Monthly Archives: September 2013

A cacophenous silence

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It is way too freaking quiet here at Casa Del Nerdvana.

I wish I knew what made the difference between “pleasantly quiet” and “so quiet it creeps me out and makes me feel sad and isolated”.

I imagine it has nothing to do with the actual noise conditions and everything to do with my own ever-shifting internal emotional state. When I am already feeling lonely and vulnerable, the silence will amplify that. If I was feeling jangled and stressed, the silence would be soothing that.

But I don’t. I have felt small and vulnerable and weak lately, and that feeling of being overwhelmed and unable to cope with things keeps coming back, making me want to run away from everything forever.

Just keep running, keep fleeing, until I have left my old self behind and I am somewhere brand new where nobody knows me and I can start over from scratch, without history or context.

Decide who I am, like V did in V for Vendetta. He had to build himself back up from absolutely nothing except the roman numeral on his cell.

Perhaps that is why I love the classic amnesia timeline where our protagonist wakes up with no memory of who they are or how they got where they are or why there’s a dead body in the bathtub, and has to solve the mystery of their own identity as well as the murder of Bathtub Person.

I mean, talk about a journey of self-discovery. It’s practically the Platonic ideal of it. And no matter what they find out about themselves, they are free to disown it. That was the previous version of me, I am a different person now. I’m not that guy any more.

And the idea has a lot of appeal for me. Not that I would want to forget everything (but some things…. ), but I can imagine myself moving to some small town in the middle of nowhere and creating an entirely different past for myself, one in which I used to be competent and together and connected and I used to have a normal life with wife and kids and whatnot, it’s just that I am sick now.

That’s a life I could live with. Then I could at least pretend that there was some point to the first forty years of my life. All those years I spent at the mercy of depression and social anxiety, doing absolutely nothing with my life but hanging out online, playing video games, and reading books (just like I do now, but at least I have my videos and my blog), hiding away from the world and all the things that might have happened to make me a more whole, sane, connected, competent person… those years lie within me like an enormous block of ice that weighs me down, holds me back, and makes me want to run shrieking into the night.

And of course, that is just how they self-perpetuate, isn’t it? I can’t do anything because of all the nothing I have done before.

And it honestly makes me sick. I don’t want to be like this. I want to be strong and resilient and capable and together, not weak and fragile and incompetent and hopelessly scattered. There is a raging fire deep under all that paralyzing ice, and it is very tired of being denied.

When I think of all those lost years and all their possibilities, I just want to cry with grief. And that’s a good thing… tears wash away grief in time. They are the only thing that can melt all that ice inside me.

They are, in fact, what was frozen in the first place.

But even with the lowered dose of Paxil, mourning is still hard for me. It’s hard for me to stay sad and just deal with the emotion. I am far too good at escaping the situation via distraction and I don’t even need a computer or book or a TV to do it.

I just start thinking about stuff. Analyzing. Letting my voracious mind take over and start “figuring things out” and escaping into rationality instead of just staying with the moment and completing the grieving.

So I only heal in little spurts, quickly squeezed off. Maybe that is why my recovery is so slow. If I could just learn to restrain my urge to escape, I could get some serious emotional work done and rid myself of my burden.

Perhaps the lowered Paxil will help with that. I need that increased access to my emotions. Part of me, the crazy daredevil lunatic that lies underneath my sane and sensible facade, wants to just stop taking the Paxil and take whatever comes to just get it the fuck over with.

But in truth, I really am a sensible person who never does crazy things out of emotional need… or indeed do anything out of emotional need. One of the biggest of my recent realizations is that I have been so powerless and paralyzed by my mental health issues that I have simply lost the ability to do something simply because I want to do it, because it would make me happy.

And sure, poverty limits your options on the score (Go, full disability application, go!). But even the things that are perfectly within my means get ignored and neglected.

I have lost so much faith in my very agency in the world that I feel like I am completely powerless to meet any of my needs and that the best thing I can do is ignore them all and pretend they don’s exist, freeze them in ice so I can pretend they are not there, and go back to just letting the days go by.

Back to pretending I am happy because it’s not like crying ever got me any help anyhow. I was only allowed to be happy, or rather, content. Or whatever. As long as I faded into the background so my parents could pretend they never had me.

But that’s a whole other clusterfudge.

Friday Science Ragamuffin, September 20, 2013

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This week we are doing the Top Ten Science Stories Of The Week! (there was just too much cool stuff to cut it down tot he usual 6 or 7!)

10. and 9. An extraterrestrial twofer??

Not one but two stories claiming, independently of one another, that extraterrestrial life has been discovered.

There is this one from a Professor Wainwright in the UK which claims that they found extraterrestrial life by harvesting particles from the very edge of space.

The claim is that these particles are definitely life forms but like absolutely no other life forms on Earth, suggesting they came from space.

If so, does that mean we are constantly bombarded with life? Panspermia indeed!

And then there’s this story, also from the UK, where a Chandra Wickramasinghe claims to have found extraterrestrial life inside a meteorite found in Sri Lanka.

