Anatomy and Art

Yesterday was a good day.  Yesterday I saw something that I created on a computer, 3D printed into the real world.  It was a silly plastic mustache for a mustache competition my company held.  I work with a man who has a 3D printer and he asked me about making him an 3D file that he could then print for the competition.  It was a simple mustache with our logo on it, made to fit around a bottled beverage so that the mustache appears in place as you take a drink.

I’m going with just a small image here since I really don’t know much about logo rules outside of putting it on our formal images.  But I just can’t not show this at all, because well look.  Those were just computer files the other day.  That was the logo, and the mustache didn’t exist at all until I created the paths in Illustrator.  I brought everything into Cinema 4D and extruded those paths individually, gave them filleted caps, and exported .stl files for Jon who has the 3D printer.  And Jon plugged that in to his 3D printer and even played around with different colors, stopping the printer and swapping materials between the logo line and the mustache lines.  We totally pulled digital files into real 3D reality.  It’s awesome, and I want to make more things.

Then I also found myself in a unique set of circumstances yesterday to need  a figure to place into a Cinema 4D scene for a homework question.  Plan A was put on hold, but I had a little time to try something and also just happened to have a friend in town who was so kind as to help me so that I wouldn’t be taking someone else away from their job while I worked on honing this process.  I have been wanting to try something with that 123D catch software ever since I heard about it at the Medical Illustrators Conference.  So Ernest held very very still for me while I ran all around him taking pictures of him and uploading them into this software.  We tried indoors, and we tried outdoors.

We never got it quite right, but I am able to export .obj files for either of those captures and bring them into Cinema 4D and literally place Ernest there on a virtual field.  And it’s all just created by taking a series of photographs around him that the software stitches together.  It’s awesome enough that we are totally going to try this at least one more time over the weekend while he is visiting here.

So yeah, yesterday basically started with seeing the success of pulling the digital world into the physical one, and went on to make some really fun headway into being able to capture the physical world and merge it into a digital scene.  Exciting stuff!

This morning I thought that I had things to say, but tonight I can’t remember what they were.  If you are a regular reader, you may have noticed lately that my site has been down a lot.  The issue seems to have something to do with my photo gallery site and php vulnerability that keeps knocking out my photo gallery, painting gallery, and this blog all in one swoop.  It will be resolved.  And I apologize for the inconvenience of late.

Here, let me make it up to you with a couple awesome images from Danny Quirk‘s self dissection series.  He is doing some really cool stuff.

I encourage you all to go and check him out on your own!

Sometimes I am reminded how very lucky I am to be making a living doing something that I care about.  Seems like I’ve had a few conversations lately, and overheard a few more that have me thinking about that.  I may get a little overwhelmed with feeling busy sometimes, or get a little head spun about the details of whatever I’m working on from time to time.  My job takes up a lot of my time and a lot of my brain.   It would be really hard to put anywhere near the kind of time and attention I put into my job into something I didn’t care about for this long.  I’m lucky to work where I do, and to work with the people who I do.  And I know that working in a field that I care so much about affords me the opportunity to be better at it.  It’s funny how that works.  Maybe the best advice I can think to give to young people starting new careers is to look for work that they care about, or even just reasons to care about the work that they find.  It can make all the difference.

There is something awesome coming to Austin.  This weekend I finally made it to one of the planning meetings for the Austin Art Authority.  Things are still in the early phases, but it’s looking like we’re on the verge of getting an amazing venue for artists of all kinds in Austin, and a supportive community is coming together improve education in the arts, promote local artists, and get people talking to one another.  Keep your eyes open for this one.  I think it’s going to be good.

One of our speakers at the AMI conference, I’m thinking it must have been Andrew Hessel, spoke about artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg who is making portraits based on DNA from found discarded cigarette butts and gum.

About a week later I saw this article circulating around from the Smithsonian
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/artscience/2013/05/creepy-or-cool-portraits-derived-from-the-dna-in-hair-and-gum-found-in-public-places/
which included this photo taken by Dan Phiffer, of Heather posing alongside her own DNA derived portrait.

The process, as I understand it, involves extrapolating a DNA sequence, and looking for particular genomic traits and likelihoods to construct a facial model.  She then uses a 3D printer to print the model out and finishes off the sculpture.

