Monthly Archives: June 2012

So let’s talk!

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No big ideas swimming around in the primordial stew pot of my mind today, so as per usual or thereabouts, I will just chat with (at?) you people about this, that, and the other.

And the other left town.

Today has been boring, like Saturdays are supposed to be in my universe. Same with Mondays. I socialize in the evenings on Fridays, Sundays, and Tuesdays, and being an introvert (sorta), I need a day in between social evenings to recharge my social batteries and be ready for another fun evening of hanging out with my buddies and watching stuff on video and making snarky comments.

We basically MST3K everything. I am sure some of you do it with your own friends too. It is the post modern way to enjoy things. Watching something in icy silence is too static, too linear, too single track, too passive for us post modern Gen X types. We have to interact with our media, and what better way than to use it as a platform for comedy?

Sure, we end up having to rewind a fair bit. Often it is because we are laughing so hard that we miss what it going on. I think that makes the rewinding worth it by a very long shot.

And it is a great way to hone your comedy skills too. It’s like improv but without the pressure of having to come up with everything yourself. All you have to do is riff. And riffing is the basic building block of learning to be funny.

Speaking of “funny” things, I have been in a weird mood for a while today. A sort of tense, angry, frustrated mood. And because I am trying to be more emotionally aware and connected, I am going to try to figure out where this mood came from.

After all, you can’t avoid what you do not see coming, can you?

I think it is just the confluence of small frustrations. I was going to send Julian to the store, but that ended up not happening, which puts my evening snack in jeopardy as we are all out of popcorn and I have just a few pretzels left to form the core of my midnight (ish) snack.

And sudden change destabilizes me, and uncertainty unsettles me, and disruptions to my routine rattles me, and I guess that is reason enough to feel a tad out of sorts.

Plus, for a while, the question of whether we are doing Costco today was up in the air, and that was more uncertainty to add to my tenseness.

We will be going tomorrow instead. I am tagging along this time so I can supervise the selection of bread machine ingredients, and maybe get a deal on the trail mix that I keep buying.

I am hoping that Costco has enormous five kilogram bags of say Oriental Mix for like fifteen bucks or so. Right now, I pay between eight and ten dollars for a kilo, so that would be a big saving, and because there is so much variety in trail mix type mixes, it takes me a lot longer to get tired of a particular mix than if I bought a similar amount of, say, tortilla chips.

Even those tasty hint of lime ones.

I am looking forward to embarking upon my bread machine adventure. I will start with the plain white bread recipe from the instruction manual. Just good old white bread, nothing exotic or unqiue, but damned good when it is fresh baked from scratch.

I am really looking forward to taking the bread machine on its maiden loaf. For one thing, I want to see how big the loaves are in relation to the usual loaf of bread from the store. That will have a big impact on whether it is realistic to consider the loves I make a replacement for the bread we buy, or whether the loaves are too small and we would be stuck making tiny sandwiches.

I am not saying that it might not be worth it. Fresh baked bread from scratch is good enough that I am open to the idea that switch to elfin sized sandwiches might well be a net gain. But I want to know.

Also, of course, I just want to see the thing in action and know it works. I have this lovely idea of making it part of my routine that I make a loaf of bread every afternoon, trying out different recipes and finding out which ones rock my world, and keeping those around.

I am sure that eventually, a loaf a day will become a bit much, seeing as I doubt we can eat a whole two pound loaf a day between the three of us. (Or can we? I am keen to find out.) And there is only so much room in the freezer. So unless we get a deep freeze, I will have to control myself.

Still, the future is filled with tasty breads, and smells amazingly good.

One last thing before I sign off and end this little chat we are having. This little British gem features a very British response to a certain Internet evil.

It is a crisply and wonderfully sarcastic reply to all those awful people on YouTube who post horribly evil things as comments on people’s videos, often in a manifestly subliterate fashion.

Presumably, the pathology of these people is the same as any chronic abuser of people. It begins as genuine emotion about something, but soon the addictive lure of such ready catharsis, such easy access to strangers on whom you can deposit all your negative emotions in a big orgasmic spurt, draws the person into more and more devastating statements, till they are heaping the vilest of deprecations on total strangers without even watching the video first.

To me, the best response to these sorts of people is mockery. Refuse to take them seriously or to take offense, because that is just what they want. Do not feed the trolls! Internet Rule #1.

That sort of person loves anger, but nobody loves being mocked and humiliated. Do it well enough and with sufficient regularity, they will stop showing up.

Or self-destruct from sheer rage. Which is also acceptable.

Well, that is it for tonight folks. See you tomorrow!

Friday Science Doohickey, June 8, 2012

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At the speed of life, we have once more returned to where we started on this merry merry-go-round of time we call the Friday Science Whatever. I have four hip hot stories to share with my science loving public today, and yes, there is a weird and wacky Japanese entry.

In fact, like last week, we will start with Japan and then move on to more serious science.

Eyes Bigger Than Your…

Once more, Japan leads the world in ridiculous attempts to solve problems with a vigorous but ill conceived application of technology.

In this case, the problem is dieting, and their solution is to invent augmented reality glasses that make your food look bigger so you will get full sooner and eat less.

The study showed that the control group ate 12 Oreo cookies in one sitting, whereas the group with the augmented reality glasses on ate only 11… a nearly ten percent reduction!

And to think, in order to create mind blowing, game changing results like that, all you had to do was wear heavy, clumsy augmented reality glasses with wires running in and out of them and eat your cookies with a bunch of scientists watching expectantly!

Talk about over-solving a problem. For the amount of trouble involved, I would want much more dramatic results than a lousy ten percent. I cannot imagine any way this could be practical, at least until we are all wearing augmented reality contact lenses 24/7 anyhow.

