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I've gone through this explanation or monologue
a couple times now, once talking to Cliff,
and then Sunday to Mike, recounting what I
was talking about to Cliff. So let me try it
again. I forget exactly how the conversation
with Cliff got around to religion and Buddhism
specifically. But anyway, I was saying that
Buddhism was sort of protestant Hinduism.
There's a fundamental difference though,
because Buddhism says there is no soul,
which is an important thing in Hinduism.
Hinduism is very inclusive, and almost
anything can really just be another part
of Hinduism, but saying there is no soul
was really enough to make it something
separate. A funny thing, though, there is no way in India you could deny that reincarnation happy. It's not something that they would even think to question, and if you were to even express doubt, they would just not really get what you were trying to say, or think you're brain damaged, or something. Anyway, it's an assumption that wouldn't even get to the point of being examined. So there's a thing of how Buddhism could have reincarnation without there being a soul to reincarnate. So you have to look at the Buddhist understanding of psychology, or how they explain what normally people think of as a self. For them, it's just a bundle of thoughts and memories. So a particular memory of something happening arises in a particular person. Most memories get contained in the body they happened to, but it is possible that these memories and thoughts could float along to some other body after this one dies, and that's what you see with reincarnation. The self, what people think of as a soul, is just a bundle of these mental things, but it's not some permanent kernel, a soul that people might talk about. It's valuable, I think, to understand that the Buddha was in a cultural situation where there were actually quite a few enlightened people. It happened all the time. It was very rare, but it did happen. Even now in India you can find real enlightened teachers. One sort of cultural difference between Hinduism and Buddhism, though, is that it's more common and popular, or accepted maybe, to have a little cult around an enlightened teacher. In Buddhism monasteries, certainly there have often been enlightened teachers, and they do have direct transmission, but the teacher doesn't become quite so important as it can in some of the Hindu traditions, where the teacher is just about all that holds the little local school together. Buddhist traditions have a wider system that the particular teacher is just a part of, so he's not so pivotal. And on a significantly negative side, in Buddhist school, it could often happen that the teacher would not be a truly enlightened being, and would just be trying to pass the tradition along. But that's neither here nor there. But the importance for me here that the enlightenment thing was already around, and Buddha was really just one of many, is that enlightement itself is actually the same for both, but it gets explained and understood in very different ways. Ways so different that it's a little challenging to try to wrap your head around how they actually are the same thing. But here goes. Sometimes in Hindu tradition, it's called realization of the true self, or just realization. It is about seeing that this personal, individual self that we think is just private and confined to just me is really just a part of, or really just the same as or a manifestation of the universal self. As I remember seeing it in seventh grade social studies with coach Ray, Atman is Brahman. While it can be put as just a cold fact like that to file somewhere, realization or enlightenment is actually seeing and experiencing that this is true for yourself, which is quite a different thing from just having an intellectual understanding of it. I'll try to go into that a bit later. Anyway, so in Buddhism, enlightenment would be explained in a very different way. And I would say probably they wouldn't want to just give it an explanation. Actually Hinduism would probably be the same way, so my discussion here is actually hypocryphal. But for Buddhism, enlightenment is seeing that really, when we think we see a self, there's actually nothing there. There is no self particular to us, other than there just being thoughts that arise. And thoughts arise everywhere. In that way, anything that might be mistaken as a person focus of consciousness and thoughts is really not different from the universe having thoughts, or just thoughts arising in the world. We are not separate selves or souls, just part of the greater world, which itself is having thoughts and is conscious. So that's the stuff I was telling Cliff and Mike. I didn't go into some other stuff that has really pointed me in the direction of this analysis. It's stuff from modern psychology that really gives me insight into basically the "religious experiences" that are the basis for what is called enlightenment. The explanations for enlightenment are actually more like rationalizations, or attempts to explain the experience, or to come to an understanding of how the world works, given what is a very deep and powerful bit of knowledge or experience. It's so deep and profound that you pretty much have to readjust what you think of the world to accomodate it. That's why you have these really weird edge cases, explanations of what the world is like that are very different from what people would normally think. The power of the experiences are enough that these world views can stick around, even if it's quite rare. They are rare, but common enough and repeatable enough that it can be a stable, if isolated, pocket of understanding what the world is like. The experiences are also very compelling and attractive, so it ends up being a worldview that you want to move toward, even if you only have a glimpse of it. So one of the big things leading me towards this view was a book, My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor. We read it for Aimee's book club meeting. She was a stroke victim, and the stroke knocked out a portion of her brain that controls the boundary of where you think you end, and the rest of the world begins. So she had that feeling of being one with the universe. And I was looking at that, and it was exactly the same sort of description I had been seeing of what enlightenment or realization was like. So I started thinking that maybe enlightenment really was just this experience of your personal boundaries being dissolved. It happens rarely, but it does happen to people sometimes. And then I came across the same thing in TiHKAL. I think it was Ann, actually, who had a chapter going over all the mental spaces you might encounter using the psychoactive materials they were talking about. I really should go look them up and be precise about what she called them all. One was the one with the universe thing, some kind of expansiveness. Or maybe there were two that were very similar to that. You also have just ecstasy, and feeling good about things. I'm sure that doesn't hurt. But there's something about dissolving your personal limited ego that is just pleasant, I would say. And then there's flow. I've only recently started considering a connection between enlightenment and flow, but I think there is something there. They are different things, but I think it's probably reasonable to say that an enlightened life would be one that is more filled up with flow. I don't want to really attempt to explain what flow is, but the shortest explanation I have is that it is being in "the zone", as they say. And the best way I would put it is that an an enlightened person seems to always be in the zone. So they do really seem quite exceptional. I saw a story one time about a tea master who had gotten a samurai angry one time, and they were going to have a duel. Unfortunately, the tea master didn't know how to fight with a sword, so he went to a sword master to get some help. He tried to show him some stuff, but it was pretty hopeless. So they had some tea. And of course, the tea master showed his mastery mind when performing the ceremony, and the sword master recognized that if he could just be like that when holding the sword, he would have a chance. And that's what happened. He managed to get into his no-mind standing there with his sword up as the samurai came up to him. Ready, or whatever it was. And the samurai recognized his determination or presence, or whatever it was, and didn't see an opening, so he backed off. For a long time, I was understanding this story as that there is an aspect to mastery that is general above the particular domain or skill. But now I have a real term for it, flow. Flow is reflected in any kind of mastery of some task where it kind of comes natural, and you get totally absorbed in it. In enlightenment, you are totally absorbed in all of life. But still, we don't really quite have a connection between flow and enlightenment. Well, you can think of it this way. Flow is like a little piece of enlightenment. For a little bit, you forget about yourself as you get absorbed in doing what you are doing. Unfortunately, you can't become enlightenment by just having more and more flow in your life. Enlightement tends to be more random, and can only come on its own, with really very little that any effort can do for it. But that's another conversation. Still, experiencing flow gives you a taste for actual enlightenment, so it can help motivate you on a real path towards it. So a question is, how can a computer use knowledge that people have discovered. One part of handling this question is to consider how a computer itself contains knowledge, which is certainly going to be different from how people do it. And in there, it has to go from however people store knowledge to how computers store knowledge, however they use it. At this point, most of the knowledge that computers have and use, if they can be said to have knowledge at all, is merely sort of implied by how the programs are written. Kind of implicit in the code. It's more like a computer acts in a certain way, and merely implicit in that is the knowledge. In some sort of expert systems, there is something like a more separated form of knowledge that gets stored explicitly, and presumably that's the kind of thing we will want if we are going to have an intelligent computer. Some kind of intermediate kind of knowledge representation and storage. I guess it's a question of really what kind of knowledge storage people have. Anyway, people also use writing as a form of knowledge storage, and luckily, that's something that computers can just store directly. But people don't just remember knowledge as texts directly--we have some other kind of storage to use is, and certainly a computer, if it is going to use texts, can't just use them directly either, it would need some internal kind of representation that it can use, plus the process and mechanisms for going back and forth between the text or language form and the internal form. People learn bits of that mechanism, but they have some kind of powerful hardware support for that, which constrains language to be how it is. So there's the question of learning by internalizing knowledge that people have. There is a separate ability to acquire knowledge on your own. I guess they must be related, but they are not the same thing. Most knowledge isn't just acquired de novo. People get a lot of help in different ways. And it's often not just complete transfer, but a combination where you figure some things out by yourself, but you get hints and guidance from what other people have done. So learning is a social experience. And that's very critical. An intelligent agent must be a social agent. And to be a social agent requires a broad variety of emotional abilities, and an ability to understand the motivations and perspectives of others. I went down to California for the kung fu tournament. I put the videos on youtube. I had fun. We went to the Intel museum and the Monterrey Aquarium and played a little on the beach, though it was cloudy and pretty cold. I got to do some forms on the beach, which was nice. I saw Cliff a couple of times. He seems to be doing well. They went to Italy and Greece and some other places. He described it as a "baby moon", some stuff they wanted to get in before trying more seriously to have kids. To save myself some effort, I'm going to copy some stuff I wrote about it in an e-mail to Aimee: What I did on Tuesday was to go down and visit the Berkeley campus. Grace's niece graduated from there, which made me think of it. I went to see the offices of two people that I read quite a bit of, George Lakoff and John Searle. Lakoff is a linguist and political writer, and Searle is a philosopher who works in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Searle also came up with the Chinese room argument against Strong AI. The office they had for Lakoff in their directory was actually just the office for the linguistics department. I noticed that there was also a Robin Lakoff with an office there that I walked by, and she is his ex-wife. The office they had listed for Searle didn't have his name on it, but the bulletin board next to it did have a poster with something from him on it. Both were kind of tucked in the basements of the buildings they were in. I also went to the bookstore. I got a Berkeley t-shirt. And I looked through the textbooks. One in linguistics seemed interesting with the title: _What is Meaning?_. Something about formal semantics. I bought a copy, so more stuff for me to read. But I think it's going to jump to close to the top. Now that I'm back, I need to finish _A Short History of Nearly Everything_. [also from that email] So, while I was wandering around Berkeley, I decided if there was anything I would want to study, it would be computational linguistics. I've already got several linguistics books on my pile. And I have a programming project that I've been wanting to do that is related to language modelling. Plus there's some other speech recognition stuff I've been wanted to play some more with. I've also gotten a little bit further that if I were to write a book, I'd be interested in doing something about being happy as an atheist. It seems like a bit of a gap that could get filled. Atheists so often come across as being rather unhappy and angry. And I was thinking how religions don't seem so much to focus on being happy as much as they could. With the whole positive psychology area of research, it's possible to really focus on that. So it would make sense for me to get the _Happiness Project_, and I'm going to try to, soon. Grace got me drinking coconut milk. I learned how to chop open the coconuts properly, with four chops in a square at the top. These coconuts were not the usual kind you see, the dark brown spherical ones-- They were young and still had a light brown colored woody pulp around them, and had been cut into basically a diamond shape, with one side flat and the other in a pointy cone. How it works is that you can sit it on the flat part, and in the cone side, it is fairly thin at the middle of the cone, which makes it easier to chop through it right there. It works pretty well. The first way Grace was doing it, was chopping enough to make a staw whole in the flat part, but doing it the right way, it ends up just being like a cup full of the milk which you can just drink. We tried to take a case on the plane, but they said no coconuts because of the liquid. That's kind of sad, but what can you do. The deal is, there was some remedy that said if you drink the coconut milk for a month, it will cure your gout, and one of Grace's relatives had a gout attack and tried it and it worked for him. I'm very skeptical. A person can have one gout attack and then never again. I'm not sure if the coconut did it. But the stuff is a bit of a laxative. Seems like all the other stuff I take for it is also like that. I don't know what the connection is. And then there's something that I've heard Chomsky say several times without explanation. After slavery was sort of abolished, they kind of brought it back by making black life illegal. That really seemed like it needed some further explanation, like what laws they were exactly. And when I looked into it, I found that this was something discussed by Douglas Blackmon in Slavery by Another Name. OK. I think the only law I actually saw mentioned was vagrancy, which was not having a job. And since they didn't have pay stubs, there really wasn't much way to prove you had a job, other than getting someone to say you did. Probably there were other things like that, I guess. What they would do, is scoop them up on a fake charge like that, and put them to work basically like a slave again. It happened quite a bit, up to world war 2. And it was just an excuse, really. They probably weren't any white guys that got arrested for that. Chomsky says something interesting. Classical economics says that protectionism is bad. You are better off if you are a country with raw materials and little industry to just import and buy cheaper foreign manufactured goods. But historically this has just been wrong. The U.S. is maybe the best example, because they used protectionism (tariffs) to support the local manufacturing unitl it built up, against the recommendations of economists like Adam Smith at the time. South Korea built up with something like that, too. We still push this idea on underdeveloped countries, but we use different methods of coercion to force it on them, like the INF. And it seems simple why it should be. If you rely on local manufacturing, and protect them from foreign competition, they have an opportunity and natural push to improve and do well, but if they have to compete with established companies, they don't get a chance. But the rich established companies don't want that competition, so we have the whole American imperial system. Maybe that's why we're style using imperial measurements and not the metric system. We're keeping our empire. Practicing for the kung fu tournament every day seems to be helping my form. My broadsword now swishes quite a bit when I'm doing that form, and everybody now moves to the back of the room instead of sitting on the side. I guess it's not necessarily so good if I don't look safe. And I'm not sure if I have proper bagua taste. It seems like I'm using a little too much external, muscle power to do it. Not cultivating enough internal power. So I don't know if I'm impeding myself By practicing like that. And the Fanzi Quan is getting pretty solid. It seems a bit like I'm doing it anaerobically, like a sprint, and I have to catch my breath at the end. A few times it seems like it's been even maybe a little too hard. I need to get into better shape, maybe. The reviews for _the Last Airbender_ are tremendously bad. I was thinking I might go see it this morning, but I didn't get up. If I hadn't seen those reviews, I might have been more likely. Seems like they're saying it doesn't make any sense. Oh well. That can happen. And with all the little kids, they probably can't act. I don't know if that contributions to it not making sense, but I would guess that poor acting can make it seems like people are doing things for no important reason. Man, the market going down again. That's not so nice. And for me, I'm not so bothered, but I told my mom to get into it because it clearly looked like it had some more ways to go up, but it turns out she got in at what has been the yearly peak. Ouch. Not completely in stocks, only half, actually. The rest in bonds, so it's not quite so bad as it might have been. But it makes me feel bad. For me, though, it means that I'm really going to need to finally look for work, which is probably good anyway. What I've been thinking, though, is that it is more important to me to support a company that does something I think is important. So I'm thinking maybe in the medical industry. There is so much room there to improve things with good programs. In fact, I saw a thing recently talking about our deficit and debt problems, and the big issue was rising medical costs. If we could have computer doctors that could lower health care costs, that would actually solve a lot of our looming financial problems. Some of that, though, was just Bush being a pinhead. He increased spending without increasing revenue. If we like what we are spending money on, we should pay for it. But The regressives were using a policy called "starve the beast" They cut revenue, in the belief that that would make us stop spending on the programs they don't like. But that's just another damned lie. It didn't happen like that. We didn't stop spending, and won't. We just borrowed. We need to cut the military and end empire. Of course, that would mean getting rid of jobs. Ouch, I'm looking at the news. Jobs are looking bad. Well, that was trippy. I just watched a little talk on Netflix by Chalmers Johnson. He's got several books talking about American Empire. And looking for stuff, I saw there is a website about an American Empire project. It seems a little bit grim though, because it's not so likely to get your freedoms back once the tyranny of empire has taken over the domestic government. Tough to deal with. But Britain was able to give up empire. Maybe we could, but there are very bad things that would happen. The worst is all the jobs that would be lost in the "military-industrial complex". That alone is enough to keep congress out of action. Obama seemed like maybe he was campaigning to reduce our military involvement, but maybe not so much. Like Chomsky was saying, the way he called Iraq a "strategic blunder" show that he isn't really opposed to the whole imperial system. The Soviets and Nazis said the same sort of thing. But maybe he just got into a situation where it was just unwise to anger the military folk. Maybe he is open to change. But it's a dangerous thing. The people whom he'd be threatening are people who carry guns around. One of the more interesting things I think that Johnson pointed out is that the CIA is unconstitutional. The constitution requires that people be able to see where their money is spent, which you can't get in the CIA. It also just doesn't work. They couldn't tell that the Soviet Union was about to collapse. They should just get rid of it. And it has become basically the president's private army. That's just incredible that people would let something like that happen. The praetorian guard. But again, it would be dangerous to put out of work basically lawless people who carry guns around. But we could find stuff for them to do, I'm sure. The whole thing reminded me of what Thomas Jefferson said: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." I'm not so sure violence isn't called for, though I guess I'm getting more admiration for the people who are just trying to talk all this stuff out. And I saw Bryan Magee talking to a Marxist, Herbert Marcuse. You just don't see that many Marxists. And he was saying, sure there were some problems with it, but he thinks it's still right. I guess the big thing that was wrong, that I've been hearing about forever, is that Capitalism is stronger than they expected. Something about maybe they didn't see how corporations would be able to manipulate and control the people and government. And that's probably not such a good thing about capitalism. So, whatever. Happy Tau Day! Grr. I walked in, and there was no music playing so I go to put stuff in the jukebox, and Melissa said hi and Britney waved, and I said hi to Melissa but I didn't wave back to Britney. That still makes me sad. She was at the other side of the bar, and I was thinking that I was going to go over and say hi in a minute, but still it was sad. And when I did, she was not so happy and said something about it. I think she's cute. She so little. But I had to go and be unfriendly like that. Melissa had a lot of stuff going on and was really talkative. We didn't hug when I first came in, but maybe a couple of hours into it, I was over there, and told Melissa to come here, and she leaned in and said what, and I gave her a hug. I think she liked that. But I had done something I was sorry about. Jerome brought in some food, which was very yummy, and she was saying how good it tasted, and I said, well she was starving, and it felt kind of mean. And she didn't really react too badly, but it seemed like there was something. At least I felt bad. So I needed to do something. And then it seems like she was a little bit more open and talkative after that. though that might have been anything. The weird stuff that happens with that girl. So somewhere in there, Bryan Magee interviewed Chomsky. Now that was trippy. His series is about philosophy, and Chomsky is right outside the edge of philosophy. And I think maybe he was saying Chomsky had trained in or studied philosophy, I don't know. But in any case, Chomsky's linguistics has a lot of implications for philosophy, especially since a lot of modern philosophy is concerned with language and meaning. In there, there was some talk that a lot of philosophical claims are actually empirical questions and can be shown to be wrong. The blank slate idea, mainly. So Chomsky is kind of Kantian. The thing that struck me the most, though, was at the end. Magee asks a question that I've seen so many people ask, is there a connection between Chomsky's linguistics works and his politics. But Magee does it in a different way--he proposes an explanation by suggesting that Chomsky, lets see if I can get this right, has rejected authority in the two different areas. Let me look for a direct link. OK something about how liberalism and empiricism arose up together as a rejection of authority. But he rejected empiricism, which has the blank slate idea, and he also says that liberalism now supports authoritarianism. So Chomsky has to go into a pretty complicated explanation of what went on. He has to go back to Humboldt (who influenced JS Mill) and the original basis for the anti-authoritarian political view. The thing then was that there was that it was really pre-capitalist. There was a big difference in power between rulers and most people, but it hadn't yet happened that there were big capitalists that had a lot of power. Now, really, liberalism has come to just support keeping the people subjugated to the rich corporations, which is really opposed to the original idea. It's really a tangent to the discussion and it totally sidesteps any question of the connection between his linguistics and politics. He could have just said there isn't a connection. But the way Magee asked it, that's the kind of thoughtful response we get. He had to answer the question as it was asked. I just watch a bunch of conversations on philosophy. They are Bryan Magee talking with various contemporary philosophers about different historical philosophers. Well, I think it's from the early seventies. That was all on a website with documentaries that links them all together, but unfortunately, it actually doesn't seem to get them all, so I've need to look on YouTube for some of the others. I'm looking at the one on Wittgenstein. I had to pause, though. I have the Tractatus somewhere, but I didn't get through it. And listening to him talk about it, it just seems wrong to me. That's probably the reaction I had when I tried to read it, too. I heard Searle's theory of the philosophy of language a long time ago, and next to it, the early Wittgenstein just seems silly. But even Wittgenstein himself thought it was wrong, so there. But something I wanted to think about was that a while back I remember Doug talking about reading the Tractatus and thinking it was all that, with a cherry on top. Whatever. I still don't know what the later Wittgenstein had to say. Maybe that's worth something. And Wittgenstein was a mechanical engineer first. So there's hope. Life is being kind of easy. I've kind of filled up the refrigerator again with my own comfort food. Lately, I've been eating a lot of tuna fish salad. It's nice because I can just get a piece of bread and scoop a spoonful onto it. And I don't even make another spoon dirty, because I just keep the spoon with it in the refrigerator. Very easy. And I have some canned chili in a pot, and when I feel like, I make a chili-dog. A little cariety, maybe. And I made a pork roast, so I'm nibbling on that. I think I actually really prefer the taste of beef, though it's more expensive, so a while back, I was making pork roast more often than beef roast. I'll have to think about that. And I think maybe pork isn't quite as good cold. Still, more easy food. In making the gravy, I used some veal demi-glace. I think that really didn't work. Doesn't really taste right. Live and learn. I'm trying to just eat when I'm hungry and not eat more than I really want. That's often not how I eat. I'll eat according to a schedule, and as much as there is, which will usually more than I really need to, the way my mom cooks. I've also got a bunch of boiled eggs, and the tomatoes are coming in from the garden. I was a bit bummed at the kung fu class. It looks like my kung fu shoes were making marks on the carpet, the way I tend to slide when doing the moving exercises. So I have to stop using them. And then everybody was saying they really slid too much, and I didn't do as well when I was using them. Too unstable and I didn't look solid and sure. Oh well, I thought I had the shoe thing handled, but I guess not. I like them as regular shoes, but I guess I'm going to have to find something else, expecially for the tournament. I told Melissa that she makes me happy. She said aw. It's not the same as saying I love her, and I haven't. I don't think I've felt like it. But I think it says something more. And it seems quite possible that you could love someone and they still might not make you happy. So I thought it was something. I'm still struck by the biochemistry of love. There's three different hormonal systems, and until recently I only really knew of the one. The "in love" amphetamine-like one. It makes you giddy, and overoptimistic, and you forget about any problems. Manic, perhaps. But after that, you get endorphins. Pain-killers. So the little bad things are not as irritating. And building up, though it's after a while, it's the main thing, is the oxytocin--the bonding. It's just what you want to stay with. I'm not positive about this one, I guess. After a while, the painkillers play out, and the irritating bits become irritating as you lose the stuff mitigating their painfulness, but you still want to be with them because of the bonding. I guess it's a little sad to think of it in a mechanical or chemical sense, but the experiences are something to appreciate as feelings. Listening to the Chomsky thing on Netflix again. I found the metaphor that I couldn't remember before. When asked how the government pursuades the media to say what they want, he says it's like asking how does the government pursuade GM to increase profits. Now there's a metaphor. Happy First Day of Summer! Dude goes on to talk about 6 virtues and 24 strengths. Seems like he needs you to go to the website and take the test, the strength survey in particular. I guess. I watched Chomsky talking about Haiti. Kind of long, maybe. In there somewhere he talked about the Bolivia water revolt as an example of real democracy. OK. The chapter on the future was clearly just a shortened version of his bestselling book _Learned Optimism_. Future as in the voluntary factors of happiness concerning the future. And optimism is about how we thinking about good and bad things that happen. If it's a bad thing, the reason for it is local in time and place, bur if it's a good thing, the reason is permanent and pervasive. It doesn't seem like that's logically consistent, but apparently, it's beneficial to think that way, and you can learn to be like that by arguing for reasons like that when you think otherwise. OK. No more, I'm a bad person who will never do well and good things that happen are just lucky. It's the bad things that are the aberrations. They had a boxing game at Dan McGuinness. I didn't try it, though maybe I should have. I did see some stuff in watching the folks do it. People do really well with hammerfist. Seems like you would break your hand if you put all you had into a knuckle punch. And the really hard hits had this really big windup, like throwing a baseball. Seems like you would see them from a mile away. I would want to do a punch with as little of that windup as possible, but I'm sure I wouldn't have the power that some of them were getting. There was one guy would actually took a running start. He was the first one really doing it, and he got the best score several times, so he got extra shots over and over as he got better. Tall guy. But lots of other people who were going at it were really much better hitters. I think the hardest hitter was kind of tubby. One guy, who looked a little asian, seemed like he must have had some kind of martial art training, because he had pretty good form and hit pretty hard without just looking like he had thrown a baseball. I don't know exactly what kind of action the thing had. It looked like it might have been a little sensitive to not having the force hit straight on. I guess I wimped out in not trying it because I didn't want to embarass myself. I suppose that's a problem for me. Super Chris said he's been doing chi gung, and it's really helped him with back pain issues he has had. He's got some videos from Dr. Yang Jwing-Ming. So another fan. He said he'd actually be interesting in being one of those real, full time martial arts students. OK, Chris. The one on the present made a distinction between pleasures and gratifications. Pleasures have direct sensory component and emotional responses. Being warm, eating food, that sort of thing. The happiness from them can be increased by spacing them out so you don't get used to them, by savoring and by mindfulness. I guess. Gratifications are things you do that you like. From what he is saying they actually don't have emotional content in themselves. It's all about the flow, which is a whole subject in itself, and he's going to go on and talk about it. He actually spent a couple of days one time talking to Mickey McFlow Csichzentimihalytzdsf, however that's spelled. So he's clearly into it. Well, my mind was blown so I had to go out. I went to Karaoke with Super Brad at Mulligans Trinity. Didn't really know anyone, and Brad waved hi when I went in, but I didn't talk to him. Chip was there and Lee was there. Lee did a few songs. And there's the little curly headed girl that I thought I remembered being with Lee, but she was hanging out with Brad. She and Brad did that Meatloaf thing, I think it was "Paradise by the Dashboard Light". One song I was thinking of, Righteous Brothers, "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" A couple guys did it. Mangled it enough that I could not sing along with it and get the tune right. It's a pretty tough one. And somebody attempted "King of Pain". Now I knew that was a tough one, and I kind of had some admiration for him to have given it a shot, and I was hoping he was going to be able to pull it off. But I don't know what he was thinking. It was out of his range. So it sounded pretty sad. But that's Karaoke. I never did Karaoke when I was drinking, and it's not likely that I would start now, but I thought of the song I would want to do. Bill Wither's "Lean on Me" I think I actually don't quite no it, despite now singing along with it almost every week now at Bardog. I need to go out and learn it for real. The music is piano, so I could probably actually do it the whole way. I may have to hunt down the music for it, even. Actually, a bunch of his stuff would be good. There are four songs of his that I play as a set on the jukebox. My mind was blown by the chapter in _authentic happiness_ of the section on voluntary factors of happiness, dealing with feelings about the past. I had to concede that I'm fairly negative about my past, but it when through some things to try to change that, trying to have more gratitude and being forgiving. And it talked about how we have a cultural belief that we are pretty determined by our past. Including the Freudian belief that things happening in our childhood are very important and need to be worked through. When people studied whether that was really true, it turns out to be false. Also, we believe in venting in this culture. That also turns out to be provably wrong to do. So, there was this cute, tall, thin blonde girl, maybe six feet. She was hanging out with shorty, kind of a tubby short black guy. And I was hanging around to see if they were going to leave together. And they were together at the bar when the tunes stopped. But some guy came in, and was standing between them. Maybe she was with him, or she just knew him. I don't know. I felt bad for shorty. I left. In _authentic happiness_ there is an interesting suggestion. He talks about the correlation between sociable and having a high level of natural happiness. And sort of related to that, there is a correlation to being married and being happy. I had just heard that. But the interesting thing he suggested was that the causality might not go from being social or married to being happy. It may well be that happy people are just more sociable and likely to get married. Or there might be something else in there causing them. But I think that it makes sense that naturally happy people are just more likely to become more sociable. Behavior coming from that would be pretty clearly rewarded. And I'll admit I didn't used to be very happy and that kept me off by myself. Now that's mostly my habit. But I think I've become more happy. I don't know if it means I will become more sociable. I would expect it's a matter of development and habits that get rewarded when you are happy. I ate the first tomato from my garden. I didn't let it get completely red, but it was mostly ripe. There was another one that was close to the ground that had been eaten away about 80%, so I was thinking whatever got that might come back for this one, and I decided it was good to get it now. It was good. I went in for jury duty yesterday. Lots of yacking from Clyde Carson, who is in charge of it. He actually said something that some people need to hear, I guess. He was talking about how it was a hardship, or should be, for you to miss work. You wouldn't want to come back after having been gone and they find that they didn't really need you. Seems like I remember a manager at FedEx talking about that. Anyway, he said, if you don't like your job, you should find one that you do like. Uh huh. The kind of problem with that is that there are some things out there that need to be done, that no one will like. But still, it's a fair thing to say. I was in the very first jury pool to be selected. Number 27. So I didn't hear all the other things judges an places that were selected for. Mine was division seven criminal court with Judge Lee Coffee. I'm not supposed to talk about the case, so I guess I don't have anything to say about that. We waiting in the lobby for a while. Sixth floor of 201 Poplar. There weren't enough seats for everybody at the first part, which was kind of bad. And the bathrooms on that floor didn't work. We got in to his courtroom at about 11:30, and he let us go to lunch til 1:00 and then stuff would start happening. There were forty-five people in the pool, but coming back in from lunch, they selected a group of twenty to be the main people they looked at. We had filled out some fairly simple forms answering a few questions, checking our eligibility, and had we been involved in stuff or did with think we might have biases. I don't know if I said anything wrong, but I was not one of the twenty. Maybe I had been preselected out, but seems like they might well have been mostly random. He gave a quick fifteen minute lecture about the law. That was pretty interesting. And we got to the voir dire. Which means something like truth-telling. The prosecution when first and combing a bigger speech explaining things with questions for the main twenty to weed them out. And the defense attorney said he would be quick, and he was quick. Talked about other stuff and asked more questions. Then they narrowed people down. They didn't need more than the first twenty. I guess they might have. They agreed to the fourteen they had. Jury selection could have taken a long time, but they got it done on the first day. The judge said to the rest of us that we were done and didn't need to come back the next day. The guy in charge had been a little confusing before because he had said maybe the judge would say one thing, and the bailiff might say something else, and we should listen to the bailiff, because they wouldn't interrupt the judge if there was any change. My understanding was that they might still need more, and the judge would sned us back to the pool, but they might get everything done, and that's what news the bailiff might say. But in this case, the bailiff didn't seem to tell us anything different. So it seemed maybe unclear. Also, Mr. Carson gave us what seemed a very clear and simple statistic. Combining people done on Monday, and those that take longer than Friday, is only two percent. I think maybe there were 400 people that day, so it seemed like we could only expect that maybe 8 people would be done on Monday. So I had additional reason to be doubtful. In just our group alone that was thirty people who were done on Monday. So I was maybe a little uncertain, but I had reason to believe that we were done. It seems like quite a few of us in that group were uncertain. The deal I understood was that if they didn't want you in the first group, you would go back to the pool, unless they got all the people they needed. So I went back to the room with the jury pool. It was 4:00, and they had said it closes at 4:30. Nobody there. I think some people asked at the office. Several people told me we were done. I'm reasonable certain we were, but like I said, it seems like there was room for doubt. One thing I did get, though. A judge could cite you for contempt of court for various things, like being late or not showing up or wearing inappropriate clothes. Mr. Carson couldn't though. He had one thing he could do, though. He could make you come the next week. So if there really was a problem, they'll tell me and I'll just have to come again. One thing, though. He had this clear assumption that no one wanted to be there. And I thought that unreasonable, or at least inconsistent, because he had given a speech the first time and repeated it again this time about how important and valuable jury service is. A privilege even, that not everyone used to have. There was aa Judge Ward that cam in and gave a speech about that, too, and thanking us. You used to have to been a white man who owned property. OK. So he asked a question, now I forget exactly how it was put, something like if anyone didn't want to hear the judge say you're done and don't have to come back. Being a contrarian, I rasised my hand up a little, though I'm sure it was one of those rhetoric questions that he didn't expect anyone to say yes to. And he actually tried to say something to me about it. I must not have understood the question, so it was a bit of a mental test. I guess that happens to me sometimes. I'll say something unusual, maybe not what the crowd would say, and people will think I'm just stupid. Here's the thing about jury duty, though. They mentioned three ways you are called on to serve. And presumably they mean the government. You can vote. You can serve in the military. And you can serve on a jury. Voting is a scam. I won't go into it here. The military is pretty well worse. They talked about how soldiers take an oath to defend the constitution. I was thinking, if I had to swear an oath to the constitution, and they gave me a gun, there would be a lot of dead elected officials. But then there's the jury. It turns out that people getting together and deciding issues is just about the ideal according to what I'm seeing Anarchist talk about as a way to handle things. And it's really a place where the rubbers hits the road, where an individual can make a difference in a legal society. One of the lawyers in the voir dire was saying the jury does not get to decide whether the law is OK. That's just a lie. You totally can decide that. I found this case to be a real test of what I thought. It was a bad situation. Over lunch, I needed to take a long walk to think about things. I walked down past Bardog, but I didn't go into, because I didn't really have time to get anything. I also went into the big First Tennessee branch, which I only ever see at night. They've got offices, too. Anyway, I didn't get on there, but I would have liked to have been on a jury. They had so many people though, that they clearly wanted to give people a chance to get out early. I watched a trailer for _the last airbender_. The movements may be based on bagua, but it's all just some kind of magic. That doesn't give me a warm happy feeling. So I don't know. Actually a bit irritating because the movement have real function, but maybe it would be obscured by here just being some way to cast fancy spells. So I'm not so enthusiastic any more. But it is bagua in real popular culture, and mostly people have never even heard of it, so maybe more people will, which is good. And I know it will give me stuff to talk about. I used don't talk much. I might even watch it more than once, which I haven't done for a movie in years. Li Lao Shr talked about watching the Karate Kid movie. She said it was funny. David was asking, probably not real wushu. She said it was just fighting. OK. I need to go see it. I didn't when mom was here. Seems like I just slept on Sunday. Mom has gone back. Now I've got bunches of food. She is still buying me a bunch of food, in addition to just making a bunch. I think I've got leftovers for the week, and a second watermelon, and another pint of strawberries. I guess it's a hobby. And they said people are dying to defend the constitution. No they aren't. That's just another lie. But it made me wonder, maybe there is something wrong with the constitution the way things are going. I guess it supports a system of power that the corporations have been able to take over. That is an issue when you have a system of elected representatives, because the choices among those can easily be restricted to compliant people. And controlling voters is pretty straightforward. Happy Ides of June! Heather came in, and I said Hi Heather about as friendly as I could. A couple of times, I think. And she was walking back down the bar, she said hi and touch my back as she got behind me, but I didn't turn around. And then she hugged several of the other guys. She brought in a friend, maybe Megan or Meg. And in 15 minutes, they had left with a couple of guys. Didn't say goofbye, which James commented on. I think the music I played was especially effective. I played a set of three girl songs, which several seemed to like: "I will survive", "YMCA", and "Dancing Queen". and a little after that, I had "On the road again", and really, a lot of people left in that. It was getting pretty late. So it was a thin but die-hard crowd that was left for me Bill Withers set, "lean on me", "Just the two of us" , "Ain't no sunshine", and "use me". So, this time we were talking when I was leaving. I said, I still want to see her some time, and she said, "I know". Getting tired of hearing it. And she has been busy, so maybe just hasn't gotten around to me. But for it to just be something on her list of things to do. Grr. I can and do just sit and watch her for hours. That's kind of pitiful, but it's something to do. I went out to a meetup meeting of memphis writers. Spring's group. I've always liked Spring. Very friendly. Sweet. Like science and science fiction though she doesn't seem to really have such a big technical background, and that sometimes gives me an opportunity to explain things, which I like, to someone who is interested, which is a bonus. One thing I explained that was unusual. Spring was saying she had trouble spelling. And she said she always had trouble with "their" I think I didn't really even focus on that at first because it so never been a problem for me that I had a little trouble conceiving it as a problem and considering it. So I mentioned the example "weird". It's sort of a shortening of wayward, and "e" was pronouched a little more like "ay", the way we say "eh", so it was more like "way-urd" and that comes out weh-ird or weird. Anyway, so I thought that might help with their, which of course it does. It's just "they" and you change the 'y' to an 'i' and add an 'r' which is the possessive ending back for them. Like it is on your and our. Their. I don't see how people can do "thier". Just seems wrong to me, but I guess if you made it as a mistake a few times, it might get confusing. I hope that helped her. There was a woman Katharine who seemed nice. Somehow it came out that she knew about websites. Some she studied in college, apparently. I'm not sure what that would be. And she's a business analyst now. I asked her if she had a personal website I might see, and i think she said a couple, but she wouldn't tell me about them. Oh well. I thought maybe I would be able to google them, but I didn't get her last name. Makes it hard. I was saying I wasn't working and she asked if I was looking, and maybe they were looking for something. I didn't really express much interest. And the waittress looked really familiar, but I just couldn't place her. She finally figured it out that I knew her through Angela E., who is a close friend of hers. Julie. I should try to see her some time.
On thing that Spring was telling me was that
tai chi was one of the styles in the last
airbender. Water bending. I did get around to
and apparently bagua is airbending. Or airbending
is based on bagua. Louie had said it was
in the movie, but I didn't get that
airbending itself was from bagua.
Makes me feel a little better about
having studied it for three years.
I get really sad when I even consider not going
down, so I just should concede and not mess with it.
I think I was kind of getting angry with Melissa
because she hasn't made any time for me. But
I didn't feel like being honest and telling her.
I said I wouldn't be able to make next Sunday
because of jury duty, but I would probably
try to come before. Now I'm not so sure.
And with my money where it is, I would need
to take some more out, and I don't feel like
doing that, at least not today. Well,
I say honest. I didn't think she would like
it. That's generally the way lies are.
So Cliff came in there. Maybe after 1. And
he said he was having some trouble with his
wife. He said how long they were together.
Then Melissa told the story of her marriage.
They had been together since she was seventeen,
and got married a few years later, twenty something,
I forget. And she had two things she asked for,
but he couldn't manage it. And then at some point,
it was like fifteen years, she was done. Then
he decided to actually change and took real
steps, but that was too late for her, she
was done. Happy for him and hope it works
out, but she had moved on. Done. Yeah.
I finished up a couple of documentaries that
I started and didn't finish. One was _We Live In Public_,
about Josh Harris. Kind of a dotcom baby in New York.
Such a narcissist that I had to turn it off.
He had a little millenium cult that had
cameras everywhere. I didn't get it exactly,
but it didn't last too long, a month a year,
I don't know. A few dozen people. Had a gun
range in the basement. Sex and showering on camera.
Then he got a girlfriend and they lived on
camera. There was a camera in the toilet pointing up,
I think. Stupid stuff. Lost all his money.
Got an apple farm. Boradband came along and
Myspace and Facebook, and he sold the farm
and tried that stuff again with lots of
video. He had the idea of a internet tv
station that would replace real networks.
No one bought it and he went bust. Moved
to Ethiopia. Largely to avoid creditors, it seems.
He had this need to be in charge of people,
so I guess he got a plantation or something.