To answer the question posed by the Smithsonian article, it’s really pretty damn cool, and *also* super creepy in it’s implications.  In an age when Americans are panicking about their online actions being tracked, the idea of our very streets being hacked for the details of our whereabouts, and health information is downright spooky.  I know I’d rather discover such capabilities from an awesome art project like this than by really any other way though.

Okay, so the last time I wrote in, it was a race to see how quickly I could get something coherent down before falling asleep.  Let’s see if I can slow down now and try to recap things a little better this time.

**note – A lot of letters that are meant to be printed after people’s names have been left off for the sake of my sanity in trying to get a recap down.  Rest assured we had a lot of degree toting folks out**

My coworker and I arrived in Utah last Tuesday to settle in to our room and be up and ready for an early Wednesday of workshops on ePMV and AutoPACK with Graham Johnson, and co-instructors Fabian de Kok-Mercado, and Merry S. Wang.  We use ePMV all the time at Sapling Learning to explore and illustrate molecules.  It’s a plug-in that works with the major 3D animation programs, and probably works best with Cinema 4D.  It reads pdb files, and when you pull them from the Protein Data Bank, they come chalk full of all kinds of information.  The polio virus molecule image that I posted last time was created using data labeled as 2plv. What was especially cool about this, was that we learned how to pull in a repeated portion of a molecule, undo the auto setting for it to center to origin, and then apply another setting that repeats the biological unit to fill out the entire molecule.

We also got our hands into AutoPACK which I didn’t have previous experience with, but I’m looking forward to exploring further now.  It allows you to pack molecules appropriately into spaces like in blood serum or cytoplasm.  Actually, it lets you pack any objects that you might want organically into any defined space.  It’s a cool trick, and one that I’m sure will come in handy.

We also had the big salon opening that night.  There were walls full of fantastic pieces, as well as those that needed tables, there were interactives, animations, all sorts of awesome.  I had “Translation” showing that I made last year with Sapling Learning.

The next day started up early with the mentor breakfast.  I haven’t participated on either end of the mentor program as of yet, but it seems like a nice idea.  Over breakfast, a man named David mentioned doing a little model sculpting on the side and he told me about this stuff, CX5 that sounds really cool.  I may have heard of it once before, but I’ve definitely never played with it.  I think I want to.

We then caught Dr. Roberta Ness‘s talk on Innovation.  She spoke a lot about frames, meaning expectations or what is conceivable from a particular mindset.  She spoke about the power of metaphors, and the importance of frame breaking.  And she reported that innovation and creativity has been dwindling in America.  And told us that creativity can be taught.  It was a good talk, and one that I have called pieces of to memory on several occasions since.

Then Jens Krüger spoke to us about 3D data visualization rendering systems that he has been working on.  I’m not sure I really got the full potential of everything he was showing us, but there were some really nice representations he had to show.  Seemed like he kept coming back to the notion of looking for more problems for all of these solutions they were developing. I think that they will do just fine finding ways to implement their technology.

We had the big business luncheon that day, and afterwards Chris Converse spoke about the future of web animation.  He showed us some fun examples of html5 simple interactives and spoke a bit about Adobe’s Edge Animate.  It is on my list of things to do, to explore that particular software, so the little tour was much appreciated.

After that I caught Tim Butler’s talk on past and present mobile technology.  Having grown up along side the advent of mobile phones, it was interesting going through their history, and I might someday have to make my own personal timeline of communication technology.  I’ve pretty well gone from corded phones and pen pals to Facebook, blogging, and a smart phone with a whole lot of steps in between, but even more steps outright missed, as Tim’s lecture really pointed out.

I also attended a workshop on improving one’s posture and work habits for healthier working with Esther Smith.  We went over some stretches and work station arrangements.  She recommended finding a MacKensie physical therapist to anyone looking for someone to work with them on improving their own work set up and personal habits.

Friday morning started with a talk from medical illustrator, Dr. Carlos Machado.  His work was beautiful.  And the only note I took, was reminding myself to never take up gouache.  Seriously, that stuff sounds like such a pain to work with.  But man, Dr. Machado has really mastered the art. The way he paints skin, just blew me away.

