I've got something like sciatica or neuropathic pain from L4-L5. Not a terrific place to be. Also have two seriously fucked up shoulders. And, I can't take NSAIDs due to an ugly interaction with drugs I'm on for my coworkers. So the solution is duragesic. It's a patch that delivers an opioid just like the nicotine patch delivers nicotine. Terrific product, really. To take enough percocet, I'd have had to eat a gram or two of acetaminophen, and I'd go from zero-to-stoned in whatever time the drugs took to dissolve. With the patch I hardly even noticed it starting up (about 20 minutes), and afterwards the pain just went away.
(note to people who've never suffered chronic pain: the pain doesn't "go away". opiates do not cure the cause of the pain, they allow the brain to function – and conduct life, daily activities – while the underlying reason for the pain remains. the only thing that makes pain go away is solving the problem. everything else is treatment.)
21 December, 2007
19 December, 2007
Comparing Apples and Cybernetics?
(rss people: this is a post from 12/19/07; it was ready to be pushed out and never was.)
I know a lot about drugs. I mean, I know a whole lot about drugs. This is for a number of reasons. The first is the occasional scourge of my immune system, another being that I spent most of the 90s reading Tihkal and Pihkal. Now, these are not exactly great reasons to claim to know a lot about drugs. But I'm not here to talk about diuretics. I'm here to talk about cybernetics.
While at college, I observed a man take yage, a drink usually containing P. viridis and B. caapi. Man is that some vile stuff. It generally makes you vomit – a lot – and this is part of the equation. You get enough of the stuff down, enough of the vile brew gets into your gut. Note that the vomit itself can become part of the desired effect – hallucination. Imagine that. Being escorted to some deity by two vomit snakes.
Okay, so keep the vomit snakes in your head for a moment. Let's instead talk about chemotherapy and antibiotics. In both cases we are giving the patient a harmful substance in the hope that we will kill off whatever is afflicting the patient before we actually kill them. Nobody who goes through this process ever feels "healed," they feel like they've gone through a war. And really, it's because they have.
And so, I sit here perhaps as Sasha Shulgin has, thinking, wow, what an inefficient way to reach god. Medicine, as advanced as it is. can still not produce consistent results. Why do we ask every patient if they're allergic to anything? Shouldn't we be able to tell if we're about to kill them with penicillin?
So add to the stack of vomit snakes and internal chemical warfare, let's address Apples (I sorta promised in the subject...).
Allow me a little theatre here. What, folks, is an Apple? It's primarily a gymnosperm. It's big and meaty and full of starches and sugars. In addition to all that, it contains all sorts of things (like magnesium, potassium, and zinc – in addition to the more complex chemicals) that we need to survive. It's not like anyone stuffs an IV in a bag and drips it into you when you're in hospital, but it certainly promotes health. Yet, how do we get all those benefits from apples? We masticate them in our mouths, swallow them, and then let them brew in the brine of our stomach which eventually yields us the benefits of the chemicals.
Where's he going with this shit?, you're wondering.
The point of all of the above is that we have a very messy interface into ourselves. Breathing is pretty gross if you've ever looked at the insides of someone's lungs as they breathe (I have), certainly blood circulation is icky, and the interface, let's say a needle, is imprecise, and, I dare say, draconian. Don't goddamn stab me with a needle when I don't feel well.
Here's the hook. People talk about brain-computer interfaces, or BCI. We've had some limited success with using nerves to control devices, and we've done some interesting work on DBS in unipolar depression and epilepsy. But where's my Apple (yarrr)?
The point is that we shouldn't be expending metric fucktons of money to develop a BCI when the interfaces we have already suck. Just ask an Apache or Spooky jock. There's a lot of information out there, and the way we're getting it into us is as messy as yage, an apple, or antibiotics. Here I fumble, quite adeptly, at this keyboard, conveying thoughts at about the speed I speak them. That's reasonably good, if you think that speech is a good mechanism of communication. Let's talk about variables/placeholders (Japanese has this), multithreadedness or even compression. Speech sucks. Emulating it is aiming for failure, because speech itself is a performance bottleneck.