It’s not quite a slam dunk, but it’s a good shot. They have confirmed the sample is definitely meteoric in origin and there appears to be an algae-like substance inside it, looking for all the world like it grew there.

Did we pass some invisible point of maturity and now suddenly the alien overlords are letting us know there really is life out there?

8. Viral Or Bacterial?

Is your illness viral or bacterial? It can make a big difference in course of treatment, and now there is a fast safe test to find out.

The test is based on certain genetic markers that are present in the body in response to specific infections (more epigenetics in action!), and can give a 90 percent accurate result within 12 hours.

This could have a whole host of benefits, but primarily, it is intended to cut down on the amount of antibiotics given to people who have viral infections, and hence slow the evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains.

And now… the Phantom Zone.

7. A New Geometry of Physics

Physicists have discovered a new geometry of particle physics that vastly simplifies the whole field and goes a long way towards finally tweaking quantum theory into something less downright messy.

It might even open the door for a way to finally integrate that fickle bitch-goddess gravity into quantum theory and integrate the world we see at the quantum level and macroscopic world we all live in and perceive.

I will just note in passing that I have been predicting that the whole bizarre quantum mess would some day be revealed to be far simpler and more sensible than we thought.

6. Did a hyper-huge black hole collapse create the universe?

Hell if I know.

But these folks seems to think so. This is one of those cases where I feel I don’t know enough about the subject to even have a layman’s opinion on it.

I confess, when things get to that scale, my mental pinball machine goes TILT.

But I like this quote :

“For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity,” says Niayesh Afshordi, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.

Well, so much for the first half. You know what comes next, right?

Brain science, of course!

5. Brain science, of course!

In this case, small animal brain science.

A new study has shown that small animals process visual information far more rapidly than larger ones, and hence live in a slow-motion world compared to us big clumsy critters.

Anyone who has tried to catch a cat has at least suspected this.

I wonder if they compensated for the very different way human beings see int heir comparisons. We pre-process raw visual info more than any other animal species.

4. Can Animals Think?

That is the question that this Time magazine article asks.

Loaded question. Define “think”, please. Sorry, I am a philosopher first, scientist second, because you can’t get useful result from wrong thinking.

We will never know if they “really” think, just like we cannot definitely prove anyone else thinks but us. Direct observation is not possible. You can’t walk around in someone else’s skull.

And considering how we treat animals, there will always be a strong incentive for doubt.

But animals can care, worry, scheme, help, hinder, play politics, have favorites, make friends, solve problems, and even fall in love.

I would say we have as much evidence of their consciousness as we have of our own.

3. Creativity Is Messy

Studies are showing that there is a correlation between messiness and creativity.

Subjects asked to do a fake consumer survey in either a messy room or a neat one. The ones in the neat room tended to choose the “classic” choice, the others the “new” choice.

This fits neatly with my theories regarding the ordering mind versus the creative mind.

Plus, full disclosure, I am a highly creative person in a very messy room.

I might be biased.

2. Finding the Imagination

Scientists Dartmouth think they may have found out just where the imagination lies in the human brain.

However, their answer is that it is a “widespread neural network”, so big frigging deal.

That is seriously not much of an answer. They might as well have just pointed to someone’s head and said “It’s all over the place in there!”

The problem is that “imagination” is far too broad and ill-defined a term, and when you combine that with our need to be able to point at something and say “There it is!” leads to trouble.

Maybe it’s everywhere in the brain.

And finally, the Big Story….

1. Making a Memory

And this being the FSW, you just know those memories aren’t being created by Hallmark moments.

Scientists at the University of California at Irvine have successfully created a specific new memory in rats.

That’s right… they created a memory in the rats’ brains. You can see why this story won the “creepy science” race. Today it’s creating new memories in rats, tomorrow it’s Total Recall city.

Go to your local equivalent of Rekall, Inc, and get yourself memories of whatever you want.

Or, the government could simply give you new memories like you were Wolverine.

Seriously, if it wasn’t for his mutant healing factor, his brain would look like a bowl of soggy cauliflower that had been shot up with an Uzi by now.

See you next week, folks!

The ups and the downs

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Mostly the downs, today.

Not that I feel depressed, exactly. Just pensive and emotional and introspective. Time for another emoto-dump.

I know I have said this so many times before, but I just get so goddamned sick of this life of mine sometimes. I feel like everything I do is pointless, I am just a cage-mad predator pacing mindlessly in their enclosure, and part of me really wants to bust the fuck out.

But I am both prisoner and prison, and you cannot escape yourself. These chains I wear, I forged over many yearsm, and I can’t just shed them and leave them behind.

After all, they’re part of me.

And so I am stuck with this interminable process of integration. I want to get out there and start living, dammit. Half my life is already over and I’ve barely done anything with it.

That is why I envy those people who have the ability to transform and transcend. Right now, in my current state of dissatisfaction and frustration, having a huge emotional crisis that hurts and is crazy and maybe even lands me in the hospital, but transforms me into a better stronger saner version of myself, sounds a hell of a lot better than watching the waning seconds of my life tick by as I undergo this slow, constant reintegration.

But I lack that capacity. I am too smart, too sensible, too stable (ha!), and too rational to go crazy like that, even if it would help me in the end.