Oh, and speaking of which…

The View From Inside Your Computer

An entrepreneur named Randy Sprague has come up with the first steps towards that heady future.

He has invented an augmented reality system which combines a special pair of glasses with augmented reality contact lenses to give the user the complete augmented reality experience that, so far, is only the stuff of cutting edge speculative fiction.

In his system, which he calls iOptik (eye optic… get it?), the glasses contain two tiny projectors in the arms of the glasses, and the contact lenses act as both the projection screen and image filter.

What this gets you as a user is a view of reality with any sort of computer graphic projected over it. Want to know what other people who bought that brand of pineapple juice thought of it? Your augmented reality system could superimpose user ratings and a star rating over the product itself. Want to know the name and family details of the person you are talking to? Facial recognition software and some augmented reality graphics could show the info floating around the person’s head.

Now myself, I am not keen on this whole augmented reality business. I am pretty much only interested in it as a way to create extremely immersive video games and other entertainment experiences, and then you are not really talking augmented reality any more, just a different and more immersive display system.

As for practical life applications, I think the augmented reality advocates are missing out on a lot of little details, like the fact that being able to to something does not make it desirable. A world in which we are all half in the Cloud all the time sounds quite unpleasant to me. We already have a problem with people paying attention to their iPods rather than each other. Imagine how much worse it would be if the person could pretend to be paying attention to you, but is really playing Farmville on your forehead and writing snarky comments about what you are saying on Twitter.

I will not be signing up for it any time soon. I like being able to get away from technology.

Predicting Your Health Future

Speaking of technology intruding into our lives, University of Washington Assistant Professor Tyler McCormack has invented a new algorithm for predicting what problems patients will face in the future.

What makes his algorithm better than previous ones is that instead of simply applying statistical models directly to patients on an individual basis, it also uses the outcomes from other patients in similar situations to reinforce the conclusions, thus creating something similar to Amazon.com’s “Other people who ordered this book also ordered… ” crowd-sourcing data pool.

This leads to superior predictions, and creates a far more robust and deeply integrated prediction model than previous systems that did not draw in real world data to test the statistical model’s assumptions.

In theory, this could be a great help to physicians, who after all can only know so much about any given condition and certainly do not know about outcomes from patients other than their own, to work with the patient and see what problems might lie ahead of them, and work to head them off before they become serious enough to require the attention of a doctor.

That would be some top flight preventative medicine.

Radiation Burst From The Past

And now, as always saving the best for last, I present you with the mystery of the massive radiation burst from the past.

Recent evidence from tree ring studies have found that somewhere between 774 AD and 775 AD, the amount of carbon-14 in the Earth’s atmosphere jumped to twenty times the normal amount over the space of just under one year.

And the great part is, nobody knows why.

A lot of the obvious explanations have already been ruled out. Solar flares intense enough to do it would have had far more effects than a carbon-14 jump. It would have to have been far larger than the biggest solar flare ever recorded. There would have been massive auroras all over the world, and surely someone would have noticed and written that down.

As for a supernova, that would have created a “new star” in the sky even brighter than the ones observed in 1006 AD and 1053 AD, which were bright enough to be seen during the day. Again, surely someone would have noticed and jotted it down somewhere.

So we are not sure what the heck happened way back then to put so much carbon-14 into play. It makes for a highly stimulating mystery, and I love genuine scientific mysteries.

I cannot begin to offer any plausible theories. The science is far beyond me. The only theories I can come up with involve crashed alien spaceships or mysterious dark matter asteroids or the like, and those are entertaining, but hardly helpful.

Still, if there is one thing we science fiction writer types like, it is speculating, and I look forward to speculating on this one for a long time.

Seeya next weekm, Science Fans!

re : The Paradox of Choice

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Once more, a TED talk has inspired me to write about it, and this particular one is a very excellent examination of a topic I find absolutely fascinating : how past a certain point, having more options makes people less happy, not more.

First off, let me get this said : I love this Barry Schwartz guy. He is likable, he is funny, he is obviously a good thinker, and he has a lot of interesting things to say on the subject.

Also, I have to give mad love to anyone who does such a good job of illustrating his points with cartoons from the New Yorker. That is intellectual brain candy for a fellow like me.

Now, on the substance of his talk : I have a deep personal interest in this Paradox of Choice of which he speaks. Being someone whose overabundance of creativity and/or lack of character often leaves him experiencing the very option paralysis of which Barry Schwartz speaks, I find comfort in the fact that it might be a product of more than my own neuroses. It might, in fact, be product of the current state of society, where we have removed all the old restrictions that used to confine people, but in the process, took away all the things people used to guide and define themselves.

I loved that cartoon with the two goldfish, the bigger one saying to the smaller “You can be anything you want to be!”. I have seen no better illustration of the problems created by the well-meant but ultimately destructive message of unlimited individual potential upon which I was raised. Myself, my generation, and every generation afterward, in fact, as far as I can tell.

But the nub of his talk was this fact that more choices make people less happy in our modern world. The more options you have, the less likely you are to be confident that you made the right choice. The more options you have, the higher your expectations are as to the quality of the result. The more options you have, the greater your fear of being judged for your choices.

That is a point I would like to emphasize, because Schwartz did not cover it. One of the most profound effects of a middle class consumer society is that, in a condition of enormous material plenty, and of communities of people who all have roughly the same income levels (compared to the difference between a lord and his serfs, for example), we compare and compete amongst our income peers almost exclusively on the basis of which products we buy. We judge and are judged by the quality of our choices. We endlessly compare ourselves to others and if they seem more affluent and successful, we ask ourselves “What do they know that I don’t know?”. We pore over magazines looking for that special info that will temporarily assuage our pervasive fears of “falling behind”. We dread like death the idea that we will be found guilty of the worst possible middle class consumer crime : “settling for less”.