So, again, dump the BCI and the dreams of BCI and all that shit you're building at MIT and all the (holy shit) money you're spending on it. Instead, work on ways of getting me information I need (like the weather in four hours) without having to grab my phone, use its pathetic web browser, and run some TCP (another wholly inadequate standard) connection to, say, wunderground.
Build it into my clothes. I carry, what, 5-8lbs of clothing around all day, depending on boots or pants (eg., denim vs silk). I want to get a chill on my back when my shirt knows there's precipitation coming. I really don't care where you put it.
Medicine is still flailing around dissecting gajillions of mice. They're not much further ahead than the BCI people. So let's focus on something different entirely. Let's work on the technology we have. Make smarter roads. Here in Virginia we repave everything every damn winter. Let's take that process and embed something in it that causes it to change color before it collapses? Gasp, dare we deploy roads as solar sinks? Why stop at high-end headphones? We have ultra-expensive amps and headphones. Why do we stop there? I know there are a lot of people that like to feel bass notes. You know what I want to feel in my headphones? Beth Gibbons. Or for that matter, Ben Gibbard.
I once said in an Amazon review (I think for the Sennheiser 650's) that I could hear the saliva in the back of Beth's throat on Mysterons, from Dummy. It's amazing, if you don't have an eq set to destroy your music with bass, or listening equipment doing the same. We're getting closer in the experience here to being able to trick the ear (I've jerked to look over my shoulder numerous times on a few sound systems). What else can we do? Randy Couture talked about stepping into a UFC ring, and the effect it has on you. 20+ thousand people, yelling. He says every hair on your body stands up, there's a huge endorphin surge, and your consciousness/set-and-setting changes drastically. So why can't we use all these messy interfaces to watch myself beat the piss out of Tim Sylvia?
Instead of trying to accomplish what you cannot achieve right now, accomplish something right now that accelerates your process to where you want to be. Or at least makes it more comfortable.
People are hell-bent on new ways to do things, new devices, new technologies. But nobody's improving what we've got. Some asshole developed Asimo instead of figuring out how to give someone a robotic or otherwise augmented leg. Why has Asimo technology not trickled down to the public? iRobot wasted very little time getting their API published. (and just for the record, I fucking love the iRobot people. Go see them at I/ITSEC and you'll understand). This very day, I could spend the cash, get the robot, and "embrace and expand" the technology. Nobody's "expanding" or "embracing" anymore. It's all a race to be the swinging dick. Maybe what we need is a little humility in our goals (that's you, string threorists!).
I guess I could sum all this up in what my friend Gunny Martinez would say, "Work smarter, not harder, knucklehead."
Make mine a gin and soda, double. And hold the fruit.
I know a lot about drugs. I mean, I know a whole lot about drugs. This is for a number of reasons. The first is the occasional scourge of my immune system, another being that I spent most of the 90s reading Tihkal and Pihkal. Now, these are not exactly great reasons to claim to know a lot about drugs. But I'm not here to talk about diuretics. I'm here to talk about cybernetics.
While at college, I observed a man take yage, a drink usually containing P. viridis and B. caapi. Man is that some vile stuff. It generally makes you vomit – a lot – and this is part of the equation. You get enough of the stuff down, enough of the vile brew gets into your gut. Note that the vomit itself can become part of the desired effect – hallucination. Imagine that. Being escorted to some deity by two vomit snakes.
Okay, so keep the vomit snakes in your head for a moment. Let's instead talk about chemotherapy and antibiotics. In both cases we are giving the patient a harmful substance in the hope that we will kill off whatever is afflicting the patient before we actually kill them. Nobody who goes through this process ever feels "healed," they feel like they've gone through a war. And really, it's because they have.
