text:
a ba'b'ian journal
old stuff 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 home
Happy Seventh Day of Christmas! Happy New Year's Eve!
Sleeping all through the night and staying up all day is unnatural. That's not what babies do. Many cultures do siestas. We do it from being industrialized and having a factory manufacturing economy that turned into a commuting culture where people have to drive a substantial distance to get to work. The infocus team except for me was a bunch of people working from home. I don't know if they were siesta types, though. It seems doable for IT. I would probably just work less, though, left on my own. One thing about people sleeping, though, is that we do natural keep to a schedule. If you get on a schedule of sleeping all night, you can well enough used to that that it works somewhat well for you.
So the dream this time that woke me up was one where I was trying to write a paper for something. About ten pagers. I was using a typewriter, but then had some problems. I didn't have a good printer on my computer, only a dot-matrix, but I decided to try to use a word-processor and then get someone to print it. Maybe Doug. I did talk to Aimee about writing a book. It's something she also was thinking of doing.
And at Bardog at lunch, we were getting up to go. And I was standing there, and I didn't notice that I was standing in the way of some guy trying to get back in his seat. I was just focused on Aimee, and kind of oblivious to everything else. I can get that way, sometimes.
Happy Sixth Day of Christmas!
Lunch with Aimee. I think I didn't have anything interesting to say this time, but it was nice to see her. I need to try to do it again sooner.
So, one of the two DVD drives on my desktop appears to be twice as fast as the other at reading in a disc. I think it's because the slower one is on the same cable and connector as the disk drive it's using. Just a guess, but that might do it. The drive might just be faster, of course, but it's like right at twice a fast, so I don't know. And probably related, it takes twice as long to write out a disc as it predicts it's going to take. Oh well.
So much to read and so many thing I think I'd want to do. I'm not so big on getting things done, though. So if I were to do a project, I think I would want to do a project that has more message passing in it, such that there was more opportunity for different levels of processing to interact with each other. There is the sphinx speech recognition system in Java, and I was thinking maybe looking at tinkering with that to add that ability. At least I should try to get it working. One issue I had when I looked at it last time was that it required some kind of sound models that didn't come with it, and I didn't know how to get them, so it wouldn't work right off. I should look into it again. And there's the computer vision stuff I wanted to work on, and that robot to try to get working. Plus getting Copycat in Clojure. So much to do.
I'm a little ahead of the pace to get through these Sudoku. I guess not by too much. I've done 34, so I'm a third through the easiest level, where they have a hundred of those. We'll see how it goes.
Happy Fifth Day of Christmas!
It might be too unreasonable to celebrate all twelve days of Christmas. Kids get most of that time off from school in the winter. Good time for a break. We could probably use more shopping.
So I had the dream again where I'm trying to go back to school. I think it was a bit enhanced by the omega-3, which makes dreams more memorable and vivid. I actually went in to a local school to look it over, and try to figure out what I want to study. What kind of math. Maybe some languages. Writing. I went to the library and got some books. All the math books were old classical, I mean actual Greek. And I looked for the counselors to get advice, but they didn't seem right for me, and I didn't talk to them. It took a bit for me to realize that I shouldn't really be in a high school. But after I woke up, I did realize that University can be a lot like high school. So if I really do want to do something like that, I could just go back to school. I could branch out a little more and take some of those other things I was thinking about. Some music. Writing. Philosophy. Some of the more obscure maths. Languages. Would take some time. I should think about money, though. I'm not sure there is a good way to try to make money learning. They say being a graduate student is being a professional student. But they really only pay you for doing work for people, especially doing research for people. I'm not sure I want to do research. That really does sound like work. Some people do, though. I could look more into it. I have in the past gone back to school during periods of unemployment. Right now this time, I decided it would be better to learn to study on my own. Academia might not be a bad place to do it. But I need to try to find the right people to work with. Stan at U of M might not be bad. Seems like Berkeley is more my kind of place, though.
It's taken a bit to find that Stanford really isn't the place for me. I wanted to go there a long time. I lit bit too type-A yuppie for me. Nice for ambitious people kind of in a hurry. Ones who can get a lot done. The quarter system means they cover big bits of stuff in short periods. So you get pretty in depth surveys of subjects. But not so much taking your time. Their approach to AI looks kind of like a big search for a short cut, and it seems to spring from that sort of compressed way of treating subjects. They are mostly into symbolic stuff. In that, you might use the text "box" to try to mean what we think of as a box. And there are now other sort of family branches of AI, and they treat them as big isolated bits. Computer vision. Machine learning. So they then just take the bits. There's not anything for trying to put everything together, which would be more something I'd be into. Stan actually puts a lot of different pieces from different areas together. I don't quit agree with the pieces Stan uses, but that attitude about what to do, not to focus so tightly, seems more the kind of thing I want. And I think it's not so odd that I picked up that attitude, since I went to U of M. It seems to kind of follow a bit more from how that place operates. You get more time to be expansive when you look at material. You're not cramming it into a quarter, you have a whole semester for everything. Unfortunately, it seems like most classes have to be big surveys of a subject. Maybe that's just the nature of what a class has to be. But it seems like sometimes I got stuff that seemed to have a little more depth.
I was trying to explain to Angela and Ian what Speech Recognition is about. One of the books I'm getting for Christmas is about Speech Recognition. Amazon hasn't gotten it here in time. I mentioned it to them, because it was one of the more expensive things on my list, but Freddie sprung for it. Los for a textbook, but high for a book in general. But what is Speech Recognition. Turns out there are actually a lot of different problems you have to solve in that problem. One it just getting the sounds. I told Ian sometimes they use FFTs. He's a physicist, so he knows about them. But more often they use hidden markov models, and there are some other sorts of acoustic models they might use. That's just one simple problem at the acoustic level, how to start processing the sound data. I was then trying to explain to Angela the weird concept of temporal alignment. Everything you say will be at different speeds. And you've got this sort of template you want to match up to sound that people are making. But the speeds are all different, so you're having to try to dynamically lines stuff up while trying to figure out what it is you're lining up at the same time. There's actually an algorithm just for trying to deal with that. And then there's something that Ian noticed. He was using a google something or other voice product. You'll say something into it, but at some point it will get confused and start picking weird words that don't match. Well, on top of all the other levels, a lot of people use a language model. They keep track of pairs and triples of words, and the probability of which word comes after the next, so you'll get a kind of chain of text, and ones it starts breaking, it can really mess up. At this point, computer programs don't try to use a model of understanding what people are talking about. I'm not sure if it would help them much, but it's definitely the kind of thing that people also use to deal with this very hard problem. And calling it a hard problem doesn't do it justice. It's a hard problem that can include a lot of hard smaller problems when you break it down, which is the way people often deal with hard problems. And actually, having isolate blocks for subproblems is not that great. It's clear that in people, all the levels of the problem interact. That's not so easy to do with computer programs. With those, we tend to like clear interfaces and interactions, especially something flowing from one level to another. Something really tangled like this isn't natural or pretty. People have just forced their solution to be clean, but then it just doesn't work right, and breaks down at times in ugly ways.
One thing that religion contributed to society is the idea of taking breaks from work. That's actually a pretty big deal. Without some reason, people would just work every day. Taking one day off a week was a big step up. And everybody off on the same day? That would probably be hard to do without some big oganizing force with a lot of money to spread its word around. So now we have two day weekends. That's a real bonus. Give 'em an inch kind of thing, I imagine. And in Judaism, from what I gather, there is also a notion of taking one year in seven off, which doesn't sound too bad. Saving up for something like that has to be a good thing. Seems like I do a little more than that, but whatcha gonna do?
Do they even put cotton in aspirin bottles, anymore? I was going to write about taking the cotton out, and how after Andy Rooney wrote about it, I started taking it out. I used to put it back in. What made me think about it is that I just noticed a loaf of white bread, and somebody put the little twisty back one. Must have been one of the California people. I always just twist the bag, and tuck it underneath. For me, the twisty is only for the initial packaging, and I pitch it when I open it. Just like the cotton in aspirin.
And then there's Aimee. I have always loved her. I think it was immediate. And she has always liked me, though not "like" liked me, to use a turn of phrase I heard Melissa use one time (though I think she was lying at the time). I just asked her about lunch and she's up for it. We had lunch months ago and I haven't gotten around to doing it again. And she wouldn't start anything I'm sure. I'm not positive what it is. We like talking to each other. Last time, she said I always make her think, which to me doesn't really sound like such a good thing, so I think I was a little bit put off. And my schedule is weird so lunch is maybe just a little tough for me to do. I don't see her as much as I'd like, lets say. But it really is love. I have some physical attraction for her that she doesn't share, so for bits in there, I was a little to annoying to her, I think. But I do like talking with her. Seems like it would be nice to have a fan. And I think I'm seeing that the physical means a little more than I used to admit to myself.
So I'm reading a little more about Historical Linguistics. Sound changes. How different sounds from earlier languages, and specifically Proto-Indo-European, changed to newer languages. I kind of like looking at proto-Indo-European, and comparing different languages. Actually learning all the languages, not so much.
Happy Fourth Day of Christmas!
Well, they had a consensus that I should cut my fingernails. So I just did, though I probably won't see them for a few days. But after achieving that they kind of wimped out and said I should do what I want. It bugged Angela, so that she kept telling me to, and Ian agreed. I said, well Melissa hasn't ever bugged me about it, but I didn't really know what she thought. She they asked her and she said that yes, she prefers short nail. So I guess they all agreed.
Angela says she really likes talking to me, and actually wishes more people could get to talk to me. OK. Well, she does really only see me when she's been drinking, so maybe that biases it a bit, but she does seem to like talking to me. And bothe she and Ian said I should be more open. I was pretty closed up when she first starting talking to me.
So I asked if she was working in the morning. Mostly I guess to see how late she was staying out. But I guess I hadn't really thought it through. She wasn't, and asked me, and now I'm not doing anything, so would I like to get together. Hmm. I wasn't really ready for that. I kind of made excuses, and she said I should just say know. But that's really bad karma. Oops. Seems to happen a lot. And along those lines I didn't tell Melissa I wanted to get together with her some time. But that's to be expected.
Man, Freddie gave me the "Mammoth Book of Sudoku". It's got 1250 puzzles in it. If I were to try to finish it in a year, I would have to average 5 a day. That's a hardcore commitment. I don't know if I'm up for it. I think I'm already falling behind. Today, seems like I was playing Freecell instead. We'll see how it goes. It's not the really hard ones like in the last book. It's got a range. It should be enough. Probably more than enough.
I have so much to keep myself occupied now. I probably don't need to get any more books for a bit, though there is one I'm thinking of--another one with interviews of famous programmers, in this case language designers talking about their languages. I'll try to hold of on that. I think I'm going to get that keyboard I've had on my list a long time. I just haven't managed to get my other one connected, or haven't bothered to try hard enough. Plus it's not such a good one, and the key feel is not very good. I should be playing the piano. The guy that tuned it wanted it to be played a lot to help work out the moisture that's gotten in it. But I'd like to be able to get some stuff recorded. Maybe I should do a little of both.
It is nice the way Angela really appreciates talking to me. She said it's probably hard to find someone as me. I should make a bit more effort.
OK, so I did 5 Sudoku puzzles to keep on pace. That makes 20. I'll see how it goes.
I'm looking at this weird new york review of books article. It's really too long for me. But one of the things it says is that having a big system of government social welfare works well in countries with a homogeneous population, where everyone is kind of the same. They trust and care about each other more. Trust each other not to try to take advantage. But the U.S. is quite different. Lot's of little groups that don't really like each other. So the social welfare thing is not so popular. So "conservatism" has a whole undercurrent of just racism, though maybe more precisely, out-grouping. That seems like an interesting idea. There's other stuff in the article as well, but that's one I see on first glance.
It's nice to see your ideas go somewhere. There was a bet somewhere about the turing test being beaten by 2029. Kurweil and somebody else. That particular post has come up more than once on reddit. Somewhere a while back concerning it, I talked about how you really wouldn't want a computer to lie and try to fool someone that it was a person. And when this showed up again recently, I saw someone else saying that. I don't know that I was the first person to point that out, but I've talked about it in a couple of places, and I don't actually remember any one before me mentioning it. Seems kind of obvious when I think about it.
I forgot to put the trash out by the curb. Just didn't think of it. My mom's been doing it for a month, and she gone. Just not back to doing everything for myself. Or something. Kind of really a disrupted life right now.
Netflix seems a bit out of whack for me. I'm only supposed to have one movie at a time, and they sent me an extra because they had to ship something from further out than the local place, but it hasn't settled back to just one at a time. I sent something back Saturday, they got it today, but I received something in the mail today. Which must have already been in the mail. It's all computerized, I guess, and I don't know if it's done well enough for them to figure this out. When I send one back, they send another, so when two chains got started, they didn't seem to figure out how to drop one of the chains. Maybe they will.
Something occurs to me as I'm playing Sudoku. One thing that I can get better at while I'm playing is seeing which numbers are missing in a particular group. I had been thinking that the best way is to run through the digits sequential, and that I could do that faster and more smoothly. One way I was looking at doing that was instead of sounding them out in my head as "one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine" I could use a faster version I have, "tanamaralachakafapa". But I'm not doing that so much, and it isn't very automatic if I don't keep it up. But I think about it. And it's something that presumably I can learn to do unconscious;y, to just see them, brain does its thing, and the numbers pop up. And if I think about how it might do it, I realize that it's possible for the brain to check each digit being missing all at the same time. And along that route, it turns out that as for actions that I can consciously try to do. It's much easier for me to guess a missing number and see that it's not there. So much faster that I can guess two or three numbers and check them a lot faster than running through nine digits. I seem to guess fairly well. I suspect there is some grouping that is going on under the covers. Not enough curvy letters or straight letters, so maybe this number. Anyway, there is room for practice to help. I noticed that when I started, I was really rusty, and I got better pretty quickly. So my sudoku intution is getting better.
We've got some thick bacon. I've been eating a bit of that. Normally I don't eat bacon, but this stuff, I think just because it is thicker, I like better. Seems like bacon always seems insubstantial to me, and I prefer sausage.
Happy Third Day of Christmas!
Colin asked for a couple of Bakugan for Christmas. Specific ones, it seemed like. Maxus Dragonoid and Bakusteel. I think Bakusteel is actually a series in there, but Maxus Dragonoid appears to be a specific object. Bakugan is a whole family of toys or a game with toys involved. Something like Pokemon which he used to be into. So some fad. And since it's just a fad, it's something he will just move on from. But that's all he said he wanted. So it made it a bit hard to get him anything, especially something that will outlast this latest thing. Freddie was saying it wasn't so important to get the specific ones. I went with my mom to help her buy some, but that was before they sent the list of the exact ones he wanted. She just knew Bakugan, I think from when she was there in the summer. And he already had around 35 of them. I even got some random ones. He got several different ones. But he did get the Maxus Dragonoid. And it actually is pretty darn impressive. Almost a transformer, it's made of 7 little pieces that fit together, each of which is it's own little thingie. Those Japanese with their weird mechanical objects. Paper cranes? What is that, exactly? Anyway, it's the only thing he plays with. He seems to like it. Seems like it must be a disappointing Christmas if you only get one thing that you seem to like. I guess it's better than not getting anything you like at all. Like maybe all you really want is real estate and all you get are a bunch of stupid clothes and toys and stuff. I did get real estate one time. Wasn't really the same, because it hadn't been my big dream. And I got a fixer-upper-car one time when I thought I wanted that so I could learn about fixing cars. But it totally did not work out. Needed a little more work than I was ready for. And it turned out I just wasn't that into fixing cars. Live and learn. What I apparently do like is books. That's just about all I got this year, and exactly the ones I wanted because it was all through amazon's wishlist system. And I really liked it. Just as a matter of getting things I want, it seems like this was the best Christmas for me ever. And I've gotten some stuff. Getting a go-cart was way up there. I loved that go-cart. Played with it for many years. Still miss it, sometimes. My first car was a birthday present, so it wasn't a christmas thing. It seems like I remember my brothers giving me big and significant things for christmas, but I don't remember so much any more. There aren't that many objects that have been all that important to me.
I think Freddie's kids have really gone a long way to not being material at all. The only thing Aaron asked for was Lego Star Wars. Last year, they wanted Wii games, and they got a ton. Maybe almost 20. And that's so many that you can't possibly enjoy them all. So you really could get the feeling that you just don't need all that. So this year they seemed not so into it. Daniel finally came out with a great list. Really long, plenty of ideas as to what to get him. Mostly hunting related. But really, he was happy just to get some money. That's what my folks were doing, and seems like what Edgar was going to do for them. Nathan was a little more clear. He didn't really want anything, and had a clear logical reason not to get stuff. He has to carry everything he's going to take with him in his car to california, plus his dad is going, so that much less space. He doesn't need any stuff, but money he sure could use. Well, OK. I got Daniel a hunting book. Nathan some simpsons discs that will pack tightly, in a case that I gave him before. Aaron and Colin also have the issue of packing stuff up. Seems like all the Bakugan that Colin got would fit in a shoebox. Aaron got a lot of Lego, and that's going to be a little bigger, but quite manageable. Last year they got some large stuff. Their house is actually pretty small, and can't hold all that much stuff, anyway.
Aaron wasn't really all that excited about Christmas, anyway, before or after. Colin, on the other hand, was junmping up and down. He wanted to open presents the day he got here, and was really running around and jumping up and down at the end. We took a long time to get around to finally opening them up, too. Maybe helping Colin learn some patience. And afterwards, Colin was very quite. He sat by himself quite a bit, just playing with his dragonoid. There's no way it could live up to his excitement and expectation, and maybe he was a little let down, but he was still pretty happy. Maybe he's just a happy kid. Aaron maybe just a more gloomy kid. It happens. Things tend not to change your level of happiness so much. It is possible that Aaron is a bit displaced as the older kid. Colin gets on his nerves a lot. But that's little brothers. I'm sure Freddie gets it, having been there.
I got the kung fu TV series. It's been a long time since I watched any of it. The first one is the pilot where they explain it all. But in the second episode, Quai Chang Caine gets him some pussy. Seems like I remembered that happening, but I didn't think it was right off. Doesn't sound like the kind of thing for a "priest", but apparently the Shaolin people don't have so much against it like western folk. And I think it isn't a Buddhist thing so much as a Chinese thing.
Happy Second Day of Christmas!
They've all gone to the farm. By myself. I was thinking maybe about going out, but it's nice just to here peacefully. I'll go out tomorrow anyway, so maybe stay here.
And I haven't gone to see my girls at the Pony all year. I was thinking I might do that, but maybe I'll just make it a solid year. That's probably good, anyway.
They're working on synthehol. A synthetic substitute for alhocol with less danger that you could recover from more easily, maybe with something taken at the end. They're looking at benzodiazapines, things similar to Valium. But I gather from reddit that those things have nasty withdrawals. Like one of the couple of things that can kill you.
Technically it's Christmas. It's just after midnight. They are mopping up. Grace is washing dishes. Mom is cleaning there too. I'm waiting for her to go to bed and off to Bardog. I was actually considering not going because I spent all my spare cash. But I went to the bank and extracted some more so I could go. Regular hours. But it's too late for Starbucks.
A radio station, WRVR, is playing commercial free christmas music. But at about 7, for a few minutes, they somehow messed up their feed and were playing two songs at once. One girl had a show that must have been programmed ahead, and they didn't turn off the other feed. Nathan was saying there was probably no one at the station to fix it. All set up in advance. It was pretty intolerable, though I actually stuck with it for a bit. Then I turned it off and played Christmas music on piano for a bit. I do that. Hopefully it's a little inspiring to the kids who are taking lessons, though they haven't been practicing like they are supposed to. Rough to be forced into it like that. But what can you do. When I finished up, the radio station had recovered. I was playing from a fake book that doesn't have a very big list of chrismas songs. I have several other books. I'll probably pull them out later. The fake book is the easiest to play from. Just give me the chords that I can play along. Don't give me every note. I don't sight read that well.
Is she never going to go to bed? Grr.
Well, if I had checked my phone, I would have seen that Melissa wasn't working because it was too slow. But I ran into Dr. Bill Baggett, which was kind of nice. I've seen him around here and there. He friended me on facebook. And he lives on mud island, though he mostly hangs out at other places downtown, so there was a good chance that I would see him sometime.
I think using the amazon wishlist worked to get me a lot more stuff. A lot less clothes, at least. Seems like a lot more stuff, at least specific things that I asked for. Maybe I've been hard to buy for. A couple of nice kung fu books. Some java books. Assorted other books. The kung fu TV series. Some Abbot and Costello. Big haul.
One different thing. On Grace's present, I wrote, "to Grace, from Aaron" That was weird. I think Colin had come in, and said to him, "Hi Colin... Aaron, no Colin" So I was having some kind of senior moment. I was sitting on the ground, so looking up at him, I didn't see his height right, or he looked a little different from that persepective, or something.
My family sure can geek out. There can be as many as four people sitting here in the den each with his or her (Grace maybe) computer surfing or something. Though Grace has now started just hiding of by herself in some other room somewhere. My dad, Freddie, one of the kids, and one will be playing Wii. Grace might get on the desktop, or maybe me. My desktop and my laptop, and Freddie brought two laptops. I have yet to bring in my other laptop when they're all busy, but there have been opportunities.
They're all off at church. I've been staying here. They have bugged me various amounts in the past, but one time, my dad said he was actually a little bit happy to have someone here so they can't break in and steal everything. Today I think only Grace said something, and I said that to her. OK, that sounds good.
How about a reddit submission about the true meaning of christmas. Pagan celebration from roman times. Maybe saturnalia, I forget. Sun god or something, just after the soltice, so the days are getting longer again. Gift giving. 12 days. Etc. Jewish people didn't celebrate birthdays. They would have thought it kind of a pagan thing.
Happy Festivus!
Well, I still haven't started my Christmas shopping. I'll just do it today, It seems like I didn't have the day before Christmas eve off last time, so I don't feel as much pressure now. I have all day, though it will be rough. And I didn't make DVD copies ahead of time like I should have. That could be rough if I try to do that.
So some more of Grace not getting it. They got some stuff for Colin. He wants some little faddish thing, Bakugan. They have bunches of diffeent kinds. Freddie was trying to at least keep Colin from peaking. But Grace just brought down the thing they got to Show it to Eddie, and then she just left it sitting here. And Freddie confronted her about it. She said Colin picked it out. So maybe it really wasn't that secret. But still. So much for the effort to keep a little mystery.
Of course, I'm not feeling that into it. I have quite a bit of money pulled out, but maybe not quite as much as I possibly could have. And I don't have as many ideas about what to get as I sometimes do. Oh well.
I did find a site that lists all the twilight zone episodes on the different disks. So I should be able to see if there are repeats on them after all. I could just be confusing ones that seem familiar from TV with ones I have on DVD already. But I have the web site with the list. It should be a straightforward thing to use a computer to check a list for duplicates. But I don't seem to ge set up with the tools to just do it easily, it looks like. Sucking in web pages isn't necessarily that easy. I'd want to just cut off the whitespace in the front of each line, sort, and then duplicates will be adjacent, which would be easy to check then. A perl script could possibly do it pretty easy. Sounds like work, though. Seems like a spreadsheet might be able to do a sort. That's like the main tool that it seems like people use for interactive programming types of things now. Computers are good at things thought out well in advance that someone can program for you. Still not so convenient for ad hoc sorts of tasks.
Closer to getting a health care bill. They had to cut stuff. And the repubs aren't involved. It seems like they say they might have been involved if they there were some bits that they liked. But almost certainly that talk like that is just lies. If they wanted to talk, it was only to keep it from happening. If they want to fix it, they can try later. One signicant thing that got left out is making getting insurance a requirement. So some people just won't. Medium poor people, like youngish adults, just will decide not to want to pay into it.
One thing that really bugged me was that in the PBS news coverage, they were talking to senators, and they included a Republican. Why ask a Republican about it? They decided not to be involved. And worse, they have already shown they will just lie and lie about it no end to try to scare people away from support. The media has just played into it all along. And yet it still might happen, despite their best efforts. One lie he said was that Medicare was going to be bankrupt in 2017. Un huh. Is that when Jesus is coming back? OK, he had a Southern accent, so I'm a little biased.
OK, so we're getting the paper. And the only thing I look at is that I do the Su Doku puzzle which is in a particular section. My mom is reading the paper, so I go to get that section from her and she decides she need to read it right then. Ann Landers or something. And when she's done, she gives it to my dad. oh well. It has the comics in it. Oh well.
That girl. She said as we were saying goodbye, if I don't see you. Merry Christmas. She's working Christmas Eve, regular hours, which is till 3. So maybe I might be able to go by.
Christmas pretty soon. Not so into it.
_Million Dollar Baby_ did get me thinking about how important it is to protect yourself in fighting. Seems like I tend to really only think about the offensive moves, but probably the defense is more important, and a lot of this stuff I'm studying must be about staying protected, but I'm not focusing on it, and not paying attention to it, so I need to look more at it. When I look at it, I do see quite a bunch of stuff--dodges, evasions of different kinds, deflections.
Property rights are a restriction on freedom. So some people have to really mangle their concept of freedom so that it doesn't appear to infringe on what they believe are their god-given property rights. And they end up just not want to pay for things that they are benefitting from.
I'm a pretty terrible manager. And specifically project management. I can't schedule at all. My time management isn't very good. I'm not so good at getting things finished and wrapped up. I had a thing for Hilton, and I didn't think through everything that they wanted done, so I really mishandled it. I basically didn't get done properly, and then the time to do it ran out, and they had to abandon it. I think I've been spoiled that I've always worked with good management. A lot of projects end up not been used, but I haven't had to worry about that. Working for other people is probably a good thing for me. I might not get as much as I might get, but it's much less risky.
My dad's hearing is not so good, so my mom has to yell sometimes. It's not so pleasant. And he can try to be "playful" sometimes.
Well, they were talking about how my dad is spending quite a bit. Gone through about half his savings. He doesn't really want to end up with any money, but there is the danger of running out before going. My mom asked me if she was too stingy. I said she was not too stingy. She has just the right amount of stingyness. Some how it got around that my dad's mom was also kind of loose with money. She'd go out to eat at fancy places instead of saving money for bills. Hmm. That seems familiar somehow.
Went to Nathan's graduate at Southern Illinois Universty Carbondale. It's seemed close. Not even as far as St. Louis. It was a graduation. On a basketball court. Seems like half of the people were graduate students. There were some twins that both got the same degree in forestry. Both with the same beard and pony tail. Very odd-looking. Somebody had a degree in German studies. Nathan graduated magna cum laude. I only recently found that it's supposed to be pronounced mangna.
I'm sore. I worked out a little too hard at kung fu. I wanted to see if I had enough stuff to do a solid hour. I was by myself, and normally with other people, we alternate, so we have pretty good breaks while waiting, but this time not so much. I did actually sit and catch my breath a few times, but still it was a lot more solid. I included all the basic exercises, and even only did those half the distance as normal (only one way across, not across the room and back) but normally we only do one set and not all the sets. The Fanzi Quan was probably the most vigorous bit, and I did all the exercises plus several times on the form. And both bagua circle forms. Again, we usually only do one. And the weapons form. And I practiced what I know of the dragon form--I think i have about three quarters--three times. I did not do the chi gung, but it is not really so vigorous. I'm doing all them, and about fifty minutes into it, my back starts to complain. Not really too bad, but just enough to see that this has been a little too hard. I still had a little bit left, but I kept to it.
Of course, I could be kidding myself in thinking I don't care how things look. I hand out with Melissa, who is exceptionally beautiful and spends a lot of time on her appearance. And there are only a few particular body types that I find really attractive. That isn't everything to me, and it's a small enough range that I've thought I have to not be restricted to it.
I only recently found out that Pat Sajak's tie always matches Vanna White's dress on _Wheel of Fortune_. My mom told me about it. Different. And Vanna's job is basically just to be pretty. I like that.
Watched _Million Dollar Baby_. Mom liked it. Maybe that biased me against it, but I thought it wasn't great. I think chickee was robbed a bit, as the hit after the bell should have been grounds for disqualification, but I don't really know the league rules. And it wouldn't really help her to win I guess. But she definitely shouldn't have let her guard down with little miss break the rules. Falling on a chair was a pretty rough break. Kind of thing that makes you think maybe it's just a movie. But freaky stuff like that does happen. And wanting to die? How about just telling people you want off life support? Doesn't seem so hard, and you don't have to go all teary on us. It just didn't bother me. Don't care. Like that stupid _English Patient_. There must be people who get some emotional thing out of this kind of crap that I don't. Maybe the fighting was somewhat interesting. I should train harder, myself. Also, he getting that good seems a little odd, but there is some good stuff that can be learned. At least I want to believe that. I should break out one of my copies of _How to be an ass-whipping boxer_. I've got more than one. I guess by accident. Of course, maybe there are no accidents.
Amazon has recommended QED from Feynman. There are a lot of different additions, I think, and I think it was from trying to find it on the web site for the local library that I saw a cover that looks familiar. I think I might have a copy sitting around somewhere. Might be easier to go to the library than find it. Or maybe to buy it. But that would be pretty silly.
I was trying to go through and maybe add some last minute things to my amazon wishlist. That's about all I have for things to get me. And probably yesterday was the last day for them to get stuff from there, anyway. I was thinking maybe I could look for some stuff that would be more easily available locally. For something from amazon, there is a bit of a tendency to get obscure stuff.
OK. Added some. I am getting the feeling though that I really dont need much. Hopefully these are things that I want. I was thinking this was a list of things I would get some time when I get around to it. I also have an old list of things I wanted that I haven't finished up with. I should look for that. I never got a quad computer. I guess I don't need one anymore. I need to get a proper hunting pellet gun, so I can shoot some squirrels. Maybe I should break down and get that revolver. I couldn't really decide on what I wanted. The best I saw was an S&W, but it was only 5 shot. That just seemed so few. Maybe that's what I should do. How many shots do I really think I'll need? Mostly I want something for walking around in the woods, and being able to shoot a deer if I come up to one, or a turkey or something. Or a snake. Something with sufficient snake loads available. And to be a bit safer against the mountain lion that's wandering around up there. I did see a deer about 30 feet into the woods one time and I had my .45, but the clearest shot was in the back end, and it would have gotten pretty messy.
Everybody seems to be into just little things, though. I think Freddie and I would be the only ones left that could really just do big stuff, which we do on occasion. A TV maybe. Something like that.
OK, it's kill and yank in emacsworld, so it's just ctrl-y and ctrl-k, though ctrl-y is a line at a time, I believe, and there are probably lots of other different k things for doing other sorts of kills.
Ouch, so sitting cross-legged has finally started getting rough on my knees, I guess. I have to pull out the little feet rest things on the barcalounger here if I'm going to go a little longer. I guess that's getting pretty sad. But maybe i can finally see how other people have been feeling all this time. I have always tended to prefer the half-lotus, though I have always been able to do a full lotus without real problem. But it just doesn't work for me for so long anymore. And maybe I never really did it for the kind of lounging time I've been doing lately. And i guess, I'm more of a lying in bed kind of person, anyway.
I've never really had a great desire to be with people. One seems to be plenty. And even that only a little bit a week. And one at a time certainly seems right for me. I'm getting Christmas cards. Dani sent one. She mentioned that she hasn't seen me for a while. But she did send a card. I should go out there, but I just don't go for lunch so much any more. And Mike and Meg sent a card. They apparently have a monkey. Pray for Doji. I thought they had a dog. My mom tells me there dog died a while back. I guess Mike must have talked about that. But I don't remember at all. And I don't remember the dog, if I was ever out there. I think I must have been, but maybe the dog was shut in the bedroom or something because he could get a little bitey. I don't really see Mike so much any more. At least I don't go out to see him. He came by here a while back. And I haven't gone out to see Doug for quite a while. I think Melissa is really the only person I go to talk to, and that's just a few hours a week, and she's working then, anyway. Still, that seems to be about enough for me. Seems like I probably should look for something better, but that's not so easy. And I'd like to reconnect to some, but that doesn't seem to be working out for me.
So there's this guy Richard on the AGI list. He's got some deal that there is a "complex systems problem" with trying to make an AI. It seems a little hard to pin simply exactly what he is supposed to mean, at least enough to explain why he's wrong. At one point, I said at least he's easy enough to ignore. But it comes up again once in a while, and it's on again now. I've been thinking of writing, but it such an irritating and emotional thing. He's got a fairly nice sort of plan. He tries to model the human mind cognitively as close as possible. Sounds nice enough in itself. But because of this "cognitive systems problem" he asserts repeatedly that his approach is the only one that can work. Kind of the way many Abrahamic descended religions say that theirs is the one true god. Worse than that, though I'm guessing that that idea started the trend, even other people who say they are follwing this one true god, those other people are just wrong. Annoying.
But Richard said something that gave me at least an approach as to how to reply. In trying to list the properties that make a system complex, he said the interactions of the parts have to be significantly nonlinear. OK. There isn't any such thing as significantly nonlinear. Something is linear or it isn't. He must just be hedging the description to hide what his real criterion must be. That is, he is subtle assume his conclusion. He wants to say that complex systems can't be design or analyzed or something--that they have this problem he's talking about. So with this phrasing, he can just say if it can be done, the interactions weren't sufficiently nonlinear. He has actually done this several times now. The latest thing was some kind of statistical system, Boltzman maybe something or other. And any large computer program has the very definition of nonlinear interaction. But somehow these are not complex system to him, as the nonlinearities aren't the significant aspect of them, or something. His big example of the kind of thing he is talking about is Conway's Game of Life, which has lots of complicated behaviors that arise in a a non-obvious way that you couldn't predict. There are gliders, guns, and so much stuff that you could have a little computer and even an object that could replicate itself. But he doesn't so much mean a complex system as a mysterious system. Some complex systems may have some level of mystery, but it is not a necessary trait of a complex system. Part of his assertion is that it is. And he says an intelligent system is a Richard-complex, or I would say, just a mysterious system, so you wouldn't be able to design one. It must use some of those unpredictable features. So you couldn't get one just by trying to put stuff together. Your best and only hope is to try to copy one that is working, specifically ours. Part of why he even tries to make a claim like that is to explain why after so many years of trying, we don't have a general AI, yet. Maybe the problem is just harder than people thought, and there were aspects of the problem that have been ignored because getting people to handle them is so much cheaper and easier than getting a computer to handle them. Another sort of argument against that complex systems problem idea is that maybe the level of difficulty is just different than how Richard has decided it is. It might be harder, and even Richard's approach won't work, or it might be easier. That's how Ben has responded. In general Richard has not been convincing. Ben said there wasn't a principled proof. But Richard appears to think he has given one. But I think he isn't a mathematician or computer scientist. I think his area is psychology, maybe. So maybe he doesn't even have the same idea about what a real proof is. And the very area of complex systems is rather weak.
OK, so I had this stuff to say. But why bother? It's just too unpleasant and rather negative. He's got this research area, and that should be good enough. He wants to be all one-true-god on people, and it seems really the best thing to just ignore that. Too emotional, like I said. Honestly like talking about religion. Except it looks like there are some noobs who are buying into it. Should I care? Anybody who gets suckered in deserves it, I guess. Anyway, I'm writing about it here, and maybe that will get it out of my system. And move on.
The season for giving. My mom is giving someone a cookbook. A copy of the better homes and gardens cookbook. The one with the red plain, though in this case it's a pink plaid. Something about breast cancer. It's her favorite kind of cookbook. She has an old one that's older than me, and I recently got a new version that is a tiny thick paperback. She's using that one right now to make some kind of cake for a trifle. Since it's a paperback, it won't stay open on it's own, and it's so thick it doesn't even stay open properly with the big heavy metal thing, I think it's a garlic press, sitting on it. The better homes and garden's cookbock she likes is in a ring binder, and this new one she's giving is like that. Almost any cookbook you buy will be bound like a regular book, and that really just doesn't work so well I guess. Plus the recipes can tend to be fancy or specific. These are just really straightforward and easy. I have tried giving my mom cookbooks. They are never really so good for her. But they have the problems I've mentioned. And fancy cooking with possibly expensive ingredients? Not my mom's thing at all. So no more cookbooks.
But giving. My mom was wanting to share something that she likes. But she only has pure objects. I like stuff that can be copied. Ideas and media. So I'm a little bit more into sharing actual copies. And where is the economy going? Do we need to forever keep making more stuff? In order to keep things movie, we have to invent a demand for more and more things, but is that going to go on forever? There are some things that are consumable, like maybe food, but surely it would be possible to just get some stuff and that would be enough. Car, TV. We've rigged the system so that those things don't last forever, and we need news ones every few years. A little sad, but it's a system that kind of works. And to game the system, we let things shift so that fashinably, you need get newer versions of things. But if all the things are made, what will people do? There is the question of how people will make money. I presume it cost some amount to eat and have a place to stay. Possibly that's a little inflated now in order to keep the system chugging, but OK. And there's some notion that if not everyone worked, society would collapse. That's just a notion, but people seem to really think that. Even now, only a few farmers are needed to support everybody. There are more than enough houses. Seems like I only spend money on entertainment, in various ways. And people can end up doing stuff for entertainment, I guess. Supposedly we moved into a service economy from a manufacturing economy. Whatever that means.
But even more than just a way to distribute wealth, people need employment to have meaning. That's a surprisingly big deal. It's important to have a sense that you aren't just wasting your days. I don't know if I'm getting that feeling. It seems like people who see me just not working kind of have that feeling about me. And maybe it's kind of grinding down on me. Of course, if I had my druthers, I could go into writing, and just coming up with nifty ideas. I do that for free now, so I know there really isn't any money in it. Computer programs are very profitable. Coming up with a new idea for a program that people want seems like a bit of a challenge in the competitive sense that all the programmers everywhere in the whole world who are able to do it. But OK, work for meaning. Part of having to work for employment is that to get money, you have to do something for someone else. It's quite possible to just spend your time selfishly, doing stuff just for you that doesn't benefit anyone else. And I'm just sitting here, and my mom just found several things for me to do--move an old monitor to the curb, blow up the air mattress, put out christmas card holders from the box and bring the box into the closet. Nobody likes being bossed around. I do suppose I've been doing stuff just for me with no benefit to others. Reading is like that. Maybe not writing as much, but it certainly can be like that.
I'm just going to come off as a bit of a slob because I just don't care how things look.
Freddie's wife Grace doesn't seem to quite have gotten the whole give-giving thing. Not as much as us, I think. I think Christmas is not such a big Chinese thing, and not so much in her family. Last year, she did want the teaching company classes on medicine, and I got those, but she was all, it's too expensive and just give whatever is easy. And I'm like, hey, you should get something you want, not something I can give you because it is easy. What is that about? Giving is something I do for me? For me, it's about trying to understand the person, and sharing something I can find that maybe I like and they might like. And maybe something that I think they might like, but wouldn't get for themselves, like maybe they haven't seen it. It can work if you don't really know them, and how well can you really know someone else? But then that's a failure in the personal relationship. One thing we do in this family is give lists of things that we want. That can make it somewhat easier. But now, some of the people are starting to rebel, and wanting to do something like one gift per household. Well, OK, if it's getting to be painful. And the grandfolks aren't doing as well for money. Maybe everyone is hurting. And that can make it harder. Also, everybody tend to already have enough stuff. That seems like a good reason. Don't buy it though. It's important to society to keep buying. The system will break down if people don't shop. It is just as bad as people not working. Personally, my Christmas budget is the same as ever. It's really one of the few things I really ever need money for, and not working has never impacted it.
Happy Ides of December!
I installed clojure box on tudor, my newer Dell laptop, the dual-CPU I had to reinstall with Vista. I don't use it as much as my old laptop really. It's in my bedroom, and I guess I mostly sit in the den and do stuff these days. Especially since my mom is in town. If she is going to be here, I might as well spend time with her. It seems like it would be kind of sad to be in a house with someone, but always stay in different rooms. So I have coljure box, but the emacs doesn't run the clojure right because java hasn't even been installed yet. That's pretty sad for me. If I were to really be using this laptop, that would have to be just about the first thing I would do. So clearly I'm not. And the sound stutters. I'm sure that's a big reason. I'm sure it's some driver thing, but I haven't figured it out or gotten it working. Seems like some page suggested it would take redoing the disk drive settings, and it talked about going into the bios and unistalling and reinstalling the disk. That sounds too risky for me to even want to try. Somethong that maybe it would work, or maybe it would brick the thing, and whoever was calling tech support would have to stop calling after that.
I still haven't become a big emacs keyboard person. Control-x control-whatsis. I did just use control-c return to get a paragraph tag for html. But for copy and pasting and marking, I'm using the mouse and the icon buttons on the menu bar. And the menus generally have the key bindings listed so I can learn stuff, but the thing on the menu for copy says "". Apparently that actually just refers to the icon, and there is some different function for the menu version of the copy than the classic emacs yank and pop or whatever it is. I could look at the tutorial again, I suppose. And I could see what I'm supposed to use to mark off text. I used emacs for a bit back in the early eighties on a classic 8088 IBM PC. It was most useful because it had a column mode which I needed for something. But I pretty quickly moved on to qedit. Bruce is still using qedit. In 2009. A DOS based screen editor. People get pretty attached to their tools. Memorizing keystroke combinations. I guess that's just not me. I could have been an emacs person, I guess. That might have fit me. You can write little scripts to customize it if you are really into it. And it integrates into a lot of development environments. Probably a lot of them have emacs keybindings. So it's something that would move with you. But I always was an IDE person. I think I was jbuilder for a while, and lately it's been eclipse. In microsoft world it's visual studio. It's a question of what tool you sit in front of all day. For a lot of developers, it's an IDE. But for some, it will be emacs. And even with an IDE, you might have a separate editor for text. I did that, and mine was ultraedit. That was nice because I could edit remotely from ftp. But like I've said, emacs can do that, and I'm actually doing that now, so it would have been a good choice. But I kind of like picking stuff to do from menus and buttons instead of remembering key bindings. So there's that.
Yeah, there was someone at Bardog who said he read my blog. Actually, he first asked me didn't I have one. It really seemed a bit odd to me. But he said he read it, and kind of liked it. I'm not really sure how he connected it to me personally, though. I still suspect he had me confused with Paul, but you never know.
And I finally got the update for my iphone. It added the ability to send MMS messages, which you need to send pictures to people. Leanne took a picture of me, and wanted me to send it to her and Asa, but we didn't see how to do it. She was convinced it was possible, somehow. It did have a way to email pictures to people, but there just wasn't a way to send pictures. I found in looking at it afterward that they didn't add that to iphones until like September, though it's something that most phones have been doing for a while. I'm not sure what that's about. And it could email them, like I said. The iphone has weird gaps in function. I'm still not so happy with no bluetooth keyboard, though I think you can get it with a hack, something I don't want to mess with. I'm just about ready to get a little netbook to deal with wanting to go places to write. I said something about it to my brother Freddie who was going shopping at Frye's, so maybe he found some solution that's out there that I don't know about. But I also said I needed an external drive, and that would probably be easier to do. Also, a netbook is a personal commitment, because you need a subscription for the connection. And speaking of which, supposedly AT&T is whining about iphone internet use is overloading their network. I guess I can really feel sad about their troubles, but I think it's impressive that usage is at a level high enough that the carrier could complain. It seems like even the phone commercials for all the iphone competitors now seem to concede that the iphone is pretty much dominant. Look at us! We're almost as good as the iphone! And we don't cost as much! I'm not sure how well that really is going to work for them, but OK. Actually, they like to say that their better in some way. Some feature or other that they have that the iphone doesn't. Or cheaper, or in the case of Verizon, better coverage. I guess. I'm not sure if anyone really thinks that's an issue. Can you hear me now? But it's a really big business, and lots of money that could be shifted around. I don't know how the android phones are going to do. Googles stuff. From what I hear, you have an iphone, or a blackberry, or you don't mention it.