Next we had Andrew Hessel come out and talk about genetics, nanotechnology, bacteria, synthetic virology, and all kinds of teeny tiny awesome that could easily be imagined turning creepy, but his enthusiasm was contagious!  We learned about Project Cyborg, and iPhone controlled roaches, and how Kickstarter is becoming a good funding platform for scientific innovation.  He also brought up the new wave of kids working with Autodesk software, namely 123D.  I don’t know how robust the software they’re using is, but I can’t help but think that those kids will have such a great edge on understanding how to communicate in software, and understanding the inherent usefulness of geometry and physics as they go through their early math and science classes.

Peleg Top was next on the stage to talk about the importance of marketing and how marketing is more than just advertizing.  At the time, I didn’t feel like I was that in to all the marketing fervor, but while he was talking I scribbled down a couple of good ideas, so maybe it was a more effective talk than I’d realized.  One was for Sapling Learning, and the other was a website design strategy for selling my paintings online.  Here’s hoping I can follow up on them.

After lunch, we reconvened to hear Brian Dunham discuss his strategy for improving the surgical atlas.  He was bringing work to a digital format, and emphasizing more of the routine surgical steps that accompany the surgical cuts and maneuvers themselves.  It sounded like he was doing good work.

And the next one I’m still pretty excited about.  Brandon Pletsch, who I had met earlier and gotten a little mini view on what he would talk about, and Adam Pellerite spoke to us about Autodesk’s 123D Catch application.  It’s a free app for the iPhone, or a desktop app if you use a PC.  It lets you take a bunch of photos of something, or someone holding very still, and the software weaves the images together ala stereophotogrammetry to create a 3D image that you can look at from different views, and even bring in to your 3D software as an obj file with a photorealistic texture map.  So far I’ve managed to capture a moderately good 3D image of my co-worker Alex but I’m not sure if she’d want me to post that attempt on the internet, so I’ll just snag the shared image of this guy from the website to give you an idea.

They were using it mostly for capturing dissections.  I can only imagine having something like that to study from when you’re trying to memorize the spacial relationships in anatomy.  And I am excited about finding ways to use this one in future endeavors!

After that I caught Tonya Hines (our new AMI president)’s talk on Open Access publishing and contract dilemmas.  After so much attention at work lately on the various kinds of licenses out there, this was especially interesting.  I honestly had no idea just how varied people’s perceptions were on what the expression “commercial use” means.  I may have even submitted my animation to the salon incorrectly, I was so convinced that anything that was sold was commercial.  But apparently a lot of people take more the advertizing definition of commercial when deciding what is or isn’t a commercial use.  And people put out creative commons licenses without realizing just how varied that label is.  I’ve always found contracts and permissions to be difficult terrain, but this talk definitely made me take note of a couple pit falls I hadn’t yet thought of.

That night we had the awards banquet.  My animation didn’t take any awards this time, but one of my teachers from grad school, John Daugherty, was recognized for his long time legacy of fantastic work.  I’m glad that I got to see that.  I learned a lot from him in school.  He’s pretty much the guy in charge over at my old biomedical visualization department as I understand it now.  Go John!

Then Saturday morning, people were thrown to find themselves eating breakfast to Fredric Hellman’s talk on criminology and solving violent crimes.  I heard a number of people lament not having been ready for some of those photographs over their morning coffee and bagel.  But he did present an interesting area where medical illustrators could conceivably go and be of value.  It was also interesting to hear a little about how these violent murder cases are worked out.

Christine Young then delivered the presidential address, and we were then off to the tech showcase.  These are generally a fun opportunity to walk around and check out all different sorts of expertise.  I know I learned a little about Zbrush, picked up a few C4D tips, was introduced to VMD, but I was probably most excited about the guy making guitars using autocad software and a CNC milling machine in his basement.  I mean come on, that’s just awesome.  It also plays into my dream of just being able to just make everything I need rather than getting stuck in so many shopping loops as seems to so often happen.

The event ended in a final speech from Carl Zimmer, who has some really interesting work on evolution and all kinds of crazy creatures.

After his talk, the AMI presidential gavel was passed from Christine Young to Tonya Hines.  And then a good portion of the conference attendees landed in the hotel bar to unwind a touch after such an educationally packed event.

Enjoying Salt Lake City, Utah for the 2013 AMI Conference.  We’re only 2 days in so far, but I’ve already learned a lot and met a lot of people.  Yesterday, my coworker Alex and I attended workshops for the epmv (embedded python molecular viewer) and auto pack plug-ins.  Graham Johnson was leading the workshops and we learned a lot about the capability of pdb files, and how to work with selections, we explored a lot of the hierarchy within the way molecules are expressed coming through that program and how to manipulate those settings, how to work with repeating biological units in molecules, and it was really my first foray into using auto-pack at all.  I kind of liked my polio virus molecule render.