And so, I sit here perhaps as Sasha Shulgin has, thinking, wow, what an inefficient way to reach god. Medicine, as advanced as it is. can still not produce consistent results. Why do we ask every patient if they're allergic to anything? Shouldn't we be able to tell if we're about to kill them with penicillin?
So add to the stack of vomit snakes and internal chemical warfare, let's address Apples (I sorta promised in the subject...).
Allow me a little theatre here. What, folks, is an Apple? It's primarily a gymnosperm. It's big and meaty and full of starches and sugars. In addition to all that, it contains all sorts of things (like magnesium, potassium, and zinc – in addition to the more complex chemicals) that we need to survive. It's not like anyone stuffs an IV in a bag and drips it into you when you're in hospital, but it certainly promotes health. Yet, how do we get all those benefits from apples? We masticate them in our mouths, swallow them, and then let them brew in the brine of our stomach which eventually yields us the benefits of the chemicals.
Where's he going with this shit?, you're wondering.
The point of all of the above is that we have a very messy interface into ourselves. Breathing is pretty gross if you've ever looked at the insides of someone's lungs as they breathe (I have), certainly blood circulation is icky, and the interface, let's say a needle, is imprecise, and, I dare say, draconian. Don't goddamn stab me with a needle when I don't feel well.
Here's the hook. People talk about brain-computer interfaces, or BCI. We've had some limited success with using nerves to control devices, and we've done some interesting work on DBS in unipolar depression and epilepsy. But where's my Apple (yarrr)?
The point is that we shouldn't be expending metric fucktons of money to develop a BCI when the interfaces we have already suck. Just ask an Apache or Spooky jock. There's a lot of information out there, and the way we're getting it into us is as messy as yage, an apple, or antibiotics. Here I fumble, quite adeptly, at this keyboard, conveying thoughts at about the speed I speak them. That's reasonably good, if you think that speech is a good mechanism of communication. Let's talk about variables/placeholders (Japanese has this), multithreadedness or even compression. Speech sucks. Emulating it is aiming for failure, because speech itself is a performance bottleneck.
So, again, dump the BCI and the dreams of BCI and all that shit you're building at MIT and all the (holy shit) money you're spending on it. Instead, work on ways of getting me information I need (like the weather in four hours) without having to grab my phone, use its pathetic web browser, and run some TCP (another wholly inadequate standard) connection to, say, wunderground.
Build it into my clothes. I carry, what, 5-8lbs of clothing around all day, depending on boots or pants (eg., denim vs silk). I want to get a chill on my back when my shirt knows there's precipitation coming. I really don't care where you put it.
Medicine is still flailing around dissecting gajillions of mice. They're not much further ahead than the BCI people. So let's focus on something different entirely. Let's work on the technology we have. Make smarter roads. Here in Virginia we repave everything every damn winter. Let's take that process and embed something in it that causes it to change color before it collapses? Gasp, dare we deploy roads as solar sinks? Why stop at high-end headphones? We have ultra-expensive amps and headphones. Why do we stop there? I know there are a lot of people that like to feel bass notes. You know what I want to feel in my headphones? Beth Gibbons. Or for that matter, Ben Gibbard.
I once said in an Amazon review (I think for the Sennheiser 650's) that I could hear the saliva in the back of Beth's throat on Mysterons, from Dummy. It's amazing, if you don't have an eq set to destroy your music with bass, or listening equipment doing the same. We're getting closer in the experience here to being able to trick the ear (I've jerked to look over my shoulder numerous times on a few sound systems). What else can we do? Randy Couture talked about stepping into a UFC ring, and the effect it has on you. 20+ thousand people, yelling. He says every hair on your body stands up, there's a huge endorphin surge, and your consciousness/set-and-setting changes drastically. So why can't we use all these messy interfaces to watch myself beat the piss out of Tim Sylvia?
Instead of trying to accomplish what you cannot achieve right now, accomplish something right now that accelerates your process to where you want to be. Or at least makes it more comfortable.