That is, and always has been, what the whole “keeping up with the Joneses” thing is about. Odds are, the Joneses are no richer than you are. But if they seem richer and more successful, it would just about kill you, wouldn;t it? To think that people think those smug bastards are better off than you? That they might even think you made stupid consumer choices? That you settled for less?

I mean, what will the neighbors think?

And this modern era of on-demand manufacturing and brands trying to push the other brands off the shelves by offering more varieties of their product and the Internet making it possible to order from anywhere in the world and from a billion different possible suppliers, this option neurosis only gets worse. When you could have ordered any product in the world, what are the odds you will be sure you got the right one? And how high are your expectations for the final result?

I also want to cover that aspect a bit more. I think that not only does a large number of options make you more demanding of the result by the direct mechanism of comparison, but it also works via the deep logic of the labour theory of value. Having the sort through a massive list of options before being able to get what you want forces you to work hard to get the thing, and the harder you work for something, the greater the reward you expect from it.

And when we are talking about is something as mundane and everyday as a tube of toothpaste, the odds are heavily against it being rewarding enough to justify the extra effort.

Another choice that disappears in an option rich society, besides the obvious choice of having fewer choices, is that you lose the choice of not having an opinion on something. In fact, the greater the scope and variety of options, the greater the number of preferences you are now required to develop. You have no choice in the matter. You are going to have to figure out if tartar control is more important to you than tooth whitening. Even if deep down, you really do not give a crap.

One more thing to add before I move on to solutions : what truly complicated this whole issue is the recent science that objectively proves that people are actually extremely bad at predicted what will make them happy. Study after study has asked people to rate their current happiness, then predict which of a set of options will make them happier, then choose, then rate their happiness again.

And time and again, people given full choice of options nevertheless report that they got no happier, or even that they got worse.

People have wondered why. How is it that we are so bad at figuring out what will make us happy? I submit that the Paradox of Choice might provide an explanation. The people are so unsure of whether they made the right choice that it spoils their enjoyment of whatever choice they make. Result? No net gain.

Now on to solutions. At first glance, the problem of too many options seems unsolvable. We individualistic citizens of option rich consumer societies would certainly balk, and balk hard,
at the very notion of someone limited our options for us for our own good.

But I think there are possibilities. For one, from a private sector service point of view, a great advantage could be gained by making all your options optional. Offer people a standard package with only a mild suggestion that other options are available, then if the customer asks for something different, you can tell them “yes, we can do that.”. That way, the customer is not inundated with options and yet still has the freedom to customize their experience to their liking.

But from a broader point of view, the only solution I see is the rise of a group of consumer gurus who work with consumers one on one to help their make their choices. Call them shopping coaches, or happiness experts, or the like. People with the knowledge and expertise to help people voluntarily cut down their options and hone in on the choices and products that suit them best. I think a lot of people would be willing to pay someone to do this.

I can even picture the rise of a chain of supermarkets which, in a sense, specialize in a lack of choice. There would exactly one brand of everything, the store brand. The consumer would obviously have to trust that the store brand represented quality, but with the right kind of promotion, you could make it work. And imagine how much less retail space you would have to pay for if you did not have to stock so many brands of everything!

We can already see choice-limiting trends in the proliferating of consumer ratings on online shopping experiences. With online shopping, you cannot directly interact with the product, and this creates a very abstract and information poor consumer choice experience. But if you can get the aggregate opinion of all the other people who have bought the same sort of product from that retailer, you can then use that information to help make your choice.

Information is only an imperfect solution, however, because of course, inundating the customer with information is as bad or worse than inundating them with choice.

Regardless, I am fairly confident that the increasingly efficient mechanisms of the marketplace will develop solutions to the problems of excessive options in our lives, and in the future we will all be able to find the number of options with which we are comfortable.

After all, it is not as if we have a choice.

More blah blah blah

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I have the distinct impression that I had something or other I was planning on writing about today, but then sleep happened and threw my brain down the long metal disposal chute into the filthy oubliette in which my dream battered (and fried) consciousness dwells at a time like this, and now all I have is the usual crumbs and leaving floating on my stream of consciousness, to pluck and serve to you.

Not an appetizing image, grant you, but nevertheless apt.

My sleep situation is truly weird lately. (Have I mentioned that before? Or did I just dream that I did?)

The Facebook games keep me awake and have reduced my nap frequency, which is good. In theory, this should mean that I develop a good, healthy, normal, eight hours of sleep a night time sleep schedule, or at least some reasonable approximation thereof.

But so far, not so much. What it mostly seems to have done is make me just plain sleep less. I do not know if that is a symptom of addiction or just continuing hyposomnia, but I have not been sleeping a heck of a lot lately. Yesterday segued right from Facebook games all afternoon into cooking and writing and whatnot and then into hanging out with Felicity till three in the morning, and that is like at least fifteen hours with no nap and with tons of various mental activity, and for me, that is like a meth and coke fueled bender of consciousness. I am never awake and active for that long. And so, sadly, despite some generic diet cola providing a much need caff infusion, I ended up falling asleep on Felicity during that thrilling and intricate drama, Friday the 13th Part III.

The movie is pretty bad even by mass produced slasher film standards, but there was a fair bit of amusement to be anyhow, because the movie was originally released in 3D and so we had a lot of fun watched for the blatantly 3D-bait moments, like when the hippie stoner guy decides to pop popcorn in a pot without a lid on. Oh My God, Margaret, our movie theater popcorn is COMING RIGHT AT US!

Plus, there was a plethora of weirdly front heavy scene compositions that would make no sense if you did not know that they were trying to blow people’s minds with 3D.

