a ba'b'ian journal

old stuff


  • December 31, 2001
spent most of the day at work hunting down a bug in the download. seriously hunting. i pulled out the java voodoo kit. the error message was a nullpointer exception in the code from oracle. i did a dissasembly of the class from oracle, and looked at the jav assembly (step up from java machine) code. and rick was playing with standard debugging printout and trial run techniques. the problem was in robert's code but he gave up around lunchtime. i actually took possession of his code and started trying things. and finally a breakthrough. i trace it to a field that was clobbered, and rick saw that it was happening i the second pass through a loop. so it clicked that the problem was after the line we were looking at, instead of before. robert was sending in a string to the database, which is correct for the normal way of doing things, but here he was using a new type of code, prepared statements, and just neglected to alter a statement for the new procedure. so he sent in the command string. and cleared the prepared statement. and we saw a null pointer exception. we actually did a search of the oracle support database, and found two cases similar, with no posted solution! it must have been the same thing. but we didn;t finish filing the case, and rick went back and put comments in on what we found.

so i'm here at ck's. the steak and egg. i asked for hot tea, but he must not have heard me and gave me iced tea. normally i would get oj. but that has always made me gassy. and finally i can let go.

i took me a party nap. got up at 11. tried to go to hooters. closed. listening to the oh brother where art thou soundtrack. real music. broke me down.

the hardest thing is being prepared for the unpredicted.

i drove over to roy's. and as my luck would have it, he was having a party. he said he hadn't had a new year's party at his place for a few years. lucky me!

deborah, his squeeze. eboe, a 8th grade lit teacher. kevin, a military buff, into aikido. carol was there, from back in the day. a bunch of sca fold. a guy david, a machinist. me trying to be sociable. i stole one of eboe's christmas beers, and as i tried to take another, he corrected me and told me not to take those. so i switched to this energy drink "whoop ass" in a thin can. with royal jelly. i might see them all at "shadow con" this weekend.

i have problems with appropriateness. sometimes i will do something stupid, and erin will call me on it. i really appreciate that. sometimes i've known women who can be what i think is "too nice" i will do something stupid that they dont like, but they will just let me go on. or maybe i just wasn't paying attention. i know aimee has a problem of just shutting down when she's angry. i need to tell erin that i appreciate it. note to self.

  • December 29, 2001
It's almost the end of the year. I guess I'm going to needto start a new page.

With mass culture, everyone can get or look at the best of everything. in small, say "developing" cultures, everybody sings, and everybody dances, and everybody tells stories. But with mass culture, especially western with telecommunication, we get to see the best writing, the best singing, the best dancing, and ordinary joes just dont even bother, and certainly wouldn't get listened to. I suppose cooking can almost be like that as well. with mass production, people dont need to take the time to cook specially, when they can go out and let professionals do it. I guess we're lucky that cooking really is pretty darn simple, and we have to do it constantly, so a lot of people actually can cook for themselves. But music? writing? storytelling? that is a lot of work, and darn hard, and most people just can't compete, and dont try. so we lose the diversity, and the microcultures (but to a large extent, not food microcultures). when we can get the best, personal, local styles are not good enough.

something that I just hit, that I'm really wondering about. I asked Erin to go see 'A Beautiful Mind', an 'oscar contender' about a schizophrenic mathematician (with all the mathematicians at work, I though she might be interested), but she said she had plans. i came back to it and asked her what her plans were, and she told me she had a date, but then she said she didn't really know what they were going to do, go see a movie. It didn't occur to me (I guess I don't get out much) to make plans to do something at a particular day and time, but not actually have something in mind. I guess I always have something in mind to do when I ask someone else to do something. silly me. well it seems silly to me now. i guess it's obvious. i always either just get together last minute, or have something in mind in advance (if only for the evening or next day). but one thing i've heard about is that women like to just be taken out, with the man in charge and taking care of everything. so i've been making a mistake. though it sounds courteous to let them know what we will be doing. of course, just a few days ago, on laura's birthday, she said she was going out with sharee, and i asked her where she was going, and she said she didn't know. maybe girls are just not that into figuring out what they are going to do in advance. not quite so dominating and always in control? so now i'm wondering is erin going out with a guy or a girl? but she was being a little private about it. privacy. i still don't get it.