I have used the bright light and sharp vision of a robust and muscular rationality as a tool for self-control for so long that I have forgotten how to let go. I feel like I always have myself in my own spotlight, alone but never unwatched, under constant surveillance in order to maintain the status quo.

And that is great…. for stasis. The pure unblinking light of self-analysis does not allow for change. It keeps everything the same by allowing for no darkness in which to transform. It monitors itself rigorously in order to make sure everything stays the same down to the very last decimal point.

And it is a cold light. So very, very cold.

A bargain was struck at some point, where in return for the feeling of understanding, control, and power that these high-beam headlights of mine give me, I sacrificed any hope for change, transformation, personal warmth, and most importantly, forgiveness.

Because that bright cold light does not and cannot forgive. The relentless search for the truth does not allow for any comforting illusions, functional delusions, deliberate confusions, or temporary solutions.

That is why it denies me any possibility of wholeness. Most people, healthy people that is, achieve their harmony with life by developing a set of beliefs about the world which are not exactly accurate in the objective sense but which serve to fill holes in their understanding of the world and which give them comfort and stability, and most importantly, makes them whole and functional and sane.

But that is not possible for the likes of me. I made the Truth my God at a very young age, and it is an illuminating and powerful master, but harsh and unforgiving as well.

And the real irony is, it’s not as though everything this mind of mine produces is the capital t Truth. I am as deluded as anyone else. Arguably, even moreso, as shown by my mental illness.

I am a crazy person. But don’t worry, folks, I am the harmless kind who doesn’t do anything crazy in public to upset or threaten you. I don’t even spread my sadness to others. With others, I never show sadness at all.

I just quietly suffer in my lonely room, not being a bother or a burden to the public. Of course, that means I don’t attract any help, either.

When helping my therapist with the very long process of applying for full disability, the subject of my problems with asking for help came up, and that got me thinking about it.

It is truly a crippling symptom, because it’s the one that keeps you from getting the treatment for all other symptoms. In that sense, it’s really a meta-symptom. I find it really hard to ask for help, even when the people I am asking are people who provide that kind of help for a living.

I get so overwhelmed with feelings of unimportance and unworthiness that I just can’t do it. I internalized a deep deep sense of a very powerful kind of shame when I was young that was reinforced by my parents’ offhanded rejection, nay, negation of my concerns whenever I worked up the courage to ask for something.

You can hurt your kids a lot of ways without ever raising your voice or getting angry.

So now I struggle to cope with this profound feeling that I do not deserve anything, even life itself, let alone food, shelter, water, and space to live. Deep down, I feel like I am a repulsive creature who should go bury himself in a deep dark hole and stay there till he dies because he his far too horrible for anyone to ever love and the best that he can expect from the world is bare tolerance, and that solely out of pity.

And even that makes me feel terrible guilty, because I know I am just a burden to these people, one they regret ever taking on because I am way more trouble than I am worth and they had no idea what they were getting into when they let me into their lives, and they would be so much happier without me around to drain the life out of everything and foul everything up.

Hence, the times when I wished to negate myself. Maybe the world a better place by taking myself out of it.

It’s been a while since I felt that way, but that part of me is still there.

Thank God I have great friends in my life to give me a light to follow away from that dark path.

A warm, nourishing light.

Here we go with more video

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I need to come up with stable names for the various types of post I do, so I can just called them “X Number Whatever” and skip having to think up a title each damned time.

And no, I cannot leave the posts without titles. WordPress allows that, but my muse does not.

My creativity can be very demanding sometimes.

Anyhow, here’s the usual video thing. Four videos, mine last, do wop do waaah.

First we have a video I saw once, was really impressed by it, then tried to explain it to Felicity, who teaches music theory for a living, and completed failed to get it across to her, and then found that I lacked the Google-fu to figure out how to find the damned thing online.

Seriously, what would the Google search for this be? Bobby McFerrin plays the crowd?>

Anyhow, here is Professor McFerrin rocking the room.

Are you not entertained? With genius level simplicity, he demonstrates the universality of music as a language of the human mind.

This semi-randomly assembled group of people was transformed into a living keyboard for McFerrin to hop around on. That by itself is a pretty neat trick, especially because he did it without explaining anything. He did it all with his voice and body language,.

But what I find really cool is that the audience followed a pentatonic scale perfectly without, I am assuming, the majority of them even knowing what that was.

I think what it truly demonstrates is that we all have a sense of interval. We might not know a thing about music, but we know how to make each note the same number of half-tones off from the previous one.

Next we have a rather neat little bit of nerdcore music, this one the sort of thing that would happen if Weird Al (hallowed be his name and works) was a hardcore particle physics and/or astrophysics (they are increasingly the same thing) devotee.

See, I learned my lesson with that thing about “complete” quantum data transfer in last week’s science post. If I don’t understand a story well enough to say anything about it, I will just put it out there to my readers, hoping those higher on the nerd food chain will explain it to me.

And I do not get 90 percent of what he is on about in that song. Any knowledge of string theory I have is so old that I still think superstrings are a thing. (But they aren’t any more…. right?).