Thoroughly disgusting person.
And I finished up _end of poverty_. Talks
about how now we have sort of extended colonialism.
And "neo-liberalism" or free market stuff is about
maintaining that colonial-style economic system.
National debt in thrid world countries serves
both to redistribute wealth from them to us
and to keep them poor, which we want so we
can continue to exploit them for raw materials.
It talks about the idea of communal property,
such that people who use property have an obligation
to others, at a minimum. The essence of capitalism
is that property is owned individually, and there
are no obligations on the owners. OK. The
solution to poverty, apparently, is communism,
though that called it something like communal something or other.
Fine. One simple step, too, is to forgive the debts.
There was something about how those national
debts were illegal, in that a new government was formed,
but it still had the debt of the old one. OK.
I tied up the tomato plants some more. There was one
that was started to ripen, but had a big chunk
eaten out, so was getting moldy inside. Oh well.
There are some others that have been on there a while.
I'm not sure what's holding them up. The ones
I've had from seed are now really big, just about
as big as the others. But I ran out of string.
I've found a problem with the weave I'm using.
The weave confines them to a plane, and some of
them have just leaned over at an angle in that
plane. To deal with that, I've just gone and put
extra stakes between each plant. Before, there
was one every second plant. This seems to hold
them in ok, now, I think. I might have just broken
down and had a single stake up against each one.
I think this will be good. The sticks I'm using
are very thin. I'm getting a little afraid that a
waind is just going to come and blow over the whole
piece, and I will wish I had used some sturdier sticks
or poles or somthing. They had suggested rebar.
Or maybe just fence posts. Next time I will know.
And it looks like I have baby squash coming in. Bonus.
Dude said his girlfriend was a "pseudo-girlfriend".
That's bush. That's bushleague.
And they recommended moving more toward property taxes
and away from income and consumption taxes. Hmm.
Wow, so I went to the neighborhood Ace Hardware
that just moved in to get some string. They've
got big cans of toluene, just like I remember
you could get. I guess just not in Wal-mart
anymore. I had heard they were thinking
about restricting it because people huff it.
Oh well. They also have sulfuric acid drain
cleaner. I guess that's fairly common.
So something I was writing about on Roxanne's
wall. The idea of heaven and hell didn't
come from Judaism. My guess is that it
came from Greek and Roman culture. Some
bozo wanted to point out that the Jews
did have a life after death, and that's
the important thing. But to me, not,
it's very different. The Jews had a
story that at the end of the world,
all the bodies will rise up. That's
just a very different thing from having
some spirit that goes somewhere else
when you die. The Jews didn't have that.
The Greeks did. And of course the Indians,
though they were more about reincarnation.
The Greeks and Romans had the thing
where you go to the underworld when you die.
The Christians either had to get the
idea of going to heaven or hell from
somewhere, or they just made it up.
Like I said, the Jews did not have that
idea, but the Greeks and Romans did.
Most of the early Christians were
Greek and Roman. It doesn't take
a brain surgeon to connect the dots.
I was hoping that seeing that one
of their big ideas in Christianity
came from the pagans would loosen
their brains up a bit. But as I
said, bozo wanted to shift it
and say that it was a Jewish thing.
I got tired of it. He went on
about the afterlife thing and
not heaven and hell, and when I
said no and went back to it,
he said "did you read what I wrote".
I don't care about him, anyway.
I thing Roxi had moved on.
Also, I was saying that heaven
and hell as places you go after
you die might have been fine stories
back then, but with what we know
about the world and space, there's
no excuse to buy it. In fact,
they pushed the notions to some
place outside the universe, I guess.
Not some actual place we might
be able to see with telescopes or something.
But that's just dishonest. If something
means something, it means what it means,
and you have to go with that. If it
turns out that is wrong, you can't
just look for something else for
it to mean, and maybe that's right.
It's dishonest when you imply
that's what was meant all along,
when it wasn't. And you can look
at hell with the brimstone (sulfur)
as being under the earth. You
can see volcanoes and lava,
so the underworld is fiery.
Like I said, the underworld
was also the Greek and Roman thing.
The heaven was just up in the sky.
Like I said, it's dishonest to
say, no, it really means something else.
But religions people don't have so
much trouble with dishonesty.
On thing Chomsky talks about is how our innate tendency restrict what we can know and appreciate. Not all possible languages will work for us. Not all possible systems of music will sound good to us. The restrictions make it possible for us to attain comparable understandings of things. And he again makes the claim I've seen in other places, that there isn't enough information to learn the language the way we do. There has to be more constraining it. I've never really seen how they come up with that, but I've heard it a lot. I guess they have examples that I haven't seen. So I reinstalled Firefox, whiping my bookmarks. That hasn't been the problem I thought it might be. I saved the old bookmarks file, which is an html page. I can't import it to actually add them back, but I can just have a bookmark to that page, and I can use them just fine. Also, a lot of the bookmarks were stuff from work, and I won't ever need them again, so I don't really even need to have them. I can also make new bookmarks. And finding stuff with google is probably just as easy, anyway. I'm half through the sudoku book now. Five and a half months. I guess I slowed down a bit recently. I've got twenty five more of the medium level difficulty. It's going to get pretty hard. Yeah, it is a google redirection virus. And my antivirus program is just not recognizing it. From what I gather, it's fairly common for there to be things they won't catch. And it's keeping windows update from working. This box was completely overrun a while back, and I didn't wipe it and start over, but just added some clean up stuff. It may well just not have gotten everything, and it finally pickup up something noticeable as a consequence. I may have to break down and start this box over. It's got some stuff I'm not sure where the original disc is, if I even have it. This box has been sort of a place to archive some old stuff maybe I don't use so much. I don't think I'll erase everything, maybe just reinstall windows, but I don't know if I even have rhe disk for that. Oh well. The Chomsky is interesting, though I haven't even gotten very far. A couple of things, dissent is really pretty much eliminated here. There are not socialists in media. This was in the 70s, but it's still true. And it reason is pretty simple. The media are corporations, and there is no reason a socialist would be working in a corporation. It's the mirror of the Soviet Union. Also, if you aren't an approved "expert" in the social sciences, no one listens to you. You have to have credentials. His counterexample was when he was once talked about mathematical linguistics to mathematicians. They didn't care that he didn't have any mathematical degrees or training or anything. They just wanted to hear what he had to say, and that would stand on its own. It just doesn't work like that in the social sciences. And one of his big points is that the political stuff does not require a lot of technical expertise or training like some disciplines. It's really accessible to anyone who takes the time. That's an important point I've heard him talk about in different places. Got it fixed with combofix I think. PCtools just found more junk. So I don't know how it will go. But it looks like I'm not getting the google redirect. It seems like it might have been from a program I downloaded, imgburn. I might have gotten it from the wrong place. And that might be why the discs didn't burn properly. Or it could be something else. And now emacs isn't working right. That might have been some of the stuff it tried to disable. But with all that went on, it could be anything. OK, the emacs problem was just that it wasn't using the right ftp program any more. I don't remember exactly what I had done to fix it before, so I'm not sure what changed. The one I wanted to be used was in perl\bin, but there was one in system32 that was being used instead. I think I may have had the one in system32 deleted before, so it would go next to the one in perl\bin. Maybe it restored it. Or I may have shifted perl\bin in the path and it restored that. This time, I moved perl\bin forward in the path. Whatever it was, it's working now. I knew what to look for because it was a problem before. OK, now I have to say I'm leaning towards going down on Sunday. Kroger has boneless ribeye roasts for $6 a pound. That's pretty expensive, but less than it usually is. I was there on Tuesday, and I think they had one sitting there for something like 8 something a pound. The whole thing was $47. Maybe they were getting ready and were going to mark it down when the thing kicked in. My mouth is watering. I want one, but I'm not sure if I will be able to break down and do it. Mom is coming into town. I doubt seriously she would get one, but she might cook it if I got one. I got the first disc of _The United States of Tara_. She's got "dissociative disorder", more commonly known as multiple personality disorder. I don't know much about it, so I don't know how real it is. The first one is kind of hamfisted with the exposition. And I guess I feel kind of manipulated. I got it on Melissa's recommendation, so I'm prepared not to really like it. It might just seem stupid to me, but I guess I got emotionally involved in the first one. We'll see. Got into a chapter on Chomsky's linguistics. He talks about how he considers linguistics a part of psychology. And other types of psychology ought to also do something like that. It's about how language works, but he looks at just the content of language, without looking at, say, brain details, or performance issues. In his view, there would be a visual organ, or something like that, and you could look at what is done in visual understanding, separated from performance issues. But this seems to me a little bit troublesome, because language is pretty special. We have a technology of written language that lets us look a lot more objectively at the output of some supposed language organ. A visual mental organ doesn't really have that kind of thing. Maybe it's wrong to say we can't look at because it is harder, but I'm not sure I buy the premise that he has, that there is a kind of mental organ for that. The picture is that the mind is a bunch of mental organs, and I'm not sure it's fair to separate them out like that. Just from brain connectivity, you can see that there is a lot more interactivity, and a model of separate organs doesn't seem plausible. Now, I do see the sort of opposite assumption, that the brain is homogenous, and all the parts sort of work the same way. It seems very common, and I have to say, I can't buy that either. So maybe it's helpful to hold a position of different organs, but it will be important to have a way to handle the interaction. And the thing with organs, in the digestive system, you have visible pipes from one to the other, and pretty clear boundaries. In the brain, maybe you have some big boundaraies like that, but you also have very fine-grained interaction, where a single cell can touch just about any other possible system you might come up with. Anyway, so I already have some issues with Chomsky. I guess it's odd that I seem less critical with his politics. Maybe I just haven't thought about that stuff as much. I don't remember if I mentioned it before, and he hasn't mentioned it here, but somewhere Chomsky did say that a bit of the connection between politics and language is looking how people think. He tries to say there is no connection, and he said that part of it was that he wanted to make the point about politics not needing special background and expertise the way linguistics does. So he's kind of being a little inaccurate in order to make a point. Ouch! What the hell was that? The market dropped three and a half percent just today. That hurts. Man, I need to get back into speech and language programming. OK, doing some googling and wikiing, I see that I've gotten it wrong. It's "dissociative identity disorder". There are several dissociative disorders, including that one and a dissociative amnesia. Seeing a little more about it, I'm still pretty skeptical about the show. Also, part of the premise is that she has gone off her meds. I had not heard of any meds for that condition, and from whay I'm seeing, there isn't any. At best they can have something to deal with anxiety. There are plenty of things for that. I think the idea is that only extreme anxiety situations are causing her to transition. I don't know. It's just making it worse for me. Multiple personalities is kind of a dream challenge for actors, but I can't really accept making up something implausible for entertainment. At least, it's losing me. I ran combofix on my other computer. It thought it found something, though not as much as the other. And in both of them, after that was done, my normal virus scanner found stuff. I don't know what that's about. So Ben had a post on the AGI that I've been kind of wanting to reply to. But what I wanted to say is starting to fade. He was saying that people haven't looked so much at a basic system of knowledge entities that makes it possible for us to know. Or something. Something like objects and properties. Didn't really sound like he had much that was actually new. And also, he seemed to be very abstract, taking a system of knowledge as something that could be independent of sensation and perception. The barrista recognized the "west coast" accent of the person in front of me something about the way he said "water". I need to learn the real phonetic alphabet so I can transcribe stuff like that properly. I asked her how she said it, and whe said something like "whut-er". OK. I said I lived out there for four years. She had someone the other day from out there, went to the same school as her. She's from Pacifica. She had said San Francisco, but that's more specific, and I doubt you would know it if you hadn't been out there. I said I lived in Santa Cruz, and had to correct myself, because that's how you would tell someone who doesn't know the area, Boulder Creek. That's not even like Bartlett or Germantown. It's more like Atoka. But she seemed uninterested. I'm clearly not a native Californian. I did the quick scan and it found some junk. Didn't seem to sonsider them very serious threats, but they were redirecting my web pages. So I decided to run a full scan, including a file scan. Didn't find much else, but it found stuff it considered a "generic downloader". It looked to be part of one of the java developer systems. That doesn't seem right. I don't know if it was a real problem. I think another computer also saw it in stuff I have backup up off that computer. It didn't say it was that big a threat either, and I'm not really sure it was anything. A little girl in scrubs. I looked over when she was talking on the phone and smiled. Did she preen? I should pay closer attention. I just got an email that my mom is coming into town next week. They were here a couple of weeks ago. My feeling is displeasure at just not being in control of my life. I should think harder about moving out. I tried to tell Bianca the real story of Epicurus and food. I'm trying to find it on the web, but I'm not seeing it. I've only seen it in Consolations of Philosophy. The first part of it was to eat with others, and I try to do it more. Eating alone is the life of a wolf or a lion, not a man. Also, contrary to what people think, he wasn't about gluttony or extravagent food. He was into very simple food. But I couldn't remember exactly. I think I said artichoke and cabbage or something. But it was simple stuff they grew themselves. They lived basically on a commune, and they withdrew from society. I need to dig that stuff up again. Bianca writes an advice column, so I tried to get what her philosophy was, but I didn't seem to get much. I think she said people did come to her advice, which gave her the idea. I guess as a vegan, she tries to be a good person. Whatever. I tried talking about test tube meat. She didn't seem that into it. And she doesn't really like meat, so she wouldn't be into it, anyway. I was trying to say that meat is not as simple as people think when they say something like test tube meat. Meat is not something you could do with just single cells expressing some protein. Meat is a whole system of structure, actually more than one kind of tissue. It includes muscle, which isn't just sinlge muscles cells--they have to at least be in strands to have the right texture and structure. Meat also has blood vessels interwoven with it, and the blood itself contributes to the flavor. There is also fat tissue, which in fact is a completely different tissue from muscle, but it is integrated in meat in different ways depending on the type of meat. Like I said, "test tube meat" not only doesn't capture it, to me, is shows someone isn't even really thinking about the question. But I think I was the one who mentioned the term first in the conversation. Artificially grown meat? Synthetic meat? Synthetic has different oonnotations. If I could just go hardcore, and use replicator technology, I'd probably be good with that. But maybe some weird genetically engineered meat plant, I think that would be interesting to pursue. But people think of something like beans. It would have to be something more on the size of a watermelon. Textured vegetable protein? That's just so far from meat. I need to look more into Peter Singer's stuff. I think one guy recommended Practical Ethics. He argues against speciesism and was big with the animal rights people. So there's a guy in here with a yarmulke. Grr. The revulsion welled up, and I wanted to say something about not respecting his supertition. But the guy he was with got a phone call, and said he was talking to a rabbi. Great. I guess that's something that might make you wear religious dress in public. So, yeah, somewhere in the meeting, Preston said he had to respect the right of people to believe whatever they want. I had to disagree. I don't respect that as a right. I don't think it's a right. So he said, maybe a matter of semantics. And I need to put that position on a firmer basis. I don't think we have a fundamental right to believe whatever we want. As a consequence of deciding that we don't want society to use force or coercion on use according how we believe, people see it as best not to use these methods to change people beliefs. Mostly. But not always. With homicidal beliefs or some insane beliefs, we do see a role for coercion. So clearly holding beliefs is not a fundamental right. Looking over the amazon reviews of Singer's book, I saw someone point out some logically invalid reasoning he uses. Sort of an assumption that he makes, though he thinks he is proving it. I don't remember exactly what it was, so maybe I didn't quite follow the counterargument, but it made me sort of less interested. And I don't buy utilitarianism. So I'm not putting that high on the list, but maybe some time. I went by Borders. Didn't see and Singer. But I saw a thing on Chomsky and Language, and felt like getting some since I don't think I have anything of his. I've only recently been watching videos of him. I've seen quite a bit of linguistics stuff, and I have generally not thought much of what I've heard of Chomsky's stuff. I guess a lot of that is Pinker. But the impressions I've gotten of Chomsky's generative transformation grammar is that for one thing it's biologically implausible. And that's understating it. There doesn't seem to be anyone who can even imagine a way that it could have evolved biologically. And the second problem I've heard is that it's not really a very stable theory. He just keeps changing it. If there really was something there, you could just say what the point was and that would be that. If it just keeps changing to adapt to new things, it runs the risk that Freud's idea did of not really being scientific, in the sense of being falsifiable. Supposedly he invented an entire field, but I don't know how big a deal that field is. I watched a couple of Teaching Company courses on linguistics. I don't know if this is really going to add anything I haven't seen. But I've generally just been entertained by the thoughtful way Chomsky develops and expresses ideas, so maybe I will like it. Dang, my browser is still acting crazy. It looks like something on links from google. Could they be sending me to ads? No, it's something in the browser. OK, upgrading firefox seemed to get it. No, still doing it. Grr, There was a story I was trying to remember. I had thought of it driving, and then a few days ago I was trying to remember. It's a story I want to get better at remembering and telling. Today I remembered it was the story of the Shuri crucible for Okinawan karate, told in Shotokan's Secret. I did try telling it to Steve and Sheila today at the atheist meetup. I need to keep working on it. I also talked to and sat across from Bianca Phillips, who writes for the memphis flyer. She's writing a vegan cookbook and has an advice column on their web pages. I'll put up a link when I get my browser working again. This computer has gotten some kind of gunk installed in the browser. Trojans or some such. Here's somethingand here's her food blog Happy Kalends of June! Man, that was a long month. I do have a bad habit of pulling away from women who love me, so I need to try to not do that. Wow, a website that just shows documentaries. That's all I seem to want to watch, so I'm feeling pretty gusto. I'd like to try to make a disctintion between being happy, and having something to consume that I wanted. I think people generally equate satisfaction with happiness. I don't know that they are the same thing, though they might be, but getting enough can't be permanent. It's something that contributes to happiness for sure, but I feel somehow it can't be the same as happiness. I did see something tried to use the Greek term eudaimonia. Maybe the thing on stoicism. Well-spirited, or well-being. Good + spirit. That sort of makes it a little more abstract, because something might be good for you completely apart from just having some kind of feeling. Something a philosopher might consider. But I could decide it's not healthy and hold that as a reason for quitting. That makes sense. One thing he said in "this emotional life" was that we aren't very good at predicting what we will want. I think I saw this in his book too (Dan Gilbert's _Stumbling on Happiness_). The main thing is that we tend to be very biased towards what we want right now, and have trouble imagining otherwise. I certainly find it true. I don't even know later in the day for sure what I will want to do. And I'll make plans and have to commit to something, though when the time comes I won't feel like it. Whether I do it often depends on the level of commitment. Having to send a message ahead has been a big deal. I just tried watching a documentary called "the mystery of love". Just a few minutes into it they had this farmer talking. And they intercut with an opera singer. Trying to tell the story about how they met on an airplane on a trip to Europe and talked the whole time. He said first to his buddy when he heard she was an opera singer that it was going to be a boring flight. I though he was going to say something about fat chicks. I had this deep feeling of revulsion, and I just had to turn it off. Oh the humanity. Happy Memorial Day! So somebody on there said you can't be happy if you don't have a job you like and you're not having sex. My reaction was, well I'm sorry. But maybe it got into me. In something later, they went into an explanation of why not working would make you not happy. Something about losing your identity. But by that time, I was starting to feel it. Maybe I'm not so happy. Josh was there. There were times when I felt a little bit invisible. And when the last person left, Melissa was walking back from locking the door, and they kiss. Like they had been really waiting. I didn't watch; I looked down at my phone. I just, uh... There was a fight. Again, I didn't actually see anything. And I didn't go over there right when it happened. I did got over a minute later when it seemed like not all of them had left. No one seemed to get out their camera, which should have been a first reaction. They did call the cops. Asa went outside to talk and wait for them. And there's this thing that I know how to fight and could beat them all up. But I'm not sure what I could have done. Probably need to just calm down and not touch. Get in between. Melissa yelled in a commanding way to stop that stuff right now. I don't know. Get their attention. Defuse with humor. Jessa Lee. Shaved head. A server. Said she doesn't drink. I asked her her story. She said she never wanted to be a server, but it's kind of nice. Aldo saw her in Walgreens, and was wearing a ceebee jeebee t-shirt, which is a big Ney York bar. And he asked her to work there. So cool. So Murphy was talking with Ben and Justin. She said she'd like to have a penis, the way guys seem to have so much fun with it. I told her there was such a thing as "penis envy". I didn't go into how I thought for sure it was just a myth, one of those strange things that Freud came up with that really wasn't scientific or real or anything. But darn it if she didn't admit to actually having it. Trippy. Freud is an interesting case. If you know anything about the philosophy or science, or maybe have heard of Karl Popper and the idea that science is about falsification and not actually about trying to prove things are true, it's interesting to see Freud's role. One thing Popper wanted to do is to find some basis or way to distinguish things that are scientifc and things that aren't. One case of the things that are not science would be astrology, but a more subtle case is Freud's stuff. Really Freud is the hard case. He wants to say it's not scientific because it's just theories, and they don't really try to see if maybe they are wrong or not. They just use them however they want, and just ignore anything contrary. I don't like how I'm just pitiful in the situation, but it's silly to just avoid something that I do like. I don't know. Everyone needs a tapcode. Well, since it is Memorial Day, I'm reading something on Stoicism in the military, and how it might not be so great. So I'm watching the "this emotional life" second episode on fear. They got something that just made me need to stop and get down. I think it was Joan Rivers. It was another of the glass half full things. I've tried to make a collection of those, so since this was a new one, I felt I need to get it down. Some say the glass is half full, but for her it's not just half empty, but what's there is full of poison. Now that's some pessimism. There's a mosquito in here. I'm trying to get it but they are so elusive. I was grabbing at it, and then it got away or I couldn't see it any more. Then maybe half a minute later I saw it on my shoulder on the other side from where I was looking. Grr. Got away before I could get it. And it probably wasn't going to come back if it had eaten. But I guess it didn't get enough because it did come back. Still couldn't get it. It's getting a little cluttered in here, so not enough clear surfaces for slapping. I should clean up. There was one girl who had real anger issues. But her anger was just about fighting people. She didn't express any real desire to kill people. For me, just fighting or even only killing a small number just seems so insignificant that I'd rather just not bother. The image I think of for anger is that it's like an ocean. Most people just get angry the way people just get their feet wet walking along a beach. I don't know if I've ever even seen anyone who has more anger than this. This person at least seemed like she occasionally walked out in the water. But she talked about getting in a fight with someone, and eventually something changing and she just started crying. It's like a child wading in the water, and a wave coming and getting in her eye, and it making her cry. Nothing like swimming in the ocean. They had a sequence if images of things that are frightening. Maybe a bulldog baring it's teeth. A snake, a big spider, and then they had and stuck on a lion kind of roaring. And I didn't really have fear reactions, but when the sat on the lion, my reaction was yeah, let's do this. With a sword, it might actually be about even. I could see the whole gladiator thing. I finally made that disc of Dave's show for Melissa. It was way harder than it should have been. I think it's been a couple years since I tried before to make one. First, the program I tried using that I thought was the one (it was from the same company where I did have some editing stuff) actually wasn't editing software. It had a button for capture and the ui looked similar so it mislead me for a bit. And that was all that was on that computer, so it had to be that if there was anything. But it wasn't. So I had to go to another computer. And I found the actually computer and the program I had used a couple years ago, but then it just would not import the files. Some kind of unhelpful error message. And some googling, I guess it was just not going to work. So I ended up having to download an entire new suite of stuff, which involved doing the search of what's out there and what's good. I decided on avidemux. It's very simple. Good for just cropping out pieces, and all I really wanted to do was cut out the commercials. Perfect for that. But that just gives you an mpg. Then you need something to add menus to make a DVD, so part of a suite that was recommended, I got DVDStyler. And I actually didn't have anything, as far as I knew, that could write out a disc, so I got imgburn. Editing out the commercials was straightforward, but a little tedious because I used the skip forward button that I think must have only gone half a second forward. So it was like I watched all the commercials. Not super fun. There were no instructions, so figuring it all out was not great, but it was pretty simple. And I wanted to duplicate the pan across the audience, and I didn't see how to do that easily, so I ended up just making a whole file by clipping out everything before and after, and saving that out. And I made an even shorter version like that. But I chalk that up to learning, so it wasn't so bad. Making menus with DVDStyle was more painful, because for some reason, it worked very slowly. In one section, I would make a change on a button going to a chapter, and it would take maybe half a minute to do it's processing and then come back. Some of what I was doing was to pick a frame in the movie with an offset of a given number of seconds, so maybe it was having to search for that, but it made the thing painfully slow and cumbersome. And I had eight chapter buttons. But I got it eventually. More trouble to come, though. Writing the discs out. It turns out that my better laptop, tudor, just doesn't seem to be able to write out DVDs anymore. I think I've never been able to get it to work. This time, the imgburn program just gave an error. Blech. So I needed to transfer the files over. It took about an hour over the wireless network to do it. And I just transfered the disc image, not the files for making the disc, so if there was an error in how I set up the disc and I needed to recompile the disc, it was going to be painful. So I transfer it to my other laptop, spirit. Get imgburn on it, too. This laptop took an hour and a half to burn the disc. Ouch. I think I've tried burning on it before and it was slow like that. Terrible. So I finally get a disc. I try it out. My cheap player doesn't recognize it. I try the newer player. It gives a message, "Incompatible disc". Grr. I suspect I've messed up the disc compilation, that thing that I just mentioned would take a long time if I needed to redo. I tried playing on my laptops, and it looks ok to them. Before messing with that, though, I take a guess that maybe the burner on spirit also has a problem, so I'm going to try burning it with my desktop, third. I copy it over, while takes maybe 20minutes, and the burn takes 8 minutes. And it works totally fine. So now I've got two laptops neither of which is able to burn DVDs. That's pitiful. But I've got the discs made. I made two for Melissa, and one for me. Actually when I played it, it looks like there was something a little wrong with them, maybe. Some dropped frames, maybe. Oh well. I may take a while before I delete all the intermediate files off the hard discs. I know it's not going to be that big a deal, too. But it was a learning experience. It puts the lotion on its skin, or it gets the hose again. There are some whiners out there. So now I'm wondering if one of the reasons they switched to digital was because it was so easy for people to tape and skip the commercials. VCRs got really cheap. I really had a hard time even finding a device to record digitally. I have one thing that's hard disk based, but it doesn't work. I got another one that only can go to a recordable DVD, so it can only hold 8 hours at most. So it's gotten very hard to record and skip commercials again. Because they switched to digital. It had to be a factor. Man. They had a little depressed girl. Actually a twin, which was intriguing enough. The other one wasn't depressed, but they had a shot of her being pretty darn whiny, so maybe. They tried a bunch of stuff and they didn't work. Some doctor mentioned something like four "classes" of drugs. Fucking savages. Medicine is so much about trying stuff and maybe it will work. That should tell you that they really don't know very much about what's going on. And yet, the get lots of money, so they don't want you to know about the extent of their clueslessness. I said they were savages. I did eventually see what was coming. They moved on to recommending electroshock therapy. They convinced the poor little girl too that she had a problem that needed to be fixed or else. Why was suicide such a bad option? They seemed to also indulge her whininess. If you act a certain way, and then people go out their way to give you attention, and do stuff for you, wouldn't you just naturally keep doing that? And they switched to using a term that didn't sound as harsh, "ECT" That makes it better. There was a guy in a tie and white coat damaging her brain into unconsciousness. Man. That's what they went to. They didn't just find her a boyfriend or something. They went to drugs, which didn't work, and then nuked her brain. And then it wasn't working, so they said to do it more. OK, they hinted that maybe it worked because it stimulated the growth of new neurons, which was something some drugs did. But that's because they are causing brain damage. Why not just hit her head with a rock. I'm sure it would be the exact same thing. How would I deal with it. Sit with her maybe. They've really pushed it into something that people can't get past on their own. And it can cause permanent change when not dealt with as they learn to stay with the pattern. But I guess I'm not expert. Got my plane ticket. It was an incredibly frustrating experience because my internet went out when I was on the page to give them my credit card info. That page took a lot longer, so I guess it increased the chance, and there was a thunderstorm going on. And it said there were two seats left so I didn't know but maybe they could be gone when I would ever manage to get back to it. So I got about as angry as I ever get, and that's pretty angry. Some maybe I do have some anger issues that I should deal with. Was I getting the feeling that something was out to get me, when it was just an unfortunate coincidence? In a bad mood, I tried a backup, the travelocity app on my iphone, which just became deeply frustrating. Several tries to remember my password, then it had a thirty-five page new license agreement that it wouldn't let me just skim completely, I had to go through all thirty five pages one at a time. Grr. That was just to download the app. Then the frustration increased. The screen was too small so entering dates on their month widget, which started sharing the screen with the keyboard so it couldn't fit so mostly wasn't working at all. But eventually I got everything in again. And I actually found a cheaper flight for an extra day. It had gone down two hundred dollars from the day before, mysteriously. So the frustration receded a bit. Saw an interview of Peter Singer on reddit. Very deep and I think it must affect my thinking on moral issues. And it's from Richard Dawkins who kind of fawned over him and treats him as a etter person than him, or at least more moral. A big thing I got from it was the idea that Dawkins suggested maybe, that altruism may be a misfiring of a valuable emotional approach to life. In the tribe, it's good to help people for genetically selfish reasons, because everyone around is related to you. In this situation, we have adopted a valuable system to just cooperate with everyone, and it is an error when it gets applied in the bigger situation of society where we aren't related to everyone, but by that time, it's too late, and we have this rule of thumb we use. Trippy. Altruism a mistake that ends up being very useful. Something mr. evolution would say. But the stuff with Peter Singer. He bases his morality, or ethics I forget which, on harm of the organism and very importantly avoids speciesism. People are not inherently special, so animals who can clearly also feel pain, must be considered in making moral decisions. So vegetarianism. Some people use the suffering principle to say abortion becomes bad when the nervous system has developed. Singer is a little fuzzier on it. In this case not seeing people as special plays a bigger role in his thinking, so a fetus really suffers a lot less than most adult mammals like cows, so he's less concerned with them. And naturally, that's makes you consider infanticide. And they got into cannibalism, which except for not wanting to upset the family, and not specifically killing for food, doesn't seem too objectionable to them. Well, I have to say I personally am not that concerned with suffering. Maybe I'm not all that concerned with trying to be good at all. I was already leaning towards favoring infanticide. It happens. It can't be eliminated, though we frown on it and do try to reduce it. It's sad. But maybe I could say that the way food animals are treated is pretty sad. Especially at slaughter. But the cows in the field eating grass have a moderately fair life, though a nasty end. Factory farm cattle are miserable. Caged chickens are quite sad. But I'm not ready to quit this behavior. And I guess, I don't think I can see basing a morality on feelings. That's I guess the problem I have. Feelings don't seem solid enough a thing to base decisions on. Saw a video on relationships. Part of a series called "the emotional life" which was from a guy who studies happiness. I'm not positive he made the connection between happiness and relationships other than to say relationships are important to happiness. There were a number of important ideas. And the relationships were family, friends and lovers, so three different but pretty broad categories. With family, we learn basic attachment. And they had a kid who was in an eastern european orphanage who really had a damaged ability to feel attachment. A forget what the friends section added. And lovers, hmm. There was a woman who wanted companionship, but could do without the sex. That seemed a little odd, and she said to her, sex was only about pleasing the guy, so she could do without it. Pretty sad, really. I think it was some other video i saw recently that talked about three different chemicals in romantic love that get released at different times. Passion, something like adrenaline, goes for 1 to three years, then at three years, some kind of endorphins. I don't think I'd heard that one. Each of those drops off. At seven years, you have oxytocin, which is about bonding. Moms get it with breastfeeding. And that builds forever. I'm not sure what the endorphins do. Make you comfortable with someone? I would expect it helps to tolerate them, where you might not so much when it dies down, but the bonding makes it so you like being with them, even if they have started getting irritating. Trippy. Also, loneliness is part of an inherited emotional system where it was very important to be with others to get things we need. It's now a bit of a mistake the way altruism is. So Melissa satisfies some of my need for love and affection. Maybe not completely, but enough that I haven't worked sufficiently hard to find something more complete. She loves me. Maybe not all that much, but some definitely. So I don't want to skip going if she wants me to come down. Watched a video on motivation. It had a lot of stuff. Actually the sound is from a TED talk, but they added some animation so it had text and pictures which I guess sort of improves the presentation. But the ideas... Well, for one, it talked about some experiments showing that higher monetary rewards actually make performance worse in tasks taking higher cognitive abilities. They kind of let that one go, even though it has a major implication that capitalism is a bad thing. He merely glosses over says people think it sounds socialist,so I guess people dismiss the results, even though they are strong and have been often replicated. But he leaves that to talk about his main topic, how to motivate workers, and in this context, it's clear he means IT workers. Great. Trivialize it. Well, there are other things that can motivate you once you give people enough money so it's not an issue. People want autonomy--to pick their own thing-- to be challenged and move toward mastery (to be improving) and to make a contribution. Well, the motivating power of autonomy is one thing that supports capitalism as being a good system, but the negative impact of higher monetary reward is such a huge problem it needs to be address. And how can it even be right? It says that if you are getting more money, you aren't doing so good a job. Is that really what we see? It explains Microsoft. I would guess that's his idea because his big example is free software and linux, where people who have jobs, use their spare time to contribute to the projects for free and give away the products. There's also the challenge, learning thing. I guess that's nice. I have to keep it in mind when I'm looking for stuff. But he talks about making a contribution. You do hear about people want to change the world. I think apple tends to be like that. It seems like that was getting important to me. At FedEx I didn't feel like I was doing anything of value. At Hilton it was a little but. The juice company just seemed right out. And now maybe I'm thinking something in medical stuff. I can see that academia really offers more challenge and development of mastery. Plus autonomy. Netflix had a video with Chomsky. Had a bunch of stuff, of course. More fanboys. A lot of old people who seems almost starstruck, and amazed at how much he appears to know. It made them seem to me kind of stupid. He is great, but people do have the ability to read stuff and find things out. It's pretty apparent that they must waste their opportunities on sports or romance novels or something. Oh well. Someone asked him about capitalism. He said it probably would be nice, but it hasn't been tried. Something about how the corporations run the government to protect themselves and avoid competition. Whatever. And another one on strippers. Gives them lots of confidence. This was in New York. No touch, mostly. One of them had studied dance for 20 years. So athletic. Did flips and things. One was a bit of an actress, and did some kind of artsy shows. Something with big feathery fans. And did it in a theater situation, and got out of clubs for a bit, but then had to go back to one when the money ran low. The most disturbing thing was that two of the dancers died. One had written a bunch of stuff, including some exposure of the Russian mafia, and just disappeared one day. One had complications getting some stuff done on her face. Something with the anaesthesia, maybe. Bummer. Weird. Half an hour ago this place was empty, but now it's about full of guys. It's about 10:30. when I got in there were a lot of women. One of the interesting thing Chomsky talked about was how the media ends up saying what the government wants. It's not so much that the goverment tells the media what to say as the government does what the corporations want, and the media does too. There was some cute example, I wish I could remember. You can find insight in all kinds of places, I guess. I was getting low on selections in my instant queue in Netflix, so I went looking for new additions. I went all the way through their list of documentaries and added a bunch. I guess it's something for exploring the world of ideas. I decided to watch one called "gay sex in the 70s" something like that. From Stonewall to the first diagnosed case of AIDS. Honestly, I lived through the period, but it's a scene that I guess I didn't really know that much about, so I found it interesting to see it documented. New York. Such a slime pit. Maybe I wouldn't like it so much. The free love of the sixties drifting into the natural inclinations of gays to not be inhibited. And little fear of disease. That was actually one intriguing point. They had incredible amounts of disease, but with modern medicine, they were able to deal with it, until they couldn't. There was one scene where a guy with his boyfriend were at a party, and it looked like it was going to turn into an orgy, which he'd never experienced, and he was up for it, but the boyfriend pulled him out of there. And he was really mad, but looking back, a few years later, everyone at that party was dead. So good call. But the one bit of insight I took from it. Somewhere in there was asserted that what they really wanted to find was a friend. Someone to be able to call some time when you feel lonely. And they had a unique situation where they could get easy anonymous sex first, and then it it works out, then have a friend. A very unique persepective, but to see that friendship was the important thing, and sex really secondary... Deep. So a couple were sitting here. And some fat chick took a picture or something, and chickee got mad, I guess, but fat chick asserted that she had a right to take pictures. I guess. Couple left. I need to use that some time. I watched another on called "Dancing for Dollars". Strippers in Canada. It really made me annoyed more than anything else. There were some girls with tremendous confidence, giving what they believe is profound life advice, when they are clearly just thick as bricks. One felt it important to stay "classy". Again, though, one of the had a message about the importance of friendship. There was a little stripper that she liked, but she decided that the friendship was more important than having sex with her. I guess that's nice. But it was also kind of annoying. It's not the first time I've heard a woman saying that sex would hurt a friendship. Maybe. I guess I wouldn't know. So I'm feeling a little angry at the moment. Not having anyone to call. The folks left. That's always disrupting. Donnie has starty working at Christie's. It really was Melissa sitting where I thought. I said I'd give her a copy. Man, there was a guy I was sitting next to. Started smoking a cigar. And was talking to these girls who had been in there chatting with each other for an hour or two. He seemed very full of himself. I wanted to punch him in the head. So long, Martin Gardner! I think I saw Melissa and Josh in the audience at Dave's show on Wednesday. I hooked up the DVR and recorded it. I'm not positive as the picture didn't seem completely clear, but I'm pretty sure. The folks have come here again. They planted some squash and cucumber and a watermelon plant, so we'll see how those go. I've got like four tomatoes coming in at least, on three different plants, so I've got stuff going. They seem to be doing pretty well. Yeah, I think the thing about seeing the return not working at the end of line is when I close a paragraph tag, and the matching function moves the cursor to the beginning of the tag before moving on to the next line. So not such a big deal. Went out to lunch with the kung fu people. They wanted to thank me and Zach for painting. Like nine plates of stuff. It seemed like way too much, but we actually pretty much finished it off, so I guess they knew what they were doing. And then after it we went and try to do some more stuff, putting up mirrors, but we couldn't get it all together and we didn't finish it. Maybe tomorrow. The Gardner book I'm working on is titled _When You Were a Tadpole and I was a Fish_ Melissa is off in the windy apple by now. She has tickets to Letterman on Wednesday, so I need to watch that, and hopefully I will finally set up the DVR. It's very pitiful that I haven't hooked it up yet. Laziness, I guess. I had a dreamt where I had slept with Melissa, and she completely changed. Became kind of cold and controlling. Was getting me to do some kind of volunteering stuff. And so I was wishing I could go back and not do it. Now I don't really think it would be like that, but I guess there might be consequences. And she remembered that I had warned her about consequences last time when it got to time to pay my bill. So this time she