Oscillator

He doesn't have lung or liver cancer, he has colon cancer, with matastasies to liver and lungs. It's an important distinction, because the cancer's behavior is determined by the cells that originally gave rise to it. Those are the cells that have travelled and taken root, causing new tumors elsewhere.

My g.f.'s granny had colon cancer with matastasies to her liver, years ago, and was given 6 months to live, assuming treatment. She preferred not to be treated, lasted three years nonetheless, and was in decent shape for most of that.

My g.f. says her granny was a tough old bird who simply wasn't ready to go. She was annoyed at the doctor's death sentence, and determined to prove him wrong. She was old though--mid 80's--wearied, and passed later, when she was darn good and ready.

Right. The fact is Jim's kid is in a hellua fix, however, it is also a fact that well-supported non-stressed people recover from standardized wounds 9 days faster than age-matched Alzheimer's care-givers. Fearful patients going into surgery have much higher infection rates (don't have the figures handy). Attitude makes a huge difference.

My mom's seen it all -- she's been treating cancer patients nearly as long as Jim's been designing electronics. She often reports that patients who are involved in and participate in their care fare *much* better. Often, she spots them, and knows who'll do well and who won't. Patients who merely show up to be worked on, passively, like bringing their car to a mechanic, don't do as well. Patients who are distraught don't fare as well.

Why? Poorly understood, of course. Scads of hard science shows fear and distress measureably and dramatically suppress immune function, while prayer, meditation, and visualization improve it. Maybe that's why. Or maybe not. But it's real.

The upshot is that Jim's kid *can* improve his chances a lot simply by choosing to.

Heartfelt best wishes to Jim and family,

James Arthur

[snip]

Thanks!

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |

| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

That's just a correlation.

As I said before, maybe the fearful patients can sense that they are sicker than the more confident ones.

I don't see any basis for this conclusion in the above correlation. What's your basis for claiming causation?

What's your basis for favoring this over the alternative explanation that suppressed immune function causes fear and distress? (Or that some as-yet unidentified factor causes both.)

Is there really a way to do a double blind study where random patients are distressed or reassured to see how they survive surgery?

Forget the damned oscillator. This is the book I was thinking about, a learned cell biological theoretical basis for the power of self-healing:

The Biology Of Belief: Unleashing The Power Of Consciousness, Matter And Miracles- Bruce Lipton

Cool, but entirely unsupported by peer review, or any other scientific process.

-Chuck

Check the references section, and look up the meaning of "synthesis"- it is understood to be hypothetical but plausible scientific conjecture in some things and strong observation of experimental results in others. The subject matter is mainstream science. Unconvinced? Go take a leap.

Personally I'm a non-believer, but who's to say... half the prayer groups in Phoenix have been activated by our many friends.

Duane went home yesterday, started chemo today.

Now asking my wife/his mother to make all the home-cooked things... real beef burritos, etc ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

OK. I don't like railing U5, because it may do funny things to the delay around the loop, and waste power... some opamps get weird when you do this. And the diode hard clipping creates more distortion than you'd get if you soft-clipped the tops of the feedback but left it sorta sinusoidal.

I'd expect that you might get more distortion, especially 2nd harmonic, in real life, as compared to the sim.

You did ask.

I should post my 1-transistor, low-distortion, super-amplitude-stable oscillator, which I did as a kid, for the Boresight Alignment System on the C-5A.

John

[snip]

Please do ;-)

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |

| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Yes, of course. One supposes that competent clinicians are competent enough to anticipate this objection and compare outcomes between patients in similar condition, eliminating your concern.

The section you quoted below was the basis, as well as the data from my mom. I don't expect *you* to believe her reports -- you don't know her. I do. She's sharp, and she's treated god knows how many cancer patients these past 30 years. That's what she does.

That's certainly an appealing explanation. With any illness, of course distress and anxiety are natural; people who overcome these are the exception. They have better outcomes.

Standardized questionaires could easily be used to assess anxiety. One study compared patients' wound-healing with and without relaxation training prior to surgery.

Here's some info on effect of stress on wound-healing:

Exercise helps too:

Stress affects lizards too:

which hypothesizes: when psychologically stressed, energy is diverted from the immune system (fact), presumably to make it available for a hasty escape (hypothesis).

Being presumptuous, we presume that lizards do not predict, rejoice, or lament their impending fates.