So my brain doesn’t even understand branes, and I assume we are so past branes now it’s hilarious. I might as well be asking how fast modems are these days.

Still, I rather like the production values of the song and the video (making those animations where all the words fit together must be hard!), and I love Sock Puppet Einstein and his unique singing voice, so I figured I would share the video with you all.

But not on Friday. Fridays are for science I understand.

Next up, we have a rather well done skit about what it’s like to live in Vancouver.

Excellent stuff. Tightly paced, well edited, high density, and tons of good material.

I am kind of jealous, honestly. It’s exactly the kind of slick local comedy I want to do some day. I would love to have a show that was the Almost Live of the GVRD.

And yes, that includes the completely shameless whoring to the audience via local place names…. just like those idiots in SPUZZUM, am I right?

As to the accuracy of the observations of the skit, I dunno. I am so far from being plugged in to the local scene at all that I am almost plugged into a completely different scene.

But it all rings true to me. When the N magnet went on the lime-green sports car, I totally LOLed. And I love the line “And that’s hardly a joke!”.

Oh, and the bit about the bike lines is priceless because just the other day I was telling Joe about my experience with the ongoing war without honor or humanity between the bikers, the drivers, and the pedestrians in the editorial and letters columns of the free newspapers in Portland Oregon when I lived there.

Seriously. You want to see people from a very laid back and hippie-ish town lose their shit and go feral? Bring up the subject of bike lanes.

Bikers : “We are angry at you drivers because you keep almost killing us on the highway!”
Drivers : “Well we are mad at YOU because we keep almost killing you on the highway!”
Pedestrians : “They should close Downtown to all vehicles and make the whole thing a pedestrian mall!”
Bikers and Drivers : “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

And so forth and so on.

Aaaand lastly, we have my lil ol vid right here.

I am not very happy with it, but the basic idea has merit and I may try it again with political news instead of wacky little things next time.

I really rambled on in the middle “anger” act, and I was trying to be all bullet-point pithy comedy, a few high density rounds into a target then move on, and I failed at that.

Next time, I will try to focus better.

Also have another piece of music in the works, of course. This time, I decided to forego the use of loops and only use single instruments to make my tunes.

I mean, it’s still sample-based, but I am using single instruments instead of all the premade loops I have, and it feels good. Loops are great for making music quickly, but in order to get that speed you sacrifice a lot of control and nuance, and I am tired of having the loops dictate the music.

So this time, it is straight composing, no shortcuts. So far, I have a rather cheerful beat going with a funky bassline and a drum beat to match.

It’s all a little twee right now, but that’s just a matter of finding the right instruments.

Wish me luck.

This brain of mind

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Time for more auto-extispicy.

Been pondering the nature of my intelligence and the way it influences how I interact with people today.

The fact is, no matter how gentle and kind and considerate I try to be, it will always be somewhat rough for people to be around me because of how I think and the swift incisive way I have of coming to conclusions that are almost never normal or typical, but instead hail from the cold dark chamber of truth within me.

So I am always going to be sort of strange and scary to people. I have hidden this fact from myself two ways : one, by hiding away from the world, and two, by interacting with the world via an online persona that is far less serious and shy than I am in the real world.

I also have managed to arrange my life so that the people I interact with most, namely my friends, are also highly intelligent intellectuals, and so are more receptive to my usual mode of thinking than the average citizen.

And this has done wonders for me. But it’s not enough. I am still pretty scared of having to deal with normal people. I don’t want to feel that vast screaming void opening up between us where I can’t relate to them and they can’t relate to me and I feel like some kind of repulsive creature that should just crawl back into its hole.

And sure, intellectually, I know that if I was simply to get out there and get enough social experience, I would presumably learn to adapt and develop social interaction skills to make the whole thing a lot less awkward.

But the fear is still very intense and it’s a hard thing to get around. I wish I could convey the kind of cold hard terror that fills me in those situations. It is the sort of fear that displaces all your powers of reason and leaves you terrified and panicked like a wounded animal.

I know all this coldness is coming from myself, not them. But when those old tapes start playing, it doesn’t really matter where it comes from.

But back to my brain.

Looking back, I feel like I have inadvertently hurt people by being like this. They ask my opinion and what tumbles out of my mouth is a highly perceptive, incisive, unusual, razor-sharp analysis that is far more than they bargained for and quite hurtful to boot.

I feel that due to my isolation and lack of social experience, I have a very poor sense of exactly how much other people perceive, and therefore when I point out what seems obvious to me with my over-sharpened mind, I am often cutting people to the quick, or at least just giving them a lot more than they can handle.

And I know I am doing this. I often dread being asked what I think by people I don’t know very well for that exact reason. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I lack the social skills to know how to modulate my perceptions and express them in a way that is more socially acceptable.

Deep underneath this line of there, there is also a pale remnant of the arrogance of my youth as well. Part of me really doesn’t want to restrain itself. It wants to deliver nothing but the white hot truth to everyone, and if they are hurt by it, so be it. They will get over it, and be better for the experience.