warned me there might be consequences, and she paid it. I guess I should have known that it would come back to me. It was a dangerous play to make. Something else not to like about battlestar galactica. They've got an ending where they land on earth a hundred and fifty thousand years ago among old versions of humans, and are somehow genetically compatible, and they get folded into humanity. They have a shot where they talk about an ancestral "Eve", and that is supposed to be the half human, half cylon child Hera. Please. Ron in the commentary also says something about an ancestral Adam. I guess it's really that statement that annoyed me, because it showed that the series was developed and largely written by someone with a pretty poor science understanding. And it largely shows. But the thing about aliens folding in among primitive humans, setting aside the biological absurdity, it kind of disregards the real human story, which is actually more interesting. At that time, actually as late as fifty thousand years ago, there were as many as four different human species around at the same time, from the very old homo erectus to neanderthals and then modern humans. That makes for an interesting world. _Quest for Fire_ tries to get it fairly close. I've got that in my queue and I need to watch it again. Leanne said that Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the South Park creators, were in Circa last night. She was thinking it was Saturday, so she told them to go to Raifford's, which was stupid for Sunday. I didn't get it exactly, but they must have been in some kind of group. They were in town for the barbecue contest. I was wondering if I would recognize them in person, but I bet I probably wouldn't, out of context. And at maybe 1:30 after Bardog had closed, some guys were knocking on the window. Could it have been them? I don't know. Probably not. But anyway, it would have been nice to see them. Leanne said they were going to the the Kooky Canuck. She said she didn't know them, but someone told her who they were. They were a lot younger than she would have thought. For some reason, I was thinking what I might say to them. I'd want to see if they are as stupid as they seem. Holding in farts causing spontaneous human combustion? Did Penn set them straight about religion being just stories? But I can see how they wouldn't want to be an atheist with how obnoxious so many can be. I would want to say how their writing and story telling has just noticeably gotten so expert, and so much better, even though it started pretty good. But it definitely did occur to me, why would I be talking to them, or them to me? It was a silly idea. So the three guys that came up. Asa and Melissa were wondering maybe if they were the guys that messed up the next door lady's decorations she had out. Tore out a sign and ripped up some plants she had. And Asa was saying if it was them, he'd go beat them up, and I could help him, since it was three guys. And I said sure. And so I'm wondering how best would you beat some guys up. The kind of fighting your train for tends to be kind of brutal. Killing people or breaking their collar bones or cracking their skull open. You don't really look at teaching-them-a-lesson ass whipping. So, what? I'm thinking stomach hits. Many some hits on muscley parts or the arms and legs, but not enough to break their actual bones. I guess that requires some finesse. Maybe work on a part of a choke out to soften them up. Throwing people on to the ground is one of the main parts of the style, and it can really mess people up, but it also gives them a chance to stay on the ground and give up if they know they've lost, if you haven't broken their arms and legs in the process. If they have any training at all and have learned how to deal with falls, it gives them a possibility of dealing with it. So it has a slight bit of humanity. And I say they don't teach ass-whipping, but Master Park Bok Nam tells a story. He used to be rambunctious. He was studying bagua with a mean old master, and he told him not to get into fights outside of school. But of course, he did anyway. One time, he beat this guy up so that he went to the hospital. The doctor at the hospital saw that he had a particular type of internal injury that he didn't know how to deal with, but he did know someone who did, so he sent him over there. And it was the old bagua master. So he figured out what had gone on, and just beat the hell out of student Park. "You wanna know how to fight? I'll show you how to fight." But that's how they taught, I guess. Trey does some kind of karate or taekwondo. He's got some kind of back spinning crescent kick that looks nice that he's put in some movies. Master Park tells some kind of story how he had one of those spinning kicks that he would do, and he was warned not to do that or he would get hurt, and the master explained something to the other student who he was sparring with, and after that when he tried it, he would always end up on the ground whenever he tried it. I guess I don't train as hard as they did in his school. But it might have been something to talk about. And I say maybe four types of humans at the same time. There is a phrase "missing link". That's extremely misleading. There are maybe twenty different human species, not all of them even in our direct descent path. So there was a whole long process of us developing from wherever we diverged from tree apes. It's actually a bit odd that we're the only ones left. And recently supposedly they found that there are still some neanderthal genes still in people from some sections of the world. I don't know. Huh, so neanderthals ate only meat. They didn't forage for berries and stuff at all. Pure hunters. No gathering. So I think I found some kind of inductive reasoning that shows that Melissa and I won't get together and meet some time outside of Bardog. Something on the lines of mathematical induction where you show the first case, and then show how one case implies the next, so it works for all cases. It's just to say that each time she puts me off a week, that just makes it easier to put me off another week, and it wasn't a big enough deal one week, so it won't be a priority in the next, or ever. Tomorrow never comes. More just a matter that she never wanted to, but at one point was nice enough to patronize me and say she would. I let it go this time, and I expect I'll just let it go, now that I have some sort of stronger reasoning about it. This is more of a probablistic argument, but I think it is pretty strong in just saying it probably won't happen, or maybe better put, probably shouldn't happen. It was a little funny. At about noon I was feeling like a week was too long to have waited, but as it got on to about 7, I was feeling like I wasn't even that interested in going. There's approach/avoidance. I don't quite completely understand the entire emotional dynamic. Watching more Chomsky. Some stuff from HARDTalk last year. It talks about Obama, who he doesn't so much care for. Just another corporate lackey. The parties according to him are right of the people, more about serving corporate masters. I also watched the one from '69 with Bill Buckley. That's kind of annoying the way won't let him finish sentences, but Chomsky kind of dances around. I don't know. It was long enough ago not to seem too relevant. My link starts on the fourth of seven because I was on this view and when I clicked on each one, they would end and I would have to go back, but down when I got to four, that was part of some sequence where they automatically continue. That's nice. Somewhere in there he talks about how really, you can't have general principles, like how to use violence. You really have to think about the situation as it is. It's all just too complicated or something. Happy fifth birthday, YouTube! Also, somewhere in there, Chomsky says what it means to him to be anarchist. I kind of use that term for myself, for instance, on Facebook. He says it's about being sceptical of authority and requiring that it justify itself. He says democracy is an ideal that an anarchist should aspire to. Or something like that. I made another chuck roast. Cooked it a little faster and it was a bit tougher. And maybe I didn't cook it as much. This time I made gravy. I used the au jus from the last one, and I also used some of the veal demi-glace. So it's very rich. It tastes pretty good. Gravy isn't all that complicated. It isn't giving me a feeling of the best I've ever had, but it might well be the best I've ever made personally, since I only just started making them. Happy Ides of May! I was watching a Nova show on the origin of man. It turns out that that head lice is a different species from gential lice (crabs). They were able to use this information to figure out at what point people lost their hair. It was actually a long time ago, like a couple of million years with homo erectus. And they found that the genital like is related to some kind of bear lice. And they could be different only because there was a hairless section separating them. I saw a little tomato coming in. Yay! Happy Friday the Fourteenth! Got Michelle sitting next to me. The drink-making barrista ask my name for my frappucino double chocolatey chip, I think that's what they call it. It's in the cre`me section. Some kind of tick over the e. I don't really know what the tick means or how it's supposed to affect the pronunciation. I guess that makes me a philistine. So it was a little hard for me to determine what I needed to call it. And the ordering process seemed like a bit of a clusterfrak. One guy took the order and marked the cup. Another girl rang it up on the machine and passing it along, seemed like I had to try to explain it again. She at first wanted to say it was some kind of latte, but the cremes are things with no coffee, which is a break for me. And then the barrista making the drink had to ask me if I had the, I think she called it a frappucino double chocolately chip. And what was my name? They should have gotten it, and maybe they will next time. OK. But since they try to write names on the cup, I've got Michelle's name that I could see on her cup quite plainly. She spoke to me to ask if the chair was taken, and no, And she sat next to me. Cute blonde, maybe a little older, though not as old as me, I don't think. I'm not good at guessing. And, mysteriously, her name was pretty much exactly facing me. It happened again. Little Sophia, who is only 4, was at kung fu, and I got her all wet. There is a water fountain, and she was too short to reach, so I lifter her up, but only after did I realize my arms were covered with sweat. Grr. So she had to wash off. This was a rough night for her. Li lao shr wasn't there, and she was expecting Reecy to show up, but she didn't either. So poor little girl was having to wander around with nothing to do, and she was in a really mischeivous mood. Wouldn't mind, kept taking off her shoes even though she was told several times not to, because we still have screws and things sitting around from construction, and kept going outside. But she's for. And telling someone not to, I have heard is the wrong thing. Don't think of an elephant! David asked me what I was going to do at the tournament. I need to figure it out. And register. Part of registering is entering the competitions, so I need to decide first. I really need to ask Li Lao Shr. I'm thinking the Fanzi and some Bagua, but I'm not sure which. Also probably the bagua broadsword, which I think is called dao in the Chinese. Busimess guy in the corner, yakking on the phone, at one point started a conversation with "hello gov'nuh" I think he was on the phone with some place in Britain. I believe they hate that. I'm trying to find out what that is from. Ah, Oliver Twist. Such gloominess. I watched Cool Hand Luke. A bit freaky. And he loses fiath, and then somehow seems to get it back as he is broken. Maybe that's something about what religion is supposed to be. Getting your head right. And the stupid Jesus imagery. I don't know. What we have here is failure to communicate. Oh, so I had thought of something. Almost everything from Starbucks, except for just the regular coffee, has milk in it. That, in a subtle way, is actually a bit of pressure against minorities, who are often lactose intolerant. And I was thinking that before I came in, but here, there is a black guy sitting across from me, and a couple of cops just came in, one of whom is black. I think Michelle said sometime to them about buying them coffee, or they should get some. Chai spiced lattes for the boys in black. One guy is Schaeffer, it seems. One guy is in jeans, so I guess plain clothes. I think I seldom see those. Or desk guy. Don't really know this cop stuff. Something that seems a bit quirky here in emacs. When I hit return, it doesn't seem to always immediately insert a newline, sometimes it seems, maybe before or in tags, I can be somewhere in the middle and it seems to add a line after the current one, but won't break it at the spot I'm in. Or maybe I'm imaginining it. Michelle's man came in. No place to sit. Aww. And he left, Hmm. The teaching company sent me stuff again. It's tempting. Ouch. I like math lectures, somehow. I'm not sure if I'd like the really hard stuff, especially at a University that's not so good, like U of M. And a couple more black guys in the corner. One with some kind of USA sweats, and some kind of Eagle insignia, so goverment something or other, I didn't see exactly. The cup says "DCCF". Kind of sublime. the rain song. I wonder how they would do it live? And then there's that crazy shining diamond. Russell has posted a couple of times about the privacy concerns in Facebook. I placed a comment saying I wasn't so into privacy, and what were his reasons for seeing value you in it. He asked what my definition of privacy was. I thought I had put in a comment explaining a bit about my position, but I didn't see it. I might not have hit the comment button, or I'm afraid the little Starbucks connection might have timed out at the wrong spot and eaten the submission. Ouch. My computer blacked out in the middle of a sentence. Probably the battery giving out, but it didn't seem to warn me or anything. Not so nice. And further bad luck. I went to the AT&T store to ask a couple of questions. I wanted to know if I got an iPad 3G, if the 3G service for it would be associated to my main account and the charges put on the one bill, or they would have to have a separate bill, which would not be so convenient. And when I went in there, I saw a thing for AT&T U-verse. They have some kind of TV offering, and I was wondering what that was by. It looks like it might be satellite. I can't do satellite because of tree cover on the south side of the house. But the evil part. I went over and stood by the desk. No one ever offered to help. No one even made eye-contact. One fat guy, Tim, was helping some customer, and when he was done, just walked away and went to the center of the room to hang out with some of the other guys. It was just making me angrier and angrier, and I waited a little longer, but I left. So At&T has an unhappy customer, for now. It does reduce my desire to get an iPad, I would say. And staying with this IPhone, I don't know. I think it might be possible to keep the device without the service and use it wifi only. I'll need to look into that. I was in a bad mood. I don't know, maybe I didn't spend all that much time, maybe five minutes. When I left, someone outside made actual eye-contact and started talking to me, but asked if I had a minute. For a survey. I did not speak. She did seem to try to be cheerful. Rough job, I imagine. So one of Russell's friend, Perry Metzger, seems to think he has found an inconsistency in my opposition to privacy. His claim is that we need privacy for financial information and that I wouldn't give mine out. I had another errand I needed to do. I went by the YMCA to see how their rates depend on income, and what kind of documents you need. They'll take a W-2, and they do have lower rates for lower income. But it seems to go down to $31 a month from $55. I will have to consider it, because that's still a significant amount. Huh, one computer had an open emacs edit window into this journal with unsaved edits. I'm rather lucky it didn't overwrite and lose stuff from today. I was able to save to a file and reconcile the differences. But it was careless. Happy Thursday the Thirteenth! Listening to the BS commentaries is just makind it worse. I'm now leaning to just not getting an ipad, or at least waiting a little longer to where I'm more into getting a job and making money. Joining the whole consumer society, that sort of thing. Actually painting a little bit was kind of good. I don't know if I was any good at that, but it didn't really have this oppessive feeling that I was hating to do it. Seems like the other guy didn't really enjoy it, but he had so much more going on and other things he could have been doing. Time with family, real work, other stuff to do, fun stuff. I may have a little too much fun stuff going on that a little work isn't so bad. Trading time. Possibly the whole 40 hours a week and having to do it or else maybe is a little rough. Or gets old, or something. And what about the word "zoologist". I heard someone say it zoo-ologist, and I was thinking, no, you might say zoo-logist, not with an -ologist at the end, or zoe-ologist. But zoo-ologist would need three o's after the z, not the two we have. It's become a standard way to say it, I suppose, but it grates. And it kind of turns on how you pronounce "zo". We;ve got a bunch of examples to compare with it. And there are a couple that actually support saying zo like zoo: to and do. But I think there are a bunch more to say zo like zoe: no, so, bo, jo, lo, ho. I don't know, I feel zoo-ologist seems wrong, but with to and do being perfectly fine words, there is an real possible case for it. Wow, dude, Martin Gardner, is 94. He mentioned sitting in his apartment in assisted living just typing on his computer, plus researching there. He was already an established writer, but still I think it's inspiring that he's still putting out books. So I needed to go grocery shopping. I had to go to Schnucks because only they have ovaltine chocolate malt. I also needed milk and Kroger has the kind I get, lactose free, for at least a dollar less per half gallon, and I usually get two, so it would have been two dollars difference. Almost worth driving the extra two miles. But I waste so much money, I really shouldn't be worried about a couple of dollars. Plus extra time and effort. I did balk a bit though, and only got one half gallon instead of two. I can hit Kroger some other time. I also got some potato chips. I have carrots to eat, but I have found that they taste a lot better with chips. I think carrot and chips are even better than chips by themselves, which are a little excessively greasy and salty. It makes a nice balance. And I don't eat dips, which is kind of a factor for me. Huh. That was just...different. I watched _Cashback_. It was kind of moody. Seemed a bit like an excuse to show naked chicks, but it went for a weird dreamy fantasy thing, and was mostly about a guy who appeared maybe to be going crazy from a breakup. Not sleeping. I guess depression can do that, though for me, depression is about sleeping too much. And he's an artist, a painter, so it's all about the feelings. Maybe a tone poem. And then he gets some kind of obsession over a new girl, and paints her over and over. Gets an exhibition of it, as well. But the funkiest thing is that he freezes time. You see that quite a bit. Seems like the twilight zone must have done it more than once. But like I said, this one goes all moody and artsy. And he brings the new girl into it. I was initially just kind of annoyed that there was just this whiny guy. So I don't know. But there was something. The name cashback has something to do with him getting a night job at a grocery store because he couldn't sleep. That whole thing just seemed lifted from fight club. And there was a stripper in a light blue cowboy hat with a cap gun that I know they stole from Apocalypse Now. Just a bunch of stolen bits. But still something. And he mentions the word crush. I'm not sure I ever really knew exactly what it was supposed to me. It implies temporariness. And an adolescent thing. I really only thought it meant foolish. I mean, I say to myself I had a crush on Wynne, but I guess more of a crazy obsession. Another beef roast. I think I was getting very hungry, because it tasted really good, like I really needed it. I think I managed to get it more like a proper braise, and it wasn't just full of water. And no onions this time. Maybe the onions were adding to the water. A chuck roast. My mom picked it out. She may well be a lot better at picking than I am. Tender. The store is supposed to have good stuff, and maybe that's it. Well, apparently Kim is in another relationship, according to facebook. Good for her. I haven't heard from her, personally. Career is about the intersection of what you are good at and what the world wants. It is noteworthy in not involving specifically what you want, except to the extent that there really should be a correlation because what you are good at and want, if only because you have to spend time at doing something in order to become good, and hopefully you aren't foolish enough to keep doing something you don't like for a long time. But not everyone is that smart, I guess. So one of the scenes in _Cahsback_ touched on an idea that I am in favor of. When he was a kid, dude had a little Swedish exchange student in the house, and since she was Swedish, modesty wasn't a big deal in walking from her room to the bathroom. Really, you could see it was just a movie device to have a hot young blonde walking naked up the stairs, but I would have to say it's about time society got rid of modesty. Some bits of clothing, like bikinis, seem quite silly. Maybe if we get rid of religion, that would go, too, but I see a bit of that eroding just in reddit gonewild Time! has come today. Felt like coming out to Starbucks. Had a little to say, maybe, but I got up feeling like I had slept enough, and it was like 7:30, a perfect time to get up in the real world and go out and great the day. So what would I like to do with myself? Writing seems like it would be nice, but putting forth a complete product that people would be interested in paying for is a lot of work. And I really have no management ability for a product like that. Capitalism really rewards management. Get a bunch of other people to do you bidding, and then take most of the rewards for yourself because you took the risk to get everything together. Now, the greatest rewards are in ownership which is a special kind of legally protected management, and there is a salary-slave sort of employed management, but even that is valued above actual production. Seems a little bit odd, maybe. Possibly one of the justifications is that management requires harder skills than line work. The pressure can be higher. But managers are often, it seems, actually much poorer skilled than line, thought they fake it by acting like they know what should be done. And I think traditionally, a manager has to "move through the ranks" in the line to get to management. But that really doesn't imply ability in the line, just political ability and ambition. According to the Peter Principle, you have to move and fail to get to a high position. Failing upward. But something had to get you to move. At FedEx, I moved toward doing more managing kinds of things, and I thought I had been doing line production well, but maybe I was fooling myself. Part of what I was doing was trying to explain stuff to other people, so that might have been more of a failure of mine and a slip that pushed me toward managing. Oops! Man, it's nice to have tunes. I forgot to charge up the iPhone, so I have my mini iPod for the tunes to supplement it. Something extra to carry. I keep that clipped on my collar, so it doesn't take pocket space, but it's an extra thing. And probably it's better not to wear out the iPhone battery for tunes. It made me wonder about Jeff, who is a hardcore apple product user. I think he sticks to the phone, and that must run through that battery, but he buys a new device almost every new major release, it seems like. Apple things don't have user changeable batteries, so they are inherently intended to be essentially disposable, which has got to be the epitome of American decadence, Disposable in some sense-- they're program is that through them you can send yours in and get a new one when the battery finally dies, which may well be ten years later. I have a very early disk based ipod from Jeff one time when he upgraded that appears to have just about died. It now will randomly glitch out and I have to restart. I assume the battery is gone. I'm not positive when it was made, but it must be at least 5 years, and maybe closer to 10. That's a good life though, and I have another one to carry around. It's nice just not to mess with it and leave one in the car. I think went it freezes, that's not so good for the mechanical drive, and generally electronics don't like to be frozen, but hey, it serves me, I don't serve it. The onion had a parody of Chomsky. I have become a bit of a Chomsky fan lately. And this is him taking a break from railing against the system. It doesn't quite capture him, I think, though. In one of his latest talks, I think it was the one at Brown in April. he seemed very personable. Of course, I think that was about the hero worship from the crowd. Someone asked him what the best experience in his life was, and he said he doesn't answer personal questions. I really wonder what that's about. One other thing in _Cashback_, it seemed to also be making a statement about wage slavery. And dude put it in an odd way, he couldn't sleep so he had extra time, so he traded time. I think for Brits, trade is used a little more where we might say sell or sale. Those quirk Brits. And I'm watching a thing with Richard Attenborough about peguins, and he's constantly saying glassier instead of glacier. Just defining any kind of rules of pronunciation as far as I can tell. Anyway, wage slavery. Dude and chicky talk about their dreams if they can get out of the grocery night shift. She wants to bw an air hostess, the moderately realistic dream, or the super dream of teaching Spanish in South America. Dude wants to be a painter. Really? Such a cliche. It occurs to me that whenever you see an artist in a movie (or play) that's actually a metaphor the writer is using for himself. Kind of a self-referential thing that seems to happen a lot. Since the writer is talking about himself, it works out for dude. The thing is a fantasy, after all. And to through out a weird detail, his cow-orkers make a prank phone call on him, saying they are a gallery owner who want to see him, and he goes there, and guy doesn't know, but he looks at the stuff, and he gets an exhibition anyway. Uh huh. Like an art student isn't going to paint like an art student. But he said he was a bit bored in art college, so maybe he had already developed some skill, and they were only refining it. Hopefully they aren't just propagating the myth of "natural talent". Talent is developed through work and time. Part of the story, though, is that he freezes time, so he has spent a lot of time on all this painting. Delusional hacks do like to write about natural talent. So that might be it. There was enough robbery in this movie for that to be it. OK, the little girl had her eyes about four inches from the paper she was writing on. And she was already wearing glasses. I don't know if it helped. Wow, someone who knows Chomsky blogged about the onion article. Too busy to read it. Yeah, yeah, yeah! I wathced a little series on ancient Greece. It was narrated by Liam Neeson. Qui-Gon Jinn himself. The biggest thing that sticks out is that they said that for the Greeks, peace was an interruption of war, where for us, war is an interruption of peace. I gotta say, that's progress. It largely focused on Athens. They had a democracy for a bit. A real democracy, a direct democracy. People didn't vote in representatives, they themselves voted on what went on. And for me, this look demonstrated how poor an idea democracy is. It kind of worked only for a little bit, and really, it only worked because there was one guy, Pericles, who knew how to manipulate the people and get them to do sensible things. At best, all the democracy did of value was to get lots of people emotionally committed to the things that the government, actually they themselves, did. So now I really don't know what to think politically. Democracy is a crock, and always was. Without Pericles, the mob just did stupid things, including a war with Sparta, where they got their asses kicked.
One of the episodes seemed a little
odd. For a bit, Athens had a big
naval empire, with trade all along the
Aegean. That didn't work out after
losing to Sparta, but they shifted
to an "empire of the mind". They
had Socrates. Really just a pest
more than anything, but he instilled
the idea of questioning everything,
which is truly the key to science.
And from that, they had quite a few
other philosophers after that, and
an entire tradition of not thinking
magically, that what happens is
just the capricious will of gods,
but that the world can be understood,
like a machine, perhaps. It is really
the legacy of the time, and why we
even care about them now, so it
absolutely makes sense that they
would have an episode that is
kind of an essay on that subject.
The other two were really just context
for that. And they really helped
situate it for me. It also helped
me appreciate how just lucky and arbitrary
it was. It's no wonder that that mentality
was swept away and lay dormant for
almost two thousand years until
it resurfaced again.
I'm trying to psych myself up to go
to the apple store and maybe finally
buy an iPad. I need to support the
consumerism. But I've been feeling
like just not spending money and
putting off getting back to work.
But it's getting about time to
be looking for work. That's going
to be long and painful. Grr.
There was a little blonde in scrubs
and a white coat. Seems like she must
have been a doctor. Or could have just
been a nurse. I gave her a smile,
and she just smiled back about as bright
and friendly as I've ever seen. I
doubt I will ever see her again, but
it was nice.
But shoot, they were out of soy milk.
So it will have moderately unpleasant
consequences for me. Unpleasant and
maybe painful.
And the last Battestar Galactica episode
should be coming today. There's also
the clip show after that, but it's
not supposed to add much. And from
what I gather, that was more of
an afterthought as they realized
that in the beginning of the episodes,
they kept saying "they have a plan"
and they never ended up explaining
any plan, so they had to go back
and try to invent something.
The series sucks. I'm surprise
I've stuck with it, but maybe
it was a bit boring. It has
a bit of a pull being a drama,
and maybe you get into following
the characters, but personally
that doesn't do so much for me
really like it might for some
other people. Some people are
into people more than others.
Most people, actually.
I'm more into abstract ideas.
There aren't so many of us,
but we do add some
value to society, though
most of society, being really just into
people, do not value it particularly so much.
I don't know if it's good or not, but my kung fu
style seems to be remarkably unconcerned about
body type. There have been fat masters,
and skinny little pipsqueak masters. The
founder had the body of a "eunuch". I
put that in quotes, because he worked
as an imperial guard and had to official
be a real castrated eunuch, but more than
likely he just disguised himself as one,
because without the testosterone, you
can't build up much muscle, and he
became stronger over time. We was
a big fat guy, like you expect from
a eunuch. But what this does to me
is that I really haven't felt much
pressure to become more athletic
looking and losing weight. It's
a little weird too. There is quite
a bit of wrestling stuff, and with
that, there is actually some value in
being heavier, even without muscle,
so I've actually had this weird feeling
of wanting to keep the weight on.
In typical external martial arts,
there is obvious value in just
bulking up on the muscle, and you can
feel the advantage from doing that,
so you have pressure to push your
body in that direction. But it seems
like baguag isn't doing that.
Getting stronger seems to be in there.
Especially in the big broadsword form.
But it seems to want to work with the body you
have. I don't know.
Spent way too much money. I need to not
do that. But I didn't get an iPad.
The store saved me from that because they
were out of stock. Too bad for them.
Getting one might have actually saved
me a little bit, after that crazy initial
expense, because I could buy online
books from amazon for quite a bit cheaper
than the dead tree version. If they
have ones that I want. And with the plebeian
nature of the world, maybe that doesn't
happen. Anyway, I went into borders
to get _the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks_.
I had great trouble finding it. I had
to ask. They had it in the section up
front for local authors. I thought they
would have it in a special section, but
I just didn't see that one. The author
is like an associate professor at U of M.
sales lady said they sold out a couple
times already, and she was going to read it.
And since I was spending money, and spent so
much time looking, I found something by
Martin Gardner that looked interesting.
He had a math column in Scientific American,
and I've read maybe a couple of his books.
He had the column before Doug Hofstadter.
This one is more a random collection of
essays. I should look over at the title,
but I'm being too lazy. I felt like just
reading general writing from someone like
me, an ideas person. And he's a real
professional writer, so maybe it will
be inspiring. And one of the essays is
about Ann Coulter, conservative she(?)-devil.
Before walking into the Apple Store, I also
went into Williams-Sonoma. I looked at espresso
machine. It's still sad that Melissa has
an espresso machine, plus all the stuff,
but still goes to Starbucks. I don't know
how good her machine is though. They had
a cheap two hundred dollar one, but it required
you to put in coffee already ground.
The real machines grind them fresh, and
then pump through high pressure. The cheap
one said it did 15 atmospheres, which I think
is right. There is a cheap time which uses
steam pressure, and that doesn't get enough
to do it properly. But I'm not sure what part
of the machine is supposed to be used to heat
up the milk. That might actually be something
separate from the espresso maker, so I would
need to look at that. I was just looking at
those, but I really wanted to buy some demi-glace,
I didn't remember if that was the store I remembered
that had it, but I think it was. I wasn't sure which
one to get, though. I was thinking maybe both chicken
and beef. Fresh market has little one and a half ounce
chicken demi-glace for five bucks. Williams-Sonoma
has 10 ounce jars for like $30. They had beef, veal,
or chicken. I decided to just try the veal. I
think that is about the ultimate in decadence.
Even some meaties draw the line at veal.
But I also got an egg cup. My folks like to
eat boiled eggs out of an egg cup. I think
we have a fancy one, but I believe I broke our
everyday one when I put it in the dishwasher,
and it fell through the cracks. So it makes
sense that I should replace it. Still,
spending money. Maybe not getting the iPad
got me thinking I had a little extra. I'll
probably get one still, anyway.
As for writing for money, that's where I can
make a stand as an anarchist. Be the change
you want. It's the Star Trek ideal. Getting
rid of money, and people just doing what they
want without all this greed. So I write and
give it away for free. That can work. Capitalism
is not set up to deal with it, but in software,
there is a real open-source movement, where you
write stuff and share it. People do pay other
people do get specific work done that they need,
but if something useful is made that can be shared,
people just share it.
I don't know about the idea that greed is good.
Russell I think affirmed it recently, and apparently
he really believes it. But I have yet to see how
it's good. It makes you an unpleasant person,
at least to me. I think it might be that some
women are attracted to greedy men. At least in
my understanding of some biological pressure,
it seems like it might be true. And you hear
the stories about chicks going for douchebags.
But I find it irritated. And the very nature
of greed is that it can't be satisfied. But then,
Ned Flanders talked about how he liked mosquito
bites because they were satisfying to scratch,
even though that could only be temporary and
self-defeating. I don't scratch mosquito bites because
I know they will go away if you don't, and will
stay around if you do. I difficult thing to
come to as it is against your natural inclination,
but it works surprisingly well. So I guess I
just personally don't have sympathy for the greed thing.
I have gotten into the bad habit of buying too
many books. That's pretty greedy, I suppose.
But I like to support a movement toward a
post scarcity period. Economy is about managing
limited supply. In information, there aren't
the same kind of limits. One thing about the ipad
is that it's all abouut comsuming media, but it
is trying to be part of a scheme where content
a\can still be sold, just without needing
to have physical media, like trees or discs.
We'll see how it goes. Getting rid of media
is a nice move, but apple is just slightly
one the edge of capitalism and unfreedom in this.
The saddest thing about conservatives is that
they've let themselves be manipulated into
support things that are against their interests
by rich people who are controlling the media.
Is that not what you would call stupid?
Part of it is by manipulating the conversation
including stuff that is generally part of their
values, and then linking bad things up with
stuff that actually would be good for them,
but bad for them if they ever became rich.
And tying into their greedy dreams of being rich.
Oh well. Foolishness, at least, if not actual
stupidity. There is a lot of just willful
ignorance too, of choosing not to know certain
things. That's something I particularly don't
like. And related to that is just what appears
to be that lies and not looking at the full
truth and story is a good thing. No one
really needs to know everything. That would
actually be a bad thing in their minds.
And further along that road is privacy.
I personally don't see that privacy is
a very valuable thing. With privacy you
lose a lot, and I'm not sure if you gain much.
OK, so there's an article on clojure in the google app cloud. That's
something I should learn how to do. I've been
trying to study Clojure, and it would be good
to learn how to work in google's cloud. Unfortunately,
there were only three people in the company that
did that. So there may well be no possible jobs
doing it. It would be something more if you could
do something, you might be able to sell the service,
or get some company to hire you to work. There
would not be people looking externally for someone
to do it. You'd have to go to them.
Wow. Saw the end of Battlestar Galactica. Just don't care.
It makes me think of that girl who liked to
make out with a guy, and then say no and frustrate
him until he just takes her without explicit permission.
That was a story told by a comic who did stop.
She asked about it after. And he was making
it a joke about how you can't play with rape.
But aggression could be an important survival
trait. Is there some tendency for girls to push
things? And for it to really be legitimate,
they would have to honestly protest. Kind
of a scary twist.
I had a dream where I was talking about food
with a Klingon. I don't think I have enough
experience talking with Klingons to really
have an accurate image of them. He seemed friendly.
I was kind of in a sad mood. I was thinking it
was because of the little stock market crash.
It went down 5% in a week. From that I didn't
go out except on Sunday, and after that I
was better. It was really just a random thing,
and now so far today it looks like it has
bounced just about completely back. I've also
been holding off on getting an iPad. Maybe I
will go do it.
I'm thinking about the remake of _Karate Kid_
that's coming out in a month. And it's Jackie
Chan in Beijing and they are learning kung fu.
His training is supposedly unconventional,
maybe so it's vaguely like the original.
I don't know if they had the story, and it
was vaguely like the Karate Kid, so maybe
they thought, hey, lets call it that and
make a lot of money from that, and shifted it
a bit to fit. And it's Will Smith's kid
Jaden. Trying to make him a big star.
Whatever. Kid acting can be quite poor.
So it kind of smells. But still, you've
got Jackie Chan. He is a real professional,
and always puts out a good product. The
old one was so cheesy. That stuff probably
wouldn't play today, but I'm sorry, it's
just not the Karate Kid without wax on, wax off.
It's just not. Looking over one story, it looks like
they do have wax on, wax off. So yay!
And JC says it's in a funny way. Well,
the old one was in a funny way. But
probably he means he doesn't have the kid
wax his car and call it training, it's
probably just some line thrown in.
They are really calling it kung fu kid,
at least in China.
I spent quite a bit of time thinking of
telling Melissa that she looked like she
had lost wait. How exactly to put, maybe
just to ask if she had. Even before going
to see her, because I was a little worried
that she was starving herself to get ready for
summer. And when I saw, she didn't seem to
have taken off as much as I was thinking,
but she did look like maybe a little. And
then she said she was going to quit smoking,
because she was running out of cigarettes.
Aparrently, all the manufacturers have changed
something in their formulations and now add something
that makes her sick, and she has just been buying
up what people have left of the old kind. But
she's just about out, so she feels she has to quit.
She's tried rolling her own, but that's too hard,
and she doesn't have time when she's busy. So
I started the conversation, She looks like
she's lost some weight, but with quitting
smoking, it's going to be hard. But she's hoping
that with quitting smoking, she'll be able to
run again. Now that would be good. I hope it
works for her. I think that stuck with her,
because maybe an hour later, she said didn't
feel like she lost weight. I don't know.
I hope she does OK.
When I left, I said I need to get with her.
And she kind of put me off again, and said
she was going to arrange all the stuff she has
to do that she has been having to put off.
But at least this time she said we would
do it some time. For what that's worth.
I did say that I know she is not good at
sitting down, so it's a little tough to
figure out. Maybe walking somewhere.
I finally staked up my tomato plants.
I got some little stick for stakes and now
getting them out of the package, they seem
very flimsy. I use three at one end to try
to help with that. And I'm trying to use a
Florida weave, which links all of the together,
so I think it might make them a little stronger.
But they might just all blow over. So we'll see.
They main plants all have blossoms, now. The one
plant off by the strawberries is not doing so
well. It's in a big mulched area, and I think
the soil is not as good. The leaves were getting
yellow. I should try to find what that means.
And I need to give them some fertilizer again.
It's raining today, which should be good.
The last bunch of seedlings didn't make it,
but I have three or so from the original bunch
that now are about the size of the plants I
might have gotten from the store, so they
seem like they will make it. They weren't
even tall enough to reach a first string in
my weave, though, so I had to hold off with them.
I should be getting some tomatoes, though.
My parents have not been lucky with their
garden this year, though. Something ate the
roots of their tomato plants, moles maybe,
so they've had to start over. And they
got some squash plants, but then the ones
from seed came up, so now they have some
extra plants, and probably they will bring
some for here. I don't really care for
squash so much, so I haven't put any in here.
Our washer finally died. It was thirty-seven years
old. That's a long life. It leaked water on
the floor, which followed along the wall and
into the bathroom on the other side of the wall.
It reminded us of all the flood victims around
this weekend. We didn't have any kind of problem
like that, though.
I got a bunch of strawberries from our strawberry
patch. Maybe half a dozen, and more than that
I left to get a little more ripe. I'm a little
surprised that the birds and squirrels didn't
get them first. It did look like a bird
might have gotten to one, but otherwise they
were fine. And it looks like the way they
sit on the ground, they are a little bit protected.
So bonus!
The tomato seedlings seem to be making it. They
are still quite small, and I don't know if they
will make it to fruit. The other plants are
getting good sized, though still not close
to full-sized. I haven't even staked them yet,
though I better get on it. But a couple
of them already have blossoms. The breed
is Early Girl, so they aren't kidding.
I kind of think the plants are really too
small to be producing tomatoes. We'll
see. And I think this may be a breed that
doesn't keep making fruit forever like
you kind of expect for tomato plants.
To laugh in the midst of suffering. So
before going down to Bardog, I tried an
ATM and it was down. Then a second one.
Ouch, it must have been the network.
I had to go back home and pick up another
c-note just in case. And driving in
to midtown, I remember thinking that
I could just use my Starbucks card,
and probably Melissa would pick up
the tab. I only got chicken tenders.
But the atm in midtown was working,
so I was fine. But I could see it
probably meant bad things for Melissa,
and yes, the credit card was up and
down all night. So she was really
suffering. At one point, she was
struggling to handle some checks,
to ring them up, and an old guy
just started pointing and laughing
at her. And while at first a little
hurt, she actually started smiling
and laughing too, despite having
such a hard time. At closing,
by herself, she was again sturggling
and wasn't going to be happy. Aldo
told her she had to stay until she
got everything though, so she would
probably be there until 6. And she had
an exam in the morning, which must
not have been good. But in the middle
of it, on account of a guy, from Wisconsin,
laughing, she was able to laugh and
be just about as happy as I've seen her.
We put the old washer by the curb, and now
half an hour later, somebody is picking it
up. They wanted to charge ten bucks to haul
it off. Now somebody could actually make some money
off it, maybe.
It reminded me of the line from Corso's
poem "Marriage" which I linked to.
I'm also reading some little bits about it.
Poetry was fun. I used to do sad little
adolescent bits of it. I've got that
junk sitting around here somewhere.
But I never was serious, and I didn't
develop or keep up. I probably would
have been more of a prose poet, anyway.
Did I mention someone once said I reminder
her of Jack Kerouac. I think she was
on acid at the time. Just some kind of
college party. Seems unlikely you'd
find anyone who would know the guy now.
And I was thinner then. More likely
to wear white t-shirts. Poetry of
course reminds me of Wynne. It's seems
odd that I can find stuff from her now.
And Kim got a MFA, so she has studied
writing poetry. I could have studied
writing this year. Maybe it would
have been good. There were several
things I could have studied, but I
really just kind of decided to be lazy.
Maybe that's fine. The cultural story
of the talents. The little Jesus story
about the three servants, each given
a talent, which was just some money,
but really anything of value. One hid
it under a rock, and the other two
invested them and used them and got
them to grow. The one that hid it under
a rock lost it. It's a story. And
it's suppose to express how valuable it
is to make use of things. But I'm not
so sure. There's pain in work.
One of the lines in the movie hooked me.
Brat's ex-boyfriend came by, and then
hung out with the dudes, and told them
he stays friends with all of his ex's,
it's kind of a Zen Buddhist thing.
And that was funny to me, and think
few people would get it. It's the
exact opposite of a Zen Buddhist thing,
which in a Zen Buddhist way, makes
it a Zen Buddhist thing. And you get
the feeling that he's just L.A. shallow
and doesn't know any better, and yet
it's true. The mind boggles. It's
what I would call writing.
So, we're going to do a demo for the
kung fu school. We practices fanzi quan,
which we have been studying. Louie said
he was not comfortable with it. He
wasn't kidding. He really doesn't quite
have it. Reecie was more mellow, but
she is quite shakey as well. I was
all for it, and I think I'm solid,
but I don't know about them. It
was David who wanted to learn it,
and he won't make it to the demo.
He did it, and he's very solid.
So I don't know how it's going to go.
I don't feel nervous at all. I was
thinking recently how I really don't
think I get nervous so much any more.
Shy maybe. I'm still not so good talking
on my feet. But it seems like performance
nervousnous does not get me. I don't
talk in front of crowds much, but the
idea does not scare me, like it seems
to most people. That's about embarassment.
Maybe I'm not so scared of being embarassed
any more. And yet, there are a lot of
things I won't say to Melissa, too scared.
Hmm. I think it's getting to where I
just don't care about what most people
think, but a few, maybe. If I can write
a public blog where I talk about sad little
things about me, I really must not care that
much.