One feature that was new in the update is a voice memo application. So I have a handy dictaphone. I really need to use that, because I always have stuff I think of and want to get down immediately. But I'm not used to the dictation thing. I've liked the idea for a long time, but the act of saying stuff out loud is just a lot different from typing it out. I think I may actually feel more comfortable typing. At least I've bever actually used talking like that, which is a bit odd considering my interest in speech recognition. But I've let that kind of go. Maybe I'll get back to it.
I finished the main compiler section, and then when I went to the Memphis Mensa Christmas party on Saturday, I mentioned it to Brent. And he said his major in college was compilers. This was back in the 70s. I think there was actually a bit of theory that has been done since then, but I guess he probably had most of it. He didn't go on to graduate school, though. He thinks that there is a big mistake in compilers, that there are a couple more different classes of languages than they say. Whatever. He also wrote three papers for professors, which they published, but since he didn't have a degree, his name wasn't on them. I don't know abuut that. But OK.
I read some article on reddit about some food some people say to avoid. It included canned tomatoes. Something about some coating on tin cans that can get leeched out by acid, and tomatoes are very acidic. And maybe an hour after that, my mom suggested that we could use canned tomatoes to make tacos, since we didn't have any fresh ones. But I wasn't so keen on the idea. I didn't realize though that she meant her own canned tomatoes, which are in glass jars, and don't have the problem they were talkking about. They actually recommended using tomatoes in jars. Oh well. But that article ad some pretty iffy stuff, like not using regular store potatoes and to only get organic. Something about how potatoes will absorb everything bad. And the reddit commentators were talking about how maybe they said store potatoes won't sprout, which is just wrong.
I finished the main section on compilers. The last bit was register allocation, and it was actually pretty complicated. It took two different sorts of graph algorithms, with a lot of simplification and modification in one of them. I didn't go line by line through the programs, but only tried to get the main ideas. I assume that even this was only one example anyway, and there is a lot more that could actually be done for this problem. There are additional topics in the book, and I didn't think I was going to go through them, but now I feel like just trying to get through them quick. And it looks like they are not treated quite as deeply and completely as the main stuff. A bit more like overviews. So it won't be so bad. But finally getting it done. Must have been at least a year I've been wanted to get through it. This is just a java book on compilers. There is also the dragon book, which is a more definitive textbook. If I want to know more, I could look through that.
One of the additional topics is on functional programming. So I get to see a little more about what is going on with clojures and stuff like that. He introduces an odd notion in order to deal with i/o in a pure functional system. In a purely function language, you would not be allowed to have something like a read function that returns a different value for the same argumments, and read would probably have no argument. Or something like print which has side affects. So the argument will include a continuation, and the result of the function will be something special he's calling "answer", like the complete result of the program. I guess I don't quite follow it yet. I don't know how it relates to monads from haskell. Probably something weird like that.
Melissa had some of the tenderloin which was the special. And it was pretty pink. And she didn't finish it off, so they through some of it away. That just hurts my feelings when I saw it. But I had always thought pork needed to be well done, so it kind of seemed iffy to me. But I did some googling, and it looks like thinking has really changed on the issue. There is a recommendation of medium, which is 160 degrees. Well done is 170. But the big recommendation I'm seeing now is just medium rare, or 145 degrees. That's enough to kill the trichinosis, but trichinosis doesn't happen any more with how they raise pigs. The cases that happen now, maybe as many as a dozen in a year, are from wild pigs not properly done. OK. News to me. Seems like I'm going to have to get used to that. I really only make the really fatty roasts, and a higher temperature for those will cook out more of the fat, and even overcooked, it will still be pretty tender. I could a loin or something one time, and it was terrible. Way dried-out and tough. Way too overcooked. But probably even if I had done a better job with it, I still think I would have preferred the fattier piece.
Hunter worked at Platinum, and he remembers me from there, but I don't remember him. That seems to keep happening to me.
Happy Infamy Day!
I brought my broadsword down to Bardog to show Hunter. People seemed to like it. Seemed like the girls kind of liked it too. Big swords? OK.
It's an idea worth writing down. From Lu Shengli's book _Combat Techniques of Taiji, Xingyi, and Bagua_. He sayd that in the external styles, a lot of people get to a middle level of skill, but very few move on to a really high level of skill. But in the internal styles (taiji and friends are internal), a lot of students don't make it to a middle level skill, but the ones who do have a good chance of making it to a high level of skill. Kind of a slow but steady kind of system, while the external styles are seductively quick to have some results, but not so good ultimately. Kind of like the light and dark sides of the Force. But a consequence is that you don't find so many good external style masters as internal style masters. So that's probably and issue with karate.
So it turns out that Hunter, who's working for Melissa again (they were at Pearl's), is childhood friends with C.J. Bader Sensei and his kids. And they fought a bit, or something. I studied Aikido with C.J. Sensei a while, though I forget exactly. It must have only been a few months. I think I did test for yellow belt. I don't even remember when it waw anymore, though. Which is pretty sad. Ich, ni sam shi, go ruk. I don't really care for Japanese stuff. I tried later under Gary Chase Sensei, but that didn't work so well either. I need to go try Chris' buddies at USA Karate. He said something about Tuesday and Thursday, so I might go by afterwards. Anyway, C.J. Sensei has some cajun restaurant somewhere out in Tennesse. Hunter talked about wanted to go out and see him. He also got me to promise I would go see _Ninja Assassin_. I checked the reviews and they were terrible, and on my martial arts list, the guy who talks about moveis a lot said to avoid it. Oh well.
Whale, I have general thought that reincarnation is not necessary for Buddhism. I'm reading Vik again, and he pretty much dismisses Buddhism because of the reincarnation. And I think about it. With reincarnation, eventually everyone should become enlightened, so it makes it universal. But without it, only some people will be enlightened, so it becomes and extremely marginal sort of pursuit. Almost certainly, your effort will be unproductive, so it really is quite grim without it. And reincarnation isn't true. So the whole thing really does kind of fall apart. It's got a lot of recommendations about being a good person, which are fairly good, but it really kind of drops off into pointlessness.
And I finally picked up the compiler reading again. I got a couple more bits of the picture, the tree represesntation of the program and generating code from pieces of the tree. I'm not focusing close enough to get all the details, and I'm not actually trying to write a compiler, so I won't really have a complete picture, but I do have a better idea now of everything involved.
I downloaded the pieces to get clojure, slime, and emacs working together, but I surely don't see how it's supposed to be installed. It was actually on a page called "Clojure Box" which actually says it has the pieces all together already, but since I already have stuff kind of installed, I didn't want to just start over. I probably have special stuff situated for me and I don't want to lose it. But I may have to use that.
OK, I broke down and installed the full clojure box. The emacs remembers my link to this journal, so that's good. Maybe that was the only big thing I was worried about. Save me some trouble. Now I just need to get busy with some programming.
There's frost on the ground. It's not officially winter, I guess, but that's a pretty definite sign that it has decided to start being cold
And the paper finally came on its own. That's good.
Now I've got medicinal stuff to take twice a day. That's just qualitatively different and I'm not happy with it. I think I'd rather exercise regularly.
So what do you do when a service company isn't able to do it's job? We tried to subscribe to the paper, but they just don't deliver it. They are able to make a special trip if we complain that morning, so they have a procedure for that. It's my folks that want it, so they subscribed a couple weeks ago when they were here, and called it in when it didn't come, but I don't want it myself, and I never called it in, and it hasn't been coming. It came once in there, a couple days after they left, but nothing since. And on Friday, before we came back, we called to make sure they would be delivering it. My mom talked to them. Maybe I should have, since I know the story. Or maybe my dad because he is better at managing things. They said they would, but I knew that that wasn't going to work. It didn't seem like they had actually done anything different. Mainly, I had the feeling that the person on the phone wasn't the right person to talk to. She just wasn't even in the right spot to get it done. Seems like when my dad talked, he managed to get an explanation about what the problem was. Something about how the regular guy didn't have the right list or something. Of course, like I said, that didn't actually quite fix the issue. Also, I didn't handle the situation either. This time when my mom called, they asked well, couldn't we have complained? And they made an automated follow up call that I didn't answer. Some time when I was asleep. And I hadn't checked for the paper then, so I wouldn't have been able to answer whether it had come or not, anyway. Keep complaining until it comes? Doesn't seem like a good way to get things done. Not fun for me. Not fun for them. We really don't want it everyday, anyway. Just maybe the weekend and Wednesday, but they quit doing that. I know it's getting harder and harder for them. Maybe a sign-- Don't forget us--we have a prescription, too! A lot of the neighbors have them sitting out. We'll see how it goes.
So, yeah, Thanksgiving at the folks on the farm. Limited internet access. I really only used my phone. I could have used my dad's computer, and in the past, that's what I did, but this time I didn't. Sitting around with my phone was just friendlier, at least. But no blogging. I actually replied on the agi list a bit, which I think is maybe my favorite list. I let the others slide really, and they just aren't as important to me. But I'm thinking, I may need to finally get a solution for properly typing on the internet. It's disappointing that the iphone does not allow a bluetooth keyboard, but whatcha gonna do. It is what it is, and it's nice for that, but serious typing, not so much. I may have to break down and get a netbook. And the initial cost isn't such a big deal as the monthly. It's probably something like $50/month. On top of the iphone, which is pretty outrageous, it would almost be starting to get silly.
And I actually got up with my parents early in the morning, which is kind of unusual. I told them I'm not quite so regular. They are big schedule people, it seems like. Though actually, my mom has trouble sleeping. Thanks Mom! She will get up in the morning more or less automatically, though, and start the fire. Then bring in wood. And an endless stream of chores and such. Just one of those that won't sit still. It annoys my dad, somewhat. And I guess I can see that. He gets his time by himself now. My dad takes naps in the afternoon, which my mom is not able to do. I also can manage it, which I guess is good for me. I think on Friday, Doug came by at around 2, and my Dad had gotten home. They ate a bunch, and Doug talked about his trip to see his North Carolina relatives, but my dad was very quiet, while my mom was chatty. I think he was missing his nap. I managed to stay up till after dinner at 5, but after that, I went to sleep, and slept till six thirty the next morning. But even after that, I napped from about 1 'til 5. So I'm not very regular. Probably not good. And it doesn't fit in well with the modern factory schedules. But then, life is suffering, isn't it?
Actually, no, life isn't suffering. Sid was very isolated and sheltered, so when he thought he finally got exposed to the "real thing" he simply overreacted.
Walking through the center of the farm, I saw a couple of critters at the pond. I think they must have been beaver, though I didn't see them that well, and they kind of looked like otter. But there were also a couple of big birds that I wasn't really sure about. They looked like storks, but my dad said they were probably crane. OK. In the trailer, there was a mouse sitting there. Absolutely still, and I wasn't sure if he was just frozen from being scared. I didn't see him breathing, though. He was sitting so out in the open, I didn't really think he might have died like that, but Mom said she had put out poison. So that was probably it. I had been going out to see the cottage, but there was a guy sitting in there, so I didn't go in.
I'm reading _The Story of Edgar Sawtelle_ for Aimee's book meeting. She said she thought it had interesting stuff to talk about. At maybe around page 170, I kind of started seeing stuff. It's like 600 pages, so I still have some space to decide not to finish it, but I'm about half way now, and it's moving along, so I think I'll probably get through it. So far, it's mostly been about these guys who breed dogs. But it went into talking about this guy's odd style of breeding, which was supposed to be kind of artistic, instead of a kind of specific factory style of breeding that some more scientific breeders were using, in order to get some known breed. And he talked about trying to get to some next dog species, moving even further away from wolves. He also seems to want some kind of smart thinking dog who can make decisions, more than just obeying orders, and they mentioned a discussion about whether that would even be possible, or something that could be tested for. I think this is what Aimee was talking about, because she and some of the other regulars are dog people. It talks about that famous Japanese dog, Hachiko, that kept waiting for this guy after he stopped coming. I guess I should bring my copy of "Jurassic Bark" in Futurama. But the book severely annoyed me. A ghost showed up. Blech.
The biggest problem I see with encoding rules for an AI is that it takes away big chunks of what intelligence is out of the computer, and keeps them in the brains of the programmer. You've got the knowledge of how to do whatever it is. And you have the ability to put that knowledge into something the computer can use. It could be actual computer instructions, or some kind of data that then gets used by some more basic program. And that seems to be the common conceptualization of what a computer based AI architecture is going to be. You've got your data, and you've got your AI engine core that always just sits there interpreting the data. But I think this pretty much has to be wrong. A real computer AI is going to have to be something that generates programs--full straight to the metal instructions. Personal bias, I guess.
I just watched Itamar's presentation for Singularity 2009. Underwhelming. I guess it didn't seem convincing to me because he didn't really argue much for his assertion that the architecture would work, and he seemed to be proposing a completely new computing architecture from scratch that he hadn't even specified. It was big, bold, and out there. But it appeared to have the same fundamental attitude about AI--that you would have data, and a data-munging engine, and this data-munging engine is just in hardware. I could easily be misdescribing it, and the data is sort of distribute through the engine instead of in a kind of RAM bank that you have in typical computers, I guess. But something I did find interesting is that it at least assumes that there won't be any programmer trying to take over the functions I was talking about--possessing the knowledge and making that knowledge usable. Those are the essential things that the architecture does. At least it is acknowledge those as central functions of an intelligent agent and doesn't try to leave them in the human.
One of the biggest ways that most AI tends to leave in the human is by using just plain text as a sort of representation of knowledge. The thing about a big glob architecture like Itamar's or Ben's is that there isn't going to even be a text equivalent of what is going on. And unfortunately for my view that a computer based AI would be something that generates programs, there might not be a real program comparable to what is going on when all that distributed knowledge is interacting, but I guess that's something I need to work out. One critical thing is that the operation of an intelligent agent has to change based on learning knew knowledge. That kind of makes it seem like the knowledge+engine architecture I was talking about was really necessary, but I guess I just don't buy it.
I think language understanding is critical to intelligence. The very idea that an intelligent machine would figure out everything itself is silly. It must be able to use knowledge gained by other people, and most knowledge that we have is transmitted and stored in language. But I often get the feeling that people think that language understanding can be handled at different isolated levels. In fact, human language uses multiple levels. It uses the parallelism in the brain to use information at all levels to constrain what is going on, the processes of interpretation understanding and generating things to say. And specifically, grammar helps the process, but it isn't really rules in the kind of absolute boolean logic sense that computer people always seem to take it.
The computer bias also seems to get folks to think that intelligence is about getting answers right. That's just not the way it is. Intelligence explores the space of ideas. The perfect is the enemy of the good. That's just a problem I see creeping up in AI.
Message passing was the best lesson from Smalltalk, but the computer language world adopted objects instead. We really need to get back to message passing. That's the kind of thing that would enable all programs everywhere to work together, and I think would be the biggest aid to getting AI. Better interactivity between people working, and different modules which could add up to some kind of intelligence.
I used saved games to get through rogue. Mainly I learned how to use saved games, and since I did, I decided to go all the way to the end. Because I had this great game yesterday with several nice magic items and like a +4 two handed sword and a strength of 26 when it starts at 16, but I let it get messed up and I hadn't saved it. I don't know if I'll get such a nice one again. And I don't know how much I'll even really want to keep playing. But I learned what the final levels look like and what the serious bad guys were like and some strategies for dealing with things. One thing that was pretty obvious is that my character heals up on its own but the bad guys don't, so I just trade hits, and I hang back and heal up and keep hitting them till they're gone. Seems a little unfair for them. Oh well. There's one critter, the medusa, that is really tough though. Its gaze causes confusion, so you can't do anything. But it seems to not work in dark hallways and or just sometimes. I'm not sure. I got past them, at least.
Hmm. That girl several times just bought people their beers. Maybe it was just that I noticed it. I think she must know that I like when she does that, and maybe she is a little more conspicuous about it around me. But then, she probably just does is a lot, and I just happened to see her do it a few times this time. They generally get a look of consternation. And I've certainly been there. You want to pay. And part of that is that you are going to give her some kind of tip, hopefully a nice tip which will impress her. And then suddenly, frustration. Foiled! One time a while back, I said "she's just mean like that". And she said "whatever". But it's sweet. I guess. Maybe confusing, and a little frustrating, but still pretty sweet.
So I was kind of disturbed. There was a guy Bob, who I'd seen around and was buds with all the folk left--it mostly just employees left over. He had been kicked out of some bowling alley for "being too loud". I think his joke may have been a little rough, maybe too. Anyway, kicked out. And moaning about it. Or something. I huess Ben kept ribbing him about it a bit. And the at some point, Ben was poking Bob, and he said "don't touch me!" so of course I made little pokey gestures at him. And he said to me, "who are you?" Well, i said I didn't touch him, and I hadn't. It was just so unfriendly, like I'd never seen him before, even though I've seen him around probably dozens of times. Not really friends, I guess. Just gave me an unpleasant feeling.
So there was this thing with Josh. I wasn't listening, but I was sitting right there. It sounded like he said something like he woke up and she was laughing. And I didn't hear was she was saying, but she had some weird sort of gesture with her hands over on her head. Kind of like maybe hair standing up. My guess was that maybe he just looked funny with his hair standing up. But that's a pretty wild speculation from only getting a tiny bit of info. But what can you do. It was likely something else entirely, but I'll never know. How did effect me, though? I guess it contributed to a state of unease.
And speaking of unease. My dad confronted me about applying for unemployment benefits. Something about I paid for it. I just didn't want to argue about it. I have my own reasons, and I think it's my business. I appreciate that he is just trying to help and it's very simple to him. Actually to most people that I've talked to. They all kind of don't see any reason why I wouldn't apply. Oh well. I really don't feel a great need to explain, but that doesn't seem very satisfying to them.
Got emacs ftp working on my laptop with vista. Same deal, I needed to get the better version of ftp installed right. And in vista, to get some other directory in the path, I had to edit the registry. That doesn't seem right, but I couldn't find a place in any of the admin screens to do it. And then I had to reboot for it to see it. And they key I had to use was buried pretty far down there: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment. Painful, but once it's working I guess I can relax.
Raked a bunch of leaves. My mom was out there doing some, so it felt a little better pitching in. She had only wanted to do a little, maybe a couple of bags, but we did seven. For me, getting started is the hardest part, so once I get going, I tend to keep going. And it's raking leaves in the middle of November, so there's going to be a lot more falling after this, but it's something. Now maybe doing a little a week will make a bigger difference, just filling the regular can.
Watched _Food Inc._ It was based on _Omnivore's Dilemma_ and _Fast Food Nation_. I didn't read the latter, but I could see the stuff it had from the former. It was nice to see the people involved. And there was the one farmer guy, Joel Salatin from Polyface. I thought it was strange that They left out all the stuff explaining his style of farming, but they showed him killing chickens. I saw it in the deleted scenes though, and I could see them deleting it, because it came across as a bit flaky. Something about allowing the chickens expressing their chicken-ness. Well, he could have said letting the chickens act in a way more natural for chickens, but he had to go all Aristotelian. And mom watched it, too. She's been working on _Omnivore's Dilemma_. And they kind of do farm stuff. Not as hardcore as this guy, though. And then there was the guy from Stoneyfield organic farms. They sell yoghurt to Wal-mart. But the people there said they didn't go to Wal-mart. OK.
Happy Friday the Thirteenth! Happy Ides of November!
I got the internet on my desktop working. Kind of a weird one. The router I'm using as a switch has just gone too bad to use. I knew it already had a problem. One of the plugs has been out for years now. And the one port just says it's disconnected on the computer when I plug it in, but the lights seem to come on. The next one I tried seemed to sort of work. The computer thought it was connected at least, but it wouldn't get an address from the DHCP server. SO I guess it is just bad. But the mac is plugged through it, and it works OK. But I guess it's just broken. Luckily, I have another router just sitting there. This one is actually a wi-fi one, but I think the radio doesn't work anymore. And it uses more power, which I'm not so happy with. But it is working now. I'm just using it as a switch, so maybe I should just get a switch, but I think those things on their own are actually more expensive than these cheap mass-produced routers. And I need to throw this broken one away. So I need to try to get the midi working, I guess.
Went to the little memphis atheist book meeting about _Infidel_. Was kind of interesting. One guy Dax got us to all go around and tell our stories about how we came to atheism. He skipped going first, so I just passed when according to the sitting order going around the room it would have been my turn. He did go back and give his long rambling story eventually. Kind of gung-ho social belief, since he was air force ROTC. But read some philosophy, and Dennett' book especially. He knows it by the subtitle, ,eck if I can remember, let me look it up: Ah yes, _Religion as a Natural Phenomenon_. _Breaking the Spell_ is the main title. Whatever. Somewhere in there I reaffirmed that I don't believe in respecting people's beliefs. The hostess Leslie said that was important, but I just don't agree. Everybody but two of us out of the seven was married. Just from that, I should try asking the little girl out. She's J though. It wouldn't go anywhere, but it could just be whatever it would be.
Man, emacs has a ton of stuff for doing html. I really don't use much markup, though. Maybe I'll change it round. I don't even use the most basic markup to underline titles. I just put underscores around them like quote marks, which I think personally is a good way to do things. Call it an underscore quote. If it wanted to, it could figure out what I mean. It colorizes things when I use quote marks. But that's a programmer figuring things out, not the computer. And this is emacs, so I could write something to handle it for me. That's the kind of thing I should aspire to if I'm going to enter the whole emacs world.
I got emacs to edit over ftp. It seems to be a matter of using a better ftp client than what is in windows. And that turned out a little more subtle than I thought. I got a newer one, and I put it in the windows system32 directory in place of the old one that was there. Or so I thought. Something, I still don't know what, was going being me and changing it back to the original program. Seems like it should warn me or something about that. It could be the virus protection or maybe the operating system is maintaining mount points, or something. Weird. I had run the command to say it was a dumb unix host, and that actually seemed to help. It finally did a file transfer, but came up blank, which was a different problem that that client doesn't work right with larger files. And I don't know if it saved the info that it was a dumb unix host somewhere. That may have been something. To get the new ftp version to work I had to put it somewhere else in the path that I control. Unfortunately, it was like, perl/bin. But at least it works. I was just about to give on emacs completely too. I tried it on my laptop that I had to just upgrade to vista. Even worse. Seems to not be able to handle the separate ftp process, and completely freezes emacs when trying to load. So I'll have to see what that is some other time.
So what's that leave. The internet on my desktop and the midi set up to my mac. And I need to get slime going. but it's a nice step.
Melissa was sick. I hope she gets better. I missed her this time. She sent me an email that she wasn't going to be there. She sent it at like 3:30 in the morning, but I didn't notice it till 1 in the afternoon, and sent her a get well soon message. And then at like 9:30, she says she went to the doctor and is already getting better. Which is good news. She had said she would probably have to go to the emergency room, which can be rough when you don't have insurance. Hopefully not too bad. I don't know really. I had already been sleeping, but good news is not bad to wake up to. Then I went back to sleep, and she sent another message that woke me up again. But that's still OK. I was expecting I would probably get up again, and this time I felt like it.
So the Memphis atheist group has a like book meeting. But they put a limit of 10 people to sign up for it because it's at someone's house, and it was full when I first looked at it. But someone pulled out I guess, because I checked and there was a spot open. I've got a couple days now to read _Infidel_. I don't seem to be in much of a mood to read stuff now, though. I also got the book _The New Atheism_ from Steve, The author, Victor Stenger was in town, and I saw him at one of the meetings. I'm kind of feeling like maybe writing something, and I want to read this and then see if I feel like I have anything to contribute. One thing that already seems interesting is that he's talking a bit about some eastern stuff, and that ego realization stuff that I've been kind of into. If he says everything I would want to say then fine, good. If I have something I want to add, then maybe I should think about it. One thing though. He talks about how a lot of these authors are scientists. Unfortunately, that's just not me, so maybe I won't have enough cred to write something. He also said that it's Sam Harris that is the atheist that's also into the eastern stuff. I guess I'm going to have to dig up some of that. I may well have his stuff sitting around, I don't remember.
So emacs passed a weird test, after almost breaking. I just tried to save my work, but the ftp process got messed up or something. I didn't see exactly what happened, but it was using maybe 60% cpu, and the memory was climbing over 100 meg, which there was no reason for. I decided to kill the ftp process, and then the remaining emacs was not happy at maybe 98% cpu. And somewhere in there, I think I hit the save more than once. and maybe I hit the close. But at some point, emacs came back, did the save and closed. If it had eaten my stuff, that would have been pretty unforgivable, and I might have just moved on, but it jumped on the grenade and I was OK. Yay for emacs! Yay for gnu! I may have to send RMS a thank you note.
I watched through the third season of the new Doctor Who. That's all they have available for streaming download. I could get the disks for the fourth season, maybe, but really it was all a little strange and silly. I guess I'm really not that much for fiction and stories like that. The movies are also not so great for me. I just had _the Golden Compass_. Some kind of allegory, I guess. Whatever. I just didn't care. I watched on dowload a documentary _The Union_ about marijuana. The title refers to a complex system for cultivation and distribution in British Columbia. OK fine. I think I saw some spots where they were just wrong or being deceptive about something or other. I forget. It was kind of interesting, though. One thing I like is the Penn and Teller stuff. Maybe I should stick to the documentaries and such.
OK, now I remember. Somebody said hemp was the strong natural fiber. No. Silk is a lot stronger, and spider silk is even stronger than regular silk. I don't know about plant fibers. Maybe. They also talked in a sort of deceptive way about the risk of schizophrenia for kids. They stated very clearly and precisely that there was evidence that marijuana increases the risk of schizophrenia in some kids who have a genetic predisposition for it. From what I've seen, these results are quite solid. But then they said well, there are some results that dispute it. Well, maybe, but that doesn't really give a picture quite as clear as the actual situation. Because on the intp list there is the little psych nurse who has seen the stuff close up. It's anecdotal, sort of, but she's seen the kids messed up, and just from that is really in favor of the laws against. Maybe an overreaction, but that has definitely affected my feelings about it. Just be clear that there is a juvenile psych risk. And they said there are a lot of kids in psych treatment for pot. Yeah, that's true. But that's more of a legal thing. Are there medical benefits? May well be. It sure seems like the legal status of having no benefit at all is just wrong. There's the stories that the petrochemical people didn't want to have compete with it. I don't know. Maybe. They completely left out how hard the processing of hemp is, but some of that is just that people haven't been building the equipment needed. And they said you could eat the seeds. Great. you can eat acorns, too. I wouldn't advise it.
Mind a bit blown. So I looked over the little booklet they sent from M.U.S. about contributions to the annual fund. There's a big outlier in the class of '82, three years before me. The whole class donated $64k, where the average looks to be in the high teens. I look over it, and there's one guy who donated at least $50k. They bracket people into groups according to how much they donate, so I know that figure is right. And the guy is Staley Cates. I don't have any recollection of him at all. I google him, and he's president of some investment management company or something. But Daern, Mordenkainen, Tenser, Otto, Otiluke, Bigby, Gandalf, Vecna...
Penn & Teller did a thing on breasts. Actually on the "hysteria" against having them out in public. And it's a showtime show, so they have a lot out on their show. It's part of their thing. And Penn talks about how they are always sexy. One of the people is trying to say there are different functions and the feeding thing is different from the sexy one. That's where he says they're still sexy. And it's kind of a shame, they really don't even go into how they are clearly very decorative. Specifically, our cousins don't usually have the really big ones, except when actually lactating. And there's the theory about needing that shape in the front, instead of just in the back, because we're somewhat built differently. I don't know if they checked out my favorite book on the subject, _Ishtar Rising_. Oh well. Maybe they'll come back to this one. Also, they said it was a free speech issue. They seem a bit libertarian. They didn't really go into about how any speech act intended to harm is not protect. And that's what they whole indecent exposure thing is about. But in some contexts, nakedness doesn't have that kind of malign intent.
Still haven't gotten emacs to edit over ftp. I actually found something in the operatings system to grab over ftp, but it loaded it read only, and putting it back would have been pretty awkward, so I don't feel like using it. I was holding off on writing because I wanted to get that working. Maybe eventually. And I need to get the development environment under emacs working, too.
I watched _Idiocracy_. Didn't like it. I generally don't like Mike Judge's humor. I just watched office space, and it was the same kind of thing, but I kind of let netflix's prediction affect my rating. It predicted like 4.2 so I gave it a 4 star. Maybe I should have given it a 3. This rating stuff seems a little hard to do. Just a number? I have different moods. I watch stuff for different reasons. I was only watching those because people talk about them and quote them on reddit. I gave idiocracy 2 stars. They have descriptions for the ratings: 1 is hated it, 2 is didn't like it, 3 is liked it, 4 is really liked it, and 5 is loved it. But I've mostly been giving stuff that I own 5 stars. I spent money on it, didn't I? And I don't know how well it's predictions are going to go. I assume it will try to correlate me with people who rating things in similar ways. Or maybe I can't expect too much. And there is a real limit on what is out there.
So I finally started just downloading stuff from Netflix and watching it on computer. I knew that could be a dangerous waste because it's a little easy. And I have been spending a lot of time. I've been watching the new Doctor Who. Over about 3 days I've watched the first season and most of the second. Or maybe it's only 2 days. And I watched one movie. And I watched a season of Penn & Teller's _Bullshit_. That's a fun series. I figure I'm going to run out of stuff pretty quick, but who knows.
And Doug told me about some PHP programming work. I haven't really done any PHP. Doug has this belief that I could just program in any old thing. Would be nice if other people felt like that.
I've been spending all this time just watching stuff. It would be nice if I could find some way to exercise at the same time. There's that guy who does that. But maybe not. I think the kung fu is good, and it takes a little more concentration, and it's not a stand in place kind of thing. I was by myself tonight. The teacher doesn't come in on Thursdays anymore, so it's just whatever students show up. I did all the forms I know, and it was about 50 minutes. I actually skipped a little bit of some of the basic exwercises, so I probably have about a good solid hour of stuff I could be doing every day if I was more serious. And actually, it's gotten to be so much that it's more than I want to do, so I skip more often now instead of just doing only part of it. I guess I kind of feel bad if I don't do all of it, so I skip it. That, and I'm not so into exercise, anyway. I need to get a little better system, maybe. And it would be good to through in some straightforward training, like tunning and weights. The way it goes now is maybe a couple of minutes, and then a rest. That's how it goes in class, at least. But this stuff is pretty strenuous, so I can see resting.
So a thing with the ratings. You will probably only rate something that you've seen, and if you decided to see it, you must have thought you might have liked it. So it's got this weird kind of bias. Now, movie critics and their ratings are quite different. They get paid to watch just about everything. That's just got to make it a different sort of thing. And they must be people who like movies in the first place. That's got to do something. But they also must get tired of watching the same old stuff all the time. Probably most people don't have exactly that problem, and can tolerate the same sorts of stuff all the time. I've got to wonder have people who watch horror movies. I am totally avoiding that stuff. We'll see how it goes.
Several little frustrations. The midi transfer from my keyboard through my stomp box to me mac doesn't work. I looked through the manual, and it seems like it should work pretty automatically, and the mac does see a midi channel, but nothing. My desktop third won't connect to the internet. It got no connection to the network even for a while, and it looks like that was something wrong in the router, but now it doesn't get an address from DHCP, so I don't know where exactly the problem is. And the ftp load on my windows emacs doesn't let me edit the file. I was frustrated for quite a while because I couldn't remember the password. It's saved in the programs I usually use, so I finally forgot it. I managed to use ethereal to capture the network traffic and see what it was. But it took a while to think of it. Now emacs looks like it's making an ftp connection. It actually has a buffer of it's traffic on the ftp connection. I see it changing to the directory, but I don't see it even trying to transfer the file, and the edit window is blank. And an odd thing, it tries to list a local directory with some generated name, but I don't find that directory on my computer. And it's a different one each time. I don't know what that's about, but it doesn't seem like that bit's work, and overall, it isn't working. With all those little things, I'm feeling kind of frustrated.
And I've cut back on all the little email groups I had been looking at. The mensa martial arts one kind of annoyed me because some guy had this sort of long post with his explanation of internal and external martial arts. But he said soft was the same as internal and hard was the same as external. He said something about quantum physics or other--I only sort of skimmed it after that first bit really bugged me. I wrote a really grumpy email about it. The moderator sent me a private email that I wasn't being respectful. I actually don't think I had anything personal in it, but it reflected a pretty high degree of annoyance with that post. The difference between internal and soft I illustrated with a very simple example. The style xingyi is a hard internal style. A simple fact that shows they are different concepts. So there was a guy rambling on a pretty long time for this email medium about something he clearly just doesn't understand. What am I supposed to do? He did also talk about chi, which is another sort of tricky area, and I didn't even want to go into that. A few other people talked about that subject, and one said it was like religion, in that it's best to avoid it. One guy talked about how he went around debunking chi stuff. Great, fine.
And this really is probably the friendliest list I've seen, so my excessively negative post really kind of didn't go along with the vibe of the group. This is a group where he'll announce a new person, and you'll get bunches of post saying, "hi, welcome to the group!" and people will talk about their styles and be supportive. The newest person was not really training formally especially, but she was a girl, and a lot of the other girls came out and said supportive things.
Anyway, so the moderator said I was disrespectful and don't do it again. That just gave me an opportunity to consider whether I really even wanted to be on the list. And I thought about it, and I haven't really been getting anything out of them, but just sort of out of habit I've been following them. Lately, the moderator has even just been talking about the martial arts movies he's been watching. It got me to go join Netflix to see Jet Li's _the One_. Fine, I guess.
I decided it would be better just to get rid of this time waster, and I put it one no mail. I can look at them online if I feel like, but they don't sit on my email thing so I have to go through all of them to clear them out. And I did the same thing to the mensa atheist list. It is quite busy, and I usually don't get much out of it. And after having these gone for maybe a week, I decided to finally put the intp list on no mail. So I've got quite a bit more peace on my emails. It is a change though in my habits, and it's a little emotionally jarring. No big email lists. No book I'm working on. So I'm kind of up in the air. Well, I did the class on discrete math, and now I'm doing number theory. That's something.
Happy All Saint's Day! Happy Ides of November!
I watched the Beowulf movie. I guess the main reason I got it was because it had Angelina Jolie naked. I guess it was her. It was all kind of motion capture animated, but that was what she looks like naked from other stuff I've seen her in. I never read the original Beowulf, though I have a copy sitting somewhere that has the old english. They kind of "retold" the story to give it sort of a modern feel to it. And I guess maybe a post-modern sort of relativism. Heroes have to be flawed, I guess. But it made it sort of stupid. The king was Grendel's father? How is that supposed to make sense? And the dragon is Beowulf's? son? And they add a thing where Beowulf makes a deal with Grendel's mother such that he would be king as long as she keeps some cup. This completely undercuts his heroism, and pretty much destroys the whole thing. There was a making of short film, and the director Zemeckis said he hated reading the story in high school. That really should be a sign that maybe you shouldn't be the one making the movie. And so they found this screenplay that like I said, changes the nature of the story. But it had Angelina naked. So that was something.
Still reeling a bit. Knuth. A really great programmer. Prolific. Solid. I read some of his literate programming, the implementation of Adventure. He uses gotos. And lots of pointer arithmetic. It's so primitive. I've spent so much time trying to stay away from stuff like that, that I just can't quite get on board with it. The literate stuff didn't really seem to quite make up for it. So I don't know. I should read something else. And it's all C. I just don't know.
I finished watching the class on discrete math. The professor was just fun. Almost corny, but he was just too fun to really step over into being corny. I was surprised at just how much stuff I didn't know about, so I guess it was good. And now I'm sure there is a lot of other stuff too that I don't know about. I guess that happens.
I did download emacs. I haven't set up stuff to work with clojure yet, specifically a popular environment called slime, and I haven't set up whatever I need to use ftp to get to my journal. But maybe I will pretty soon. It looks a lot better than I was thinking. Lots of stuff on the menus, which I guess was something I worried about. And I used the calculator already for some of the discrete math stuff. It has an rpn one.
Trippy. I got the Blue Man Group video about the complex tour on friday, put it back in the mail at the post office at 5:30pm, and they had it the next (this) morning, and they say they are shipping my next one. So that's a good response time. I still haven't tried downloading anything. Actually, the one they are already shipping (Strangelove) was one of the few I could download, so I was thinking I would try it as a first one, but it's already too late.
Man, I suggested to Springs little writing meetup group to do a group project for the New Atheism. I think I heard about a thing where they actually made a balloon out of lead. Spring expressed that she wouldn't want to be involved in anything militant. And seemed to be trying to be nice about it. But she spelled it "athiesm". Well OK, Spring, clearly not your thing. Somebody else said not interested. One guy though wrote kind of a screed. And by how freaking long his post was, he must be a professional writer. I've one other guy write like that. I think loggorhea is a good word for that guy. Anyway, maybe this guy was trying to be clear. He said something about not trying to come off too strong. But he was "strongly" opposed. Could divide up a group like that. Speaking from "experience". And what do I say? Kind of pissed me off. If you're not interested, you're not interested. Am I trying to force you to do something you don't want to? And he didn't want it to take away from the general writing mentoring support stuff that the group is for. Fine.
Saw a couple of videos about a very common four chord progression in pop music. One was pachelbel's canon, an old classic thing that had it. And like I said, I've been watching blue man group. I love the little geeky girl annette strean singing "I feel love" I think some time I linked to the video version, but I haven't found it yet. I like fun happy love songs.
I just heard about a bra that can store drinks. Plus it makes your boobs look bigger. And Christmas is coming up. I may need to order a few. Seriously.
And a mash-up of Carl Sagan and that crippled guy.
Sooj was in town. I had been looking for it for months. She doesn't get to Memphis that much any more. It was at some kind of pagan. I didn't really want to go see them. Not my people, and for religionists, I have to say on thinking about it I think they are a step backwards from the cross worshippers. I haven't seen sooj in a few years. And I don't really relate to her music. It doesn't speak to me. And I was thinking it seems kind of self-indulgent, but probably it speaks to the little group of pagans and their folklore or whatever. So I what was it about sooj? I think maybe I just thought was cute. I like her body type. Oh well. So I decided not to go.
And I went to Brad's birthday party at Dan Mcguinness. Super 5 played for a while. At one point, Transitt played "Sweet Melissa" and I sent Melissa a text that they were doing that. Kimberly was there, and I got a hug at first. We didn't really talk, though. But she was blabbing on and on with Vince. And other folks. I was going to tell her I would like to dance with her when something good came on. But I didn't ever really talk to her. And in there, she was yakking so much, I remembered how much I don't like people who talk too much. So probably I let it slide. Still.
So there were a lot of helium balloons. I tied loops in the string and tied some to various things. I had one on my glass for most of the time, with a slip knot from the loop. But a lot of the time, I was wondering how you make a really simple knot like that onto chairs-- things with closed loops. The slip-note I was thinking of requires you to be able to slip the loop over the end of something, which you couldn't do on this thing with the back of the chair. So I wasn't sure what to do. I didn't want to tie the basic twisty half square knot or whatever. I want to learn more about knots. One thing I tried, I could see where the one piece of string didn't have anything binding it. But at some point I found an extremely weak knot with just a little tuck under. One little pull would undo it, but with the balloon pulling on it, it held. So I guess, knots can be interesting. I guess I should get some string or something.
But I ended in a gloomy mood. Kind of depressed, maybe. I'm thinking I don't feel like going to see Melissa. Last time I skipped, I really regretted it, but this feels different. Last time, it was because I had gone out so much, I think, I just didn't feel like it. This time, being a little depressed, I don't think it would do as much, and the whole feeling awareness things has changed it a bit. Maybe I have to concede that I might not want to go hang out this time.
Watching _Across the Universe_. Yummy. My second Netflix item. Took a whole week in between them. That seems a little pitiful, so I'm not quite so happy with it. I still haven't donwloaded anything. Maybe that will make a difference. But the movie is nice. lots of Beatles' music.
The teaching company had like a two day sale on everything. I noticed that they have something on discrete math. I had also been looking at one on number theory. So I decided to get those. I've been indulging in things like this lately. But I've been looking at this for a while. And it gives me an excuse to skip seeing Melissa once.
OK, after sleeping on it, I will probably go see Melissa.
So, an unexpected happy result. My mom got some slightly old donuts on sale. And that's already been a few days. But I put them in the microwave. I think I actually put them in there a little longer than was needed just to warm them up. The microwave generally can make stale things fresher because of how it interacts with the water in the bread. Being stale generally means that the water has moved out of the starch, though not necessarily completely out of the bread, and the microwave, which heats up the water in preference to the other molecules, manages to get it to go back. But with these donuts, actually a cruller and a cake donut, it didn't go back to being like a fresh donut. It ended up crunchy. I think for bread it tend to not be so good as that just makes it too hard, but because these have a lot of oil, it's kind of much softer, though crunchy. Kind of like a big potato chip. It actually seems a little better than the original to me. It especially improves the cake donuts. Trippy. The microwave may have dried them out, but it's possible that it got stale enough to have dried out, too, but the microwave gave it a mix of crispy and not stale.
Happy Ides of October!
OK, I'm reading _Coders at Work_. It started kind of slow, but has gotten very interesting, so I just read a hundred pages into it. I guess maybe the first guy, a ocuple years younger than me, just didn't seem to have much to say. This last guy went on about JavaScipt, the mostest-used, best language in the whole world. He talks about mash-ups, where people take programs from different big groups and put them together, and he had a neat idea I wanted to get down. There's going to need to be something that can put together programs like lego. This is similar I think to my belief that the proper place for an AI is to control programs on a typical computer. So there needs to be a way to write instructions for it. This guy's idea is to use javascript, which can control a browser at least. I'll need to look at that.
The second guy was some little punk kid. Did Livejournal in college or something. Started programming when he was five. Said something about getting 25 grand a month in click through ads in maybe high school. Great. Perl or C hacker or some such. Whatever. Hires people, though. Makes money, I guess. Hurrah for capitalism!
The first guy did some lisp. Likes writing screensavers for fun. The third guy said he would have made reading Knuth a hiring requirement, but couldn't get enough people like that. I think I read knuth when I was maybe 15 or so. Maybe I should review it. And I think he's worked out some newer volumns, so I should get those.
Happy Tuesday the Thirteenth!
Happy Columbus Day! Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!
So, Josh was sitting there. I didn't say anything to him, and he didn't say anything to me. He didn't really seem happy at all. Melissa really seemed kind of unhappy, but I think the latte picked her up. She didn't get one at all when she came in. And Jeanne brought her a second one. It might have been the coffee, I don't know if I helped. And maybe just working makes her feel good. She just seemed so much better when I left from when I got there.
I'm watching a Yale lecture on the Philosophy of Death. He is arguing the position that there is no soul. And later will talk about values of death, and maybe how living forever isn't so great.
I put in another sell order and the market went up. That's nice, though I think I'm spending a little too fast right now. I say up. It's at a yearly high.
So Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. OK. Seeing a lot of stuff about it. People say he hasn't done much. OK. One guy said he changed the tone of U.S. foreign policy. That seems right. It sounds to me like Norway likes where he's going and wants him to stick with it. Sounds good to me. He called for getting rid of all nuclear weapons. He's reached out to Muslims, and Iran, and North Korea. He pulled the "missile defense shield" out. Sounds good.
I need to get the things down before I forget. Dude says that the beliefs that children and money make you happy are "super-replicators". Believing them makes society work, so society gets people to believe them. Even if they aren't technically true. But some things, if you expect them to make you feel a certain way, you will predict in the future and actually remember in the past that the make you feel that way, even if actually when it happens, you don't.