and then i asked aimee to go see it. i almost said that i asked erin first, why would i do that? if you do stuff that might sabotage a relationship, then you dont feel as bad when it doesnt work, because you know you did something wrong. i guess. stupid bad habits. and i'm going to church with her.

i got 'return to castle wolfenstein' and i played it till 4 in the morning. some things that i noticed and missed about the original. The shouting in german isn't as intense. i'm not getting the feeling that these are real people. and their fighting is vicious. almost machine like and inhuman. kind of like the terminator. they come after you and come after you. in this game they are actually better at it than in doom and quake. they team up on you aned us strategy. one lays down cover fire for the other to move up on you. and yet somehow it loses it's impact. they just seem like monsters and not men. that self-preservation kicks in and you dont feel the least bad about killing them. them or you. i'm not sure its quite captures the horror, though. because there is no sense of it being wrong. you do it because you have to. but in a real war, people say 'you do it because you have to' but there is always the understanding, that, no, you don't really have to. you can just run away. they mention that. there is always just this macho posturing. but here, you can't run away, you dont have a choice (excpet to turn the game off). the thing is. in the first wolfenstein. you could come up one a situation where the guard would run out of bullets and surrender and yell 'I'm unarmed' and would just stand there. you could just let him go. killing someone under those conditions really gets to you. that's real psychological stress. you feel bad about that. that's the real horror of war. sure, there is feeling scared for your life and fighting for defense. but in that mood to shift to just killing someone who isn't dangerous after all. my lai. that gets you. since this is a game, you can go searching around for treasure, and have to kill people while searching around, but it doesn't have the same sting. you already think of it as a game at that point, and they no longer are people. i don't know. i've only played it the one session, so i don't know how i'll adjust. i just remember that after some point from playing the first one, the human screams, killing people pleading for their lives, i was scarred, and i needed to recover. this just seems like a little game.

shoot the hostage

so i drift towards a kind of satanism. the notion of being happy under a loving god while others are out in the cold seems undesirable. i'd rather be out in the cold.

a different look at what awakening is, from 'psychology of awakening'. awakening is the release from a consciousness mediated sense of self and instead acting out of the pure and total 'unconscious' mind.

dude. that was a date to end all dates. it didnt go well. and it really didnt go badly. we didnt have much chance to talk, except in the car. i'm sitting at hooters, again. but that was the plan. i left my car at the church and we drove in her car to the movie at wolfchase. a beautiful mind. it remindied me why i dont want to get married and have kids. they had an insulin shock therapy scene. i had heard about that. man. i just didnt feel like talking after that. i dont feel like ever talking after that. aimee liked it, though. something about she had gone to lunch with tom miles.

let me reiterate. i hope i never speak to another woman again.

i think i love her. but i sure didntg act like it. maybe i dont? was i scared to reveal myself. dude was preaching about what happens if love becomes obseessive. there is fear of various kinds.

theresa, the bar babe here, says everybody hates this place. uh!

maybe it's jjust because i failed. i failed to remotely involved or interesting. i dont think i was even nice. i was just a lump. and meanwhile theresa is like a little busy bee.

girl was bitching about getting only a forty dollar tip.

theresa drinks vodka.

theresa has long hair. i asked her if it was a lot of work. she said it gets in the way. i asked because erin seems to be growing her hair out. i'm just wondering if i should encourage her. i do like it.

i got a dance with whomever she was. the black haired babe. and adera. and adera remembered me and gave me a great dance. and i tipped her ten dollar.

what it means to be a button-pusher: if there was a button that would destroy the world, destroy the universe, i would push it. so i want what nno one else would would want. i am the will to oppose all other will.

