world. It is the direct handiwork of the Creator. By studying the Bible, you're looking at something written out by a person on pages made by a person, translated by a person who copied the words of some other person. There was an understanding that the Bible was somehow divinely protected from getting too corrupted, but it was still at best a second-hand connection with God. Interpretations could go screwy. Looking at nature and natural laws skips the middle-man and gives you a direct view of God's work. Studying nature (and thus science) gives you a closer understanding of God. As Hugh of St. Victor wrote back in the 12th Century, the world around us that we can perceive with our own senses is basically a whole extra Bible given to us directly by God.

Members of the Church investigated the writings of the Classical Greek and Roman pre-scientists, and winnowed out a lot of the stuff that just didn't work (Aristotle and Plato and the rest were pagans, of course, but Christianity was often willing to accept the parts of pagan ideas that actually seemed to work). By the end of the 13th Century, the Roman Catholic Church had helped to introduce into Western Europe systems and tools for accurate measurement and time-keeping (without which Science couldn't happen), a new number system, the notion of describing the natural laws of the universe using mathematics and graphs, and a lot of important fundamentals of chemistry, biology, and physics (such as the Mean Speed Theorem). They were also starting to get the idea that, hey, maybe running experiments to test thing might be a good idea! The Middle Ages is really where Science first started to truly take form, and the Roman Catholic Church was a big part of that.

So the Church was generally in favour of investigating the world and its properties, so long as it was done in a proper and organised manner.

And that's where the difficulty came in. Heresy was something that the Church did not appreciate. The conflict came on the rare occasions where the Church made a definite point of doctrine on some matter, and then Science came up with something that seemed to go against that specific point of doctrine. The Church was actually usually very relaxed about hypothetical scenarios that involved heretical points, but if you wanted to state as a definite truth that some matter of Church doctrine was wrong then you'd better have some really solid proof.

That's where Galileo got tripped up. He was actually well after the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance. By that time, the Church had gotten a bit more prickly on the subject of heresy and disobedience due to that whole little matter of the Protestant Reformation and the European Wars of Religion and Church vs. Monarchy tensions and other such details. Galileo started publicly spreading his idea of heliocentricism as an established fact. The Pope of the time had actually been a friend of and fan of Galileo for many years, and he did apparently do a lot to cut Galileo some slack. But it ended up all becoming a big mess, and the Church decided it had to take official action and put Galileo on trial. Even during the trial, it wasn't so much a case of Religion vs. Science, since the prosecutors in the case included some people who are still recognised today as important scientists themselves. But Galileo had broken Church Law in Church lands, and so they demanded that he provide proof. And he couldn't (partly because his theory, while closer to correct than the accepted geocentric model, was still substantially wrong). So the Church ruled against him, and came down hard on his theory to make an obvious example of how heresy wouldn't be accepted.

So that shut down a whole area of scientific inquiry in Roman Catholic controlled lands, which was a big loss.

But in spite of that, Science continued and eventually developed modern leg braces, so yay!
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Re: A Bracing Experience

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And here we have an example of why I like to say I'm not a history buff. I am frequently wrong about stuff like this.

I would like to point out the fact that the whole fiasco with Galileo was taught to me in school as "religion v science" and that Galileo lost. I asked why and got "because mumblemumblemumble he was mumble questioning the bible and the word of God and the Church mumblemumblemumble." I wasn't convinced, so I went to a science teacher to get the other side of the story and that's where I got the "because the church was the most powerful social, economic, and political force in the civilized world at the time, and the outcome of the case had nothing to do with who was actually right, and everything to do with who had more power."

Granted, I am more than a little biased against... Well pretty much all things religion. So I'll admit my fault there, because I just sorta assumed my science teacher wasn't bullshitting me. Probably wasn't, just repeating what he had been told, too.

I was still in the "ask an adult" phase of learning back then. I think I'm getting better about looking stuff up myself now, but I really should look up stuff I thought I knew, too.
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Re: A Bracing Experience

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GlytchMeister wrote:And here we have an example of why I like to say I'm not a history buff. I am frequently wrong about stuff like this.

I would like to point out the fact that the whole fiasco with Galileo was taught to me in school as "religion v science" and that Galileo lost. I asked why and got "because mumblemumblemumble he was mumble questioning the bible and the word of God and the Church mumblemumblemumble." I wasn't convinced, so I went to a science teacher to get the other side of the story and that's where I got the "because the church was the most powerful social, economic, and political force in the civilized world at the time, and the outcome of the case had nothing to do with who was actually right, and everything to do with who had more power."
Well, that was sort of the problem that Galileo had: the Roman Catholic church wasn't as much of a powerful social, economic, and political force at the time (of course, the most powerful such force at the time was probably China, and the Ottoman Empire hadn't quite started into its spectacular downwards slide yet so was quite formidable still itself). It had lost a good bit of its power and influence. The Reformation had torn it apart, the Counter Reformation was turning things upside-down within the organisation. Most European monarchs were growing more confident in resisting Church influence, moving on in the direction of becoming the absolute monarchs of the Early Modern years (in the Middle Ages, monarchs had barely any more power than any other noble had, and spent more time pleading in court rather than waving swords around battlefields), and a sense of nationalism was starting to develop in many lands and was distracting people from religious pursuits. So the Church was feeling very vulnerable and angry, and was more likely to lash out.

Of course, “the Church” was made up of thousands of clergy and many more laypersons, so individual reactions towards anything varied from person to person and diocese to diocese. Even during the most liberal periods of the Roman Catholic church there would have been officials who were insanely conservative and close-minded, and during the most conservative time officials who were easy-going. In the midst of the Galileo trial, the various people involved likely worked off of all sorts of different motives. Some may have been all in an uproar over heresy and hellfire, others more concerned over the more worldly aspects of Church law and power (I don't remember offhand if Galileo was working in the Papal States at the time when the fuss started, which would have put him directly under the secular power of the Vatican rather than just under the less imperative power of its religious authority).
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Re: A Bracing Experience

Post by DinkyInky »

Just Old Al wrote:
GlytchMeister wrote:What Middle Ages are you talking about?

Granted, I’m not exactly a history buff but there was this one dude called Galileo who had some problems with the whole science vs the church thing. And that’s just one dude, I thought he was just the famous case and there were all manner of clashes where the church said “nope, bible’s right, you're wrong, shut up, or I’ll excommunicate/execute/assassinate you.”
He was making a humorous reference to the time when he and I were young - and NO, that was NOT the Middle Ages. I recall similar statements from Da Nuns...who disdained the creationist literal nonsense. The term 'parable' was used to explain the whole God-screwed-around-for-six-days-then-pulled-an-all-nighter.

Heck, how else can you explain the duckbill platypus, or the avocado? Leftover parts.
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Re: A Bracing Experience

Post by AnotherFairportfan »

Heck, how else can you explain the duckbill platypus, or the avocado? Leftover parts.
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