What else. you see what you want to see. You remember the exceptional things the most, and especially you remember how things turn out at the end more than how it goes most of the time before the end.
ok, imagination add some details and leaves out others. Our feelings about what we imagine are affected by how we feel (meeting someone on a scary bridge or grocery shopping while hungry). And we forget how well we rationalize after something happens. He does recommend not using your imagination to predict and to just ask people who are doing it, but we don't want to because we think we are special and unique snowflakes, which we're not.
OK, another dream where I'll wake up and have something to think about so I won't go back to sleep. Plus it seemed like one of those more vivid ones, though I think I missed my omega-3 which is what seemed to do that. Anyway, I was back with Holly. Yummy. She came to town, but it was someone else's house. After a bit, was a little distant. Still, was yummy.
I don't know if I was expecting Melissa to read my mind. I sent her a text hoping she did well on her tests. She had a midterm monday and a test on wednesday that had been put off two weeks. I was hoping she would text with how she did, which she did last time I asked, though that was when the test was delayed. But I didn't actually ask. And I was hoping she would do it if she wanted to. I don't want to be too nosy.
And then there's Angela. S. not E. From college. At some point, just wouldn't talk to me. I guess that happens. But I don't know if she just didn't love me, or was just trying really hard to keep from. or what. Because she wouldn't talk to me. Makes it hard for me to understand. But then, I was pretty foolish on several occasions.
Sp, back, back. I think it was not so much about Holly as these things with Melissa that have a couple of times gone a away and come back recently. But some about Holly. I do want to be with her, though I seem to have some problems with it. Or there are some problems in there somewhere.
Wow, I ate way too many pork chops.
So I finished that book on happiness. I kind of feel empty, like I need something to do. I've got other stuff on the pile to read, but not much I have a great desire to look at. And maybe there's stuff I should do, but I don't feel like it. A deep sort of dissatisfaction. And I've told Melissa that this kind of stuff happens when you finish school. You kind of wish you were back in. But the happiness book has some stuff that helps explain it. For one, you don't remember everything. And especially, you most strongly remember the very end. And that's going to be the nice feeling you have when you're done. You forget about the pain when you're doing it. And he said childbirth is like that. I guess.
I signed up for NetFlix. And I'm looking over the movies. It could be just from the dvd cover art. But it looks like page after page of moronic crap. It's depressing. But I have a couple of dozen things in my queue, so I am find stuff at least that I think might be interesting.
And I signed up through the castles game so I could get some extra team members. It gives me access to one more quest to run, and it's magic item which has a lot of defensive power. I'm trying to get a lot of defensive power so I will win more often when people attack. Having more team members helps with this. I'll see how it goes.
But the grimmest thing could be how much time I might end up wasting on all this stuff. I have a lot that I could be watching.
So yes, it has happened before. I think about how probably I am repressing lust for Melissa, and it makes my feelings stronger, and so I don't feel quite as strongly. Just like with a certain other person. But I still love them, just not quite so strongly.
Wow, a squat in Memphis got raided. I heard about it because of the anarchism subreddit, not because I pay attention to local happenings. I thought about it because I went to Schnucks to pick up some pork chops, unsatisfied with my recent schnitzel experiences. The black checker and bag boy. The bag boy asked me about my iphone, if I had a lot of applications. I actually don't have any, but what comes with the phone. But that's been fine. Trish has mentioned one for alerts for radar and stop-light cameras and traffic. I don't know if I should go down there. There's also some collective near U of M, supposedly.
So, I have , like, a french braid. Girls and their little dress up games. Leanne gave it to me.
I'm reading _Stumbling on Happiness_. It seems to have several insights. People fill in more blanks than is usedyl when imagining the future. People overestimate the impact of things, both good and bad. The feeling of control is the main benefit to being able to predict, while being able to make better choices is very counterintuitively not very important to happiness. I'm skeptical about this conclusion, though. It may not affect happiness as much as we think, but surely it has survival benefit. People are supreme predictors, and we are top-notch survivors. But some of the deal with happiness may simply be the long term impact to happiness. Nothing much really affects it long term--we settle back to our personal set point. We will adjust to anything. So I'm not sure how a feeling of control would be any different. Except that learned helplessness is an essential aspect of depression. Anyway, this need for control may be the thing that keeps me playing this silly computer games I've been playing lately-- the facebook stuff, freecell, winrisk, even rogue. Winrisk has sometimes been frustrasting because if I catch a bad break, I can lose out and it's a bad feeling. And the control may be the thing that makes geeks like programming.
Also, he made a distinction among three types of happiness. There's the feeling of happiness. But somehow that doesn't get it for some people, like philosophers especially. If you were in some kind of simulation, but nothing was really going on, even though you felt happy, some might say you aren't really happy. And there's the eternal reward thing. Somebody said you could only judge if you are really happy when you die. And there is a greek word "eudaimonia" for this. I guess I don't have a great handle on it. There's also a kind of judgmental happiness. Like when you say, "I feel happy for you". You think you should feel happy, even if you don't really.
That was a different experience. And different mainly from having a counterintuitive result. I decided to follow my natural inclination to be antisocial, and a I was very happy with the result. I replied maybe to the "Stammtisch Sud" of the German speaking meetup. So I go there, and there's a bunch of folks I didn't recognize. So I sat in a table next to them instead of joining them. And then maybe someone came in, that I might have recognized from that group, but didn't really know. And I take some time, but I finally order the first item, the wiener schnitzel with fried potatoes and red cabbage. And I'm just looking at email and I think, were there any people I might have wanted to sit with? There were three people that last time I think had been there that I knew from outside that group. Lana, Robert Paulson who I knew from Hilton, though only slightly, and Dick Shaw. And I look over, and Robert was with them. But he was only a bit of an acquaintance and I wasn't that interested. And I figured I'd be happy to be out of there when I was finished, instead of having to sit around with them. And I really was.
But how about the food? I could think of it as I was mostly going to try out the food, and maybe if I felt like it, joining the people. I've been craving pork chops lately. Bad experience with the stuff from Aldi's. So this was a good chance. The wiener schnitzel was very good. The potatoes and red cabbage were also very good. But my first reaction was that it was a little more peppery than I would like. And it just wasn't the way mom makes it. They were really thin. The Aldi ones were really thin. Maybe there is some idea that they are supposed to be thing. My mom does try to get them thin. But I've had schnitzel in Germany. They weren't that thin. So it wasn't like momma makes. Mine are not as good as momma's, but I like mine better even than those. That's work. But I guess that's what I should do. Now I know.
I don't know what the show is. I think the actress is Jenna Elfman. Girl wanting casual sex gets knocked up. I switched over to it while house was on, a couple times. Each time enough for one joke, maybe. Hated both. Maybe something about the slutty sensibility.
And the House episode had James Earl Jones. I mean, Darth Vader! How could I not watch that? Died spitting blood. Hard core.
So the Facebook castles game has become a little different. And disappointing. So, with the gold maximum of 2 billion gold, and now an hourly income of a little over one billion. I lose money if I don't take care off the money every two hours. So I'm mostly just wasting money. That's annoying.
My rogue playing has gotten a lot worse than it used to be, but I had a really good game because I got a little treasure room, and I got a ring of stealth. That lets you sneak past monsters. But I didn't realize that it makes you need more food, and I starved. Well, I was faint when there was a troll around. Bad luck. So I looked up a kind of cheat site to learn all the secrets. The rings using food was something I could have used. Oh well. I hope I don't waste too much time on it. Also, one thing I never knew. Using the bow while throwing the arrows helps it a lot. I've been throwing arrows without the bow, and it seems to work fairly well, so I'll try it with the bow now. And I've started a game and it seems to be quite a bit better. Honestly, in most things I like the up front bashing critters, but that leaves you open to being hit, so I understand it's a bad strategy in general.
in the immortal words of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, au revoir
Saw _Zombieland_ and _Capitalism: a Love Story_. Meh.
A little sad. I had two months to get health insurance protected by HIPAA, that I couldn't be denied for previous stuff. But I didn't get around to it. And in the last week or so, I thought about making some effort, but kind of decided against it. It was probably too late as there was probably some fairly long application process, and stuff would have to be sent in. Plus I hate the insurance companies. And if you need stuff done, it's cheaper to go overseas, anyway. Also, I decided that my life hasn't really been all that great, anyway. And I have like at least three things that could kill me. And the feds are working on some stuff, and I want to see how that turns out. It looks like they will have something, though maybe not a government run insurance for everyone. But probably they are going to make it so they can't deny you for preexisting conditions. They'll probably make it expensive, though. And they can't drop you if you get sick. I guess. I'm not sure how it will work out. They are going to make it mandatory in some sense, but they lowered the fine from something pretty big, to something fairly small. So a lot of people will just stay out of it. So it might not do so much. And insurance is a bet that you will get sick. I think it's a bad idea to bet against yourself. And there's always bankruptcy.
Happy Kalends of October!
We had a party for Blasphemy day yesterday. Liz did. And it was basically a U of M party at R.P. Tracks. She has organized a little campus group of freethinkers or something like that. And they had an article about them in the daily school newpaper. Huh. I didn't realize it was daily, so I'm sure they need all the stories they can get. She had copies of the new testament, so I tore up the pages, little bit by bit, taking some time with it. And otherwise defiling it. One guy burned some of it with a cigarette. Liz's little kid took some into the bathroom, and flushed a bit. Not quite blasphemy, but close enough, I think. They took a vote, and I got the certificate recognizing my eternal damnation. So I've go that going for me.
Noel, Liz's little kid, talked about programming languages he knows about. He's in the fourth grade, so that sounds good. Visual Basic, C++, and C#. Though I think what he means by programming is that he can use the M$ visual builder tool to generate programs. I'm not sure how much he knows about writing actual code. I suspect not so much. He did mention using "msg *" on a command line to send messages to a group. There was another guy John he was talking with, and they were talking about batch files and viruses. Didn't pay that much attention. I said I was a Java person. I think he asked, the coffee or the script. I didn't hear the coffee thing. And it might have been coffee or language. But I think more likely script. And he seemed interested in javascript, but seemed to wish he had access to is, or something. I said you could put it in a URL bar of a browser to get results, if you need a handy calculater like "javascript:234*931;". But it didn't look like he followed me. He creates videos and does animation things. Good at using computer tools. Liz of course is the proud mom, and thinks of him as very smart. A bit ADHD. But when he took an IQ test, he got in the bottom 25%, which was a puzzler. The little puzzle kinds. Probably had never seen something like that before. Maybe doesn't think abstractly. I don't know.
It made me really, really mad. So Lana posts some picture or something of a fat slobby looking guy, with a caption about real men. On girl says she was sad enough to be with some guys like that. And one girl said it was funny, but there were a lot more pretty women than remotely attractive men. OK. I guess I'm not capturing what made me angry about it. Something about how they laughed at him, and I feel basically like him. Maybe I'll try to move on.
So, I think some of my feeling about this new grape gatorade flavor is the dissappointment I felt when they first changed it. When they added the artificial flavor, it had this aftertaste that really disappointed me, and I was annoyed that I just gave it up. But it's in an 8-pack, so I didn't have to stop at just one, and after getting over the memory of the initial disappointment, I can appreciate it a little better. I think it's not quite as good as the original, but it still has most of the original flavor, and just the little bit of synthetic aftertaste. So I like it a little better now than when I first tried it. It's growing on me again, I guess.
I guess I learned something. I was feeling kind of bad over the weekend worrying about Melissa. She had to do an interview with a foreigner and write a ten page report about it, and as of Thursday night, she didn't even have the interview done, and she still had to work the two nights. So I really doubted she was going to be able to get it done. But she did. She had even more than just that to do, too, but she stayed up two nights to get it all done. Had to set the alarm for every 45 minutes in case she fell asleep. Got it all done. She seemed to feel good about it, and I was very happy for her. And I felt bad for doubting her. And it's bad that I felt bad during that time. It should not have bothered me so much, and it worked out well after all. I don't know.
But of course, Melissa did not actually do an interview. She made that part up. Melissa is very sweet, but she can be a very bad girl sometimes. I don't know if I even want to write about the bad things she says she's done. Anyway, she didn't do any specific interview, but it was based on things a foreign friend of hers has said in the past. So that's pretty close. I guess. It would be perfectly reasonable to come clean with that instead of making up a fiction about an interview. But you do what you gotta do.
And I told Melissa about Carlos Castaneda. He got a Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA based on one of his books. I think probably the first one, but I might be wrong about it. The stuff about Don Juan. But he almost certainly made all of it up. Pretty impressive, though. So anthropology isn't always quite so much about telling the actual literal truth. Whatever that means.
I told Melissa that there are some things that I like and drink too much of. I've been drinking the carnation instant breakfast drink mixes lately. They're rebranded as breakfast essentials. And my favorite drink was the original grape gatorade. They don't make it anymore. They have a grape now, but it isn't the original. The original was all natural flavoring, but now they use artificial flavoring, which as an aftertaste that I just really don't like. She suggested I try the Aldi's copy. So I just went out and got it. It's the same as the new gatorade grape, which is just not the same. It has both artificial and natural flavors. So maybe they have some of whatever they originally used. But the artificial flavor simply ruins it for me. And it's easy to guess what happened. The natural flavor is just slight more expensive, so they stopped using it by itself, and mixed in some cheaper stuff. And I'm sure they didn't notice any difference in sales, if there was any. But they lost me. I drank too much of it, anyway. I must have gained ten pounds just from that.
And when I was at Aldi's I saw that they had some pork schnitzel. I like pork schnitzel, so I decided to give it a try. I was expecting it was already cooked, but it wasn't. OK, fine. It said not recommended in microwave, and they weren't kidding. I tried it anyway. I eat microwave cooked meat fairly often, and I probably wouldn't recommend it, but for me it's find. Generally it's like boiling--it's not as flavorful, because you get a lot from browning, but I think I must be fairly sensitive, because I like the very light flavor of the meat. This stuff though, was terrible. Imagine boiling something that has breading. So it was soggy. And I think this may be some kind of pressed pork. Ick. It says to fry them in a pan. I'm trying that. But if I wanted to do that, I could make them myself from scratch. I'm quite capable of doing that. I've made them several time. But I thought this might be easier and I could at least give it a shot. We'll see.
Well, it was certainly better. But really not so great. I won't try it again.
OK, now I'm confused. I was thinking about something I might write here. I went to Aimee's book meeting, and it was just me, Mike, and her. But that would be wrong according to my understanding of the Latinized grammar that it seems like I learned. It was just us at the party. It was just we? Maybe it's idiomatic. There were just I, Mike, and she? You would probably say just me, Mike and her were at the meeting over "I, Mike and she were." But even that is wrong according to a rule about how you are supposed to say I last. "She, mike, and I were there" actually seems right. So how does 'it was just she, mike and I'? better but the vereb doesn't agree. 'There were just she, Mike, and I' or maybe "They were just she, Mike, and I'. Maybe. I think we can throw some pramatics into that. Say me first because obviously I was there or I wouldn't be talking about it, and get it out of the way first to deemphasize it. And 'it was just me' is such a common thing as to be a big congealed phrase that you might run together. An idiom as it were. As compared to the idiom 'as it were'. Anyway, enough of that.
The book was _Accidental Guerilla_. It was by a military advisor, an expert in COIN or counterinsurgency. He has analyses of some of things happening in Iraq, Afganistan, and a few other places. Aimee had not finished it, so it was going to be just Mike and me talking and Aimee would take a bunch of notes because they wanted something for the newsletter. And it turns out that when it's just basically me talking with someone else, I can be quite gabby. Plus I think it was a subject I guess was interested in, so I was able to remember a lot, and go on and on. But maybe I got it out of my system, I don't so much feel like going on and on here.
So there is a big difference between counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. In counterterrorism, you go after the bad guys. In counterinsurgency, you support and protect the population and get them on your side, and fighting the bad guys is just sort of incidental. Because the kind of thing that happens is that you get a feedback loop from fighting in people's home area, which makes them angry, and then insurgent and terrorist forces get more support, so you fight some more. Most of the people fighting are not the hardcore radicals trying to take over everything. This guys uses the term "takfiri" for them. Most of the people are just locals who got caught up in it. One thing he pointed out is that a choice that seemed to make sense is actually very bad from the view of counterinsurgency. We keep troops isolated on big bases and drive into areas for operations. To locals, this makes us look like foreign raiders, which we are, and is very alienating. The bad guys often are just living right in there, and can come out at night to intimidate people. So you need people sitting in there all the time. He doesn't talk about this, but in classical occupying armies, the soldiers just take the food and stuff of the locals. That's actually something we could do different. We would certainly be able to pay for stuff, which might make us seem a lot more welcome. In addition to the typical construction that would go on. And it doesn't have to be just military people. And the best is to use local people, anyway.
It at least was saying that we do have stuff we know how to do handle the situation, though it wouldn't be that easy or guarranteed. And unfortunately it's not like a regular war, like the first gulf war or even one of the world wars. It's more like the cold war. We're talking 20 or 50 years. Yikes.
So that was Thursday night. On Friday night, I saw them sort of mention this in the news. Though that could be more because that was the first day I watched the news. They used the term "CO-IN" for counterinsurgency. Some guy has a report out on the situation. McAllister, maybe? And it was one of those, we could do it this way and it might work, otherwise we should just give up. There wasn't an easy half-assed way.
And I missed some reporting about the Dalai Lama. The Memphis mayor went to give him a fist bump. I guess it was confusing, and he thought it was kind of a violent sort of gesture. Aimee said it made the national news. Great. The mayor said it was something about flu germs. Uh huh.
I went to Bardog after the meeting. Leanne was kind of sad because she just quit her job and her boyfriend was out of town, so we were kind of affectionate. She's a sweetheart. I think she mentioned seeing this blog. Oh well.
And for a bit in there, there were a lot of people singing along with the jukebox. Some of the stuff I put on. That was nice. And there was some stuff that Melissa liked and I mentioned it to her. Sometimes she dances a little bit. I think that's very pretty. Just a tiny bit. Maybe a little more like swaying to the music. Still pretty. But I haven't really kept up with exactly what she likes. This one was Willy Nelson "On the road again". That was new maybe she likes stuff she hasn't heard a million times as well. She seemed to like "sweet child of mine" but that might have just been when I first played.
Seems like everyone likes "paradise city" I think I put it in, and it came up, but that was actually from someone who had put it in before me. I suspect it was this girl I've kind of got my eye on. A little taller than me. Short black hair, but pale. Always has significant boobs sticking out. That may be it. I saw her playing a bunch of stuff at the anniversary party. And she strikes me a possibly being another auditory person. Visual people wear sort of fancy pretty clothes. Hers were just very simple. Solid colors. I think it was maybe a black sleeveless top with jeans. She was with some little blonde who was one of those sort of obvious visual people. I guess. I'm still not an expert, but it's starting to jump out a little bit more. Anyway, chicky hasn't given me a second glance. Actually, it's more like frowny looks. But like they say, la vie.
But Leanne can be treacherous. She had her keys in her hand, and said she would be right back and left. Melissa had to run and stop her from driving away. She got her a cab, though she was saying she really needed her truck in the morning. Deal with that then. I felt silly that she fooled me and I bought it. But I guess I'm not so used to people in bars like Melissa is.
One thing that happened in Iraq. At about the time of the surge, Al-Qa'ida in Iraq pissed off the tribal people. There was a claim that the trigger was that they wanted some of the women to marry, and the tribabl people just wouldn't go there. No marrying outside for them. But it was probably a bunch of stuff. So suddenly we had a lot more support from the locals. It seems to me like we just got lucky.
I'm trying to find more about this report, and I found an old blog from McCallister. It's COIN stuff. Don't see this report, though. Maybe it is McChrystal. Darn mick names all sound the same. OK, yeah, it's McChrystal. It's a classified report but it was leaked to Bob Woodward at the Washington Post.
Aimee lent me a copy of the book they read last time, _Shimmer_. They had the author there. Starting off kind of with a bad attitude about it because she talked about how it had something that a technical person would see was impossible. I think I see that, but it might be something else. Also, in the first section the people are having a business meeting, and they are askin, if you were food, what kind would you be? What do you mean if you were food? We are food. People do get eaten. Do you mean if you could be some other kind of food what would it be? I don't want to be a pie.
On the disc that has "One the Road Again" is Willie Nelson's cover of Bridge Over Troubled Water, which I've been watching on youtube. I googled for the meaning. I had heard heroin. One site talks about a bunch of songs. What is silver girl supposed to be? Not a needle? According to inteviews from Paul Simon, his girlfriend was sad because she found some grey hairs. Well OK. Just a song about friendship. One person mention's a poster with a black couple where the guy said "like a bridge over troubled water I will lay me down". OK.
Wow, i just checked my account. I've been spending a little too much. Haven't been keeping track. Not so good.
Early, the bounter hunter in Firefly, said something like "Man is by far stronger than woman, but only woman can make a child. Does that seem right to you?" Actually, Early, it does. Women are too valuable because of that to do much fighting, which is the kind of strength you are talking about. Better left to more expendable men, so that's why selection pressure pushed that way.
I'm just feeling really angry right now. Like chopping stuff with my sword. It seems like the trigger is this guy Scotty the door guy at Bardog, and it was closing time and he said to me, ten minutes, and then 5 minutes left. Generally David and Melissa are cool with me staying around, but I don't know. If he wants me gone, I'm happy to leave, but I wait till Melissa comes out and says goodbye. And I guess there was this sort of heavy feeling building of feeling unwelcome, and it was irritating me for whatever it was, fifteen minutes. But that couldn't have been all it was. Before that, I had the beginnings of anger or something, and that just kind of aggravated it, or kept it going or something. I guess I wasn't sure it was anger exactly before. Maybe. Seeing Josh and Melissa kissing again. But Josh spent a while talking to Johny. And then Josh left. He didn't say anything to me on the way out, but we haven't really been doing that lately. And Melissa was talking to Johny and they were just laughing and laughing. I was at the far end of the bar, so I couldn't tell what it was. So I walk over, and she leaves before I got there and miss it. And ask Johny what's going on or something. Maybe he said something about he needs to pay attention, I don't know exactly. But if seeing Melissa and Josh kissing bothers me so much, I guess I can take it as a sign that there are things going on in my head that I'm not looking at so closely. I've looked at them before, but I guess I tend to just let them slip back.
It was Bardog's big anniversary party. They had a big alley party, with a dunk tank and a band. There was a meatball eating contest. Your were supposed to eat 40. It had been 30, but they upped it on Wednesday. Melissa had suggested I enter, but I thought against it. I can eat a lot, but I eat kind of slow. And I was thinking they were bigger than they were. So I didn't enter, but I've been kind of regretting it, and then being OK with it. The kind of thinking that can make you unhappy. Several pukers. Didn't know the winner. Aldo said it was two and a half pounds. That kind of made me think I could have done it. But after that, they had some barbecue. That was really good, so I'm kind of happier that I got to eat that instead. And as little as I ate, I kind of think probably better not to have been in it. It might have been about a plateful, but not as much as the meatballs, I think.
There was a little girl who cut her hand. There are two girls I can't tell apart. One is named Britney and she works the day shift. I don't know if this was her. Cut her hand, and was quite a bit bloody. She was washing it in the sink, and I was standing there, and Dave asked me to stand with her to make sure she doesn't fall over. Some times people when they get hurt a bit and see blood, they can get a little weak-kneed from being scared. So I stood with her a minute, and she talked about it a bit. Sure.
But I guess on a positive note, the omega-3 seems to be making my dreams very vivid. I seem to remember very long ones. I'm not becoming lucid so much, but it has altered their character somewhat.
Yarrr, Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day!
I just listened to the commentary for the Season 12 episode "Trilogy of Error". They are just so proud of it, well at least the writer Matt Selman is. It's actually starting to seem infectious. I liked it when I first saw it, but I only saw the connection to _Run, Lola, Run_, but I hadn't seen the movie _Go_ which was really the main basis for it. That might have added a little, but the idea itself is neat. I think it's great. I actually think all of Season 12 is great, as I have gone through it and watched them all maybe four or 5 times now. Has the series gotten better since the beginning? It would make sense. You become a lot better after 10 years of doing something. South Park noticeably has gotten really better in that time, though South Park is kind of limited in just it's fairly childish nature. The thing is, people say that things went downhill since what, maybe the 9th season. One person I remember specifically mentioned Ian Maxstone Graham as an unfunny guy who is at this point a bigger producer. And maybe that's it. They aren't going as much for pure comedy as interesting story-telling, which is something that does get better. I guess that's what I'm seeing improved in South Park, too. So this year, they one the Emmy for the flowers for Algernon story, I forget their title. Homer gets smart, bonds with Lisa, then goes back to being dumb. It was also the movie Charlie, which won an academy award, so it's a good story. In that one, it's a medical experiment and there's a mouse Algernon that it happens to, too. And I read the book as a kid and have it somewhere, but I don't really remember. The deal is, he gets smart, becomes obnoxious, but falls in love, and then you see the mouse lose it, and he loses it too. It was good and heartfelt. This one, trilogy of error, isn't so emotional, but it's intellectually interesting. Melt Selman calls it a "chrysalis of genius". Kind of a smarty show. But I'm kind of a smarty, so I like it. And the other super great one, the one with Lisa and the substitute teacher, "Lisa's Substitute"-- it did not do so well at the table read and probably it doesn't have as many jokes and isn't as funny, but it's a warmer story and people really like it. Maybe manipulative. Lisa loving something.
I went to Borders and I was greeted. A cute little blonde girl said "hi. welcome to Borders" And I think I tried to smile a little and say thank you. And I may have mumbled howsitgoing, but she just said "wut?". I guess they need to try to add value above Amazon. And halfway to the back of the store by the helpdesk, another boron smiled and said hi or something. I don't know. creepy.
And I get to the back, and there's this cute little dark-haired pale girl shelving. And some other boron was visiting her and commented on how they stuck her in the very back, shelving. And I said, "MMM, shelving" but I was pretty far away and not really talking to them. I was thinking of saying to her, "you probably always wanted to be a librarian, but you got stuck working at Borders" but I didn't. You probably could have guessed that.
But hovering in that area, I did find a book with that nifty calligraphic form of the word "zen" on the cover that you sometimes see. A pile of then sitting on the floor under a little advertisings table. I was intrigued and took a closer look. Zen and the art of making a living. My first reaction was how most people now who write these sort of zen inspired books really know jack shit about zen. So I felt kind of sad about that. But I reached down and picked it up to at least look at it. Seemed a bit like _what color is your parachute?_ I've tried getting that book several times. Every year has a new addition, so you can always get a new one. But I don't really ever do all the work in them. Personal inventories. And job hunting as 40 hour a week sales job. That's a nightmare job. I'd rather be unemployed. So maybe I'll skip getting that one this time. Bamboo slivers and fingernails come to mind. But this one, was worth at least thumbing through. And it seemed like it was packed with poorly understood quotations of oriental wisdom. But it was about trying to find the right sort of work. And I probably should be doing that, so I picked it up.
I went there to get _The Accidental Guerilla_ for Aimee's book meeting. I probably won't go because I'm getting more tied to the kung fu meeting on Thursday, since I'm the one keeping the extra key, but I'm torn. I'm interested in this military stuff. I'll try to read it and see how it goes. I could give the key up for a week.
So I got the kung fu book in. Li Lao Shr told us the name of the teacher who taught her the Fanzi Quan form. The story she gave was that he had this form, and with the cultural revolution, he put it in a box, but when they were bringing back more traditional wushu again, he took it out of the box. His name was Wen Jingming. He died in 1985. But he had a book on a _Kaoshou Fanziquan_. It's a form of fanziquan supposedly developed by a guy who went to prison, but couldn't do all the movements because he had to wear cuffs, shackles. I wasn't sure if it was the form we were learning, but when I got it, I could see that definitely it was. The hands tend to stay close together. The kicks are not high--that's actually pretty nice. Capoeira is also supposed to be from being shackled, but in that, you do a lot of rolling around.
So, I had been stuck on the second to the last puzzle in the sudoku book. I left it alone for a few weeks. So I got out of the habit. But I went back to it. Finished it up. Then got the last one. So I'm done with it.
So I found an ouchie in those facebook games. It looks like your money amount is a 32 bit integer, so I can't get more that about two billion. And I just reached it. I don't think it does anything weird like turn negative or something. I think it just stays at the maximum. But that's it. So all that investment and growth I was playing with. Topped out. Boo! I guess it was fun enough while it lasted.
I don't know if I've written about computers needing to be able to ask for help. I remember thinking about it. It's a pretty obvious idea. Some robot guys have actually found a neat and easy way to do it. They use the Mechanical Turk, an online web system where you get people to do simple jobs for like a few pennies each. The job in this case is just to ask what is this thing I'm looking at, a big problem for computers, and they need someone to tell them to learn.
So a guy Itamar who I saw at the AGI convention is saying we could have AGI in a few years, not decades, using information modeling from deep machine learning (some subfield I'd never heard of) and reinforcement learning. I would be skeptical, though. Still it's an interesting claim.
Can't sleep. Don't know what the deal is. Going to see Aimee for lunch at Bardog. Missed her on Wednesday because the emails didn't work right somehow. Maybe sent a reply to a wrong place. So I was thinking How I would describe Aldo to her. "Owner" doesn't quite cut it. Aldo dreamed it up and made it happen. What's the word for that? Now it's a place for him to have fun and do stuff. Resident? Creator? Something deva-like? I'm thinking of the Hindu story of how the universe is just a dream of one of their gods. I need to remember the name of that one. Brahma, maybe? He creates it by his dreaming.
I thought of something that might be a problem in AI. People have a notion that when you learn things, you always learn correct things. Probably most of what you think you learn is wrong, but we have a cultural system that puts pressure on us to discard mistakes that we have. But we don't think of putting an AI in an environment like that, with so much correction. We just want it to be right all the time.
Argh. I was writing a letter in a text editor. That's a little safer than doing it in a browser window edit box. I thought. And then my editor crashed. I haven't lost stuff like that for a long time. I don't remember the last time, but it could have been years. Then again, I've lost stuff like that in browser window edit boxes, so I guess that counts, but it's been a while. It seems like it's just on that machine that it has trouble like that, not the one I'm on now. And I've been using this editor, UltraEdit for maybe ten years. But that may be changing. Maybe I'll switch to emacs. It uses lisp, and I'm trying to get back into lisp. I used it a tiny amount maybe 20 years ago, but it had some nice features then. And in the original pragmatic programmers book, it recommended mastering an editor to handle a lot of mechanical stuff that a programmer needs to do. I never master Ultraedit, but I was trying to utilize it a bit better for that kind of stuff. Turns out that some of it's regular expression stuff was actually a bit buggy, so it didn't work as well as it might have. But I really prefer having all the options on menus, which is not really how emacs works. I think you're just supposed to know, or call some documents up or something. Not at all like menus.
Yesterday, president O was going to talk on 60 minutes. And I kind of wanted to see it. But there was sports on like at least three channels. And then 60 minutes was delayed. And I was getting more and more frustrated. Plus the Simpsons wasn't even going to come on. So at one point I decided I didn't want to see one second more of sports. I didn't want to have to see it changing through channels. I'm tired of the jocks. I just had to turn it off. I don't care what I missed. Not one more second. Not going to turn it on to see if 60 minutes had made it on lest I see any of that moronic filth. Of course, going to Bardog, I was going to be subjected to it because they would have it on there. But I would have a little more time to settle down, and it wasn't my choice, and there would be other stuff going on, too, and other things to look at. Today they have tennis. Blech.
Happy Sunday the Thirteenth! Happy Ides of September!
And the pragmatic guy said that thing about how everything that ever happened to you is stored in your memory. Maybe, but maybe not. That idea mainly comes from one thing that happened one time when an epileptic was having brain surgery. They stimulated a spot on his brain, and he relived some memory from a long time ago. It could have just been some glitch that happened because he was epileptic. I don't know what other evidence there is for that idea. Maybe there has been some more.
I've been thinking of going to try to see Ashley for the last several hours, but I'm not completely in the mood. I just haven't completely let the idea go, though. Probably won't. I kind of felt like going to see Melissa, but I didn't commit and send her a message, so I didn't feel quite up for it.
The turkey is disappearing pretty fast. One breast is gone. One leg. Most of a thigh. Half of each wing. I like to eat the wing tips when they are crunchy. I have this big thing of gravy. I may have to eat it like soup or something. I boiled the giblets, and was thinking of just making gravy from that, but then I had a lot of fluid at the bottom of the pan, so I used that too. I think I really put too much water in pots when I roast stuff. I'm probably not supposed to do that at all, because it doesn't brown it as much, and you get a lot of flavor from that. But that's just how I've been cooking, I guess. Considering that I cook stuff in the microwave, where it doesn't get any browning at all, that's just something I'm used to. Really very bland. But I'm kind of sensitive to spices, too. I never liked red hots when I was a kid. I mention that, because there is a liquor that they push a lot at Bardog, Fireball or something like that, that is kind of flavored like that. And I did some of that, and really didn't like it. Couldn't do it all at once, though I'm not sure I ever can do shots like that.
So it turns out I own millions of acres somewhere. I should sell it and make some money. I'm not using it.
I'm cooking a turkey. It's been in the freezer since last Thanksgiving. Where does the time go? The old roasting pan seems like it's got rust coming through the black painted coating. It kind of looks dirty maybe from last time, but it seems more like it's rust. The thing is older than me. Probably time to let it go.
I just watched a TED talk on happiness. One of the reddit commentator's said it was life changing. I don't know about that. I didn't quite follow it all, though. But from what that guy said, I'm trying to look at it harder. The first time I was doing other stuff, so maybe I wasn't concentrating on it so much. Maybe there are too many things. He talks about the simulation in the prefrontal lobe. And you can change your views about the world and you synthesize happiness. There is also an impact bias, where you always thing things have a bigger impact than you think. I can definitely see that I do that. My whole risk aversion thinkg. Not so good. But all that stuff people get and seem to thing is a big deal probably isn't such a big deal either. Important subject, though. How to be happy. Seems important. When you don't get what you want, you change what you feel about what you wanted so that you like what you have better and what you didn't like not so much. He mentions Shakespeare saying how nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so, which is something but not quite complete. He goes with a quote from Adam Smith about how some things may be better than others, but not so much that it is worth don't something nasty that you will regret (lie, cheat, steal...). So you would expect crooks not to be so happy. Then again, who is?
Wow, so my castles income is more than 60 million gold per hour, and it seems kind of pointless now. They changed the vampires game so that the investments all have a P/E of 100, which is really pretty high, and it has now fallen behind my kung fu pets thing. where I think I've get about $6 million per hour. So I'm about done.
So I guess the thing about that work was that if I were to do all the stuff that they were asking for, I would be getting ripping off, because we agreed to fewer hours than it would take. It would have been more hours if that unexpected stuff wasn't included. So I was procrastinating.
And one thing about getting into a procrastinating mode was that I didn't reply to Aimee, who replied that she would like to go to lunch, so when and where? A couple days of it was just shock and trying to recover, so I got started putting it off. And then it just kept going all week.
I think I see an implication of Gilbert's talk, though. Keeping your options open will reduce your "synthetic happiness" compared to making a decision and just sticking with it. So P's are likely to be less happy in that respect. Well, keeping your options open after you have something, that is, keeping open the possibility of changing you mind later. I guess if you wait before, and then stick with it once made, that's probably OK. But probably there is some issue with thinking it is a bigger deal than it is.
Finished _Pragmatic Thinking & Learning_. Just decided to power through to the end to be done with it. Had lots of little recommendations. Don't check your email all the time. Write mental map doodles. Have something with you all the time to take notes. Make plans. It finished up pretty quick I guess. I'm probably not going to do much with it. And I don't what what I could have been thinking I would get. He did recommend meditating. Fine. Glad to have it done.
So I'm trying to read _Pragmatic Thinking & Learning: Refactor Your Wetware_. And he's talking about using oracles or ambiguous stuff to get you thinking. And then he goes to the "sound of one hand clapping". Ugh. That just bothers me. It's just an emotional reaction, but what can I do? Maybe I should send him an email.
Argh, you gotta hate when Rocky spills over into your life. So the bit with me is a thing I did several times. Janet or somebody will get emotional. There a bit where she screams, and I'll yell, "what the fuck, bitch?" Rocky is kind of nice in letting to just yell something you might like to some time in real life but really probably shouldn't. But since then, there have been quite a few times now where I just have this urge to just yell that. And it's only been a couple of days. Just now it was Joss Wheadon in the commentary for the Firefly episode "Objects in Space". Something about existentialism and how things can be overpoweringly real. He talks about seeing it as a kid in Sartre's _Nausea_. Things are never just partially real-- they are always complete fully real, and it makes the guy feel "nauseous" (OK, I don't want to get started on that one again). But dude, that is so sophomoric. And Joss admits he is not intellectual and doesn't know much about philosophy and he was a kid at the time he had his "existential epiphany". But gee, man.
So I didn't end up really saying much of anything. It was really busy. They had to kick people out at three, and they are usually done at 1. I stayed around maybe twenty minutes more, though, which didn't happen on Friday. David and another little girl Randi were hanging out, too. I was thinking maybe asking how she felt about me coming around, because I'm still not sure. And I guess we didn't get to talk much because she was so busy. But when I was out the door, and we were hanging out, she finally was asking me how my week was looking, and really seemed to linger a bit more than I was expecting. But I really felt good that she was talking to me. I was happy, though she wasn't really as happy as me. And it was that I just didn't want any more. It was plenty for me. And I guess that's what happens. It's only after it's gone that I want more.
So it was a reddit on some Terry Pratchett book. The little lies like the tooth fairy and Santa Claus get you ready for the big lies, like god, justice, mercy, duty...
Went to Rocky Horror at the Orpheum. I've forgotten almost everything. Two girls I saw there, I also saw at Bardog. Stephanie who was a bartender at Dan McGuinness, and Carol who I've seen hanging out with Melissa. Angela put her number in my phone so I could text her stuff. I told her to read something by John Schwartzwelder. I also met her friend Julie. Studied audio engineering, but is going to get a masters in forensic psychology, but will have to leave memphis for that. Both Julie and Angela worked at Jarrett's which is near me. I'm not sure what the deal is, but David came in and was kissing Julie.
So I think I've done about all I can do in Age of Castles. I've become the cow. My hourly income is now over 5 million gold, so there is no other thing that's really worth doing to get gold. I can try to build upsome statistics, including my defense, but that doesn't make much difference with only the 6 people on my team, as that's a multiplier for it. I may start buying marketplaces just because it's easier buying a lot of those. When I came back tonight I had 44 million gold sitting. Maybe I should try getting a script to automatically reinvest, so no money is sitting around to steal.
I keep thinking about it. I go out on Sunday when it's empty and I don't really see anyone except Melissa, but I go out on Friday and I see and talk to several girls. Most times when I go out on busy nights it's crowded and I don't talk to anybody, but sometimes I do. Hmm. Haven't really had any luck in bars, though. Just don't see the smart chicks there, generally. I'm not too sure where they hide. But it's something. Probably smart chicks all become doctors and lawyers, anyway. It's the most sensible thing.
Happy Kalends of September!
I've been playing a game on facebook, Age of Castles. Kind of a strategy game, though it has objects and text that are sort of in a medieval setting. I don't quite get it all, yet. There is a little section of things that you can only get if you actually send money into the game, or sign up for a deal with one of the advertisers. One of the things you can get with the money only bits is extra soldiers, and there were some things in the game that I could only do with a couple of extra soldiers, so I sent them $10 so I could move a little further in the game. And it was fun enough, so I felt OK about sending them some actually cash. You can actually get more people by recruiting facebook friends, but I don't really want to get more actually people involved, so this was just easier. I think this will end up largely boring, and I'll give up in a little while, but for now I'm liking it.
This company has several games set up in different settings, but the game play is basically the same. One is with vampires, and one is with kung fu pets. My little nephews actually signed me up first with these, but I've been playing this one, since I have played other medieval games. And I found one of my friends who is actually very high level in it. But the game is all about numbers. You have gold, you have "energy" which you need to do quests, and you have "stamina" which you need to battles, and you have abilities and each level you get, you get 5 skill points to increase your abilities. I've been putting all the skill points I get into increasing my base energy, so I can do more quests. And when you use up energy or stamina, it regenerates fairly slowly, 4 minutes per energy point and 5 minutes per stamina point. I started the game with a base energy of 10, but now I have a base enrgy of 130, but still a stamina of only 6. If you fight someone, you can steal some of their gold away, so it can be a source of income, and you get some money for quests, depending on the quest, each of which has different energy costs. So you try to balance which quest gives you the most gold for the energy, it could be anywhere from 100 to 10000 gold per energy point, but the higher level ones take bigger amounts of energy, so there would be long waits between. And maybe you have to wait, but generally, since I put everything in energy, I can get to the next level right away, and that puts you back at maximum, so I've been moving up pretty fast. But a few times, I have had to wait it out.
And the most interesting thing for me in the game is that you can buy sources of income at different levels. Generally, the price to earngs ratios is around 40 to 1, and the payoff is hourly, so in a couple of days, you would double your value. So you get to explore the very exciting idea of exponential growth in a time frame you can see. And there is stuff you can buy that would help you in battles, if you want to have income based on battles. But the thing is, quests and battles can only give you income that increases basically linearly with time, but the investment incomes, if you reinvest, is exponential. When you attack someone, they put a maximum of 100,000 on how much you can steal from them, if you find a rich wimp that just sits with money in cash--how much you get to steal is proportional to how much cash you have. Because of this, I always keep my cash low, because then I don't lose so much when I lose a battle. And I've got a list of cash cows that I bleed off. It's rare to find characters that are weak enough for me to beat and sit with money so I always get the maximum, but I've collected some. The thing is, your power in battle depends on how big your army is, and most people have very large ones. I have a tiny one, and can only fight other people with tiny ones, so I'm a bit of a niche predator. But it's not going to take me long, especially with exponential growth, that even 100k gp is going to be insignificant compared to my income. Right now I get about 600k per hour. If I used all the stamina I can get in an hour, which is about 20, I could only get 2,000,000 per hour from fighting, maximum. Pretty soon that will be my regular income.
And some characters I've seen have incredible investment incomes. I saw a person with 100 "marketplaces" each of which has and income of 60,000,000 per hour. So that's an income of 60 billion per hour. No wonder I also get the maximum from attacking her, though I lost a few before I got a little better weapons ability. And some of these kind of have me wondering if maybe some of these characters are fakes that the game people have planted around to make it interesting. I tried to look up her facebook user, and didn't find it. I thought that was screwy, but then I saw a guy with 1600 marketplaces. That's an income of 100 billion gp per hour. And it represents an investment of 80,000,000,000, that's 80 trillion gold pieces. I'm not sure how that's possible. Keeping up with the exponential reinvestments who be an incredible amount of work, which is why I think maybe it's fake, or there are scripts or there are definitely things I'm not understanding in this game. Which some of the lists of items some people had, I was thinking at first that maybe when you kill someone, you get all their stuff, which is why I first started into doing battles. But that's not it.
There are definitely things I don't get about this game. And there's one thing I don't quite follow. The P/E ratio for the investments actually goes down as the cost goes up. The cheapest one for 11.3k makes 350, for a P/E of 32. The middle ones are around 40, but the marketplace cost 5 million, and only makes 60k, a P/E of 83, so it makes the most economic sense to never buy any of the bigger ones. The only below marketplace is a temple for 415k, earing 9800, a P/E of 42. And when you sell anything, you lose 10% in the transaction, so going to marketplaces, you at least 50%. Maybe it's just easier to buy larger objects, because from the drop down list you have, you can only buy at most 5 objects at a time. Which is why I'm suspicious of 100 or 1600 marketplaces. That's a lot of mouse clicks. So, one of the questions I don't know is if it's the same to buy marketplaces immediately, or to buy temples, let them double up, and then convert to marketplaces at the end. But the whole mathematics with exponentially increasing amount over time is just something I don't have a good feel for. So I said the battles are probably going to become insignificant for making money.