But I don’t truly believe it. That’s just my id rebelling against restraint. Everyone has a side to them that wants to ignore all limitations and just do exactly what it feels all the time.

But you have to be rich to get away with that.

Nevertheless, I feel a dark shadow of anger stirring within me lately. The urge to be brutally sarcastic and bludgeoning is something I deal with on a moment to moment basis.

I know this is just part of learning to integrate the hot circuit of raw emotion into my cold dead mind and make myself into some semblance of a three dimensional human being. And I knew this would be rough and that I would have to wrestle with myself a lot before the deed was done.

I have suppressed my emotional self for far far too long and thus been denied its strength, its power, its toughness, and its warmth. I need to tame and harness the fire inside me, not just douse it all the time. It’s the only way I can become whole and strong and capable, inside of fractured, weak, and incompetent.

And as I integrate, I become capable of a greater level of awareness of my surroundings, and that’s the first step towards dealing with them better. This will, in time, make my personal world a lot less harsh and then hopefully I can finally walk into the sunlight and leave this lonely cold cave of my own devising.

But Oh Lord, it will not be easy. I think I am past the worst point of dealing with the anger inside me. I am not feeling like doing crazy things lately. Wrong things, for sure, but nothing that would land me in jail or make me a monster. Just things that would make me an asshole.

And I could be such an asshole.

Before I forget, here is my video for today. It’s a talker.

It’s a biologically strange thing that we can live so close together. In order to achieve it, we had to develop some highly complex and sophisticated coping strategies.

We don’t look at it that way – fish don’t know they’re wet – but we all have a whole suite of perceptions and responses custom tailored to life amongst hundreds of strangers.

From the point of view of a state of primal savagery, it is astonishing that we can commingle in such a way that respects everyone’s personal space and that implies such a profound trust of your fellow humans (all of whom are dangerous and intelligent predators armed with evolution’s most powerful and adaptable bodies) that you can treat them like they are not even there.

Just faces in the crowd.

We don’t give ourselves enough credit for that, I think.

Watch out! It’s another VIDEO EXPLOSION!

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Whole whack of videos to share with you nice people tonight, concluding, as always, with my own.

First we have this totally kickass feel-good inspirational video :

What I love so much about that video is that it is a story of relentless optimism and ingenuity. Everything Richie wanted to do as a child was greeted with the answer “yes, you can do it. Now let’s figure out how. ”

That is such an inspiring combination of the ideal and the pragmatic that I can’t help loving it. We need more people in this world with that same attitude.

Problems CAN be solved. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you they cannot. They are sad people with limited minds who would prefer to think of something as impossible over facing the possible change to their world-view if it’s NOT.

I want all the young, bright, idealistic designers and inventors in the world to see this video and see what happens if you completely dedicate yourself to solving problems.

And what happens when you are willing to imagine a seemingly impossible outcome and then cut your own path in order to get to it.

Anything is possible when intellect, knowledge, vision, and determination get together.

Next we have this. Pay attention to the center top of the screen during the first part of this vid to see a clue as to what is happening.

Oh, and fullscreen is best.

Holy SHIT! Did you see the size of that boulder? When I first saw this video in animated GIF form, I was so surprised by the landslide that I actually ducked.

You know, just in case rocks and debris came shooting out of my monitor to hit me.

Truly, the age of the dashboard camera is upon us, and with it scores of extraordinary videos taken on what for the driver was just another ordinary day.

This is what happens when people can document their lives like never before. We can all share our once-in-a-lifetime experiences, and thus enrich one another as a whole.

Imagine what it will be like when we all have Google Glass on all the time!

But enough of the wholesome world of the triumph of the human spirit and cool videos of natural disasters, and delve into the realms of horror available only to the deviant monsters who make Cracked lists.

These are, honest to god, the most disturbing ads in the history of television.

Like this one, which seems to have sprouted directly from the nightmares of David Cronenberg’s children.

Trust me, if I ever have a nightmare like that, it won’t be coffee I reach for, it will be a loaded pistol.

Or then there’s this big dose of 70’s drug inspired clusterfudge.

It’s like they got the message that the groovy thing was to make stuff that looked and felt like an acid trip) seriously, the 70’s WAS drugs…everything was stoned), but they missed the part where it’s supposed to be a GOOD trip, not a “do not take the brown acid, it is bad” trip.

I am sure that sometime soon, I will be startled out of deep sleep by a voice whispering “Dacron Polyester”.

And speaking of whispering, this is, I kid you not, the most terrifying ad I have seen in my forty years of living on Earth.

So of course, it’s for a child’s toy.

In 1965, the most popular doll in the world was Chatty Cathy.

This was…. a competitor.

Holy crap that’s scary. I am seriously terrified by that doll. That is so disturbing that it would make a killer ad for a 70’s evil doll horror film.

Hard to believe there is anyone who did not realize how creepy a whisper can be, but apparently at one point, there was enough of them to not only make this ad, but to put it on actual television, presumably deliberately where innocent little children would see it.

And as this was a simpler and more innocent time, people had fewer defenses against the sort of thing back then. Pity the poor little girl who runs to their Mommy because a superficially normal and harmless doll ad scared the bejebus out of them and now they want to burn every doll they have.

