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"Dilbert" Creator Gets Voice Back
Scott Adams lost his voice 18 months ago to a disorder called Spasmodic Dysphonia. One day, it returned. He is apparently the first person in history to recover from this malady. Read his account. It is inspirational. I can't find any other word for it.
Stop using the Enlightenment icon for unrelated stories, kdawson. I don't think it means what you think it means.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Fellow Dilbertites,
:)
It seems the great overloard Adams was in fact inflicted by the great malady. Rejoice at his miraculous recovery!
PS - I was quite confused at first as to the authenticity of this until I got goog-learned. It seems it really does exist, he very well may have had it, and if he recovered was indeed a miracle. However, it could also be an elaborate ruse, as I would expect from a satirist of his pedigree.
That leaves me speechless.
Sorry...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
While teaching the course his voice was like a hoarse whisper. He characterised it as having "forgotten" how to speak. But while telling the class about his voice, he said he could sing. And suddenly as singing his voice was loud and strong.
I wished he did that for the whole course.
In what way would pretending to have a rare illness and then pretending to be cured be satire? There is a difference between "lies" and "satire."
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
Wikipedia has a nice article on Spasmodic Dysphonia.
As the blog indicates, this is thought to be a neurological condition. When I was studying AI as an undergrad, we learned a lot about neural networks. This seems like the sort of thing that could happen if the brain's speech area's neurons somehow became trained to stop delivering impulses for "normal" speech. In this case, it would be theoretically possible to train the network back to normal levels. Of course, it could be something completely different.
Here's wishing Scott the best.
Mr Adams is extremely good at thinking creatively at problems. In the back of one of his books ( i can't remember which ) he talks about his experimentation with affirmations. It was extremely interesting to read about his testing and just the way he thinks. I envy his ability to reason through and logically deciefer things he doesn't initially understand.
Nice to hear you got your voice back.. now get back to drawing funny stuff!
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
I swear if I were him I'd keep using the Enlightenment icon for stories of inspiration just for the near-violent reaction it gets. No offense, but you're all rather uptight in an amusing sort of way.
I think you missed the point - the boneheaded stuff is in Dilbert *because* it occurs in your office. How many dilbert cartoons have you read, and thought - he's been round here looking through the windows!
:-)
Its basically observational comedy - standups do it all the time, and it works. Find something that people recognise and emphasise the parts of it that are dysfunctional. I suppose we laugh about it because we'd cry otherwise
Thanks, I changed this. There really is no perfectly appropriate topic for this story.
I've been fascinated with speech conditions, primarily because of the nature of how people end up compensating and communicating. It's definitely related to something neurological, because scientists have shown that, for example, you use different parts of your brain when you speak personally vs when you sing. I've also seen people who, when they act on stage or in screen, speak in perfect diction, tone, and with great command, but if asked to improvise or speak informally, they say umm a lot and/or seem very nervous. A prepared speech in front of many people would often work, neurologically, the same way as an acting or singing performance.
I wish Scott Adams the best. He's one of the gods in the geek pantheon, and it would be sad for him to suffer so when he brings joy to so many of us.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Reminds me of a Monty Python sketch where one of the characters was unable to say the letter "c" because of a trauma he had suffered as a sbhoolboy, so he used "b" instead. Midway through the sketch, it was pointed out to him that he could talk normally if he instead used "k" for "c".
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
In honor of this situation, I say we rename the disease to Dilbert's Syndrome. Note how Dilbert has no mouth? Think about it :)
;)
You think this is callous? Far from it! Again we name it this way in order to honor the first person who kicked it. And I think Scott would enjoy the irony of having a neurological disease named after one of his characters. Scott Adams is all about Irony
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I recently stumbled across his book God's Debris (Free PDF file) at http://images.ucomics.com/images/pdfs/sadams/godsd ebris.pdf. I'm not real a big fan of Dilbert and only read a handful of the comics but this book is very interesting.
Why? Because some of us are actually interested in Enlightenment's development and upcoming release. As it is this is something very much like bait and switch. I see the icon, and get a craptasic story instead of something related to E. Is it so fucking hard to cook up a human interest icon? Maybe a fluffy kitten, or a pink pony?
This is a great idea, and I don't know why you were modded to zero. We need a human-interest type of category. I suggest a kitten crossed with a pony, like the skull and crossbones. I for one, welcome our new kitten/pony icon/category overlords!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Here are two facts that align with TMS:
- it doesn't have a well-described physical mechanism -- i.e. doctor's don't understand specifically the physical mechanism of the diease
- the fact that it is a phenomena of the muscles align with other TMS diagnoses -- in this case paralysation instead of oxygen deprivation.
Now before any of you claim that the two are mutually contradictory, understand this: the doctors don't have any explanation for *why* Scott's muscles are paralysed. They just are. They have no reason or cause not to be working; they just don't. There is no diease, such as injury, bacteria, virus, or anything that would have paralysed these otherwise working muscles. They just aren't working. But, the person can sing.The fact that Scott was able to work his way out of it through self-hypnosis, visualization, and practice, seems to indicate that it was something in the mind. Sarno's course of treatment for TMS includes such activities. He also recommends psychotherapy for dealing with emotions.
In fact, in Sarno's recent book _The Divided Mind_, he recounts a story about a famous turn-of-the-century hypnotist who was able to cure a person's muteness, while they were under hypnosis.
I'm not in favor of going to herbs and drumming for medicine. But it seems to me that emotional issues causing physical problems are an unexplored and undertreated area of modern American medicine.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Does this have anything to do with the return of Loud Howard? (I wonder?)