I'm reading a reddit post about
a math problem in a radio contest. If three
people can sit around a table six ways, how many
ways can 8 people sit around a table. The guy
said eight factorial, and they didn't think it
was right. He got his girlfriend to give the
number, 40320, and she said he was right with
8 factorial. Honestly, though, that's not
a number, so I don't think it's right.
But it gets a little worse. I didn't
get the answer right away myself, which
makes me feel bad because I'm studying
combinatorics right now. Looking
at the discussion, I'm not sure
the question is properly posed.
The thing is, and this has gotten
to me in the past, I can think of
quite a few other possibilities.
The first one, though, we might
be able to get rid of. We aren't talking
about a round table, because then three
people would only have two ways.
How many chairs are there? For
six to be right, there would have
to be only three chairs. Maybe it's
circular and there are four chairs.
Either way, there is no way for
eight people to sit around it.
Maybe people are just sitting on
the floor, and we aren't worried
about how many chairs. You can think
about different rules, and get different
answers, though at this point, I only
have zero or 8 factorial. The rules
have to make three map to six.
Anyway, I don't know. For some reason, though,
I didn't right of recognize six as three factorial.
anyway, it's something.
I watched _Cocaine Cowboys_. It was about some people
in the Cocaine business around Miami in the 70s and 80s.
The Colombians took over from the Cubans, and it
got very violent. So some of the drug war legitimately
became about the violence. I guess that makes
some kind of sense. America needs its violence.
Somewhere in there, there was something on gun
control. I could have been the thing on that
fat Moore guy or Nader. But they said that
gun control works. Most countries don't have
a problem with gun violence like the U.S.
because they restrict handguns. But Michael
more used Canada to say it isn't the gun.
They have lots of guns but don't have
our gun violence. But he didn't say the
important fact that they have long guns,
but they restrict handguns. Huh. It
couldn't be that, it must be the economic
or social conditions.
Wow! I made this three minutes microwave chocolate
mug cake, which I saw on reddit.
It was incredibly easy, and didn't mess up any bowls
or pots, which added to it just being easy.
My mom, who bakes for real, actually seemed impressed.
The cake isn't great, but it is adequate, and
it's not even klitschy, which how her cakes
sometimes turn out. It was actually
fluffy, which I completely was not sure about.
It must be something that steam or egg does.
I have never made a cake before, so it
was a nice first try. And I didn't even
measure it really, using a regular tablespoon,
and not a measuring spoon. I am quite pleased,
and now I can have chocolate cake any time I want.
Three minutes is the cooking time, but the scooping
and mixing made it only about 10 minutes.
And then there's the Frontline episode on the vaccine war. Mom's who opt out and
endanger others. But don't think they do, out of ignorance.
Another thing to remind me of Wynne, who is a pediatrician.
She's a smart, successful doctor, so I might
like to talk to her, but I don't think she
would want to talk to me. She's also very
sweet. But I kind of scared her, so I should
leave it alone.
I'm watching a thing on Philip Glass.
I don't really like him. I'm not much
for classical music or whatever he does.
Big effort music. But he's rich. Does
movie music. Now there is a section on his
sort of spritiual stuff, like Buddhism,
but he doesn't call himself a Buddhist.
He says he's interested in taoism.
In that sort of diverse interest, including
being Jewish, he reminds me of Cliff,
who also studied music.
He does chi gung and felt it after 5 years.
Well, I guess I might have 2 more years.
Being rich, he knows all kind of famous people.
Ginsberg, the Dalai Llama, Ravi Shankar.
All kinds of film makers, of course.
They had Scorsese and Woody Allen.
So he just said something that kind
of illustrates what I don't like.
He was talking about some kind of
adventure weirdness out in the desert
maybe that he did when was 65, and
he said most people were retiring
to the bahamas and playing golf.
No. Most rich people are doing that. I guess
other people don't count.
At about twenty 'til 10, I said I
was going to go to Starbucks to get
her another one. And again with the lip,
she was saying I didn't have to, but
I said very plainly that I wanted to.
I think I had to do it twice, and
she did give in. One ominous thing.
I looks like she didn't eat anything
that day. I asked her if she ate
something, which I do fairly often,
and this time she was kind of
evasive and didn't come up with anything.
That girl. But seeing her with Josh.
She is just so devoted to him.
Man, I was with Melissa off and on for
about 12 hours. It doesn't get old.
She she went off the shoulder today.
some kind of tube top at work, and something
else during the day. I'm not sure why
she needed somethign different for work,
exactly, but thinking now. She had a white
skirt with some kind of salmony top,
but that skirt didn't have pockets she
would need at work, so she had to
have her little denim skirt, but then
maybe the top wouldn't match any more,
so she switch to a blue one. Quite yummy.
I guess it's hard to separate out how much
is just liking how she looks.
Bardog did really well in the wine race.
They were running pretty hard, and
didn't spill anything. A lot of people
went a little too fast and then lost
bottles. But it seemed that was more about
the wind gusting. So quite a bit was just
being lucky enough not to catch a wind gust.
But that's fine. They got third place.
This time Melissa didn't have time to help
Jeanne with her queen of the vine
costume, and she just didn't get it together.
I didn't get her name. I little girl walked up
to me and talked to me a bit. First I was at the
jukebox, but then she came over to me at the other
end of the bar. She said I looked happy all the
time. And I said thanks. I don't have to work
right now. I really wasn't very friendly, especially
compared to her. She said she liked me shaved,
though she also like me with the beard, too.
Most people aren't happy all the time.
So I'm seeing something different now. The video
will pause, but I noticed that the timer keeps
counting, and after maybe five or ten seconds,
it will come nack after a pause. Maybe it
was doing that before, but I wouldn't give
it enough time to come back. I don't know.
Seems like before I would kill the process,
and it wouldn't be able to recover, or maybe
I would pause it.
I started watching a Frontline episode on the
digital nation. They have a bunch of MIT kids.
I don't like MIT kids. And maybe that's part
of the deal. They themselves talk about
how great they are at multitasking, but then
they have some psychologists testing them,
and they are actually very poor at it.
Luckily, there is grade inflation to make
up for it. What I don't like is how
important they think they are, how
sure of themselves. Maybe spoiled would
be the word. But somewhere, I know I
read about how the parents of some
kids in some kind of economic group
have empowered them to feel entitled,
that they should get what they want
because they are so special. Annoying
is what it is.
I just read an article against paying for online dating.
It's from a free dating site, OKcupid, so they
have an interest in making the pay competition
look bad, but it does statistical analysis
on it. The main sort of fact that they have
is that on paid sites, usually more than
95% of the profiles are from people who
aren't paying, so they can't answer back.
That makes the experience quite poor.
Guys will get frustratrated, and then send
poorly done messages, and that will annoy
girls. I did finally give up my subscription
to match.com. I met two people from it.
Still, the analysis suggested you might get
one reply in 100. I didn't get very many
but it wasn't that bad. Also, the profiles
list how recently you've had activity.
That seems like it would indicate you
must be a subscriber, but I guess not.
Part of what they go for is to try to
persuade people to subscribe so they
will reply. I think I just recently lapsed,
and somehow I got maybe it was a "wink".
Possibly fake, or something. I don't know.
They keep sending stuff. But I've given up
on them.
I also saw an online game game where you're a shark
Yay! My tax money came in. It's actually been
in several days and I hadn't checked. And since
I got more money back than I put in, "refund"
isn't really the right word.
So, I'm kind of bummed out the Kimberly Hill
doesn't accept me as a facebook friend. She's
a cute little girl I see at shows with Super 5.
I think she's cute, so I'd like to see the pictures she
has. And she's got hundreds of friends, but
doesn't accept me. She may not recognize me.
I don't know. I've recenly tried to reduce
my facebook friends to people I know personally
in some way, though they may just be acquaintances,
and some are people from the intp, but I
feel fairly close to some of the intpish.
I got through the third season of battlestar
galactica. I think they've gone a little
weird. Starbuck is back from the dead,
and it looks like it's just fantasy,
not science fiction. They did something
with "All along the watchtower" but whatever
cover they are using doesn't sound to
me like the song. And they have the lyrics
stuck in there, and it just seems goofy.
I should be done in a couple of weeks, maybe.
I've got a thing to watch Netflix download
on the wii. It's kind of more convenient
seeing it on the TV than just on the
computer, I think. It's easier to have food
with it on there. Mostly I've got documentaries.
I saw something on Michael Moore, and something
on Ralph Nader.
Donnie and Melissa were talking. Donnie said
he doesn't like to spoon or cuddle, it's too
hot. And Melissa had to agree with that.
She said she would be like, get away.
She doesn't like to be too hot when
she's sleeping. Boo.
I decided to shave. Getting too itchy, and
I finally found someone, Angela, who didn't like it.
I think it was about time.
Maybe it doesn't sound like much, but we don't
have computers or robots that can name things,
that is, just tell you what something is called.
There's isn't even really an idea of how you
would do that, though really, that isn't
all that clear a thing to ask. Given any
particular something or other, it could
be called a large number of things. You might
call a person a person, or a man or a woman,
or by his name, or maybe a brother or sister,
or a cook or a worker. There are so many
possibilities, and what you might say
would depend on what you are trying to do.
Language is really more of a game that we
play. But it's a game that computers don't
play.
Angela also said that she didn't like the
beard so much. She didn't even recognize
that it was me until I came up to her.
She suggested maybe a goatee, but I
think that would be too much work for
me, so I may get rid of it soon.
I surely don't know what it means, but
I saw Melissa naked in a dream. She was
on the other side of the room, though,
with lots of other people around.
My thought is that maybe I'm letting
go a bit.
I finally did my taxes maybe a couple of days ago.
It was a lot harder than I was expecting. Maybe
three hours to do. What I didn't realize is that
every time I sold mutual funds had to be listed
out individually, with the sale date, the purchase
date, and the sort of basis plus the sale price.
And this was all using a fairly feeble interface.
Also, I tried to use their free version, and
I chose it, but at some point they asked if
I wanted to import old information, and said
sure, but apparently, that requires paying
for it. Once I clicked that, it never let
me undo it. I went out and went in again,
but it stuck with me like herpes. I couldn't
get back to a page to start over and go
back to a free version. So I was very unhappy
with that. So I would say avoid HR Block.
And above that, while I was putting in my
mutual fund sales, it had a check mark
for if the sale was a wash sale, and that
would substract out some of the losses,
but my investment company actually had
the sales only partially as wash sales.
So they didn't let me put in the information
exactly. It ended up not mattering because
I had more than the $3000 minimum allowed
losses, but it was something more. But
on the plus side, apparently with the
Democrats in power, there were some
kind of money giveaways, and I got
back about 50% more money than I
put in. That really doesn't seem
right to me. And I tried to uncheck
that crap, but it wouldn't take it off.
It doesn't seem likely that it will
do me much good. I'll probably blow
it or something.
The jury duty meeting I went to on Wednesday
was only a preliminary meeting. They only wanted
to exlude those obviously ineligible people,
like non-citizens or non-residents, and give
out an designated week. They had a system
where you could stand in line and maybe
get a week you wanted, or at least not
get one you didn't want. I've got June 14-18.
They said 80% make it out by Tuesday. A
combined 2% get out Monday or take more
than a week. So those aren't so likely.
They had maybe 3000 people there, and
they got through pretty quick I
waited till near the end of the week
selection, and got out in two hours.
Over several days recently I had little
tasks I needed to do. Put out the plants,
move money around, do taxes, wash dishes,
go to jury duty, go shopping. I think I've
got everything done, but I've got a lingering
feeling of having something I need to do.
I might have forgotten something maybe.
Or maybe just the feeling is hanging around.
I don't know.
I went to Kroger, and looking through the
meat reduced for quick sale, I saw a package
of steaks, about 4.3 pounds reduced to $10.
They weren't so great cuts, but they looked
pretty good. I didn't feel like frying them
like steaks, so I tried just slow roasting
them. I put them on 200 for maybe three hours.
I had put a little water in the bottom, but
they really just lost all their liquid,
and it ended up almost like a stew. So
not the best of cooking, but it was OK.
If I had just made them like steaks, I
would have just eaten them completely
one at a time, but like this, I can
just cut off a little bit at a time and
nibble. And just solid au jus. I haven't
even made gravy the last two times I cooked
beef. It goes fine. And I made some rice.
I've about run out of potatoes and I
don't have any bread. So, except for
now having some rice, I'm almost going
carb free. For breakfast a few times
I've been having just eggs, sausage, cheese,
but no bread. It really does seem like
I don't get as hungry when I do that.
I'm thinking eating four pounds of steak
isn't going to be great, though.
Just saw an article suggesting we can do
two things at once, but not more. Maybe.
Doing two at once is hard enough, though.
Melissa really seemed to be so tired as to
be delirious. Seems like she was trying
to tell me I didn't have to tip her so
much or something. But she said thank you
so sweetly. She is really sweet.
Gardening today. I put out the tomato plants.
And some of the seedlings. A couple of the
plants actually had three plants clumped
together and I did not separate them.
Maybe I should have. And I don't thing
the seedlings are going to make it.
They really didn't have significant
roots. But I can give them a week.
Plenty of time to put in other plants.
The strawberry plants have a lot of
blossoms. Probably the critters will
get them. I need to do something
about the critters.
Man, I still haven't done my taxes.
That's kind of sad. I need to get on
it. And I need to put the tomatoes
in this weekend. I went to the
hardware store to see about getting
some more plants. They have them for
a dollar each, which seems like it
wasn't too bad. The plants in the
breed I wanted didn't look so big as
the others, though. And they didn't
have a convenient flat to hold just
10 like I wanted. The flats were
like 16 plants, and just with everything
I decided to hold off. And I come home.
I've got a dozen seedlings in this
second batch. I think I will just
Put them in the ground like this.
Maybe they live, maybe they die.
I was probably going to just give up
on them anyway, so I might as well
give them a chance. My dad was saying
the last bunch got sunburned and I
put them out before they were ready
for full sun, but he just says
a lot of things that he thinks,
and acts with complete confidence
when in fact not even that often correct.
It might have been that. I think
possibly I didn't give them enough
soil space to develop a large enough
root system. Plants are leaves
and roots to suck up stuff. They're
not all that complicated, really.
With not enough roots, they wouldn't
be able to suck up enough water.
Right now, my big plants haven't even
really been growing, and I haven't
even really watered them so much,
and they haven't really wilted so
much. My first batch, I think
I may have let wilt a bit too much.
And that's going to be an issue
with this garden. I have a problem with
not always watering plants enough.
I'll see how it goes.
Poor Melissa. It looks like she didn't
pass her biochemistry test. And she
talked to the guy. He said it was easy
and some people got 100%. I didn't quite
hear and follow what Melissa was saying
about that. It seemed like she was
suggesting that maybe there was some
cheating. He also said she wasn't
getting it. That might just be. It's
a touch subject, with a lot to memorize
and learn, and you have to have a lot
of strong background in the underlying
basis, like organic chemistry, to just
be able to follow the material in that
class to begin with. And Melissa don't
sleep so much, so it is must be even
harder to absorb the stuff in the
first place. She works full time.
There's nothing to say that it's even
going to be possible for her to learn
the material with the effort and time
she is able to put in. It could just
take more than she is giving. There
may be people who are doing well because
they have more time to put in, and maybe
they are just more interested and better
at it learning this particular type
of material. And one thing about Melissa,
she's got the fear in this class. I've
seen it. You start doubting your
ability to pick up some material,
and you just don't think you get it, and
it doesn't sink in. You think there
is more to it than you are seeing and
it doesn't make sense, when in fact
you have simply not taken up a
sort of emotional response of
accepting how things are. I've
seen it in math a bit. It's kind
of an attitude of I can't get it.
You really want to have the feeling
that it's really not bad.
I did go down to Bardog on Thursday
night after kung fu. Asa asked
why I went down there in the week,
which was unusual for me. I said
I wanted to see how Melissa did
on her biochem test, which was
really probably the main reason.
And she might need some comforting
or sympathy if she didn't do well,
which I thought was likely, and
it surely would be nice to help
celebrate if she did well. It
was really full, though. I had
to park down a hill where they
quite often have cars broken
into, because you can't see it
so easily. And I couldn't
leave it there. I was actually
not so worred about my car being
broken into. Since mine is the
cheapest car Toyota makes, it
just happens to be less likely
to be broken into. And I actually
still have enough money to buy
a couple more if I had to. I
have to admit that really, the
only thing I care about is how
upset Melissa is when I park down
there. She worries, and has
told me not to do it. So after
and hour or so, I just parked in
the alley. Asa said he has done
that a lot. And he could come
tell me if there is a problem.
And really, I was thinking about it.
I don't worry that much about getting
a ticket. Really the only thing
I care about is for Melissa not
to be mad. And then sometimes
a parking place would open up,
and I could have moved into it.
Asa kind of encouraged me to
just be a rebel. And like I
said, it wasn't that big a deal to me,
so I just left it there.
And I asked Melissa if she had eaten
anything. I do that pretty often.
And today she said, no, she hadn't.
And I think that kind of makes sense.
Some people don't eat when they
are stressed, and Melissa was really
pretty stressed. So there. She did
get something. A pickle and an egg roll.
She also has lattes, which have a lot
of milk, like 16 oz. each, and she'll
have like 4 in a day, so just from that,
I don't worry about her all that much.
But one thing that gets me. Her boyfriend
should be making sure she eats. It
seems like a minimal thing. And maybe
it would be just too annoying to have
someone that does that. And I absolutely
don't ever know how her relationship
is going. She never ever talks about
it, and I don't think I should be asking,
but still. And on Sunday, she seemed
like she really needed to just be
comforted, and that's a BFs job,
but I didn't really want to say anything.
She's got some issues. I would like
to help her out, but it doesn't seem
like is into that. And it seems like
she kind of proud and wants to always
take care of herself and not rely on
anyone. Blech!
So part of the deal was that she was
really tired. She really looked like
she might not be able to drive home.
I told her, though, when I was leaving
that I've seen her more tired than this,
though she did look very tired. This time,
though, it seems like David who was working,
probably wasn't going to let her get
away with it, and was going to put her in
a cab. He was going to get Asa to take her,
but he didn't have his car. Possibly however
Asa was getting home, they arrange it
to go with Melissa. So they are looking
after each other, there.
I just saw a little reddit discussion on compilers.
Specifically, it was about a kind of data structure
called control flow graphs that is kind of
old school. Dude seems to be saying that
computer science has found stuff that is
better, but they still use them because
the main textbook on compilers, called
the Dragon Book because it has had
dragons on the cover of all the editions,
uses them. The book gets updated,
but it's not really a start from
scratch thing, so it keeps the main
stuff, and this is one of the main things.
I guess that's how science goes.
I probably should let it go, but writing
about it helps me let go, so here it goes.
Listening to Ron Moore in his podcasts
about Battlestar Galactica is like hearing
a guy jack himself off. And they have them
where he gets on with David Eick, and it's
like gay porn. Just an hour of slurping noises.
Not really my thing. In season three, though,
Mrs. Ron is starting to get on them. I didn't
like them before, but somehow they managed
to make the commentaries worse. She some
kind of costume designer. But she doesn't
know how to sew. OK, whatever. But she
didn't seem to understand that the human-style
Cylons reincarnate. So she wasn't following
how Caprica six was the same person. Maybe
it's just a detail, but it seems like the
story couldn't really have been making
sense. So how was she watching it?
It seems like the kind of thing, where
people will laugh along, even though
they don't get the joke. The mind boggles,
and I really am not happy having to listen to her.
She talked on the little newsboards. I don't know.
I got three in this week. If I keep up this rate,
I'll be through with them all in a month.
Now I'm just trying to get past it. That's
really just sad.
And they had this thing where they settled on
a planet for a year, and then the cylons took
over, and they escaped after a few months.
It was like they were completely changing the
series, but it was just a four episode arc,
and then I guess they're back to where they
were. It seems so TV.
OK, reasoning by analogy. This is not
a valid way to find something that is
definitely true. But it is a way
to find a proposition that might be
true, and then we can see if it is.
So maybe not quite reasoning. And
possibly, in the analogy, there might
be mechanisms in both situations
being compared to make them true,
so it has some kind of chance
to make it true. It's a place
to look for truth, not a way to
find it for sure. And possibly,
just psychologically, it might be
a way for people to remember things,
as they can keep track of which
analogies work, and use those more.
I think really thats more the benefit
for people, because we form emotional
responses favoring and adjusting how
we apply different types of analogies,
and that can be a mechanism for learning
in the sense of adjusting tendencies
to act and support beliefs in particular ways.
We say intelligence. In part it's a
creative ability to come up with successful
ways of handling slightly new situations,
though they have to be similar to other
previous situations.
There's a little shaded section of the backyard
that isn't very thick with grass. Sometimes
it has standing water. And maybe you would
call them mostly weeds. Now it's got a bunch
of dandelions, but I've been trying to pull
those. It's also got a lot of little
purple flowers, and a lot of little yellow
flowers. I guess you would have to call
them weeds, but they are little flowers.
I think they are kind of nice.
Some people on reddit are very disturbed
with some of the terms for
iPhone developers. The original
programming language has to be one of
theirs, like objective-c. It's so you
can't take apps starting from adobe.
And maybe so you can't develop for
droid in java and just translate that
to the iphone. I seems like a weird
restriction, and I'm not sure how
enforceable it could be. But it's
a way for apple to stay in control
of the software on their device.
I haven't really tried doing anything
for the phone yet. This really looks
like a pretty terrible thing to have done.
But the istuff is pretty popular, so
maybe they can get away with it.
Honestly, I'm not sure how much extra
software you really need, but this
sure hurts the idea of it been a new
platform for software. I think you
can use onjective-c, c or javascript.
No lisp? Boo. Well, javascript is
almost a lisp.
I saw somewhere that they are looking
at mini towers for phones. Some dealie
that takes the phone signal and puts
it onto the internet. I'm not quite
sure of the details. I know the
iphone already will grab a wifi
for its internet if it can.
I often watch a bit of the NBC national
news if I can. But it's getting to
where all I want is their little one
minute teaser summary they have in
the beginning. It's really enough
to give me the daily overview of
what's going on. I used to like
the PBS summary that the do in the
beginning of the show usually, but
now they've moved it to somewhere
as the second story, but that doesn't
put it at a particular predictable
time. It's somewhere around twenty
minutes in, but I just don't care
to watch the first story to see
the daily news. So they've blown
it for me. And what usually happens
on NBC is that it's just a summary
of their stories, and not necessarily
news. I just looked at it today.
I think they mentioned 5 stories.
One was just their human interest
story. Two were about celebrites.
One was about a news story that
really happened almost a week ago,
but people just happen to still
be talking about it, and one is
something that just happened, and
people are talking about it, but
it's really more of a human interest
sort of thing about some particular
person that really makes no difference
to anything. So there really is no
news at all. Infotainment. A summary
is as much of that as I want. And then
from other sources, you can see that
there is real news, but generally in
other countries, so they don't
talk about it. Like on the BBC news.
So maybe I should just stick to the
internet. But it's not a video,
and sometimes there is some stuff you
need to see.
I guess what I would like would be to
make her breakfast, and give her massages
at night, because you have to do
those most nights over a period
of months for it to really work
with fibromyalgia. Or maybe it
really doesn't work. Getting enough
sleep is probably important. And
just being with her. A real relationship.
Not going to happen, but it's possible
in some sense, and something to imagine.
I tried Aldi again, and this time they did
have strawberries, for 99 cents a pound.
I bought three. I ate one of them the
first day. They had at least a pallet--
hundreds of pounds. Honestly, they weren't
that good. Maybe picked too green. But
they were good enough. I just like them.
Went by the apple store to look at the iPad.
It seems nice enough. They had a lot of them sitting
around. Probably not as big a deal as they'd like.
The on screen keyboard actually seemed big enough
to type on reasonably. but without any kind
of feel or feedback, it's probably no quite
good enough, and I'd need some kind of real keyboard
in addition. We'll see.
Reading _Tihkal_. I had a reaction that while
the dude is clearly a genius, the chicky not
so much. And she's a mensan and all, but
seems like sort of an average person who
thinks she's better than she is. And I get the
feeling that being married to a real genius,
who probably has to constantly reassure her
and massage her ego (they actually write about that),
she really is confused about it. So at some point,
I've decided not to word for word it, and I started skipping
around. Dude is a genius, but he too seems
to have some limitations as well. There's
a chapter on his stamp collecting. Didn't
read that. But what is some of the fun stuff?
There's a chapter on morning glory seeds.
Kind of unimpressive as a drug material.
At some point, it was possible to by a big
sack of them, though, which was I guess
of some significance. I think we had
morning glory growing in the garden here.
Kind of a weed. I never saw any seeds.
But maybe I didn't know what to look for.
This gives a better description.
Wow, I see Doug standing out there talking
on the phone. I'm sitting here at Starbucks.
What else. Chicky became a therapist.
Kind of woo-woo. She has a section
of all the "places" you can get to
on psychedlic drugs. And it's all
stuff that is basically already there.
And she gives sort of poetical names to them.
She's got "the void". It's when you
think everything is meaningless. Basically
acute depression. Fine. There's "inflation"
which is where you think you're special.
Know everything, that sort of thing.
Actually, she calls it "the goddess"
or something stupid, but calls it
inflation later. She said she was
too embarassed or something to
put it in the first book. I'll bet.
I'm thinking another word it "delusions of grandeur".
A little subsection on euphoria. OK.
There's the oceanic experience,
where you feel one with or a part
of everything. That's the kind
of thing that you really hear a lot,
that for some people makes the drug
a nifty wonderful, gift from god sort
of thing. Great. But she actually
talks about how good the ego is,
and how it would be bad to dissolve the
ego, though there are people who
say that's nice. As someone who
sympathizes with advaita, this
was really where I started getting
tired of chicky.
A little bit
on time distortion. She mentioned
on person for whom time completely
stopped, and she spent forever
stuck one time. Forever. Ouch.
They tell one story one time, where
time slowed down, and it looked like
they might be able to stop it, but
what would happen if they did.
Could be very bad, and you might
get stuck. So there was someone
who got stuck. Would never try that
stuff again.
But there was one thing that stuck
me. She did a thing on paranoia.
I realized that I've never experienced
paranoia. And it she said it was
a kind of projection. You feel
bad about yourself in some kind of way,
or you're out to get other people
or something, and you kind of
turn it back on yourself. Or you internalize
thinking you are no good or something.
Some kind of psycho explanation, I
guess I don't really get. But I
just don't really have the kind
of background feelings you need
to get paranoia, and it hasn't
ever hit me. But chicky has all
those kind of issues, so it
hits her all the time. Totally
can't handle the weed. I'll
been to all the other places
she talks about, plus a few others,
but I've never been paranoid.
One fairly intriguing thing with these
guys. The reserve the word "hallucination"
to mean actually perceiving things or
scenes or objects that you think
are there, but other people wouldn't.
Pink elephants, say. Just wavy
lines or rippling they would
not call hallucinations. Now,
most places that talk about these
drugs _do_ say that kind of stuff
is hallucination, so their talk
about the drugs is quite misleading.
Because in fact, hallucinations in
this sense are actually very rare
for most of these drugs. He mentioned
a couple, ketamine and something
else, that actually do often have
them, but the others, not so much.
And then there are flashbacks. *sigh*
They are used by the regressives to
scare people. Mostly lies. They
want to scare people by saying that
if you take something, and any time
for the rest of your life, you
could start tripping again. That's
not the deal. And they come up with
a complete bogus associated idea that
because there are flashbacks, there
must be some kind of lingering amount
of whatever drug it is lurking in your
body ready to pop out and zap you.
More lies. Not biologically possible.
They especially say this with the weed.
It's fat-soluble, so maybe it sits
waiting in some fat deposit somewhere.
Some tiny amount. That's probably
the key to seeing that it's just bogus.
This tiny, miniscule amount of drug
has the same effect as the whole thing.
When you deal with the raw facts of
dosing requirements like dude does,
you see that having a tiny amount
work like that is silly. Flashbacks
are a psychological phenomenon.
Kind of like a memory. He gives an
example of some experience or something
that was unrelated to an substance,
and the experience came back to him
one time, and it was like he was back
there again. And you've got the ptsd
people having flashbacks, where suddenly
they're back in the jungle again or whatever.
Same deal. Nothing to do with the drugs.
Just sometimes the brain will go back
to some places that it's been. Drug
experiences are just weird enough that
they'll get stuck in your brain that
way sometimes, and come back to you.
Doug said he's going to Google I/O 2010 in May. He's been having
trouble with his phone, and last year
they gave out free phones at the conference.
They aren't doing that this year. They're
sending them out before the conference.
David at kung fu is going to a wu shu tournament that's out in San Jose in July. I said
I'd go too. Li lao shr has a friend or something
out there, too, so she might go. I need to look
more into it.
One little girl sitting looks oddly familiar.
I'm sure I've just seen her from here, but
I think I heard her say something about
White Station, and maybe I saw her out there.
Her friend talked to me. Asked about laptops.
Wanted a recommendation.
Looking over the stuff from Uncle Fester.
He goes on about how to grow ergot. He
outlines a plan to put like a couple of
acres of rye with ergot. So you
get maybe 200 pounds of ergot, enough
to make maybe a kilogram of LSD.
That's like maybe 10 million doses.
It's kind of a crazy amount. Obviously
nothing he has done, and probably
no one ever did that. I would wonder
if even the people who make pharmaceutical
ergot product do anything crazy like that.
I don't know if there is a synthetic
process to get the basic starting
blocks for it, so maybe they do
start with natural material. And
I guess it's sad that I don't know
that. If I had even looked over
the recipes, I would know that.
Just lazy. Anyway, there is
a migraine medication, ergotamine,
that is in that family, so yes,
somebody somewhere is making
pharmaceutical variations on
the stuff. In fact, probably the
main way to cook LSD is to start
with ergotamine. Turns out,
egotamine dosage is like somewhere
in the large numbers of milligrams.
LSD has dosage around a tenth of
a milligram, so you can get quite
a bit doing that. And messing with
ergot, a fungus that grows on rye,
and cause gangrene. Is someone going
to grow two hundred pounds of it?
I don't think so. So more than anything
else, it's just entertaining to read.
Morning glory is a lot more likely.
And there's Hawaiian baby wood rose.
I don't know what that is, though.
Much higher level of stuff than morning glory,
though.
One other thing Uncle Fester talks about.
You can make benzaldehyde from toluene.
Benzaldehyde is something you can use
to make meth. It roughly can do the
job that ephedrine does. You need
a little more stuff if you are starting
from benzaldehyde than if you start
from the ephedrine. The cold pill thing.
I still haven't quite grokked the procedure
from the cold pills, the super simple
in your kitchen personal use process.
But the thing to make benzaldehyde,
wow that's pretty straightforward.
And it's a hardcore procedure for industrial
level. Like making many pounds of
the stuff. And it actually involves
some electrochemistry. You have
to oxidize the toluene, so you use
electrolysis to make manganese oxide.
And toluene. I remember you could
just go into Walmart and get a can
of toluene. They use it for paint thinner.
I'm guessing they don't have that any more.
Nope. They've got some stuff that has
methanol, acetone, and toluene, but
I'm sure it's useless for this.
My dad fixed a lamp we have here
where the switch went bad. He likes
being out at the farm, but I think
he must have appeciated how nice it
is being in the city and not having
to drive 20 miles to get to the store.
He had to make quite a few trips
to get parts and things. One time he
got the wrong thing.
So I don't know how bad this thing is
with Melissa. It's kind of nice to
just have a nice friend like her.
I hope she likes having me, just
as someone who cares about her and
doesn't make any demands of her.
At least I think I don't. She keeps
doing the stuff with the lemonade,
and I hope that doesn't get old
for her. It's just so sweet.
But sometimes she has been late
for work trying to take care of it.
I'm not so happy that she has trouble
like that. So maybe I am a little
bit demanding. But really, I think
that's more something she's gotten
in her head. I like it, and I
hope it makes her at least feel
a little bit nice to do something
for me. I try to take care of her
to the extent I can. I'd do more
if she was into it. But for me, what?
I don't feel like I need a lot of
attention, and this seems really
just about right for me. And the plus
is that I don't go to titty bars.
I really just don't even feel the
desire to, which surely must be a
plus. But on the other hand, I
also haven't actually gone out on
any real dates. That also hasn't
seemed like I really needed to.
But that's a bad thing. I probably
should be talking to people. I'm not
making an effort. I probably should
be. And it's a thing I've had a problem
with. Waiting for maybe something
to happen with someone that just won't,
and using it as an excuse to not take
an risks for getting to know someone
new. But there's also the thing that
I don't think I really like most people.
There's that.
So David at Bardog was really drunk.
He was telling me that I should talk
to his sister some time. She's really
smart, maybe in Mensa or something.
I really should do that. I think
I have met her some time, but I
don't remember right now which one
she is. And I don't know her name.
But I should definitely try to
be friendly.
Tink on Facebook had a link on something
what might make people shy
or introverted. Some kind of "sensory perception sensitivity".
Doesn't really sound like a real thing, necessarily
My laptop tudor ran a chkdsk when it rebooted.
It looked like there was trouble, and it
really would only schedule one of those
if it had detected some problem. It
doesn't even automatically try one
of those anymore when it detects an
unnatural restart. It has to be specially
flagged to do one. And it can't run
chkdsk while the operating system is
running, after it's loaded. It has to
do it before everything, so it has
to set some flag somewhere and run it
instead of loading everything. I
didn't quite see what problems it
found, but it said there were zero
bad sectors. I'm guessing it's
gotten more sophisticated than back
in the day. It used to be that
when there was a problem in a spot
on the drive, it could just mark
it as bad. But that's a very naive
approach, because a disk drive
that is flaking more than likely
has problems that aren't really
in a particular spot so much
as dust that's getting kicked
around such that you just get
errors in different spots. At
least that's my understanding.
And I think this drive and the
operating system now is just handling
it in a completely different way.
It's gotten so it just deals with
the errors a bit better. There
are ways to deal with correcting
errors on reads, so it's just
handling stuff mostly now a bit
under the covers, and not kicking
the errors higher up to the applications.
That's my suspicion. Of course,
it could just be that the problems
I'm having are just different from
what I'm thinking. I think I need
to get a new drive, though it's
always so much work to rebuild
everything. It would be good if
I could do that, and get a thingamajiggy
to connect the old drive with USB.
I hear they have that kind of stuff,
but there might be an issue getting
one that works with this laptop drive.
They make those special, some way.
Checking, a drive would only be
like a hundred bucks. I should just
do it and not whine. It is quite
a bit of trouble, though.
They've called me for jury duty next week.
I'm not sure how that's going to go. I hear
that now they're going by driver's license.
They used to go by voter registration.
My newer laptop Tudor seems to have some
disk errors. When I play some files with
VLC the computer freezes up. And I had
suspected that it was a disk error before
when the whole OS crashed and I needed to
reinstall. I haven't been able to get a
disk fixit scan to go through. And I've
been getting quite a few blue screens.
But I tried just making a copy of the
file that was freezing, and the copy
worked ok. So I'm thinking there are
bad patches sitting what was just a little
ways into the unused disk area. I think
it was crashing when it was trying to
use the bad sections for disk swap area.
But at a certain point, the bad areas
got into some files I created, and then
only good sections were left. Because
it was doing pretty well for me just
recently, while my free space was kind
of low. But I just had to delete big
chunks because I need the space. So
I expect that I'm going to have trouble.
And it's a little interesting that
it could copy the files over, though
there was probably some bad stuff in it.
I think probably this particular program
just is not robust enough to deal with
the read errors. It's freeware.
I've been watching downloaded stuff on
Netflix. I saw _Enlighten Up_, which
is about yoga. Some little girl, Kate Churchill,
was into yoga and making documentaries,
so decided to do a documentary on yoga.
But she was going to get someone who
was not a yoga person to look into
it, and see if it changed his life.
The guy she found to do it was a journalist,
and was quite skeptical. He had some
kind of white collar conventional dad,
but his mom was a shamanic healer,
of all things. So the go to the little
crappy American yoga schools and see
the little space cadets. Doesn't
really do much. And they go see
some famous yoga guy in Hawaii.
That's not enough for them, so they
go to muddy smurfing India. First
Hawaii guy's teacher, but they
also go so Iyengar. He's like the
only yoga person I actually have
heard of. I studied yoga for some
while, I don't remember how long,
but they talked about Iyengar. Lou Hoyt.
I miss Lou. Anyway, so they talk to
Iyengar. Taskmistress must have
been on about how it's all spiritual,
because that seems to be what dude
thinks he's supposed to be looking
for, and he's just not seeing it.
So Iyengar sets him straight.
He started studying as a kid because
he was really sick. He just wanted
to be able to stand up and walk.
He didn't get into the spiritual
stuff until later. So, just what you
want to get out of it. Then they
kind of travel around. They learn
about bakti yoga, which is the
bigger thing in India. Devotion.
Probably the Hare Krishna's would
be the best example. You might
try to do stuff through your own
power, but bakti yoga is not like that.
And they talk to some other kind of
big guru, but I forget what all he
talked about. I don't know. I
wonder if Cliff ever made it out to
India. That might be something to try.
What else. I saw some mythbusters. Meh.
There was also something on philosophy,
_examined life_. Philosophers can be
some flaky folks. It seemed like
they tried to be kind of artsy by
talking to them as they walked around
and stuff. One huy was rowing in a boat.
Another was just driving around it looked
like New York. Some guy was talking about
ecology walking around a garbage dump.
Trippy.
This time, I was wanting to give Melissa my usual
amount, but I was thinking that probably she was
going to be resistant. My birthday and all.
She was trying to do something for me, and it
would have totally messed it up as a gift if
I had given her money. But I gave it at
least a shot. And I'm not sure but maybe just
doing that little might have hurt her feelings
a little bit. I was also contemplating just
stuffing it in her pocket or somewhere.
Jeanne actually stuff money in her pocket
one time when they were hugging. She might
have suspected that too, because after a
little hug, she kind of flitted off and
moved to a safe distance. Said "no money".
I said OK. In the past, I think I usually
convey that I'm a little disappointed that
she does this, but hopefully this time it
came across that I think she's being sweet.
She _is_ pretty sweet. And this kind of thing
gives me an opportunity to come an extra
time the next week, so maybe I'll go in tomorrow.
The parents left yesterday. Kind of sleeping
all day today. The black forest cake is already
almost gone. Only one piece left, though we did
freeze a few pieces. The leftovers are dwindling.
Should get back to the usual routine by myself.
I'm not sure I would call it "normal" since it
seems like they are here just so much. I just
have two modes of living, by myself and with
them around. The transitions are a little
rough, maybe.
I got some stuff done yesterday. It was kind of
cold, so they made a fire. Since it's Spring,
I figure that should be the last one, and
it spurred me to clean out my papers from
the 90s and burn them. Since I was getting
busy, I felt like connecting my ipod to my
amplifier. I had the cable sitting connected,
and it was more a matter of just trying it
out. But actually, it didn't quite work.
I'm not sure what the problem was, but
there was some kind of noise or attenuation
in the signal. I think it's an actually
problem in the electrical stuff in the
amp. Maybe something from being dusty.
Or it could be a problem with the speakers.
I could use new speakers. But I guess
I should try it with headphones to check.