People are hell-bent on new ways to do things, new devices, new technologies. But nobody's improving what we've got. Some asshole developed Asimo instead of figuring out how to give someone a robotic or otherwise augmented leg. Why has Asimo technology not trickled down to the public? iRobot wasted very little time getting their API published. (and just for the record, I fucking love the iRobot people. Go see them at I/ITSEC and you'll understand). This very day, I could spend the cash, get the robot, and "embrace and expand" the technology. Nobody's "expanding" or "embracing" anymore. It's all a race to be the swinging dick. Maybe what we need is a little humility in our goals (that's you, string threorists!).
I guess I could sum all this up in what my friend Gunny Martinez would say, "Work smarter, not harder, knucklehead."
Make mine a gin and soda, double. And hold the fruit.
18 December, 2007
clonazepam
my mid-day dose got rid of all those ouchies i worked up yesterday. naturally it's tightly controlled.
17 December, 2007
normally
i'd take two tylenol and keep working. but i'm exhausted and in pain, and there's nothing OTC i can take for it. fuck.
good morning
Wondering whether our new dress policy either contradicts itself or specifies a logical "or" here. But does a polo shirt fail the shirt/tie/sweater, to speak nothing of (gods!) suit? I think most days (I do own a single suit but quite a few shirts and ties), I wear a polo. It's not unprofessional or unkempt; have you ever looked at one of your vendors' consultants? I guarantee it will be slacks or jeans, a belt which probably has at least one tool on it, and a polo shirt with the first button buttoned. We don't send our Cisco guy away because he didn't wear a fucking tie.
This morning was like every other, more or less. I think in the shower, a lot. Sandy does not. So while I'm combing my hair, the out-of-left-field question comes up: Do you think Ireland will ever reunify? She pauses a minute, then gives an affirmative "no!", followed shortly afterwards by "where the fuck did that come from?"
It makes me desperately sad that after I got into the office before anyone else, I spent twenty minutes crawling around on my hands and knees trying to find a pill that I take daily to make other people more comfortable. I think I've mentioned this before, but back in july I dislocated both my shoulders pretty effectively. Around the same time, I started developing a painful sensation on my left anterior thigh. I'd been taking Nambutone with terrific results. Things that had been unbearable before became maybe not even annoying.
And now, one of these daily drugs, that I have to search out on the floor lest I miss a dose, conflicts very, very strongly with NSAIDs (basically, non-opiate painkillers like Tylenol, Vicodin, etc). So my blood levels of the NSAIDs have mostly tapered off, and I'm mostly back to me.
Only, now, it hurts to put my arms around Sandy,
13 December, 2007
Crap
The drug that was working beautifully for both my shoulders and my L-spine is interacting with a drug I can't not take (I can't even walk in a straight line on the two) and I have to stop taking it. This means my shoulders go back to being fucked up and my back goes back to hurting.
Boy am I gonna kill some motherfuckers with a dragonov tonight.
Boy am I gonna kill some motherfuckers with a dragonov tonight.
Sound, open and closed cans
Ever since I got my first set of open cans (Senn 590s), I decided that was the sound for me. You go back to sealed like the Koss or Bose offerings and there's just no comparison. And, really, I don't have any idea how it works. Let me tell you a story. I'm a closet homo. I really like Dido. Specifically the Life for Rent record (it hits the right musical and emotional chords with me; like I said, closet homo). The first track, White Flag, is wonderful in so many ways I won't write the essay it deserves here. White Flag opens with this incredibly warm vibrato synth note that pans right-left-right. This, as you can imagine, is wonderful with a good set of cans. Another point is the chorus, in which you can hear her singing to a chorus, and you can hear the pick hitting the individual strings.