The quests I have now are such that I can make about 400k gp with a quest costing 30 energy. And it takes 2 hours to save up 30 energy, so its an income of only 200k gp per hour, but that doesn't include level ups, which will regenerate a full 130 energy, so I can make 1.6 million gp when that happens. I can make that, or I can choose to do other quests, which different things involved. If I level up on a different quest, I can get an extra skill point. And you have to do all the ones in a group of about 6 before you can do those again, so several times, I have spent energy doing that instead of just going after the money. It's all kind of numbers swimming around, and for right now, it's keeping me entertained.
Somebody just attacked me, beat me, and got 0 gp. That had to be frustrating. I just happened to have left it with almost no money. An hour later there would have been a bunch. Then there was this one guy. I had attacked him randomly a while before, and I may have even killed him once, I don't remember. He attacked me and lost maybe 15k of gold. But after that, I think he must have put a bounty on me, which is something you can do in this game. Put up a bounty, and you show up on this global list, and everyone tries to kill you. Because several people out of the blue attacked me, until I died once. Oh well.
Wow, that's journalism. So, 60 minutes did a story on "e-waste". Recycling electronic waste which is often hazardous. There was some U.S. recylcing firm that said they recycle stuff in the U.S. and don't just ship them off somewhere else. But they had some containers that they shipped out. And they saw some C.R.T. monitor tubes in a container, so they got the number of a container and they tracked it. And it went to Hong Kong. Chinese customs caught it and sent it back. They talked to one of the business guys, and he appeared not to now. The lawyers said someone shipped it under their name without permission. Uh huh.
So even before that story, I was thinking about how Mr. Hachett at M.U.S. tried to introduce us to journalism. I totally didn't get it then. To me it was just a painful assignment--painful because it involved other people. I hate that. I had to get my parents to drive me somewhere and I had to talk to people. I just hated that. We were supposed to do a story on a little Tennessee town. I had Tatumville. I think they maybe had a story. He had suggested getting a soil sample and checking it. I got some topsoil, but didn't get it tested. Topsoil wouldn't matter anyway, it it was tested. They had maybe a store. And I think I talked to some old person and they had had a steam bus at one point. Seems like my parents must have done more work than me, because I just hate dealing with strangers. And now thinking back on it, it could have been fun and interesting. But not for me back then. Now I actually care a lot more about writing. Not so much back then. It was just work I had to do and I personally felt I didn't like it, especially being made to do it.
To the vegetarians I say this: beans contain material that we cannot digest. More than just the fiber, there are actual carbohydrates in them that can only feed the bacteria in our guts. It is quite a stretch to think that this is a perfectly natural and appropriate diet for people. Certainly we can manage it, but it is just not logical to say that it is the best thing for us. One might argue against eating animals for other reasons, but to say that eating vegetables is the best thing for us is a stretch. Of course, I'm not the best to talk, because right now, I'm eating a donut.
Of course, maybe the vegoids want to go rabbit. Rabits get a lot of nutrition by eating their droppings, which are mostly bacteria. It's the bacteria in their guts that is able to digest most of the plant material they eat, so the the rabbits can get the nutrition by eating them after they poop. Of course, it's a bit of a flaw that all this happens in the gut after the part that absorbs stuff, so it involves pooping, but what'cha gonna do? Perhaps that's what the vegans have in mind. They could also grow mushrooms on their poop, if they want another step.
That girl. I think she doesn't want to see me, or is at least uncomfortable with it. She has a little netbook or something that she is trying to get ready for school, and I'd like to see it and maybe help her with it. It's full, and she's gotten a little memory stick for it, and an external dvd thing. She mentioned she was going to mulligans for something, picking her players for her the fantasy football team. but she couldn't be socializing then. ok. but how do I react? I kind of feel a little hurt, but should I say anything. I should just get over it. I feeling saying to myself, "self, just get over it". I care about her, and should just try to be happy with that, though she just doesn't want me in her personal life. It happens. A bit of a strange thing, though. Angela Edmondson seems to like hanging out with me there. I don't know. She's nice.
And then there seems to be a natural sort of tendency to play hard to get and be frustrating and difficult for men. Just part of being picky. But some of it is to make sure more aggressive men are selected. Aggression is a masculine trait that gets emphasized. And then there wasstory about the girl who liked it rough. on reddit Though "rough" doesn't quite capture it. She likes to make out, but frustrate the guy until he just does her. But I'm not positive that it's just something weird. Sounds a little too natural.
Yesterday at least, I had a feeling of deep mental. Not so much riht this second. I guess I'm getting tired, and maybe I'm feeling a little emotionally shaky. But it felt kind of deep. Seems like it was about not feeling encumbered, like I am right now.
OK, I was having trouble with some sudoku puzzles. Making little mistakes. So something is definitely going wrong with my brain now, different from just a bit before that. Didn't sleep so well, and didn't get as much. I guess it varies. Some of it might be that the pencil I'm using is a little dull, so the writing is light, and I can't see it as well. The near vision is going a bit. But there is a focus issue.
So the girl is definitely in my brain. She said something that I'm reflecting on. Aldo called in and told Jay to log off the poker game downstairs. He must have wanted to play at home. And I said that stuff can mess you up. And she said with a little smile, everyone has their little vices. Are you trying to say something, dear? Maybe I should listen to that. Do you think I'm just stupid to come see like this? Maybe I'm putting that a little harsh. But I get some kind of vibe of slight contempt, sitting in there with the general sweetness. Some flavor, I supposed.
I got the Simpson's season 12. Just watched the 250th episode, the on with the who. They just played "won't get fooled again". And there were badgers. Seems like that should remind me of someone. i wynder who?
A little frustrated. I didn't go out and get some cash, so there are some things I can't do. And I felt like sleeping, so I missed a meeting scheduled earlier. A person can't have everything they think of that they might want. That can be frustrating. And if you can think of more things, then as consequence, you might be likely to be more frustrated. Frustration turning into unhappiness is a reaction though. Part of the whole thing with reflection causing suffering. Which, I would submit, is the point of the story of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. A couple of kids who otherwise had so many good things going for them.
R. Don's greatest success. The gym shooter. I don't even remember his name any more, but the idea of it. And I think it's a success, because he did a lot of what R. Don suggested. He worked out and got into good shape. I think he was talking to women. He became obsessed with those things and they became his life, though he didn't become good at them, and he was a nut, so he really gave up on life in there, somewhere.
But on the intp list, there is another guy who has made working out an obsession--Ool (Ulrich Schlegelmann). A guy in Germany who doesn't work--he sponges off his parents and possibly the welfare state for the meds and doctors. But he works out four to six hours a day, so he's in pretty serious shape. Six foot 220# football style, when he started at those measurments, couch potato style. And he just gave his exercise plan. Most of it was detailing the video player and where to download stuff to watch. Because that's his system. Be addicted to watching downloaded TV. but only watch while working out. So in effect, become addicted to working out. And I don't use "addicted" lightly in the sense of having a habit. I mean the sense where it harms your ability to live the rest of your life. He doesn't work, and didn't before, but he surely can't now. Which may be fine. The world is affluent enough, and machines really do enough of the work that just not everyone needs to work. And you've got lots of rich parents that can afford some dead weight. But the most striking thing to me about Ool's story, is that just like in R. Don's plan (R. Don Steele has Steele Balls Press with _How to Date Young Women for Men over 35_ and several things like that, plus he runs seminars, one of which our friend the gym shooter attended) Ool just stumbled into a girlfriend. From what I gather, some welfare mom. But I presume someone in good shape that he met at the gym. Schopenhauer had a cool term for this Wille Zum Leben, the will to life. This sort of push that is beyond any individual's goals or desires that pushes people into sexual relations. A very sort of striking concept in how it is so much bigger than any one person. Striking to me in this case because Ool had become such a loser, and he seems to also be a narcissist. But he's got a girlfriend now.
I seem to have decided not to take classes. Right this second, I'm reconsidering, but there were a bunch of things. It's money, it's time. And it's only classes that involve hobbies for me that I'm not really interested in enough to do hard work for. And I had a realization that possibly what my motivation for doing it was just some loneliness and wanting to be with some people. Getting out there instead of just being by myself. And if that's it, I should just get a real job. And I sort of conceded that I'm never going to write. One class was going to be fiction writing as the prerequisite for the creative non-fiction class, and the other was the into to philosophy class, which I wanted to take as an opportunity to finally be force to write philosophy in the fairly disciplined, at least focused, way that philosophers do. Instead of just blogging. So the problem with my concluding I'm never going to write, is that I'm writing right this second. But of course, I meant that I won't write as serious work. Maybe that's true, I guess.
What were the other areas I wanted to study? Music. I actually haven't played anything for a while, so I probably will never be serious. A few days ago, I finally connected my fancy pedal board in to my mac, and got it to suck in sounds to garage band. I did it for the few seconds just to get in a sample. Turned out to be hard, but only because I didn't have the device set right. And I got it working, but now it's just sitting. Probably the bigger thing would have been to get the keyboard thing working, instead of just the guitar input, because my guitar is much too week. I can actually come up with creative new music on keyboard--not on guitar.
I also was thinking biochemistry. I've had several rationalizations for that. To be sure, I have always liked chemistry, though in organic I lost motivation, and wasn't into memorizing the three dimensional reactions which was the main deal there. And some of it was the possibility of being in the class with Melissa next semester, which is probably just very lame. Melissa kind of lights up in talking about how much she hates the class. So that's a lame reason. And I could just read the book to learn the stuff as much as I want. I also have a possibly real reason--I'm interested in bioinformatics, and it could be part of a job to know this stuff. One very specific aspect of that that I've mentioned. I don't think there is much software capable of doing the chemical-spatial reasoning involved in chemistry in that area, and it would be a very valuable thing to go into. Drug discovery is all about getting molecules of the proper shape to interact chemically in desire ways. Just understanding how particular reactions work is challenging in itself. But again, I'm not so serious about that.
One of the biggest things is that I think I'm just not ready to be on a schedule again yet. That can be so hard, or at least, unpleasant. I have trouble getting out of the house. The Simpson's season 12 DVD came out on Tuesday, and I was trying to go out and get it. I could have gone at night and tried Wal-mart. On Wednesday, I managed to get up in the afternoon, and was out the door at maybe 5 PM and found it at Borders. I looked for it in the case with the other Simpson's seasons, but didn't see it there. And a little worker lady asked if I was finding everything, and I didn't have a good answer for that, and she said if I needed to get in the case, let her know. But I was figuring that they had some place for new releases, and I hadn't seen that. They've moved everything around there, and it's been hard for me to find stuff. The videos are tucked way in the back now. And walking back through the store, it turns out that the new releases thing was dead in the middle, and it was sitting right there. I must have walked close enough for it to bite me, but I was focused on getting to the back of the store where I thought it should have been that I didn't see it. I do have a problem of not seeing things so well any more.
So getting out of bed for school seems like it would be terrible for me. But a big thing is that I don't have the money right available for a big impulse move like that. I could take it out. And going to school for a semester shouldn't really be an impulse thing.
So I just went down to the campus and I found it discouraging. So I don't especially want to take classes. The first thing was that I saw that there is a guy Dr. Yeasin who has a special topics class on something in pattern recognition. I couldn't find out on the web what the actual topic was. I didn't see a web page for him--actually one of the links that might have gone to one was broken, so I figured I could go by his office and he would have the syllabus up or something. I have generally seen those hanging up for classes. But I go by there, and nothing. He was actually in there, and he was talking to students, and I could have asked, but I just didn't feel like it. Didn't give me a good feeling. So I go across campus to the philosophy building to see if that teacher Marda was there, or maybe they had something up about the class. I didn't remember her full name--it's a hyphenated something, so I didn't see that she had an office. She's an adjunct professor, so she might not even have a spot. So no luck there. I went to the bookstore to see the textbooks for the classes. That will often tell me something about them. The one for the music class I was interesting was called "ear-training" and that's exactly what I want to study. But I looked at it. It was just a workbook with some musical staffs where you are just supposed to transcribe melodies. And you'd have to have a recording along with it. Didn't seem like such a big deal, And I would think I could do that on my own. I was thinking it would be good to have a teacher for that, but I don't know. There was actually a textbook for fiction writing. It seemed to cover character development, narrative flow, point of view. Your basic writing concepts. And practicing that stuff might be good. The worst thing, though, was that the biochemistry book was a new edition. I don't want to have to guy a newer version of a $120 book. That just seems annoying to me. Annoying enough that I just feel like passing. Doing something else. If only just spending the time sleeping. So it was a discouraging visit.
But thinking about it, I've never been good at learning on my own. Actually, I have become a fairly poor student in general because I don't do the work needed. For most of high school I didn't but I quit as a senior, and never did in high school or college or graduate school. I became merely a reader. I would read the stuff, and that's all I would get. If I was lucky, I could write a paper, but I never did enough of the work for a real project--just reading for research. And I skipped almost all homework problems and exercises, so I didn't get so much from them. Turns out the homework pretty much always is what you are supposed to be learning. I could pretend that I would be able to do them, but probably not if I hadn't done them. I just watched videos for some classes, and without the exercises, they aren't really very much. So doing work for those things would be good. Right now I'm reading a clojure book, but if I don't actually program with it, it's a useless thing to do. So learning to study and work on my own would be the best use of my time.
So, thinking about the classes, it probably isn't a good idea. These are beginning things that I might want to get into, but really I probably wouldn't. Writing, music, philosophy, biochemistry. Really not my areas. I'm better off spending time working with computers. And maybe some of my feeling now was from talking to Melissa about it. She was saying how biochemistry sounded interesting, but they just don't teach it there well. And the writing thing-- she was all ick. The music maybe she could sympathize. And no comment on taking philosophy because of the cute teacher.
I've been trying a couple of things that are supposed to intensify your dreams, and maybe help to have more lucid ones--omega-3 and melatonin. Vitamin B is also supposed to do something, and the big guns, which I'm not ready to try yet, would be nicotine patches. But those two seem to make a noticeable difference, actually. Maybe a slight increase in intensity and a bit greater tendency to be lucid. One odd dream that was very vivid and maybe a little lucid. I was playing monopoly. And I would count out money to pay rent. I remember one was like $18. And I would count some out, and it wouldn't stay the same amount, so I had to keep trying to count it out. Kind of frustrating. I started putting down some houses. I think I had the orange properties. It was fairly vivid, like I said, and I forget if I noticed I was just dreaming.
I just went to see _District 9_. Scientifically, it seemed kind of stupid. But it had interesting character development. High ratings and good reviews made me go. I guess I could see what they mean. But generally, I guess I'm not so good for most stories. They don't do so much for me anymore. And possibly a bit of it is getting less and less from visual stuff.
But I think it helps to give me a little more perspective. My stuff is kind of trivial. I probably do have to be a bit concerned about midlife sorts of things. Assessment.
Happy Ides of August!
This week has been all about the food. My mom has been in town, and I've been eating heavily. Today I made cream chicken, with her supervision, to learn how to do it. Not so bad. Burned the sauce a little bit on the bottom, but we transfer pots over, and it didn't seem to be a problem. I used a bit of the glace de poulet, which I think helped. It really didn't taste right before the lemon, and I actually squeezed a lemon instead of using juice. Probsbly not how I'd do it myself. Maybe not the best, but it was pretty good. And I used milk with lactose (actually my mom poured that in) I would probably use the lactose free, but we used very little, so it probably won't make any difference. And we used margarine instead of butter. I'm not sure why we did that. It would not have been my choice. I'll try it again some time. Three tablespoons of margarine and three of flour, with some olive oil in there to get the consistency right and help from burning. Browned a bit. I think the word for that is "roux". Used a quart of chicken broth and some milk. And we put in an egg. Seemed a little much, and there was a bit of a lump from it, but not my recipe. A little lemon and worchestershirestershire sauce. And some mushrooms and the cut up chicken. A bit of work, maybe, but not too bad.
I ate my first tomato today. There are several more growing. It was pretty good. My mom brought a couple dozen from their garden, so I've been eating some. But it was nice to have one of mine. I also finished up a watermelon. So much food.
It might lead to something more. I'm thinking that might be a girl thing. I was saying that Hilton has a little bit of work for me. In total, I'm guessing it might be 8 hours of work. Hardly anything. But both my mom and Melissa said that same thing about it. I guess I haven't mentioned that kind of thing to any guys. But it stikes me that I remember Kate, Bruce's wife, saying the same thing when she got a little clerk's job one time. It actually did lead to something for her. But I don't remember a guy ever saying anything like that. Though that could just be selective memory. Why I suspect it might actually be a girl thing is that _Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus_ thing of different conversational styles. Women tend to be a lot more supportive.
Bardog has this little puzzles, kind of complicated metal wire things where you are trying to get a ring or something detached from the rest of it. Last week, I was working on one for quite a while, and I could see part of what was involved, but I just couldn't get it. This last time, I noticed something else that I had not seen before--there was some stuff that would only fold properly one way, and I had just by accident gotten it the wrong way last time. So this time I got it right pretty quickly. But it's quite possible if you were solving it, you might get it by luck, and not ever notice that there was a wrong way. I was explaining that there are several levels of skill for a particular puzzle. There's being able to solve it, just by fiddling with it, and sort of getting lucky and solving it. There's also understanding all the tricks involved, so you can solve it striaghtforwardly and consistently, and the highest level I consider is where you can explain it to someone else, so they will be able to figure it out. Now, I would add being able to solve the puzzle in your head, that's got to be in there somewhere, and it's a little different from understanding how all the tricks work. And it's possible that you know roughly how the tricks are supposed to go, like you know some piece has to be folded in some way, but with that knowledge, you still have to play and juggle a little bit-- you haven't quite fully gotten it. There was a pretty hard one that I was working on. It took me a while to get it the first time, and then I tried to get it again. I did it a three times, but it was complicated enough, with several little tucks and things that I don't fully understand it, but I'm a little better than just doing it from luck. I couldn't do it in my head. There was one puzzle, with just two pieces (this hard one must have had a dozen pieces joined by little links) and I could actually just look at it and see how it was done without even holding it. That's the kind of skill I aspire to, but I don't quite have the visual acuity for that at this point. There was another of the really hard ones, and I worked on it for a bit, but didn't get it. One of the guys who worked there did it. I think they've spent more time on them, and he may have seen it. But he gave me a clue that will let me solve it. It has a ring, and I thought you would only try to get the ring off, but there's a third piece, so it will come off into three different pieces. I wasn't even considering that. But it makes sense, one you start considering it as an option.
*sigh*. So I went to Folks Folly Saturday night. I asked Melissa if she had been to Erling Jensens, which is a fancy place and she said no. And I was saying about how I don't go out to fancy places because I don't like to go by myself. It seems like some people might show some interest, but Melissa kind of did the opposite, which I think I've seen before. Kind of got a little more quiet and physically moved off a little bit. Like she was trying to avoid the obvious thing that might have been coming next. But didn't.
I bought a book, Neil Strauss' _Emergency_. He wrote _the Game_ where he went into the pickup artist community and wrote about it. I liked that, and I at least thought the writing style was interesting so I thought I would like this one. He basically becomes a survivalist. But I start reading it. He was such a prissy little city boy. I never really thought of myself as a hick or anything but it just seems sad. He was talking about having caught a fly in a cup and letting it go outside, in the beginning section where as part of his training he is having to kill a goat. All whiny about how cute it was, and his girlfriend named it Bettie. OK, I've never tried killing a goat, and I've never shot a deer myself. But I've been standing there when people have been butchering them. My little teenage nephew is probably going on about his dozenth deer. I am a bit of a gun person for a long time. My folks are living on a farm. I guess I'm already really a part of that culture. Maybe this book is interesting to city-folk, and I really didn't get very far into it. But somehow I just don't have any respect for this guy or something. I don't really want to follow him on his journey to hillbilly nutdom.
In looking at the classes, I noticed that the aural theory class, which I believe is the one that includes ear traing, has a co requisite of the first music theory class. And they music theory class is at the same time as the biochemistry class. The thing was, it was getting some ear training which was the main thing I wanted to take classes for. That's just been one thing I haven't been able to study on my own. I could probably just read the biochemistry textbook and get everything out of it that I would want. Another class that for me where I would benefit from supervision is a creative writing class, which I'm thinking about. Also, Bruce told me that one of his cute athlete friends is teaching philosophy. I looked her up and she's doing one of the sections of the intro phil class. I think I could possibly benefit from that--give me a chance to write about classical stuff. And I would be doing it primarily because of the cute teacher, but is that bad? I already spend a lot of money to hang out with a cute person. And a cute person with a Ph.D. in philosophy? Makes sense to me. She's married. But what difference does that make? Maybe she has some philosophical friends. Also, about the music class. They require you to take a placement exam. I actually already took a placement exam, and they put me past the first intro. So actually, I should go down and talk to them. There was one time I tried to take lessons, but I didn't have the money to be going to school then, and abandoned it all. And really, maybe I should just try working, or something. One writing class I was thinking about was fiction writing. I've never tried writing a whole story in my life. People who are interested at all just do it. I think I've just never really been interested. So maybe that's not such a good plan. But I haven't really tried. I have liked poetry. There's a poetry writing class. But a class for that? I don't know. Sounds like work. There is an online class from the tennessee board of regents called "creative writing" but there is no description of the class, which is strange because for most of them, they have the syllabi up. The link for this one is broken. And the thing about fiction writing. There are a lot of people who like to tell stories. I just never have been into that. OK, that's somewhat silly for me with my blog to say. I kind of just write about stuff happening. I don't generally just make up stories out of nowhere. One thing that caught my eye is that they have a class on creative non-fiction, but the prerequisite is this class on fiction writing. I don't really get that, but that's what they have. So that's why I was thinking maybe the thing on fiction writing.
So, interesting. I'm watching an anarchist video. Well, it was linked to on the anarchism subreddit. I have only seen a few seconds of it, but it right in that bit is talking about how pitiful voting is. I've never been in favor of voting. I kind of have that attitude, but I've never tried articulating it quite like that. And it's nice to have a community of anarchists. It has been exposing me to a lot of anarchist theory that I've just never looked into. There was actually a little kid in memphis who tried to start an anarchist meet-up group. He never could get anybody involved. Maybe I should try to look him up. He lived on some kind of communal house near U of M. It sounded pretty crummy, and I never went by. Maybe I should. I'm not particularly a gather with the people sort of anarchist. More of a stay off to my self intellectual sort of anarchist. But one of the popular anarchist things is to write. Maybe I should write in a tree-killing style, instead of just a blog.
I'n thinking of taking some classes. But I'm being reluctant out of some kind of laziness or something. I want to take a writing class, if I can find a proper one. And an ear-training class. that's the kind of thing I'm just not doing on my own. And I've been thinking about biochemistry for a while now.
It also talks a bit about bullying. I don't know if I've ever really been bullied. I think at M.U.S., there was some kind of typical kid meanness, but not really the beat you up sort of bullying. So I tended to be kind of angry and mean. But I'm sure that wasn't so much them. That was just mean. I'm a pretty angry and mean kind of person. This whole niceness thing just never was me. Tell you the truth, I don't think it's a boys thing, and at an all boys school, it can get pressured out of you. I was really unhappy about not having girls around, and I'm thinking now that that probably had a lot to do with it. I think I have a pretty large tendency to be nice--went I was tiny I was fairly sweet to girls, and I felt somewhat nice in elementary school, but that environment at least for me seemed quite opposed to developing the habits of being a nice person. Too much posturing or something. A crucible, perhaps. Designed for toughening you up for an honor culture. Veritas honorque. They had honor in the school motto. It is only fairly recently that I've realized how much I hate honor culture. The truth part I like, though.
At Bardog last Sunday, I found out that one of the people that hangs out there, Angela, is the daughter of one of the math teachers that was at M.U.S., Mrs. Edmondson. There was some skirting around in finding this stuff out. She went to Hutchison, and had a brother who went to Germantown. I think I must have met him or maybe I just heard her mom mention him. Math was kind of my area in high school. And I told her her mom would know me, and I gave her my name, and Angela had actually heard of me. I'm not positive how that would have come up, but I guess it's possible. I was kind of legendary at the time, so she immediate starting being impressed with how smart I was. She was pretty drunk, though. She lives with a guy Ian a couple blocks from there. Ian was a physicist about nine years older than her. She's about five years younger than me. Ian went into computers. He does .Net stuff for the banking industry. They were one of the first. Maybe I should get back into it. Aimee said First Tennessee is hiring IT people. They got out of mortgages, and merged up with some folk and got a new CIO and are building back up.
Anyway, I was talking to Angela and Ian about the calories in sugar and alcohol problem. Ian, as a physicist, said that it must have just been the yeast that did it. But it really wasn't a precise answer. I have finally looked it up in the biochemistry book. I think I have it worked out now. To restate the problem, sugar has 4 calories per gram, but alcohol has 7 calories per gram, which is more than sugar even though yeast eats sugar to make alcohol. How can it go up? Well, the answer is that gets a lot lighter because for every molecule of alcohol, there is a molecule of carbon dioxide release, and they weigh about the same. Carbon dioxide has a molecular weight of 44 while ethyl alcohol has a molecular weight of 46. It loses about half it's weight. That's how yeast can actually gain energy from the sugar, and the energy per gram still go up. It goes up just slightly less than twice as much pergram, but that is balanced by losing actually a teeny bit more than half the weight. To be more detailed about it. A molecule of glucose in glycolisis breaks down into two molecules of pyruvate, giving a net yield of two molecule of ATP (from ADP--that's the basic way cellular energy is used in working form). This reaction has a bit of an issue in that it uses up NAD+ (which becomes NADH). And in order for it to keep going, it can't stop with pyruvate. But there Are three things that can happen after that point. A cell can use Oxygen in the citric acid cycle, and take the pyruvate all the way down to CO2. That's where most of the stored energy actually comes out. The first step only gets a tiny bit. In anaerobic metabolism, the pyruvate can "dehydrogenate" (lose a couple hydrogen) to lactic acid. Most people have heard about that in sprinting, which can painfully build up lactic acid. This actually regenerates the NADH back to NAD+, so that first step can happen again, which is why it is important. But the other possibility is a somewhat more complicate thing that creates alcohol. A few things do it, most notably yeast. And just to keep in the details, there are two steps. The pyruvate "decarboxylates" (loses a carbon dioxide) to became acetaldehyde. And acetaldehyde dehydrogenates to make alcohol, a step which gets back the NAD+ from NADH, which is the chemically important function of that step. It doesn't provide any energy or change the carbon's reduction state, but it makes it so the glycolysis can keep working. Well, I find it interesting. Maybe I really should take the class.
Happy Kalends of August!
Another month. Time keeps moving along. And the bills keep coming. I have to think more about getting a job. Aimee said First Tennessee was hiring IT people, so maybe I should look there. I'm now doing a little bit of stuff for Bruce. It should only take a few days. Probably should only take one, but it's tricky enough. I didn't go see Ashley because I really don't have enough cash on hand. But it will wait, I guess. And Tom Dick and Harry was playing but I didn't feel so much like going out. And Super 5 tonight, but I don't really feel like it today, either. This weekend, there has been a lot of stuff that I could have gone out for. And I ended up not going to kung fu. Just didn't feel like it. I did go to the book club, which was nice. Got to see Mike's place, and his library. I think that was a good choice.
I'm trying to get through _Programming Clojure_. It's got a lot of examples that it wants you to type in as you go. That just seems so inconvenient. I did it a little, and it did seem to really reinforce stuff. But maybe I'm just too lazy.
Now I have something to think about. No one else is going to make the kung fu class on Thursday. I said I wouldn't go either so the teacher could have some time off. And I have the book meeting I could go to. But she did say if I don't have the meeting I could come. Also, I think the plan had been for me to get a couple more moves in the dragon form. I was by myself on Thursday a few weeks before, and that's when I first got started on the dragon form, so it makes sense. So I'm a bit torn. I've read the book. A mystery called the Overlook by Michael Connelly. I guess it was fairly well done for a mystery, but it seemed like such fluffy, cookie-cutter crap that I had kind of decided that I didn't really want to go to the meeting. I can't imagine talking about it for two hours. It was probably the fastest read I can remember. Cotton-candy writing. I got it from the library, and I had trouble finding it because I looked in general fiction. There is a whole section on mysteries. And that makes sense to me. It's very far from anything that could be considered literature. Weak. Cliched. In the first few pages I was thinking I've only really read stuff that makes fun of this kind of writing. But at least it went quick. Anyway, I have to decide if I want to go to kung fu. Actually, I do want to go, but I also want to be nice and give the teacher some time, and I said that, anyway, and people make plans. I had been thinking even that I could still go to the meeting after, since the class would probably be short.
"You can push them out of a plane. You can march them off a cliff. You can send them off to die on some god-forsaken rock, but for some reason, you can't slap 'em."-- Grampa in "Bart the General".
And it speaks to conflict between doing what you want and doing what's good for other people. Or what other people want. And somehow it makes me think of Melissa. It's probably not so good for me to keep just going down there. I should move on. Find somebody who will really want to spend time with me. Not so easy, but at least I could be looking.
So Ashley, the one who used to be Melissa's roommate, and worked at a lot of the same places, plus I knew her at Mulligans Quince, is working as a stripper at Christie's. I remember them saying she was at Christie's, but I thought she was working as a bartender, because I've seen her working as a bartender at a lot of places. But a stripper. I want to go down and see her. Actually, I wanted to go down to see her even if she was working as a bartender, so I checked again with Melissa what she is up to. I also had seen her uncle at Doc Watson's, and had forgotten his name, so I had to ask about that (Lee). But it can be pretty hard to be a dancer. I would like to see her.
Yeah, the conflict between what you want, what you think other people want, and what you think is best. A weird one.
I saw something. One of the main things about programming is patience. A deep amount of patience and sticking with it that people don't realize. It was in the context of learning how to do it. There was some student who had a bug, and he was saying he looked at it for half an hour and couldn't find it. To anyone who does it, that's just funny. A lot of people who try to learn don't get it. Chris, the guitar guy, was talking about how he didn't get it. He does some technical stuff. I don't know what the difference is. I guess there is need for the programmer people all over, so I should be a little more confident that I can get something. And maybe a little more into it. It's economically important. I don't feel called to it. I'm not sure I really respect it that much.
I saw an article about amazon buying zappos. It contains a little video by Jeff Bezos, the big guy at amazon, and he has a short list of the things he knows: obsess over customers, invent, think long term, and it's always day 1. OK. I don't obsess over customers, but I do try to come up with new ideas, which seems a little like inventing, and I like to pretend I think long-term. He has a bit of a subtle idea about inventing. If you have several problems, you should look for something that handles more than one at a time, instead of just trying to find one thing for each problem. I'm interested in amazon because one time, they actually sent me an email about a job. I think that was back when the economy was doing well, and it's a different world now, but it's something.
Argh, so it looks like the TV here in the den may be giving out. It has several times dropped into a horizontal line in the center. It has generally come back if I turn it off and back on, but it looks like it's only a matter of time. And it's fairly new, only a few years old. A bummer. I'm really not in the mood. I have been using it kind of a lot though, lately. I just started playing boxing on the Wii again. My mom has always thought that playing video games has hurt other TVs that we've had. I don't know about that, but it is an odd coincidence.
Netflix. I may have to try it. I have admitted to myself that I have kind of a bias against it because Melissa suggested it as a counter-suggestion after I said she might ask me over sometime to watch stuff, since I don't have cable. And I watch lots of 22 minute episodes of the Simpsons and right now Futurama, but I seem to have some kind of trouble committing to watch a whole movie. I really mostly just have them on in the background, anyway. I don't know. It also has a download thing. I might use that. I don't know if you can here commentaries, though. I probably like the commentaries as much, or maybe more. That's what I listen to on the Simpsons and Futurama. It seems like somehow it satisfies my social needs fairly well. Probably a bad thing. Cheaper than going out, though. And often more entertaining, actually. I really have not been watching movies lately, so I'm pretty out of touch with popular culture. But I kind of think that's a good thing. We've been getting pretty decadent. I'm browsing through their selections, and I really am not very interested.
I roasted a chicken. I could have tried the cream chicken, but I figured I'd try the roast and make another gravy. And the roast is a little more versatile, I guess. It goes with potatoes better. I messed up the drippings a bit. I have always been adding a good bit of water in the bottom, and this time, I had too much, and it did not dry up on the bottom like it did with the pork roast. What happens when it dries up is that it browns a bit more, which, because of the Maillard reaction adds the nice flavor that you get with a roast. It's kind of important and I'll keep it in mind next time. The tricky part is to get them reduced, but not burned. Anyway, I had some thick juice, but not quite browned. I added some of the chicken glace that I just got, and that seemed to really improve it. Nice stuff. I think I'm going to need to get some of the beef stuff from williams-sonoma, though actually, I don't make so much beef stuff, so maybe I should stick with the chicken. I think the next thing I need to make is a duck. I have roasted duck quite a few times, but it has been a while. Now I could do it with a gravy.
I watched Bruno and the new Harry Potter movie. Bruno was silly but I wasn't in the mood. I saw a midnight showing of the potter one. They had like eight screens of that. It didn't seem like there was anything really much going on. It was just setting up the next movie. So I didn't much care. They had this thing of a couple of characters having their little lovie dovies going out with other folks. Boo freakin' hoo.
I'm listening to some Feynman lectures on Physics. And I got to something trippy. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. If I'm traveling at 100,000 miles per second away from George, and some light is traveling away from him, it doesn't look like it's traveling 86,000 miles per second away from me, it looks like it's traveling 186,000 miles per second away from me, and 186,000 miles per second away from George. That's trippy. I'm not sure how that works. I had thought I had got it, but now I'm not so sure.
Happy Monday the Thirteenth!
I think I got lucky. Somehow I miscalculated my money last week. Mostly I forgot about the $80 cash I need to pay for kung fu at the beginning of the month, and somehow, I kept pulling out little bits of cash, like $30 at a time, so that I didn't have the money left in the account for a bill that was due on the fifteenth. So I started the process to pull some cash out of stock, which takes like four business days for me, but I didn't realize it until after hours on Tuesday. It takes like three days for the cash to be available, and then I have the wire transfer, which is supposed to be able to post in one day, I think, but really doesn't seem to quite get there until overnight. So the money is available in the cash account with my investment company on Friday, and I order the electronic transfer. And on that day, I send out the check. I figure it should be OK, because the letter has to travel to its destination, and it really is supposed to take time for a check to post, and the electronic transfer is really suppose to happen right then, anyway. But no. I'm looking all weekend, and the money isn't moving over. It sits there unsettled. Even Monday morning at about 4. It seems like there is overnight posting at 3 that I'm hoping will happen. But no. So I check now at about noon to see what has happened. The bill is going to At&T, and unfortunately, they are one of those that doesn't do the old style check posting system. They use the whole new style scheme of taking the check and getting an instant bank transfer based on it. I remember citibank doing that kind of stuff, but I didn't remember if AT&T did. It's possible that they even tried it once and it didn't work, I don't know. But I guess luckily for me, the electronic transfer was marked as having happened before that, so it looks like it turned out OK. I sent out another bill at the same time to Comcast, but that's not on there, yet. Hopeful it'll be OK. Maybe I should invest in some overdraft protection. Or maybe I should manage my stuff better. One of the issues involved in it is that the market was rallying, but just dipped a little bit, so I was kind of trying to hold off a bit. Oh well.
I saw something weird in the food book that has been puzzling me. Alcohol is made from sugar by yeast. Part of what is confusing to me is that I think yeast are getting some energy out of it in the process, and that might be wrong--it could be that the yeast are just using the alcohol defensively only. That is certainly one function for it, it kills off other microbes. The weird thing is this: sugar has 4 Calories per gram and alcohol has 7 Calories per gram. The energy content has gone up. Now, some of that may somehow involve the carbon dioxide that goes away in that reaction, leaving the alcohol. And I think the C-O bonds in the sugar have less energy than the C-H bonds, so the ones leave have less energy. But it really seems weird to me. Alchohol is more like an oil than a sugar, because it has fewer C-O bonds than a typical sugar. Oils have 9 Calories per gram. But right now, I don't really get it. I asked Melissa about it. As a biochemistry major and a bartender, it seems like something in her area. And she waid off the top of her head she didn't have an answer, but she could look at it and see. So maybe she'll get back with me. And she seemed to think that maybe they had talked about it. We'll see.
Something I've wanted to try for a while, I made some chocolate syrup with honey. I remember I was kind of upset when I saw that chocolate syrup is just chocolate of some type and corn syrup. Corn syrup has got to be just about the cheapest stuff there is. I get more honey than I can ever use because my dad keeps bees. And chocolate syrup is actually kind of expensive. So quite a while I had gotten some cocoa to do this with, but I hadn't gotten around to doing it. If you try to make hot chocolate with cocoa, you see the problem. It doesn't mix with cold water, kind of stays in little dry clumps, so you have to heat it. I was figuring making syrup would have the same deal, but I try just stirring the cocoa into the honey, and it seemed to do fine. Now I'm thinking that its thickness is just letting it mix ok, and maybe the dissolved sugar lets it attract the chocolate instead of the water just making it repel it. Extra thick, though, much more than regular syrup. I wasn't really sure about the proportion, but some recipe seemed to suggest about a third cocoa. I later found a recipe that has water and sugar, and it has hardly any cocoa. So I'll keep working on it. That other recipe had some other interesting ideas I need to try. The stuff I have isn't quite like the original, but it seems to be doing alright. This recipe suggest using some vanilla, which really makes sense, and a little butter, which just sounds interesting. It does also involve heating the stuff up, which makes sense, especially sense it's like one to one water/sugar, but also with the cocoa. And it has cornstarch. I guess for thickening or something.
Yeah. Machines really do a lot of work for us, so honestly, we don't really need people working so hard. I guess conservatives hate the notion of freeloaders. It makes them feel bad that other people take advantage, and just in general they love discipline. So they like having the whole busy work, servant wage-slave labor thing, which is just so soul draining. And honestly, it's part of their religion. Religion is good for slavery. Work hard until you die and everything, and then you'll be rewarded. I kind of suspect that Christianity was popular with the politicos at the time because of how well it supports the whole slavery system. It is still a sort of question of how it managed to catch on so well. And I just recently heard from Steve and Sheila the idea that maybe Paul was just a con-man like Joseph Smith. They were listening to the Teaching Company lecture on Paul, and they were thinking how similar they sounded. I should look into it. Was it just a scam? I know that a lot of Christianity was invented by Paul, and I've heard the idea that Jesus was something he came up with, and later people thought he was really there. But I was thinking more delusion than out and out fraud. So I'm intrigued.
I do need to look at getting some work. I think I'm a pretty smart guy, and just grunt application programming is a bit of a waste for me. It hasn't generally been a concern for me, but I should look at best using my potential. I guess.
Been watching Auto-Tune the News #6. Can we please choose something in between? Mediocrity? Chastity? Puppetry? Obesity? Marijuanity? Pretty Please? Shorty!
I dug down into my pile of books. I finally finished the latest John Schartzwelder, _Dead Men Scare Me Stupid_, so having taken something off the top, I thought I could start some others from the very large pile of ones I haven't even started. And Maybe I'll go back to some others. I sort of shuffled one actual stack on the floor so some of the ones I feel interested in are closer to the top. I was feeling like looking more at _Halfway up the Mountain_ and starting _Lamb_. But in that stack was _What Are You Optimistic About?_. It just seems to happy and uplifting, and I've been a little depressed, I guess, so I started on it. Not completely pollyanna, they try to be realistic and scientic and evidence based. It's all fairly short essays. Lots and lots of ideas. Sam Harris has one-- moral realism. The idea that morality can be studied objectively, as it is based on suffering, which is something that you could presumably see out in the world. Trippy.
Fresh Market had glace de poulet gold. Four dollars for an ounce an a half. But that's about what that stuff costs. It's a chicken glace, or sauce extract. They didn't have the beef or veal version. But since I had it, I could google the product and the same people do make a beef or veal one. Seems odd that they didn't have that, too. Oh well. You can get them from Amazon, but the shipping is expensive enough that you would need to get a bunch to be worth it, I guess. One reviewer said the stuff from Williams Sonoma is better. There's a store for them here in Memphis, if it's still open. It's $30 for 6 ounce demi-glace. The glace said the ounce and a half would make four cups of stock, so it's pretty concentrated. I'm not sure how much I'm going to try to use. I'm sure I'm not going to thin it all the way to a stock.
Right now, I'm roasting a pork shoulder roast. About 4 pounds. I was thinking I was going to get a butt, which is a little fattier, and that's kind of what I wanted, but it was twenty cents a pound more. I was just feeling cheap. And I could get a little more for less price, though this had a pretty big bone, some maybe it wasn't so good. But I boiled down some bones just now, so I was thinking that might be good. One thing I'm doing different with this roast is using some vanilla. The food book suggested that would go well with pork, so I'm giving it a shot. I was just going to do a few drops, but I couldn't see the stuff in the little bottle, and it kind of poured out. And I used pepper and salt, which I normally don't do. I have been using garlic powder. And some lemon. I also always sit the roast on onion slices. We have a little metal rack that I could use, but I've found the onion slices seem to do a great job. I don't know if I'm going to try to make a gravy. I usually just use the juice as it is. Mom mom has shown be how to make sauces, but it never sticks from just watching. I need to do it with supervision. That really worked with sauteing the squash. Several times she has shown me how to make a cream sauce for cream chicken, or chicken ala king, and it just doesn't stick. It's one of my favorite things to eat, but I have never made it myself. Many times I've deboned a boiled chicken in helping her make it. I just haven't gone the whole way.
Well, the gravy was easy after all. I guess if you see something hundreds of times, you shouldn't worry so much about trying it. It wasn't especially flavorful, though. Probably needed salt. The vanilla made a kind of a strange accent. That and the whole onion made it a little sweet. Now the pots and dishes are done. Tunes make chores much more palatable. I'm becoming pretty domestic.
Me eating vegetables. It's odd. But it's more a conflict between me not wanting to waste food and eating vegetables and not wasting food comes first. Seems like it always does. And it seems like it's not that I don't like eating vegetables, it's just a lot of work fixing them. Maybe I'm getting more used to it, though. This food is from my parents' garden, which I picked myself. And it's mostly not very good. I have a plastic grocery bag full of green beans, but they are mostly too old and kind of woody. My mom had me sauteing squash for her a couple times, so I practiced that enough to be comfortable with it. I tried at with these garden beans one time, and they were pretty terrible. These I tried boiling in bouillon, and they were a little better. I've got a bunch of overgrown squash that probably will have the same problem, and I'm not sure yet if I'm going to try it. I picked it mainly because it needed to be picked, but I didn't just throw it away right away like I possible should have. One thing about this, too, I seem to like tomatoes again. I liked them as a little kid, but not really since then. I'm thinking now, though, that the problem was that I haven't been putting salt and pepper on them, which my mom did for me as a little kid, and I guess I just don't like them like that. I pretty much never salt or pepper anything, but I guess I need to learn better.
Finished the book on food and cooking. I guess I know some stuff now that I didn't before. Probably more than anything I appreciate that stuff a lot more.