Anyway, it kind of came and went, so I
don't know how it is.
Melissa got me a big porterhouse steak for me
birthday. And LeAnne got me a chocolate chambord
cake. So I had a good birthday celebration there.
And then my parents also got me a steak, with
a ceasar salad and shrimp cocktail. And I got
a black forest cake. It was just a completely
different cake from the one I got at the bakery.
Lighter, maybe, or at least, it didn't give
me the kind of "ate too much" slightly sick
feeling I got from the other. Real whipping
cream makes a difference. It won't last long.
Another year older. Doesn't really seem much different.
Two separate news stories of religious violence today.
Muslims in Moscow and Christians in the U.S.
With all that beef, my knee is hurting a bit.
Hopefully the colchicine will get it.
Are we created equal? Is that right? I think
the idea in whatever founding document that's
from, maybe the U.S. Constitution, I think
the idea is that people are basically the
same in how the government should treat them.
Some are richer than others, even simply
at birth, so in that sense, it's not true.
And something the founders didn't know about,
there are genetic differences in people.
They will have different abilities. It's
possible that they believed in the _tabula
rasa_, the blank slate, I think from Locke.
That's also an idea that is probably believed
to be wrong in science. I think it's dangerous
to have a government based on a principle that
people don't believe in, so it's important
to see if this is right. And I think at
best it can be salvaged with the idea of
right as in, it's best if things are done this
way. And the idea to take here is it's
best to treat people equally under the law,
to not give some people special privileges
for whatever reason. Like what was done
for the nobility in the previous historical
system. That's how that was a step up.
Part of an issue, though, is that with
money, it is possible to buy privilege,
so the idea of eveyone being equal is
just not true. That leave a question
of what to do with it. The privileged
will naturally want to keep it that way,
so it's likely that they will be the loudest
thing you will hear. And legitimately,
that will think it unfair to have anything
of theirs taken away. Of course, they want
it to be ignored who they took their stuff from.
And then there is the way how the national
debt, because rich people hold the most bonds,
is a way to transfer money from the poor and
middle classes to the rich.
A little disturbed by the idea you can get from
Kuhn. You can't change people's minds. At all.
They won't change. The only way for a general
opinion in society to change is for the old people
to die while the younger ones adopt a new idea.
He was talking about scientific revolutions,
but it is probably true for atheism.
Some examples of how some newer scientific theories
dropped stuff. Newton's theory of gravitation didn't
have any sort of reason why gravity work. With nothing
touching, there wasn't a mechanical reason. It just kind
of described it. The idea of the earth going around
the sun had several problems. If the earth is moving,
and you drop a ball off a tower, shouldn't the ball move
away from the tower because of the motion of the earth?
There's also a fairly obsucre thing, but let me try to
explain it. If the earth is moving and the sun is stationary
(relatively), then when the earth goes from say one side of an orbit
to another, there should be some change in the position
of the stars, called a parallax, but you don't see that.
Now, it wasn't till hundreds of years later that people
could solve that problem. There's no parallax because
the other stars are so far away. But at Galileo's time,
there was no way to know that or find it out.
Listening to the South Park Season thirteen commentaries.
They've got one, the f word. They have an intention
to do something like taking the word back, fags.
Somewhere, they saw that it didn't originally mean
homosexual, but was maybe toward women. So maybe
it could shift to someone else, in this case,
harley riders. Or generally big loud people.
I think that's kind of a neat idea. I generally
now is used to mean bad. As a pejorative to
be technical. And maybe at some point it
was fag as in sissy. But people really have
mostly moved past thinking homosexuals are
bad. So maybe we could take up fag just
as a general pejorative. There is some
argument with the glad people. We could see.
I guess I should talk to some folk.
I did get a little more of the bagua applications.
Louie is surely into them. We did some of the
sparring exercises. There's one that involves
a bump that aims to knock over, or at least
unbalance. And some stuff that goes right
into a choke. Actually the rear-choke release
as an exercise also involves practicing going
into the choke. Which is a little trippy.
Dang. They did a commentary on an episode that
wasn't even finished. So they weren't watching
it, even, just talking about it. There must
be money in it. I haven't gone through and even watched
all the episodes, and since I don't have cable
I haven't seen them. Matt and Trey kind of
hate the commentaries, but they do them
to add some value, I guess. I think they're
good. This time, it seems a little mellower.
They are apologetic sometimes, but they
also seem a lot more relaxed. They're
successful and don't have anything to prove.
And I really think they're doing a good job.
Maybe they're getting a little happier
or more satisfied. Hopefully they aren't
going to let it slide, but with all they've
done, they've really become expert craftsmen.
Good writers. They try to do immature stuff,
but they do it very well. They got an Emmy
for "Margaritaville", though they kind of joked
that the next one, "Eat, Pray, Queef" was really
their best. Maybe so, M&T. Maybe so.
My dad thinks that my tomato seedlings got too
much sun so were burned. That may be it.
They seemed kind of happy the first day I had
them out in the sun, and actually are worse now
than they were, though back then, they only
had the two rounded fake leaves and now they
have the kind of real tomato leaves, but really
smaller or of less area than those original.
I don't know. I know I also didn't seem to
keep them watered right. And I still suspect
that the little containers are too small for them to
have a sufficient root system. So I really
had given up on them, but there were actually
about seven plants left when my parents came here
a week ago, and they are holding on. My biggest
mistake and loss, now I see, was keeping
them outside when I went out of town for
the weekend. Possibly keeping them outside
in general wasn't so good, but that really
ended it for them. Since home depot didn't
have plants, I got some more seeds, and I'm
trying a new batch. I think it's really
a little too late to do this, unless I
have a lot of luck with these new ones.
It could be that I planted those others
too early or it really is a matter of
the container. This time I'm leaving them in the
original wide common tray, which I'm hoping will
give the roots more room. They were doing
so well initially. Also, the little things I'm
using have holes in the bottom so the water
runs out. Maybe that leaves it a little more dry
than they'd like. I sure don't know. But
I get you learn from experience. Seedlings
to plants was something I completely didn't
read anything about, and I guess I thought
it was easy enough, but there are obviously
things I missed.
I have some kind of soft spot for farm girls.
We've had a sort of hobby farm for a long
time now. Not quite a real farm. My dad
was really more of a city boy who kind of
romanticized about farming. And I think
he went off to a farm in the war for a
little bit as a boy, but they were really city
people in Berlin. My mom, though,
was on some kind of real farm for quite a
bit. It was out in the east, and they
actually road to western germany in wagons
fleeing the Russians. She seems to have
a lot better sense about tending the
farm stuff than my dad, really. And I'm
in no way a farm kid, but I guess I
appreciate it somewhat. Wynne and Holly
are farm girls, more or less. I think
it must be less and less common. One thing
it seems to do is make you work hard, kind of
to have an expectation that you should be
doing something all the time. Completely
different from my attitude.
OK, some wild speculation. But it would be
entirely possible to have a gender difference
about food preference. And I mean specifically,
that men would have a stronger desire to eat
meat than women. There is a particular
taste receptor, called "savory", which goes
along with sweet, sour, salty, and bitter.
All you would need to do is to connect up
whatever controls what you want with
that receptor. I haven't actually heard
of anyone investigating if that really
happens in people, but at least anecdotally,
it seems like I see guys wanting meat
more than women. I'm sure there's variation.
Personally, I don't think that much of sweets.
That also might be a little stronger in women.
I'm not saying here that it's necessarily
like that, only that it does look pretty clear
that with the taste receptors like that,
we can see bits of a possible mechanism.
I just commented to a little girl on reddit gonewild who
has some kind of stalker. She posts naked pictures of
herself, and somebody gets creepy and sends her email, and she
gets freaked out, and pulls all her stuff. I said people
can be crazy, but she shouldn't worry too much because
usually they are harmless. Not fun, though.
So there is some ISPE stuff on ning.com. Kind of a little
closed community. Generally not much activity, but it
can be at a pretty nice level.
I got up late yesterday. I think when my parents are here,
I naturally shift into that so I'm not with them all the
time, and I have time to myself at night. Anyway, it was
after eleven, and the first thing I get is where's
the sledgehammer? They want to split wood. I have
left it in my car when I brought them the nice
wedge I have. I think it's called a wood grenade.
Something about the design makes it work extremetly
well. Anyway, so I get up, and immediately I
get pulled into chopping wood. My dad really
did most of it, spltting these logs in half,
but I used the axe to chop them into fourths.
And there was this one log that just would not
split. It was a fork, so pretty much one
big knot, which can be impossible. We definitely
worked on it well past being tired out, and then
just gave up and knock the wedge back out.
So now my back hurts today. And I went to
kung fu. I did the broadsword form, but I was tired
enough that I really did it pretty poorly. And I
haven't been practicin it as much. Lao Shr did
tell Louis, the oldest student, to help me with
the sparring practices. He's been wanting to
get into that more for a long time. There is
one particular exercise that I have never gotten,
and just then, I found how it is a counter to
a rear choke. It makes much more sense now.
I bet I'll get a lot more stuff from this.
My mom is going to make me a black forest cake
for my birthday on Monday.
I wouldn't have asked her, because now I'm
thinking it's too much work, but she wanted
to, so it's fine. And she has the kirschwasser
already, which is the most expensive thing.
But still, even with that, the ingredients
are $10, so it's an expensive cake. And I
have said it takes two days to make. That's
once you have the ingredients. She's having
to do all manner of preparation and shopping
beforehand. Somehow, the whipping cream
she bought didn't make it home. So she had
to call, and she's going to have to go back for that.
I should stick with cheesecake.
Woo, that was playing it pretty close. My bank
balance went down to $7.75. Everything seemed
to post yesterday. I wasn't really keeping super
track, and I took out a bit of cash, too, so
I was lucky I didn't bounce anything. But these
transactions are supposed to be looking at
what is available, so I don't know what kind of
risks I'm running.
Argh, so with my parents here, they answer the
phone. So all the people calling asking me
for money are getting through. Not so fun.
One was from U of Memphis. And it's reasonable.
I've given them stuff two years in a row.
But I told her I'm not working now. And she
actually offered to give me the number of
the employment office. Helpful, but no thanks.
Listening to the lectures on Philosophy of Science.
I'm in the sections talking about how weak
induction is. You really don't know the
sun will rise tomorrow based on experience.
Saying you do is really more of a way of
talking. It's really more what we mean
by being reasonable that we think we
know the sun will rise tomorrow. More
convention than anything else. But if
you look at the thing in statistics with the law
of large nummbers, if you can take a random
sample that's big enough, you can get
an idea of some property of the whole
population. But usually you have some sort
of bias, so you are only looking at the population
that falls under your bias. Not really a
super valid thing.
Argh. Another mistake. So I got up a little
earlier. Actually, I've been up since 3, but
I went in to the kitchen where my parents
were earlier than usual. Since I was up,
mom asked if I had washed my sheets recently,
and I said no. So she is washing them.
It's sunny today and is going to rain tomorrow,
so to be able to hang them out, it needs
to be done today. But part of my being able to
get up early was that I was planning to take
a nap pretty early. Now I can't do that
because all my sheets are in the wash. Grr.
So the girl standing behind me in line at Stabucks
had a vanity plate that says "nirvana" on her
little sports cars style mini BMW. She was
parked next to me and I got in first. I was
thinking what to say. I was thinking "I'm
guessing you're a Buddhist." But I looked
at her. And it was a matter of totally
avoiding eye contact. So I didn't say
anything. Maybe just a Cobain fan.
I didn't see what she got. I felt
repulsed.
Man, I went to Home Depot to pick up an
extra diamond wedge for my folks at the farm.
They don't have any tomato plants. Boo!
maybe they're out, I don't know. I picked
up some more seeds. Maybe I'll try again.
The thing about what is math and this thing
about induction both being about the language
game seems very significant to me from the
perspective of AI. Our ways of thinking
is quite specific to us and our linguistic
bias. How a computer might deal with things
would be quite different. But there is
still the question of how to get a computer
to play our language games.
OK, something trippy. The notion that science
is progressing, according to Kuhn, really is
more about the fact that after a scientific
revolution, or paradign-shift, the successful
system writes the history to make themselves
look triumphant. It ignores the things lost
in the new paradigm.
And I call the opposition racist because part
of the opposition is that they
want minorities to get sick and die,
or at least don't care if they do.
Maybe that's a little too harsh a way
to put it. It's maybe closer to
say that they feel like they are
going to be ripped off by money
going to help the minorities they
don't like. But if you watched the
news, there was actual racist
actions by the crowd. They went
after black congressmen.
So, it turns out Melissa was fine.
That's nice.
I was thinking of taking the online
classes in computation molecular
biology, but looking at it more,
I decided against it. The money
was a little more than I wanted to
spend, and I looked a little closer
at the descriptions of the classes,
and I didn't see that they had
really added that much to the stuff
I got in the class I already took.
Plus, it was just going to be for
getting access to the lectures,
and I really should just be
able to do the reading and get
stuff out of it. They have reading
lists, and I should just go through
those.
One thing I don't like is how republicans
say everyone is against it. They just
stand up and lie bald-faced. It's kind
of their thing. I haven't really been
able to follow what they say their
reasons are. Something about socialism maybe.
That sounds really like just some kind
of fear-mongering, or an emotional
attack to mask the real thing.
OK, I like Vanna White. My folks are here,
and we're watching the wheel. Her job
is just to look pretty. I think that's nice.
So, poor Melissa. I went down there
Friday night. As usual, after that,
I sent a message saying thanks, and after that she sent me a long text,
still late. It actually split into
three. I heard it, but I had been sleeping
and didn't look at it then, and then it
was late afternoon before I noticed it
again. She was saying she was falling
asleep driving, and was really having
a rough time because she had a test
she needed to take that was going to
take three hours. Wish I would have
gotten up and done something. Since
I didn't see it till really too late,
I didn't send anything, and I will
wait until I see her on Sunday to
see how it worked out.
Watching more BattleStar Galactica.
It's not too bad on it's own
without the commentary. For a few,
I had just watched it with the commentary,
just getting the idea of the plot offhand.
And then, I was watching the commentary,
and then going back to the episode.
I really not only don't mind having
things spoiled, I prefer knowing
what is supposed to be going on
before it happens, so I can focus
on the other stuff. The big
surprise stuff really doesn't
do much for me. More than anything
else, it usually annoys me because
it doesn't make sense to me, though
clearly it must have to the writers
to some extent. To the extent that
writers have any sense at all, which
I'm starting to doubt. This
time I watched the episode first,
and then listened to the commentaries.
I found that the commentaries make
this stuff much worse for me. I think
just watching it, I can leave alone
why stuff is supposed to be happening.
But when I hear Wrong Moore's explanation,
it always sounds stupid. On a few
of them, he stopped saying they
were "great" all the time, though
he did get back to it. I guess
it was probably a bad sign when
he stopped saying they were great,
but at least it was a relief.
So, at one point, he made a big
that the little fighter ships worked like rockets.
They were quite capable of just
coming to a dead stop, and flipping
around. But then, they have this
big plot point (or hole, if you will)
that there's this pilot, tripped
out on "stems" can control her
fighter in this super fast
incoming landing they have to
do. It's supposed to be like
landing a plane on an aircraft
carrier. But aircraft have limitations
that they have to keep up their speed.
I don't know why I'm sticking with
this series. I'm on the second
season, so two and a half more seasons
to go. Seems like a lot of geeks
liked it, and it had some kind
of philosophical things to say
about AIs and identity, maybe.
I think it's just not quite so
deep to me.
The Teaching Company sent another
message about a one day sale.
They do those on the weekends.
And there was this one class
I was waiting for, philosophy
of science. I was thinking,
if they have it, I'll get it.
And I was worrying, because it's
getting to the end of the month,
and I've let the cash dwindle.
I didn't see it
in the e-mail, but I went
to the site, and sure enough,
it was on sale. The DVD was $100,
but I could get the dowload for
$50. I remember that worked really
well the last time. Bunch
of stuff on the ipod. So
I got it.
Spending a bit
extra lately, maybe. I just
order some stuff from Amazon.
Some Ragnar Benson, Survival Poaching.
Good old Ragnar. I wanted to get
a copy for my nephew, Daniel,
for Christmas because he
asked for books on hunting.
I didn't fell like I had time
for an amazon order, so I just
got him something that looked
good from Borders. I plan to
give this to him, though maybe
I'll look at it first, and
I'm not sure about gifts from
nowhere. Seems like it would
be nice if that were an easy thing.
I don't think he would really want
to do any of this poaching stuff,
but I think it would be fun for
him to read about. And he's a
kid and probably has crazy friends
who would do that kind of stuff.
I also got some stuff from Uncle Fester. I
used to get his stuff from Loompanics.
I think they published it, but he
does his own stuff now. I just noticed
he's got new editions, so it wouldn't
hurt me to get an update. And he's
going through Amazon, which is totally
cool. I assume Loom's sales weren't
particularly protected, but it was probably
harder for the thugs to find out about them.
I know for sure that if you get something
from Amazon, it's practically public information.
But what can you do? Knowledge wants to be free.
Dang. I got a package from Stanford about
their online classes, and I just opened
it up and glanced at it. I see that
they have two classes on computational molecular biology.
I've been interested in it for a while,
and just recently I've come back to
being interested again. It's something
I'd like to go into, and clearly
is the kind of thing the bioinformatics
class I took was supposed to be about,
but really failed at. So it would
be nice to take a good class about it.
But I'm totally not in the mode to be
studying and doing work for a class.
Plus, this appears to be the same
kind of grunt genome sequence pattern
matching that I saw in my class.
The state of the art to me did
not seem very impressive, though
I do not really know the subject
very well. It might be good for
me to audit these classes. That's
some scratch though, and it's a
little last minute. They're only
two months. I shouldn't be a baby about
it. And in two months, I just
don't think you can do so much.
The deadline is Wednesday. And to pay
for it, I would have to get the
money extraction stuff started on
Monday.
Finished _Pihkal_. Well, the readable
part. The rest is just a catalog of
the different chemicals in this family he has synthesized.
Don't feel like wading through it.
Mostly chemical procedures with a little
commentary. The last chapter was
a rant on freedom and the drug war.
Kind of old stuff at this point.
OK, well not much that happens to
a person or that he gets really changes
a person's happiness, at least not
how he expects. But there it does
seem like there are a few things
that a person can do to affect
what that natural level of happiness.
To me maybe. Seems like I've been
less happy in the past. Maybe
it's just the freedom from work
talking. There legitimately
are going to be things that you
don't like. Some conflict with
others. Shame, embarassment.
Appearing subervient or less
well off than other people.
Being lower down in a social
hierarchy has developed emotionally
to be unpleasant to push people
along. And that kind of points
to some of what happiness
appears to be about. It's
kind of part of an award system
to push people to doing things
that are good for the species.
Acquiring safety and food and
family and such. And in this
role, happiness isn't so much
about trying to get to some place
as something to be continually
going after. More about the
journeying than the destination.
And it's kind of a mistake
to reify it--to thing happiness
is a thing to get instead of stuff
to do and experience. Whatever.
I guess I should have more to say
on the subject so maybe I'll come back to it.
I saw another interesting question on reddit.
What is math? Kind of a deep philosophical
question. Back from Plato, he was thinking
that there is the world of ideas independent
of the physical world. But I kind of
like the theory that he got that from
tripping balls one time. It's the kind
of thing space cowboys get into. And I
think it's marginally popular. In some
circles, say. If you want to say there
is just the material world, you do have
to deal with what mathematic truth
which certainly seems to be independent
of the people thinking about it and
dealing with it. I guess I found the
discussion interesting. The insight
that I think got to me the most was
the idea that mathematics is more
than anything else a language and
a way of saying certain things
in a way that we like. In particular,
number itself is not something in
the world. If there are two apples,
in the world, there is just this apple
and that apple, and it is only we who
consider that they are two of the same
thing, or if you have more of something,
it is us deciding that they are somehow
the "same" or interchangeable in a way
we can count. I guess it's kind of
an outcome of having stuff that we might
trade with other people, so we want
to keep an accounting.
Along these lines,
I remember the story of the so called
primitive people who didn't have number
words for more than. So they would
talk about there been one of something,
a pair of things, or a bunch of them.
And usually you only here that bit of
the story, and only sometimes will
people go on to the further story.
Some people like this have herd of animals.
And they don't keep track of them
by numbers. They are so close to their animals
that the know each one individual,
so let's say each on has a name.
They don't treat then individually
and count them, they run a roll call
by name. Counting actually implies
a loss of information, and treating
things that actually have distinct
identities as if they are interchangeable.
It's a way of dealing with the world,
and sure, it can work in some sense.
But the way it works kind of is
about reducing the cognitive load,
so we don't keep track of as much.
Simplifying things.
So, in math, we talk about the world
in a simplified way. And as a consequence,
there are certain implications and
tautologies that follow. 1+1=2 isn't
so much a truth that exists in some
way as a consequence of this way
of talking. There are huge amounts
of consequences like this, and not
all of them are so obvious. Some of that
is because this was of talking is
a little bit unnatural.
A little bit unnatural,
but it does turn out that there is
some actual inherited math ability,
to some extent. We don't really know
much about brain development,
and how gene expression can come
up with mental ability. I think
that's kind of sad, but it's
a tough problem that people haven't
tackled yet. Still, it's clear
we have some inborn abilities.
We can get that because apes
also have some of these abilities.
Counting. Estimating quantities.
Telling when one group of things
is more than the other. Similarly,
telling amounts and when one
thing is bigger than another.
That's a bit geometrical, but
that actually counts as math.
And it's very important in
a survival sense to know when
something is bigger than you,
and in related situations,
when other this are bigger than
others. Generally bigger creatures
can stomp on smaller ones.
From what I see, though, for
animals, bigger generally
means taller, so it was really
weird for people to stand up
vertically--to most animals,
we suddenly became bigger than
them, even if maybe they
actually weigh more. So
we became quite scary.
A lot of predators have to deal
with that, and will atack
bigger things. And truthfully,
people can be pretty nasty.
Sitting at Starbucks again. Just
felt like getting out, and writing
somewhere else than home. Not
that big a thing, I guess. Quite
a few laptoppers. One cute little
girl had a mini-Toshiba something.
Another cutie had a Dell with a pink
cover. Where do you get a laptop
with a pink cover? And I guess
more importantly, why? Last night,
at about 9, I wanted to go out,
but everything was closing. So
I have to wait and go out when
things are open. Seems so limiting.
Life is limited. It wouldn't
be like that in New York, maybe,
but seems like even in Silicon
Valley, not much went on at
night. I don't know about
San Francisco. Maybe there
might have been stuff. I
guess if I want to go among
people, I would need to keep
to their schedules. But maybe
it's pitiful that I would want to.
And there is a fat chick sitting
in the corner, knitting. Sad.
Loneliness is such a...drag.
I wanted to go out somewhat.
I also felt like just going
to sleep at 9. I didn't do that.
Maybe I should have. I went shopping.
Got some milk and bacon. Yummy bacon.
The smell of bacon pervading a house
is so friendly. I think I didn't
end up falling asleep til maybe 3.
So less time in the day, if I were
to sleep a lot. But balancing out
12 hours sleep, probably getting
6 hours would be good. Weird, perhaps.
Went by Borders. I don't really need
more books. It's just something that
I think makes me happy. I saw
an "autobiography" of William Shatner.
With someone else. Now, an autobiography
is supposed to be written by the person.
If it's with someone else, probably
that other person really did most
of the writing. So I'm not really
sure of "autobiography" is the
right word. I wanted it. I'm not
sure I really want to start a new
book right now, though. So I didn't
get it. I'm not all that into Shatner.
Well, for a hardcore Star Trek fan.
Make I should concede that I really
want it. I can go back and get it some
time. It was in the discount section
for like 6 bucks. I really have no excuse.
One of the reasons I went in there,
other than comforting, was to see about
a book _Stumbling on Happiness_. I remember
wanting to read it, but I couldn't
remember if I had. If I had, I didn't
really quite remember what it said,
and I'd like to, since I'm pondering
the question of happiness again.
I read it from the library, so I
don't have my own copy. Maybe that's
one I should have gotten so I could
look back at it. It was chock full
of diverse little things that maybe
I didn't get all of of. And probably
I wrote about stuff here. But I
really need to cut back on getting
books since I don't have proper
space for them. And I have some shelves
that I'm just not using properly.
The books on them have been there
more than 15 years. I need to rotate
them to boxes, and put the books I have
on my to-read stack up on the shelves.
But that sounds like work. I also
need to get rid of all my papers
from the 90s. Don't need those.
I've got a stack of stuff on my
dresser that goes a few years back,
and a box with really old stuff
that could be cleared out so I
could put this stuff away. Laziness.
Sitting hear writing about it is
so much easier than doing anything.
I listened to the commentary for the
last episode of the first season of
_Battlestar Galactica_. It was done
by Ron Moore, the main writer and one
of the producers. He used the word
'great' at least half a dozen times.
That just annoys me. Clearly he likes
it. It makes sense to him. But it
just doesn't do it for me. It doesn't
really quite make sense to me like it
must for him, and I really just don't
like it. I guess I'm sticking with it,
for lack of much else going on. Inertia,
maybe. Listening to some of the extra
commetary stuff, they say it's a drama
in space. I guess I'm really not into
dramas.
I was tired. Didn't get a nap in. Went
to sleep at 9 and slept for 12 hours.
Didn't go down to Bardog. Did send
a message that I wasn't going to make it,
though I had earlier sent one that I
was planning to go. Kind of feel bad
that I missed out. Oh well. Maybe
another time.
We watched _Bones_ last night. Actually
two episodes back to back. But it seemed
very odd to me because the Bones character
was extremely different in the two different
shoes. In the first one, she seemed to
have Asperger's. Almost no emotional
sympathy or anything. But in the first one,
she seemed maybe a little naive, but still
kind of sympathetic and slightly emotional.
I don't know what was supposed to be going
on. It was very jarring. I don't
think I ever watched an episode before.
Pain is no fun. My wrist hurts again.
I'm watching _Big Bang Theory_. It's
the one with Wil Wheaton. I had
heard about it. Coolness. And the
Asperger dude Sheldon has some type
of feud with him. He's been quoting
Khan and just said the Klingon for
'revenge is a dish best served cold.'
Wil is a redditor, so we see him post
on occasion. I don't know if I've
ever been in a thread with him.
He also blogs.
I don't really read it. I think his
blog bounces around, since googling
seemed to point to different places.
I got to Sudoku puzzle 400 in my book.
So that puts me about a third through in
just about 3 months, but it's kind of
slowed down since I've got into this
section so I don't know how I'm doing,
really. And it was mostly a burst in
the past week.
Just came back from the farm. I looked
back in the woods in the back part.
I didn't realize that there are little
roads going all through it, so it won't
be a problem to walk through when it grows
up a bit. Right now it's actually
pretty clear down on the ground, and I think
it's not going to be too bad.
There are no roads in the kitchen.
Spring break. I had been thinking that maybe
on spring break, Melissa would have some
time to get together, so I asked her if she
was doing anything. On Monday she would
be sleeping and on Wednesday she was going
to see her brother, and she had lots of
errands. So she said her week was booked.
Maybe so. She could have been able to
tell what I was moving toward, so I got
the feeling that she wanted to keep me
from asking to get together. I have done
it often enough. So I didn't ask this night.
The intention to keep me from asking in
the first place, that something that
I thought I saw this time. And I could
see that. Not wanting to have to say
no again. I stopped counting the no's
at 5. But from her perspective they
are probably tiresome and kind of unpleasant.
A recent similar experience. I went with
Andrea and William to Texas de Brazil.
The way the place works is they
have guys walking around with different
cuts of meat that you can try
and they will ask you if you want any.
They have a thing where you have little
markers with green on one side and red on
the other. If they are green, that's
supposed to say you are wanting to try
more, and red is you want them to stop.
At some point, all of use were ready for
a break, and we put them all red, but
the guys would still come up and ask
us, and we would have to say no.
I felt just slight bad at having to
say no to each on. I just didn't like
that. Especially since they had this
system where I shouldn't have had to.
They were just ignoring the little red
market. It wasn't really too bad,
but it was just slightly off. When
you go to strip club, a lot of dancers
will ask you for a dance, and there
doesn't seem to be a nice way to
tell them, no thank you, I don't
want a dance. The best I can come up
with is that there are particular
dancers I'm looking or waiting for.
So I can relate to not wanting to say no.
But she theoretically could be open
to saying yes. I think she just isn't
really. Sometimes it seems like she might
want to get together, but it's all
the things she has going on that keep
her from having any time to. I don't
have any way of telling the difference
though from just not having time
and not really wanting to, and that
just being an excuse. In fact, I
have to say that if you really wanted
to do something, you wouldn't really be
worried about other stuff going on.
Except also, doing anything new that's
out of your routine is always going
to be a little uncomfortable. So what?
Feeling a little angry? Disappointed?
Frustrated? Certainly sympathetic.
But I also don't really know what
the situation is. I don't really think
I feel confused, just uncertain.
Just read something I found interesting.
One of the characters in _Pihkal_ is
described as an 'anima' woman. It's
a girlfriend of the main dude, and it's
one of his psychologist friends that
says she is one to the female lead
in the story. But the notion of
an anima woman, it's a woman who
isn't really complete in herself,
but finds needy guys, and feels
out just what they want and becomes
that for them. And it reminded
me of the Star Trek:Next Gen
episode "The Perfect Mate" with
this creature they called a "metamorph"
which was empathic and adapted
to whoever it was. It sounds like
this concept was the thing behind
this story.
So, two girls at Bardog said they liked
my beard, Ruby and Britney. They said
it was "manly". Seems like I need to
take a picture before I get rid of it.
I recently saw a video with Chris Hitchens
that seems to stick with me.
Anyway, he first asks if it's more believable
that the reports of miracles are just wrong.
But then, say you grant that maybe they
happened. Parthenogenesis maybe might
happen. And raising from the dead supposedly
happened a bunch of times right then.
Even if they did happen, it wouldn't
prove that Jesus was divine or that his
teachings were true. So you really aren't
left with anything.
I'm listening to the class on Paul. I guess
I didn't know this, but quite a few times,
he is just begging for donations. That
is just sad. I know people do that now,
I just didn't know it was there from
the beginning. It's just about the money.
Did a little digging in the garden. The ipod
sure makes it nicer to do work.
And as for being easy to do work. I'm
reading _Pihkal_. It's about a couple
who work with amphetamine analogs.
The book is over 900 pages. It makes
sense that they would write a lot.
For some reason, though, when I
was thinking of the guy, I was
thinking of someone sort of portly.
I guess maybe it's a default for
older people. It just completely
did not occur to me that a hardcore
amphetamine user would be skinny,
which in fact he was. Silly of me.
I'm listening to the guy talk about Paul,
almost through. His name is Luke Timothy
Johnson. He admits that most people don't
believe what is saying. I mean he is
really out there. I guess hearing it
from him maybe it sounds somewhat plausible.
OK, the situation is that using textual
and literary criticism, most people now
think that several of the books of the
new testament say they are by Paul, but
really are not. And he thought that
way, but on further study, he's come
up with a different idea. Part of the
common notion is that Paul is writing
how he feels and we see sort of the
real Paul. This guy's position is
that Paul is writing using traditional
Greek rhetoric where you write adopting
a particular persona for the kind
of writing you are trying to do.
In addition, the letters were dictated,
so they never really were done exactly
by Paul, anyway. Maybe that saves
them from being the kind of forgery
that most people now think of some
of them. But it throws away the
other important notion that it
was the work of someone with some real insight
or, in the kind of superstitious phrase,
the "divine inspiration". At this
point I real have a lot of just disgust
for the religion and I don't really care anymore.
Looking for that other Hitchens video,
I found him
talking to Dinesh D'Souza. It has
some sort of deep stuff about how actually
bad the Christian message is. The idea
of "vicarious redemption" is bad. The
thought that someone could do something
to remove your responsibility for
bad things you have done. Part of
the conversation is how some people,
like Thomas Jefferson, might think
that you could throw out the god stuff,
and Jesus would be a good moral teacher.
But with this being a substitute sacrifice
thing, he would just be a crazy or stupid
person. And even if there really were
the god stuff, it would still be a bad idea,
because you're still saying it's OK to
harm people as long as you have whatever it
is, this relationship with this third bunch.
God stuff being true or false, Christianity is not good,
and it's probably false, anyway. So
"anti-theist" is a good word for him.
I tried putting the tomato plants outside
yesterday to get more sun. I think it
made a noticeable difference just that
one day. They are still so small because
they haven't been getting enough light.
The temperature was up in the fifties.
Right now, I'm looking at the temperature
on the TV, and it's been holding at 34
for the past hour, which I think is
just a little too cold, so I've been
holding off putting them out. Only
two dozen tomato plants have made it,
about two thirds. That's a pretty grim attrition,
but I'm still not so great of a gardener.
Two squash plants. Two more are sitting wilted,
and I keep thinking they might come back,
but sometimes plants collapse so bad
that they can't recover. I think these
are gone.
Somehow, I have rotated into a much more normal
sleep schedule. I think I went to
sleep at 8 or 9 and slept solidly 'til 5:30 and
got up. Something similar the night before.
Although, then, Thursday, I came home from
kung fu, started doing a Sudoku, then
started getting spots in my vision. Right
in the center so it was hard to do it.
The beginning of a migraine. In the past,
I think I've been able to eat or drink
whatever I was lacking and got better,
but I'm not sure what it needed to be.
So I went to bed. I think I didn't
wake up for maybe 5 hours, but I
had a bit of a headache then. Not
a really bad one, but I did feel a little
sickly. I'm glad I must have been
asleep for most of it. And I was able
to go back to sleep for a pretty normal
night. That must have gotten me to
a better pattern.
Decided to roast a duck. It had an orange
packet, which I like because it's easy
to take out while still frozen, but
they put in the neck and giblets too,
which were not so easy. I left some
of them in, and we'll see how it goes
like that.
And I did put the plants out pretty quick.
They really seem to like the sun.
Listening to some commentaries on Battlestar
Gallactica. They are just full of them
saying how great they are. But I don't agree.
They seem so proud of how they managed to
shoot duplicates with the one actor.
So fine, maybe he's a good actor, but
they couldn't just use twins? It just
doesn't impress me that they did
something difficult when there
was an obvious easier way.
I tried the roast again. I've been
thinking that how tough it is really
shouldn't bother me. How it tastes
should be the main thing. And now trying it
it really doesn't seem very tough.
If I slice it thin, it's perfectly
fine. It being fatty is quite different
when it's cold. I think pork fat must
be softer cold. I really like the taste
of rare meat. I guess that's something
I don't really get enough, so now
I'm much happier with it. It must
just be something I've been missing.
I get it at Bardog, I just haven't
done it as much myself because I
usually roast pork or chicken.
So I'll definitely keep that more in
mind. I haven't made the jump
to less done pork. I know now that
I can do it, but I haven't been
brave enough, yet. This one,
I didn't even do it especially rare.
To about 150 degrees, which is medium
rare to medium. But I don't quite
have the taste right. Not really
browned enough for a really rich flavor.
I think the gravy was pretty poorly
done. Practice.
Almost through with the first volume of
_the Art of Problem Solving_. There
was a chapter on counting, which is
some combinatorics. I'm also watching
the Teaching Company class on discrete
math, and just watched one of the lectures
on combinatorics. It's interesting to
see the contrast. The lecture covered
more cases that I think weren't
considered in the book. But, it seems
like in the section on probability,
it kind of touched on some of the
cases, but not as generally. There
is a particular combinatorics problem
called integer partition. It's the
problem of how to get a particular
number by adding together some
given number of numbers. Like
how many ways you can get 5 by
adding three numbers. Well,
they consider what the probability
of getting a particular roll from
two six sided dice. You have to know
how many possible ways to get a value.
That seems like a similar problem.
I guess it's not the same because a
a one and then a four is different from
a four and then a one. But here
you have to just about list out
the possibilities. The partition
problem actually doesn't have
a simple way to figure it out,
but there is a recursive function
you can use, which actually can
be weird to calculate. I remember
when I first was going over this
class, I was studying clojure.
Clojure lets you do recursive
functions pretty easily, and I
could try this there.
So I just ate pretty decadently.
Just some sliced of beef and potato chips.
Seems pretty hardcore. Didn't
quite get enough, though. Actually
after that, I felt like something
a little lighter. So I had turkey
and cheese on toast.
Well, I thought Melissa must have been doing well
on her money, but in fact not. Her debt must be
really crushing because she said she can't even
pay them all each month. She only pays maybe
75% each month. So they call her all the time
and she doesn't answer her phone. Poor thing.
Her ex-husband racked it all up. Boo. It's
not fun when someone you care about has problems.
And I can relate to it.
And there was a cute little girl with black hair
and a really big tattoo. I'm not sure I even
really wish I had talked to her, but I didn't
in any case. She did like the Beatles song
I played, though. That was kind of nice.
I'm watching the Discrete Math class again from
the teaching company. Combinatorics.
I've been trying a bit to avoid buying groceries.
I eat more when I have lots of food available,
so it seems like it would help a bit to put it
off. But I'm about to run out of bread, and
that's a probably because I have hotdogs
and lunch meat sitting around that will
go bad if I can't eat it because I don't
have any bread. I've been building
a list of things I want to buy, and it's
getting pretty long. I don't think there
can be anything more boring than
a person's grocery list, but here is
mine: a roast, milk, sausage, bacon,
refried beans, eggs, bread. Maybe
I should consider vegetables or fruit.
I don't know what's in season though
in the beginning of March. I just recently
got some potatoes.
And speaking of vegetables, at Bardog,
I had the filet, which came with garlic
mashed potatoes, but also some squash and
zucchini that I think was the best I've ever
had. I asked the cook, and he said he used
some garlic salt, butter, but also some white
wine. I think it was the wine that really
added something new. I may need to try it
some time. I've got squash plants. We'll
see how it goes.
I've been thinking of getting a duck. But
I don't want an old duck, I want a duckling.
But I don't see ducklings any more, they
all say duck now. I don't know what that
is. It could be that these are all old
ducks, but that really doesn't seem likely.
It costs a lot of money to keep ducks alive
long enough to get old. Chickens when you
buy them are usually only a couple of
months old. They don't say "chicks". They
probably just decided to do that with ducks.
But it might not be like that. I know a
long time ago, I bought something that
said "duck" instead of "duckling" and
it was pretty bad. Really tough. So
I don't know. It's been years, I think,
since I've made a duck. Seems about time.
Gah, I had some kind of trojan on this computer.
That's not nice. I guess too many risky sites.
I got the stuff on my shopping list. Right
at $50. Three pounds of bacon and three
pounds of sausage. Those were pretty expensive.
I also got some snacky stuff. Some burritoes
and some nuts. The roast was pretty cheap. Chuck roast.
Very fatty. I've already made it. Kind
of tough. Didn't do a great job. But
I think it's good for a first shot. I might
need to go for something a little better.
But my wrist is actually getting a twinge,
so I might stay away from beef again.
I watched _Moon_. Kind of an obscure
indie science fiction movie. I think it
tries to be hard science fiction. I
had a lot of trouble with just the
sort of attempt at science bits.
Mining helium-3 on the moon for
fusion? That just seems stupid to me.
And there are these fully grown
clones kept in cryonic suspension.
That also seems stupid. Plus they
have some kind of memory implants,
and are being used as slave labor.