So the story is that I burned the CD (we bought at iTMS) for the car for this 70-miles or so trip. It almost hurt to hear this beautiful track butchered by the sound system in the subaru. Everything was flat and muddy. But the interesting thing is, it was flat and muddy all around me! Having however many speakers the car has, the cans can hardly compete. The Shure 535's have 3 drivers per each. My guess is the BMW Logic Sound System would give them a real run or their money.
Headphones can do incredible things, but even a shitty sound system can produce effects that the cans can't hope to accomplish.
So the story is that I burned the CD (we bought at iTMS) for the car for this 70-miles or so trip. It almost hurt to hear this beautiful track butchered by the sound system in the subaru. Everything was flat and muddy. But the interesting thing is, it was flat and muddy all around me! Having however many speakers the car has, the cans can hardly compete. The Shure 535's have 3 drivers per each. My guess is the BMW Logic Sound System would give them a real run or their money.
Headphones can do incredible things, but even a shitty sound system can produce effects that the cans can't hope to accomplish.
27 November, 2007
More Cherryh
Despite getting my wife's cold over the holiday, I actually spent the time entirely unproductive. I could have read, hacked, or written. Instead, I opted for none of the above. I spent time perusing 4chan on my blackberry (!), and watching canned TV (Dexter on DVD – based on a book; do I get credit for that?). One might call making various desserts for thanksgiving productive, except for the fact the cream came out of suspension and I was greeted with butter all over the bottom of the oven. The latter literally caused billowing smoke to issue from our patio door. I'm sure we were very popular on Thursday.
At any rate, I suppose the reason I failed to actually read anything was the material I was reading: John Horgan's Rational Mysticism. It's an interesting concept, and Horgan is even a moderately interesting dude. But it's kind of a slog through the muck of half-baked religious zealots, rather than, you know, anything "Rational." Or am I misunderstanding the word? Is an objective narrative, explaining various religious (Horgan uses the term "mysticism", and I think that gives short shrift to folks like McKenna) ideologies "rational"? To me, rational implies thought, which demands criticism – or at least comparison – when addressing multiple, opposed, points of view.
And so, much as I hate to read more than one book at a time (one of which always suffers), I put aside Horgan and picked up something I'd been mostly considering as intellectual cotton candy: CJ Cherryh's latter two Chanur books, bound in a single edition (called Chanur's Endgame, after the final book).
A brief digression: It's kind of funny to see anthropomorphic cats with guns on the cover, and to read the various descriptions and blurbs. It's kind of hard to tell you're not reading a fantasy book until you actually get into the first book. Sandy was quick to point this out, and I can hardly disagree. However, having read Cherryh's fantasy books (well, a few of them), I don't see the parallel in her work, particularly regarding critters like the tc'a or knnn, or the Caliban/Weirds in 40,000 in Gehenna.
At any rate, as I got only a few pages into it, I was reminded, yet again, how hard she actually works on these books. I think I'm probably down to the last few science fiction books of hers I haven't read (although, eep, she's supposed to be working on a sequel to Cyteen), and I guess I read them far enough apart that I forget the level of detail she goes into. Not the mind-numbing, triumph-of-the-nerds world building that I've bitched about before, but it's almost like the world is the story, and the characters are simply bouncing around in it (hm, but not in a bad way, as that would seem to imply). At any rate, I quickly lost interest in the Horgan book, and I'll probably finish this one before picking Horgan up again (and of course, there's at least one Stross book asking to be read from my to-read pile).
It's worth noting that the reason I don't read more of the Cherryh books more quickly is the experience I encountered while reading Cyteen. I was taking the Metro to and from work, and so had a good hour or so per day to myself. The story was very engrossing, and I'd often just wait in the station if it was too crowded to read on the train, instead reading on one of the benches. However, as I got towards the end of the book, and the unread pages kept getting thinner and thinner, I was incredibly pained: if I finished the book, the story would be over, and I wouldn't have more to read. So I'd read a couple pages, smile, put it down, and look patiently at the tunnel for a train to arrive before wincing and going back to the book. I knew what was going to happen; the ending was clever if not exactly surprising. But, as I said, when it was over, it was over. I have a hard time rereading books, as I've got sort of an eidetic memory when it comes to that. I can forget the book in the intervening period, but if I get five pages in, I get all of it back pretty much instantly. This more or less means that when I'm finished with a book, it's over, and I am left without the characters I got to know in the book, frequently to my chagrin.