And then today we heard a variety of speakers, starting with a talk on innovation by Dr. Roberta Ness, new manners of data visualization, and the future of web animation and even a talk on good healthy working posture and habits.

I am on the verge of falling asleep here, otherwise I’d say a little more about it all.  These medical illustrators seem to get up early though, so I’ll have to try and say some more about it all later.

And as of tomorrow, I’m off to the AMI conference in Utah.  I leave my fellow local ladies to storm the capitol for healthcare rights without me.  And I’m off to learn from epmv’s creator Graham Johnson about the awesome workings of that plug-in and how I can get the most out of my molecules in Cinema 4D, and pick up all kinds of other nuggets of awesome along the way.  Who knows, I may even manage to pick up an award for the Translation animation!  Woot!

A couple of weeks ago I attended Lakes of Fire, the regional burn event of the Great Lakes area.  It was a good trip, although a difficult one too due to the loss of Drew (aka True) Bradford, just days before my flight into Chicago.

He is missed by many.

A brilliant mind and artist in his own right, he was always working on something.  We had a memorial for him out at the event, and his old camp showed off the lights he’d made sonar receptive so they would always flash with the beat of the music.  I think that the last long talk I had with him was several months back when he wanted to know everything I’d picked up about prosthetics, in particular ocularistry.  He wanted to make an animatronic sculpture with eyes that could see via camera and allow someone hiding elsewhere to speak to people through the guise of this creature.  Prior to that he hit me up for tips on using my anaplastology know-how into an awesome Halloween mask.  I still have stone in my studio to this day because of his ideas.  He was a seemingly unstoppable force, and it is weird to think of him as having stopped.

He is truly missed by many.

Yesterday was the 4th of July, and I have to say that I found myself having a hard time getting into any kind of patriotic spirit for the holiday.  I am living in Austin, Texas again these days and those of you who watch a lot of news probably already know that this city has become a major battle ground for women’s healthcare, and specifically abortion procedures.

About a week and a half ago, Senator Wendy Davis filibustered for about 11 hours to keep a bill from being pushed through that would change the standards for any clinic offering abortions such that we are likely to see 42 clinics close out of the 47 we have practicing today.  That would leave Texas with only 5 such clinics left in operation.  She was stopped short of her 13 hour goal by three strikes.  One of which was that she received aide, when someone helped her put on a back brace.  Technically this is against the rules.  But the other two were for being off topic or “not germane” as it was stated in court.  The first time she was said to be off topic, it was for mentioning Planned Parenthood.  And the last time it was for mentioning the sonogram law, both pretty well on-topic sounding to just about anyone without a strong reason to pretend like they were not.  I watched the proceedings from a live feed online.  It was my first day back in Texas after about a week out of town, and I’ve never been so obsessed watching people call point of inquiries and such.  It was by far the tensest display of parliamentary procedure I have ever encountered.  When her filibuster was prematurely ended, people got up to ask questions and delay the proceedings that last hour, and when their questions were no longer addressed thousands of Wendy Davis supporters made so much noise (a move that many have called a people’s filibuster) that a vote could not be taken by midnight, and the legislation was not pushed through.

They did try though.  A vote was taken, all be it after midnight.  And the very same people who tried to argue that discussion of the sonogram law was a final strike of being off topic and ended the filibuster prematurely then decided that it would be okay to change time records to show that they had succeeded in getting the vote in on time.   With so much of the world watching, they were caught and it is only because so much of the world was watching that they were not able to cheat this bill through like that.

Hours later, Governor Rick Perry called a second special session to bring this bill back up again.  They met for the first day on Monday, and thousands of the bill’s opponents dressed in orange and went to the capitol to make their presence known. I was there with a co-worker on our lunch break, and the scene was impressive.  Photographer Bob Daemmrich got this photo from the forth floor that afternoon.   

The senate adjourned fairly quickly, but a message was sent, and if nothing else I managed to re-register to vote so that I will be ready for the next election.

That evening there were protesters with signs at the Capitol on both sides.