It all seems so useless and implausible.
A couple of visual things really bothered
me. They used the conventional thing
were they move slowly. They aren't
going to do that. With one sixth
gravity, they will fall a lot slower.
I think in some of the exterior shots
they attempted to make it look like
lower gravity, but nothing in
the interior. Maybe there was no way
to shoot that, but to me it seemed
very noticeably wrong. I think
you shouldn't attempt to shoot
a movie that's supposed to be
on the moon if you aren't physically
able to make it look that way.
I think as I sat with it, though,
maybe the acting or the drama
was good enough for me to suspend
my disbelief. If I'm needing
to suspend disbelief though,
it has failed to be hard
science fiction, but whatever.
Did I end up caring what happened
to them? I don't know. Maybe
a little. I was very lukewarm.
I ended up not really disliking
it. Not very positive, I guess.
As opposed to how much I just
didn't like _No Country for Old Men_
which so many people really liked.
I'm just not into the movies lately,
I would guess. Maybe I should hold
off on the Netflix until I get
more into it. Or switch away
from dramas. Something.
I just read about child prodigy Kim Ung-yong. Talking at 1. Ph.D.
in physics at 16 and was working at NASA.
Then he wanted to be more normal, and went
to a "mediocre" school and studied
civil engineering. Got a Ph.D. and has
published a lot. People called him
a loser, but that may be some kind of
Korean thing. For me though, it kind
of speaks as to the limits of what kind
of achievements are possible for a really
smart person. There are limits as to
what is available to be done. What if
we have a computer program that is really
intelligent. Say it's smarter than everyone
else, like this guy. What is it even going
to be able to do that's going to really
helo everyone? Are there really big hard problems
that need solving? Is life not just ordinary
and mundane?
In the reddit discussion
they mentioned another guy, William James Sidis. He was into
languages and math. He seemed to have things
a little rough, though.
I just read an article about insomnia.
It could make insomnia worse just by reading
it, though. The idea is that thinking
about or worrying about falling asleep
makes it harder to fall asleep because
if you have a goal to fall asleep, you
have to think about whether you have
fallen asleep, which can wake you up.
There's some reddit discussion, too.
So I think I got up around 2. But I went to sleep
at around 4 thinking I would get up and do something,
but then didn't really feel like anything. It's
not even 9. I could go to church somewhere, maybe.
Good for a chuckle. Also there is the little
sitting thing at Eastern Sun, but it's so many
years since I joined them that it would probably
just be weird. I am looking quite mountainous.
I have a few times now felt the total frustration
that I've seen with people doing math. You just
get stuck and don't do anything. Freezing up.
This geometry stuff I guess I'm a little weak on.
But I try a few things and it falls into place.
I guess that's what the fun of math is about.
And Suduko does the same thing. You'll go along,
and you'll get stuck. And you'll look around
or stare at it. Then the blocking point will
give way, and you'll power through to the end.
Still, in this book, it's giving problems that
are reasonable doable, though they have tricky
bits. Probably in the wild world of math, there's
no telling if you will get through any particular
problem.
I certainly remember people blocking on math.
Terrible feeling. Terrible look. I think
I tutored people a couple of times way back
when. Always the same thing.
Well, mind a bit blown. While sitting here,
I read the chapter on analytic geometry.
Just Cartesian coordinates and lines
and circles. Stuff I've seen so no big deal.
But the next chapter was the power of
a point. Maybe I've seen that. I think
possibly, but I don't think I was run
through applications and the proof.
I think I remember problems that must
have used those and not getting them.
Trippy. The concept isn't that hard.
if you take a point, a circle, and
lines through that point hitting
the circle, the product of the two
lengths of segments from the point
to the circle is always the same.
If it's a tangent, count it twice,
so the square. It seems kind of weird
that it should be the same, but you
can show it with similar triangles.
And probably you would need a picture
to know what I'm talking about.
Still, seemed cool to me.
I think on the AGI list, there is
someone who is working on getting
and AGI based on recognizing objects
in a screen capture on a computer.
Or at least, it looked like at
first he was shooting to deal
with recognizing objects in
a screen capture. Sounds like
something I would support, or
maybe I talked about something like
that. Also, now I'm thinking
of the phone as really an obvious
AI platform, so I would want
to have the phone be able to recognize
things from its camera. Seems like
I just heard a mention of something
that would convert a page to
text from a digital picture.
That seems like an important step.
The thing I'm thinking of is
these geometry problems. Just
inputting them seems tough.
You'd need a picture. Hopefully
with whatever optics you get, straight
lines would still be straight.
That could be an issue. Pages
in a book don't always show up
flat. Something else to think
about. There's still that
thing with solving the link puzzles.
Phones also have microphones.
I think someone has an app
to recognize that stuff, but
it just captures the sound
and does it all on the server.
I swear there is room for
some processing to be done
locally, and a much smaller
chunk handled on the server.
It would even be reasonable
for the server to download
bits of model or algorithm
as its recognition improves.
Maybe I'll talk to them.
Then again, servers are
so cheap. Bandwidth, too.
I also picked up some kung fu shoes from
Dach imports. About $8. Not quite as
cheap as they might have been, but
could have been worse. These have a little
plastic sole instead of a cloth one.
That makes them a little noisier, but
they can actually handle wet ground,
which the others just couldn't, which
is i think a better thing. The back
yard is so muddy. I think these shoes
seemed to be quite a bit nicer for
doing the form out there. So I'm
happy with the purchase so far.
They don't seem so durable, though.
They've got some kind of attempt
at sharp grip, but I think walking
outside just a little bit has softened
them up. I think it's probably something
better for gripping carpet or a mat.
I went by Charlie's meat market. They
didn't seem to have any better cuts
sitting out than any of the regular stores.
The meat may well have been better, but the
cuts seemed the same. You could buy whole
boxes of steaks, which I guess was odd.
And maybe if I'd asked at the counter I
could have gotten something special.
I bet that's what I would have needed
to do. They're prices were I guess
a little higher than a regular store,
which I would expect. I just didn't
see anything that I really felt like.
Now I'm thinking of just trying a
chuck roast from Kroger. Generally
those need to be braised, cooked with
water, and that's really not what
I think I want to do. I will
try a really slow roast, maybe.
Give it a shot.
When the president was talking to
I think it was the Republicans
about healthcare (it might
have been more of Congress)
one of them said we have the
best healthcare system in the
world. Obama's reply was that
he wanted us to be able to do what
all other advanced nations do,
cover everyone. And I kind
of get the feeling that the
degenerate (I think that's
a better word than regressive)
was playing a gambit trying
to get Obama to say something
bad about the U.S. system,
which would not be popular.
But if you think about the
degenerate statement,
if you think we have the best system,
then you don't want to change
it. So it is clear that they
are only trying to stop change
and should all just be ignored.
I think it might be a little
unfair to say that they are happy
to have poor people die, but
I'm not sure that it isn't
very far from the truth.
I know the lawmakers aren't
like that, but they are
reacting to their consituency
and I think it's those degenerate
scum opposing healtcare reform
that actually do feel that way.
I saw something recently that
they have a lower average IQ.
'Lord' mean dictator. People used
to think that could be a good thing,
but we don't any more.
Gained back a couple of pounds. I had
a box of chicken and I've been eating
a lot of bacon. Oh well. Disappointing.
I lost a bunch of the tomato plants. Took
too long to water them. And they aren't growing
so fast. I'm not sure how it will work out.
Well, David, one of the other bartenders
at Bardog, said what he made last year.
It seemed like quite a bit. More than
I've made some years that I was working,
but less than I ended up with at Hilton.
Of course, with so many years that I don't
work, and nothing last year, that's a lot
more. And Melissa was saying how she
makes as much as David but he has a third
as many bills as she does. But that
says roughly how much she made, which was quite
a bit. So that gets me a bit. She now has
made about as much as me, and with me
not even working, it's a lot more. So
it is now quite silly for me to give her
the money I do. Plus, my contribution
isn't really even all that much any more,
with how much she is making. Now, I
think at her other jobs she might not
have been doing as well, and it might
have been more significant. Now not
so much. I don't really want to stop,
but it is getting kind of pointless.
For me stopping can only mean not going.
Existence is futile.
OK, a solar system simulator. It's kind of fun.
I finally open up _Zen and the art of making a living_.
It's seems really too long to get through, like 500
pages. I have a long way to go even to get to page one.
But one of the prefaces has a quote from Aristotle--
where your talent and the needs of the world cross,
there lies your career. I guess that's helpful.
I have to focus on what I can do that other people
want. So far it's pretty much been computer
programming. That's all fine. But that notion
has some deeper negative implications. Your
career does not involve your wants or needs,
just your talents. That's a little sinister.
Presumably, if you want something and from
that you work to develop a talent involved
with that area, it would become a factor,
but only indirectly. Softening that perhaps
is that in general, your wants might be
shared and from that be part of what the world
needs, but that doesn't necessarily follow,
and there is an important large class of
exceptions. If you want something only
for yourself, that's not something that
the world needs in this sense. The world
needs for it to have food, not for you to
have food. So if you are a farmer, and have
something extra for every one else, that
could be part of a career. Similarly,
anything you make for yourself that you
can also give to someone else because you
make more than you need, again, possible
career. How it relates to me. I used
to write programs for myself, because
I liked them, so for fun mainly. Occasionally
for different math things that came up
just in classes. It gave me some talent
for writing programs. I think no program
directly I wrote for myself was useful
to anyone else. Not sure if I'd even
be able to come up with anything like that.
I've only done contributions on the projects
of other people. So I'm pretty limited.
This book is along the lines of the follow
your bliss thing in _What Color is your Parachute_.
Fine. Maybe I'll make it to page one eventually.
Maybe it'll be too imposing. If he asks
what is the sound of one hand clapping, I'll
probably be out.
Hmm, so I got some thick-cut bacon from Aldi's,
and it has some kind of maple flavor. So I
have a lingering smell of maple syrup,
and now I have a hankering for french toast,
or do I mean, freedom toast?
So, the light on my insrument gauge didn't
come on when I turned the headlights on.
And I just went to the dealer. It was
the dimmer turned all the way down.
There's a dimmer? First I'd heard.
And looked at the glyph on it, I guess
it might be interpreted as a gauge with
one of those triangle dimmer icons.
Guy said he likes easy ones. If it
was a real problem, I didn't know what
it could be. I would have expected it
was solid state, so no bulb to go out.
I guess so. Seems like it could have
been expensive. But it was nothing.
So I guess a bonus.
I got through the chapter on triangles,
which was most of geometry. It was
very long for this book, maybe twenty
or thirty pages. Not only most
of geometry, but it was a large
chunk of trigonometry as well.
Thing moves fast.
I did ask Melissa about her mini computer.
She said it's with her brother, and hearing
that I let it go. He's a computer person,
so he would probably use it as well as me.
But I'm not sure she didn't just leave
it with him to work on because she had
trouble. So maybe I should follow up.
Because I was thinking I might have
this wandering damage with my car,
I was feeling a little shy about money.
I just saw it on the drive down there,
so I was a bit in shock.
I also asked about my shoes. I asked LeAnne
first. She said she's not so much
of a shopper, but she was excited to
have the Internet on her phone so
she did a tenacious search. The
hard part is to find what they are called.
I wore them so I would have them to show.
Asa said they were doves, or something like
that. But Melissa recognized them as kung fu shoes
and said Chow Imports. She has some, maybe $5.
Well, OK! I guess I need to go there.
I am so happy not working. Seems like that's
going to have to become an issue if I need
to actually eventually get a job. But then,
I was pretty happy when I was working.
Happiness can be quite independent of
everything external. It can come from
inside. I seem to remember that at some point
in this past year, I was starting to not
feel quite so happy with not working.
I'm not sure what that was about.
Maybe just a mood. They come and go.
A whiff of perfume. A girl in a soft pink
suit. Maybe laid it on a little heavy. Has
some kind of red matching organizer thing
and a laptop. Independent business-woman
for coffee and a little net? I looked,
smiled, I don't know if she acknowledged
me, but she did preen. She had put her stuff
at the table opposite, but thought better,
and moved to the corner. Isn't that special.
The old guy next to me has a mini cup. Is that
espresso? What do I know about the weird
stuff done by starbuckeroos?
So, I was early enough to go by MUS before school,
and I considered it. But I'm at my most grizzly.
So far from that world. But they are friendly.
I don't know how many years it's been. Time
sure flies.
I got around to going to sleep at maybe 3.
And at 6, I was golden. It's weird when
that works out, and I'm never really quite
sure. Generally, lately, I'll sleep too
much, and then when I finally get up,
I'll just be tired. Maybe that seems wrong,
but it's definitely life. I do have
some sleep issues, though that it's
practically the human condition.
If you sleep too much, it will be
hard to fall asleep when you need to,
and if you try to have a schedule,
you'll be really messed up, and then
maybe you won't get enough, and
then you'll be tired from not
getting enough. Sometimes
I'll sleep seven hours and wake
up, and not be able to go back
to sleep, but it doesn't feel
like enough so I wish I could,
and I'll try and it won't work.
One thing I've found is that
light makes the most difference
in being able to sleep. I'm
not positive even that it's
just light on the retina thing.
I do remember hearing at some
point that the pineal gland in
the skull gets a bit of light
through the eye-socket, and
it regulates melatonin, and
that regulates the sleep-wake
cycle. An unconscious mechanism
makes it hard to be aware off.
Since I started using a black cloth
over my eyes quite a while back,
I've been much better at sleeping.
Taking naps whenever, and being
able to sleep in the morning
if I feel I need to. But being
free to sleep only really works
when you're not at a regular
job. So it's been good this past
year. But I need to find a
compatible way to make money.
I wonder what the lady in pink
does. And darn these aging eyes.
I can't see what the icon on
her grey laptop says. Boo.
Of course, writing is one off
those things you can do on any schedule.
But making money with it, now that's
a different thing. Lana has just
been writing about stuff she has
been seeing lately on getting published.
Some resources, or descriptions of
resources. Somebody mentioned a local
writers' guild, and they meet to talk
about stuff, but I still haven't joined them.
Lana claims to be a story teller.
More of a drama queen. I remember people
concluding that she had borderline
personality disorder, which is just
sort of like being an extreme drama
queen. Maybe it helps with the writing.
Didn't Hemmingway supposedly have some
sort of mental illness? I forget.
I would have thought that the chai
would enhance my wakefulness, but
I'm starting to fade. I guess it
was only a matter of a short time.
I really didn't sleep enough, but
I was feeling just right immediately
getting up and for a bit. Possibly
the caffeine caused everything else
to catch up, and it could be some
kind of sugar crash as I haven't
eaten sufficiently.
Ouch. Starbucks. Neighbor seems
to have said something like
Bill Gates and Einstein has Asperger's.
something about getting her kid to
be more social. Had mentioned
communicating on Facebook. Freaking
extroverts trying to make everyone
like them. I just bought a pickaxe
for the garden. Maybe I should have left
it in the car.
OK, this girl looks like Jennifer Schwalbach Smith.
Now, I'm not so good with faces. Maybe
the tiredness and caffeine is making me
deslusional.
Well that was interesting. I went by the Germantown
Fire Station Headquarters and visited my brother
Edgar. He's running for county commission.
He suggested I run for city school board.
It would give me something to do, and that
stuff is pretty fun. You talk to the people
doing stuff in government. It sounds like
something maybe I'll look into.
I went by Chou Imports looking for kung fu shoes.
They aren't at their old place on Summer,
but they have a place on Germantown Road
and Dexter. They are discontinuing
the shoes, though, and didn't have any
more in the bigger sizes, so I didn't
find anything. It was next to Ace hardware.
I found that they do have hammer handles,
but I don't know the size I need, so I
need to go back and bring the hammer heads
I have. I did pick up so stakes for
the tomatoes and some twine. And with twine,
maybe I can practice some knots.
Wow! I just saw a video of how to do a
general
equation solver in clojure. In high
school, I did an equation solver, though
I forget what language it was and how
broad it's equation solving was.
I think it was probably polynomials,
but it might have been somewhat more
general. And of course, I don't remember
what method it used. It might well
have used newton's method, which this
thing does. One thing about this thing,
is that it uses a numerical approximation
for the derivative. If you just use
polynomials, you can take the symbolic
derivative. I think that is a neat
kind of thing, and it seems like
the kind of thing I would want to
do. If necessary, and you can't
get the symbolic derivation, then
maybe fall back to a numeric derivative.
But derivatives are actual quite easy,
and it seems fair to at least try
to do that first. It's not really
newton's method if you are approximating
the derivative, though I don't know
what that would actually be called.
Maybe secant something or other.
Clojure has a nifty something that
makes this kind of stuff easier--
lazy sequences. In all other programming,
when you do something over and over,
in advance you have to figure out how
long you are going to go, and when you
are going to stop looping. That's work
you have to figure out up front, and
it makes things harder. With a lazy
sequence, doing stuff to decide
when to stop is a complete separate thing.
You can put it off till later, and easily
change things around and try other
stuff once you get the basic pattern working.
And the part the fits especially well with
math is that you can use a function iterate,
where you just write something that takes
a the current value, and calculates the next one.
so if you want to have a list of number going up
by tens each time, you write a quick function
that says add by ten, give it a starting number,
and say iterate. That's it. Then once you have
that, you can say take 5 to get the first five,
or do something that checks till it gets to
whatever end you want. Newton's method says
take the last guess, and subtract the function
at that guess divided by the derivative at
the guess to give the next value. That's
just the kind of thing you want with iterate.
What he does then is have some other special something
that takes any old converging series like that,
and keeps going until the difference between
the two gets to a small enough size picked out
before. But since they are broken apart,
*decoupled" as it's called, you can pick
a convergence routine separately from your
bag. It sounds like a nice setup for this
numerical stuff. I did take a class on
that stuff in college. Well, I thought it
was interesting. And he uses numerical integration. I remember
doing that. Good times. Integration symbolically
is significantly harder than getting derivatives,
but it is still quite doable. Something I'd
want to try. But with computers, the numerical
stuff is so easy that it's almost a waste
of effort to mess with the symbolic stuff.
The thing is, derivatives are almost always
doable, but sometimes, it's not even possible
to find a closed integral form, so you have
to do it numerically anyway, so you can
try the pain of searching for the closed form,
or go straight to something that's really
easy on the computer.
Looking over this math stuff again, I naturally
wonder how it would be to get a computer
to do this math stuff. And I'm thinking,
surprisingly hard. First, you have to
be able to read to get the problems in.
Computers don't read, you have to type
stuff in. Typing things in isn't trivial,
either. How do you do exponents? And what
about the geometry? You can't type in
a diagram. So it's a serious problem.
But I think it would be a worthy one.
This thing is all about the concepts,
and getting concepts in a computer isn't
the easy thing, either. One of the things
about it, though. There are different levels
of understanding. If you can do something,
that's one thing. If you can explain it
to another person, that's another. But
if you can explain it to a computer,
and get a computer to handle it, that
is an incredibly deep understanding
that you have to have. It doesn't
have any room for sliding.
After transplanting the tomato seedlings
to newer trays, I tried putting them
outside to get a little more sun.
It was kind of overcast, so I took
them back in. Actually, it's been
clowdy for a few days now. Anyway,
one of the plants broke off in the
wind. But it had a little bit of stem
connected to the two leaves, so
I buried that bit of stem and I'll
see how it goes. Supposedly, these
plants are able to grow roots quite
a bit off the stem. The thing that
said that said you should bury them
quite a bit deeper because of that
when transplanting. There's even
a thing where you prune off the
lower leaves, which can give you
even more stem for that. Anyway,
so there's this plant that was broken.
I'm not sure how I'm going to tell
if it's dead. There are already
a few that were kind of wilted
when I tried to move them, and
now I think they are just dead,
but this one still kind of looks the same.
It's got a couple of nice leaves
that look solid. But it might
just not grow. So I guess I'll
have to wait and see. I always
like the hardcore survivors, so
I hope it makes it.
I watched _Kill Bill 1_. I really don't like
Tarantino that much. It looks flashy, but
it is so vacuous.
I was thinking I would go out. Super 5 was
playing at Dan McGuinness. And I was thinking
maybe I would go see my girls at the Pony
after more than a year. But I just did
not feel like it. I slept for a bit,
and I got up early enough still to go out,
but still did not feel like it. I
guess I saved some money. Seems like
there might have been something I'd
like to get. Maybe Wii Fit. Probably
wouldn't use it, though.
I have not kept count, but there have
been a whole bunch of people who have
died going after Caine. Supposedly,
he is supposed to care a lot about life,
but he just keeps killing people.
He should have given himself up a long
time ago just to stop the slaughter.
There was one when he was in China.
For some reason, in the third season,
several episodes were completely in
China, with nothing in the U.S.
Anyway, there was one guy in China.
It was an Imperial soldier acting
as a ferryman sitting in a boat.
Caine knocks him out, and dumps
him in the water. Knocking him
out I can see. Fine. But putting
him in the water when he's knocked
out means he will die. That was
just totally unnecessary. He was
by the shore. He could have dragged
him six feet and he would have lived.
He went too far. in this episode now,
another guy was chasing him, and
fell off his horse and died. He had
the wanted poster. He finally gave
a look that maybe he was tired of all
the death. And he saved his head.
I guess that changed his look maybe so
maybe he'll be harder to find. I don't know.
They say you won't learn if you don't do the
problems. I'm lazy, and I don't want
to do all the problems. So I don't know
how it's going to work out. That became
an issue in college where I got lazy and
didn't do the work so much. But in this
one, they don't have endless busy work.
There are relatively few problems, and
they are often quite challenging. And
they say that some of the important results
that you need to learn are in the problems,
which seems a little unfair. That is,
there is stuff you need to know that they don't
explain in the main text, but you can only
get by working them out yourself in the
problem. Seems a little bogus. And to keep
those results, I would imagine that you
need to write them in the book. And example
is that in one of the problems, you
work out the general form for doing complex
division. They don't write it out and give
it to you like probably most books would.
If you want it, you have to do it yourself.
And yes, chapter two is complex numbers. That's
pretty hardcore for a chapter two. But it's
kind of another extension to arithmetic.
I guess it makes sense. And it's only 5 pages.
It naturally comes after exponents, because
part of exponents is roots, which are
fractional exponents. That stuff makes
sense if you've seen it before. I kind of
have to wonder if this would really work
for a little kid to learn it the first time.
The authors are actual teachers, so I assume
they've used it. They say they are trying
to show everything all together. OK.
Chapter three is linear equations. Twelve
pages. Linear equations. And not just
one at a time, but also systems, and they
stuck in line graphs. Maybe there isn't
that much to it. Seems like normally they take weeks
or months dealing with it. Maybe not.
In that twelve pages, they included word
problems. Most word problems are just
linear equations, and the hard part
is figuring out the equation. These
included the problems like Joe painting
a fencing in 6 hours and Pete coming
in and shaving it to four hours.
I guess I'm kind of wondering where
all they are going to go after covering
what seem to be the main topics.
They say they are going to do more
geometry. Americans are very weak in
geometry. That's probably fair.
One class and then that's it. I
remember that the problems on
that impossible math test that
I really couoldn't do were weird
geometry problems. Doing some
of the problems, I think I was
remembering that maybe there were
some hard problems that I actually
would have been able to do.
So Chapter 4 is a bit of a puzzler,
and that's where I left off.
It's about proportions. I guess
that's like fractions. But also
equations where you might have a lot
of variables and you might be dividing
or multiplying. I've only looked
at a couple of pages. It just seems
like a weird step, after complex
numbers and linear equations. I
don't know what they are going to
talk about. Peeking ahead, chapter
5 is about 'using the integers'.
Who knows what that is. Chapter
6 is quadratic equations. OK,
that I can see. It seems like
a real math subject. But then what?
They give quadratic equations 15 pages.
Maybe I should just list the chapters:
And there's a volume 2 after that. Supposedly
volume 1 is just grade 7-10. Well, OK. I glanced
over it. Some trig, more geometry, a bit of
number theory. Actual has limits. Seems pretty
much like precalculus. I may just go back
to the group theory instead.
More group theory. I got a ways into the other
rubik's article. It seems to be making more
sense, and the diagrams work. It wants you
to use a rubik's program to simulate stuff,
but so far it hasn't been such a problem not
to have done it. One problem with it is that
it's a rough draft, and there are noticeable mistakes.
Not too bad I guess. The knot book is going
a bit slower. It is more dense, and seems
to assume a bit more familiarity with group
theory as it's bringing up even more advanced
sorts of stuff. But I'm not so worried about
absolutely getting everything at first, because
I get the feeling you're really supposed to
take several passes with it. I'm finding it
interesting stuff, and I'm a little unhappy
that i didn't get more into it when I was young.
I remember in like 9th grade, Mr. Dwiggins
gave me some stuff on abstract algebra, but
I didn't get very far along with it. I
don't remember exactly what the problem was,
but it seems like it didn't have enough
context or examples, so I had trouble seeing
what the point was. In both of these explanations,
there is a lot of that, and I'm finding
it to be much more accessible than what I
remember. I guess proper teaching makes
a difference.
One other thing I'm wondering about is
category theory. From what I'm seeing,
category theory is an abstraction
even further away from group theory,
which is already getting very abstract.
Supposedly category theory can have
something to do with computer science,
so it relates to programming, but I'm
totally not sure what the connection is.
Reddit has had articles on category
theory for programming, but I don't
think I've ever slogged through any,
and I don't have a link to a particular
one that stands out. It tends to come
up in relation to functional programming,
where I think the correspondence is
more significant. I may have been
thinking of the article category theory for the java programmer. That would have stood out for me.
A really weird kung fu episode. David Carradine
directed it. In one of the commentaries,
he talked about how he wanted to get
into directing, and they didn't know
what to do with this episode, so they
let him do it. Part of it is old
Caine hallucinating while dying of
poison in a cave. In the other part,
a rich kid has little Caine for tea
and poisons him. He wants to find
out what death is like. The rich
kid says he will give him the antidote,
but somehow little Caine doesn't
think it really is the antidote.
I guess it makes sense not to
trust someone who has tried to
poison you. Old Caine was poisoned
by a scorpion, so I guess all
the stories of scorpions talk
about how you can't trust them.
Even so, old Caine is very nice
to the scorpions he sees, and protects
them from falling rocks in the cave
where he is trapped. So little Caine
convinces the brat that he switched
the half empty tea which he has
gotten him to drink. At first,
the brat doesn't believe, but
then he buys it, and totally
believes it was poision. And
then he's falls for it and thinks
he's poisoned. And sure enough,
it wasn't the antidote. Oops!
OK, so they go to the chemist who
sold the original poison, and get
the actual antidote, and it comes
out that little Caine drank it
too, so they go back and save him.
It puzzles them that Caine would
poison him, which would just be wrong.
But no, he didn't. I don't know.
I guess it holds up. In old Caine's
story, someone comes and tells him
to worship "Otto" but he refuses.
Apparently, young Caine had that
same hallucination, and told the
brat about it, but the brat wanted
to know the name of the god to worship,
but Caine won't tell him. OK.
And there is a girl who offers
herself to old Caine. I was thinking
it was going to be girlfriend number
four, and he kisses her, but holds
off on anything else. Oh well.
Overall a weird one.
I'm not sure about how accurate the
Shaolin temple is in it, though.
It's a Buddhist monastery, but
they keep a supply of food. It
may well be like that there, but
it is my understanding that
A Buddhist monk is suppose to
not keep anything but his bowl
and robes, and can't keep food
from one day to the next, so he has
to beg every day. That seems
kind of nice to me, as it gives
them a connection to the community.
I could well see different systems
giving that up as impractical.
The thought that not keeps coming to me is "leave that
girl alone".
I got the black forest cake from la Baguette. I would
have to say that it's pretty good, but it somewhat
misses for me being a real schwartwalder kirsch torte.
It somehow doesn't seem like it's made from real
whipping cream. And it doesn't have the subtle
fragrance of kirschwasser. It's not sweet, but
the sort of frosting stuff they have instead of
the whipping cream is somewhat unsettling. It's not
covered with chocolate sprinkles, but only has
some lightly done around the outside. But I
think I was kind of expecting that it would be
disappointing, so that's probably coloring
my judgement. I gave it a shot.
And I've been thinking of doing a beef roast,
or maybe a bucket of chicken, but I lost
maybe a couple more pounds, and now I just
feel more like staying on track than gorging
like that. Eating a cake probably won't help
me, but maybe that will be enough for me.
The knot theory is continuing to be interesting.
At this point, it's mostly just group theory.
I also had started reading something on
group theory for Rubik's cubes, but the images didn't
get put into it, so it was too hard to deal with.
There's
another one, so maybe I'll go through that one.
I chopped a little more wood. This time was unusual
because I didn't use the wedge at all, just the
axe. One piece took a bunch of tries though,
but did eventual break up.
I ate two big piece of cake. In all a quarter of it.
I guess it was too much.
I told Leanne that I probably with shave this week
or next, but after hearing about Epic Beard Man, I may have to hold
onto it.
It's two days later, and I'm just remembering something
I wanted to ask Melissa. I should write this stuff down,
maybe, or get an email address. I see her so often,
it shouldn't be an issue. And I kept thinking I had
something, and it never came to me. Seems like that
happens a lot. I could send a text, but those are
so short it's hard to say it all. I'm looking
at getting a netbook, and I think she has one
that didn't quite work out, so maybe I could
buy it. She never seems open to that kind of thing,
though.
A weird kind of experience at Bardog. Asa and Ben
actually got to fighting a bit while I was standing
next to them. Asa had Ben in a choke, and I guess
Ben was pushing back on him. They were roughly squatting
on the ground, so there wasn't that much he could do--
a typical counter is to drop down. The ended up
pushing up on me, and I kind of supported them for
a couple seconds, but I let them go a bit, and unfortunately,
there was a box of fancy gold-rimmed glasses from Stella
sitting there. I think Stella is gone, so there won't
be any more. You could hear them crunch. Three of them
did make, though. But Melissa came over and was all,
"get off the ground!" I almost never see her angry,
but she definitely had reason to be. That was really
childish. Just little boys. And I hate for Melissa
to be unhappy. Anwyay, after they broke it up they
were saying that I could have beaten both of them
up. I don't know. I wish. I probably do have fifty
pounds on each of them. Asa had a really good hold going.
Early, I was talking to Asa about Bruce Lee's one inch punch.
I was trying to explain my understanding of it. You
are moving your whole body before your hand even moves.
You drop your weight, and start twisting, so there's
actually kind of a wind-up or whip before it gets to
your arm. I just tried mine on my bag here, and it's
been so long, I've really let mine go. Plus my wrist
has gotten so bad that I'm just too shy to really put
any good power into a punch any more. Pitiful.
So that's two separate occasions that people have
said I look like a "mountain man". A guy from
kung fu and the folks at Bardog. The look is
getting pretty archetypal. I need to get a picture.
The stupid webcam on this laptop is not being recognized
by the operating system, but reddit roulette was able to grab it. Crappy operating system.
I think there are probably drivers on the install disk
that I must have not put on here when I fuckgraded to Vista.
I still haven't gotten into using my phone. I finally
let my dad have my camera since I'm not using it.
But the webcam would really be just right for this pic.
Grr.
Finished up the other fake book. Interesting little gems.
The little Indiana Jones theme. The Pretty Woman riff.
There were several things that were just too long
for me to get into right off--Pachelbel's canon , Classical Gas, Walking in Memphis.
And this book has everything printed unusually small,
so it's hard for me to see it, especially these bigger ones.
I felt like spending money so I bought a valentine's
day heart-shaped Godiva chocolate box half off, which
was still way too much, but I thought it needed
a home. I was expecting that eat it all at once,
and I was really pretty hungry, so I didn't think
it would be an issue, but after half of it,
it was enough. And I had some chicken with
BBQ sauce waiting. I think I just like meat
better than sweets.
Wow, so it looks like I have a couple dozen
tomato plant seedlings. I think I'm going
to have to move them into bigger temporary
cup things. In another month they could be
getting pretty big sized. And then I will
have to look at actually putting them in the
garden. That's going to be a challenge
in itself. I'll probably have to put up
some kind of posts with strings, as it
may be too many to try to stake individually.
I guess they call that a trellis. We have
three cages, and they work very well, but
with this many, I guess I'm past that.
I'm googling stuff and I'm seeing bunches
of stuff. Pruning? I guess I'm not that
hardcore.
Did play piano for another three hours.
And I watched a bunch of movies
streamed from netflix. So a lazy weekend.
I had been thinking of going to a mensa
regional gathering in St. Louis this
weekend, but I saw that it's three
hundred miles so about five hours,
and that just seemed too long to me.
I still remember that barbecue from Bardog
whenever it was. Possibly it was combined
with me being really hungry, but I think
it was the best food I can remember.
Or maybe just me liking it more than anything
else I can remember. And I just ate meat.
Some kind of beef, but I don't know what
cut it was. And it was sliced up into
little chunks on toothpicks. Very tender,
a little hint of fat. Moist, not at
all dried. Not overcooked, yet warm
enough. Maybe being cold wouldn't have
hurt. Could be that I usually only get
roasts that are cheaper, just because
my mom doesn't like to spend too much,
except for very rare special occasions.
But I've had prime rib, and I don't
remember it being that good, maybe
close. They have a good butcher that
they use. Plus Chef Demitrie is pretty
good. I'm not positive what all did it.
I've eaten at prime steak houses, but
it wasn't the same. Maybe I'm ordering
the wrong thing.
Finally went out shopping. Along the way,
I think I witness a sign of the breakdown
of society, and I managed to use my dictaphone
on my iphone to take notes. But I'm
not writing based on those notes, but from
memory, so I'm not quite there yet. Anyway,
I was driving, and I kind of tucked in through
some middle class sorts of neighborhoods,
and I saw three security guard cars from
three different companies. But no actual
city police cars. Surely that indicates
some kind of breakdown if private citizens
are having to supplement what is a police
and government job. Middle class not getting
its fair share? I don't know. Because
I moved into some must lower rent areas,
and bang bang, actual city police. That
included passing by the university,
but they essential have their own city
cops patrolling. Its a government school,
so it makes sense. And the city having
to patrol the lower rent stuff? I
guess it falls to them. But possibly
an even more profound observation since
I was thinking about it today. I drove
through the highest class neighborhood.
Just this side of germantown (which is
in some sense a ritzy suburb). This
was down shady grove. Fred Smith's
neighborhood. Whatever millionaires we
have. I saw two city patrol cars
driving together. I guess they need
protection, and pay enough to get it.
So I went to La Baguette. I ordered a
black forest cake. It's a French bakery,
and that's a German cake, so I'm
not sure what they are going to do with
it, but I'm giving it a shot. I think
the lady at checkout was Vietnamese.
They were a French colony, weren't they?
She said they have good stuff. But it
was really way too expensive. I think
in Germany, they actually have enough
bakeries that there is competition,
plus enough people who actually know
what they're doing so it doesn't
really cost as much to get good,
I don't know what you call them,
baked goods, I guess. Patisserie.
I don't know the German. And I got
a baguette. It's about what it is
at the grocery chains. And probably
about the same thing, too. Bread
is not very complicated.
And went to the main library which is
in the same parking lot as la Baguette.
Actually, supposedly the French teacher
at MUS, Dr. Dahl, started la Baguette.
I don't know if that's right. Anyway,
at the main library I tried to find that
fancy math book I saw on line. Didn't
see it. Browsed the math section.
They've got a lot of stuff. Seems like
I only ever looked at my local branch
as a kid. Make I could have become
a real math person if I'd had this
stuff. But even it had some gaps, I
guess, not having these fancy math books.
Going back east, I tried the AT&T store.
The chick at the door asked me, why the
hell was I in there. The way she was asking
didn't even seem like a can I help, it
was really more, what do you want.
Definitely thrown off guard, and she
asked if I needed to talk to a salesperson.
But I wanted to look. Maybe they have neat
phone stuff, and I wanted to see if they
had netbooks. I certainly didn't want her
attitude. So I look around. They had
stuff on DSL. I used to have DSL from
them, but I've got cable now. It's more
expensive though, so maybe I should go back.
I did finally see their section on internet
stuff, and yes, they do have netbooks
with integrated at&t connections, like
the stuff on the iphone. Want. The things
are $200 with 2 year commitment, but it's
"starting" at $35 or $40 per month. Gah! I didn't feel
like asking what the cost actual is.
That's the kind of question they just don't
answer. And they didn't engender good feeling.
They have separate plug in dongle thingies
that can work with a laptop. But I'm
trying to get away from toting a laptop.
too big. They keyboards are slightly reduced size,
but I found them acceptable. I think
one was an hp mini 110, there was an acer something
and a samsung something. Seemed like non-intel
chips, which can be very weird, but they
had windows 7, I think, which is something.
I think I'd probably almost like linux.
I will think about it. I should also look
at getting some income before commiting
to spending scratch like that. But the
money is actually about in the range of
what I'm spending now. And getting out
among people to write is something I'd
really like to shoot for. I'm certainly
not meeting people sitting at home.
Then I went to the bookstore. The hard
part about the books I'm looking for
is that I don't know the author. The
title is something like, the art of
problem solving, which is a little
vague to narrow down. But borders
didn't seem to have it either, according
to their search. Actually, the search
found more than have a dozen books that
kind of seemed to match, and they
didn't have any of them, so whichever
was the one I think I'm looking for,
they didn't have it. I did browse
the math section. I found a book
on knot theory. That's something
I think I've even said I'm interested
in. I've got Ashley's book of knots,
but it's closer to an encyclopedia
of knots, or maybe a dictionary.
It's hard to learn stuff from a
dictionary. You could learn everything
there is to know from one, conceivably,
but getting a solid understanding,
it just isn't organized to do something
like that. If I were to try out all
the knots, that's the kind of thing
that would give you an understanding,
but you would have to figure some of it out,
yourself. We'll see what this book
does. Some of what it is talking about
is algebraic topology. There is some
group theory in there. And that's
the kind of thing I'd like to know more
about.
I also saw something on shaolin something
or other. Principles, maybe. The
writer is supposed to be a grandmaster,
with like a tenth degree black belt.
That made me suspicious, as I don't
think they really do belts in Chinese
kung fu. That's a Japanese and American
thing. And I tried thumbing through
it a bit, and it seemed like there
was a lot of vacuous fluff. But I
looked at it, and maybe I will consider
it again sometime if I have time
and I'm in the mood. I think it's
good I didn't just pick it up for later,
which I've done way too often. So much
to read. I've got stuff sitting, now.
Then I went to Kroger. Got some lactose
free milk. My mom had gotten me some soymilk.
I use to do that, but I'm not sure it really
improved that much, because while it
doesn't have lactose, which I have
trouble digesting, it seems to be that
soy on its own naturally has other things
that no one can digest. So a bit of a wash.
Also got some grape juice.
But one of the
main things I went in there for was to
look at the beef roasts. They had rump roast,
which I'm thinking is just not quite what
I want. It can be a little too solid with
not the kind of marbling I'm looking for,
so it can get tough. Of course they
had english roast. And it helps me understand
why people say the English have such bad food.
That's a vile cut off meat. I looked at
one, and you could just see the huge line
of grisle right through it. It can make
a pot roast, if you like boiling meat.