I guess if one were to pick literary heroes, it would be hard to go wrong with Ms. Cherryh. As such, I don't feel especially bad about reading borderline-furry, space-faring fantasy fiction. It's kind of daunting to see that her "other books by ..." page is actually, you know, a page (and that's just the SF stuff!), that she's still writing, and her work is just... well, it's splendid, really.
At any rate, I suppose the reason I failed to actually read anything was the material I was reading: John Horgan's Rational Mysticism. It's an interesting concept, and Horgan is even a moderately interesting dude. But it's kind of a slog through the muck of half-baked religious zealots, rather than, you know, anything "Rational." Or am I misunderstanding the word? Is an objective narrative, explaining various religious (Horgan uses the term "mysticism", and I think that gives short shrift to folks like McKenna) ideologies "rational"? To me, rational implies thought, which demands criticism – or at least comparison – when addressing multiple, opposed, points of view.
And so, much as I hate to read more than one book at a time (one of which always suffers), I put aside Horgan and picked up something I'd been mostly considering as intellectual cotton candy: CJ Cherryh's latter two Chanur books, bound in a single edition (called Chanur's Endgame, after the final book).
A brief digression: It's kind of funny to see anthropomorphic cats with guns on the cover, and to read the various descriptions and blurbs. It's kind of hard to tell you're not reading a fantasy book until you actually get into the first book. Sandy was quick to point this out, and I can hardly disagree. However, having read Cherryh's fantasy books (well, a few of them), I don't see the parallel in her work, particularly regarding critters like the tc'a or knnn, or the Caliban/Weirds in 40,000 in Gehenna.
At any rate, as I got only a few pages into it, I was reminded, yet again, how hard she actually works on these books. I think I'm probably down to the last few science fiction books of hers I haven't read (although, eep, she's supposed to be working on a sequel to Cyteen), and I guess I read them far enough apart that I forget the level of detail she goes into. Not the mind-numbing, triumph-of-the-nerds world building that I've bitched about before, but it's almost like the world is the story, and the characters are simply bouncing around in it (hm, but not in a bad way, as that would seem to imply). At any rate, I quickly lost interest in the Horgan book, and I'll probably finish this one before picking Horgan up again (and of course, there's at least one Stross book asking to be read from my to-read pile).
It's worth noting that the reason I don't read more of the Cherryh books more quickly is the experience I encountered while reading Cyteen. I was taking the Metro to and from work, and so had a good hour or so per day to myself. The story was very engrossing, and I'd often just wait in the station if it was too crowded to read on the train, instead reading on one of the benches. However, as I got towards the end of the book, and the unread pages kept getting thinner and thinner, I was incredibly pained: if I finished the book, the story would be over, and I wouldn't have more to read. So I'd read a couple pages, smile, put it down, and look patiently at the tunnel for a train to arrive before wincing and going back to the book. I knew what was going to happen; the ending was clever if not exactly surprising. But, as I said, when it was over, it was over. I have a hard time rereading books, as I've got sort of an eidetic memory when it comes to that. I can forget the book in the intervening period, but if I get five pages in, I get all of it back pretty much instantly. This more or less means that when I'm finished with a book, it's over, and I am left without the characters I got to know in the book, frequently to my chagrin.
I guess if one were to pick literary heroes, it would be hard to go wrong with Ms. Cherryh. As such, I don't feel especially bad about reading borderline-furry, space-faring fantasy fiction. It's kind of daunting to see that her "other books by ..." page is actually, you know, a page (and that's just the SF stuff!), that she's still writing, and her work is just... well, it's splendid, really.