One thing I just tried. I was planning to go stay at the farm over Fourth of July weekend, and I was going to miss garbage pickup on Monday. So for that week, instead of putting chicken bones in the garbage, which would have gotten pretty bad after a couple of weeks, I put them in the freezer, and I would boil them after the week. And when I came back, I got a 10-piece bucket of KFC crispy, and I had the bones from that, too. It was a bunch of bones, actually a little more than I though. I did use a little lemon juice to make it more acidic. The idea is that bones have a lot of collagen, like 20%. When I was done, they were very crumbly, and I had some really thick stuff. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, but I have it, now. A weird thing is that the KFC bones have given it a bit of a KFC flavor, though I'm not exactly sure what that is from. It isn't like stock, it's opaque like milk. I guess it's just some kind of sauce that I should pour over something. And speaking of sauces, supposedly you can buy demi-glace in frozen foods, which is part of that classical French cooking where you cook down a bunch of meat. I really need to try to find some of that. I don't think I've ever seen it. It's a ton of work to make. Sounds tasty, though. I love the taste of meat, and this is like pure meat extract. Yummy. It seems to me like so much cooking is flavoring with herbs and spices and plant stuff. That's just personally seems wrong to me.
And I've been a little more into cheese. Nothing fancy. Cheddar is good with me, and even "American" whatever that is. I even tried some Velveeta. Maybe I was hungry, but it didn't seem so bad. It isn't exactly cheese, but it is what it is and somehow it seemed alright.
And I come back, and a lot of my corn stalks have broken of. They haven't gotten very big, but they were at least growing. I think some are working on little cobs.
Happy Fourth of July! Happy Independence Day, which is kind of an ironic holiday for a dictatorship.
Out feeding the mosquitoes again. Mom hid the sprinkler somewhere, so I have to water the lawn by hand. Last week, I did the front in the midafternoon, and it seemed like the sun must have dried up most of it, so I decided to do it in the evening. And the mosquitoes were out in back. I think there must be places in the backyard where there are some puddles, because there are a lot of them there. I got one when it was sitting on the back of my hand, and had a big blob of blood. We'll see how it goes. I don't seem to be scratching them, so maybe they will go away. Also a bit of a sunburn. I had used some repellant, but I think I washed it all off pretty quick. And I never use sunblock. Seems like it wouldn't have been that bad, but it got the backs of my legs.
Michael Coplon and Liz have been doing push hands everyday, and just yesterday, I joined them. I missed on Tuesday because I didn't sleep well the night before, and at the appointed time, I was asleep. They do it from about 12:30 to maybe 2. Push hands isn't something I've really done much, but it's similar to an Aikido exercise I did a little bit. I really used more muscle than I shoould have, but I'm really not so used to it yet. My back really hurt after it. Michael is quite good. He pushed me over quite a bit, so I see better now what they mean by that in tai chi. I guess it was kind of odd for me, because in bagua, you never stand still, and it seems like that was what you were supposed to do in this thing. Liz, though. She said several times she didn't like to do it with me. I didn't do things that she was expecting. She was used to just beating up on Michael, I suppose. They were saying I had monkey arms. I'm not sure what they meant. I think they meant they seemed longer, but I don't know if that's right. I know my legs are short, but I'm not particularly sure about my arms. I know I used to be more rubbery. And there were just a few times when Liz just said she wouldn't practice with my. She did a little more at the end when she was getting a bit more left out, just to be doing something. Michael seemed to be happy to have someone else to play with. And I think I did a few things that he wasn't so used to, and he was happy to have a chance to practice against those things. But it seemed like such a bummer for Liz. So I said I would go again, but I don't really want to if it's something Liz doesn't really want. She seemed to try to be nice about it at the end when we were talking about it. But she tries to be nice. And at the beginning, she was tapping me quite a bit, and she was always saying sorry. That sounded like something that could have contributed to her not liking to train with me. Didn't really feel comfortable with me. Actually Michael was saying a little bit about that, that he didn't really know me so well, so he didn't know so much what to expect. But I don't think I let her Liz me as much as she wanted. A few times I trapped her arms or grabbed or pinned them. And I think a couple times i went for throws. I didn't actually do any throws, but I tried to go for the set ups, which are hard. I don't think Michael ever got off balance--that seemed like a priority for him. The biggest thing I got from it was how out of shape I am. Doing something for an hour or two every day probably has a lot of benefit. We'll see how it goes.
I brought Liz a copy of Yip Man because her son Noel is studying Wing Chun. Michael had actually loaned them a copy, and Noel watched it, but Liz didn't see it all. I also gave her a copy of effortless combat throws from Tim Cartmell. She probably is not going to be so effective trying to hit someone. They seem to really be into the whole scratching eyes out, thing. I don't know about that. Some things will just make people angry. The thing about throws-- it takes a lot of practice and skill to get good at them, but you don't have to be very strong to use them, and they can do more damage than anything else.
But emotionally, the most significant thing for me was how Liz just didn't like me being there. And I've always liked Liz, but there sometimes rejection can be a big turnoff. I don't know. It seems like when someone is too interested, that can make you less interested, so you would think that being hard to get would make you more interested. But I guess if someone just doesn't want you around, maybe that can hurt your feelings. Or maybe I'm just thinking about how not being with someone can help you want to be with them. But actually spending time with them, and seeing nothing going on can be discouraging.
Happy Canada Day! Happy Kalends of July!
That was a very different day for me. Should I write about it? I'll have to think about it. Lots of people involved. I guess that's what's different about it. But I'm thinking, maybe better to just let it settle like a normal experience. When I write about things, I tend to let it go more easily. But maybe I shouldn't.
On thing though, was something I was talking about in the MFA meeting. Fundamentalism and atheism are actually pretty close. They both have a sort of conception about god as a real, sort of physical magician character in the world. Just that atheists dismiss it and fundamentalists accept it. Liberal religions are actually quite distant from both, in being able to accept the mythical and figurative nature of religious stories, and that's good enough. But that view can explain some things. I thought about it and brought it up because there was a guy there who was a fundamentalist, and became a bit of a biblical scholar, studying Greek. But he came across something that just broke the camel's back, and unravelled everything. Now I can't remember what it was. I think he said it was in going over the flood and ark story. And it was thinking about the ostrich. How could there be a flightless bird? It had to be evolution. So he just gave it all up. And that was the first time he had been in a group of atheists and admitted it to anyone. For twenty years. But back to the relationship between fundamentalists and atheists, and the separation from liberals. The thing was, he didn't go from being a fundamentalist to a liberal Christian who just thought they were stories. He went to being an atheist, and just still thinking they were literal stories, they just were wrong. My analogy picture now is that in ideaspace, fundamentalists and atheists are standing right next to each other but with a tall wall in between. It is possible that the wall can be broken through, and people move from one to the other, but it is very very difficult. But way far over, past were the wall ends, are the liberal religionist. It would be a long walk to move between the positions, but you don't have to go through a wall. And one thing is is that the fundamentalists come into much more conflict with the atheists, because they are concerned with similar things, like how the earth and life here physically developed, so you have evolution debates, like talking over a wall.
Kevin mentioned an atheist blog by Greta Christina. Actually he talked about one post showing up on alternet about "Why Do Atheists Have to Talk About Atheism?"
I think it's important to a fundamentalist worldview that the world is very young. And an important part of that is that the creator of that world is nice. He general doesn't do something that doesn't work, and it fails, and something new has to come along. Just because of all the mistakes, evolution in that worldview is a bad thing. Evolution requires a long time. So for the idea to work, and to have a good creator, you really do need everything to have only been going on for a short period of time, like a few thousand years, maybe. One that time scale, you could possibly well see things as getting better and better all the time.
OK, so Michael Coplon suggested something that I found intriguing. Jason had said something about how he saw an article one time about how the was some kind of problem with crime and people had gotten together for a big prayer meeting. The article was just about the prayer meeting, and they didn't say anything about doing something that might have actually affected crime, like meetings or something. Michael suggested that government people, especially conservatives, support that sort of thing so people won't look for the government to do any work. It helps keep government out of things if people think they are doing something themselves. But it's just prayer, which is pretty useless by itself. I did tried to defend it a little, that it was at least a speach act showing that people want things a certain way, and that has at least some value.
Also, Anne talked about getting a letter from some city councilman replying to her note codemning his opposition to some gay rights something or other. He said he felt he had to make decisions based on faith, which he did in this case. OK. Something about separation of church and state, blah blah. I did not speak up about separation of church and state not being in the constitution, only establishing a church. Not the same. It did seem like something that might have some legal bearing, though. He wasn't trying to uphold the contitution--equal protection-- he was using something else. Not really attempting to have rule of law, but of men trying to follow religious beliefs. Some people believe that's fine, but others don't. But the restriction on establishment can be thought of fairly narrowly. It's wrong to use public school to indoctrinate people into believing religious ideas of some group. OK, that's something. But the government also can't make people believe and make decisions a certain way, like I'm guessing Anne wants.
Let's call it non-ordinary reality. I was still asleep. I had looked up and saw that Super five was not playing. But I suddenly wondered if maybe Tom Dick and Harry was playing. I did understand that I was asleep and only dreaming, but I did think of that, and I was wanting to look it up on the computer, but it was just too hard to wake up and do that. So I just fell back in silly dreaming. I did wake up a little later, at 9:30, and checked and sure enough, they were playing at 64. So I get up and go there. Nice enough. Missed the first set. The had a DJ, and I did get to hear Thriller. There was this really cute little girl in a cowboy hat. In the third set, there was an empty chair next to the spot where she had been sitting. The chair she had been in was tipped over like she was coming back. I decided to sit and get a burger with tater tots. She asked to have one of my tater tots. Sure. I did not properly make her feel welcome, I guess, because she only took the one, though she said she might get some with cheese. And then some guy asked to try them. And that was fine. He must have been really hungry, because he kept popping them. There were really more than I wanted, so that was fine. And I told him little girl in the cowboy hat was thinking of getting some, and she was too little to eat a whole one. He didn't seem to feel like following the implication, though. I've been playing on my iPhone the whole time. She was actually trying to take a picture with her phone, and tried to get me to take one of her and a friend, but it seemed too dark, and I couldn't get it them to show up on the screen, but just take the darn picture! Whatever. I don't think I got anything. She used a lighter for more light, but it didn't seem to work. She went off dancing with some guy to some country song. Some time after she came back, she asked me what I was doing. I said I was hanging with friends. On emails lists. Which ones? Well the intp, and the mensa atheist list. On the intp list, some guy was fired from his pizza delivery job. Bad attitude, it seemed like. But she asked me why I was an atheist. Hmm. Now there's a question. I guess it's clearly just a story they made up. There are lots of stories. She said she was a native american, a methodist, and a buddha something. Spiritual person. And believes there is more. But not such a big believer. And it's important to her not to criticize other people. Seemed like she had stuff to say. I had mostly been sitting such that my arm was between us, but I did eventually sit to include her a bit better, so that my arm was back a bit, and facing her more. And I could look her more in the eye. But I guess that was threatening to dude, because he came and sat on the other side of her, and then she was just talking to him. I don't know. Seems like she had mentioned a husband. But then she said something about a Church of Christ person, which seems like she must have meant him. Not my business. So, they say you have better luck if you don't seem interested, but if you don't talk at all, that doesn't do anything. Kind of a balance. She said when she went to college, she because more liberal. I should have asked about that. The bartender was also very cute. Jessica. I really didn't have enough money to tip properly. A couple of fives. I think she deserved better. As much as she smiled.
I don't remember where it was. Some comedy TV show. Maybe comic book guy? Nerd is doing well with some girl, and she makes a reasonable suggestion about him, and he says, don't try and change me. Man, I wish I could remember. It was so slick.
mosquito. it's dark, but it came in front of the screen. Couldn't get it. nasty critters.
Got at least one bite now. But I think I got it. And I am quite able to not scratch. It will go away if you don't. I'm not sure why people have such trouble with that. Self-indulgence? Poor impulse control? They just prefer the slight short term release over the long term satisfaction of it going away? It's easy to scratch almost without thinking. Great way to live, not thinking.
I found it. It's in the Simpson's tenth season episode "Mayored to the Mob". I just watched it recently. It's the one with Mark Hamill and Star Wars stuff, and it's at a sci fi convention, which is a place where nerds have more luck:
% Bart and Lisa run off, probably a good idea. Elsewhere, the Comic
% Book Guy goes through a few boxes of comics, making a horrifying
% discovery.
Comic Book Guy: Someone has mixed an "Amazing Spiderman" in with the
"Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spiderman" series.
This will not stand.
Comic Book Girl: Pardon me, but I wish to tender a serious offer for
this stack of water-damaged "Little Lulu"s.
Comic Book Guy: "A", that is not water, that is Diet Mr. Pibb. And
"B", I ... ooh ...
[the Comic Book Guy obviously sees something he likes
in this woman's face, as he is unable to speak at the
sight of her eyes, braces, and misshapen nose]
Comic Book Guy: Tell me, how do you feel about forty-five year-old
virgins who still live with their parents?
Comic Book Girl: Comb the Sweet-Tarts out of your beard and you're on.
Comic Book Guy: Don't try to change me, baby.
I mean, when we were talking, our faces were like 12 inches apart. That's pretty far inside each other's personal space. When she was eating, her elbow was bumping up against me. Somehow familar. But I'll probably never see her again, and I didn't even get her name. I probably wouldn't recognize her if I saw her again.
I watched the scene. I'm not sure if the text quite does it justice. They're wearing the same "alien biopsy" t-shirt. They kind of linger on moment between them, with some Star Trek music cue, I'm not sure exactly. Maybe it's the music from when the space flower made Spock and everybody fall in love. She might have been jailtail. And they did a weird smile with a twinkling on her braces and backlighting. And when he says don't try to change me baby, it's not like he's going on-- he just goes back to what he's doing.
Little red-haired girl Michelle at Walgreens is still very cute. Maybe eventually I will remember her name.
And the girl at the bar asked, I'm not positive how she phrased it, but it was something like, "what reason do you have to live?" Or "why do you get up in the morning?" That was kind of trippy. Seems like the wording of the question must have been important, but I don't remember exactly. I think I said something like, well, I just try to be happy. Seems like she was explaining how if there was nothing else after, then what? Just be happy with what you have. Why does there have to be any more? Seemed like there was some kind of emotional disconnect, like she was seeing some problem that I was not seeing. I don't know.
Wow, there it is. I'm listening to the commentary on the Star Trek: First Contact movie with Ron Moore and Brannon Braga, the writers. This is the movie with the Borg. They're talking about how continuity has been such a problem and they'd like to get rid of it. I guess that's where that new crap came from. They also talked about how people like having this whole universe of stuff. And now it's gone. Maybe that's just what I didn't like. I do like big bodies of multiple pieces that create complicated worlds. And they threw it all away. Well, I think about it. I guess there were actually several things that I didn't like about the recent movie, and that was just one.
OK, health insurance. So it looks like Obama's plan is just to get a government health insurance in addition to the private insurances. So the government is going to get into the business. I guess that's not too bad. One of his big priorities is to lower costs. So he's going to stick it to the providers. And hopefully the drug companies, too. They're about the only folks who might be able to muscle in on that racket. They already buckled under before with the medicare thing--where they got an agreement not use their muscle to negotiate prices. Hopefully they will come to realize that the real power of organized crime. The government is the biggest mob of all. The druggies got them on their side, but surely they could turn against them at any time. I hope that's what goes on. The cutest thing I saw was what Obama said when some insurance folks started whining that the government with its muscle was going to put folks out of business. But people were saying the government wasn't going to do a good job, because it was too bureaucratic, or some crap like that. Can't have it both ways. Not logical. If you can't do your job, screw you. There was also the thing about "rescission". If a person gets sick, they'll go back over the application for some mistakes. Somebody didn't put 'acne' on her medical history. And they denied all the claims, backdating it to deny previous ones, too. And they were talking about this in Congress. I think they ask if they could really live with themselves. And then they ask if they would consider stoppin that crap, and they all said no. Well OK. Piss off the big mob, and less just see what happens to you. And I like the way Obama has already shown he doesn't care about contract anymore. The deal with the repayments to creditors in the auto industry. Lots of regressives pissed off about that. He's going all anarcho-syndicalist on us. Excellent! They wanted a dictatorship. We got it. I'm just glad it's going left-wing on their asses.
I hate microsoft and its crappy operating systems. I wanted to just to turn on my computer and write something, but my desktoip has a thing sometimes when it gets stuck in something on start up and won't get through it for a half and hour or so. But you can't tell it's happening until you've waited for a few minutes. So I'm just sitting there. Getting angrier and angrier. I just went to another computer. And of course, by that time I don't really remember what all I was wanting to write about.
I just listened to Noam Chomsky talking about some political stuff. Old stuff from like back in 1970. Comparing different political systems. I think it waw classical liberalism, his style of libertarian anarchism, and I forget what exactly the others were, something like socialist statism and capitalist statism. Whatever. He said he was kind of an anarchist back then. And I have said I'm an anarchist. I don't think I'm quite as consistent or thought out as Chomsky and some of the other writers he was talking about. He said one thing intriguing-- all anarchists are socialists, though not all socialists are anarchists. And yeah, socialism is an economic system, not a political system. People use the scare word socialism to try to keep the government for paying for health care. One problem with that is that medicine is not really a system of industrial production, so it isn't really the same sort of economic entity that is talked about in the discussion between socialism and capitalism. The central issue there is who should control the means of production, and the socialists think the people doing the work should, which is a little more decentralized, and the capitalist think a small number of owners should, with the control flowing from the top down. And that system turns people into little unthinking cogs in a big machine, which essentially devalues them as people. The system Chomsky advocates is a system where the workers control everything. I think the logical idea is that people who do the work know best how to get it done, while the capitalist idea, I suppose, is that the owners put more work into making decisions because they are more strongly motivated by greed and have more focus. I don't know exactly. One of the capiralist arguments is that central control is more "efficient" but I'm not sure how important that is. Also, it might be difficult to get a large number of people involved in the decision process, which is needed in a socialist system, but that hardly seems like it would be true, especially given our modern communication systems. I think the idea is more like an athenian democracy, where any citizen can come along and make suggestions. More decentralized than that, of course, because there would be a lot of different systems of meetings. I haven't really looked up what he means by "syndicalism" but I'm guessing it's just these systems of meetings to get things done.
So I got to the chapter on candy, I don't think I'm going to actually make any candy myself, but it's interesting to read about it. Also chocolate. Mmm. It turns out that the original cacao bean is actually pretty tasteless on it's own, other than being bitter. Most of the taste comes from it fermenting and then roasting. Seems like I wanted to get some of the original beans, but I see that's not really so got. So the fermenting is in the mushy goop around the pod. Bruce told me that in South America, you can get that stuff, and it's really yummy or something. Probably it's some kind of alcoholic mixture, too. I've kind of been interested in trying that, from what he said. Also, the fermenting is done on the plantation, and it's quite possible that they do a poor job--not enough, or so much that it gets moldy. Seems like the big chocolate people surely must have some system to help the farmers do a better job. But whatever.
The parents left for California yesterday. And I've already finished off pretty much all of the leftovers. So many little pots and things. And I've washed them already, So I can get back to just eating how I want. I guess it's nice to have food prepared, but it's disruptive, and I had put on a few pounds, which is probably bad.
I've got the book club downtown tonight at Aimee's. _Revolutionary Road_. Actually we're going to watch the movie. I've been having a lot of trouble deciding if I want to go down to Bardog after. And I have to give Melissa warning, so I have to decide early. I think I've decided against it. I'm getting more and more cheap, and I think I don't want to spend the money. And the sad thing is that I really kind of do have the money, but it's all in the stock market and I just feel bad about selling. It's really kind of that that's making me feel cheap, I guess. Usually I just spend money like a drunk sailor. So I guess that's probably actually a good thing. And there's that Mensa Annual Gathering that I kind of feel too cheap to go to. I guess it's just as well. I really need to get more busy and try to write some programs or something. One thing I'm realizing-- for a while I was thinking I wanted to do web design, but since I realized I'm really not very visual, I can see that web design, because it is so visual, was really not something that I could really get very interested in. It's kind of ironic that at FedEx I was a big person on the GUI team. It didn't really do very much visual stuff, and if I did, it was quite simple. I was mostly wrestling with the underlying mechanics to get it working. I do need to be more self aware about this. Possibly I have trouble looking for stuff because I keep thinking of these visual sorts of projects that I really am not interested in.
Busy news day. Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton resigned after 18 years. Michael Jackson died. That seems to be the be the big news infotainment story. And yes, it's sad, but not really that big a thing. The PBS news hour doesn't seem to be mentioning it. Its main story is the Supreme Court decision against strip searches. Hmm. They're not saying he is dead. Farrah Fawcett did die, though. Maybe they didn't get it confirmed in time. Oh well.
Happy Father's Day! Happy Solstice! Happy First Day of Summer! Happy Longest Day of the Year!
Mmm. Pancakes.
So, I went shopping with Mom. We were picking out a chuck roast for today, and there was one a little bigger, but it had a line of fat and gristle. Also, the color was a little darker, which just seemed better to me. I said I thought it looked good. It's my feeling that fattier pieces taste better. And even the gristle is going to have a bunch of collagen. That was just the top that we could see. The bottom was worse. And my mom said it wasn't very good. And she's cooking it slow. We'll see how it goes. Last night, she made a ham steak. Baked it in the oven with pineapple on top. Cooked out a huge amount of water, so it was really dry and pretty tough. Not the worst I've seen. I've done a lot worse myself. But that really was kind of unexpected. I'm not sure what otherwise we could have done. Looking up a recipe, that's basically what it says to do. I don't know what happened.
OK, the roast was good. Tender. If there was gristle, I didn't see it. And the ham steak. Mom cooked it for an hour. It was from frozen, so maybe it should have been a little longer, but the recipes say 20 minutes.
So the last section on sauces is five pages about salt. The word sauce comes from a word meaning salt, but still that seems like a lot of space for it. Then again, he said every thing in the book pretty much involved salt, so I guess it's important. I'm not sure what all it's going to have to say.
Well, I said the chapter was about bread. It hasw gone on to talk about cakes and pies and pastries and cookies. It's also going to talk about pastries. So flour is really versatile. I kind of need to go get something.
So Melissa got a new car. A fancy pretty red audi. It had like 20,000 miles on it. She was about to pay off her old car, so she felt like getting another one. and she wants to keep the car note. Seems very silly to me. And she wanted it for the trip to Florida she has gone on this week for fathers day. Parents down there. She was so happy, showing it off to people. It is very nice. Turbo. Never had a red car before. I always do red cars. Seems like its gotten a lot less popular because everyone says red cars get more tickets. I'm pretty sure that's because sports cars are so often red. Or used to be.
The next chapter is on sauces, something I really don't know much about. In honor of it, I broke out the barbecue sauce and had it on some chicken. Right now, I'm still looking at the history of sauces. It looks like the French used to boil down huge amounts of meat to make sauce--more meat than would be served at the meal. Used to, I think they must have quit that.
Happy Ides of June!
Finished looking at the Stanford lectures on machine learning. Seems like you probably really need to do the homework to fully get it, but I at least have some understanding of what they are doing. I looked at the preview lecture on the class on probabilistic reasoning. I at least get what the class is about. The textbook is going to be published at the end of August, so I might get that. They were just using a draft of it. It's a big graphical way of encoding complex probability distributions, but it seems like it still relies on people to understand what the symbols and events mean. I guess that's standard in AI. There's a class on natural language processing that's available, but it seems like it's the same way. I might try going through it, but I'm not quite so enthusiatic. The machine learning seemed to have an emphasis on robot control, as the professors big project is an autonomous helicopter. It was his big example for just about everything.
They switched over to digital TV. Last night, there was a big storm, and I couldn't pick up one of the channels during it. I know the antenna had moved because I tried to move it to a better spot but still didn't get it working, but I think the weather had an effect, because it's working now. One channel isn't back, so I don't think I quite have the direction right. And I had checked it before the storm and gotten everything. I don't see the ABC at all, though. It was very weak before, and it was UHF, so I might just not have it. Oh well.
Wow. I just watched the first lecture on Natural Language Processing. It's statistical NLP. So there is pretty much no attempt to ever understand the meaning of anything. It's treated as just code hashing. So I have just about no interest. I might watch a few, because they do seem to get a lot done, in some sense. And it's fairly easy stuff, somewhat related to the machine learning stuff.
Happy Friday the Twelfth!
Wow, so there's an answer. Their just going to make it illegal not to have insurance. Have to pay a fine if you don't. Or get a waiver. That'll fix it. That sounds like the kind of answer that the insurance companies could get behind. Seemed like there was other stuff in there too. I don't know what it was, though.
So when you lose weight or burn calories, how does the weight get out of you? I think it's not completely obvious, but the carbon goes out from breathing out. So just from that you can see just how slowly losing weight is going to have to be. You have to breathe out pounds. That's just going to take a while. That's mostly it. The nitrogen from protein metabolism goes out in urine, and probably some of the carbon from that, but generally, it's from breathing.
OK, here it is! I think I've talked about it in real life. The commentary for the season 8 Simpson's episode, "In Marge We Trust" Josh Weinstein, the executive producer, talks about how he can relate to Homer Simspson, in that when he gets home he just wants to remove his pants. It's not a sex thing, they encumber him, and he just wants to remove his pants.
On the mensa atheist list, I wrote about how I am annoyed by people who say they are agnostics. And pretty much everyone there argues with my position, using what I find a very tired argument that you can't ever know anything completely, there is always some doubt about everything. But I find it misleading to say that, especially to religious people who are only going to take compfort in that, and think that they are saying they might be right. And I thinking it's more of a rationalization so they don't have to stand up for what they know, that religious stories are made up. Because it is misleading, it is less honest to say you are an agnostic, unless you really are just a wimp like that. Plus with that freakish conceptualization, know is a meaningless word. I have no doubts about the statement that there is no god. Maybe you do. My feeling is that if you do, you are being a wimp and caving into the social pressure, and are probably not being honest with yourself about your thinking and reasons. Also, an agnostic isn't just keeping his personal beliefs to himself. He is making a statement about what "I" can know, and that's personally insulting to me. Maybe I have a different theory of knowledge than him. I do, actually. Ah, whatever. Agnosticism stirs up feelings of anger and righteous indignation in me. Grr.
And reddit had a thing about how 95% of blogs have been abandoned. Seems low. It made me look at Cliff's blog. He's actually been writing. Good for him! I think he like published a short story or something. I don't know. Writing for money? It seems kind of wrong to me, somehow. And killing trees. Don't get me started.
Wow, so I'm reading the chapter on bread. It's actually on cereal doughs and batters, but that's mostly bread, and the section I'm on is bread specifically. And I'm seeing how little I really knew, even though it's one of the things I've personally tried to make. Though I'll grant that I've mostly just been lazy and used a bread machine for the work involved. One very intriguing thing is that refrigeration makes bread stale more quickly. And I've been putting my bread in the refrigerator lately, most because I really don't eat that much. Probably a vicious cycle, because now I'm just eating stale bread. OK, I ate the fake store bread slow enough that it would get moldy, which is pretty bad. So at least it isn't getting moldy. It turns out that toasting bread actually makes it not stale (on the untoasted part) so if you are going to toast it, it's fine. But I've also been refrigerating the fancy sourdough stuff that I've been getting, so I've been eating stale sourdough bread. But with butter, it seems to taste OK. I can't even put butter on the fake bread--it'll smush or rip up. Heating can also make it not stale, and supposedly you can do that in the microwave--I'm guess as long as the water doesn't escape. I guess I should be clear on what staling is. It's when the water moves out of the starch grains, which makes them hard. But they did an experiment by sealing some bread so no water actually escaped and it still went stale. So staling isn't the same as drying, excatly. The water may still be inside the bread, just having moved out of the little spots inside the starch structure (I didn't quite get a full picture). So when you heat it, the water will go back to the right spot. In toast, the inside will not be stale anymore. But bread right out of the refrigerator--stale. You can even freeze it, and it will be OK. Kind of trippy, actually. So, stale or moldy? I guess personally, thrwoing away stuff is painful to me, so I can tolerate it being terrible. Still, now I at least understand a mistake I'm making.
Argh! So Bardog now has a big set of about a dozen of those little puzzles where you'll have these different pieces that seem linked together, and you'll have to manipulate them some kind of way and one piece will come off. Argh. I sat down next to a guy who was just whipping them off. I just had to tell Melissa that I don't like those things. I did a simple one, and there was this harder one, and I'm sure I could do it eventually. But I just don't like that stuff. I don't want to have to demostrate how smart I am. And I'm really not that good at this visual reasoning stuff. The guy actually said on the one I was doing that you could see how to do it. Huh? Back at Fedex, they had puzzles like these sitting around, and I'd be happy to do them there. Anything to avoid work and I guess, to be sociable. And it was nice to think about them. Personally, I thought it was a better accomplishment if you could explain to other people how to do them. And I think the best accomplishment would be to get a computer program that could solve those. And I said that to Melissa, and I got a reaction... It was like the opposite of when you connect with someone. Or maybe it was when I describe this puzzle with four cubes with colored dots that you had to arrange in a pattern so that on each side all four colors appeared. I wrote a program to do that. It was like, maybe I sounded proud of it and she thought I was trying to impress her. Turned her, off. Kind of increased the distance between us or something. Because I had a place I was going with that. It took me however long to write-- I had to come up with a way to represent the information about the arrangements of colors on the cubes, and put that in, and then put in a program to try the combinations. I don't know, I've never really been so much into hobby programming, I've only done really small bits. I have no idea how long it's going to take--I don't know if I calculated the number of possibilities. And with Java, you don't know how fast it's going to be. It took one second to run. A few hours over a few days for me, and then one second. It's the kind of thing that makes me think that there are going to be some amazing things happen when computers are able to program. But I didn't get to that part of the story. I just completely disengaged with her. But seriously, I need to get some computer vision applications on the iphone. It is quite within the capabilities of that device to use the camera to grab a 3-d model of those puzzles, represent which parts are attached and not, including things that are rigid pieces and which are chains, then use the internal 3-d model to find the solution, and then display a video of the solution so a person can do it, including just having the camera there watching the person and guiding him through it. That's even without the hack cheat of just storing all the known puzzle types in a library. That's a problem worthy of an AI researcher. You could publish that shite.
While shopping for a sudoku book, I read in several of the little introductions. Quite of few of them will talk a bit about the strategies you can use. One of them mentioned a couple that are on my outer edge--x-wing and swordfish. And this one also talked about chain patterns, which to me don't seem much different from a guessing strategy. And I think something actually talked about narrowing the possibilities to two, and then following stuff till some error, which is the trickiest thing I do. Some where in there, they said something I found insightful. There is a rhythm to sudoku puzzles. You might go pretty good at first, and then you get stuck, and you finally find the tricky ones, and you rush to the end, and that momentum makes you ready for another puzzle. That rhythm is a big piece of what makes them addictive. It really seems like the kind of thing that happens to me, especially for when I'll do a bunch of them in a row. I'm hoping that being aware of this will help me not waste quite so much time with them now. These really hard ones seem to be a little better, because they are frustrating enough that I don't feel like doing more so much. It was kind of unusual that I put one down and came back. I was really tired at that time, but still. And I used the word "addicted". That implies there is some harm, and in this case I think I have been harmed because I have spent too muh time with it when I should have been doing other things. Real addictions can hurt in other ways, like making you not get enough sleep or exercise, or interrupting work. I've got so much email that it's getting to be a problem like that. And then there's reddit. I've already talked about how reddit has the gambler's reward-- it won't always pay off, but will sometimes. Something like that will really get you hooked. TV can be like that, too. You'll keep going through garbage because once in a while it will pay off. Man.
Happy D-Day!
Must be a full moon or something. I wasn't sure what to make of it. In from of the Schnuck's, there was a car that was mostly up on the curb, with back end up against a lamppost, facing against traffic. There wasn't anything special about the road right there, so I don't know how they might have spun out and ended up that way. I didn't look too close, but I didn't think it was bashed in any from hitting the pole. Didn't call anything in. Didn't pull over to check. Too weird.
Went to Doc Watson's to see Tom Dick and Harry. Saw a guy passed out (Steve). Sitting a couple seats over. At first I only saw some leaning over and I thought they were just kissing, but more folks went over, and I saw he was just passed out on her shoulder. There was some girl, tall, kind of cute and, um, friendly. Talked with a lot of people. One guy she danced with kept hanging out around her, and eventually they kicked him out. There was one guy who came in pretty late, Sitting over to my left a little ways. On the last song he gave out a yell. Sounded like it was right in my ear. And after that, he kept yelling for them to play another one. I've never heard a cover band do an encore. Not this time, either. But as the siren was leaving, she told this guy nice to meet him. See you shelley, or something like that. And John Roth, the singer guitar player guy, was sitting by himself off in the corner, eating his food. Kind of made me sad. I kind of wanted to talk to him, but he chose to be off by himself. I had actually eaten by myself like that in a bar with a bunch of people around, so I guess I can relate. But like Epicurus said, that's the life of a wolf or lion, not a man.
I had gone out to Borders because the web site they were open till 11 one weekend nights. Lies. They close at 10. Got there ar 5 till. I wanted to pick up a sudoku book that I had already scoped out, but I was thinking I might be able to hang around a little. I didn't complain to the cutie, though. They seemed to be rushing to get everyone out.
So the sudoku puzzles are supposed to be the guy's hardest level. But he says in the intro, if you have to make a lot of marks to figure it out, you're being too mechanical and you aren't understanding it. And no guessing is necessary. OK. I'm not sure about that. It sure didn't seem like that in the last bunch I was doing. I've done one puzzle, and I didn't have to write down the possibles. It seemed like these are going to be hard from how few number they start with, but I don't know. I think it's not great to be getting into this habit again. Maybe I'll be able to lay off if it gets boring.
Happy Tiananmen Square Day!
My mom is such a farm girl. She was born on a farm and left when she was still little, maybe 7, but has these mysterious gardening abilities. My yields on the wheat sprouts have always been low, maybe 20%, but the one batch I made when my mom was here that she tended a bit (adding water when it needed) was like 90%. I don't know what the deal was. Then then next one I did by myself was back to my usual 20%.
Argh. So it looks like they are finally going to try to cancel my government health insurance. Great timing.
I did go for a second day in a row without eating meat, to see that I could do it. Then after midnight, I had a hot dog. I have lots of bits of meat that need to get eaten, so it wasn't going to last long, but maybe I will try to buy some meat substitute items to replace things.
I got to the section on beans. They are musical because of some indigetible sugar forms (oligosaccharides). This is different from onions which have chains of fructose that we simply can't break down but will break down from cooking. Just about the best you can do for beans is to remove the sugars by soaking, but that also removes water soluble vitamins. I'm sure the beano product has enzymes for breaking them down, and that might work. Also, it looks like soy milk probably has those sugars, so that isn't necessarily a complete improvement over regular milk for my mild lactose intolerance. Soy also has the issue of phytoestrogens, which might be a bit of a cancer concern.
Only single payer government health care can work. If independent insurance companies continue to be part of the picture, they will make the paperwork burden too expensive, and any government involvement in paying for healthcare won't work. Of course, they have enough money that they will keep themselves alive, so they will ensure that government healthcare will fail. And it's possible that the government will do something, and it won't fail immediately, but it will eventually, which is something the insurance people can live with. The problem is that it is a big burden on the american economy. One can at best hope for a technological deus ex machina. Possibly computers (and A.I.) will contribute unexpected solutions to the problem. The biggest problem is the overhead from dealing with many payers. Specifically, with the insurance people, every little charge is itemized, whereas with the single payer systems everywhere, you just make one big bill. The difference between the two ways of doing things is simply huge. And it's a lot more work with lots of people keeping track of the charges for each little thing, and whether each little bit is paid. It's part of why the U.S. just pays a lot more than everyone else. But it's that kind of thing that can be improved by better computer systems. Recent privacy concerns have multiplied the money that the insurance leeches can suck out of the system, too. Interesting coincidence, that. OK, but why does it have to fail with anything but single government payer? If there are people who are trying to make money, they won't pay for the expensive people unless forced to, and they will always find ways of getting out of paying if they can. If the government is going to guarrantee health care for everyone, they will be left paying for the expensive leftovers, while the insurance people pay only what is profitable, statistically. But that's how the U.S. government has pretty much been working-- private profit and public loss. It just doesn't seem like that can work for very long for everyone. A lot of rich people are doing well, of course. We'll see how it goes. One thing that isn't really factored in is that the U.S. is a nation of gun owners, and they may just eventually get pissed off and snap at some point, altough it tends to be individuals who snap, and that's ineffective.
Argh, so that was a bad sign. Yesterday, I had slept fairly well, comparatively, but I got up at maybe 6. Then I took a nap at maybe 1 or 2. The first I looked up was maybe 5 something, but I went to sleep again, and then got up at maybe 8:30. That's just pitiful.
Wow, they overrode the veto on the guns in bars law. Trippy.
I come back from kung fu class, and my feet hurt. I walk kind of pitiful. Some of that is that the gout was acting up, and I think the exercise aggravated it a bit.
The notion of a dictator creator is clearly just a silly fabrication in the minds of primitive people. A tribal or possibly city level dictator is just about the only system of government they could know about. so it's pretty natural that that's just about the only way they could imagine for the universe to work. So it's more ignorance and lack of imagination or experience than anything else. I have some trouble that the whole substitute sacrifice thing makes sense to anyone, too. It doesn't really fit with an omnipotent being, unless you just are tied down to some limited concept of his personality. Someone must pay. Why is that, exactly? It doesn't make sense to me, and I can only guess that people at some point just accept that it's the way it is, and maybe have no reason to question. I don't know.
It's perfectly possible to have conflicts. I might love someone, but know that they don't want to hear from me or be with me. My conceptualization of love is that it is actually several different desires together: to be with someone, to communicate closely with them, and to help them. And since they are different, they can conflict. Specifically, if they want not to be with you, then avoiding them helps them, even though it conflicts with your desire to be with them. Some people, I think, are more about doing things because of how they feel. Feelings are very important to them. Not to everyone, though. I think to some, it would be a long bigger deal to be frustrated like that. It might seem cold to just dismiss the feelings, and make them sad. I don't know though. I'm not so good at understanding those emotional folk.
Wow, I haven't eaten any meat today. That's really unusual. I can't remember the last time. Generally, if I eat anything at all, it will at least have some meat. But I had a bean burrito, and some watermelon and a banana. I guess it was just enough and I didn't feel like any more. The fruit is stuff I'm trying to finish off left over from my mon's visit. I've got a bunch of milk to drink, too. I need to go find some veggie patties. Unfortunately, it seems like they cost as much as meat, so it doesn't seem like there is a lot of advantage to eating those.
I got through the section on wheat. They did mention having green wheat, as it's kind of sweet and moist. So my desire to have what I was calling fresh wheat is not unreasonable, and some people somewhere like it.
The money I took out is disappearing fast. Funny thing, though. I took it, out, and the market went up, so I still have the same amount of money in there. Actually a little more. Though of course, it would have been a good bit more if I had left it in. Whatever. I should probably just get a job.
And the Mensa annual gathering is in a month. But I think I really would feel bad about spending money to stay in a hotel for six days. And I'm not so big on conventions, in general. So many people packed together. It's not really my thing. Probably wouldn't be worth it to me personally, though without going I'm not sure I would know. I had been thinking I might go, but as it gets closer, I'm not so into it. Plus, the hotel wouldn't be the one of the actual convention. I really like to be able to go up and take a nap or a break at any time. Going to the hotel at the end of the day isn't even close. Spending a bunch of money right now as uncertain as things are probably isn't a good idea. When I looked at the schedule, I really didn't see a lot of stuff that looked super interesting.
Happy Kalends of June!
Can't sleep. Weirdness with my bank. I've been trying to get some money out from my stocks this week. Shorter week so I lost a day. Put sell order in on Tuesday, and it wasn't, what was the word they used? maybe reconciled till Wednesday, so somehow they money wasn't available in the cash account of my investment company til Thursday. But that was going to be OK, because they said very clearly that an Electronic Transfer would be available as soon as the same day. I guess. Somehow it wasn't quite. It did seem to be posting on Friday, though. And I checked Friday morning before hours (like maybe 6), and it had transaction posted for that day, and the money was added into the available balance, though it wasn't part of the current balance because that's the end of previous day balance. Great, fine, it should be there Saturday, and luckily they do open on Saturday. So I check at maybe midnight or so Saturday morning, and things are completely not fine. The transaction is no longer listed. It's not in the available balance any more, and mysteriously two new charches have come out of it, dated from like Tuesday and Wednesday. And of course, not in the "current balance" which again, is supposed to be close of previous day balance. Grr! So, like, I'm not going to have any money, and I won't be able to go see Melissa. Not happy. I bit of tossing and turning. And then I get on match.com cause I'm feeling lonely. And they have updated questions, so I fill stuff out and update things. Eventually, at maybe 5ish, I check the bank again, and suddenly the transaction is back, and it's back in the available balance, plus it's part of the "current balance". So they've got some kind of weird nightly batch running somewhere that updated things. I don't know where that is exactly--I know my investment company does some kind of batch nightly for updates, so it could be something with them. But overall it's not giving me warm fuzzy feelings. OK. I was checking the investment company balance, and it had sort of looked like it had held onto the money until it appeared in my bank account. It was showing up sort of unresolved. So there may well have been some kind of clearing going on in the middle of the night. Also, it looks like they gave me a penny's worth of interest as the money say around waiting to move on Friday. Weirdness.
Happy Memorial Day! Happy Towel Day!
So I finally asked Melissa if she wanted to talk some time when she wasn't working. I didn't really ask it in a kind of persuasive way to get her to say yes. And I knew she was too nice to just say no. She said, well I know her schedule, and she doesn't have any time. But she hasn't been sleeping. That's really what I was thinking. If she isn't sleeping, then instead of her just lying awake, we might talk. But she said that even if she can't sleep, she's trying to. Oh well. If she had wanted to, I probably would have already known, and she wouldn't have made excuse had she actually wanted to. So that's that. I needed to at least ask.
A survivor. So I was washing the dishes. I don't really do that very often because I tend to just rinse and reuse. It must have been at least a week. I found in the drain one blade of wheat that had been growing there it must have been quite a while. the green part was more than for inches long, and there was a strand of root hanging down that was also about four inches. Living in the drain of the kitchen sink. I think I'm going to need to try to plant it out in the garden. A real survivor.
On Friday, as I was leaving to go to temperance, across the street, there were these birds just walking up the sidewalk. A pair with several little babies. Just walking along. I didn't know if they were ducks or geese. They were kind of big, and they had some colorings that I just wasn't sure about. I thought I should take a picture, but I didn't know how to take a picture yet on my new iPhone, so I didn't. I just looked on the web for different breeds of ducks and geese. They were Canada geese.
So my dad had an attack of gout in his toe. Went to the emergency room because he couldn't sleep. It does hurt.
I think my squash plants are just getting eaten. The one that had survive had had several leaves and looked pretty healthy, but a couple days later it was gone. I never saw one wilting, they just were gone. And I think I saw a slug sitting around that area. I tried planting some more seeds, but if they are getting eaten, then there just won't be so much I can do. I don't know if we have any stuff to put down for the slugs.
Well, ok. I just went toAsk Dr. Janice. She showed up on the meta cognition email list and mentioned her blog. Just joined mensa. And her recent post talked about how hard economic times are good for finding love, and I wrote a comment, because that seems to be right for me personally, and at least I'm considering it now. I haven't had any luck right now, exactly, but at least I'm thinking about it.
Sat next to the guy Eric who was really into music. Possibly did DJing, but was into vinyl. would not compress music. And the cop who hang's out there is named shawn.
I don't deserve breakfast in bed everyday. I don't want to live like a mule on a trail ride.
So the problem with synching my iPhone was just that I needed to update the itunes i was using on my laptop. So that's good to know. My stuff is on my old laptop and I need to get it going on my new laptop, because my dad wants borrow it for the trip they're going on. No telling if it will make it back. A computer of his just broke.