So I suppose the film can be forgiven if it did not have much of a plot. The plot was not the star of the movie. The 3D was, and I can only imagine that seeing the movie in the theaters back in 1982 was quite the freaky trip. This was the same era as Jaws 3D and Amityville 3D, so you can imagine it was a good time to be a movie fan who had access to some quality marijuana.

As is, though, it was a bit of a slog. I am sure that I would have fallen asleep anyhow, after my long day, but still, watching such a boring and badly paced slash festival did not help me stay awake at all.

But hey, at least the movie inspired one of my favorite Weird Al songs of all time :

That whole album is huge with me, because it was the very first tape I bought all for myself, and my brother thought I was pretty weird for picking some comedy album as my First Choice Ever, but I was determined, and I have worshiped Al ever since. He is the God of All Comedy Nerds. Hail the Al!

In other news, my Sunbeam bread machine arrived last night. The UPS guy was very cool, young and fresh faced and great smile, and my god I am turning into a male cougar.

Anyhow, I unboxed it today (no video… sorry, kitchen gizmo fans!), and put it together, and I really would like to have tried it out but I have no yeast (well, none that did not expire last October) and no milk, and I really really really want my first batch of bread from my new toy to be good, so I am going to hold off until I have fresh supplies and can do everything totally according to Hoyle.

It is important for that first loaf to work, because I get terribly emotional about cooking and if the first loaf is a disaster, I just know I will take it really hard and that means I will be reluctant to try again. Even if I know exactly what went wrong and how to prevent it the next time.

I really am too easily discouraged. I keep trying to fix that, but end up giving up almost right away.

The problem is that I make strong emotional impressions right away when I do new things. And I am sort of shy and timid person to start with, plus depressive, so unless things go very well the first time, I am likely to form a very negative impression of the enterprise and never try again.

I know this is wrong. It is bad policy and not at all logical or scientific. After all, you cannot judge based on a single data point. I am sure the first time I tried to walk as a wee sprog, I fell down, and it was a bad experience. But I just kept going, and learned.

And just look where it got me : sitting down! We fat guys are crazy about the sitting.

But it is very hard to reason with, let alone influence and definitely let alone change, your basic emotional nature. Those first emotional impressions are very strong and vivid, and my best policy might well be to use my planning skills to make as sure as I can that they are positive as opposed to trying to make myself into somebody that I am not.

I will never be the sort of rugged person who tries over and over again till he succeeds.

Not unless there is a lot of money in it for me or something.

Poke it and see what comes out

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My mind is totally blank as to what to write about today, so once more I will be setting sail with no destination in mind and hoping to find islands anew, or at least avoid falling off the edge of the world.

The words, they come slow right now. I was just doing some cooking for my friends tonight, and puttering about the kitchen, listening to the C to the B of the C on the radio, and now to suddenly sit down and try to write is a jarring grinding of gears. Writing is so different from any other mode of operation that to switch in to it suddenly is quite the shock.

My gearbox is smoldering as we speak. Then again, it has never been a very good one. I have always had trouble with sudden changes, even ones I am generating myself. You would think that if it was something I decide to do myself, all my bits and pierces would align to my will and it would not come as a shock to the system.

But I have an easily shocked system, it seems. Perhaps it has to do with my poor cardiovascular condition, I do not know. But even when it is things which are totally my idea, like for instance sitting down to write right now, it is a little bit of trauma.

I know that part of that is my tendency to be a little abrupt in my actions. I tend to launch into the next thing with a burst of energy to get me up to speed, and I suppose that is not as good, shock wise, as a more gradual, harmonious style.

But I truly know no other way. That is always how I have done things. I sort of gather my energies then launch. It is like kick starting a motorcycle, or that bit with the old biplanes where the person yells “Contact!” and spins the propeller hard to get it started. It takes a fair bit of torque to get this heaving bulk of a body into motion. You cannot slow start a dump truck.

And of course, my hyper uniform depressive’s existence does not help me to develop better coping skills in relation to coping with change. Indeed, from a certain point of view, one might say I have dealt with an inability to take uncertainty and change by retreating from the world, and thus keeping myself from ever developing the sort of higher tolerance that less avoidant people develop when they are working their first jobs out of college.

That is what comes of being so sick for so long. But at least I am in therapy now.

Had it this morning, in fact. I talked to him about my money worries and he prodded me to call about getting on to full disability. So I made the call as soon as I got back from therapy and shopping.

Turns out, I have a form waiting for me at the office. Apparently, the bizarrely complicated procedure is that you call them, they generate the form with your name on it and whatnot, and then you go pick the thing up at the office.

I guess this is to save the paper and expense of printing up way more forms than they need and then having them sitting in a drawer somewhere waiting to become useless when they change the form again. This way, it is all print on demand, and they can change the form whenever and however they want.

That is great for them. But I have been trying to get this done for three months now, and that is because I wasted a lot of time confused as to whether I just picked up the form like usual, or whether I had to make an appointment with a social worker, or what. Nobody until today actually coherently explained the process. Oh well, it is just months of my life, nothing major.

I also explained to my therapist, Doctor Costin, how that scrip for Zopiclone had not gone through yet, and he seemed surprised and a little pissed off. So he faxed the form in again, with a little note saying “Second time faxing”, and seemed sure that this would clear up the logjam.

This amuses me. I have noticed that doctors seem to have a lot of faith in their ability to exert power over other agencies. For example, they seem to think they have the power to call ahead to the emergency room of a hospital and make sure you, their patient, goes to the head of the line.

Emergency room people find this notion dryly amusing. No mere GP is going to override their triage. It is cute that they think they have this power, though. I suppose it does no harm, and helps them maintain the attitude of authority and confidence that a doctor absolutely must have in order to do their job.