The next day it was the House meeting.  And this time there was a sea of blue t-shirts showing in force as well as those in orange t-shirts.  The meeting was scheduled from 3:30 to midnight, and they were taking registration of support or opposition from anyone who stopped in with the opportunity to sign up to testify in the court.  Again, I stopped by on my lunch break  I wanted to beat the lines that would inevitably come and go on record as being opposed to this bill.  The scene felt eerily like some kind of sports event with everyone all color coded and chanting and cheering for their side with sloganed signs and t-shirts.  Only to the winner goes the right to basic healthcare and autonomy, or something like that.  It was weird.  I registered on an iPad that I was against the bill but did not ask to testify since I wouldn’t be back until the end of the work day.

Keeping the sports metaphor in mind, there seemed to be a sort of pep-rally going on out in the rotunda, or maybe it was more like a revival.  There was a large camera and a sea of blue t-shirts sometimes chanting, and sometimes singing “Amazing Grace” and always someone with a microphone in the middle but I guess they were projected into the camera, not outward where we could hear anything.

I want to be clear that these guys were already set up and filming since before I got there a little after noon (and it didn’t look they’d only just arrived).  Many more were inside and already in line to get into the 3:30 meeting.

When I came back later after work, the crowd had gotten much thicker.  In particular, a lot more opponents to the bill had made it out.  Again that sports feeling that is just strange when one is talking about legislation and access to healthcare.  The rotunda was still all blue in the center, but now orange around the sides.  When I took this, the blue shirts were singing “Amazing Grace” again while the orange shirts chanted “Healthcare is a human right, not just for the rich and white.”

Different chants would go in and out throughout the day and into the night.  And there was always a line to get into the meeting room itself.  I never made it in there myself, but I did watch some of the testimony from the overflow rooms.  I think I heard that there were twelve rooms like these, set up with live video from the meeting itself.  I saw a doctor testify, and was frustrated to see him questioned in ways that so evidently displayed a lack of understanding of medical science.  There was a pastor called.  And some expert on hospitals and how they run and whether this bill might even block all abortion services in Texas on technicality especially if doctors are having to ask permission to work in religiously affiliated hospitals.  And then came the more personal testimonies.  And some of these were more principled.  But many of these were women getting up to speak about the worst day of their life.  Many spoke of instances of rape and how long it took them to even be able to admit to what had happened to them.  Many spoke about being pushed into getting an abortion when they didn’t want one, or having medical complications from their procedures.  The team mentality in watching these testimonies from the overflow rooms was a little disturbing too.  I am vehemently pro-choice, but I do not doubt that people have had some horrible experiences with abortions that either didn’t go well medically or were not what the patient really wanted.  One of the reasons I became so interested in patient education is because of how easy it is for people to get pushed into procedures without fully understanding them or when it doesn’t actually serve their needs.  I believe whole-heartedly that patients need to be able to get as much information as they want to make informed decisions about their health in any even remotely elective procedure.  This is a problem with healthcare at large though, not just in cases of abortion.

In the end, I wound up sticking out the whole night.  In so doing I spoke with a lot of people.  Some of them had personal stories to tell as to why they were there.  I spoke with an 18 yr old pro-lifer with a laptop who was actually very sweet, and like most healthy teenage boys, didn’t seem to know much at all about how reproduction works and the kinds of risks that pregnancy and delivery carries.  People keep emphasizing how risky an abortion can be, and especially late-term abortions (which is also a part of this bill).  Yet one of the doctors who testified was very clear when he made the point that it is still less dangerous than childbirth.  That 18 yr old kid looked up how many deaths in childbirth there were last year through the CDC and found something like 700 or 750 women died just last year giving birth in the United States.

I also spoke to a middle aged woman to whom I can not attribute such innocence.  She spoke to me with a smile and asked me my views.  I told her that I was vehemently pro-choice, to which I received that old Southern smiling “Whhhyyy?” and was further lectured about how mis-informed I must be to believe all the news sources that have brought up how many clinics this bill will close.  She also went on to argue that health care standards should always be raised and told me how she only had protecting women at heart.  For a while I even believed her good intentions.  But she eventually told me that she had been a part of pushing through the sonogram law that forces women seeking an abortion to have a sonogram, regardless of a doctor’s recommendation.    I was a little bit stunned at the time, that someone who had claimed to be in favor of better medical standards would also be bragging to me about legislating an unnecessary, invasive, and often emotionally tortuous procedure to all those women she claimed to want to protect.  It was a goal of mine that night to remain civil when talking to people who disagreed with me, but I can’t help but shudder at the thought of this woman today and that I shook her hand that night.