So I just saw David Brooks talking on Charlie Rose's show. On the torture stuff. I didn't quite get the deal. So, the early Bush program had said torture was alright. And you had Abu Ghraib. But this is the part I didn't know--they changed their policy. I guess they didn't ever really say, and they always wanted to look tough, I guess. Bush kept saying they don't torture. The part he was leaving out was "any more". That used to be the deal, but they changed it. I guess I missed that part. So Obama basically has the same policy, but he's being a little more clear about it.
More frustration. I just finished Call of Duty World at War and no zombie mode. I checked it out on the web, and sure enough, it's not available on the wii. That's weak. But it has the point and shoot which the other systems don't have so I guess that's something.
Now I'm sad. All the squash plants that came up are gone, except for one. The old weeds that were there before are taking over. I guess I won't have much of a garden.
The iPhone has some features missing that I was expecting. It doesn't connect to my computer, so I can't put all my songs on it. And it can't use a bluetooth keyboard. I'm not quite used to the touch screen keyboard, and it never would be as fast as a real keyboard. I get the feeling that apple wants to make sure you have to have other devices too, that this won't be enough for you. Oh well. I need to get used to it.
Spent a bunch more money. Not good to be spending money when you don't have any coming in, but it could have been worse. I avoided taking any more out of the bank like I was thinking I would do. I would have needed to do that to buy the propane burner to fix the gas grill, but I decided to just not get that right now. It's been something I've been putting off because I have to get out grill and measure the size, and that little extra bit of effort was enough for me to put it off. So I decided to hold off on that and just go get the tomato plants. It's already really late to be doing that. I really should have gotten that earlier. And I was thinking $350 per plant, and they had some for that, but I saw they also had little things of much smaller plants with a bunch of them, so I got like 8 plants for that price. We'll see how that goes. I guess I need to use miracle grow at this point. Then I got some food. I got some lunchmeat, and they had a big thing of bologna for one dollar. I think I've tried it and it's pretty terrible, but for a dollar, I just can't say no. Did get some chicken. And some soy milk. This was all at aldi's. I really don't like their soy milk, but I needed something, and I didn't feel like I was going out to another store. And then I was out of gas, so I had to fill up. I didn't think it was that low, so it was an unexpected expense. $20 got it to the top notch, though not quite full. So I spent all of the small bills I had. And I didn't get a new loaf of bread, so I'm going to need to go get some more money and buy that, but maybe I can hold off. I'm also trying to hold off on selling some stock, but I'm going to need to do that pretty soon. I almost did today because it was up at the start, but I just saw that it went back down. So that's probably good. And holding out a while is probably good.
Numbers in English have a disadvantage. It takes a bit long to run through them because the sounds are pretty complicated. And having "seven" with two syllables messes up the rhythm. In _Outliers_ dude suggests that the asian number system where they are all one syllable gives them a slight advantage in math, which adds of for them over time. In sudoku, just running through the nine numbers in my head kind of can be noticeably rough. So just today I've started using the alternate number sound system that I have, and it seems to help a bit. It gives me a chance to practice it, and make it more natural. I'm hoping that helps me out. tanamaralachakafapa. And it has a nice rhythm so that I can run through it pretty fast. But I don't have a lot of puzzles any more. I've got a few sudoku triples that my folks cut out of the paper. I've got about four of those left. Each one has three puzzles that share a single square of nine, but they are skewed a bit, so I find them a little visually unpleasant. seems like I always make a mistake because of that.
Wow, that hurt. Spent a lot of money today. Finally got an iphone. And probably it wasn't good that I didn't pay cash. Yesterday I would have had enough to pay cash, but I spent enough that I didn't quite have it. I considered going to the bank to get just enough to cover it, but I wasn't sure how much it would be, and other stuff was going on, so I didn't get to it. But that meant I had quite a bit of cash, and when I have a lot of cash, I have a greater chance to spend it. Part of what was going on was that I had a flat tire, so I had to get that fixed, and since I didn't get to the bank, I didn't have enough smaller bills, and I had to break a hundred, which is generally a bad thing, because it's those smaller bills that get spent so easily. Right in the shopping center with the tire place is a radio shack, and I was needing to get a midi cable, so I went there. The midi cables were about 13 bucks, which isn't so bad, but I saw that they had microphone stands for about $20. I've been wanting to get one for a while. I've got this super neat bit of technology that I got a while back that I just haven't been able to to use right because of little things that I've been missing. It's kind of a guitar effects box, but it has a thing where you can plug in a midi device, like a keyboard, plus a microphone, and it will digitally record the inputs, or let you connect it in to a computer. Sounds neat. Actually, I'm not positive what all it will do. But to play guitar and sing with a microphone at the same time, I pretty much need a stand. So there you go. And the microphone too is a bit of an issue. The thing has the little three wire connector thing. I'm not positive what that's about. I saw that radio shack had an adapter, and the adapter changed from a quarter inch to that connector, but it also changed the impedance. I'm guessing that there is this big electrical difference between the two kind of microphones. The fairly cheap microphone I have will plug into a computer, and I bet that's not the right kind of thing for this. That adapters was like another $20. Ick. We'll see how it goes. So I have a musical keyboard that I believe has midi output, but I'm not positive the midi works right. It may be that the cable I had was not the right kind. The connectors fit, but it seemed like it was a cable for a computer keyboard, but not specifically midi. I'm not sure if I've ever gotten it to work. But I'm not sure I even know where that is, so I really need a new cable. And I think it's possible that maybe the midi just doesn't work on this keyboard. I may be thinking of an older keyboard that I had. Maybe this one doesn't even have midi. I should check that too. If this doesn't work, there's another keyboard that I've been looking at. That might be better anyway, but that one has weighted keys, and this doesn't. It makes a big difference in playing if the keys don't feel right. Anyway, so I have some musical stuff to play with, now.
So my back has been hurting. And I don't know what has done it. It's been a problem since Wednesday I'm guessing it must have been something from a couple days before that. It seemed OK the eveing before at kung fu, though I felt tired that day. Quite bad on Wednesday, and maybe a little better on Thursday, and I went to kung fu, but couldn't really do anything, though I did learn the new Fanzi chuan moves. Since then, it's been getting better a little slowly. It seems worst on the right side, and the thing that is the worst is trying to lift or kick with the right leg. The thing that has been a problem in the past that I think must be the issue is that I tend to not keep my hips level and my back straight, so I get out of alignment. The worst is that I will lie on my side propped up a bit so my back is bent. I do this because I have my computer me next to my bed, or my laptop sitting next to me on my bed. I also sleep on my side quite a bit, which also keeps it out of alignment. It might have been something with that. And I'm afraid my matress is starting to have a dent in the middle. That was a problem with my old mattress, and I got a new one a couple of years ago, but maybe it's starting to have trouble. That would suck. But pain sucks. I also have a couch here that has some kind of issue such that it seems to hurt my back if I sit in it. The cushion is soft or something or the springs are worn out, and it isn't level anymore. Really need to do something with it, if I knew exactly was wrong with it. And I'm thinking about it. Lately I've been sitting cross legged, but it's not fully crosslegged with both feet underneath. It's what's called "half-lotus" with one foot on top and one below. Seems like I always found that a little more comfortable, but it seems like maybe it makes my alignment a little bit off. I just tried sticking my legs out in front and raising the footrest on the recliner here, and it seems a little better. And I was doing quite a bit better, but I had to mow the yard today, and that wasn't great for it. Also the walking around. And maybe the sitting wrong was an issue.
One thing about the back pain is that it's giving me a bit of a motivation to eat less right now. Some of the deal has to be the extra pounds. It's enough that it's not comfortable for me to lie on my stomach, so I have to lie on my side if not my back, and I was thinking that might be an issue. The extra weight just in general can't help. So sitting with the pain, I feel much more like not eating. Plus it's been harder to get up and go eat stuff, so I can more easily skip eating. I hasn't come off particularly fast, but it's something. I think I might be down a small bit. And maybe it will give me some momentum. I also haven't felt like going out to buy any food, which helps. I did go out and spend money today, and I went to a Fresh Market in the same shopping center as the radio shack. But I was looking for some tea wurst which they didn't have. so I was able to leave without spending anything. If they had had that, I would have tried a pound of the German bologna that they had. That was the other thing I went there for. Luckily I was spared. I remember in Germany there was some kind of cold cut that they had that I really like that was pretty close to bologna that I don't think I've seen. I miss that stuff, whatever it was. I have been eating a lot more like that. I've been getting sourdough and putting butter on it and eating in real european style. Unsliced bread. I'm finding that sliced bread isn't always quite as nice as people seem to think. It makes it easy, but easy can make you eat more. If you have to slice a bit to eat more, maybe you have a bit of space where you don't need to have more. And the more american way is to just make a bunch of stuff, and then eat it all. It can happen then that you make a lot more than you really want. Skinny people are able to just not finish it if it's more than they want. I don't know how they do that, and I can't live like that. I have to finish it, even if it's way too much. That happened last night. I had the Island club. David asked me how it was, and it was good, but he said he wasn't able to eat it all. It was really an american portion. They even put egg on their club. Decadent. Or if you want a nicer word, prosperous. I have some tuna salad I'm finishing off. I'm out of bread, so I'm going to have to go get some. But I can at least hold off until tomorrow. I got some food a week ago, and I bought a box of fried chicken with it. Gobbled that up. Probably that kind of thing is why the pounds aren't flying off quite as fast as they could. But I feel prosperous.
Wow, so I went out to the garden. Actually, I was checking on the wheat sprouts. My second batch was in good shape, the sprouts weren't as tall as I let them get in the first batch, But I decided to pull them out at this stage, because some of them were growing great, and I guess the rest were just dead and rotting, so as not to let the rotting get any further, I decide to just pull out the good live ones, shake them a bit, put them in a bowl, and threw out the rest. And I emptied out the last of the old wheat, which is almost 10 years, so I figure it's good to be done with it. Now I have a nice 5 gallon water jug thing with a spigot because that's what my brother gave it to me in. Kind of a nice way to give two gifts--make the container also a nice object to have. For Cliff's first marriage I gave them a little bronze deva statue (it might have been buddha-ish, I forget) wrapped in a purple tapestry. Sort of a philosophical gift. But I had the wheat to go give out to the birds. And I didn't pick out sprouts, just really the tall healthy ones, so I tossed some of them onto the garden. But I got to look at the garden, and I noticed that there are a bunch of squash plants that have come up. Those are really big sprouts. There is some corn coming up, though it's not quite that much. I can't really tell about the spinach, there's a little that might be right, but I don't know, because there is also some weeds. The bed with the tomato seeds is quite a mystery to me, because there are a bunch of little tiny sprouts, but that could easily all be weeds. One other thing is that I definitely also have wheat coming up in the places where I put it. It looks pretty much the same as grass. Wheat actually is a kind of grass. It actually grows better than grass, but it's a little thicker. I mowed today, and one section where I've been feeding the birds is actually a thick patch of wheat, a lot taller than the other grass and thicker. So, since I actually had stuff growing, I had to water. I think that's the part of gardening that I hate the most. I only did it for a few minutes today. I didn't have my ipod--that might make it doable. But just sitting there with the hose seems like such a terrible waste of time, and then you have to do it at least once a week--or maybe every other day. It's not hard, it's just too boring and busy work. I have hardly the initiative to always do that kind of stuff. And today I had mosquitoes. Blech. I'll use repellant next time. I wasn't expecting to do more than just go and throw out the wheat. I'll see how it goes. If I am going to get good about watering, then I need to plant more wheat, because that was the problem with it.
Happy Ides of May!
So I've got some wheat sprouts. Actually kind of tasty. Kind of sweet. Not quite like alfalfa sprouts yet. Not even an inch tall and already mostly green. Possibly I need to be keeping them in the dark. If I keep it up, I'll probably have a lot of experience, since it only takes a few days. That's a pretty fast turnaround to be trying and learning stuff. I haven't eaten them all yet. I remember last time I tried they went bad pretty fast and got moldy.
So I learned more about Melissa. She does Sudoku in pen. She talked about some commercials she had been in and some country music video she was in. And the one Bob Dylan wanted her to be in, but paid less, and she had to be naked, so no thanks. And she worked at TJ Mulligans Trinity first as a waittress. She may have said that , but I had forgotten. I knew she worked out at Mulligans 64. And she said that the first time I saw her at Dan mcGuinness, I asked for a Dr Pepper, but she remembered me from Trinity that I drank Guinness. And I had kind of looked at her funny. I don't remember that. It does sometimes happen that people will remember stuff I've said that I don't remember. But this was really nice. I feel bad that I forgot about it, but it just seems so sweet that she had remembered me. Even so, with all of that, I still didn't ask if she wanted to talk some time when she wasn't working. There was some guy, He asked if she was single, and she said yes. They had known each other a long time. I think from Trinity. She worked there in '98 till 64 opened. Some time after that, they were walking along and I heard him say he should take her out some time. I didn't hear how it went after that. But after that they were talking about stuff, including some bit, seemed like they were talking about someone else, sometimes you need to just say you're not interested. So in that context, I didn't feeling like saying anything similar to Melissa. Whatever. I thought I was getting better.
Wow, I had two separate things I could do to go see people. The monthly Mensa meeting was finally on a Monday night. And there was the weekly Monday night meeting with Lana and Briggite. And I slept for like 11 hours last night. I'm really sure what the deal is with that, but whatever. I decide to take a nap at 4. But then I just did not want to get up and do stuff. So I just slept through both of the things. Shoot. I'm not sure I really wanted to go see the mensa folk, but still, I need to go see people. There's one little Mensa girl that got recommended as a Facebook friend that I really would like to meet. Some other time maybe. Plus I missed the big season finale episode of House. Whatever, House sleeping with Cuddy and the morning after at the office. But I'm getting to catch the end of the weird Medium arc where there's this big serial killer and company that hired Allison to shut her up. Not really that big a thing. Probably would be better to miss this, but it's something.
n Well, I bought some wheat at the whole earth foods or whatever it's called. The place used to be Wild Oats, but I think I did read that they were bought out. Lots of people there they had a lot of deli stuff and pizza by the slice and there were folks just sitting and eating at tables they had. The breed of wheat was hard red winter wheat. That doesn't sound like really what I want to be trying to grow here in the summer, but whatcha gonna do. Also, it is possible that the kind of wheat I had that one time that I really like is some other kind and I won't like how this turns out when it's done. But I guess I should give it a shot. I'm not sure how much wheat varies. The thing is, I know fresh maize corn is so much different from dry corn. Of course, sweet corn is also different from field corn, and I think my biggest experience growing corn was field corn, which wasn't super sweet. We'll see how it goes. Wheat is incredible cheap, though. The price I piad for this stuff was probably ten times what a real farmer would pay in a co-op, but even it was really cheap. It helps to understand those third world people who live on less than a dollar a day. Maybe I'll start baking my own bread again. And maybe I should try to talk to my little farm girl friend.
I'm not really getting a lot of ideas for planting from the reading. Maybe I'll try growing some sprouts. One thing I saw that was interesting is that there are some plants that have fructose chains that we can't digest but intestinal bacteria can, so they give us gas. Raw onions are like that. But when you cook onions, the chains break down into fructose, so they get sweet. I think I had heard that about onions, but I didn't quite have the whole story.
Wow, so there's a cougar out at the farm. They saw it down by the cabin. I wonder how you get one of those. Sounds like a challenge. Now I have a reason to always carry out there. I need to get a better hunting quality gun. Maybe I should finally get that .357.
Heavy. The Simpon's today just did a little story of MacBeth. Homer did the tomorrow soliloquey. I didn't even remember where it was from. But I think I got it this time. Now they're doing the fountainhead. Maggie talking! I wish I would have recorded it. It was Jodie Foster. Yummy. They also did a Snow White and the Seven somethings, such that it avoided the Disney copyright.
I just watched the episode where Deanna's mother goes catatonic. And they find out about a repressed memory of D's older sister who died. Loss. I guess everyone can relate. More like Start Trek, to me. It just seemed like the movie just wasn't really Star Trek. It had some approximation to the characters from the orginal series. But come on, a person with a father is a very different person from that person without a father. Kirk was supposed to be a bookworm in school I didn't see it. They throw in something about how he has great aptitude scores. I didn't see that either. I guess I shouldn't get started. There was too much I didn't like about that movie. But so many people liked it. Great reviews. I think the deal is that it is probably good on its own for the average person who doesn't really care about Star Trek. I'm trying to characterize how I feel. Not disappointed, really. They did something fairly good to most people. But to me it violated the very notion of that universe. The only way they could deal with the situation was violence. What is that/ It was a crazy person, and maybe they had to, but that's all they ever really tried. Mostly irritated. I don't know.
So Super 5 was playing at Doc Watson's. I went to the Greekfest, and sat around with the Mensan's but it was kind of boring and I didn't really engage or talk much. Got to Doc Watson's a little after they started. Got a sprite, and she asked for $2. I didn't have a lot of change, so I didn't give her anything extra right then. i guess I should have. Because she never tried to refill it, and I went pretty slow, but eventually it got to the bottom. Before that, Super 5 went on break, and I talked to Chris a bit. He came over to talk to me. I didn't really feel like talking. He seems to be hurting a bit with no money. Talked about his ex. It didn't sound like he is seeing anybody right now. No money. Having some issues with using a nitrocellulose paint or something for the coating of a guitar he's building. Keeps cracking underneath. Hard to work with. In the second set, the glass gets empty. And nothing. So I just get up and stand by the door and shortly. Stiffed her. I guess. Probably not nice. I was thinking of maybe getting some food, but not if I'm invisible. Probably not really my place, anyway. I went there because one time I saw someone who talked to me, and I was hoping maybe to find her again. But I don't think I would recognize her. There was one girl who I wasn't sure, might have been her. Maybe not. Looked familiar but could have been someone else. Kept getting up and dancing, but had trouble staying on her feet. The barmaid kept bringing her back to sit down. Whatever. I haven't ever left Super 5 before the end of their gig before. But I wasn't especially into it, in addition to feeling a bit ignored or maybe unwanted.
I am no gardener, but I planted all the seeds I have. I think an ipod can make anything tolerable. I know it made it easy to get through three years of maintenance on a big Java project. I may still try to find some wheat an plant that around in available spaces. I love the taste of fresh wheat before it has been dried out, which is normally about the only way you get it. Still soft. I should make a better effort to get it all the way. I doubt seriously I'll get any tomato plants from the seeds, much less tomatoes, so I'll probably go out and get some plants. I'm very curious if I'll get squash plants. I used a little potting soil for them, because that stuff will hold the water better and maybe give them a better chance, plus it lets me know where I put seeds down, so I'll have a better chance of telling them from the weeds. That's going to be the trick, I'm guessing--knowing which plants are the ones I want, and which are the weeds. I have no idea what kind of luck I'll have with the corn, but I think it's fairly easy to tell those plants. I tried planting some spinach. That's just a wild expirement, and I have no idea how that will turn out, if I will even be able to recognize the plants and tell them from weeds. Plus it's such a shady spot. Even if I get corn plants I don't thing I'll actually get corn, but I think spinach at least has a chance because you're trying to get the leaves, and if there is a plant at all, it will have leaves. I actually grew spinach or lettuce or one of those in California, but I let it get to seed--I didn't really know much about it. Trying to put the stuff in, i saw that the beds are really not quite ready. They were completely overgrown with thick morning glory, and I'm sure I didn't get it all out, so it's probably going to come back. It would be nice to find some perennial that I could just put in there. We used to have parsley, and that stuff was just great. I've really slowed down on my reading. I finished quite a few things, and now I've got stuff that I'm not quite so interested in, like the java compiler book, but another thing that is sitting there is the book on food and cooking, and i was just getting into the vegetables, so maybe I should pick that up again and it might give me some ideas. It's already May. I'm really behind, but I guess it's better late than never. I know peppers are probably the easiest thing. Even I have been able to grow peppers, though not as well as I might. Don't really like them too much, but they're something. And I've grown radishes, though not in this garden. I find them tolerable. I actually like onions, and i've never tried them. The big ones are probably out of my skill range, but there might be some breeds I could manage. I think the deal with onions is that they are so cheap to buy, and the ones you grow aren't any better. It's not like tomatoes where growing your own can make a big difference in the quality. I hear carrots are pretty easy, but I hate carrots.
Ouch. Actually had a bit of headache coming out of that movie. Too many problems for me. A lot of silliness. could have been worse, but it had enough things I didn't like to be annoying.
Got some seeds. I got some tomato seeds so I'm going to give them a shot. I'm not doing it right, I'm sure, so I don't expect much. But they want $3 a plant. Possibly reasonable, but I just don't feel like it. I need to go back to get an element for our gas grill, so maybe I'll get some.
Maybe the headache had a bit to do with it having been a long time since I'd eaten. But not completely.
Man, the _Star Trek_ movie opens, and my unease is increasing. The reviews have been very good, generally, but still I'm hearing some things that don't sound good. Roger Ebert gave it two and a half stars out of four, which is about the lowest of the bunch I saw. The more worrisome thing he said was that it is space opera. I don't like space opera. It's not science fiction. The science is crappy, and they do quite a few things in this that really break with real science. And that kind of thing bothers me. Lately, it's been bad. And I've been watching TNG instead of the original series, which was a little better, but even it is bothering me to some extent. The original series had the characters, and I get the feeling that the people who like it are liking that bit. Plus it's a big adventure thing. I'm not so much into the adventure stuff, but I'll see how it goes. And it has time travel. I hate time travel. It's stupid. It just annoys me. I'm really afraid that I won't be able to get past that. And I'm not in a very good mood now, so I am really doubting that I will. Just thinking about it is making it worse, too. I'm not sure i will go see it tonight. I was expecting it to open Friday and would go around lunch when it wouldn't be so busy. And I really hate waiting in line so going tonight probably won't work for me. I'm just not excited about it.
I was thinking I was going to go out about now, before going to kung fu, and get tickets, and go buy some seeds and plants for the garden. But I haven't. Maybe after. I think I've done all the initially turning of the soil that I am going to do. Pickaxe. Pretty tiring stuff, that I spread over several days. I'm pretty bad out of shape, I guess. It was actually better yesterday when it was wet and rainy and overcast. Today was getting hot. Unfortunately it looks like the spot doesn't get much sun. It was before 4m and it was already completely in shade, and probably had been for a while. Not much will grow with shade like this. So a Garden is probably pretty doomed, anyway. We can usually get some tomatoes, but I tend to not water enough to really get a big amount. And squash sometimes does OK, but I don't really like squash that much. I had been thinking corn, but with so little sun, there is probably no way. And I remeber the wheat did something until died without enough water. I could try that a bit, if I can find some. I want to do some stuff from seeds, and I want to soak them overnight. So if I can go tonight, it would be good. But I don't know if i'll make it out.
The swine flu epidemic. They're trying to quit calling it that becayse some idiots are avoiding pork because of it. Some Muslim country tried to kill off all their pigs because of it. That probably was that big a deal as the pigs would have only been for the few non-Muslims, there, but still. And even that wasn't too unreasonable because there was a case somewhere of pigs getting that flu from people, so it might have done something. And a couple hundred people died from it in Mexico. But it's looking like it's not going to be that big a deal. It was scary because the people dying in Mexico weren't the babies, old and sick people that are usually the only ones who die from flu, but middling old adults. It's a new flu, so there isn't any resistance. And the people who got infected were people who got out a lot, so working adults. But a report I saw from the McNeil Lehrer News hour suggested that the problem was that Mexicans just don't like to go to the doctor. You don't need a prescription to buy drugs. So if they go to the doctor, it's usually very far along. They didn't say whether the people who died just never had gone. Now they've put on a big campaign and they appear to be really stomping this thing out. Still, tens of thousands of people a year die from flu. Actually from flu related problems. I think that's probably mostly from pneumonia or something that you can get as a consequence. They're trying to call it H1N1 or something like that. Those indicate some markers that they use to distinguish different flus. If it's a combination that's been around, people might have some antibodies against them, though they don't work all that well. The show sent Ray Suarez out to Mexico city. Their hispanic journalist. Seems like he must speak pretty good Spanish, becuase he always pronounces any kind of Spanish name with this accent that sounds really authentic. But I don't think I saw him actually speak Spanish, and a few of the people he interviewed were speaking English. I thought it kind of scary that he went right out into the heart of what seems to be a deadly epidemic. And he was wearing a mask for a bit, even though seems like they've said those masks can't keep out viruses. Hand washing. Expecially with those little hand sanitzers. That's the big thing. Then they talked about a bit of a sad thing. Some places don't have water all the time. Maybe it was water pressure and not so much plumbing. Still, it's pretty sad not to have water.
The stomach pain wasn't too bad from the hot stuff. There was a little bit. I think it wasn't quite as bad as before.
So I ate another bowl of these "flaming hot" potato chips. I got them with all the leftover chips from the party after the tai chi day. When I ate a bowl then, that night my stomach really hurt for a bit till they were out of my system, but that went pretty quick. I'm not sure how much of it was that I drank milk with it to deal with the heat from just eating them. This time, some sugary drink seem to work about as well, but I feel like a slight bit of discomfort coming on, but that may just be in my mind. I say that, but the whole point of the red oleoresin capsicum that's the hot stuff in peppers is that it causes pain. That's actually the kind of stimulation that makes people like it. I suppose people do a lot things that are painful because they get stuff out of it. Personally, I'm not particularly into that, but what're you gonna do. Just looked at the wiki. Capsaicin is the name of the chemical. Capsicum means the pepper plant genus. I refered to the oleoresin, which is the term I've seen before, and I believe it means the lipid extract. I've tried doing an extraction of it to make some pepper spray stuff. Probably the extraction pulls out other things, too, so it's not quite the same thing as the pure capsaicin. And the wiki says interesting. Birds aren't affected, but mammals are, so it protects them a bit from mammals, but not birds, and birds will can distribute the seeds. I've cut back on trying to turn the soil in the garden. Maybe I should get back to it and put in some peppers. Mom said squash grows well from seed. I was going to try that. For tomatoes I have to have plants, and I'm guessing I need them for peppers. My dad has sprouted a bunch of tomato plants from seed, but He started a while ago, and they are much more serious about it than I am. We'll see how the hot stuff goes this time. One thing that seems to help me is dark toast. I think it's the carbon. One time I had a problem, and I used activated charcoal, and that totally fixed me up completely. So I'll see how it goes.
Eating the hot chips, I was watching the Star Terk episode "Second Chances" that introduced the transporter duplicate of Riker. He said he will go by Tom Riker, so I can call him that. Transporter duplicates are kind of a great philosophical idea for science fiction. One list I'm on was talking about the concept identity and some trippy variations on the transporter. Instead of somehow breaking up a person's molecules, they scan a person without destroying them, then make a distant copy, and then kill off the original. Which kind of seems silly. I personally doubt we would have transporters. Kind of seems silly to me. One thing similar that wouldn't violate the laws of physics would be to grab the data representing a person and his brain state, stick it in a compact form possible with nanotechnology--which would probably be really small, I'd guess, less than a gram, or maybe a milligram. A speck. Since it's so small, you could shoot it out of a cannon or something, probably even pretty close to the speed of light, and have some nanobots with it that could build up an android with roughly the persons shap to simulate them, and then when done, send something back to reintegrate the memories. But with that kind of technology, that's only one of many possible things that could be done. Anyway, the Star Trek episode. The Will and Tom totally didn't get along. I think that was crappy writing. Something just so there would be some conflict in the story. They are both friendly people, and it would be weird, but surely they could have nice to each other. I think it would be great to have a duplicate. Kind of like having a twin. And again, this violates what I thought was the idea that the Star Trek would was this great, happy place. I don't know if Gene was dead yet by that time, but they sure were messing with his universe. The new Star Trek movie is coming out on Friday. I heard a bit that it was going to be pretty happy and optimistic. In contrast with a lot of the stuff that has been getting dark lately, with the brooding anti-heroes and everything. I hope it goes OK, though with the mood I've been in lately, I won't be surprised if I'm not so happy with it.
There was a bit though, with Deanna. They talk about how Will wanted to work on his career, so Will and Deanna didn't stay together kind of drifted apart, but stayed friends.. Tom picks up right where they eft off which was when they were still really into each other and were planning a future after a bit. They do a bunch of lovey dovey stuff. And Will warns her that Tom would likely make the same choices (working on the career). And she has this thing that she doesn't want to get hurt again, but she does slip into the romance thing. Then Tom gets this long distance assignment, and wants to get together in a few months. But no, it ends up looking like it won't work. And there's this moment with Deanna and she has this sad look. She kind of blinks like holding back tears. I was kind of touched. Anyway, I think it works out pretty bad for Tom. He didn't really have a chance. He eventually goes outlaw and joins a rebel group. He probably had to deal with jealousy, too.
Another Star Trek that just got on my nerves. It's the one where Picard falls in love with this lieutenant commander Nella Daren who is working under him in stellar sciences. She's just so pushy and J. I just had this intense loathing for her. Couldn't stand her. Could barely get through the episode. Actually last night I watched it for about 10 minutes and had to stop, and I just came back to it this morning. And a little way further along, I felt like turning it on again, but I decided to just try to get through it. There's some kind of bit in it, where she goes down to a planet, and is stuck in a firestorm, and they lose communications, and they don't know if she alive for a bit unitl after, and Picard is like totally lost. He says he shut down. The first time I saw it I remember thinking, new character, they must kill her off. This time I was hoping that would have happened, but no, she makes it. There's a bit of weirdness about it. Supposedly there were 6 two person teams, and they said they got 4 out, but two were left, one of which she waws on. And then they are brining back survivors, and there are like 5 people coming back, and then 3 more, including her, and 8 people didn't make it. So there was some kind of bit with the people I didn't follow, or it could have just been a continuity error, I don't know. So I'm in even a worse mood. And then Nella and the Captain are talking about how he couldn't put her at risk again, she she has to transfer. WTF? They can't work it out? Part of the deal with Star Trek is that they've worked through all the little psychological problems and don't have hang ups anymore. So the whole thing violates the ideals of Star Trek universe. It's like when in the last Star Wars movie, or episode 3 or whatver you want to call it, the Jedi start killing people. That's just wrong. It bugs me. And i'm just not in the mood for it. And there was this little bit in the discussion where Picard suggests that they could still get together sometimes even when they are apart. What's this? Picard being clingy? I guess they knew that it wasn't really going to happen and Daren seems to treat it like what it was, which was freaking lame. She walks away with this sort of disappointed look. But I didn't like her, anyway.
Somewhere in there, I watched the Star Trek:TNG episode, "Ship in a Bottle". It's the one where they have professor Moriarty come back, and he's pissed that they haven't yet found a way to bring him into the real world, and he uses a trick to make it seem like he has gotten into the real world. The trick is to alter the holodeck so that when the captain and Data and Barkley try to go back into the real ship, they go into a simulated ship. And somewhere in there, the captain gives away his command codes, so Moriarty takes over the real ship with those. And then Moriarty has this girlfriend and tries to get them to bring her into the real world too, thinking that maybe that solution used by the trapped folks will work for the real ship. And then the captain fools Moriarty by having the fake holodeck on the fake ship simulate another fake ship and brings Moriarty and his girlfriend out into it. And then they have that program just running on a little computer--no longer even a holodeck just a simulation on a computer. The thing that seemed to make it worth mentioning, was that at the end, the captain says that it's possible that reality could just be a simulation like that. I think that idea has been used in different places. Not too long ago, I saw someone who said that it is more likely that this reality is a simulation than a real thing, just based on the possibility that once life and technology develops, there will just be a lot of simulations that get run, which will outnumber real realities. One time I told someone that things seemed to make more sense than they should. If that isn't just a psychological thing, then that would be consistent with a simulation, though probably at the time I was thinking some other form of created universe. I saw Dennett argue against a simulation, talking about the computational explosion involved with it. In immersive video games, it's always very restricted and limited where you can go. It's too hard to just be open ended. That was a bit before some of the things with bigger maps, so I don't know if it's still that convincing.
I finished the book of Sudoku puzzles. Kind of took it easy at the end so it took a little longer, but the puzzles weren't very hard. Even the highest level in this book didn't ever require me to write down the possible answers. Just glad to have it done. Don't know what I'm going to do next.
Happy May Day! Happy Kalends of May!
Been in an angry mood lately. Didn't think it would, but even seeing Melissa didn't help. I think it probably not so great that Josh was there and they were kissing quite a bit. But I was expecting that it wouldn't make much difference anyway. I had said last week that I would come out. This week she didn't ask, and I didn't say. So maybe it'll be a chance for a break. I also haven't been doing my forms so much, taking it easy on the arm, so that might have had an effect on my mood. Whatever. Anger happens sometimes.
I believe the guy in the linguistics lectures said "text is not language". I think that's deep and important. So much of AI seems to assume that it is.
At the tai chi day thing, Liz was demonstrating some push hands with Michael Coplon. He kind of lectured a bit on the concepts of Tai Chi. Press, rollback, and I forget what. I wasn't watching too close because the other were wanting to practice then. I like Liz, and she always kind of opens up when talking to me, though that probably isn't me. But she seems to feel comfortable with me, which is nice. And she looked extra cute in her little pink tank top. She doesn't do the form. They do some kind of wild sparring. One of the people from the tai chi class said they thought Michael was terrible. I'm not really sure what the issue was, though.
Happy World Tai Chi and Qigong Day!
La muerte peluda!
I was part of a presentation at U of M. We did our Bagua tournament form, synchronized between the four of us. I think it looked pretty good. It may not have actually been our best. I personally think I lost the synchrony of the steps, and it seemed like I noticed David doing the kick at a different time. But it was still pretty good.
Disturbing. I've been watching the simpons dvds in order, and i just finished the third season, and wanted to put in the start of the fourth, but i can't find it. grr. i hate when that happens. i think i've looked in all the places i keep dvds. it may have fallen somewhere. or maybe somebody took it. but i don't have it. so i'm annoyed.
well, now i'm on puzzle 134. again, a few were already done, but that's pretty far along. i really need to do other things.
I'm watching the evil slut bitch episode of Star Trek TNG. There's this girl, magically empathic sex slut. Goes after the capitain. Some kind of bonding or something. OK, if you haven't seen it, there's supposed to be some kind of thing where they get imprinting on someone, and she has this arranged marriage with a guy, so she is supposed to imprint on him. But she says she imprinted on Picard first. It's just a story, but I don't believe it. I think it's more likely that she's just telling a story because Picard is into that pining romantic crap. He's got that thing with Mama Michelle.
Felt like doing a bunch in this other book of sudoku. at least a dozen were already done, but i got to 103, so now I'm more than half through it. I guess I should slow it down. do something else.
the arm is getting a little better. hopefully kung fu didnt aggravate it too much. i was too weak on the staff form, so Lao Shr told me not to do it. Did the broadword and it went pretty well. I don't have to use the other arm for it. I only used the wooden one, just to be safe. I'm using ice now, which I didn't do to start off, and it really seems to help.
well that sucks. Using the wrist-weights doing th e bagua has messed up the muscles in my left arm. really sore, and trouble when it's in a particular position. in particular, I can't hold it over the keyboard to touch type. at least right now. it varies. i went to bagua and was able to do stuff. had a riger balm patch and some tylenol and had done some massage stuff. pressing down on painful spots like i saw in the book _pain erasure_ it has worked for me in the past. worked to some extent. not too well, i guess. but i dont know. i'm a little afraid that pressing on it might be hurting it a bit. and i dont how long this pain will last. That's distressing. I've got the demostration on Saturday. I kind of faked it a bit yesterday, and i should be able to do at least that well, i would guess. but it's not feeling as good as yesterday, so i dont know. kind of stiffening up. it wasnt hurting to just been it straight up, but now it is. it had been more a thing of twisting it inward. just not fun.
Man, that was rough. I got my arm in a position where it hurt pretty bad, and somehow I couldn't adjust it to be better until the pain got so bad I felt sick. Nauseated, and maybe the blood drained away from my head, or to it, however that works. and i broke out into a sweat. had to kind of sit for a bit, but it did pass, and i could rest my arm on the counter and it was alright. I'm not sure what you call that. maybe it was shock. I kind of felt faint. It felt like the muscle must gave been pulled, though i'm not really positive what it is. and i think it must have been the tylenol that helped. it seems to make it better for a bit, but it had worn off.
I got a pork butt roast. I was like 6 bucks for 6 pounds of meat. Very fatty though. I'm a bit stuffed. i felt like something hearty while I try to get better. maybe a cup of grease cooked out. still plenty more where that came from. decadent, perhaps.
i'm just sitting here watching star trek tng season 5. there was one episode that just seemed terrible. maybe i was in a bad mood. the "science" just seemed so stupid. "the masterpiece society". maybe they're all like that, but mostly i've been better at suspending disbelief.
finished the book with 240 sudoku puzzles. pretty rough at the end, but the third to the last i got without writing down the possibles. mostly i had to do that and guess, though. nice to be done with that. i've got a much easier book. maybe i'll work on that. it's on 60 out of 201, but they are a lot easier. i really should do other stuff, though.
Finally got to the end of _Art of Seduction_. I've been working on it fairly slowly for months, at least half a year. And I guess my conclusion is that I'm just not interested. Too much work, and it's about pretending to do stuff, and just kind of sounds unpleasant to do. I suppose my bias is a bit intpish, where lying about stuff and that sort of fakery just seems repulsive. It treats it all like a game, and I just don't think I'd like that. One thing in particular about the book was that a lot of the examples, and the thing was almost all about the little example stories, were just fiction, and stuff happened that just didn't seem very believable. Somebody will take these big chances on things, and they work out great. Like in a book. It doesn't seem like a solid basis to talk about something. And I suppose a lot of that stuff might work out sometimes, if you're lucky. Maybe I'll look at it again, but like I said, it just didn't sound very fun to me. There was one little bit at the end--it said if two people get together from mutual attraction, it isn't seduction. Something about that's a different thing, so that stuff didn't apply. Well great.
It takes me a bit to recover emotionally, but I think I'm doing ok this evening.
I got through the puzzles with the third of four levels of difficulty. There were forty of them. The difficulty was a little variable. The third to last I got without writing out all the possibles, but mostly I had to guess a bit. Then I did the first at the hardest level of difficulty. Ouch. I could hardly even guess any before I had to write out all the possibles, then there were bunches of combinations. only a few had been narrowed down to two possibilities. By guessing among those, I was able to at least narrow down some that led to a contradiction--it was not enough to get to the final solution like in the others, but I was just able to make some progress. I guess I was lucky with that. I don't know how the rest of these are going to go, but it looks tough.
I've started using wrist weights in doing the Bagua. That seems to be increasing my power. And I'm getting pretty strong with the big broadsword. I hope it's not just becoming external power, though. It must require some power just to lift it and move it, but I'm sure the idea is that you use the momentum of the sword to move it around, and to a large extent you are just guiding it.
Then again, I could be getting better. I just solved the third puzzle from the hardest set without writing down the possibles. So that's 17 more and I'll be done with this book.
I've generally had trouble looking for jobs in the past. It's hard to go out and look when you don't even really want what your looking for. And the general business application programming I've done hasn't especially been all that rewarding. It's paid pretty well, I suppose, but that in itself hasn't been super motivating.
So Doug has an office with a door at one of the places he consults at. He shares the office with someone else, but still. I've never had a door at any of the places I've ever work. And yet Doug doesn't like going there. Seems a little silly. Maybe I should try to have a place with a door. Probably if I were to work as an actual engineer, I might have a door. Little computer peons don't get doors, I guess.
I hope I don't pick up saying "so" a lot. I'm watching the Stanford lecture on mahine learning and the guy says "so" a lot. I like to follow that with singing "a needle pulling thread" whenever I see someone doing that in real life. Just to point out the silliness of it. Not a terrible habit, I suppose. It's better than "um". But it's not as good as keeping your freaking noise hole shut until you have something say. Anyway, in this lecture, he talked about distinguishing benign cancers from malignant cancers. No. You can have benign _tumors_ but not benign cancers. Nobody called him on it. I guess that's fair. At least be a little respectful. But a little later, he messed up Bayes theorem. He wrote basically P(y|x)=P(x|y)*P(x)/P(x). No, that ain't right. Like that, the P(x)'s cancel. Obviosly wrong. The thing was, I couldn't remember exactly what the right thing was--Bayes is a little tricky. It should have been P(x)/P(y) or P(y)/P(x). I always forget. I thing it's P(y) on top. But he was sitting in a room full of Stanford students, and nobody called him out and fixed it, or at least said it was wrong or something. I think he keeps the lecture notes on line, so it's probably right there. Maybe nobody was really paying attention. The mistake was bad enough--and it's easy to make that kind of mistake. But somebody needed to say something. I got in a bad move from the cancer thing, but this just really pissed me off.
One thing I'm thinking of that should be the right way to be the best possible student. One thing I tried to do in classes was to take pretty heavy notes, and then go back and rewrite them to review and expand. I sort of tried to almost do it like dictation. But really, I should just video lectures, and then go back and transcribe stuff. I think the digital camera could probably do an hour of video pretty easily. I forget. But that would probably be the best way to study. I think they say 2-3 hours outside for each hour in class. That would be about right. But in there, you are supposed to be reading the textbook. I guess the most of the learning is supposed to be from that. So there would need to be that, too. And working problems is very important. I didn't do enough of that in college. This professor does a lot of proofs, and going through those proofs, and being able to do them on your own is another important thing to be able to do. For dictation, they have those little foot switch things. If I do that, something like one of those would be good.
Happy Tax Day!
Emotional change is difficult. The changes have to happen at the preconscious level. That is, we have to change how our reactions work even before we are aware of them. So it takes a kind of retraining that at the minimum will take time, and in general will take a sustained effort where we aren't even going to be able to see our changes.
Happy Good Saturday!
I'm not so good at telling if girls like me, and I'm not so sure that isn't a common problem. I also suspect that girls have some natural tendency to be a little mysterious about it, at least compared to the way guys are completely obvious. And there are subtle things about that. It draws people in if they seem uninterested.
Happy Good Friday!
It looks like David at Bardog also knows Clare.
I just watched a fourth season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Wounded". Some captain kills some Cardassians. It has a scene I had been thinking of where Chief O'Brien say he hates what he became because of them. Kind of sad and grim.
I gets it's emotionally rough what I keep doing to myself. She got a little bit sick. She was in the bathroom for a bit, and said that it had not been good. And that she needed to get insurance. She probably drank a little too much on an empty stomach. Or something. There were lots of cute girls around. Andrea told me to talk to her friend Ellie and we were sitting next to each other. Not really much to talk about. She has a brother named Andrew Edgar, whatever it was. Mann, maybe. She was a tiger, got a BBA in 2005. And then, there was some guy, didn't catch his name, who was like a marketing manager for the tigers. She put her phone number into his phone, and really glommed onto him. Andrea took my chair when I got up, and I was going to let her have it, but she gave it back to me. I might have been missing some of the forces involved in that, though. There was a guy Brandon, a med student, that Andrea was talking to. It was his Birthday. And she got him talking with Nick, which was someone she also liked. She admitted to me that she was bad. There was a guy who seemed to give me the right on fist or whatever. That got me thinking of a question, and I asked it of Andrea-- Where does a fist go when you open your hand? i remember she had said she liked intellectual types. But she didn't feel like a trick question in her condition. I didn't really go into what was the context to what the question involved. So I certainly messed that up. But we didn't really have a connection. i don't know what it is, but sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't. It can be handled better. Anyway, the context was in the most recent teaching company lecture on philosophy of mind (there was an older one by Searle). It was about a philosophy that has gotten more popular of functionalism. The deeper question involved here is what is the relationship of the mind to the brain. A person might say that the mind is the brain, but that's probably not quite right. You would like to say that the fist is the same as the hand. But when you open the hand, it isn't a fist any more. And it would be tricky and maybe not quite right to say that the fist is something the hand does. Probably something more like we call a hand a fist when it is doing something-- when it's closed. So maybe it could be that we call the brain a mind when it is working in a certain way. That leads to the question of whether a computer could do something like that, could work in the same way that we are talking about.