  • December 19, 2001
so it's the next day, and all i can think about is that Aimee said that she wasn't sure we could be friends because i saidi thought she was boring. It seemed like I discounted that, and that she didn't still think that, but now I'm not so sure.

  • December 18, 2001
where does the time go? seems like only yesterday monica was crawling around the white house floor on her hands and knees.

i'm sitting he at automatic slim's tonga club waiting for Aimee. I'm early. I'm having a Guinness. In a can. Cigarette smoke wafting into my face.

I just saw a proof of the monty hall, goat problem, that was done by taking a program for the simulation, using data flow analysis and optimization, and refactoring it to a simpler form, that directly shows that the odds are 1 to 2 i n favor of switching when monty opens the door to a goat. proof though program refactoring. joel was into it. but somehow i had trouble buying all the assumes. people resist going along, and rationalize that it is an even bet. i i think about it. that is safe to err on that side, if they might be cheating. maybe, i dont know. i've done the analysis myself.

so erin is going back to florida tomorrow morning for christmas. i missed her today. well i walked by when she was talking and didn't want to interrupt. and she didn't come by. so i'm sure i'm wrong.

i went to sleep early yesterday. like 7. i wanted to get up later and do online christmas shopping. i was procrastinating. but at two thirty in the goddam morning i get a page. the stupid download failed. me sleeping. but i needed to get up so i sign on. and do you type on this little silly keyboard? Even a cat couldn't type on this keyboard!

Dinner has been nice...thanks for meeting me (and compromising on the time). I've been a maniac...ready to lace up my running shoes and not willing to give up my time to do anything else. Taking tonight off has been fun.

A pleasant evening with Aimee. a bit of revelry. She really is sweet. i think 'kitten' best describes it. and me trying to be chivalrous. I walked her to her car. order of the cross and all.

and so I go over to the map room to chill out. red bull. whatever. and whom do I meet? Michele. lightened hair. she is having fun as a psychology student. some things really do make sense.

I don't choose heaven. I don't choose freedom. I choose chains.

Aimee helps me to be content with my place. Michelle has helped me not to try to be satisfied with being in isolation.

a moment of realization is worth a thousand prayers.

  • December 5, 2001
there is a bioinformatics conference in tucson about which erin sent me something from the java users group here in memphis. a week at the end of january. i thought about it. but i'm not overly interested in bioinformatics. there is less there than i thought. kiran has writing me about a paper for bioinformatics. i just don't care anymore.

it is only reasonable that the goodness or evilness of my nature should be influence by how well i have been treated.

erin has decided that we should drive separately to the mensa christmas party

  • December 5, 2001
so i thought about it. she clearly meant if i had 2000 here at work. which i don't.

  • December 4, 2001
that was different. erin said she had something for me. she asked if i had win 2k. she had the star trek weakest link iin some computer format. on some device needing usb transfer. so i asked if she would come to dinner. and she said she would think about it. that's what you say when you dont want to say yes, but you want to be nice. hmm.

  • December 1, 2001
At long last, i got the java compiler working on my palmtop. i don't know if i will use it, but i got it working. that's a big deal for me. it's one of the reasons i got this thing. writing in bars is just an added plus.

so i'm sitting here at discretions. a social club. something different. down at the pinch. a person should be open to new ideas.

i still fill good about quitting school. they're playing purple rain. that's cool.i wrote and told aimee about it.

wow. black r&b vocal harmony is about togetherness.

single by choice. prefers his own company.

barry white. damn.

ok. truth is truth. however you are. drunk or whatever. sitting in a bar. it's still true. but you might miss it. maybe you're too sad to listen.

have you ever been the lynchpin? the little piece of the universe. that everything depends on? maybe you shouldn't go back and try to correct your mistakes.

i hate being cold, you know? being cold and shivering. it happens, and you can accept it. but i don't like like it. ok, maybe i'm a little drunk. and that's a little obvious. but i thinkt needed to be said. i don't like hating things. i just wanted to say.

how would you create a universe in which everything supported everything else?

who knows what the future will hold?