After all, you would not want your doctor to seem like they might not know what they are talking about, do you? They have to be confident in order to reassure worried patients that everything will be OK now. That is what makes them such potent authority figures in society.

Well, that and the drugs.

Right now, I have pasta sauce simmering in the slow cooker. I was going to make the sauce my usual way, simmering it in a big pot, and then it suddenly hit me : use the slow cooker instead! It is built to simmer things! It’s a simmering machine! So I browned the hamburger and cut up veggies (yay fresh mushroom!), put them in the crock with the sauce, and put it on high. When I am done writing, I will turn it down to low, and leave it till later when I cook the pasta and the garlic bread in order to have everything ready by 8.

I really do like to cook. And tonight, I cook for my friends, and hence, I cook with love.

Hope everything turns out OK!

Just checking in

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With no particular inspiration or desire impelling my writing process tonight, I figure it is time for me to just pause and write down whatever is going on in my life, and give a sort of The State Of The Me address, as it were.

Right at this exact moment, I have a sinus headache. It is of less than crippling intensity, but still fairly bad. It feels like it is loosening my teeth. But I have my usual methods of dealing with it and so I suspect that I will soon subdue the beast trying to drill its way out of my temples via a long sharp steely horn pressing directly between my eyeballs.

My sleep is still being weird. Weirder than usual, that is, and its base weirdness level is pretty high. But I feel as though I have lost all my ability to predict or control when I will be sleepy and when I will be alert, and this lack of control is stressing me out.

Stress is probably the reason for the destabilization in the first place, come to think of it. I have been stressing about money a lot, because I am in the midst of the dreaded Five Week Month, the malign calendar phenomenon where there are fives weeks instead of four between my disability cheques.

It would be funny if it was not so harsh. Sometimes, due to a trick of the calendar, we poor people who are unable to work through no fault of our own, we victims of the cruel and callous hands of Fate who are forever doomed to a meaningless subsistence due to infirmities of body or mind, who are already operating far, far below the poverty line, are cruelly expected to make the exact same amount of money last a whole week longer than usual.

I do not get another cheque until the 27th of this month, which just happens to be when the fourth Wednesday of the month falls this time. Even in normal months, I am just barely limping along, so you can imagine how well I am doing with five weeks to cover instead of four. And I am not the sort of person who can take this kind of financial stress philosophically, even though realistically, I know I can probably cope with it one way or another.

But I am just too keyed in to my money as a source of stability in the world, little of it that there is, to be able to take this sort of chaos calmly. It eats away at my calm and raises my stress level, and there is just not a damn thing I can do about it.

Well, that is not true. I can make that damn phone call to try to get the higher disability level thing going. But my disability makes that very hard to do. Hah hah hah, Life. Very funny. Your Catch-22 is both clever and devious, as will as cruelly sadistic. Great job. But joke’s over, OK? I cry Uncle. I submit. You win. Now let me up so I can run away. That is how it is supposed to work.

What else… therapy tomorrow, so I suppose I will tell Doctor Costin about the whole five week month thing. It will feel good and be therapeutic to tell someone about it. Most people have absolutely no idea just how bad it is down here at the third lowest rung of society. Below me, there are just people on welfare, and the homeless.

Most people have absolutely no idea just how little we are expected to get by on. I bet if you asked a hundred people who have never been on disability how much we get a year, they would not guess that it is less than $8K/year. Most people who have never been at the mercy of the System would not, in fact, think it was possible to live on so little. I envy their innocence of such things.

Certainly nothing in my middle class upbringing prepared me for this kind of life. And I have not known much else in my adult life. My disability has kept me this poor my whole adult life, or worse. At least I have some cash like this. When I lived off friends, I had none.

Still playing a lot of Facebook games, although I can feel myself growing disenchanted with them. I am hoping that addiction cools to interest, so I can keep enjoying them but not in quite such a feverish way. And not in a way that exclude other things.

On the other hand, all the stimulation and occupation of mind at least keeps me awake. I take a lot fewer naps now… not sure if that is a symptom of the sleep destabilization, or a cause, or what. Probably a meaningless distinction when dealing with such a intimately interrelated system as the human mind. All output is also input, and so on.

And in a weird way, I am making friends, or rather, Friends. All these games encourage you to hook up with other players to swap virtual whatsits and so on, and so I have at least a dozen people from all over the world on my Friends list just because of all these little Facebook games I play.

And even though I only hooked up with these people to get ahead in the games,they are still on my Friends list and hence their status updates appear on my Timeline and mine on theirs, and so we are part of each others’ lives now despite being widely scattered over the globe.

And so, in pursuit of my solitary vice of video games, I am actually very slightly piercing my veil of loneliness and, who knows, maybe it will actually lead to me socially interacting with a wider group of people, and actually turn out to be a positive thing for my recovery.

Better living through Facebook game addiction. Who knew?

Facing the Book

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Facebook, that is, and my recent hardcore addiction to it. Or specifically, its games.

It may seem odd that a long time hardcore gaming addict should fall prey to the same gaming trap that sucks in Farmville loving housewives and grandmothers having Words with Friends, but there is no doubt about it, I am addicted, and like with hard drugs like heroin and crack, the time between initial exposure and serious addiction was very brief. I was hooked pretty much right away. Even as I type these words, I feel a strong urge to go play them and see how all my little virtual worlds are doing. But I will not, because if I did, there is no way I would be able to restrain myself and continue to write.

Now as a student of the video game form (in much the sense that a wino is a student of the grape), I have to ask myself just what it is that took my jaded self so hard and so fast.

I mean, I have been playing video games since I was barely tall enough to see only the top half of the Space Invaders screen. Surely I should have a fairly high resistance to all their tricks and guiles. Yet the Facebook game phenomenon felled me like a heart-struck elk. What gives?