I feel pitiful. I want to go see her. I didn't send any advance notice, though. And I have to get up in the morning, so I've decided against it. Probably some of it is just loneliness. And when she has problems, I guess I worry. Girls in distress I guess we can be wired to want to help.
I suck. But that may be more of a mood thing.
I had this thing where I had a little vision issue. I guess it was kind of an aura like the start of a migraine. And I hadn't eaten much, so I think it was that, but I also had had a pretty tiring bit of a workout. I did the sword form a couple of times, and the second time, I was a bit exhausted and had some trouble holding it up as much as I should have. So maybe some lactic acid thrown in. But that was significantly before the vision thing. Maybe an hour. I don't remember it happening more recently, though it might have, but I remember this happening as a kid after a fairly brutal gym class, with maybe running three miles or something. So maybe it is more of an exercise thing. It might also involve sleeping too much. Seems like that used to give me headaches, and I've been doing that more lately. I don't think I ever noticed a connection with sleep and the migraine vision problem, though.
I get a little more about parsing and compiler compilers. Something I don't think I had seen before is how an LR parser uses a stack plus a state machine or DFA (deterministic finite-state automaton) to do the parsing. I may have heard someone mention it, but I didn't get it. I knew or had seen that DFA's were too week to handle parsing, because with a fixed state, they can't handle things like nested parenthesis. I saw that in a computer sciency textbook, I forget, but I didn't get all the way through that one. Maybe I should dig it up and finish it. It was for one of the more intro CS classes. I wonder what else it had in it. The DFA's are a classic way of modelling a simple class of programs, but they are only equivalent to regular expressions--like I said, they can't handle nested things. One thing about human grammar is that we handle all sorts of nested grammatical thingies. I'm not sure that we use a general stack, though. We can keep track of several levels, but we have quite a bit of a limit as to how deep we can get before we lose track. Working memory or something, so five or seven might be about it. And that's a bit interesting because computers with their super memory can and do handle a much greater amount of levels. If they were to be big language users, they could quickly start talking in ways people would have no way of understand, just because of this simple matter of being able to handle greater nesting depth.
I was feeling in a better mood there for a little bit. I think it has a lot to do with the old blood sugar level or something. That's something I've thought in the past, anyway. It doesn't really seem to make so much logical sense, the way it fluctuates.
I typed this out on this page from Stanford Engineering Aske The Expert but then I didn't dubmit because I didn't feel like being the first person to comment. The page was linked to on the Si Valley AI meetup group: When I think about the question of whether computers can think and feel, I often get back to the question of whether people really would want them to do that. Human thinking and feeling is not reliable in the way we expect computers to be. It doesn't always go exactly the way you expect or want. For people, that can mean that some folks will come up with great new ideas, but it necessarily also means that a lot of people will just get things wrong. Society as a whole searches through the space of ideas. But so far, we haven't really wanted computers to share in that search. We have made them to be very faithful and reliable servants, and we have used a lot of artful technique to get them to be like that. Not having feelings has more than anything else just been a desired goal, not a lack because of some weakness in their substrate. There might be some who claim to be working to get computers to be more, but they are held up by all the work done to make them behave otherwise.
Wow, this video was awesome. A couple of chicks fighting with light-sabers over a guy. OK, it's a commercial for SABER, whatever that is. But the blonde girl, Clare Grant, is from Memphis. I'm trying to find out a bit more, but not getting too much. She went to U of M. It looks like she must have gone to White Station, but I don't know for sure. Playboy Babe of the month November 2006. Not naked though. She lives in L.A. now, but the big question is if she ever gets back to Memphis and if I know anyone who knows her. She's done some kind of Indie stuff in Memphis and has been in some MTV something or other about the Memphis music scene. She's also into sci fi, so I kind of wonder if she's been to MidSoouthCon. I missed it this year though. It was a week earlier than I was thinking so when I checked for it, it was already over.
Well there you go. Doug knows Clare. It was Clare Johnson. And she was dating Jason Grant. They broke up, but she is using the name Clare Grant anyway. She did go to White Station. They are actually facebook friends.
Was it cheating? I'm working through a book of Su Doku puzzles, and I'm on a section with the 3rd out of 4 levels of difficulty. I've already had one puzzle where I just couldn't get it with the absolute logic that I know, and I had to use a kind of partial guessing strategy that I have to use sometimes. I had narrowed things down to where a lot of the squares have only two possiblities and I just try one or the other using a mark, a line under or over the choice--under or over lets me try both ways. On this one, there was something that happened after maybe two or three steps that caused a problem, so I knew that that choice was wrong, and I could go on from there. I hate guessing though. I don't really consider that cheating, but I think of it more as a failure. If you're good enough, it seems like you should never have to guess. Then I got to this puzzle and it was a similar deal where I was stuck. But this time I went to a program that handles a lot more strategies and rules than I really get and use. It lets you turn them off, so I can at least check if there is something that I should be able to get and I'm missing. Because I don't always know if I'm just slipping up, or the difficulty is just such that I wouldn't normally be able to get it. And sure enough, with the strategies that I use, I wouldn't have been able to get this one. There are a couple of strategies that I don't really quite get, that I've seen on there before, that I can almost get, but haven't been using (x-wing and y-wing). With those, I would be able to get it. I'm guessing I'm going to end up needing them for a lot of these in this section. I've got thirty something more to go. And then there is even a harder section. So is this cheating? I guess it was more giving up. And I was getting help, hopefully so I can learn something. Sometimes it does happen that you will hit some problem that you just don't have the knowledge to solve. If you keep only to the things you know how to do, you will be stuck and not be able to get it. You can go look for someone with more knowledge, or use trial and error, where you might try something wrong, and then you will have to go back and fix things. That's a pretty general truth. One thing in this problem though is that with the guessing, you don't necessarily learn anything more general that you can use next time. You might only find something that got you through this one. So a lesson to learn might be that getting help is probably a little better. And I say it would be a lesson for me because my personal preference seems to be wanting to do it on my own, even if I don't learn anything. That seemed to me the way that was less like cheating. Something about losing face from going to someone else. The pride thing.
It was something that got me a bit discouraged. I really was kind of useless, and didn't say much. Melissa was talking with a friendly guy who she must have known for a long time. He works at the Rendezvous. I think he must have brought her food on occasion, too. Anyway, she was talking about her fibromyalgia. It helps her to walk. If she sits still, it hurts worse, so it's good if she keeps moving. And she was saying that's probably a problem for people, where they just take something and keep still, and it gets worse and worse. But I ended up not saying so much. she asked me what I was doings this week, and I didn't really have much. She said she could understand not doing much for a bit, but she would have to start doing something. I said I didn't think she knew anything about just not doing anything, but then she did start talking about someone who just got used to not doing anything. Maybe her mom, I forget. But I got the feeling she really didn't sympathize, or didn't like it so much. I doubt anybody really would, though. And right then she was sort of sweeping me out of the place, and I got this extra little sense of distance. I had been thinking I needed to ask if she wanted to talk some time when she was not at work, but I guess it's just as well that I didn't.
Having a bit more trouble getting through the part on parsing. I do kind of get again that there is some mechanical stuff going from a set of production rules for a grammar, like in Backus-Naur form, that describe a language to a parser, but I don't quite see all the pieces like I do now for a lexical analyzer. But I guess it won't take too long.
Hmm. I did one more Su Doku puzzle-- one of this hard set. But it went quick. There is one sneaky rule that is pretty simple though it is actually a bit of an advanced concept, called unique rectangles. It's kind of sneaky in that it isn't so much a logical requirement because it depends on the convention that a puzzle has only one solution. It works by elimating a situation where there might be two possible solutions, which might not really be valid, but it works for the puzzles they usually have. It's kind of iffy, but it can be so easy that I use it a lot.
Hmm. She was shuffling me out, but I had asked for my bill and paid it, and that to her always means wanting to leave. I kind of feel a little bad because last week on my birthday. I had waited around a long time, and she never gave me my bill. And then the last guy other than me was leaving, and went to leave with him, and I hadn't tried to get my bill, like I was taking for granted that Melissa would cover me. She does that a lot. And when I was going, she said she would handle my bill. It didn't hit me right then, but it got to me later that I had kind of been skipping out on it. Or I at least should have asked or something. I really kind of felt bad about it after. And I totally wouldn't be surprised if it had bothered her just a little bit, though she is really always so sweet about things like that. And it couldn't really be about the money, because i always give her a lot more than than, and I bring her Starbucks, and she buys lemonade for me. But it's the consideration, and I don't want to take her for granted. This time, someone had gotten into the lemonade and used 5 of them up. It made her so mad, and she said she was going to text all the girls that work there. Melissa just seems like a classic idealist type, who just gets righteously angry when someone violates her principles. But she's one of the quiet, keep her feelings on the inside types, also. As opposed to the ones that wear their hearts on their sleeves (the EFs), where you can always see what they are feeling. The thinker types don't general have such big emotional reactions, and that stuff doesn't make as much difference, or at least it isn't quite a matter of feelings. They (or maybe I should say we) can be pretty nasty when their principles are violated, but the feelings are really such a big deal and they don't hold onto them or identify with them, or something. It's somehow a different kind of thing, even if it sometimes looks similar. Able to laugh it off, maybe. I don't know. It's not personal, it's business. Something like that.
I made some pork chops a little while ago. They are in the freezer frozen in pairs. I have on occasion just cooked them complete in the microwave, but it hasn't always turn out as good as I might like. So I defrosted them for about a minute in the microwave. And then fried them in a pan. I did learn from _on food and cooking_ that the browning from a pan creates complex molecules that add flavor, and you don't get that in the microwave. So I understand the difference. With chicken, I'm happy enough with just the plain taste. It's roughly equivalent to boiling, and with chicken, that flavor is about right. And a lot of chicekn dishes just use boiled chicken, so I can be happy with just that. With pork, it's just a bit of a loss. Maybe more because there really are any boiled pork dishes that I ever eat. Just about the same with beef, though somehow, I can kind of be happy with microwaved hamburger. And since I like raw beef, that makes a little more sense. I like the pure taste of the meat. I guess there's something different with pork. Anyway, with the pork chops, I used a bit of oil. And the oil has cooled off, but there is still some sitting in the pan. It still has the pork flavor. Yummy. I don't know if I should try doing something with it. Maybe some hash browns or something.
Well, there's another level of failure in solving these Su Doku puzzles. Before this level of difficulty, I've been able to solve I think all of the puzzles without having to write down all the combinations in the squares. At this point I'm finding that I have to use that fairly tedious method. And it's not so fun. So I kind of think of it as a kind of failure. I'll take some time just trying to solve particular squares without doing that. And even after I write them all down, if I get enough solved, I'll erase the notes I have and start with blanks again, though I just did that and had to write corrected possibilities again to get further. And some of the first wait for writing the numbers down is a bit pragmatic, because with too many combinations, it can be a little too difficult to see what needs to be done. And in some sense, doing this mechanical stuff seems a little cheap. Or at least no so fun, even if it works. And, what's a bit tricky, even if that's what is necessary. To feel bad having to do something that has to be done. I guess it's that kind of thing that can make you want to give up and do something else.
I did make some hash browns. They were pretty good, but they messed up the pan enough that the work cleaning it was enough that I probably won't feel like doing that again so soon. It's that kind of thing that makes me use the microwave more. Having to clean up pans. So I also tried making a hamburger patty. I defrosted it a little in the microwave, and unfortunately, it got cooked a little, so not a good start. And I guess I didn't really get the pan hot enough. It's teflon, so you're not supposed to really get it too hot. But it's very old and mostly the teflon is gone, so that's why the hash browns were hard to clean off. Probably just the wrong pan to use. Anyway, since it wasn't really hot enough, I didn't get enough browning, and really the taste was not any better than just doing it all in the microwave. What I did different with the pork chop was to cook it long enouogh to sort of brown, but with this thing hamburger patty, I didn't want to way overcook it. Anyway, it wasn't terrible, but using the pan didn't really do anything. Mistakes are good to learn from, though, just as must as successes.
Well, that entirely sucked. I got a puzzle that I got stuck on, and I tried it with that solver program. And it could not be solved with the strategies I know or the two i'm trying to learn (x-wing and y-wing). I tried adding one more strategy that I can almost get, and it worked with that. And then I tried to follow what that strategy was doing (simple coloring) and looking into it, it is basically equivalent to the little guessing from two choice with marking that I use some time. So for this one, I couldn't really do better than that guessing. I suppose I need to look through the other strategies, but it looks like I might have to conclude that there are just some puzzles where I just have to use a guessing strategy. That seems to just finally change things.
But wow. I investigated the other strategies. There was a nifty fairly simple one that I could have applied. It was another tricky one, a uniqueness one. They are calling it BUG--bivalue universal grave. It's a pattern where there are just some possibilities and you can eliminate some possibilities that would make for multiple solutions. I'm not sure if I can quite get it, but it might be a trick to learn.
Well. that was an interesting experience. I read the chapter in the java compiler book about lexical analysis. It had some computer sciencey stuff like finite state automata, but I had seen that before. But this time, it went some where that made sense. I guess it makes some sense for a single regular expression, or a computer program in general, but it made extras sense for a lexical analyzer, which has the bigger task of taking a possibly long list of regular expressions and having a program to analyze some stream of characters with them. I also get why there is an automatic program lex to create a lexical analyzer, because it is actually a fairly mechanical process to create a program to do the lexical analysis. At least an efficient one. OK, a lexical analyzer takes a stream of characters and breaks it up into tokens, which are like distinct words in a computer language. One thing you don't want to do is to run through every regular expression in your list for the beginning of the list each time. That's way too much work. You need to do some analysis on your initial list of regular expressions so it's more quick and parallel. It also makes me wonder about the related problem in speech recognition of breaking up a sound stream into words. That can't be an easy problem. We use a lot of parallelism, and knowledge about words, and it takes a long time to get, too. Anyway, I'm not sure I could write a lexical analyzer generator myself off the top of my head, as I didn't quite absorb the algorithm, but I get the idea, and I at least see what they do.
Happy April Fool's Day!
I finished _Meditations on Violence_ by Sgt. Rory Miller. It got great ratings on Amazon. A lot of must reads. I guess. Dude gets in a lot of fights. What does he say? Hmm. You will freeze in a fight, so try to learn to get out of it. Develop a reflex reaction that might kick in before you freeze. There are several levels of opportunities to avoid a fight. Don't be in the wrong place, notice and avoid someone's intent to attack, his opportunity, and at last resort, the actual movement. He talks about some flaws in traditional training. Real fights are very complicated, brutal, and fast. There are different types of bad guys, predators and hustlers. Some fights are about status, but some are about predators trying to get stuff from you, and they don't care. Adrenaline will mess you up. I don't know. I suppose I haven't gotten everything out of it, yet.
I finally finished Misnky's book, the _Emotion Machine_. In some sense. I didn't read it very well. So many starts and stops and here and theres that I probably didn't get a coherent picture of it, and I didn't get too much out of it. Of course, his stuff tends to be just a bunch of ideas from him. I'm not sure it's all that coherent on its own. I never did get through _Society of Mind_ which seemed to be the same deal. A lot of different ideas, and not so much a solid book. Maybe I should look at it again in a way more about extracting the main content. This was more powering through to at least look at all the words. I suppose I'm not that good a reader, if I don't adjust myself like that. I sure don't read as fast as some people say they do. But then, the people that talk about reading fast never seem to me all that bright, so I don't know if these people are really getting the things they read. Of course, that may just be me.
So I need to admit to myself that there are a couple of things that I want to do first, and I'm just not going to seriously look for a job until I do them. Which is somewhat sad, I guess. But they are things I want to do to see if I can handle them and like them well enough to try and look for real work doing them. So I should admit it, and then make a real effort to get them done. I tend to be bad about keeping things open and just playing without getting them done. So I need to have things where I can get to a definite finish point. Which is to say, my general AI project that I've been wanting to work on cannot be one of these do first projects, though maybe I can be working on it in addition to looking for a job after I have done my initial starting up projects. And just studying compilers is too vague. I can try to get through the dragon book, or the java compilers book. Those are kind of long and slow, so maybe I should skip that. Then again, I really think I need to learn something about compilers. A definite task relating to that would be to write a compiler, which is the standard assignment for a compiler class. There is a bunch of homework assignments I needed to do for computer vision, but I need an absolute list if I'm going to do something regarding that. That's the way the class worked, and now I'm seeing how good that was. I can just have a vague thing of doing some computer vision stuff, though I do want to do something. The two things I am definite on is that I need to get Copycat working in clojure, and I need to build a robot, thought I'm just realizing that is too vague, again. I need to have a plan to build a robot with specific software to do some specific task. Well, at least it's good to be coming up with a plan. Thinking about robots just now, I realize that the most important thing is to be able to grab things. People now often think about wheeling around, but the grabbing is the most essential. Some sort of movement surely is needed, and I need to decide how general I want to be with that. In the robotics class, I did learn a lot about robotics motion. But grabbing specifically is a complicated action involving a lot more than just motion. Anyway, I'll think about it. And I need to write something for the iPhone, but I need something specific.
The term Gladwell used for what Chris Langan lacks is "practical intelligence" so I need to look into that.
David at Bardog (seems like he said his family name is Sharp) was expressing admiration for Ayn Rand. Something about the best philosopher ever, or something. I said I thought it was oversimplified and suggests a certainty that isn't really there, and that appeals to people. But it's been a long time since I looked at anything from her, so I don't remember much, really. Largely that I had a negative reaction, and maybe from that initial bias, I've had negative reactions to everyone who seems to like her stuff. But at least I should try looking at what it's supposed to be, again. It seems like a big libertarian thing. I don't know if people realize that Alan Greenspan, the guy who probably more than anyone else put libertarian ideas into practice, finally had to admit he was wrong about all that. And now we have a major depression to demonstrate how bad those ideas were. Of course, people are really tied to their beliefs. Especially simpleminded ones like these. That's just the nature of having simpleminded ideas.
Looking over the wikipedia for Rand, I saw the term _magnum opus_. I've talked about how masterpiece didn't orginally mean something that extends a domain--it is a work that shows domain mastery in a guilded craft, but should not show people up. But I didn't think of the term _magnum opus_. That translates as "great work". I'm gathering that it has a bit of the connotation of being large--magnum kind of means great as in big. Also, it doesn't necessarily mean successful. It is kind of an alchemical term for actually turning base metals into gold, or making a philosophers stone. So it doesn't even really seem to be a particularly real thing. It kind of gets used for composers, like for an opera or something big. I don't know if is a better word for what people want to say when they sue the word "masterpiece" these days, but it is at least a candidate to consider.
I got my Spring _AI magazine_. Looking through it, I saw the article by the AAAI's new president. He's kind of an AI robotics guy, into the soccer robocup as a big general AI problem. And he's saying that instelligence is largely a matter of constraint satisfaction. I can go with that. Seems like the hardest part, though, is being able to learn what the constraints are in some situation or problem. So you in their kind of system, you get to program in the constraints, i guess. Soccer is a really tough sort of problem. Just being able to get to the ball and kick it is an issue. And with these trash can robots that they tend to use, it's more a matter of bumping it than getting your foot lined up to kick the ball. Still, they do have some kind of humanoid robot that is supposed to be a standard platform for the robocup. They used to use aibo, which was a little dog robot, which also could get by with just bumping the ball. They've got an ad for it in the cover--NAO ataldebaran-robotics. I don't know how it's going to go with my copycat thing. I also have that ARM robotics computer (qwerk), and I need to make a robot from it.
And I said constraint satisfaction. A big example that he used other than soccer was Su Doku. It's a good example of logic constraints.
Wow, that sucked. I finally got around to trying to do some stuff. I grabbed the email I wrote in January to the INTP list about the stuff I wanted to do. One of the things was get Copycat running in Clojure. So I fired up clojure and got started a bit. And the first thing I'm seeing is how so many things are just renamed in clojure. So it looks like it's going to be a pain. But at least I did something, got frustrated and quit pretty quick, but I wasn't really trying to really get started, just to look at it real quick. The list also had some books I was working on. I finally finished _Bonk_ a few days ago. I've got a hundred pages left in _Emotion Machine_ so maybe I will be able to finish it. I decided not to try to read the book _Charlatan_ for Aimee's thing on Thursday. I only do a limited amount of reading, and I've got so many things sitting around.
I saw something icky in Copycat. It can only take one letter change at a time. so it has some serious limits.
I finished another book, _Outliers_ by Malcolm Gladwell. It had a bunch of interesting stuff. It takes 10,000 hours to be an expert. In Canadian hockey, where kids in little league have an age cut off in January, that little advantage in the beginning means that most of the big players are born early in the year, largely January. There are also good years to be born that give you adavanatages in different fields. around 1955 for computer entrepeneurs. And plane accidents are more likely when the pilot is flying, because the 2nd in command will be on the radio, and won't be as assertive when talking, at least that was an issue for Korean airlines. And there was a big thing about entitlement that rich kids get, that poor kids don't, and social habits that they develop from that. That was an issue that I think I have. Not being very assertive is kind of part of the idea. But their big example was Chris Langan, who has a high IQ, but never could manage issues in college, and really it seems like life in general.
Suddenly in kind of an angry mood. It's passing a bit, though. I wanted to go out and see the new Target near hear, but I checked the hours and it was about to close. Feel the silliness of the whole M thing. Gained a couple pounds. A little frustrated, I guess.
One of the most interesting notions I got from the conference was from one of the German presenters. I should look up which paper was involved. But anyway, his system used, great now I son't remember the term. It was anti-resolution or anti-reduction. But it was a procedure in symbolic logic that combined two different frames in something like analogy. You find correspondences between two descriptions. I think the example was the Bohr model of the atom where the nucleus is the sun and the electrons are planets. The thing of it is that the correspondences could be a lot of different things, and the hard part is finding and keeping track of the ones that work fairly well. One issue, of course, is that when you have a lot of frames like in a system with lots of knowledge, it is an explosion of possibilities, so it is difficult to work with. But that's an inherent issue with analogy. The antireduction or antiresolution, or whatever it was, at least takes it into the realm of a more mechanical process, like a resolution theorem prover, with variable binding and such. It is a big search problem, but at least I can see it in terms that make sense in coding, so I have somewhere to go with it.
Happy First Day of Spring! Happy Spring Equinox!
Back in Memphis. The conference was pretty good. A lot of the systems had the source available so there is a lot to look at. But some from last year weren't there. Nothing from Stan Franklin. There was a guy from IBM that was missed. Then I stayed for a while in Baltimore. That was pretty nice. One of the things I wanted to do was to see how well I could handle the drive. It was fine. I listened to some classes on DVD which gave me something to do, and otherwise listened to music. So it went fine. The drive back was 900 miles, for 14 hours. Next year the conference is in Lugano, Switzerland. I'm not sure if I will go.
Happy Friday the Thirteenth!
I'm sitting in my hotel room (502) at the Crown Plaza at the agi-09 conference. The drive was arduous. Google said 13.5 hours, and I thought I was going to do better than that, but it ended up taking 14. and then I got lost a bit in Arlington. End up in the Pentagon parking lot, though my destination was really only a couple of miles away. Too many freeways with no place to stop. Then a big parking lot. So got in about two. Had trouble finding this little place I wanted to get to. The money is dwindling away. But I think I have about enough. But was very uncomfortable on Friday. didn't eat till dinner, except maybe an egg and honey bun. And sleepy. Slept a long time at night (10 hours) but then decided to sleep through one of the talks for a couple of more hours. Got a footlong from Subway, and that should be food for me today. Much happier with some food.
One thing was kind of neat, though, driving around-- The Washington monumet really stands out. Especially at night because it has a big red light sitting up at the top.
Happy Square Root Day!
I was sitting on union at third, waiting to turn right at the red light. there is a sign for no right on red. It was late at night, and pretty much no traffic, but still. There was a cab behind me and he flicked his lights and honked, then pull out into the other lane and turned around me. Normally around here there is right on red, but for some reason right there they had that. Kind of irritating. And the light changed as he was turning, so we ended up going at the same time, anyway. But I'm sure he thought I was the one being irritating. And he was working for a living, which is a little different. And maybe he didn't see the sign. I actually was already past it, so I couldn't see it from where I was, but I had seen it before.
Seems like a lot of little things lately have got me my frustration tolerance a little lower. There was also a big truck. The road was about to go to one lane, with the right and left lanes were turn only, but this big truck--I mention it because I find big trucks just scream selfishness, pulls up along the empty right lane. And then goes straight anyway, not in front of everybody--there were about 5 or six cars, and he got in maybe second or thrid, but some illegal crap. I had pulled over to the middle lane like I should have. So when he was getting through, I honked my horn. I feel like it would be good to honk when I see people breaking the law, just so people know that not everyone thinks it's ok. I hope I didn't confuse the guy in front of me, though.
Finally got a mac mini. I had a bit of trouble with the dvi video cable on the monitor I was using. didn't quite fit, so I had to cut off some plastic. And I had all kind of trouble just doing that. To get the stand off, I had to take out 4 screws. Then I tried using a dremel tool I never used before, and had trouble with that. The cutting wheel didn't want to unscrew. So I gave up for a bit, and used the vga cord with the adapter just to get the computer on, and then came back and did the dvi thing. Too much frustration. And then the dremel cutting wheel wasn't even really doing a good job, so I just used wirecutters. Should have gone to that first, and I would have been done easily. Live and learn. I guess I do get frustrated a little too easily for all the little fixit projects and building things that I might like to do. Oh well. I'm not sure how I manage computer stuff. Just used to it, I guess.
Dang, so my Dell laptop just bluescreened. I didn't really see when, I just had it folded down, and saw it when I came back to it. It may have tried shutting itself off in there. I had to update the video driver to something that seems a little iffy, so maybe that was it. But it's irritating. I have rearranged stuff. I had big CRT monitoring that I was keeping on my nightstand, but I put that upstairs and now have a big flatscreen from work sitting there. But now I have space to just keep a laptop sitting there, so now I'm doing that. And I'm noticing that this laptop has a little whispery fan, and occasionally do kind of a puff venting, so it isn't ultimately quiet. With my newly recognized auditory preference, I see how that's a bigger deal to me. The mini mac is very quiet, and that just seems so nice. I haven't turned on my desktop since the rearrangement. And I may move the mac in here. We'll see. It works pretty well on the desk in there.
I never really liked doing touristy things. But now I'm thinking maybe it's more of a visual thing. I just doing get so much at looking at all the "pretty" sights. Or having memories of the sights.
I noticed that the mac comes with some sort of music software. I need to try it out. And I think if I want to really look into music again, I need to get a proper midi keyboard and start input stuff to midi and putting it here. It's been something I've been wanting to do for years now. I saw a keyboard thing in the apple store. I see there are keyboard things for mac. One other thing musical thing recently at the Java meeting was for the iPhone, maybe it was the ocarina, kind of a flute like thing. but they had online stuff so you could listen to people around the world. Sounds like there really should be some other types of jamming apps.
also, since I'm auditory, I think that talking to the computer is the best way to deal with it. That's why I'm interested in the speech rec stuff. But most people are visual, so that isn't the most common thing, and most computer stuff is done by visual things like screens and mice. Keyboards are sort of visual, I guess, in the sense that displaying text is visual amd their direct effect is to do that. phone are a natural auditor or speech input. the phones now do have screens with fair size, though they are pretty small. computer screens use a lot of visual area because they are up close. the phone screen takes up the kind of visual area like a tv screen off in the distance. That's a qualitatively different kind of thing. A computer screen is comparable to a book or magazine page. A TV screen makes up for things by having a lot of motion and action, which lets you get a lot of information without taking a lot of the visual field. So if you want to do visual things on a phone, you need to think TV and not book magazine, or computer screen. But again, a phone is much more naturally auditory.
I barely talked to Melissa at all. But I do have the feeling that I really just liked being around. It was really a crazy night for her, and she was kind of whining to me about the problems she was having. I guess I liked being there for her to talk to. But I didn't really have anything to say.
Happy March! Happy Kalends!
Argh. So many people over here. I really would rather have been by myself. Both parents. My mom got Mike to come over and do plumbing. And he has the two kids. And they want to play with my stuff, so I had to spend time setting things up. And then they wanted both my laptops, so I ended up without for a bit. And Tristan asked me if he could use the one in my room, and I said no, but they used it anyway. Two kids sitting in my room. Not real happy with that. They played with the light sabers a bit. And then they were playing with the laptops next to each other, and they looked at a couple of sites about information about sex. Like I didn't notice then that they had pointed the screen away and were being a bit hush, and like I wouldn't check the history. I don't think I saw any porn sites, other than the ones I had gone to. Maybe they aren't that brave. They actually seemed a bit timid. I was checking my emails when they came. Like 200 had stacked up from the MetaC group. Seems like they are a bit out of hand. And I wasn't paying too much attention, and they were kind of wispering. I think they wanted to ask me about using my Wii or something, but they never did. They were playing with it, and putting stuff in. They were searching channels on the TV. They asked my dad something about which channel and he said 3 or 4. Clueless. This TV has a special button on the remote you have to use. You can't get to it from the buttons on the TV. But did they ask me? No. To chicken. Probably just as well. Eventually I asked if they were trying to get the Wii working. I think it would have been good if they could have figured it out by themselves. But, um, no. And I have a 11 year old laptop upstairs that I try to get set up for them with some old games on Mame. I couldn't remember the keys to use to play. And they weren't that interested. Turns out there are all sorts of free online games, and they needed a real computer with a browser and internet. Well la-di-da. But on the old laptop, Terrin was playing a bit, and asked if I used it, and I said no, and he asked if he could have it. Hmm. well, I suppose it makes sense that if I'm not using it, he could have it. But I really was leaving it there for guests. And I don't feel like rewarding greedy little punks because they have come across some slick ploy and lost the inhibitions from using it. Nice trick, kid. Good luck with that. He did the same thing with a mouse I didn't even know I had. I think my brother left it. I guess I was a bit surprised bit the boldness of it. Maybe I should think of a response. Maybe, "make me an offer?" Maybe I shouldn't say I'm not using things. I did give them an extra copy of _Kung Fu Panda_ I had sitting around. One thing I seemed to notice from Terrin. He seemed really emotionally needy. He kept asking his little brother to come over and watch what he was doing. Seems like it's usually the younger brother that's the irritating one. But I kind of had the feeling that they are still shaken up by the break up of their parents. And she calls every day, sometimes several times. She called a couple of times just this evening. So I'm guessing maybe a bit of neediness runs in the family. Mike's not like that, of course. He was quite able to cut her off. And I would think that could be a little scary, too. Hmm.
And I think this categorizing of sensory preferences explains something. I don't any pictures here. I haven't even expanded the look here to put pictures here. I'm just not very visual. I don't care about the look. I never really have. Some people do care about looks. But that's just not me. There are fancy blog engines for living in that world. That's just mine. I fell in love with Holly before I had ever seen her. Just reading her words and listening to her on the phone. That was enough. I liked the look, but honestly, it wasn't that important.
Sixty minutes just did a thing on Bernie Madoff and his ponzi scheme. The thing that stood out to me was saying it was an affinity scam, where he conned people like him. The thing is that it's Jewish people. And I imagine that just makes it a bigger story in the news. All those rich Jewish grampas getting wiped out. It's so sad. If you can have sympathy for greedy rich people that don't know anything about finance. Look for a Hollywood movie.
One that about Mike and his kids, they don't eat much. In particular, they didn't seem to eat more than they wanted, like they were stocking up for a famine. That's kind of the way it seems like my dad and me were eating. They ate a big breakfast, and then didn't have lunch, and Mike skipped breakfast, and did have lunch. He skipped breakfast because he was still full from the night before, where he ate maybe two servings of lasagna. I don't really care so much for lasagna, but to eat sociably, I joined him and ate more. But an irritating thing. The kids didn't join us for lunch, but then wanted to take some leftovers along, and then they took a lot more than they would have eaten, and didn't really leave us with enough for a full meal for two. They are all very skinny though, possible maybe a little too skinny. Mike says he doesn't cook, and mostly just eats peanut butter and tuna. Man. I eat too much. They only eat two meals a day. And my parents said they eat three, but I finally had to say I only want to eat two.
And my dad was talking with Mike about fruit trees. Mike is going to grow a couple. My dad was talking about how everything he plants dies. I hope Mike had enough sense to realize that my dad is not the right person to take advice from. But he gives it freely. I felt I needed to keep quiet. But one thing I want to say was that he could take some encouragement that my dad has been able to keep some apple trees alive. Or, probably more accurately, apple trees are able to survive even if someone like my dad plants them. Because he did something incredibly bad for them. Fruit trees need wind, some kind of breeze that will blow off the dew or any water that gets on them. An open field. But my dad put them in the most isolated little gap in the woods, that is absolutely calm. So they always have fungus growing on them. The apples look terrible. But once peeled, they taste okay. Apples--the survivor of the fruit world.
Melissa does Su Doku. She hasn't been able to sleep this week, so she does them. But when I heard that, I think my feelings really kind of changed again. It makes her seem more relatable to me, I guess. I don't know if I had told her about the massage therapy stuff for fibromyalgia stuff before, but I did this time. How there is stuff just to stimulate the parasympathetic system, so she can maybe sleep. And different things she might take. I even said finally that there were things that I didn't feel comfortable talking to her about at work, so I haven't ever, but maybe sometime. Right now I'm kind of thinking it's pretty irrelevant. Maybe I can let go a little more. I didn't give her really much chance to respond as it was just when I was leaving. So now I can spend some more time on Su Doku.
It was 70 degrees a couple of days ago. Today it is snowing. That's just crazy.
Well that's a bummer. I just found that deleting emails on my phone is deleting it off the pop server, too. So someone sent me a 3MB file, which used up the memory on the phone, and I tried deleting a bunch of messages on the phone to free space. I was keeping a month's worth. Now they are gone forever. I have years of stuff saved. But not this stuff any more. Grr. I don't know what all of it was. I hope it wasn't too important.
Today was my last day working for Hilton. We went out to lunch at Dan MscGuinness. Dani put in our order kind of late, so it was a long time getting our food. She felt so sorry about it. I just wanted to give her a hug. I think I did that recently when I made Melissa feel bad about something. I think it's a good way of dealing with something like that. It didn't actually bother me, though I don't know about the others.
Happy Mardi Gras! Happy Fat Tuesday!
So, I'm listening to the commentary for the sixth season Simpsons episode "Bart of Darkness", and I had to pause for a comment. David Mirkin, the show runner, just has a really impressive energy. It just seems nice to listen to someone so up. I guess that's the kind of thing that makes me just listen to the commentaries, more than the show. Bunch of really sharp people.
This dream was semi-lucid. I think I must have realized I was dreaming, because I think I remember there were bits where I would think I would try to explore what would happen. Anyway, it was very vivid. There was one, where I gor to a garage, with several red cars, and I thought how in dreams I could never find my car, so maybe this is the future, and you just take whatver car is available. So I grabbed the red vw bug (actually that's the kind Aimee has) and I was driving through this inside tunnel system with lots of doors. I figure underground. Didn't come up with much. Didn't see any people, But I was thinking about the vividness of fantasy. And how in this dream, my internal dialog to myself was far far clearer and solid than it would be in real life. Sacks confirms that auditory imaginiative vividness can vary. His dad could have a symphony in his head, an internal ipod. He had maybe an internal piano. Seems like something you could have built up and cultivated.
So i powered through to the end of boothman's love book. man. I guess I get the feeling he wrote stories that fit what he thinks than actually had something real he was finding out and telling about. fiction from his brain. he had luck with someone who is opposite from him. he invented or found stories to corroborate, and he's passing the message around, because he is a noisy extrovert and that's what they do. I was thinking I had finally gotten to the point of where he would say what to do in that 90 minutes he was talking about, after 200 pages of not very much. Talk. Great Nick. Thanks a bunch. He did talk about levels of revealing private details at different levels of risk and playfulness. And there was that think with matching and mirroring. He called it synching. Like I said, I thought it was neat when I tried it. But it really sounded like he didn't actually think there was much that was likely to happen in 90 minutes. It was more that once you had found the right person, and continued contact, love was inevitable. And some of that seemed to be more that it would work because you believed it was right, and his deal with "matched opposites" a way of knowing the person was right, was more a thing that would make you be sure about it being the right person. And I was getting the feeling that as an extrovert, to him, external validation is the most important think, so he thinks a supportive, quite person is the right match for him. I'm very doubtful. His assumption is that you fall in love with how the other person makes you feel. That's the extrovert, external validation thing. It really sounds to me like his bias. He seems to argue about how the complementing makes you a better team. I don't know, it sounded nice. Maybe personally, I just don't like people who are different from me, much more so than an extrovert possibly could even imagine. Still, I like Aimee, and we're are opposite in exactly the way he talks about. So I don't know. It was definitely something to think about. But his idea is that I would love someone because they made me feel intelligent. I don't think that has ever happened, but there have been women I have loved because of things about them. Like I said, I think it's this thing he has stuck in his brain.
Also, actually Liz is this type, and I really like her. Something weird about how much I like her, too. And her current husband seems to be more like my type, a kind of quiet computer guy. Hmm.
Dang. So there was a creepy guy, Alan who was pretty drunk, and was asking Melissa if she would marry him. There were some of his buddies around though, too. One of them was trying to get his card so he could pay his bill. didn't even have the sticker removed yet. said he needed to tip 20%. you have to tip well if you want to take someone out. But someone in that group, I don't know if it was the same guy, put a bill down. Seemed like I heard Melissa say it was a hundred, and she was giving him the change, and he let her have it all. But then, she kind of sat with him a bit, and kind of seemed to like him a bit, though in a bit of a reserved way. I think his name was Mark. And it's sad, but I was feeling kind of jealous. And it's sad because Melissa always gives me a huge amount of attention and even that night gave me a lot more than that, but I still was getting a little jealous. Not nice.
This time, we sat around listening to this cute little red-head talk till maybe 1:30. I think her name is Sara.
OK, they say it's a heart shape, but I think people really understand it's an ass shape.
Watched the Simpson's episoe "Grade School Confidential". Actually, I watched the commentary, and then it in the original. There was a bit that got me laughing. Skinner and Crabapple have a secret thing going, and then it comes out, though rumors about it get out of proportion, the superintendent tries to fire them, and they barricade themselves in the school. Skinner wants to plead his case, but Bart comes up with a plan to get their attention first. So Skinner comes out with a bomb strapped to his chest. But it's not a bomb. It's hot dogs. "What kind of a man wears Armour hotdogs?".
What is love? So I'm going to try to read this book about making someone fall in love with you in 90 minutes. The first thing he's talking about, though, is what is love. And he's starting with the idea from Plato's Symposium that love is about completing yourself. I'm only a couple of pages into it, but he doesn't seem to tell the Greek story. I'm not sure if it's in Plato, but there was the Greek story about it. Actually, I think I saw it most vividly in _Hedwig and the Angry Inch_. But it's a trippy little story. It used to be that people had 4 arms and 4 legs, but the gods thought they were too happy (or something, I forget, actually it was they were challenging the gods, whatever) so they broke them all in half. Now they are all just trying to get back together again. OK, I looked it up. It's from Aristophanes and is talked about in the _Symposium_. The story also has three genders (hetero, gay male, lesbian).
OK. Had to take a long break from it. Needed a nap, and then there were 150 emails on the MetaC list. Plus he used a different system for breaking people into 4 groups, and it kind of seem like he mangled it a bit, putting in some stuff that is incidental to the categories he was using. The scales he uses are thinking/feeling and introverted/extroverted, so he gets rationals (IT), controllers (ET), supporters (IF) and promoters (EF). And says go for the opposite, as they complete you. OK. But he says the rationals are organized, and that's simply not always true the way he lined it up. IT's can be organized or not. that's a different scale (J/P). Anyway, despite this being a bit messed up, he did say something that kind of looked right. The different types like different things in how the other people make them feel. IT's like to feel intelligent. ET's like to feel powerful. IF's like to feel valued (this one seemed a little weak, maybe useful, and EF's like to feel important, or maybe popular. Anyway, not going to finish it today. Actually, I felt like punching him in the nose again. Worked a bit on the heavy bag again. Right is still weak, got a little better maybe. Left is good. I'm thinking, I'd want to hit someone in the forehead and snap his head back. I wonder if that would work. The higher up, you get more leverage on the neck. I don't know if I'd be able to break someone's neck, but I hit pretty hard. It would have to at least knock them off balance.
Anyway, this opposites thing is completely new to me. I'm not sure yet if I agree, but it is intriguing. Also, I don't think I've been with someone who is that particular type--I have generally prefer women who were closer like me. Or maybe it's the other way around. But I think Aimee is actually this type. Hmm. Also this new Andrea is clearly this type. And she said she is into the intellectuals, so she is kind of already doing this. I will consider it.
Happy Friday the Thirteenth! Happy Ides of February!
Wow, I actually went to the library today and borrowed the book for the book club this month instead of buying it. Some because my pile of books just looks too big. I brought home all my books that were at work, so that made it bigger, and I bought a few more, recently. I have been trying to put books in this big plastic boxes, but they have been stacking up, so I probably have two boxes worth. I should proably get some more shelves. Who knows, maybe I'll move and then have space to keep them all on shelves. Actually, maybe I should look at what is the cheapest, easiest way to do bookshelves. Right now, I do wooden ones with backs that at least look kind of nice. Maybe I should go ultra with library style metal adjustable. something where you can put them on both sides--stacks. OK, also it saves money to borrow, which is not too bad a thing. I don't think it would have hurt. Also, at least this one was available. I'm not sure if the last one was. My brother had wanted to get stuff from the library over christmas, and I let them try my card, but it was expired. I found that you have to get them updated each year. What's up with that? _Musicophilia_ by Oliver Sacks. Stuff about the psychology and pathology of music. It looks interesting. Kind of like a book I might like to own, but hey.
Happy Thursday the 12th! Happy Darwin Day! It's his 200th birthday!
So, I think it's not actually complete natural to sleep solidly all in a big block at night. A nap during the day is a bit more natural, I believe. But maybe you can get used to it. I suppose you can get used to almost any schedule, but you need a pretty good amount. Then again possibly there are some things that you might, um, want to do that could wake you up, and then when you finish, you would want to go back to sleep if you could.