Oh, if you are wondering what ad was top of my nightmare fuel charts before this, it’s this one.

And again, it is intended for children.

Suddenly, the Teletubbies seem quite normal and restrained by comparison. The world of children is terrifying.

We need something sane and wholesome to cleanse our mental palates of all that ill-conceived accidental horror. I know…. let’s watch one of my videos full of dick jokes and the like!

Trust me, this will seem like a Norman Rockwell painting of a teddy bear picnic by comparison.

To answer the question that literally none of you have been asking, the bits of sweet sweet music I have been using for the intros and outtros lately are not, alas, my own compositions.

Maybe someday…. but not yet.

Instead, they are some samples I, um, borrowed from a site that preserved these samples from the ancient days of a device called the Mellotron.

The Mellotron hails from 1963, and it worked on a very simple, clever idea.

You take the keys of a keyboard and hook them up to a set of tape players that are all set to play at different speeds. Put the same bit of tape into all the tape recorders, and you have a very primitive version of a sampling keyboard, and have the sound of a whole orchestra at your fingertips.

Sure, it was a lot of work, but it was the best you could do before the age of Moog brought us all into the wonderful era of FM synthesis.

The people behind this particular set of Mellotron samples were studio technicians, and hence had lots and lots of musician friends who could come in and play something short but amazing for them.

The samples are absolutely gorgeous, these people clearly were no mere techs, they had a very keen ear for what makes music beautiful, and the face that you can totally tell that they were on tape at one point only adds to the appeal for me.

I have been trying to make music with those samples, but it’s very hard to work with samples that rich.

And now you know!

Meh bleh argh.

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Feeling kinda bleh today.

Good day to just throw some links at y’all whilst I diarize.

Like check out this extremely clever bit.

I love this kind of meta-comedy. For one, the skit starts with an excellent bit of misdirection. You have no idea what the joke will be because you accept subtitles as a natural thing when talking to brown people, so you don’t even consciously notice them.

So to then have them become central to the bit is brilliant. And then to have a character get mad because he is subtitled and feel it is an insult to the quality of his English is doubly brilliant.

All in all a genius bit.

So yeah, today I have been feeling crappy. But then again, it’s the afternoon. I always feel like crap in the afternoons. And today, I have to do both parts of my day’s labours in the afternoon because tonight I will be going to the monthly BCSFA meeting.

At least, that’s what I should do. I honestly do not feel like it. I am tempted to just skip it and stay in and rest and stuff so I can be bright and perky when I hang out with the gang watching videos tonight. I just do not feel like pulling myself together to go out and be social today. I want to fall apart instead, like I usually do when I feel down. Just melt into a puddle of squishy good like I am Odo in his bucket, and regenerate.

Later, when I have my strength back, I can pull myself together and form a coherent shape and stick with it for a while. But right now, I just feel so dissolute and dissolved that just having it together enough to type these words to you wonderful people makes me feel like I am balancing a nail on my nose.

But I think I will go. I will go specifically because it will be difficult to do so. I am sick and fucking tired of the path of least resistance. I need to start building some strength of character. Put some muscles on my wimpy will and straight out this spineless soul of mine.

Sure, remaining formless maximizes options and minimizes commitment. If your resting state is shapelessness, then you can always take on whatever shape is needed at the time and can never, ever, be caught in the wrong shape at the wrong time, which somehow seems like the worst thing in the world.

Like if that happened, part of me will screech “See! You should have stayed formless, you idiot! Then you could have taken the shape you need instead of being stuck in the wrong one!”.

But maybe true adaptability means being able to handle things whatever shape you’re in.

And the thing about having formlessness as your default state is that it means that to actually take a useful shape requires energy, and maintaining that shape requires a constant input of energy. And that means you have this drain on you all the time you have to keep your shit together, and that limits how long you can do it and how stable any given shape can be.

Whereas with some investment in permanent structure and strength, you will have a shape even when you have no energy. Sure, you might be a little less adaptable, and it definitely means deciding on a shape and committing to it, which is very very hard for liquid types like myself.

So many possibilities… how can you possibly pick one? I saw one of those “find your passion and follow it” speeches recently via TED, and it all sounds very good and is no doubt true. I do feel like I have hidden behind excuses and cowardice for a long time. I have nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of, and amazing talents and abilities, so in theory there is nothing stopping me from just going out into the world to stake my claim and leave my mark on the world.

Nothing except abject terror, that is. The excuses and lies and self-delusions might be holding me back, but they are also my shelter from a world I feel to be cold and hard and unfeeling precisely because I have protected myself from it so effectively for so long.

I am a very old caterpillar.

Chief amongst these excuses, and the bigger one that I can’t seem to imagine how to overcome, is that issue of selection and commitment.

I have so many talents, so many interests, so many passions…. I can never choose. Having to choose one and commit to it truly feel like Sophie’s Choice to me, and like Sophia’s Choice, not choosing is easier, and involves less guilt, but leads to a far worse result.

And I’m all about outcomes. Aren’t I?