Maybe I'll try it if I'm feeling poor and
desperate. I think they had a chuck, but it's
also not really quite what I want. They had
sirloin tip. I don't know enough about that
one, and I might give it a try, but based
on the other stuff they have, I'm thinking
it must not be a great choice. I'm really
curious now what Bardog used. And I need
to go to a store with a better selection of
meat. I think I need to try the whole foods place.
Triggered spark gap. Mentioned on a sixty
minutes thing on Iran trying to smuggle stuff.
It can be used in a lithotriptor. But as the
name seems to indicate, it's an electrical
detonator. Maybe I should get some.
"Joy is but the shadow pain casts"-- member of
the Swedish curling team which took the lead
over team USA as Marge injured her shoulder
sweeping too hard to make up for
Homer's bad throw. OK, I like the Simpson's.
I googled the quote. It has already been tweeted
and google has picked it up. Only twenty minutes old.
It was a great Valentine's day episode.
There are some computer system domains where
the computer does quite a bit of learning,
and some of the behaviors are based on
that learning. In speech recognition,
for example, there is a lot of automatic
sound modeling done that helps the computer
go from different aspects of the sound
to particular kinds of data that move
it towards being recognized as text.
And at different stages, learned data is
used to make more accurate sequences of
text.
There is an entire area of application
called machine learning where the data
is just so big that people don't
try to stand in the middle, and they
just get the computer to go from the
stream of data to the range of desired
values they want to get to. One fairly
interesting example is the thing where
they control a helicopter. I believe
it's some sensory information about
how the helicopter position and speed
responds to different changes in its mechanical
operation. And I think the idea is that
you also have a person who is trying
to control the helicopter, with help
from the program. One result was
that they could get the helicopter
to fly upside down, which a person
couldn't do on his own trying to control
it, but only with help of the program.
Those cars driving themselves are another
big area with lots of machine learning,
but people were in the loop there
to a great extent, setting up what to
be connected to what.
Part of situation in human intelligence
is that behavior is guided and controlled
by emotional behavior and reactions.
This is very far from how computers
operate. Computers just behave as
precisely determined by the sequence
of instructions and data sitting in
their very numerical memories. I'm
not sure we even really understand
and appreciate the significance of
our mental emotional behavior, but
perhaps more important, it's actually
something that we don't want the
computer to have. We kind of think
that somehow we can have the intelligence
without the emotional system, because
out ermotional systems apparently
get us to do things that we don't
think are all that intelligent.
We hope to distill out real logical
consequences of learned information,
instead of just basing behavior
on emotional likes and dislikes.
But this is a big flaw in the
project. All of a persons behaviors
come from these emotional considerations.
Some mechanism has to be in the computer
there somewhere. But since for now,
people are always in the loop, we can
pretty well conclude that the work
people are doing is doing this job.
And from the way people are picking
goals even for the machine learning
systems, one can see that this is the case.
So people at this point aren't even really
wanting to let the computer go and do
things on its own, which is part of
what it is to be intelligent. The project
doesn't move forward in part because it's
not really what people want. People really
want and expect a computer just to do
what they say, not what it wants to
and thinks is best. We don't even want
a computer to have wants. We want
to supply the wants. And I guess without
its own wants that it can explore,
a computer on its own is not doing
the complete process involved in
acting intelligently.
Some of this reflection for me comes from
what Lockhard was saying about how mathematicians
really work. Mathematicians find solutions
to problems because they like finding
elegant solutions, not so much because
they have a problem and it is the need
involved with the problem that motivates
them. Other people who have the actual
problems can use the results of the
mathematicians, but that's a different
thing. It is vaguely similar to how
computers use the results of their
programmers. They work for very different
kinds of motivations.
Finally, in the third season, Kwai Chang Caine
has girlfriend number three. Actually in
one episode in there, there was a flashback
after he had left the temple but before
he got into his legal trouble where he
runs into a chinese vixen, and they
seemed to sort of fall in love, but
don't quite get to do so much about it,
and it doesn't work out. Anyway, right
after that, we have girlfriend three.
They don't actually do so much with it,
as it's really just part of a side plot,
and I guess it adds some tension as
in the main plot, he apparently gets
a pardon and has to decide if he wants
to go back to China. Pretty harsh
to have a girlfriend just to have
more tension in the plot. Not quite
as irritating as inventing science
just for the plot, I guess. Anyway,
this episode was extra special because
William Shatner was one of the actors.
And he gets to use some of his special
fighting skills against our kung fu
master. But he gets beat up, of course.
I guess he lost a fair share on Star
Trek, too. Also, one of the other
actors from Star Trek was on there.
Instantly recognizable, too. The
girl that played Elaan of Troyius. Looking at the wiki for her,
I see that she had worked with Shatner before
Star Trek, even, so they must have been buds.
Kung fu has been getting a little
into woo-woo stuff. Psychics and
magical stuff. Blech.
Learning is complicated though. Possibly
different kinds of things. People have
an ability to use language to convey
stuff, and that kind of learning seems
significantly different from trying
things abd being rewarded and thus
increasing that behavior. Plus there
is knowing how to move in different ways.
Seems like that kind of learning is different.
Some while back, maybe a few years ago,
I bought another big fake book. It
got to the bottom of the pile so I
hadn't played from it yet. And the binding
is more of a book binding instead of a
spiral binding like the other, so it
doesn't sit open as easily, which may
have contributed to my not wanting to
try it out. But I decided to give it
a shot. It has got a lot of different
stuff from the other one, so not too
much overlap, which is good. I played
for maybe three hours and got to about
'G'. That's not playing all of them.
Not too many of them, really. There
are a lot of ones I've never heard of.
Same as the other one. And I get more
aware of the limitations of my ability.
Oh well. Hopefully playing helps me
get better. But it's really not so
good to do it in bursts. It really
needs to be everyday. And if I ever
get to playing on my midi keyboard
and record the stuff, that'll be nice.
So I can hear myself, and have something
to listen to. I wonder how much space
three hours of midi takes up? Doesn't
seem like it should be all that much.
I'm playing on the piano now. That's
something I'm supposed to be playing
every day, just to work the moisture out of it.
It didn't seem too bad.
OK, I'm reading in my book on historical linguistics.
It says that there is a French word "vasistas"
that apparently
comes from the German phrase "was is das" which
means "what is that?". That doesn't seem
like it could be right. And the word means
roughly a ventilator or fanlight,
a little window above a door you can crack open.
I don't know how it got to mean that. That's
just weird.
All the women at Bardog. Angela was there,
plus Ian of course. And she was hanging
out with her friend, Julie, who I think I
would like. And I finally got the name
of Murphy, who hangs out there a lot.
And a bunch of people from __Jersey Boys_.
There was a really cute little redhead, but
I never came close to her. But one
nice little girl, Jenelle, flirted quite a bit.
That was nice. Lots of kissing in that
group. A couple of guys seemed to start it
off, then Jenelle, kissed on of them, and
then one of the other girls. That was
pretty. And they were taking pictures.
Jenelle even got some hugs from Melissa.
And when I was going outside, she came
back from wherever she was, looking for a guy
we thought might come back. I didn't offer
to walk back with her. Oh well.
Super 5 was playing at Stella Marris.
It looks like a strip club. It probably will be one.
Does a restaurant ever have a DJ booth? I guess
they have to do some political stuff to get it there.
And it was totally full. The parking lot was full
when I got there.
Apparently Chris was talking about this. It's a thing that grabs the guitar for
input through USB, plus they have software
for processing it. It runs for about $100,
so I think that's what it was. It's the kind of functionality
I can get from my fancy stomp box, though
using that isn't so easy. So maybe I should
simplify and go for something like that.
They have a more expensive model that had more
inputs, and I might go for that.
Grady Booch of all things, recommended Gaping Void. He's a long time blogger. Old school.
I think for Booch it was something about creativity.
Maybe he does artwork for business cards or something.
Booch also recommended a book, _Beautiful Code_,
which I think I have somewhere so I should dig
it up. And it reminds me that I think I
have another book with interviews of programmers.
It's a genre that I seem to like. _Secrets of
Rock Star Programmers_, I think. I should dig
it up.
Parents here. Food cooking. Broiled chicken
and french fries. Yummy!
Melissa sent me a message that she couldn't
find any lemonade. I guess wintertime makes it
tougher. So I should bring something. She
tried several places but she was late.
It makes me unhappy when she's late
for work because of me, but it is kind
of sweet. I'm sure she's not happy about
it either. So I'm not really sure what
to say about it.
I've been kind of worried that I might have been
a little emotionally scarring to Wynne. Now
seeing that she's still into poetry, and having
seen how gloomy some of it is, I have to think
that yes, maybe I was. She was always kind
of emotional. So maybe mine was not such a
big impact. And for a while, I've thought that
maybe I'd like to say sorry or something,
or try to say how she was always nice,
and had a good impact on me, to try to
maybe mitigate whatever impact I might have
had. But now I have just a feeling of,
oh well, damage done, water over the dam. No real
interest in going back to it, now.
I didn't go out to the weekly Mensa meeting last
night. I'm thinking of going to the St. Louis
regional gathering next weekend, and I
thought it might be good to go and see some
of the locals to see if any were going, and
maybe some advice or something. It looks
like kind of a small one, but St. Louis
is close enough, and I've never gone
to one before. I had thought about going
to the national one last year, but
I balked at the money. I think it was
Pittsburgh. Which is just around a reasonable
driving distance. This year is Detroit.
Also doable. Actually, in Detroit,
you could probably squat in an empty building.
So I guess I need to see.
It's a convention though. I'm not so good with groups of
people. And I'm not so positive about what that
is. I'm just about OK one on one, but
with more than two, I have trouble even
joining in on a conversation. I don't
really feel like taking up people's
time or something. I saw something recently
that suggested that some geeky types
have trouble with the conventions of
turn-taking in conversations. So
there will be awkward pauses and
interruptions. That sounds likely
to be an issue for me. And having
a group of people, the whole turn-taking
thing may well just be too frustrating.
I do remember that I often find that people
don't let me finish what I'm trying to say.
And I've had people try to finish my
sentences, and invariably, they won't
say exactly what I'm trying to say,
so I'll just get frustrated. So
my experience in talking in groups
is generally frustrating. Also,
when talking, you have to find areas
of common interest and agreement
to have stuff to talk about. I
think I have fairly unusual values
and understandings about how things
are, so I don't usually find that
much in common with other people.
It's the kind of thing that makes
me usually not like dramatic movies,
so going to movies is a problem.
But in the situation of trying
to talk to a group of people,
I expect that I won't have anything
that is common to all of them.
I would guess that me talking
is mostly me trying to explain
my point of view, instead of
a kind of mutual sharing and
agreement that I think is a more
usual kind of conversation.
How about that airplane food?
Well there you go. I can see
why I haven't played much guitar.
My amplifier has a loose connection.
It's the amplifier. I wasn't sure
what it was. It could have been
my old guitar, or my homemade cables.
But with a new guitar and cable,
it still has the problem, so it
must be the amplifier. And the
connection is loose. So once in
a while, for a few seconds, it
will work. Darn. I bought that
amplifier used. Maybe it was
shaky when I got it. I guess
I need to write it off and throw
it away. I charged it, and all
that credit is gone, anyway.
So I guess I need to get a new
one. The few seconds it would
play it would be fairly nice.
Pretty loud. I guess that's
all I could want. It's too
much of a headache, though.
And it always had a buzz, even
when it there was no other signal,
so I just generally haven't
liked it. One question is if
I should try to sell it off,
again. But if it's really trash,
I should just dump it. Since then,
I've thrown away a lot more money
than this. I think it was about
$400. Man, I didn't really need
to be spending money on this stuff
right now.
So I'm shopping for amplifiers.
The Fender Passport 150 looks good to me. It's
a PA combination. Really, it's
for plugging in microphones to
amplify people's voices in a meeting
or something. Maybe could be for
a guy and his acoustic electric guitar.
That's actually the kind of thing I
want, because I have a keyboard
and and acoustic electric guitar,
and a microphone and nothing to
hook them up with. It's like $400.
I also saw the Peavey KB5. It is more specifically a keyboard
amplifier, but it's close to a PA, and
it probably would work fine with a guitar.
It's like $550, though, and that's just a
little more than I'd like. Both of those
are 150 watts. I'd like more, but it looks
like that's really all you can ask from
these combination amps. But if I were
to just be honest with myself, I'd
have to admit that what I want is
a Marshall stack. Speaker cabinets
separate from the amplifier, or head.
In their amp buying guide, Sweetwater
says that Jimi always had the dual 4x12".
Maybe I should concede and do that. But they
point to a cabinet that costs $800, but they
have one that costs $400. I don't what the
difference is. That's just the speaker.
I haven't looked at the amplifier head.
There's probably a lot you can do. And
in amplifiers, they always want sell
you built in effects. I have an extremely
fancy effects box, so I just want
a straight amplifier, which is why
I was looking at just PAs. We'll see
what I find.
Of course, I was one of the few kids
in my high school who even took the
American Math Competition tests. Maybe
we had half a dozen in my grade, I forget.
Those had really
hard math, at least for me. Stuff I
hadn't seen, and seems like they
would sometimes actually give me
a headache.
I chopped wood again. That's the last
of the stuff that was sitting to be chopped.
It looks like it's good for maybe two
weeks of burning steady, and it's
February and getting warmer, so
maybe I'll be fine. When it's gone,
it's gone. I needed to chop it
before the weather gets bad again,
since it was sunny. We were down to
having only maybe two or three days
worth, if we kept it up, and it seems
like we were just taking it a little
easy so we wouldn't run out. You're
more careful when you can see you're
about to run out. But the stuff now
is all wet from standing on the ground,
so it won't burn so well.
Finished learning the movements for
the Bagua dragon form. Now I can
just work on perfecting it. We've
only got three out of eight of the
sections in the Fanzi Quan form.
We would've gotten section four,
but there weren't enough people
that showed up. When that happens,
I get to learn more of the dragon form.
So that's it. I don't know if there's
anything else for me to do by myself.
The teacher is really trying to have everyone
learn the same thing. It's a lot easier
like that. So, what to study next.
Reecy wanted to learn Xingyi, and that
would be good. I think Louie is going
to explode if I don't study the sparring
form. But they've kind of cut back on
that because people were getting hurt.
There was one wild guy who messed it up.
And another kind of snag is that it
isn't something I can do by myself
when no one shows up. So it's not
really the greatest thing. I'd like either
one. For now, I need to spend time
on the dragon form. And I think there
is a variation when you do it in pairs.
My parents are in town for a couple of
days. My dad had to go to the dentist
here in town. And they're coming back
on Monday. My mom is making a pork roast.
And I ate a bunch of spaghetti yesterday.
So a break from my attempts to eat less.
And I'm holding off on picking up the guitar
from Chris while they're here. The money's
in the bank. I'll just do it tomorrow.
I said a week, and tomorrow will be a week.
Probably better anyway to have an empty
house when trying out a new guitar.
I did go on a bit yesterday. I guess that happens.
Not sleeping so much and Starbucks. Plus I
have been somewhat reflective lately. So,
bit of a manic Monday. And we had not
only just a full moon, but a wolf moon
as it's called. A perigee moon that
was extra close so extra big and bright.
Hopefully I'm not a werewolf.
So, Oracle bought Sun. They might have
sort of kept it alive in some way, but
it looks like they are just obliterating
any traces of it and moving on. There
are Sun boxes out there, so I don't know
what all's going to happen to them.
And Sun kind of had some kind of possession
of Java, but they did something to release
it as open source, so I don't know what
exactly Oracle has in relation to it.
I'm thinking that in some way, Java is
not dead, but with Sun gone, there's
not really going to be much work on it.
Microsoft has been trying to kill it
from the beginning. One other piece
is mySQL, which Sun bought. Sun was
keeping it alive, but I would guess that
Oracle really wanted to grab it and
do something with it. Get rid of it,
maybe. It's almost a competitor,
though it kind of works in a slightly
different market area--open source
as compared to Oracle which is a big
closed sort of system for big commercial
stuff. Kind of a tough time in computers.
And overnight the money has shown up in
my bank account. So that's a plus. Apparently
that means it takes two business days
to get access to my invested money.
That seems just about as liquid as
you could want. It takes maybe
that long for a check to clear.
OK, so I've got my laptop at Starbucks. I don't
have the wifi going to it yet. I'm not sure
what hoops they want me to jump through. Apparently,
they want me to get one of their cards. I hard heard about
that. But now when I see it, it has to be an active
card, bought or used or refilled in the last months.
That's not the same thing as just a card. I'm not
sure if I want to be active enough to mess with
it each month. Now, I buy from Starbucks every week,
but I prefer to use cash instead of doing any kind of
card thing. Maybe I can change. I'm not sure I
want to. We'll see. For now, I'm writing offline.
That's totally not the same. Can't do links or any
of that stuff.
Now the thing is, the wifi is done by AT&T so my
iphone is allowed to use it. A while back when
I was in here, I had to do some kind of hoop to
get access. The splash screen when the phone
browser tries to access it would come up with some
kind of log in, requiring the phone number,
and it was send a text to the phone with a log in link,
and then it would connect. It seems to do that handshaking
automatically now. So AT&T is giving me access to
my phone. Now this works very well for them, because
it doesn't clog the phone wireless network. The
iphone is becoming an incredible hog to them.
So much that it's been worth it to them to set
up these wifi points. But for the phone, not
so much for just everyone. I don't know
if being one of their customers is enough.
I need some kind of account with them.
I may well have one with them somewhere that
I can use, but I don't know yet. Maybe we'll
see.
Lunch with Aimee. At the Market Cafe on I
think it's Madison. Wish the internet was up,
or I'd give the link. The try to use farmer's
market vegetables. The owner took our order, but
passing over to the server, my soup turned into
a salad. That's fine. Probably just as well.
Hamp and Jenny were there. I think Aimee never
found Jenny, so that was nice. Tucked in a
different building somewhere. Maybe we can do lunch.
Fun writing in Starbucks, though. Got the tunes
on the iphone. Weird Al's song, "Pancreas".
He says his pancreas attracts all other pancreases
in the universe with a force that's proportional
to the product of their masses and inversely
proportional to the distance between them,
but to be more accurate, the forces is
inversely proportional to the square of
the distance between them. Maybe that
wouldn't fit so well in the song, but I
hate for him to be misleading to people.
It's like the place in the Wizard of Oz
where the guy, I think it must be the
scarecrow, says the area of the square
of the hypoteneuse of an isosceles triangle
is equal to the sum of the squares of
the other two sides. Maybe it's a little
more clear in print. This was also
quoted in a Simpson's episode by Homer.
And like the commenter there said,
"it's a right triangle, you idiot!"
Somehow, I got to talking to Aimee about
seduction. And I mentioned R. Don Steele's
_How to Date Young Women for Men over 35_.
I loaned her his book _Office Politics, I'm
guessing it was maybe 10 years ago now.
She really hated it. Anyway, I was trying
to get to how, if you just want to easily,
you should just get a wedding band. But
R. Don has a whole program of self improvement.
Exercising, learning about things that
interest young women. Getting out to
a gym. Actually, what seems like a
fairly nice program. And dating young
women is maybe an incentive, or goal,
or possibly a reward. I guess I don't
have a great way to describe it.
Doesn't seem like there is going
to be a good way to sell it to Aimee.
Because she asked the natural question
of what young women have to offer that
maybe an older woman like herself might
have. But she said, other than the
obvious physical stuff. Umm. Seems
like that's a little hard to just drop.
But I tried to add what R. Don added.
Young women have a bit of a fresher
outlook. They can be more vibrant.
The world hasn't worn them down as much,
and they won't be as bitter as older
women can be. Again, I don't think
that's going to be a case I'd be able
to make with Aimee, easily. And
R. Don has stages of women. An
older single woman will have different
things going on. A young woman is
probably not looking for a husband
the way an older woman almost certainly
is. She could still just be looking
to have fun for now. I guess.
So, going back to the shuttle to take us
back to her office, we just missed it driving
away. Instead of waiting for the next one,
we decided to walk. And immediately,
we saw that it was a mistake for Aimee.
The sidewalks were covered with ice.
I can walk on ice fine, but Aimee had heels.
Ouch. And this wasn't slush or snow, or
rough mix of snow and ice or even just
snow with a bit of a crust. This was
an early layer of snow, which had been rained on
and that has frozen to a perfectly smooth,
solid layer of smooth ice. Even ice can
be rough enough to get some grip. In
one spot there was just this nice slope,
so I couldn't stand, I just lightly
slide down, my legs spreading out.
But I said I could keep her from falling.
I'm actually very sure footed. In fact,
my style of kung fu emphasizes walking
with sure footing. And it gave me a chance
to tell me a story of the founder of Bagua.
He worked for the Emperor, at one of the
imperial palaces. As a waiter, actually.
Part of what he did in developing
this style of kung fu was to work on
improving and practice a style of
weaving and dodging footwork. So when
he was serving food in at the crowded
banquet, he weaved around between people
carrying the trays, never touching
anyone or spilling anything. And the
emperor, ro somebody like that, who
happened to be interested in kung fu,
said, hey, this guy probably has some
pretty good kung fu, based on how he can
move around so quickly, steadily, while
dodging and avoiding people. So he
got to do a demonstration of his kung
fu, which, yes, was very impressive,
and he ended up getting a job with
the guards, and did end up teaching
and training them.
OK, so telling the story will we
were walking on such terribly slippery
ice maybe help distract Aimee from
all the danger. We were walking
holding hands and I was definitely
trying to help steady her. I think
they like the whole protecting thing,
too. Plus, from what I here, if
you can get them really scared,
and their heart is beating,
they will kind of confuse that
a little bit, and have stronger
feelings for you. Anyway, something
to think about. And then, after walking on
ice for a couple of blocks, we noticed
that we were walking on the shaded south
side of the street, whereas the sidewalk
on the north side didn't have any ice.
D'oh! So we crossed the street and
then we were fine. But we survived,
and then got past it.
At lunch, we also talked about
computer languages, since I'm
reading about computer languages
designers. What swung it in that
direction was that she talked about
her regular meeting on Wednesday.
I told her that the C# guys have
regular meetings on Monday, Wednesday,
and Friday, from one to three. Every
week. For the past 10 years. Now
that's meetings. But they do a lot of
stuff. It's no wonder C# keeps adding
features. I tried to survey the
C family of languages and how object oriented
programming affected that family.
C was simple, but to handle big projects, they've
made several attempts to add object orientations.
C++ has been a bit of a disaster. It's
gotten too big. Still has pointers.
Java is a little better. C# is kind
of a reaction to Java, though since
it added back pointers, one might see it
as a step backwards. Objective C
is like a fork before C++. Aimee
has done some COBOL and I forget what
the other thing was.
So I've been playing the money pretty close.
I need $80 tomorrow to pay for kung fu for the
month. I have $62 in the bank, after what
I've been taking out over the weekend.
And went out to dinner saturday and sunday.
Got a lot at Bardog. Soup and Mussels.
Melissa kindly paid for the soup. She often
picks up my check, so I didn't know what
to expect. So I only had to pay for the mussels.
She actually expected me to get the fillet,
but that was $25, and I think she would
not have covered that. Which was good.
And any other time. I would have done it,
but I'm real close. And the after it
all, I was having lunch with Aimee.
Normally, I would pay, and I would
run over her objections in a manly way.
And I had prepared an argument. She
can pay when she asks me out. And she
tried to act like she kind of had. Because
when I sent the email, she said she had been
thinking of sending me something, already,
what a coincidence! And she picked the
place. So I simply did not fight back
very hard. Plus, I paid the last two
recent times. A few weeks before,
a few months before that. And not so
recent, I think it was maybe 7 years
before that. So if we are taking
turns, it was her turn. And maybe
she might be a little more comfortable
taking turns, but who wants to be
comfortable? The owner guy as
we were paying used the word "manly".
Somehow letting her pay might be
manly in some way that I was not
familiar with. Something to do
with being gracious, I think?
OK. So I let her pay. Leaving me
with the $32 I still had. OK.
Yay! So I theoretically have the
money, without needing any extraordinary
effort.
But I said I was playing it
close. Actually, I have a hundred dollar
bill that my mom left to help with the
utility bill. I think it's gotten really
sad that my mom feels like giving me money.
When I was working, I usually gave my mom
money every time she came to town, to
buy groceries. And over Christmas last
year, every couple of weeks. And usually
a hundred. She really appreciated that,
because her money was tight. And you know,
when I stopped working, I still had enough
money to keep doing that, and probably I
should have, but I try to keep my finances
to myself, and there would have been questions,
and I don't think she would have gotten
that yes, I am managing my money, and I
can still do this. When I was working,
from the very beginning there was the
understanding that the job was temporary,
so it was all about saving money, because
when it was gone, it was going to be quite
a while til I found another one. And then
it lasted more than two years longer than
I was expecting, so I saved enough to
go for a really long time. Even spending
money at the rate that I was thinking,
I could go for two years, with everything
working to plan. I did tell her about the
two year thing. Maybe a year and a half.
It's been a year now. And this is all
without cutting back, which maybe would
be a good idea. So I guess she decided
for me to cut back on the money going
to her. That includes one of the two
tax bills for the house. I paid the
city, but she paid the county. I caved
in to that. And then I didn't throw
money into food over the holidays like
I should have. Ouch. I just went
down that road, I guess. So she
goes back to the farm after the holidays,
and then leaves me with money to help
with the utilities. Now, to be fair,
normally they run around $100, but
in the winter, maybe last time, it
was over $300, so it could have been
pretty steep. But it was only $230.
So really no big deal. Whatever.
So Aimee asked me, what my dream job
is. It's a very good question. I
didn't finish answering her, and
the discussion veered off. I talked
about the book _the Passionate Programmer_.
The guy is a saxophone phone player, so
he has analogies to being a musician
and programmer, like trying to be the
worst one in the room, so you can get
better, and it's more fun. And he's
got a lot more stuff. I have to
look more into it. One thing I've
found is that I'm not manager. I
don't have good time management,
and certainly no people management.
And I'm not a self-starter, so
I can't do the academic sorts
of big projects on my own. Though
that may just be that I haven't
worked on becoming like that,
and developing habits to do
projects like that on my own.
I certainly can do work on my
own, but so far, I've needed
management for figuring out
goals and plans and schedules
and that sort of thing.
There was the passionate programmer
one, and there was another about
finding a good IT job. I forget
where it was, but somewhere it
suggested that you should try
to focus on an industry that
you are interested in. IT
isn't all the same. There are
different areas. Along those
lines, I've been thinking of
going into medical IT.
In general,
too I've found that it's more
important to me what the company
does. In particular, I just
did not believe that it
ever absolutely positively
had to be there overnight.
I guess that's where the conversation
with Aimee derailed. I kind
of did get stuck with that.
And she found it ironic that
a person with admitted problems
with time management couldn't
understand someone who had
procrastinated to where something
needed to be there overnight.
Because I think people who
believe it has to be there
overnight are just mistaken.
They've made a mistake somewhere,
and now they are propagating this
mistake thinking someone else
can fix their mistake for them.
I have heard people say they
believe it absolutely positively
has to be their overnight for
something, but I've never heard
any convincing explanation that
that is the case. Of course,
I haven't heard that so often.
I think financial documents was
one thing. But all documents
can be transferred electronically
instantly. Somehow, there is
something about physical legal
documents with signatures,
but as far as I can tell,
that's just garbage. Bruce's
business is all about documents
like that. Honestly, the cost
of FedEx is cheap compared to
the money involved in properly
preparing the documents, and the
work that he does involving them.
So fine. And losing stuff in
the mail? That would suck.
So I've been right there.
Still not convinced.
My ultimate dream is AI.
But I'm not sure that it
is something I could be
doing work on. Which is,
I guess sad. It's something
maybe that I want to be
able to do, but I can't
now. Should I focus
on becoming able to doing
something in that area?
Do I need to be looking
at what I most want to
do that I am able to do?
Maybe I should. Am I
able to do research?
One of the things I was
just thinking of looking
at doing was something in
biochemical informatics.
In chemistry, reactions
work in particular ways depending
on the geometry of the things involved.
The shape of the molecules, plus
actually a lot more information
about how the pieces can move
and bend, and how charge distributions
and electrical forces are arranged
Geometrically. And there is
a huge map of chemical reactions
in biological systems that are
well mapped, along with different
proteins that are involved. One
important problem is seeing how
the shape of a protein interacts
with different chemicals, because
of their shapes. And it is
an incompletely handled problem
simply to go from a protein sequence,
which you can get from the gene sequence,
to its shape. So there is a lot involved.
This is bioinformatics research at
the postdoc level. A lot of work.
I honestly do not have the full
background to do it, but it is
something I would like to get into.
That seems something worthy of
pursuing. It also might involve
AI sorts of things a dealing with
computer knowledge of complex
spatial objects. The computer
vision stuff might apply to that,
as some partial analyses add
information that is similar
to how vision takes incomplete
information to give you a
solid understanding of an object.
When people talk of computer
models of drugs, I'm assuming
they use something at this level.
When you get a molecule of a particular
shape, you can check it against
all the biological molecules you
know about, and see it there
are some strong reactions that
will end up causing the freaky
and unpredictable "side effects"
that happen in medicines all the
time.
Argh! There was a Trojan on my
other laptop. And loader programs.
Ick. I don't know where I got them.
Not nice.
So one question I would have is,
how much organic chemistry do
computers understand? Is there
a way I can get computers to understand
more organic chemistry? Part of the
question is also how much I understand.
I was never that great, and I've forgotten
a lot. There is a lot to know. There's
fundamentals, but there's also a lot
of just mass detailed facts. And then
biochemistry adds a lot further into that.
OK, so I said I was playing very tight
with my money. There is an additional
bit. On Friday, I put in an order
to sell stock. A big chunk. It
takes time for the money to propagate.
This time, I;ve handled it a little different.
My account seems to have diffent bins.
There's a bin for mutual fund shares
of a certain type that I have. I have
a bin that's labelled cash. And in
one view of my portfolie, it will say the
amount in the cash bin, the amount in
the mutual fund bin, and it will have
a weird line that says credit or
debit from unsettled activity.
Fine. So far, I've treated the unsettled
stuff as money I simply don't have
access to. But today, I found that
there is another view, it has a line
that is cash plus unsettled amounts,
and then it has a completely different
line labelled, money available for
withdrawal. Huh. And when I
look at it, the unsettled money
is available for withdrawal. OK.
Now, one difference in the pages
seems to be that this one seems
to talk more about it being an
instantaneous snapshot, because
with a trade account,stock
sales and orders and purchases
have particular times at which
they are places and occur.
The time of day makes a difference
in these kinds of things, so
that kind of stuff can make a
difference. I am only trading
mutual funds, which are settled
at the end of the day, so the
times aren't that big a deal.
I am not positive that the fund
people aren't jigging me with
the fluctuations during the day,
but that's more of an issue
with the manager. You gotta
trust somebody. I only
get a settlement date, not
a settlement time. This fund,
though, in very day I sold,
had a 1% swing. That means
they could have juggled it
and lost or gained whatever
it was. But like I said, I
don't know. Whatever.
Anyway, this time, I went
and places a transfer order for
money that in one place said
it was available, but had
not made it to the cash bin
And it took the order. I don't
know what it's going to do, though.
My transfer order was places
before their closing time,
4pmET, where they say it
can get executed that same
day. In the optimistic
scenario, I might have cut
out a day in the time it
takes to get money out.
Or maybe it won't make
any difference. Or, of course,
there's the pessimistic possibility.
They may believe I have overdrawn
my account. And it could
fail and I will have to pay
a penalty for that. Wouldn't
that be special? I tried looking
over their help pages, and I just
didn't see anything to indicate
they could do something like that,
but some places are just all about
having gotchas like that.
They sent me an email saying they
transfered the money. The money
has been taken out of the unsettled
"bin". These bins I'm describing
are on a pages called "positions"
the other one is called "balances".
I guess there is a difference.
And the market went up, like 1.4%.
Actually, the day-trading amount I
was thinking of really wasn't that
much. But the 6% over the week kind
of hurt. If I had done it a week before,
or I bet waited a week. But I waited
til the last, and possible a little
too long. In the morning on Friday,
it was going up, but then it went down.
*sigh*
And the money is gone from
my investment account, but it
has not showed up in the display
from my bank account. I'm not sure
what to make of that. I apparently
do not have a situation where I
can account for all the money
that I have. I have some sort
of record of the transfer, but
until it gets to the destination,
I don't have a listing of the money
being anywhere. Maybe it's sitting
in a transaction house, somewhere.
Bacause in the pessimistic case,
it's not sitting there, and the
handling system might catch up
and starting chomping.
So, one thing Aimee came up with.
Does R. Don have something for
cougars? And my thought was,
that'd be like having a book
on how to shoot fish in a barrel.
But you know, maybe there's a need
for that, too.
I just watched some videos of Pat Churchland, kind of a neuropsychological philosopher of mind.
One thing she talked about in there was how
significant it is to unconsciously mimic other people,
or mirror them. This was something I read about
a while back in that book about getting people
to like you, and I tried it out a bit. And I wrote
about it somewhere.
OK, dude called it "synching". So they did an
experiment, and they told the person to avoid
imitating completely, and the other people
would end up saying he seemed creepy. OK.
And she (Pat) was trying to explain maybe
what the significance might be. How do we
know if a stranger is dangerous? That's
one of the signs. If they can pick
up social cues. It's actually a little
beyond just being different and trying
to be like the group. Also, if you look
at babies, they try to copy people,
smile when they smile, point when they point.
It's important for them to learn, and it
also adds to their charm. Plus, here
was the coldly scientific eerie part
that she said, if babies can't do that,
that's gonna be one of the few ways that
mom knows if there is something wrong
with the baby. Ooh. She talked about
infanticide in there somewhere, too.
That's actually a subject I go too, sometimes.
So she seems like my kind of lady.
Canadian, though. Occasionally, she'll
say something in a way that just reminds
me of all my cousins up there. Okay, eh?
One thing about Julie, though, that's still
sticking with me. At some point, they
say her husband suggested putting one
of those paypal links, for donations.
Grr. Those things bother me, but I
can see the idea of donations. At least
making it possible. Seems like Russell
did that, but I don't see it now. It
just seems like begging people is
just such a painful thing to do. When
it doesn't work out, ouch. So I guess
I won't worry about it. And Julie's
character didn't improve, but it moved
to sort of a happy ending, despite it.
Or maybe her realization was the thing.
And to realize that everyone is a bitch
too. That would be an extremely sad
and annoying moral. That may an additional
reason I didn't like it. The happy ending
was that she got her book published
and made into a movie, and her husband
came back. I mean he left her for a bit.
That's just sad. I guess marriages have
troubles. Especially when the wife
is that annoying. OK, I told Netflix
three stars. Julia Child part was nice.
The Julie part did not completely ruin
it for me, I think. Two and a half seems
like it would have been right.
Man, I didn't go see Super 5. And it bums
me out because I said I would. I took a nap,
and woke up around 10, but I just couldn't
get myself to get up and go. I really
didn't want to go out, but I didn't want
to not do what I said I would. Inertia
won out. Maybe I didn't know about the
snow when I said I would. Maybe I
still try to say what i thinking people
would like to hear when I'm with them,
but it isn't quite the same when I'm
by myself, and I don't think of all
the stuff pushing me around then.
Conflict. And how to be reliable
about what you're going to do.
Lately, not so much.
I guess that's another thing about
the star trek movie. In this new
reality, Uhura is his girlfriend.
They tried to play off the weird
geeky attractiveness that he has,
but completely deflate it by making
him attainable. Fork that movie!
Fork it up its evil crap-hole!
And I saw something talking about
how _Avatar_ could be conceived of
as racist. I'm not sure I really
had that reaction. Maybe that
was in there, somewhere. Primitives
cain't do nothin' til one of massa's
people joins up wit' 'em. It's
just about at the level of jar-jar,
now that I think about it.
OK, so a lot of people pronounce SQL
as "sequel". I have settled on pronouncing
it "squall", because it's kind of stormy
to use. The book talks with one of the
guys who developed it. It originally
was called SEQUEL, but they had to
change the name to not violate somebody's
tradmark, so I would say that all the
people who say it "sequel" are violating
that trademark, so they need to stop. :P
And Gosling on Java. He's happy with it.
He might actually use Scala instead, though.
But for him the big thing is the JVM,
and that's solid. On C#, he said they
took most of Java, but left out the security by
still having pointers. He said it was "grotesquely stupid".
But he had to admit that because of that,
you can't have C or C++ on the JVM.
I guess you wouldn't want to. But then
you here from the C# guy. Their big deal
is that on their VM, whatever it is,
I think they call it CLR, you can use
any language you want. And more harshness.
He says the Java people aren't trying for backward
compatibility so much as never improving at
all. You could add new things and the old
stuff will still work. But I think that's
typical microsoft deception. If you constant
upgrade, the new stuff will be able to use
the old stuff. It's the microsoft attitude
that you always need new stuff. It's part
of the deal when you make stuff as crappy
as that. It will fall apart if you don't
replace it pretty often. Great if you have
money invested in landfills. Or maybe sewage treatment.
They had an objective-C guy. He uses Java now.
Apple took over that language, and they didn't
talk to them.
I put a log in the fireplace, actually the longest
one, that was the entire width of the thing.
I had to put it in diagonally, and it was
maybe eight inches thick, so it was fairly
big, too. Not super big. We've got a bunch
that are more than a foot across, but they
are short enough to fit in straight. This one
was wider than the opening at the front,
and seemed like it might have been wider
than the inside, but maybe it burned off
a little on the outside, because it eventually
settled in parallel. When I first put it in,
it was kind of wedged, sitting up off the bottom,
though I guess resting on some coals. It burned
down about half through, and was sitting up
against the back, and I tried to roll it
forward a bit, but it just disintegrated
into a pile of coals. A thick layer of
burning coals covering the whole bottom
of the fireplace. And when wood is just
heated, baked, it turns into charcoal.
So this was basically a mass of charcoal,
but all the surfaces were red and burning.
And now it isn't even just yellow flames,
It's about half blue flame. Really hot
for a bit, but it won't last too long.
So I put in one of those thick one
foot logs. So it'll get a chance to
roast. This one, though, wasn't lying
down, it was standing, with the flat cut
part on the cement. I pick it up, and
there are beetles living under it.
I don't know enough about bugs. I
don't know what kind they were. They
kind of look like small roaches, but
like I said, I don't know bugs, so I
don't know. And there was sawdust.
I think we had termites in there, too.
It'll be good to get rid of this stuff.
So I wanted to check on the log and
see how it was doing. When it gets too
hot, the doors expand and you can't open
then. So I've got me a fire going.
OK, the C# guy did turbo pascal, which
was quite nice.
I felt like trying some French food, so
I Googled it at Starbucks, and there
was a place River Oaks, that was only
a couple of blocks from there. I didn't
feel like driving downtown or to midtown.
And it supposedly has Chef Jose Guttierrez.
The best food I've had, I think, was from
him at Chez Philippe a few years back.
This menu, though, seemed pretty heavily
American. I had the soup, a chicken and
peas cream, and the pork tenderloin.
It was good, but nothing memorable.
Little bartender Courtney. I'm not
sure what she made of me. I am quite
shaggy lately. I put the money in
the little book thingie, but she didn't
actually take it. I wanted to keep the
receipt, but since I left it, I felt
I needed to keep it with it so to be
sure she could connect it up, if she
was going to save it to the end. I
actually had exact change, but tipped
a twenty. I don't eat out very often,
so I wasn't all that comfortable with it.