I posted somewhere (a place in the philosophy section of the ISPE Ning site) that you could be sure that there is no god the same way you can be sure there is no Santa Claus. You could trace the history of the story, and see that it is just a story, with no real basis for being correct. Now I'm kind of wondering if that isn't a little circular. If you start with a hypothesis that there is no god, that is just confirmation. But then, if you start with the hypothesis that there is one, you think you have confirmation for that, too. But what is the confirmation for god that people find? The world seems ordered. And most importantly, life and so many parts of bodies and plants and things, seem to have a purpose, like someone made them that way. Well, it turns out that Darwin (his birthday today, remember) whoed how just selective survival of occasionally mutating species can create features that have valuable function. That leaves the question of why we exist in the first place here. Not completely answered, but we have inorganic, non-life processes that can create some fundamental organic compounds--I say some, actually all the ones we need. It would need quite a bit of chance to make a replicator, but with any replicator at all, you have evolution, which we've seen is an extremely powerful force. Why an earth that is so supportice of life? We have the anthropic principle that we could only be here at all because it's a place conducive to life. It could well be that starting life is rare and we are very lucky here. And then there is the origin of the universe. Again, we have the anthropic principle to explain why we are in a universe that supports life-- we have to be. But we have to explain why there is a universe at all. The long-hairs keep working on this, suffice it to say that we know that individual particles appear and disappear all the time now. We could just be one of those fluctuates, but with an additional random event of "inflation" where suddenly a lot more stuff appeared, at least relative to us. More than likely, we are not the only universe. Since the word "universe" means only "one", we would have to expand that idea a little bit. We are in a pretty big region where all of the physical constants are the same, as far as we are able to reach. There actually are places, like black holes, where we can't go, and maybe the physical constants are different there, but by extension, I say there are other "universes" separate from us, and not connected in the sense we can't go there and nothing there can come here, because the differences in physical constants make it impossible for travel in between where we would continue to exist. You can also add to all this the psychological tendency for people to see agency --to think that some purposeful creature is doing something. This is kind of an evolutionary adaptation, so we are better at noticing the presence of predators and prey animals. It just got reused in the stories about the origin world. Also, I was thinking maybe I would have to start with the hypthosis of no god first. I'm thinking now that the real thing that points to it is how the Judaic creation store, is just one of many in the world. They can't all be right, because there are so many, and they are very different. They have a common element of having person-like gods, but again, that's a human psychological tendency. There is the question of why the judaic system is so common. It's really just popular. It also has some features that help it survive. It says all the other stories are silly. Well, that's true, and they contradict each other. It seems a little odd not to think that story too is silly, once you've started don't that path. I guess it happens. Also, there is the whole out-grouping thing. We don't like foreigneres. That actually place into that. People just love to think and say that other people are wrong. So they have to presume they are right, despite being silly. So more psychology. Anything else? I don't know. They've also pushed the idea of god to not really have much of any real meaning. God used to be up in the sky (I guess) now they can't really say that. Now they say God is everywhere. That doesn't really seem to mean anything, though. There isn't really any test that could show if it correct or not. Convenient, yet suspicious. Then there is all the money the people get from propagating the system. It kind of gives you a sick feeling when you think about that, so another pychological thing, people are going to keep themselves from even thinking about it, lest they feel like suckers. That's a really harsh one. No one would want to admit being taken in like that. So if you can start them with the donations early, they are going to really stick with saying they believe, especially to themselves. It's going to really hurt to admit they've been taken. Probably there was social pressure to do the donations, but once done, it really locks in your brain.
I had to correct the names of the books a little bit. They still might not be quite right. The fall in love one isn't about making anyone love you. you have to find the right person. Boo! And presumably, not everyone will like you. Also boo. I think I wrote wrong titles that were more universal.
I finished _How make people like you in 90 seconds_. Read it all in a burst on Sunday. It is pretty short, with not so many pages, and they are quite small. It doesn't have that much in it, either, but then, it really couldn't because it's about 90 seocnds that can happen between people. So let me see, not everything stuck. The first immediate thing (I've forgotten exactly), eyes smile beam hi shake. I really should look that up. This quick period is about making a connection and establishing rapport. Engage in conversation, and ask open questions with what when where why and how, and not yes/no questions like are you or do you (they stall conversations). He went on a bit about mirroring or matching the body position and movements of the other person.
And he talked about the idea of different sensory preferences--visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Visual is the most common. They are people who are most concerned with how things looks. Auditory with soounds, and kinestheic with how things feel. I think he overstated this one a bit, but it seems interesting. Supposedly a person will tend to use words and analogies that reflect their preference. For example "Looks like trouble", or "sounds like trouble". I'm not sure I quite get the kinesthetic, maybe "that's a solid choice" or "feels funny". He gave fairly big lists of words that fell into the different categories. And there was a test to see which you were, or something. Seemed like I was all over the place. And you don't simply have a single prefences, but you have an order of preference. Visual people are also very concerned with how they look. Like I said, I didn't quite get it, but it was supposed to be something where eventually it pops out at you, and you start seeing it a lot. He also said it was valuable in connecting with people. He said a cop pull him over, and by his beard and physique he was obvious visual, and he used the visual words, and that got him off with a warning. Uh huh. Well anyway, it's something he talked about. I think I'm mostly auditory, and to a lesser extent visual. Like I said, I don't get kinesthetic. Also, he did talk about how if you are talked to someone using the wrong, they might not follow you and be confused. I guess.
So, at Bardog, I pretty well failed at using any of this stuff. I sat a seat over from Paul, and Melissa finally introduced us. Totally failed to connect. I said I read his blog, and had one myself. Didn't talk about computers or anything, though I knew he was a computer guy. Paul is generally quiet, so I kind of let him be, but still, anybody would like a connection. Also, going to the jukebox, there were a bunch of little girls sitting there, and one of them behind me tried talking to me. Do I try to be at all friendly? No. She asks if I was going to play anything good, and I said no. That really is a very useless thing to do. It's just a bad habit I've gotten into.
But for a couple of minutes talking to Melissa, I tried out the matching/mirroring thing. I forget what she was talking about, but I tried following her hand and body position. It really did seem to make a difference, as she kind of seemed like she felt more connected. She had to go do stuff pretty soon, but she really seemed to hang on to that little conversation a lot longer than average. That was the only time I made an effort to do it. I forgot about it when we were saying goodbye outside, and as I thought later, it really did feel different, like we were less connected, and instead of kind of dwelling a bit like sometimes happens, we just moved on pretty quickly. But I have to remember to practice and keep with it. That little experience though really gave me a feeling about how it could be. In general, there just hasn't really been so much connection between us, but if I managed it better and really kept a solid connection, she probably would really want to see me more. So I definitely need to cultivate this. It also makes me want to look at his longer book, _How to make someone fall in love with you in 90 minutes_. Seems like he said that one was based on a lot of research. OK.
So Prez Obama is trying to push a big "stimulus" package through. And he's at this point not even trying to make something that Republicans can support. He threw in everything a Democrat could want to spend money on, so there's no way they could like it. But it's an intriguing strategy when you think about it. First of all, government cannot push the economy along. It's just not that good. The economy is a like a big elephant, and it's going to do what it wants to do. The government is is like a little chattering monkey. I don't think it really has much relevant effect on it, though, it does seem like some of the permissiveness lately with some of the investment rules did let the banking crisis get out of hand. But that's something else. So Obama has made this an entirely Democratic thing. And it will work or it won't. He's rolling the dice. But here's the fun part of it. The economy will get better. It might, and probably will, take a while, but it's going to take a while. And it will in fact have nothing to do with anything the government has done. It will get better on its on. That's just way it works. But he will have to get credit for it. That's the way the presidency works. And doing it this way, he won't share any of it with the 'pubs. Some of them are going to have to support it though, so they are already trying to defuse this whole ploy. It's not something that they don't get. They are also trying to kill it by saying it won't create job. Well, duh, it won't create jobs. That's what I've been talking about. Anyway, the whole mess is just about people being scared and not spending money. It's entirely a mental thing with the people. But what can you do about that? About the only thing the package really does is give the feeling that something is being done, and maybe that will have some kind of calming effect.
Honestly too, health care is a job issue. One of the big things that scares people about jobs is the whole thing with insurance. If people did not have to worry about that, then you wouldn't have this sort of extreme fear that is causing problems in the economy. And it's really sad that the U.S. is one of the few places where people don't think that protecting the health of the people is the role of the government. But that's more about the conservative mindset that hates for other people to get anything for free, even if that makes it cheaper for you. Kind of like how there is also this teetolar streak in America, where drinking and other fun is a bad thing. It's the darn Baptists, I tells you. Trying to push us back into the stone age.
OK, I haven't gotten through it yet, and it's a little more sad than necessary, but it seems insigthful. A bit about how not to fail at life. I do get the feeling I was making a mistake by staying unemployed as long as I did, then again, periods where I, um, dated, really only corresponded to when I was not working, or only worked part time. So not positive about it.
Well, I think a hackintosh (installing the mac operating system OS X on a PC) is going to be too hard for me to do. More too much work, the kind of thing I just wouldn't finish. So if I I want to do iPhone stuff, I should probably get a Mac mini. And I can develop stuff on the emulator before actually getting a phone and switching over. And at least see if I'll be into it. Like I said, I have been interested in phone apps, and I think the phone really is the proper interface. Voice is the way to do computers, and the phone is the best way to do voice. But I haven't gotten into actually doing stuff. Maybe it will get me there. But I'm not sure how well the emulator handles the sound inputs and such. Hmm. anyway, we'll see. Also, people talk about just doing the touch. But they are thinking stand alone programs, not my sense of interactive control of a computer. The front end to a server program. That's what I'm thinking.
Looked at Paul site. Says he has his eye on a job, but doesn't want to give anything away lest he have competition. Great Paul. Thanks a bunch. Good luck with that.
Robert Plant's and Alison Krauss's _Raising Sand_ won the Grammy award for best album of the year. I got that album last year. I like it, myself. One of the tracks _Please Read the Letter_ also won for best record, though I'm not sure what that means. A song from a different artist won for best song.
I've finished the leftovers in the refrigerators, but there is a bunch of stuff in the freezer. Roasts of various things. Hamburger, pork chops, that kind of thing. I tried one of the pork roasts, and it was a pork loin. It ended up very dry, and it maybe wasn't as good as the cheaper cuts that I'm used to which are more fatty. Extremely white meat, whereas, like I said, I'm used to these other cuts that don't end up with the pure white like that. I guess it really wasn't too bad. I say dry, I think it cook have been worse if I had overcooked it, but I got it pretty much right to 170 without going much over, like i have sometimes. But except maybe for a tiny bit around the outside, there was just no fat at all in it. Just a different thing, and I guess I'll have to keep it in mind.
Happy Friday the Sixth!
I was standing outside at work in the covered walkway, and two people said the weather was so nice, we should get out of work. One of those days.
Today I've been listening to the commentary on Star Trek: First Contact. The one with the Borg, and Zephram Cochran and the first warp drive. It's Johnathan Frakes, who directed it, and also plays Riker. He just sounds neat. Really into it. Having fun. Some of the people on the other ones were brought in, and never really cared about anything Star Trek. Changed things round and just made them in general suck, but Frakes I like. Billy Borg, Andy Borg, Tom Borg, Wayne Borg. There's another commentary with Braga. Grr. don't care for braga. I don't know if I just go on to the next movie, or what. I haven't looked at any of the "text commentaries" from michael and denise okudu. Seem like they are just too irritating to have to read. And like I said, each movie has a second disc. Frakes in this one mentioned that all the borg (there were only a dozen) did some kind of a capella thing that might be on the DVD. I should hunt that down. Dang, in the next movie, there is no audio commentary at all, only the text one. boo.
Finished of the ham and cabbage and the quiche. So it's pretty much all gone. That was quick. Freezing cold today. But the sun is shining, so when I went outside to practice the new stuff from the staff form I just learning, it seemed kind of warm in the sun, except when the wind hit.
Listening to the commentary on Star Trek VI with Nick Meyer. He says he doesn't really agree with Gene's view of the future, without racism or conflict. So I'm not happy that they felt they had to just change the nature of the imaginary universe they were working with. I guess that's why the movies sucked, and the whole thing just declined gradually with time.
I was sitting looking at my phone. It's memory was full for some reason, and it wouldn't even let me delete messages to try to fix it. It wasn't downloading email messages only the headers because it was full, so it was in a pretty useless state. So I was looking at it, and Andrea put both hands on my arm and was looking over at it. I didn't react at all, and just ignored her. Playing it cool. I'm kind of trying to play with her, but I don't know if she is also playing with me. We'll have to see. One thing that was very pretty, when she was leaving, she called
Now I've got all these left-overs and I was worried they were going to last an annoyingly long time. Three of the big square corningware dishes, and about a third of a quiche. But I finished one and a half of the corning off. I guess their not quite so big as I was thinking. There really is just one serving in them. The half is just rice and vegetables, and I'll probably have it with a chicken leg quarter. I almost did that today, but I finished off the chili instead (with some of the rice), just so I would make a lot of progress on these leftovers. The parents really disrupt my eating habits, and not just while their here. The sad thing is they leave leftovers too, so it's hard to get back to my much more moderate diet. Plus I gain weight from all that. And the food isn't really the food I like. The full container that's left is ham, cabbage, and potatoes. I guess that really is the harshest bit. Who likes cabbage? But the way mom did it, it's really surprisingly good, but still. Seems like Andrea abd them were saying something about cabbage.
On Thursday, Melissa forgot to bring in some more lemonade for me, and I had to switch to something else, sprite and pineapple. I had told her on Sunday that I was coming to the book club Thursday, but I had gotten so good at always sending a text message, that she was relying on the text, and didn't remember that I had said anything. Now I know. But it tells me something. She doesn't think about me when she's home the way I think about her when I'm home. I'm am only associated with work in her mind. Oh well. She isn't going to school this semester, so she has more time and I abolutely need to see her outside of work for something.
I googled "kidney regeneration" because the teaching company lecture on healing said that the kidney had some ability to regenerate. This is actually pretty unusual. It goes on to say that most healing is by scarring, which is something else. The liver also can regenerate, and with the myth of Prometheus who had his liver eaten every day and regrown, you just wonder how the ancient people knew that livers could regenerate. It could have been weird experiments with animals or slaves, or maybe someone sometime survived losing a lot of his liver from being attacked by animals or fighting or something. Anyway, so I find a yahoo answer entry on this question It appears to be basically a transcription of that teaching company lecture, with a little stuff added at the end. Plus it's altered a bit, because the guy talks about how he isn't the same as when he started the class. I recognized it specifically because he used the unusual word "mashed" for a liver mangled in an accident, and they use the same word here. And I was thinking maybe it was just plagiarism (it is not attributed), but Possibly dude was reading something out of a textbook. So I don't know. They do say there is a textbook they based the class on. Maybe I should try to find a copy of it.
Gout in my left outside ankle. No fun.
Plus they leave milk. I like it kind of, but I'm lactose intolerant, so it can be painful. This time I have chocolate to add, which makes it go a lot better.
Happy Groundhog Day! Happy Groundhog Day! Happy Groundhog Day!
Argh. So I got my tax forms from my broker. A bit harsh. I've got about a thousand dollar of dividends that I have to pay tax on, and yet, because they were reinvested, it's only worth maybe 700 to me, but I'm taxed at 1000. Plus, the whole thing lost more than twenty times that in value, but does that affect it? no. boo. And it would all be fine if I were able to hold onto it till it comes back to a more reasonable value, but now I might have to take a loss. Still, if I do that, I think these guys keep strong enough accounting that I'll have the numbers to declare them. Though I guess since I don't itemize, it won't really be important.
Well, hmm. Andrea, who seems to hang out more and more at Bardog, said she likes intellectuals. It was just them and me, so I moved to sit next to them so Melissa could just hang around next to us. Actually, she tended to go hide instead, but anyway... Bunches of people came in after that, but I was still sitting next to her. And it was more like she said she had been dating pilots, and liked their brand of slightly intellectual. I think the more sigificant attribute was probably high income, but she said that. So I should definitely try to go out with her. Though it might be tough because I don't have a lot of respect for her right now. And she's such a yakky extrovert.
Happy Kalends of February!
Parents just left today after staying a few days. Gained a couple pounds. Didn't do any of the reading I wanted to. I don't feel properly vacated, or weekended. We watched both _Wrath of Khan_ and the movie after that, _the Search for Spock_. I couldn't leave them hanging with Spock dead since they brought him back right away. III and IV were directed by Leonard Nimoy. I got to listen to his commentary on those, which was nice. Shatner actually was also on the one for IV--the one with the whales. And Shatner directed number 5, so I need to listen to that one. In this set of all the movies I have, each one has two disks. I haven't looked at what's on any of the extra disks. I'm a little ascared because the movies mostly weren't very good, except maybe Khan and the one with the whales. I don't know why they thought they could have an extra disk on each one.
And it's Super Football Game Day! I'm planning to go down to Bardog. But really, that's just not my culture. I was just thinking today how Melissa was a cheerleader. She is just not my people.
It was almost 70 degrees today. It snowed just a few days ago.
Seems like I've been posting quite a bit in different groups. I don't know if any of it would be worth repeating here. All stuff and non-sense.
At the book club meeting, we started talking about the next book _Musicophilia_, and I described the music I have in my dreams. How it sometimes seems richer than what I can hear in real life, because my actual ears have lost a lot of the higher frequencies, and in the dream it can be very loud and intense without the problems you might have in real life, with buzzing and distortion. But then we went around and heard about some of the variation even that little group has in dreaming one person has no sound in his dream, and no one talks, but he does have color and tactile sensation. Aimee has everything, including smells. One person used to dream in French. Aimee describe one especially weird thing--when she is really agitated, her dreams can be on a big black background, but the dream one happens in a little corner off to the side on the bottom. Lucid dreams are not so common. Aimee said she has had maybe only one. I said when they are lucid, they become easier to remember. There's the one person on one mailing list who is almost always lucid, and remembers seven dreams a night. They wondered if she might not be rested. I said I had heard of another person who was switched on lucid like that. It happens sometimes.
Just watched the _Wrath of Khan_ with the folks. Seemed like they said they hadn't seen it before, but it's been broadcast, so I don't know. It was nice, though. RIP Ricardo Montalban.
Again with the snow. And nothing on the roads.
I don't know what I've been up to. Trying to read the book for the book club _The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World_. Sort of. Not that into it. Also watching the classes on pathophysiology. Right now cancer.
I get up. And I'm really having trouble this moring. Somehow I was dreaming about cutting off my hands and replacing them with artificial hands, and after I had the first one off, I was thinking I don't want to cut my hands off. That was just about the feelings of bad things happening right now. Anyway, I'm getting up, and I see that it's hard because my schedule for a few days has been to be sleeping til a little later. You get used to sleeping and being awake at particular times of the day, so it's rough for me to get up early again as the week starts. And I go to the kitchen, looking out the window. And it's freaking snowing. You don't want to go out in the snow around here. I look at the street and it isn't sticking yet, so maybe it'll be OK.
Gosh. Went to the atheist fondue party at Dale and Michelle's. I have forgotten how much I love those guys. Liz kind of gushed, unloading her life's story kind of thing. I saw Spring first, and it was a long lost friend kind of moment. And I think their getting cuter. I didn't quite follow it, but it seemed like Spring had something going on with her boobs. It seems like she is a big self-conscious about them, and they are quite ample. I think maybe her blouse was poofing out a bit so she was kind of open in the front. But we was standing and talking pretty close together, and Liz just took her pointy fingers on booth hands and went boop onto Springs tits. Liz can be a little wild at times, and seems like Spring is one of those concerned for everyone, worried everything is OK kind of person. Some kind of weird girl bonding moment. I guess they do that. But with tits involved. It was nice though.
It was nice to see Steve. I was not particularly talkative, though. Michelle actually said it was nice talking, or not talking. There were some things I just didn't go into. There was a guy who couldn't make it, Rick, who's a Buddhist. Steve said I was like Rick, but not as good. He asked if I was spiritual, and I said you could be spiritual without any supernatural elements. I wouldn't go into that any more because there wasn't a simple thing I could say. I told them to read my blog. Heh. They didn't know I had one. But why would they? There is a regular meeting of Occam's on Monday. I need to finally make it out there.
So, I think I'm going to try to develop some phone apps. I think I've even written before that I'm interested in doing that, and it seems like a good time to try. And I'm thinking iPhone, but that takes a Mac OS. It might be possible to do a hackintosh. Anyway, Doug has been looking at Google phone, and that android platform. It's so far behind the iPhone that it just seems wrong, and I couldn't quite place why. And it just stuck me. Doug is thinking like a loser. He's likes the platform because there isn't as much competition as on the iPhone. And I say that because it does seem like Doug has a habit of thinking like that. Maybe I do, too, but I don't feel like continuing to act like a loser right now. I'm mean loser in the sense of a person who has been beaten down and not gotten the whatever and expects not to get it/her. Sometimes you really just need to have confidence that you will succeed, or at least can succeed even if you might not, and try to fight with the big boys, instead of crawling into a hole waiting for crumbs.
So the question Louie had for me at kung fu was why did the Byzantines give up Scholasticism. He asked me did I know that, because he wanted to tell me, but I feel I'm classically educated well enough that I should be able to give a shot to that question. I hadn't considered it before. I'm only dimly aware of the traditions. But scholasticism was a system of knowledge where you verify things according to how they match the written body of knowledge from classical antiquity. It must have been largely platonic, but I assume they had some aristotelian stuff, because he was the big cataloguer of all that was known. But the thing about scholasticism was that it had no room for empiricism. You don't decide anything by checking the world with an experiment, you check what is written. So it is very brittle to new information and ideas. The Byzantines were way out in the East, so they had contact with new ideas from the Muslim (I forget the timeline, they probably were before that because they got conquered in the great Islamic sweep), but they also had some contact with China, which often came up with nifty experimentally new devices and thingies. So I would guess they just hit something they couldn't deal with, that wasn't in their books they used. So after letting me drag on, Louie says it was stochastics. They couldn't deal with randomness. We had been talking about Nassim Taleb and the big Black Swan that just hit us. And the Chinese do have a system that embraces randomness. The I-Ching is a system of interpretation of random events. Ba Gua itself the word refers to the eight trigrams, which are elements they use in the I-Ching. For a particular I-Ching entry, you would have two trigrams, so there are 64 combinations. So the fighting in Ba Gua was something about disrupting the flow of someone's attack with randomness. And there are some established philosophical ideas from Chinese systems. When they are hard, be soft, when they are soft, be hard. And different principles for what to do in different situations. I forget what all, exactly. There are a bunch of them. The might have an attack moving up or down or pulling forward or back. And you would react in different corresponding ways. There's a system involved, and it's supposed to be integrated a little better than just being a big bag of tricks you can use, which is the kind of thing is seems like most styles are. I haven't quite gotten into all the principles, and they really have to be shown with examples, because I get the idea that while it wants to be a general system based on principles, it seems more likely that it really started with the big bag of tricks, and they just kind of fit together in the guys head in a vague was that sort of made sense, and really it's more a matter of a way to remember it all. That is, you could not get to the techniques just starting from the principles, but the principles give you a way to organize and think about the techniques in your head. There are just so many ways a body can move around.
So Dale and Michelle had a little baby grand piano sitting in the corner of the living room, where we all were sitting. It was really kind of strange. It really did five you the feeling of rich and sophisticated, and I asked them who played, and Dale said it was his mother's. So it was more of an objet d'art. They had all these little statues and things, too. There was a little one that looked damned familiar. I was talking with Liz about it, and David came to my but I wasn't positive. And Spring came along. She's actually an artist, and yes, it was Michelangelo's David, and was looking at us like we were total rubes for not having known that. And I did feel a little pitiful. But something seemed just slightly off about the proportions. And not the way the actual David is off. But I've only seen photographs, so probably it was me. Next to it was a mini Eifel Tower. And on the other side (this was above a fireplace) were some bowls. Hmm. Phallic symbols and vagina symbols. Great. Anyway, there was a baby grand. I like to try out pianos. But it's been a while since I played in public. The kids had jumped on it. You can imagine. They didn't stay so long. And Liz said, well, look what you'll be following. So I played a bit. And when I play on a piano, I don't perform previously composed pieces. I just play. And people are always surprised when I sit down and play. It is nice to have cute girls sitting behind you watching and listening to you play. They did clap. But there are always folks who want you to play songs they recognize and know. I don't do that, though I really should have taken time to learn that. Maybe I'll get back into it. But it was Steve. He's into the classical stuff. Asked for some Chopin. And I just had to say, I don't play that stuff because I don't like it. Too much work. And talking to Liz, I only really can fake stuff anymore. Man, that Liz. She's yummy.
So I tried the Rambo. A cheesesteak sandwich at Bardog. Paul actually did a thing about it in his blog including a picture. I told Melissa about that. She picked up my tab, so I guess I have to say nice things about it. And she likes venti non-fat vanilla latte's from starbucks if you want to do something nice for her. Anyway, the sandwich was so nice that the cute girl sitting next to me spoke to me (bonus!) and told me it looked good. So there you go.
The idea of memes is useful in thinking about religions. Part of the concept is that meme-systems evolve. And not metaphorically other than that memes are kind of like an analogy (that's a little unfair because all new words and ideas are really metaphors anyway because in order to understand them, you have to relate them to something you know). If you can buy that there is something such as an idea that replicates itself in someone else's brain in some sense, then it actually is evolution and survival of the fittest when they compete and only some survive. It's a different form from the evolution of living species, and a little more abstract, but it is exactly the same thing. But how it works in religions. Genes never actually exist by themselves, and probably memes don't either. Genes do get encapsulated in single organisms, and memes don't operate quite the same way. But genes continue to exist when new species happen. Some of the really ancient genes for some basic metabolic processes are in almost all creatures on the planet. Genes for things how the genetic code works. Maybe there aren't too many. I was thinking how sugars are processed, but not all critters even use sugar. I guess mostly they do. So maybe it would be helpful have the idea of a meme-body, that is, the entire set of memes that a person has. And of course, this changes around for the life of a person. And inside the meme-body are full meme-organs that have a consolidated function. I've seen Blackmore and maybe others try to use the phrase meme-complex, and sure, that's one way to describe it, but I'm not sure it quite captures the way they work together. These folks do describe religion as a meme complex, things working together. And meme-complexes evolve. I guess it kind of could be said that organs also to some extent evolve almost, maybe slightly independently from the individual species. I'm sure real evolutionary biologists would have a lot of problems with that idea (a lot of them don't like the idea of group selection), but we're talking analogies here. Anyway, so you've got religions to some extent evolving. A lot of times they share elements. In the way memes can move around, they are quite different from genes. So the correspondences in thinking about the two are certainly going to break up. But you do have religions competing. They even get people to fight each other. They really are often super evolvers, because a common meme that many share is that all people who believe the other systems are bad, going to hell, should even be killed sometimes. And it's this commonly shared meme that makes me say Christianity requires hate. It's part of the common structure.
So I was saying how seduction includes a slight bit of injury to the woman--not really satisfying what she is really looking for, which is someone to stick around. It's kind of a biological imperative. And it can involve actually being a little deceptive about that, which makes it worse, I suppose. But a part that I wanted to bring up, and I don't think I got to, was that to seduce people, you have to be somewhat OK with hurting them. That's the kind of mental block that I'm having with it all. Now, I do understand that once you get into it, the rewards just dwarf all the other consideration. And like I said, properly done, you do share real love. So with the way it is inevitably rewarded, it makes total sense that it can become a common way of doing things. So serial monogamy, which is the kind of thing I see so often, becomes a very strong "basin of attraction" to use a non-linear dynamics analogy. It's a way of acting that is very easy for people to be pulled toward. So it makes a lot of sense that different cultural systems have done a lot to try to encourage and support more lasting monogamies, even for a lifetime. And that's disregarding the issue of just promiscuity and having multiple partners at a time. That is, or at least has been, a serious health concern, so it can surely be said to be dangerous. But there are also the psychological effects, which I'm trying to look at here, which are also generally not good. Anyway, it seems like seducers have to have this bit of callousness. And psychopaths really can be super seducers, because they just don't care at all. That's an extreme, but I just feel that a seducer to some extent must be at least a little weak in that area. So I don't have complete buy in, but I'm still finding it interesting to read about.
I just saw someone saying that she likes honesty. The feely types, and some things about her made me think she was one of those, means something different by honesty than what the rational thinky types mean. And it can cause confusion. I kind of get the idea that the feely types are to some level trying to get the thinky types to like them more with a statement like this. Playing on the confusion, not so much as to be deceptive, but more in a sympathetic way to meet them half way. Because a feely person means someone who isn't trying to deceive them. The thinky person isn't so much interested in what the deceptive person is trying to do. They just don't like the inaccuracies of the statement itself. The feely person cares about the person. The thinky person, not so much.
Looks like a golden retriever. I don't think blondie is a cold-climate critter like ours. Wolves too seem like they'd like the cold a bit better. We think our dog is part wolf.
So my back was hurting, and I stretched and did the chi gung, which is a little movement exercize, in the kung fu class, and generally took it easy, and I think it actually got better. So maybe they know what their doing.
But sociopathic seducers does pose a question. And not all sociopaths are good seducers, but they can be great at it. My understanding of them is that they don't feel empathy. But to seduce you at least have to understand the feelings of others. So how would that work? Not having empathy means that their pain and feelings don't matter to you, and you don't share them at all. Maybe they just feel everyone else is inferior. And possibly the understanding is not from sharing. Or maybe they just learn manipulative behaviors. Also, possibly it's kind of like the reaction people have toward animals sometimes--"oh look, he thinks he's human! How cute!" I don't know.
Mmm, about to watch the lecture on the girly bits.
OK, only a couple minutes into it and I need a break. Talking about the hymen. Never seen one personally. He said mostly it's even already destroyed by puberty. By athletics or some other trauma. Uh huh. Usually it has perforations, but sometimes it doesn't (imperforate hymen), which is a problem when she starts menstruating. And she'll need surgery. Sure. Though some other treatment comes to mind.
One thing he mentioned before and he mentions again (to compare it with a girly issue) is a bit of how appendicitis usually works. It usually starts with pain at the belly button and then moves to the side (right side). That's a big way they can tell what it is, because it moves. It does that because of neurological situation, but it is an important diagnostic feature. And I think it was helpful to me when I heard it, because sometimes I do get pain in my side and wonder. But now I know. It has to start in the middle, otherwise it's probably something else.
Happy Ides of January!
It might be the coldest night of the year. I just went out to get some firewould, and the dog across the street starting barking. Sure, maybe it was a typical get out of my space kind of barking, but I kind of got the feeling it was maybe a, help me, I'm freezing, and I might die kind of barking. I have a bit of trouble imagining people leaving their dog out on a night like this. We have a really arctic kind of dog that seems to like being out in the cold. Will sit out in the yard at night. And has a pretty nice den like igloo sort of house to go to in the garage, if he feels like going in. i don't know what the deal is with that dog across the street.
So I was thinking about this whole seduction, pickup thing. I'm slowly getting through a book titled _Seduction_, and I've been variously interested in the mystery method, and R.Don's stuff. But it violates several systems of ethics. And can get pretty bad. If done properly, you don't particularly just use women for sex. You do really share a bit of love along with the fun, and the women do benefit or at least enjoy it to some extent. But in general, women really want guys to stay around, and they don't. So, if only for that, you are hurting them, though maybe "hurt" is a little strong. More of a disappointment, perhaps, and it also is kind of loss because it didn't really work out. And it perpetuates a culture of guys picking up and moving on. That's the kind of thing I don't like. I never wanted to pick up and move on, and it's been the women in my relationships that have moved away from me. Although, some of it may have been me because I wasn't able to give up my situation to be with them. But now I'm at a point of transition. I have to find a new job. And maybe I'll get something around here, but I could finally look at something somewhere else. I have a better idea of the kind of place I want to be. I have money to last a bit while I look, and to some extent enough to manage a transition like that. I do have reason to stick around, but it's not such a big thing. One other consideration, and why having a bit of money to last a bit makes a difference. I could also be looking for a girlfriend while looking for a job. And I've found that I'm a bit picky, so looking around the country might actually make sense.
It's really nice to have something you know you like. Something that's easy enough to get and reliable. A lot of things, you might be in the mood for sometimes, and sometimes it will be good, and sometimes not. But if you know about something that always works for you, that's really special. It really is something to cherish. And in my experience, these things for me are very personal. Typically I'm the only person I know of that really likes them totally like that. It is more a thing about me. But that's kind of good, because there's not a crowd. Actually, not having a crowd may be part of the deal.
Christianity requires hate. In many places, Jesus preaches hate. it's time to expose their lies about being all about love. Even the "Love your neighbor" subtly brings in hate. Love people close around you. Everybody else can go to hell. I say this in contract to Buddhism, which has a meditation practice that builds up to feeling compassion for everyone in the world, with a step along the way of feeling compassion for the enemies you know. And the difference between love and compassion is significant. You don't love them, but you make an effort to put yourself in their shoes and feelin their perspective and feelings and understand them. As you, you may still hate them, but maybe it's softened, and you can let go of your little personal perspective one the way to having the fully global perspective of an enlightened being.
Sure, thinking about where I'd like to go next, I'm really interested in St. Jude. I think about FedEx the work was interesting, but there was something about it that I just didn't like. Really rubbed me the wrong way. Some of it seemed to be that it was kind of a family place, and I didn't really make any friends there. I haven't made any friends anywhere else either, so that can't be that big a deal. But there was something about the mission of the company. I just don't think it ever really absolutely positively had to be there overnight. I just didn't have buy in to the company's mission. So it ended up to me just feeling kind of greedy and venal. It was just about the money. Hilton just for that has been a lot better for me. People do need places to stay when travelling. And it's nice to go to a fancy place, where you get pampered a bit. But when the money tightens up, I can see it having trouble, so it's perfectly understandable that they should need to cut me back. And the work environment was quite different. I was working pretty much by myself. I'm not sure if the co-workers at FedEx were irritating so much. Actually it was really a great team and I feel lucky to have had the chance to work with them, but it was nice to move on. And right during that period I ran into _Software Craftmanship_ which actually got me thinking about the stages of development of a craftsman. You start as an apprentice, then become a journeyman, and then work on something to be a master. I was certainly beyond being an apprentice, but it seemed to make sense to me to take the journeyman idea, where you would move to another situation and learn more there. Anyway, I feel good about when I left, even though I didn't do well right after that. Hilton has been good development, too. I'm not sure if I'm ready to work on a master project yet, but maybe it is time. Honestly I guess it probably is. Still, maybe I should think just about getting a job as part of a career in a more general sense. Anyway, the thing about St. Jude is that it's a place where the work is meaningful, and that is a bigger deal for me. Perhaps it will still be just grinding out different sections of systems. I need to be better at that.
So what would be a software master craftsman? Well, there is a concept of senior developer. Typically, sometimes the advanced people go more into management, but the senior developers I've seen do archictectural designs, and help make design decisions about how to do things on particular projects. And then their coding tends to be very skillful and reliable. Sometimes they build frameworks, or essential design pieces that other people can copy.
On thing I'd like to mention is what a masterpiece is. People actually have a bit of a misunderstanding of what that means. Most people think it is just something truly excellent, a master creating something at the top of his game. But technically, that's not quite right. It is a work that is supposed to show that a journeyman has mastered the craft in the state it exists, and something to show the guild that he is ready to take apprentices and start passing things on. But it shouldn't be too good, or that would make everyone else in the guild look bad. I really don't know of any guild stories, so I don't know if supergeniuses with masterpieces that are too good was often a problem, but that's what they said in _Software Craftmanship_. It's just something that shows conventional mastery. I'm not sure if there would have been a word for a piece that is of unusually high quiality, so that's what masterpiece has come to mean, but that wasn't ther original idea.
Anyway, you make your masterpiece, and then you can grind out quality merchandise. And that's your job after that. And as a master, you can grind out your own stuff, and get other people to help you, and they can learn how to do it to. It is part of culture where you don't have mass production and factories and machines to crank out things. But it really does seem like writing software isn't to that point where you have mechanical stuff to get things done. People do try to create mass produced bulk stuff like that. I don't know how good it all is. And then there are the software engineering approaches to creating software. I guess. I don't know if I've been exposed to it enough to know if it works for anyone. Anyway, some of the examples of software craftsman were some of the people who had a particular software product, and it was their baby, and they just kept with it. I think there were some editors that were like that. Probably the id guys (the Johns) were like that. I don't know if there is a big product I would want to work on and stay with for a really long time. I really should be working on some stuff, though. One other anaolgy. A dissertation project really sounds like the same basic idea as a masterpiece. I didn't do a master's thesis project. That probably should have been the same corresponding thing. Actually, come to think of it, a Ph.D. project is supposed to advance the field, the way I was saying a masterpiece would not, so I guess it really is a more advnaced thing. I guess personally I just haven't gotten good at working on and finishing a big project, start to finish. That is something I really need to do.
Wow. Sitting with her is just so much different from just remembering or thinking about it. I understand there are just other things going on in my brain that I am not aware of. But whatever they are, they just make me feel good to be in her presence. And not just that I guess. She talks to me and remembers things about me, and that is just so friendly and pleasant. I don't know, it may actually have been that my feelings were detectably different. I guess I'm not that good with them. This time when I was leaving, she asked if I was maybe I would see her this weekend, like maybe I might not. Hmm. I don't know what that's about. I guess it's like what happened with that other girl. There was certainly other stuff going on that was confusing me and making me think some feelings stronger than they were, because there were hidden feelings adding to the soup, but even when I bring those out and my feelings shift around a bit, I do still love her. Which means I like to ve with her and talk to her. I guess I didn't talk as much last night, but I haven't been talking so much lately in general.
I'm not sure why, but I was dreaming of coyotes. chasing us. Could be the crime I keep hearing about. Somehow, personally they don't seem to bother me so much, and I float above them. and somehow i got to talking to an ag extension girl about artificial insemination for our cows. someone asked me about ai, and I switched to that, I guess. Nephew did shoot a coyote recently. It was chasing a deer. Picked the wrong deer, I guess.
Melissa's parents bought her a new computer, an hp mini. It fits in her purse. Her old one was too big to really carry around, so she is really happy about this. And I really like seeing Melissa happy about things. But she needs Microsoft Word. It doesn't have a disk drive, so she doesn't know how to get the copy she has onto it. I said networking is what they expect when you don't have a drive. And suggested that maybe OpenOffice will work. She has a trial version which will expire at some point. Such a little sweetheart.
So Kim at some point in the beginning of December and said the journal had been more interesting. I tried going back to see what it was. I'm not positive. I was reading some better psychology stuff and had things to pass on. So maybe I should keep reading good stuff like that, if I can find it. I don't know.
Not a good sign. Nausea and a bit of a headache.
Well, it looks like my job is gone. That'll certainly change your perspective.
I just saw another canned soup commercial dissing MSG. I think I saw another one that said they didn't have anything that didn't taste good, like MSG. I'm sorry. I've tasted MSG. We have some can of something, I think it's called "Accent" and it's like pure MSG. I tried it, and it's just great. I could probably go for just a solution of just this stuff. It wouldn't be like real food, but it would taste good. It basically tastes like chicken broth. I get the feeling that some of the boullion I've had was really a small bit of real broth, with just a big load of this stuff, to give it flavor. I've had real broth that has a lot less flavor than this stuff. Some of the problem is that it can fool you, and you aren't getting as much meat as you think. Also, some people are sensitive to it. I don't know, gives them headaches or something. But screw people with metabolic deficiencies.
"Oh, you're not only a fool, Leutnant, but also a religious fool, and perhaps a mystic at that."
I chop wood maybe a couple of times a year. Now I feel like staying very still for a while. I was definitely feeling the few extra pounds I just gained in the last month.
I never went out to Shadowcon. Missed the belly dancing. I did start playing a little Call of Duty:World at War. And we watched the Marx Brothers' _Night at the Opera_. They are quite silly.
So the guy that started the kung fu style that I study, ba gua, became a eunuch to work for the emperor. I hope that doesn't have any personal implications for me.
So I was chopping wood, and I heard a big squeal and crunch. I couldn't see it from where I was standing, but there was a wreck on the corner there. Probably someone did not come to a complete stop at the sign. Or they started up together. They actually ended up on the lawn on the corner. Seems like I heard them hitting the curb. Big SUV, or maybe a minvan, and some kind of sedan. Good time to be buying a new car.
So, I'm watching the anatomy and physiology class on RW discs, so I don't have to keep the discs, I can just write out the one I'm watching at the moment. But I'm using this laptop to write it out. The write speed is like 0.6, which is terrible. Takes an hour per disc. I'm not sure what the problem is. I think the removable hard disc may be slow on this machine. But I guess there isn't any rush. Plenty of other things to do. It kind of sucks this morning because I burned the wrong one, so I have to do another one. I'm actually using 2 discs, so if I had been more organized, there wouldn't have been any delay at all, because I could have been burning one while finishing up the other. But that would have been almost like work.
The doctor used a great analogy, the squid response. When you don't understand something, throw a lot of ink on it. He used it specifically about how names for medical things that aren't well understood are very long, but I've seen plenty of places where people write a lot without saying much.
Shadowcon is going on this weekend. But I don't really feel like going out. Or doing anything much, really. Right now, I think the dance is going on. The past few years, there have actually been people dancing. I think it's all the cute young girl geeks. But I have yet to dance, myself. And I'm missing it, anyway, this time. Probably just as well.
So I'm watching the Teaching Company class on anatomy and physiology. This one is talking about the cranial nerves. He said there was a mnemonic he couldn't say in a G-rated lecture like that. And it took me a bit to find. I think there is a wikpedia entry with nothing but a bunch of mnemonics for it, but not this one. It's pretty memorable. Only one object transcends time and foams vivaciously: Glorious Vagina! All Hail! Or there's another one. Oh, oh, oh, to touch and feel virgin girls' vaginas and hymens. So, actually, I'm not sure which he meant.
One thing that stuck me just recently is how much our knowledge is broken up into separate sections. When you're thinking about one topic, you are pretty restricted in what you consider. Just things that are generally relevant. You don't have everything you know available or contributing all at once. But you could switch to it pretty quick. It just makes you wonder how you would do something like that for a computer.
celebrating my inner grinch
so I was taking a class at MUS, and having trouble finding the room, so I got there a little late while he was calling attendance (early in the semester). some english something or other from Mr. Shelton. And he asked me if I was ready to read. And I didn't even have the book yet. And asked again. so I said ok, I won't take the class and left. Hmm. There are just some things I want to say no to lately.
Happy Twelfth Day of Christmas!
I figure it's easy to fall back into old feelings. They tend to be like habits. And it was nice to see her again. Seems likes it's been a long week. It was still not quite the same. She got me a I heart New York T-shirt. That was really nice. Sometimes I don't say thank you enough when I'm stunned. She has a beautiful smile-- at least I like it.
Happy Eleventh Day of Christmas!
tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day
They watched _Beautiful Mind_ last night. I got a copy, but I don't care for it so much. And Freddie was reading about it. It's pretty inaccurate. Plus dude did not have visual hallucinations. They also talk about delusions, which is a different thing from hallucinations. So now I have reasons to like it less.
Happy Tenth Day of Christmas!
Hmm, still with the Melissa dreams. I had one a couple days ago where she was naked. That seemed nice, though it was more about frustration. This one, she was working at a store or something, and she kind of turned her back on me, so I left. And i did realize that I'm going to feel bad if I am not nice to her. So I don't know. And I had some dream that involved something about quantum probabilities. I guess it wasn't really anything, though it seemed important. It got me to thinking about how people's thoughts are about manipulating a lot of flexible constraints, which is very different from manipulating hard discrete rules, and obeying instructions exactly. Remembering dreams is a sign that I got more sleep, which is a good thing. The rest of the crew were out at Edgar's house, so I could go to sleep early in a quiet house.
Yeah, my feelings for Melissa still seem weaker. But I really don't want to be mean to her. She has been a sweetheart.
Happy Ninth Day of Christmas!
They're all playing World of Goo. Aaron got a copy for the PC for his birthday yesterday.
The God Helmet. I thought I had heard about that. Using transcranial stimulation to trigger religious experiences.
Happy New Years! Happy Eighth Day of Christmas!
I did go out to see Super 5 at Dan McGuinness. Anything to get away from the family. Didn't really talk to anyone. Kimberly was there with her radiant smile, but left at 11. Lee from Transitt joined the for a few songs. It was not really as busy as I've seen it get in there.
It happens every year. I don't believe in locking the bathroom door. I think everyone is capable of knocking. But the nephews, not so much. So I'll keep my foot against the door. Sure enough.