So I must dream into being some form of compromise that keeps my options as open as possible while also letting me actually go out there and actively explore some of them, and accept that said exploration will necessarily involve the possibility of some options being chosen and some discarded.

Time to man up and become a firmer, stronger species of goo.

Oh, and today’s vid is another piece of music.

I feel kinda bleh about that, too. I get the feeling that I will have to keep hammering away at the music thang for a while before I can make stuff that actually satisfies me.

Oh, and speaking as I was many words ago of TED, I found an amazing website via a TEDx talk by its creator.

It’s called DuoLingo, and it offers you high quality language training absolutely free. And not only that, by just using the website to learn to speak French, German, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese, you are also helping to translate Web pages from English into those languages.

So I am totally going to be using it to learn French. I started at the beginning, even though I do remember some of the French I learned over twelve damned years of taking it in school, because I figure I need to learn it all again if I am going to develop any sort of fluency.

And man, is it a pain in the ass dealing with gendered language again. Argh.

Oh well. Talk to you tomorrow, folks!

Wassup wit me

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Time to catch you all up on what is happening Chez Moi.

Yesterday, I went to therapy, disability form in hand, and me and my therapist made a very good start on completing the darn thing.

Which reminds me, I haven’t done my section yet. Need to do that before Wednesday, when I will be going back to see him again to hopefully finish the goddamned thing.

It’s 28 pages long, so… it ain’t easy.

I have been foot-dragging on doing my part because I don’t like filling out forms, and that goes triple for scary-long and complicated government forms. If it’s just a matter of checking off boxes and filling in my vital statistics, that’s one thing.

But this has long sections where I am asked to describe this or justify that, and this is going to determine whether or not I get a major lifestyle upgrade, so there’s kind of a lot of pressure.

Plus, my therapist advised me not to come across as too smart to need help. I am to keep it simple or maybe even come across as a little stupid.

It seems unfair and inaccurate for the people who assess these things to associate a high level of intelligence with not needing any help, but whatever. I will try to keep it simple.

My brilliant plan is to do the whole thing in pencil, getting everything as humble and convincing as I can via the magic of the eraser, and then trace the final version over in pen.

That takes a lot of the pressure off, honestly. I don’t have to get everything perfect the first time.

I also went to see my GP yesterday, and he told my my sugars were bad (no duh there), but also that my hemoglobin count is abnormally and unhealthily low, and that combined with my complaints about sour stomach issues led him to think I may have an ulcer.

I am a little skeptical. If it’s an ulcer, it’s pretty mild. I have problems but not brutal fucking agony. Just a tendency to develop acid indigestion when I haven’t eaten in a while.

Still, it seems like my gut has been producing way too much acid for a long time and that definitely could cause an ulcer. And we have no other explanation for where that hemoglobin is going. I have not been bleeding anywhere that I know of. No nosebleeds, no cuts, nothing. So where is the blood loss happening?

He also mentioned anemia. I might be iron-deficient. That is distinctly possible… I don’t eat much meat except when I eat out, and I eat out only once a week these days.

And as far as I know, the only other sources of iron are a lot of nasty green leaf veggies that I am not keen to embrace. I was supposed to ask the pharmacists about iron supplements (which they keep behind the counter for some mysterious reason) but I forgot.

Speaking of the pharmacists, I will soon be taking Tectra, aka Pantoprazole (which sounds like a form of medieval Italian puppetry), which is an acid blocker like the Ranitidine I am already taking, but stronger.

Why is it stronger? because is belongs to a class of drugs with the most awesome name ever. Drugs like pantoprazole are know as proton pump inhibitors.

Is that not the most Star Trek thing you have heard today?

“Captain, I dinnae know how much longer I can keep this tub together. That last shot took out our primary proton pump inhibitor. Another one like that and we’re space dust. ”

“Five minutes, Scotty. I just need five more minutes. ”

“Aye… I’ll see what I can do. ”

Oh, and one last thing about my GP visit : I had to wait one and a half hours past the time of my appointment before I actually saw my GP. That’s bad.

But the good part is, I complained about it to him the moment I saw him, and that is quite positive for me because I usually have trouble expressing anger even in that mild a form and have even more trouble asserting myself on my own behalf.

He claimed not to know things were that bad, which is plausible. Doctors are often quite clueless about the non-medical aspects of their practice. That is understandable, after all, they are basically Talent and Talent has to focus on what it does and leave extraneous details to others.

He says he will look into it. I sure hope so. That shit is crazy-making. I ended up watching the tail end of some Breakfast TV type program, an entire episode of The Young And The Restless (it’s like two thirds nonwhites now, which is awesome), and some highly obnoxious Oprah-style female-oriented show with makeovers and recipes and stuff. God daytime television sucks.

I miss the days when I could watch game shows all morning and cartoons from noon to three!

And then more cartoons from four till six, then supper, then back for Wheel and Jeoprady at night. And when they are over, it’s prime time!

God I had a sad and lonely childhood.

Which is probably why I make videos like this.

It is more or less a short theater-style monologue, the sort of thing one might do if one was asked to bring something short for an audition.