The other pro-lifer (well, the term pro-life always feels disingenuous when talking about someone like this) that I spoke to has actually made a couple of news articles since that night.  Her t-shirt had a gun on it, and did kind of double take trying to figure out what that was about when I first saw it. Here she is showing the shirt off to someone else who by the look of the photo (taken by Guillermo Hernandez Martinez) was equally unimpressed.  This woman came looking for a fight and was happy to engage with anyone who so much as stopped to read what she was wearing.

What gets me now though, is that I found this photo in an article on Thursday night that was titled “Texas abortion battle heats up as activists ‘Hail Satan!”  Now, not only is this something that I never encountered in the entire time that I was there that night.  But the supposedly scandalous video floating around to confirm it is literally a college aged woman in a moment of frustration, and the whole scene lasted about 3 seconds.  3 seconds, in over 12 hours of non-stop footage of the entire event from the middle of the rotunda and this is what makes the headlines.  I first found out that this had made the headlines when an old friend who now lives in Germany asked me about it.  And the other night I found two more articles with similar titles.  And I have to admit, I’m pissed off.  I’m pissed off enough that I felt the need to write this entire post documenting my experiences throughout the night.

The meeting ended that night, with the House cutting off testimony after midnight as planned.  At that time there were over 1000 still waiting to testify out in the halls though.  And at that time, despite specifically stating, when asked at the beginning of the meeting, that there would not be a vote, they voted.  This vote was especially objected against by Representative Sylvester Turner, who had amendments to the bill and had been the one to ask at the beginning whether or not there would be a vote that night.

None of this process feels right.  Our own legislators can’t follow law themselves even in the law making process.  Conservative radio calls us a vocal minority and has accused the bill’s opposition of busing in protestors from out of state.  Then the other night church buses from Arizona were spotted as pro-life protesters showed up in their own droves.  Thousands of people have shown up repeatedly in opposition to this bill, and will do so again next week.  And after spending a long night in this scene, and going to work tired the next day I’m asked from Germany about whether the rumors of people chanting “Hail Satan” are overblown.  Yes, yes they are overblown.  And even if they weren’t, any secular news source should be able to tell the story from more than just that viewpoint.  I have seen no headlines pointing to the continuous religious display being put on in honor of legislating healthcare.  Scripture is not medically valid.  And we already have medical standards in this country.  They’re called “medical standards.”  We don’t pick and choose which procedures are more popular or controversial when we decide how best to handle them medically.  Or actually, we do now.  As it turns out, I am very much back in Texas again, and a large part of the population has no problem taking scripture as science, just so long as you pick out the same parts they do.

I care about this country, and I care about this state.  But this fight is ridiculous.  And the way it is being fought is even more ridiculous.  And the further I delve into Texas politics, the more ridiculous and disconnected I find it all to be.  These issues are divisive.  They are divisive in ways that I can’t help but feel affected by personally.  Personal autonomy, and individual liberty are some really basic ideals that we have here.  Telling half the population that their body is only their own so long as their will to live and healthcare decisions don’t affect anyone else is not okay.  Telling women that they should just keep their legs closed if they don’t want to get pregnant in a society that warns women, sometimes daily, about the likelihood of rape is not okay.  Treating pregnancy like a punishment for promiscuity is not okay.  Forcing a woman to carry a child against her will, whatever her reasons may be, is not okay.  Legislating medical care based on religious ideology is not okay.  And legislating medical procedures without any concept of how they work, or the anatomical systems involved, is not okay.

I think that this is the most political post I have ever written here.  This issue matters to me.  It matters because my life and my body is my own, and when people legislate against my ability to make personal healthcare decisions for myself, they deny my autonomy.  When the potential for new life is legislated to be more important than my life that is here now, it speaks volumes as to what we think of women.  And I am disheartened by so much fervor put forth to stop women from being able to make one of the most important decisions that they can make.  And I am horrified at the utter disregard of basic medical science and anatomy that comes out of so many of the people pushing this legislation forward.  Medical standards need to come from the medical community.  They need to come from people who understand the rules they’re making.  For the same reasons that patients need access to information when they are making their own medical decisions, people making decisions for the rest of us via legislation damn well better know what they’re talking about.