Mine was of a much more temporary nature but still frightening.
I had been playing basketball at the gym one evening and took a good elbow to the head down in the post that put me on the floor. Hurt, but didn't knock me out or anything. I got up and continued playing the rest of the game. I didn't think much of it at the time. I went home, grabbed a shower and headed for bed. I was single at the time so I didn't chat with anyone at home.
The next day I got up, felt fine, went to work. Someone came over to ask me a question and as I responded, the words were just a jumble. I couldn't pronounce anything. Sounded like I was just mumbling some unintelligible garbage.
My vocal cords were fine. I could make sounds. I could understand people. I could write responses on paper. I just couldn't form words. I headed to the ER.
Anyhow there was nothing they could do for me. The scans showed no dangerous swelling that needed immediate attention, but obviously something had been short circuited in my speech center. I took me a good month+ to get back to where I could speak more or less fluidly again.
For me, it wasn't a "one day I could talk again" sort of thing. I had to work at it every day. I'd practice speaking in the mirror. I could speak very very slowly if I concentrated on each sound I wanted to make.
Anyhow I just wanted to convey some sympathy towards Scott Adams' situation.
I really mean it, and you're better off reading it and skipping the glurge-ridden replies to his blog entry. One's right out of AA, which degenerates into some sort of e.e.cummings work that makes me wonder if the author fell off the wagon while typing it. Another respondent details how her husband beat necrotizing fasciitis with the power of positive thinking ... sigh.
I really do like to be happy for people's good news, really, but listening to the way some folks say it just gives me twitches.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
There are some similarities, and it's certainly possible to model biological neurons and systems in a machine. Those models will bear some similarities to neural networks used in classifying tasks, but there are also similarities to a whole range of (other) graph problems. It's kind of like the relation between ray-tracing and triangle/Z-buffer based rendering. The latter is a way to approximate the former, sort of. They have some similarities, and programmable hardware that's good for doing the latter might be tweaked to do the former as well, but you don't get a raytracer just by cranking up the polygon count, as the whole strength of the normal rendering paradigm is based on greatly simplifying assumptions that are centered on Getting Stuff Done.
Yet in many ways medicine is still in the dark ages - there's so much we don't know or even begin to understand about the human body.
Why?
I know this is offtopic, but what the heck:
As a physician I feel qualified to respond. Care to lend parts of your body for experimentation? I can't promise you that you'll survive. I can't promise that you won't be disfigured. And I can't promise that you won't die from the consequences of some unforseen side-effect. No? I didn't think so somehow. We're bound by ethics to try things only when we're almost completely sure they will work and "do no harm".
I find it amusing how you can compare say coronary artery bypass grafting, or a laparoscopic hernia reduction, with Egyptians drilling holes in people's heads. They did it, yes. Now how many people survived the procedure?
As for the X rays and film, I believe I can introduce you to the CT scanner, a device now so affordable that most hospitals have several - even one _inside_ the ER. The film is still used for a hard copy, but it's printed by computer. Oh speaking of X-rays, I suggest you have a look at all the virtual endoscopy that's being done now, with 3-D modelling software. I can see inside your blood vessels without even touching your body. Let's not mention MRI's or PET scans shall we? No X-rays involved there at all. Quite a bit of progress since 1800. Radiology is one of the fields that is booming. Those radiologists are going to put us all out of work, I tell you.
The most common method for curing infections? Actually penicillin is hardly used nowadays, at least not at home. I invite you to look into penicillin derived synthetics such as the cephalosporins, aminopenicillins, ureidopenicillins. Then we have entire new classes of antibiotics, from macrolides to fluoroquinolones to aminoglucosides. Never heard of imipenem and meropenem? Most people haven't. How about vancomycin, or linezolid for that matter? I just named almost a dozen different families of antibiotics, each with different biochemical mechanisms.
Pain relief? Aspirin you say? What about all the non NSAID analgesics - metamizol, acetaminophen. Or all the other non-aspirin NSAIDs - diclofenac, ketoprophen, sulindac, indomethazine? Oh and for pain relief we can even talk about tramadol, or the use of anti-epileptic/anti-depressant medications like carbamazepine and floxetine. How about newer stuff, like Gaba-pentin? Then there's the opiods. We used to only have morphine. Now we have demerol, fentanyl, and a host of others....
Why isn't medicine evolving as quickly as, say, computing has over the last 100 years?
Just because you can't see the progress doesn't mean it's not there. Today we doctors must stay current more than ever. Some collegues estimate that almost everything we learn in medical school is obsolete within five years of graduation. And the pace is accelerating.
There are lots of diseases we still can't treat or cure, but now we understand why. The cure, however, is sometimes impossible due to the very nature of the disease. Many diseases are the manifestation of intracellular problems: abnormal gene expression, deficient receptors or intracellular messengers,etc. There's no way we can reach inside every single cell and fix what is wrong. So we make do with medications that block certain metabolic pathways or receptors, increase certain substances in the cells or body, or decrease others, to compensate for the defect.
Yet people still die. We run into new problems as we push back the average life expectancy. And society creates new ones. You had a far far greater chances of dying of a heart attack 50 years ago. Nowadays the survival is around 90% provided you make it to a hospital in the first hour. However people are having heart attacks at far younger ages due to the western sedenta
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
So wait... that means he's a girl?
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
I'm confused. You are supposed to "Do no harm" yet you handed this guy his own ass with this comment? :)
As a surgeon, I was actually pretty impressed with his skill at minimizing blood loss while performing a proctocephelectomy.