I think the key here is that the truly addictive ones are designed to be a sort of Satanic synthesis of all the various elements that can make a video game addictive, all turned up way past eleven.

Here are some of those elements, in no particular order.

  • Colorful, cartoon style graphics. Attractive cartoon graphics are inherently visually rewarding to the player, making every interaction colorful and fun. The rise of the Angry Birds juggernaut attests to that. Add in some fun sound effects, and the game becomes pleasurable to interact with purely as a toy, with the discovery of a new animation generating the sort of delight that a baby feels when discovering that shaking an object makes a noise.
  • Keeping you very busy . The brightest and most amusing animations in the world would not have much effect if they were few and far between, so the games make sure to give you tons of little tasks to do in order to keep those rewards coming fast and strong.
  • A full mind is a happy mind. Also, by giving the player so many things to do, the games can create that highly pleasurable feeling of being “in the zone”, operating at peak efficiency, which has the powerfully addictive effect of pushing all the noise and confusion out of one’s mind and letting one be truly absorbed in the moment. All video games have this potential, but these Facebook games do everything to maximize this potential.
  • Constant small rewards. In addition to the other forms of reward, in these games every little action generates some small, incremental in game reward. Just a little bump, like some gold pieces, a resource you might need later, experience points, or whatever. This reinforces the rewards from the animation on a higher mental level, and increases the pleasure and hence the addictiveness.
  • Quests, lists, and goals. And to complete the troika, all of these games give you lots of medium-term goals, usually but not always called quests, for the previous two levels of reward to slot into, making every action immediately rewarding, incrementally rewarding, and goal oriented rewarding, and this creates a broad and seamless reward stream that is potently addictive.
  • My spreading empire. Those three levels then nest neatly into an open-ended long term goal structure based on growth. Your castle gets bigger and nicer looking, you get closer and closer to being able to defeat the evil Count Villainous, you go up levels and have more powerful abilities. The more you play, the more you have. Powerful stuff.
  • Just a little friendly competition. And if that is not enough to get you to devote yourself to the game, all these games have ways of letting you compete against both your friends and all the other players in general, so that the more (and better) you play, the higher your name climbs on the leaderboard, thus drawing in the people for whom interpersonal competition is a powerful draw.
  • And as the pusher always says… … the first time is free. Thus, there is no entry bar. All these games are free to start and technically free to play forever.

And with that, we start getting into the dark side of these games. If all these games consisted of was a fun, additive, but highly rewarding experience, they might cause a dip in productivity but they would hold no sinister underside.

But these games are profit driven enterprises, and all these potent manipulations of the reward center of the brain have one goal in mind : to convince you to pay them real money for virtual items, and what is more, to convince you that it is entirely your idea to do so.

The secret lies in their dual currency systems. All these games have two virtual currencies : a common, easily acquired one which you get via gameplay, and a second one that they give you just a little bit of at first but that costs real money to get after that.

Usually but not always, the difference is made explicit by having the lesser currency be silver, and the other be gold.

And you can play the game as much as you like without ever buying any of the for-pay currency. You are never forced to pay money to continue in the game. Not… exactly.

However, the games are so structured that in order to keep playing continuously, you have to pay. They offer you a very rich stimulation stream, made especially rich at the beginning of course, only to have it suddenly end when you turn out of a third currency, often called “energy”.

And you can get more energy right now…. for real money currency. They are counting on your desire to maintain this high stimulation level in order to get the dollars from your pockets.

Also, of course, there are “premium” virtual items that you can only get via the real-money currency, things that are more powerful, make the game easier, or just plain give the exact same sort of signals of wealth and status that real world luxury goods give off, and for a fraction of the price.

So while I am so far enjoying playing all these little games, I am fully aware that, as appealing as they seem, they are basically machines to create psychological addiction for profit.

And I imagine I will get burned out on them soon enough.

Luckily, I can’t afford to get truly addicted.

Bachelorettes In Prison!

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Oh wait, that should be bachelorettes AND prison. My bad.

There are two articesl hanging around my browser looking bored and wondering when I will get around to commenting on them, and today I decided to give in to the guilt and let them have their say.

The first one is another example of procrastination making me quite late for the party on an issue, but it is an opinion piece which concerns the recent hooha over a gay bar banning bachlorette parties.

First of all, before this broke, I had no idea that having your bachelorette party at a gay bar was even a thing. It would not have occurred to me that straight ladies would do this, although in retrospect, the logic of it is obvious. You can have your bachelorette party at a bar with a somewhat outrageous and sexually open atmosphere that is full of hot guys wearing next to nothing shaking their groove things, and yet feel perfectly safe because you are (somewhat naively) sure that none of these hot guys will be hitting on you or any of your future bridesmaids.

Now right of the bat, that sounds exploitative, does it not? The feelings of the gay men who frequent the club are not even a consideration. Maybe they do not like being treated like testosterone wallpaper, or worse, unpaid strippers, for the amusement of a bunch of loud, obnoxious, drunk women who will feel perfectly safe making crude, fumbling passes at them and their boyfriends and who treat the other paying patrons like they are all part of some exotic show.

And all while patting themselves on the back about how progressive they are for being “willing” to have such an important event at a bar for, you know, those people.

Want to be progressive? Have it at a lesbian bar.

That is not even counting the political issue about celebrating marriage in front of people who cannot get married to the person of their choice.

But still, it took me a while to sort out my feelings out about this issue, because like a lot of outsiders, I am inherently biased towards inclusiveness. I do not want to kick anyone out unless it becomes absolutely necessary due to their behaviour. I want everyone to be together and get along. The idea of refusing any defined group entry rankles me. And to do it for political reasons makes me feel ill in the pit of my stomach.