Watching it now, it feels…. incomplete. The ending is too abrupt. It needed to be developed more somehow. I was trying to keep things lean and efficient, and so when it seemed like it was done, I resisted my usual tendency to want to cram things full of elaboration and just say “OK, then… it’s done.”

But I think I went too far. I should have at least said, right before the last line, “So… best country, best part of the country, best town, best job, best race, best religion, and best family!”

And only THEN say “How lucky can one guy get?”

Oh well, learn and move on!

Friday Science Demonstration, September 13, 2013

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Oooh! Friday the 13th in 2013! The triskaidekaphobics must be freaking out today, poor souls.

Luckily, I am not now nor have I ever been superstitious.

After al, it’s bad luck!

Here I am, back again with the science goodies. This week, have stuff from the world of brain science (natch), hydro-exploration, nanotech, quantum teleportation, and testicles.

We will start out with a story that is only sort of, kinda, maybe about science, but it is so cool that I just have to share it anyhow and damn the format.

An enormous aquifer has been discovered in Kenya!

How big? Enough to meet all of Kenya’s water needs for seventy freaking years.

And that’s just what it has in it now. Scientists say that this aquifer is replenished by distant mountains, so it should never run dry as long as it’s managed properly.

Which brings me to my little message for Kenya. Meet me at Camera Three.

Kenya, we don’t know each other very well, and so it’s not really my place to say this, but I feel it needs to be said by someone anyhow.

DO NOT FUCK THIS UP. I am serious. I know it’s hard to get your shit together when you have millions of starving people and not enough of anything, but do not flake on this.

This could make Africa a way better place to be. The impact of a find like this could be massive. It could rewrite the entire face of your part of Africa.

So don’t blow it!

Next, some news that I feel I need to share with despite a certain issue.

Japanese scientists have succeeded in doing the first complete quantum information transfer!

I feel compelled to share this because it sounds extremely important.

The issue with sharing it is that I do not understand nearly anything in that article. I grasp quantum data transfer (or ‘quantum teleportation’ as the press insists on misnaming it) and I think I understand how that could be used computationally for, as far as we can tell, literally instantaneous date transfer (welcome to Cloud 2.0, where getting it off a website is faster than from your own computer).

But I grok not the talk of transport efficiency and measuring after and whatnot.

So enjoy the story. I am positive that it is important as hell.

Just don’t ask me to explain it to you any time soon.

Next up, we have an article that asks “Are there things which science can never, ever know?”

Nope! Next question please.

Next we have a story from the plasmoid-hot world of nanotech about the invention of the world’s thinnest glass.

What I loved about the story is that this discovery was made by accident. The researchers were trying to find something else and stumbled upon the super-thin glass in the process.

That’s how I know that nanotech is the new plastics : people make awesome discoveries by accident on their way to making other awesome discoveries.

Oh, and I have to do this or I won’t be able to sleep at night. Read this direct quote from the article while I go and fetch a rolled-up newspaper.

Just two atoms in thickness, making it literally two-dimensional,

*BAP!* No! No no no! Naughty science writer! That does NOT make it literally two dimensional! It still has all three spatial dimensions, you untutored ninny! Granted, they are all tiny, but they are all still there and I know this because no matter how thin, it’s still fucking MATTER.

Now go in your corner and think about what you’ve done before I have to get out your crate.

Next up : brain science! Of course. We love our brain science here at the FSW.

Two stories of brains and science this week. First, some research indicates psilocybin, the stuff that puts the “magic” in “magic mushrooms”, maybe be useful in treating PTSD and depression.

Mice given a dose of psilocybin after being trained to fear a certain sound via operant conditioning recovered from that induced phobia far faster than the control group. Intriguing.

(And I know this isn’t relevant, but isn’t the idea of mice tripping balls on ‘shrooms adorable? Little mice laying on their backs, lazily pedaling their little mice legs because they think they are running in a running wheel the size of a planet… )

There’s also indications that the psilocybin induced the growth of new brains cells in the mice.

Now if I may doff my anti-transcendentalist hat, both the new brain cell growth and the rapid recovery from the phobia could be explained if the psilocybin killed a bunch of brain cells first.

Dying brain cells provide really amazing acid trips, and it’s easy to forget traumatic events when the brain cells with the memories are just not there any more, man.

On the other hand, if it’s more brain cells you want, you could just take a nap.

Sleep doesn’t boost the number of actual neurons, of course. Once you hit age 25, you pretty much have all the brain you will ever have.

But it does double the number of oligodendrocytes, otherwise known as the cells that manufacture myelin, in the brain while you sleep.

Myelin is the fatty coating that your body uses as the insulator for the electrical wiring that is your nervous system. Without myelin, your whole nervous system would short out.

Still, I am not sure having more of it makes much of a difference. It strikes me as the sort of thing where there is only “enough” and “not enough”.

Finally, saved for the end not because it’s important but because it’s funny, we have this story of an anthropological study that claims that men with smaller testicles are more likely to be involved in early childcare than their big-balled brethren.

So ladies, if you want a guy who will be great with the kids, look for a man with tiny balls. That is so intuitive that it’s hilarious. And a little suspicious.

That’s all for this week, folks. I will be back in seven days time with more awesome science.