Also, note that wound-healing, like recovering from cancer, is an immune response.

I recall a year or so ago it was reported that exercising breast cancer survivors had stunningly lower recurrance rates. I'm personally curious to know whether that'll turn out to be due either to the exercise iitself, or vitamin D obtained thereby. (A credible guy on National Public Radio mused not long ago that vitamin D deficiency is more common than thought, and believes this contributes to a large number of cancers.)

Sorry for the late reply ... I missed your post.

Best, James Arthur

Single transistor? That would almost certainly be some kind of frequency selective positive feedback into the BE junction of a CE for natural limiting of amplitude- say through a bridged-T feedback. That would limit out to loop gain of one- and play with the DC bias point for low distortion.

I'll post it to abse later... my camera's not handy. It's actually...

common-base.

includes frequency trim, but no other adjustments

frequency tc below 50 ppm/K

amplitude exactly predictable and repeatable, essentially zero tc, pretty much zero component sensitivity; that was a requirement to drive the Talyvel inclinometers. [1]

total of 5 cheap parts.

In the meantime, speculation is welcome.

John

[1] dang, they haven't changed much but the color!

This Talyvel inclinometer was some kind of RVDT? From what I see about these things, the amplitude and distortion requirements are whole percentage points and not a lot of effort was expended on producing super pure and stable sine wave generation.

The one we used has a lamination suspended on wires, that moves with inclination and varies the reluctance of a couple of coils, a lot like an LVDT. I think it's filled with oil for damping. I used this oscillator to excite it, and a synchronous detector+lowpass filter to condition the output. Amplitude stability was important, distortion much less so. It also turns out that the output is fairly nonlinear and asymmetric at larger inclinations, so I had to compensate for that. This was about 1972, and I was just a brat, so I can't claim it was the most brilliant design possible. I just thought the oscillator was cute.

I had the guys in the machine shop donate a 55-gallon drum. We placed it on the ground-floor concrete slab, filled it with sand, and clamped a 2" thick machined-flat steel plate on top. The guys fabbed a neat platform, pivoted on ball bearings, driven by a micrometer, so I could crank in angles with arc-second precision (finding horizontal is easy: just reverse the Talyvel.) It worked great as long as nobody walked around nearby and bent the slab.

This was part of the Boresight Alignment Kit for the C-5A. It worked with a bunch of fixtures, lasers, and retroreflectors to align a bunch of stuff, inertial guidance, compasses, radar, things like that. I got to do the laser power supply, too.

John

Oscillators have always been one of my favorite things, and simple ones that perform nicely, doubly so... but it still is just a double coil Hartley ;-)... probably invented when you were in diapers.

I was doing stuff like that in a laser laboratory at the university of Maryland, in a similar time frame. Seeing the vibration from a person walking down the hall, being transmitted through air suspension legs and into an interferometer bolted onto a 2000 pound optical table gives one new insight into his understanding of how movable the unmovable really is.

-Chuck Harris

Before. Also invented before the transistor. What's fun about the oscillator is the way the amplitude is regulated, not by hard limiting and not by transconductance nonlinearity, but by peak detection and feedback gain control.

You can say "that's just a Hartley" or you could say "it's really cool the way the amplitude limits and the way the tc's cancel." Different people have different attitudes about stuff like this.

Yeah, it's fun to do mechanical stuff now and then, and not just electronics.

John

Definitely, but I was thinking of when the transistorized version of the old tube Hartley was first tried. It had to have been before '63, but I suspect that it was within a few years of the invention of the transistor.

What's fun about the

Well, I think it's cool how a emitter follower creates its negative feedback control, but that's the nature of this business, lots of little cool things that we all take for granted.

If I could support myself, and my family, in the manner to which we have become accustomed, I would happily spend the rest of my life providing EE support for a university research lab. It is a great job for the jack-of-all-trades types like myself... but alas, there is barely enough money in it to support an already well supported grad student.

-Chuck Harris

That's about what Win does, I think. It's fun to be around all the physics and stuff, as a dilettante, without the tedium of having to get a PhD and all the post-doc stuff. Plus, it gives you time to write books (well, two editions anyhow.)

John

Oh Fuck, Jim, I just read this thread, and wept.

I cannot offer my prayers as I do not believe in deities, but please know that my thoughts are with you and your family.

I am impressed with many of the comments though; on the whole, engineers are a smart bunch of people.

Regards, Terry