But I think I have to side with the ban on this issue. These bachelorette parties sound like they are highly disruptive to the kind of safe haven atmosphere that a gay bar has to generate in this cruel and unfeeling world. And the sad and undeniable fact is that sometimes, in order to create an atmosphere of inclusion for one group, another group has to be excluded.

Even typing those words makes me feel ill. But there are plenty of other places for ladies to have their stagette parties. Nobody is denying them that right.

They just have to do it somewhere else.

The other story I wanted to touch on is this story from Norway about the world’s nicest prison.

Briefly, the story is about Bastoy Prison, a prison located on a small Norwegian island that is run far more like a summer holiday camp than a prison.

There’s a beach where prisoners sunbathe in the summer, plenty of good fishing spots, a sauna and tennis courts. Horses roam gravel roads. Some of the 115 prisoners here — all men and serving time for murder, rape and trafficking heroin, among other crimes — stay in wooden cottages, painted cheery red. They come and go as they please. Others live in “The Big House,” a white mansion on a hill that, on the inside, looks like a college dorm. A chicken lives in the basement, a guard said, and provides eggs for the inmates.

And here is the kicker : they have a very low recidivism rate. Only 20 percent of inmates reoffend within two years of leaving Bastoy. And that is what we want, right?

I mean, we pay a lot of lip service to the idea that a “penitentiary” is someplace we send people to be “rehabilitated”, right? The idea is prevent crime in the future. We want to make good, normal, law-abiding citizens of these people. Right?

Or do we? I imagine a lot of people would howl with outrage at the idea of a prison that treats murderers and rapists so well. After all, these people have done horrible, horrible things and we need to punish them for it. That is what we want to do and that is what feels good, feels right, when people have made us angry. Lash out, make them suffer, call it justice, and then act surprised when treating people like animals in cages turns them into the very sort of anti-civilized monsters we do not want roaming the streets.

So what is more important, our safety or our urge to punish? The prevention of crime, or our bloodlust for vengeance? What would you say to the relatives of a person killed by someone fresh out of prison who had lived so long in that savage environment that they were barely even human any more?

Would you tell them it was worth it, because we made the criminal suffer? That we would gladly have more citizens suffer and die from the actions of dehumanized brutes rather than restrain our lust for revenge and our deep sick desire for a little piece of the suffering of a stranger?

I mean, we have to hurt and torture and dehumanize somebody, right? Someone has to fill in for all the people in our lives we wish we could punish but cannot or will not. And we have criminals in our power, helpless and vulnerable, perfect whipping boys for whatever is pissing us off.

So what if a few extra people die? Just more of an excuse to punish!

The party never ends!

Or maybe we could learn from Bastoy that what these people need is civilizing influences, not savagery.

Friday Science Hoojamajigger, June 1, 2012

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Well here we are, the first day of June, the month of weddings and school year endings and the Summer Solstice, that longest day of the year when officially goes from Spring to Summer and all the little kiddies get out of school and begin the serious business of enjoying the hell out of not being in class, at least until they started to get bored.

When I was a little kid, I got bored of summer pretty quickly. But then with each successive summer, the time it took me to get bored grew longer and longer, till by high school, I was already at the point where I was thinking “School again already? Damn. ”

But enough personal remembrances. On with the science!

Dear God Japan

We will start off with the weird invention from Japan today, as it is not really all that weird and is barely disturbing at all, and is, in fact, kind of mysterious.

This time, the Japanese have come up with what they are calling a telepresence robot, a field of development they seem to be pursuing with a greater zeal and dedication than any other nation despite the complete and total mystery as to why anyone would want such a thing.

I mean, OK, check this thing out.

Seriously now. What is the frigging point? Why would anyone want a tiny robot on their shoulder that crudely mimics what some remote person is doing? How could that be anything else but incredibly creepy?

And yet, the Japanese seem to be hot after this kind of technology. Just another impenetrable mystery of the mysterious East, I suppose. My theory is that it has something to do with all those soft and hard H anime movies where the shy and hapless male protagonist ends up with a tiny magical chick as a roommate, sex slave, or something along those lines, and I Dream Of Jeannie wackiness ensues.

And did you see that picture of the intended end product? The dude with the hologram on his shoulder? Yeah, that is absolutely nothing like what you have shown us, folks. And even if you could do that, it would still be pretty useless and creepy as hell to boot.

Imagine seeing someone walking down the street talking to a hologram of some geisha on their shoulder. Once you convinced yourself that you had not suddenly been granted the unwelcome ability to see other people’s hallucinations, you would think that person should just talk to their friend on their cell phone like a normal human, wouldn’t you?

Once more, the Japanese have disturbed me with their apparently need to create non-people people.

The Serpents Of Medicine

And I am not talking about the two on the caduceus either.

So, not these guys. Look, they're kissing!

No, what I am talking about is snake type robots that would be let loose in your body to fix it up.

Let us just pause for a moment to let the icy cold squirmy heebie jeebies we all get at the thought of anything like a snake slithering around inside us subside. Feel free to talk a walk or get a hot drink. I will be here when you get back.

Squickiness aside, the technology is intriguing. With a properly defined “mission”, it would be safe to let an autonomous robot loose in the human body to say, clear arterial blockages, destroy bad cholesterol, patch up faults in the nervous system, and who knows what else.

It would be done under a doctor’s supervision, of course, and would raise the bar for how rigorously something was tested before being used on live human beings (I imagine cadaver testing would be first), but still, it could be a viable tech.

Of course, nanotechnology might beat them to the punch and make medical repair robots the size of virii instead, which you have to admit would be a lot less intrusive.

And a lot less creepy.

I mean, what if you could feel them moving inside you?