Oh well. And I didn't say much at all.
I listened to my iPhone, and read stuff on
it, so I was entertained well enough.
I'm not sure what I might have expected.
At one point a song from Weird Al came up--
"Genius in France"-- which seemed fitting.
Wow. I just got to the point where Julie
just comes out and says "I am a bitch".
I was trying not to say it like that,
but there it is. That pretty much
expresses my feelings. So now I'm
guessing there's going to be some
kind of character development where
she becomes a better person, but I'm
sorry, it's too late for that for me.
I'm thinking I might get an iPad when
it comes out. A lot of the reddit
geeks are whining about it. It doesn't
work like one would expect a computer to.
You expect to be able to program a computer.
But this one you can't. One guy
said he wouldn't
have become a programmer if they had
iPads. Fine, great. But most people
don't want to program. We'll see if there
is a market for this. It looks like
just a fancy kindle. But a kindle is
on my list, so there. Sounds expensive,
too. And then another $30 a month to
get the 3G connection. Argh.
And the market went down. Ouch. So I just lost
a bunch of value. It looks much more like
I'm going to need to get some work soon.
I guess I still have a while. Oh well.
I saw Super Chris at Bardog. I said
I would buy one of his guitars.
He makes custom guitars.
His buyer for it backed out, and he's just wanting
to unload this one. He is going to work
on getting more sales, and he could certainly
sell them for more. Selling is always
a challenge. Getting rid of this one
will help him get some cash for materials
for another one.
But French cooking. Honestly, it seems like
too much work. And really, that appears
to be part of the style. Hopefully,
after all the work, the food is really
good. I guess that's the idea. Rich.
Snow here. Went out to bring the DVD
to the post office. It's been rainy
a lot today, so it washed the snow off
the streets, so there's just some slush.
But it's going to fresh and be really
nasty. A good weekend to just stay in.
But Super 5 is playing at Dan McGuinness
tonight, and I'm intending to go down.
Could be icky.
Watched _Avatar_. Knew it was a bad idea.
I guess it was good to have seen it in
the sense of sharing the experience.
So many have seen it. But everyone
goes to the bathroom, too. Somehow,
it reminds me of that.
So I turned on House. Maybe fifteen minutes into
it. At about 25 minutes there was a commercial
break, and I considered going to the
store quick. I might have been able to
make it back to see the end, which I think
was mostly what I was interested in, I
guess. But I stuck with it for a little
more. Some kind of psychopath as the patient,
which intrigues House for some reason.
But at maybe 35 minutes into it, there's
another commercial break, and I've had
it with the commercials. Maybe if
I'd seen it from the beginning, I would
have been more invested and the breaks
wouldn't have bothered me as much.
Or maybe I've just lost my tolerance.
I mostly only watch DVDs now, with no
commercials. I don't know.
So I go to Kroger's. I was going to
get two half gallons of milk this
time, instead of just one. The last
one lasted four days, so this should
get me a week. I'm not so happy that
I had to go back to the store so soon.
'Cause I really hate shopping. And
maybe pick up some fried chicken.
Last time, I got the banquet's,
plus the milk, and it came to $10 even
which seemed odd. And I get really
expensive milk, it's lactose free,
but the store brand is like $2.99
instead of 4 something for the Lactaid
brand, so I really save a significant
amount going to Kroger where they have
it. And I check out the chicken
at the deli. It's $6 for 8 pieces.
Might as well get the banquet for that,
and I think the quality is better.
But they have some marked down to
$2.50. Getting old, maybe, but
that sounds like a deal. Hopefully
it's not too risky. So the total is
around $9.20. I've gotten a little
more food for less money. So bonus.
If I bought a whole chicken and fried
it myself it would cost more. But I
get it home. Very dried out. Sitting
under the heat lamp too long. So
it isn't so good. But theirs isn't
all that good, anyway. So I've
live with it.
Even with the later departure, I
still made it back to see a little
of the end of the _House_ episode.
Missed all the dialog, so I don't
know how it really ended with the patient.
Just some weird mood stuff with him
going up to a house in the snow.
Fine. Some kind of character development
or something, I guess. Isn't it special
that he's growing as a person? Life is
but a something something. Googled it.
Walking shadow. Fine.
Makes me wonder. Why would I even
bother with mundanities? Writing
about watching TV and going to the
grocery store. That has got to be
really sad. But it's writing. It's
kind of fun for me. I wouldn't expect
anyone to be interested. But it's something.
There's all that text out there. Trees
died for some of it. But no trees died
here. That's got to count for something.
And it's a little bit about my alternate.
Right now, paused on the DVD player is
_Cathouse_, and HBO something or other
about some Nevada brothel. Ugh. I'm
not sure I want to know. Some kind of guy
on screen who just entered and is being
introduced with a grin on his face.
I guess it's humanity. Man.
Ugh. Or maybe, moo. I ate too much chicken.
And I did get through _Doctor Who_ season four.
It was OK. Really not as memorable I think
as it might be. Maybe got a little too
melodramatic for me.
One implication of having most computer science
students write a compiler is that there's going
to be a lot of computer languages out there.
I think that may be what has happened. Because
there really are a huge number of computer
languages, and more all the time. But having
a lot to choose from could mean that the ones
that get popular are pretty good. But it
doesn't really seem that way. Computer
programming is just hard. People might
flail around trying to get a better system,
but it hasn't especially been working very
well. One attempt with computer languages
is to make it so it's easier to find problems,
but to have that, you have to have redundancy,
which means a program will need to be longer.
That's the kind of thing that a lot of
people don't like. So there's push back
against that. I forget which it was, it
might have been AWK, but they were saying
that just about anything you type would
be a valid program, but if you have that,
you don't know if anything is wrong.
One specific thing, in AWK, you don't
have to declare a variable. If you
use it, it magically appears. So if
you have a typo and have misspelled
something from before, that won't be
an error that the compiler or interpreter
will catch. It will just make a new
variable, and it just won't work the
way you probably want. Guy suggested
you might have something to warn you.
But because of this kind of thing,
it's not so good to have a long program.
And AWK programs are supposed to be
short, maybe a line or two.
Netflix has season four of _Doctor Who_
available to stream, so I'm watching that.
And then there's a chapter on AWK. Which seems a
little odd. AWK doesn't seem like a real major
language. It's a pattern matching scripting tool
under Unix, but not quite a full language. But
then you see what the real deal is. The guy
they're talking to is Al Aho. He's the 'A'
in 'AWK'. There's also Weinberger and Kernighan.
But Aho is one of the authors, along with Ullman,
of the dragon books, pretty much the definitive
textbook on compilers. Maybe i wouldn't have
even noticed it, but he mentioned that the
pattern matching algorithm used in AWK is
documented in the red dragon book. OK.
So I tried googling Wynne to see how she's doing.
Somewhere it said that one of her interests
is poetry. And they're not kidding. You can
google
her and poetry and find quite a bit. She won some
kind of poetry contest from the AMA.
Apparently when she got a masters in bioethics
from U Penn, her thesis was a series of poems.
That seems a little weird, but whatever.
I guess she likes writing poetry.
Watched Homer do the tomorrow soliloquy.
Some drama with the job thing today. I haven't felt
like talking to the headhunters, and I think they
called yesterday but that was it. But somehow today
Doug decided to contact me. So he called and I
didn't answer.
And let me back up. Last night I had a dream. I dreamed
that the Mark guy just came into the house here.
Didn't knock, just came on in. And he brought some
girl or something. And Doug came on in too. I think
that was about it. So I think I'm just feeling a little
intruded upon.
Conversely, though, I had another dream where I was staying
at a hotel. I had enough to pay for it in my account,
but then I spent a little too much on something or other,
and then I ended up being a little short, and I had
to worry about that. So maybe I'm a little worried
about having enough money, so maybe I really should
try to get some work.
Anyway, Doug called and I didn't answer, but then he
came by. I didn't want to see him or talk to him.
Even before that, I was thinking that with this situation,
I wasn't entirely happy with him, and I just have
less of an interest in seeing him in general.
So I just ignore him and don't answer the door.
I was trying to take a nap, anyway, so I really
did not want to be interrupted.
Some time later, though I get a call from my parents
at the farm. Doug has called them. Great. So
now I'm not happy. I called Doug and told him I'm
not happy. I thought not calling because I'm
not interested would be enough, but Doug called
my folks. So I told him to leave it alone. Fine.
Great. But now it may be time for me to really
look for something. And now I don't have as much
interest in staying here in Memphis. There was
some stuff I needed to look at first, including
one book on IT interviews, a couple on IT job
searching more generally. And I have a more
general thing on careers--something with "Zen"
in the title. I do want to look at iPhone programming
a little bit, and there's the clojure thing
I wanted to do, but maybe that's so likely
anymore. Not if I suddenly need to do something.
One thing about not staying is that I gained
extra weight over christmas. That's a minus.
But I've lost a couple of it. Still, it's
going to be hard now.
And with all the problems in Haiti, my situation
is nothing to complain about.
And the job is not too bad. One of the headhunters
seemed to get that my last experience actually
fits fairly well with this job. But I'm just
not really excited about the company, and life
is too short to do something you don't care much
about.
I was giving this possible java work a couple days
to see if I might become interested, but it doesn't
seem to be happening. I'm not answering my phone.
And I don't really like when it happens to me,
but it happens enough that I'm sure they must get it,
though I have commented on how hard it is to get a
message when all you have is someone not responding.
So it's a couple of days, and I still don't really feel
like I'm going to want to go downtown this weekend.
There was actually a little bit in there where the
old feeling of just wanting to go down there came
back, but it passed. No telling what it'll be
like come Sunday. I have usually decided to go.
But even last Sunday evening, I didn't really feel
like going, but because earlier that day I said
I would, I went. And I guess it was nice, but
maybe it was getting to be enough. I went in Friday
night for a couple of minutes just to say hi
and ask Melissa about school, because I was out
downtown with friends, and then said I would
try to bring them by. I was there Saturday from
about 9 til 3. And then I went Sunday. So that
was quite a bit.
Finished the first of four Simpson's season 20 DVDs.
The episodes are pretty good, I think. I miss
the commentaries. The last one was one with Lisa
and Crossword puzzles. Homer makes her mad
by betting against her in a tournament (which
was a good bet), and then gets the New York Times
crossword puzzle to have a secret message to her.
And the main guy is Will Shortz. My mom has a book
of Sudoku puzzles from him. I wish I would have
saved at least the cover from that last book I
did, but now I'm thinking it was not one of Shortz's.
Browsing Amazon for Sudoku books, (and I think my last
book was Wayne Gould's Fiendish one), I came across
a comment on on book that talks about a technique the
author is calling "trailing". It's where you
pick one of two possibilities and see where it
goes. I have to do that sometimes. And he wants to
say it's logical and not just trial and error,
but is not very convincing. I don't know. He
marks some puzzles where you have to do that.
Seems a little iffy. Plus, there were some puzzles
that had two different solutions. That violates
a sort of agreement that people have, so those
are in some sense failed puzzles. One of the
comments refers to the mensa guide to solving sudoku puzzles so I've
added that to my Amazon wishlist. Maybe if
I finish my book of 1250 I might try it.
I've slowed down, though. Too much other stuff.
I have a strong feeling of not wanting to go back.
That never lasts til the end of the week, but there
it is. I was saying I would give Asa a ride back
to easy Memphis, but there must be some deal where
I'm not allowed to be in the place when they are
doing something at the close, maybe putting the money
in the safe. I don't know. But they had to put me
out. And Asa said thanks but he's OK. There was
a cabbie who came in and would pick him up, though
he had a fare to go to, but probably after that.
Whatever. It just gave me pause that they really
don't know me that well. I hung out for an hour
when they were closing down, but it's still really
just provisional.
And there was a thing where Melissa needed to go
to the bathroom, but she couldn't because she
had gotten Asa to stand by the door and make
sure it was locked when people left. So
I went over and did that instead. Priorities.
And I found a song that Melissa seems to really
like. "I Will Survive". I asked her about it,
and she said it reminds her of the last time
she saw her favorite aunt Ginny happy. She was
95 and it was at a party. It was before several
of her relatives died and she got bad sick with
the shingles. It came on and she was dancing
and having a good time. So when Melissa hears
it, she remembers and feels good. And what I
noticed is that she dances to it herself.
And that's just very pretty. I didn't tell
Melissa that, though. Oh well. But I played
the song twice.
Actually, the first time I
played it, in a sequence of a bunch of things, the
music was turned fairly low, and when it came on,
she turned the volume way up. And that was a little
bad for me. The very next song I had was Queen's
"fat-bottomed girls". Melissa hates queen.
She tells me not to play queen (that or meatloaf,
but I hate meatloaf too, so I don't play it).
And because the sound was low, I thought it
wouldn't be so bad. But like I said,
she turned the sound up right then. Maybe
her good mood held on a second, and she
got right busy right then. Often she'll
turn the sound down when Queen plays, but
she didn't. I tried to have a bunch of
good stuff after it. And I played it one
more time so we could have the whole thing
at full volume.
There's one song that works really well.
"Lean on me". People will sing along
with that one. It's a friendly bar.
So UPS delivered today. I got my Simpson's
20th Season DVDs. No Commentaries. Talk
about disappointing. That's really the main
thing I do with them, listen to the commentaries.
I'm sure that's just me, but it's important
to me. Oh well.
I also got a book, _Masterminds
of Programming_. Interviews with the designers
of quite a few popular programming languages.
I will probably find it fun. Again, just
me personally. I read _Coders at Work_,
which was famous programmers, not so much
language designers, and really liked that.
I got together with Doug and one of his friends, Mark Dinstuhl,
for lunch yesterday. Mark needs to get out of
a programming contract, and in order not to
injure his relationship with the people involve,
he wanted to have an alternative candidate
for the job. So I have contacted the recruiter.
We'll see how it goes. I haven't had that much
luck with recruiters. They tend to get a list of
particular technologies from their clients,
and really can only go by that list. And from what
I've seen, they don't have such a great understanding
of the craft of programming. The programming isn't
really their area, in some sense. Their task is dealing
with people. I already have a list of minuses for this
situation. In general, it would be good for me
to pursue, though. We'll see how it goes.
Lately, I've been thinking what features I like in
women. For me, she needs to be smart, and probably
has to be atheist, though maybe in the broader sense
of just not being so caught up with the silliness.
But then physically. I think the most important thing
is petite. I like freckles and fair skin, too.
That seems a little rare, though. So I was looking
at all the women in Bardog. There are always a lot
of women there. Melissa has even remarked how there's
a lot more there than most places. Anyway, there
was this on woman that really seemed pretty to me.
Fairly short, curvy, dark hair. Maybe I stared a
little long. At closing, though, I was sitting by
the door making sure it was locked behind people.
And she was coming to leave, I forget what she said,
maybe nice to see you, and shook my hand. Then she
kissed my hand. It was so sweet. I of course, didn't
have any real way of handling it--that's just not
me-- but there it was.
Went to Borders. The had a book that was
on my amazon wish list, so I picked it up.
Pearlman's _The Book of Marial Power_.
It seemed nice because the sections were
brief. Not too many pictures. I
never get anything from pictures of techniques.
I just can't follow them. And it seemed like
he wasn't too fluffy, but a little concrete.
Maybe someone who actually might understand
physics. That can really be a problem,
in my experience. I saw something else that
looked good-- _The little black book of
violence: what every young man needs to
know about fighting_. I think it's along
the lines of that other one, I think it
was _Meditations on Violence_, which was
really good. But it was really too long
for me right now. Maybe some other time.
I also got the Scientific American Mind.
It has a section trying to deal scientifically
with falling in love. Sounds good to me.
Also has a thing on suicide, and it had
a picture of someone who cut herself.
Both of those subjects remind me of someone
I know. It also has a thing on social networks,
"what they do to you". Seems like something
may I should try to know more about, but then,
knowing these guys, it's probably just obvious
stuff. Seems like they said something about
people do best if they use them to enhance
their real relationships. Gee, really?
Alone again. At last. Played some piano.
Seems like I prefer to do that by myself.
My mom asks me to play a lot, and the
piano tuner guy says it needs to be played
a lot. But I resist that. Maybe I don't
like to be nagged. And my mom shows
sort of a mawkish kind of appreciation that
isn't so pleasant. And maybe playing is
a little personal for me. But one thing
I'm noticing is that I'm pretty heavy
on the sustain pedal. A lot of what
I like is how the harmonies play
when you can get all the notes holding
on for a long time, with some of them
fading. It can be a very rich sound.
Like a mocha chai. But the midi
keyboard, is not going to have a sustain
like that. Probably. There is a plug
for a sustain pedal, and it might try
to handle an effect like that, but it
probably won't be the same. I'll need
to check it out. And I'm not sure how
bad I feel about losing my doodlings.
I play something and it's gone.
This time, I tried some more improvising.
My improvising has actually gotten
pretty rusty. At least I remember being
better than this. Maybe the faking
of songs got me out of the spirit of
loosely playing. We'll see.
Where did the last 5 pounds come from?
I had been sitting at 205 for a while.
It has been a bit since I was checking
it all the time. Maybe a couple weeks.
Some of it must have been the KFC. And
there's the pork roast. And I've been
drinking up the OJ. Seems like OJ often
gets me. It's kind of sneaky, because it
goes so fast. And since it's so cold,
I haven't been doing the kung fu as
much as I need to. So maybe a combination
of things.
They had a guy Mungo Park. For quite
a while I thought it was park, but it
is the guy's name. The story kind of
inspired _Heart of Darkness_ which
inspired _Apocalype Now_. Plus _Aguirre:
the Wrath of God_. A guy going up
a river and his party just being eaten
away by natives. And he had gone to
Africa before and been captured, but
got lucky and escaped. So what does he
do? He goes back, marries a girl he
seems to have fallen for when she was
8 years old. Friends with her big
brother. They have some kids. Then
he takes the brother and goes back.
In the first one, he did it cheap,
with hardly any folk. This time
he gets backing. And they send along
40 army guys. Made him sort of a captain.
Like Willard, I guess. And the brother.
Burned them all away. At the end there
were maybe 3 of the army guys. A lot
of it was just malaria, but some of it
was because at some point he decided
not to pay the bribes to the locals.
Some kind of river toll, I guess.
So they got constantly attacked.
But the end is cool. They were
being attacked and he picked up
a guy and jumped in the river (the Niger,
I think). They got the story from
one of the slaves with them that got
captured, and somebody tracked him down.
Never got the body, so they don't
know if he was captured, or maybe he
went native, and set himself up
as a little chief or something.
So you got this dumbass. And his son decides
he wants to go look for him years later.
Romantic fantasies, I guess. He got killed, too.
A mistake, mistake! I have
this sort of feeling that the mistakes
that people make are actually very important
to "intelligence". We don't always do the
same thing. Sometimes we do something a little
different by accident, but it just happens to
be a better way of doing something. Or is
useful in a different way. So over all,
people in general are exploring the space
of ideas, trying things, and as a group
we progress. It's tricky though to
have a machine try to be part of that game.
Because we just don't want machines that
just try things, and get them wrong.
We just want them to do what we say.
That's just a very different thing
that people don't seem to consider.
At least it doesn't seem like they
consider that.
But there is another problem with
keeping the fire burning. The fan
that we have on the fire place makes a huge
amount of noise. It's like about 5
refrigerators worth. My mom is getting
a little hard of hearing so I don't
think it bothers her so much. And she's
a little more visual than me, anyway.
So for me personally, it just not a
pleasant thing. I took a nap for a
couple of hours, and it was almost out.
It maybe be more work than I was thinking,
too.
OK, so he keeps thinking there are people
on the moon. And then he decides that
maybe the sun has a cool interior, and
there are people living in there. Great.
But then he goes on to try something.
He takes a prism and cuts up sunlight
into colors. And he puts a thermometer
in the dark part past the colors you
see. And it gets hotter. So he discovers
infrared radiation. Possibly a bigger
deal than discovering Uranus, which he did.
What a freakish goof.
One cute factoid. Dude had a telescope magnifying
maybe 6000 times. At that magnification,
a star will move out of frame in a couple of
seconds. So it's not so practical, unless
you're just good. I guess these days, they
have little mechanical things that can compensate
for that. But I didn't realize what the
numbers involved were.
Wow. Two hundred and ten pounds. A new maximum
for me. I guess I need to do something.
Not every moment rules
OK, so the guy found Uranus. But he sounded like a crank.
And he got crazy upset when they said he got just
found it by chance and was lucky. He was being methodical.
He was looking at everything in the sky. And yet he didn't
find Neptune. So there's that. Part of the deal was that
his telescope was extra strong, so it was strong enough
to tell that it was a planet and not a fixed star. But
I don't know what was going on with the forest on the moon.
So, it turns out that I have to transfer the money over
before 3:00. The message was pretty plain when I did
it correctly. It says 4:00 E.T. In my head I was thinking
4, by I was thinking local. We'll see how it works out.
I chopped some more wood. Didn't finish it all off though.
Mom is leaving tomorrow, and I don't know if I will
even keep making fires. It's work, just to do something
the central air can do by itself. I guess it makes
the den warmer than the rest of the house. But it's
some work, and you have to keep going outside. I
don't like going outside if I can avoid it, and I
can if I don't keep a fire going.
I'm reading _Age of Wonder_ now for Aimee's
meeting. It's about scientists in the Romantic
period. I think he's claiming it's some kind
of second scientific revolution, but I don't
think I've ever heard that. Aimee said she
liked the writing, but I'm not quite so into
it. It seems like it's just biographies of
scientists. What does that have to do with
anything. Aimee is a people person, and I'm
sure there are more people who are more interested
in people than actual science. I guess that's
the idea. But it isn't doing that much for me.
The first guy had gout, though, so I guess
I can relate to that. The second guy kind
of seems like a bit of a crank. He thought
he saw forests on the moon, and was pretty sure
there was life there. this was in 1780. But they
could see that there wasn't any atmosphere, the
way the stars at the edge of the moon aren't hazy.
So there's that.
So I'm at the door about to leave, and she says she'll
see me again...? Asking me when it will be. Like she remembers
i wanted to see her, and was now open to suggestions.
But I just said next Sunday. OK. That's a strong guess.
I don't really feel like it now, but probably in a week.
I was especially quiet.
It's finally above freezing after several days. The outdoor
TV antenna got frozen stuck pointint in a direction
that has a problem picking up the CBS station. That's
a channel that my mom has her soap operas on. I hope
I can move it now.
And some of the significane to me is that there are
some people with whom she'll talk on the phone
any time. For a long I've considered that a real
friend is someone you'll talk with on the phone.
That's just not me.
I desire...macaroni pictures.
Well, what do I really want? I want the
emotional connection. The feeling that someone
wants to be with me and cares about me, as well
as my wanting to be with them. But I guess
I just didn't feel it as much. But wants ebb
and flow.
In the fifth kung fu episode, kwai chang caine
sleeps with another woman. That's twice so
far. What a slut.
So, it could all be showing how much my feelings
are just about romantic interests, despite how
I might want to think of it.
A had a dream where I had this thing
I thought of and wanted to write about,
and I was trying to blog about it,
and I was facing some kind of challenges
about how to put it in. And there were
some special sorts of links I wanted to
add, and trying to make changes was
hampered by having dynamically generated
page, and I had somehow started editing
the generated page but needed to get
the changes back in the original. Oh well.
On thinking about it now, the thing was not
so great. They say their god is the god
of everything. But if it's every "thing"
then they are thinking of the world as
just things. Which is a restricted view
about what the world is. But they are
pretty limited thinkers, in general.
Well, what else is there? Did this god
make 2+2=4? By decree, which is suppose
to be how the world works in this view,
as far as I can tell?
How the world works is a different question
from what the world consists in, what the
world is made of. Is the world just things?
Does it include these ideas, and if they
can be said to actually exist somehow,
then where are they? It's an old question.
I forget how people deal with it in the
fashionable current philosophies.
But I just saw a little three minute video on the philosophy of Hume.
I had seen bundle theory in Susan Blackmore's
book on consciousness. That is, I saw the
term used there. I was seeing the idea that
there is no self in studying Buddhism,
which I did a bit more when I was looking
at advaita. Advaita and Buddhism have some
similarities. Advaita though, is nominally
a Hindu tradition and in Hinduism, there
is a very important assumption that there
is an immortal soul. Reincarnation and
all that. The immortal soul is also kind
of related to idea and belief that there
really are such things as identities,
that it means something to be a particular
thing, above just having different properties.
In advaita, you would eventually come to
an understanding similar to in Buddhism
about the self, when your conceptualization
of a separated self dissolves, and you
in some sense realize that your self
is not different from the whole world,
other than it just being a habit of
how you think about yourself. So
Blackmore is also into Buddhism, and
I had come to her from that direction,
but Hume was talking about that stuff
as a Western philosopher. And an atheist,
though that was illegal at the time.
My brother and sister-in-law try to switch
up cooking. Alternating one and the other.
And they used to do the thing where if
one cooked, the other would clean up.
Except that ended up very unfair.
My brother has inherited my mom's
style of cooking, which ends up using
a lot of different pots and pans and
dishes and things. But she does
a style where it can often just be
one pot. Stir-fry, maybe. Sometimes
more than one thing, but it minimizes
the number of dishes. That style
of cooking takes that into account,
so now if they cook, they have to clean
it up.
Personally, I try to consider
clean up part of any task, not something
separate that can be pushed off. I got
that attitude from doing back stage stuff.
I like ripping stuff apart--I had my
own crow-bar, but I understand that
hauling it away has to be part of
ripping it up. And building in
the first place is just a part of
ripping it up.
My mom still cooks with a lot of
dishes. She seems to always be cleaning
dishes. For her, it seems more a matter
that she doesn't like how the mess looks.
Personally, when I'm by myself, I hardly
clean. I will rinse, leave it sitting,
and just reuse the same plates, small
and large, a bowl, a small class for
sugary drinks, and a large water glass.
I do tend to take new spoons and forks,
and they collect. And I have a square
corning cooking pan that I eat from
that just sits that same way. Fits
the chicken quarter. The most dishes
I end up are from leftovers my mom leaves.
And occasionally when I roast something.
So I keep in mind the clean up as
part of eating, and I eat so to minimize
that. Goes to eating habits. Some
people just eat out. Or don't eat,
and live off Starbucks. I'm sure
cleaning is a factor.
I'm again thinking of classes.
It's something to be around people.
But I'm realizing that U of M people
just aren't intellectually my kind of
people. So the right school is
important after all, and I didn't
go to the right one for me. But
I should consider doing it.
But today my mom is trying a stir-fry.
Wild duck-breast. I actually don't
care for my sister-in-law's chinese
cooking. Maybe it's just not what
I'm used to. The flavor doesn't seem
very good to me. Too many vegetables,
maybe.
Huh. I finally tried dictating something.
But I didn't get the controls right, because
when I looked at the phone next, it said
it had kept on recording. I thought I
paused it, but I don't know what the glyphs
are supposed to mean. Does the pause button
mean it's paused, or is it waiting for
you to push it, and then it's paused?
I get that the red dot is the record button.
So it's got seven minutes. At this point,
it's easier to just remember what I wanted
to say. and it didn't come out so clear.
After I was done, there was stuff I would
have added, but I was driving, and it wasn't
a good time to try to figure out the buttons.
Anyway, so I didn't go to shadowcon in part
because I didn't want to spend the money.
really didn't think it would be worth it.
But I feel bad that I'm making decisions
like that based on money. I could have
spared it. It wouldn't have been a big
deal. But my latest withdrawal has winded
down, and I probably need to take out some
more this week. I'm not sure what's going
to keep me from spending, though. And I
was kind of moaning about that, and then
I go to Borders. I wanted to pick up
the book for Aimee's meeting. And I think
I had been warned. Not in paperback,yet.
But I went to their website, and it said
cover price $40, but they would sell
it for $24. And I get in there. $40.
Kind of made me a bit upset. I'm sure
amazon would be the same deal. That's
$24 but you have to get it delivers, so
shipping, plus you wait. If you want it
now, that'll cost you. And I'm thinking,
their happy to give you coupons for
discounts. If you want to print it out.
And you get to hold the book in your
hand. This book (_Age of Wonder_)
was in the science section. There were
a couple of little girls sitting on the
floor in front of general science just
reading. If you want, you can just sit
in the store and read them. Can't do that
in the web store. So if I want to be sensible,
I could save $10. Have to wait a few days.
Plan. Habe I ever really been that sensible?
Probably not. There's a lot of things I
could do to not spend as much. And if
I want money so bad, I could get a job.
So there are options. Part of the whole
money thing is having a family. That's
expensive. But it works out for some people.
Not really my thing.
So there was a web page somewhere I read
that talked about why you might want to
study compilers. I gave several problems
that you might be able to deal with if
you knew about writing them. And I
told Aimee about it. But I sure can't
find it now. I looked through my reddit
saves, and it isn't there. I'm sure
that's where I saw it. I'm not
sure what to google to find it, but
the efforts I made didn't work.
And reddit search is a little too crappy
to help with it.
Ah it was Steve Yegge post. I
found it by doing a reddit search in the programming
subreddit, until I got to a post that
simply mentions yegge in it's title.
Then I thought, it seems like it could have
been a yegge post. Then I googled yegge and
compilers, and there it was. I don't think
the reddit search would find it, though.
I don't see it there. Who knows if the title
mentioned compilers, or if it was even submitted.
And I was expecting that I would use up all
my twenties, but it turned out I had
$5 in borders bucks, so I only had to use 2.
But I plugged in the midi keyboard worked fine.
That's something that apple is pretty good at.
But I didn't get any sound out right away, so
I got a little frustrated for a bit. And i
had to turn the computer on at the switch was
seemed odd. Usually, it sits there asleep.
and I just have to hit a key or click the
mouse to wake it up, but not this time.
So I turn it on, and I hear some kind of startup
chord or noise or something, so I think
the sound is working. And then I go into
garageband and plink and nothing. I go
to record, and it even puts markings down
that seem to indicate the stuff i played and nothing.
But I had been deceived. The sound was from
the computers internal speaker, and I had
turned off the amplified speaker connected
to the audio output. Oh well. so it didn't
start off great. But one important thing,
I didn't hear any delay from hitting a key
and getting sound. I'm not sure why I got
that before when I was trying out some midi
on whatever it was. I think I saw somewhere that
it depends on the sound card. And i had been
plugged in to several things to get into the computer.
This has a much simpler connection. It did seem
a little strange at how far away the sound was from
the keyboard. And I had the volume pretty low.
I didn't record any plinking. Maybe
I'll build up to it. And I'll have to see what's
involved. I'm not quite sure how to do the link.
I'll probably just have something to click.
It's been a little bit rougher getting over my
disappointment than I might have liked. But I
guess I'm getting better.
I still haven't opened up my usb midi keyboard.
But it came and it's sitting there in the box.
I burned a Netflix rental on Dr. Horrible's
Sing-along blog. I think you can watch the
main bit online somewhere. But I think
the disc is worth a Netflix. Probably wouldn't
spend actually money on it. Now I'm
listening to "Commentary! the Musical"
Inspired, I think.
Yesterday, Doug told me about a job prospect. A
friend of his actually had a couple of people
who wanted him, but he accepted from one fairly
quick, so there was this other place that still
needed one. Just a possibility, but a place that
needs someone. I said I wasn't really ready to
be looking right now. I guess. Doug didn't know
what the company does. Seems important. At this
point, it seems like the purpose of the company
matters to me.
And it did snow. Maybe an inch. The roads are clear.
But it did snow, so they got it right.
My dad asked, I think it was Colin, what twelve times
twelve was. And he was talking about how hard it was
to just figure it out when you want. He went through
twelve time ten is one twenty plus twelve is 132 plus
twelve is one forty four. But I said there is a easier
way. Tweleve times twelve is fourteen times ten plus two times
two or, ten times fourteen, one forty, plus two times two, four,
or one forty four. this kind of thing works for all squares
thriteen times thirteen is ten times sixteen (one sixty)
plus three times three, nine, or one sixty nine.
fourteen times fourteen is ten times eighteen, one eighty,
plus four time four, sixteen, so one ninety six.
Eighteen times eighteen is twenty times sixteen ( three twenty)
plus two times two (four), so three twenty-four.
twenty three squared is twenty times twenty-six (five twenty)
plus three times three, so five twenty-nine. And
it's based on (x+y)(x-y)=x*x - y*y, so x*x =(x+y)(x-y) + y*y,
which works well for itty bitty values for y, like up to four
or five. The five ones are paricularly easy. Say thrity-five
time thirty five. That's thirty time forty (twelve hundred)
plus five time five, twenty five, or twelve twenty five.
The quares of things with five always end in twenty five, and that
big product is always in the hundreds, because you are multiplying two
multiples of ten. When you here about this system, the
suggestion is to try to do all the squares up to a hundred
in your head for practice. It's not too hard.
I took the outside Christmas lights down today. I saw on wikipedia I think
that people somewhat recently started thinking it was bad
luck to leave decorations up after twelfth night. OK.
They seem sure that it's going to snow tonight. Usually
they aren't that good. And I'm not sure that they aren't
colluding with grocers. But I just saw the radar, and you
can see snow moving this way.
I've finished the first hundred Sudoku puzzles in my
big book of twelve hundred. That's all of the very
easiest ones. And they went pretty fast because they
were pretty easy. The next batch is somewhat harder.
A hundred fifty of those. We'll see how it goes.
I did finish of one of the four out of five star
ones that my brother started and was kind of stuck on.
And I did the one after that. Those are fairly hard,
but I don't have to guess yet on those. It seems like
they require noticing pairs of possibles, which is
harder to do without writing down possibles. I guess
I'll see when I get there, though it will be quite
a few months.
OK, so I kept going and I'm now at 106.
In the replacement for Ann Landers, I think it's
"Ask Henrietta", maybe, there was a section on
someone who wanted to connect with a friend.
It was a couple of woman who saw each other
maybe once a year. They had fun together,
and said they wanted to connect more, but
hadn't yet. She said they should just do it,
but it can be hard to integrate new people
into your life. That's true.
In the book on historical linguistics, I'm
in the section on sound changes. One of the
common changes is the dropping of a vowel
between consonants. And I was kind of surprised
that they gave a couple of current examples:
'family' is often pronounced 'famly' and 'memory'
is often pronounced 'memry'. Ouch. They got me.
My language is turning into mush. And they have
a Greek word for this particular change--'syncope'.
Huh.
There are ways of asking questions which indicate
what answer you expect. "Isn't this a nice day?"
And in some ways the grammar may support it. I
forget exactly what it was, but Latin had some
sort of construction for yes or no questions that
indicate whether you expect a yes or no. English
has something like that. But sometimes it has
to be inferred a little bit more. "Do you really
want eat that chocolate?" Or something like that.
Similarly you might say something in a way that
comes across that you don't really mean it. And
people soften commands in different ways to
sound less demanding and maybe seem more polite.
Dr. McWhorter really hates the construction
"Can I get a hamburger?" But it's along those lines.
And it can be just a matter of inflection and how
you say something. So confidence can make a difference.
We had said goodbye and see was backing back into the place,
and I said I wanted to get for a couple of hours. But
she just before I had been asking about her week, and she
said she was working everyday but Monday. So when?
And school was starting back in a week or a week and a half.
Oh well. I guess I didn't come off as very serious about it.
But I was asking. I was only saying what I wanted.
I doubt I came across as thinking it might happen.
Melissa was in a country music video.
Only for just a tiny few seconds. But she stands out.
She hadn't actually seen it, but somebody recommended googling
it, and sure enough it was on youtube. Highest paid per
unit time she's ever gotten. Mostly because it was only
a half an hour, but it was a good amount. Like twelve hundred.
She has gotten that kind of money for other jobs, but they
might be there eight to twelve hours. And she always adds the
story of how they wanted her for a Bob Dylan video, but they
wanted her naked (behind a screen), and the money was a lot less, like
maybe $300. So she said no. And they had an article in the paper about
how they made the girl that did it look bad, or something. Anyway.
I'm up to Sudoku puzzle 70.
Finished Sudoku puzzle 60. Seems like maybe these
easy ones are rotting my brain. I tried a harder one
in the paper, and there was stuff that I didn't
look for. I was too used to really easy stuff.
I think I may have to take breaks I'm not sure
if I really want to finish this in a year. At least
at the extremely steady pace of 5 per day. Maybe off
and on will work.
So Melissa did one of the 16 by 16 sudoku puzzles.
She sent me a message that she had finished it
at maybe 3 or 4 in the afternoon. I'm hoping that
that's just when she got up and sent me a message.
I had sent her one saying I had forgotten to tell
her she looked good in her new boots. I hope it wasn't
that she had been awake all that time. She has trouble
sleeping sometimes. So much to worry about with that girl.
It's the tenth day of Christmas, and my mom took down the
tree. Julie did hers several days ago. Savages.
Played quite a bit of piano for the family. Maybe two or three
hours. I mentioned that at Bardog, and Gary said something about it.
I said I was wanting to maybe study a little more and he said he taught
piano. I said I was just faking it, from a fake book, but he
said you have to know something about it to fake it.
Melissa got off work early. Which meant I was actually there
when she drove away. I don't think that's ever happened
yet since she's been working at Bardog. She asked me what I was doing.
And she said she was just going to curl up with her sudoku and something
or other. I didn't really get any sense that she wanted me to ask
if she wanted to do something together. That hasn't ever worked out
in the past. But I suppose it's something I could have done. But then,
she said pretty clearly, and it might have been several times, that she
was tired. So I guess it mightly have only been subtle hinting, but it
seemed very clear to me.
She bought some boots like those ogg boots. For 19 bucks. As opposed to
like $200 for the real thing. She just was not going to pay something
like that for shoes. Even though she had a give card that would have
covered it. But good for her. I balk like that, sometimes. It was her
Christmas gift for herself. So she asked me what my gift was for
myself. Seems like I've already bought something. But maybe not.
I seem to remember there was something at Brooksone for about $200 that
I really wanted. But I don't remember what it was. Couldn't be that
important. And I think I'll finally buy that keyboard that's been on
my list for a while. Something to catch midi. And I can maybe finally
put stuff on here. I think it's compact enough for that.
The thing at Brookstone that I wanted was the iwear video glasses
for ipod. They didn't have any. But I think I can't skip it for
now. Priorities.
I ended up staying home and not going out like I really wanted.
I was thinking my people would prefer that, but I didn't feel
so happy about it. And they all wimped out around 1, but I
felt it was a little late to go out. And I wouldn't have a Starbucks,
anyway, so might as well not go.
I chopped some wood. Nice sunny day to start the year. Almost
50. Pretty warm for chopping wood.
It's my nephew Aaron's birthday. We're having a wild goose
and a pork loin. And my mom made a Schwartzwilder Kirch-Torte.
However it's spelled. Black forest cherry cake. Lots of work.
Yummy, though. I say lots of work. A chocolate sponge cake
has to be made the day before for a couple of layers. Whip cream.
Kirchwasser. Seems like at least four or five hours. I don't
even ask for them, anymore, but Freddie asked for it
for Aaron. Most people don't like it so much. Not as sweet
as American cakes. But he says they're used to things not so sweet.
We'll see. If they waste any, I won't be happy. Unless I get it.
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