The End Of Allergies

And now for the Big Medical News of the Week : some scientists from the University of East Finland think they may be on the trail of a vaccine to end allergies.

And not just one allergy, or specific allergies. All of them. Every single allergy in the world would be cured with a single vaccine.

Boom. Gone forever.

It is an awesome and thrilling thought. Imagine all the serious life-threatening allergies in the world
wiped out like polio. It would be amazing if they could just sure that horrible peanut allergy that has cropped up in the last 20 years or so. Nobody should have to live in fear of peanut butter breath. That is just too much for anyone to have to bear.

But no, they are talking about all allergies. From the big to the small, from deadly auto-histamine disorders (like some forms of arthritis!) to the common sniffles many of us get every spring, gone with a shot.

The vaccine would basically alter the allergens so that they would not trigger a histamine release, and without those pesky histamines, there are no allergic responses.

Now, this begs the question why we have histamines in the first place. What is the point of these responses? I cannot, for the life of me, see the evolutionary advantage of being allergic to something. It is not like a runny nose and watery eyes help you to pass on your genes. If anything, they make you a lot less to do so, as nobody is going to want to make babies with the sneezing guy who is about to be eaten by a sabre toothed tiger.

So I have been pondering the question of what would happen if a person simply had no histamine whatsoever for a while now. I am not so arrogant as to assume if I do not know what it does, it must do nothing and we could get rid of it.

But seriously, Darwin. Allergies. WTF?

Back to…. normal?

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Well, here we are back at what passes for normal in my weird weird life. Things were getting sort of different there for a while, with shallow sleep instead of deep, Facebook games keeping me busy, and my mind bubbling over with the desire to comment on big ideas instead of mumbling on about my personal problems. I have to say, I was sort of enjoying it.

But I knew it had to end. You can not roll on with very little sleep forever. Sooner or later, the hypomanic bubble collapses and then your brain forecloses on your sleep debt and forces you to pay it off all at once, immediately.

So I had a very heavy nap this afternoon, and I anticipate more of them in my near future.

Ironically, this deep sleep has further delayed my Zopiclone experiment. My psychiatrist has put me on stuff in order to help me develop something like a normal sleep schedule, and I was supposed to go pick up the prescription today, but I ended up taking a long heavy nap instead and that left me without the energy or will to go pick the damn stuff up, assuming it is read by now.

See, it is on the “limited coverage” list, which means my therapist has to send in a form asking the Province to approve the prescription. Is it not wonderful to have bureaucrats second guessing medical professionals just to maybe save a buck or two?

So anyhow, despite my therapist’s solid confidence that the approval would be a matter of hours at most when he wrote out the scrip on Tuesday, it was not approved yet when I checked Wednesday night, and here it is Thursday night and I am too scrambled feeling to even call to see if the stuff is ready yet.

Oh well, I will check tomorrow and pick the stuff up if it is ready then.

The idea is that it will help me get to sleep, and maybe that will help me stay asleep and thus get a normal REM pattern going and that will hopefully help a lot with my mood and whatnot.

All very sound theory. Proper sleep is the cornerstone of health. Who knows, if I was properly rested, I might be a lot less depressed and have the energy and, most importantly, the confidence to go out there and take on that big old world.

And that’s a good thing… right?

And I was all for this plan… but then I made the mistake of reading that Zopiclone Wikipedia article I have linked to here, and now I am frankly kind of terrified.

Especially because what I am taking is basically Ambien, and has all the same (potential) freaky sleep activity side effect like sleepwalking, sleep driving, and sleep eating.

Now sleep eating would be bad, especially if I eat the Bad Stuff that would hurt my diabetes. Sleep driving, well, I do not know how to drive and do not have a car, so that is not a big problem. But people on these drugs have sleepwalked to the point where they wake up in a strange neighborhood with no recollection of how they got there or what time it is or anything, and that prospect freaks me out.

Why? Because I already have nightmares exactly like that, and mild issues between dream reality and real reality, and so having that happen would freak me out completely. Especially because I do not have a cell phone, so I could not just call home and tell Joe a cross street and have him come pick me up.

No, I would be completely lost, and terrified. I might not even be fully clothed, and who has not had that nightmare? After all, I sleep naked, so unless I incorporate sleep dressing into my unconscious mindscape, there will be a big fat guy with a big scar down his middle wandering around Richmond naked, and that is bound to cause a stir.

At least the police would probably be nice enough to throw a blanket over me and take me home, at least the first few times. So there is that, I guess.

I even had a dream that I was being chased by the police this afternoon, that is how much this notion has been preying on my mind.

Of course, these freaky side effects are rare and so I am probably getting freaked out over absolutely nothing. The most common side effect of Zopiclone is a harsh and unpleasant metallic taste in the mouth upon waking, and while that sounds fairly nasty, it is a lot better than making the news nude.

And not everyone gets that, so who knows? Maybe I will be lucky, and all I will get out of it is good sleep. I have actually wanted to try Zopiclone ever since I read about it in the Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet.

The protagonist Tyler takes it (illegally) late in the book, and says it is like brain candy, and makes his life so much easier now that he is getting proper sleep and is fully rested. He says it is the only sleep aid that gives you a normal REM cycle, which Wikipedia says is not true, but still, ever since I read the book for the first time, I have been intrigued by the prospect of a proper sleep pill.

And then, decades later, my psych prescribes the stuff for me, completely without my prompting (apart from complaining about sleep, of course). It is hard not to see this as destiny, or fate, or weird fortune, or my wyrd being upon me, or some such mystical crap.

Knowing such things to be nothing but superstition does not make you immune from the feeling. The human desire to find patterns in our life creates such feelings in all of us.

The difference, I suppose, is in how much you believe them.

And I am destined to try to dismiss them, I guess.