viva la christos!

man. the more things change, the more they stay the same.

my sweet lord. i really want to see you.

to sit. just to sit. in the woods. to be free. or where-ever. and for everything around you to be undisturbed. peace. and then you can be apart from it all.

working for the order of the cross is an experience in itself. you can't always get everything right. but you know you are going in the right direction.

to fight back the darkness. not because you think that there will be no darkness. but just because you fight back the darkness.

i'm at the pancake house that i went to with andrea. sitting in the corner. it has been an interresting morning. i have sweat stains under my armpits. i am obviously not getting ready to go to church. i'm an up all nighter. i'm hoping to go to the meditation meeting at the eastern sun at 8:30. it is about 25 or six to 8

i missed it. i didn't get finished with breakfast until too late. i actually drove by. there were cars there. but i didnt want to disturb them. and there was really no need for me to go in.

  • November 27, 2001
i just had the 'i hope i never go into another classroom for the rest of my life' experience. i'd heard about it. i guess from people who didn't have fun in school. i was having fun. but i just couldn't finish this project for the one class, mostly because i just had no interest in doing what was required. we were supposed to do some neuro-fuzzy project using matlab. i am a professional programmer. i don't use matlab. i just don't. i won't. i could have, if i had cared more written my own version of the tools in matlab. andi wanted to do that, and i still want to do that, but at the time i picked my project, i was into metaphor, and i wanted to do a project involving that. but using neuro-fuzzy programming and writing a metaphor simple do not fit easily, and i didn't put in the effort to make it happen. i was working on a paper to talk about the motivation and background for the project, but with no implementation or results, i basically had no reason to write anything up. the project is 50% of the grade for the class. so i have given up on this class. and somehow, giving up on this class has made me feel like i can just give up on the whole thing. i just dont feel interested any more. in taking classes. i still like learning. but i just dont want to do it in a classroom on anyone else's terms. part of this reaction is from what just happened with doug. doug has always been into learning things by himself. after the depressing class, after which i decided to just give up (and i can do that. there is no reimbursement depending on grades or scholarship or job waiting on me to do well and graduate), i went out to the bookstore (borders) to buy some books. hey i have money. who needs a school? and i think it's a way geeks console themselves--going out and buying books. $280-worth. but i ran into doug there. and he had a java question he had been working on for a couple of days. his object oriented understanding needed a little work, since he just threw away all the object handles he created. he was trying to do a pretty simple animation and he subclassed a canvas to draw a ball object. we put debugging printouts and found that his paint just wasn't being called. and then i noticed. he had capitalized the 'p' in paint. so it didn't work. grr. and somehow, that made me feel that i had gotten all i wanted from classrooms. i can learn fine by myself. i bought a couple of books on design patterns (i have the first 1, and bought vols 2 and 3 of patterns in java). i got the o'riley book on ejb. i got a book on 3d computer game graphics. i bought a book on programming for the java virtual machine. i just recently got the dragon book on compiler design from amazon, and now maybe i will write a compiler to java byte code. i'd like to do some genetic programming as well. and of course, there is always the holy grail of a program that can do programming. and not simply a program generator (though those are fun), but a program with some kind of understanding the way us limited computer guys have understanding. and i got a book 'code complete' from microsoft about software engineering. that should be good for a chuckle. but anyway, with luck, no more classes for me. that phd thing was just vanity, anyway.

  • November 27, 2001
why are women so nice? since women are smaller than men, if they weren't nice, they'd get beaten up. plus, it is good to be nice. cooperation is helpful. but if you have become adapted to wander around and kill things (like men), being nice is not such a good thing. it's good to cooperate with just a few people, but not just everyone in general.

  • November 23, 2001
it's getting very annoying. since everyone was gone, i got a lot done. and i even got more done after robert left. and he is about the least disturbing as anyone could be. it seems like just hearing someone else typing is enough of a distraction. and erin is talking about working on the weekend and taking off during the week.

erin is curling my toes. she likes the attention and is being appreciative, and we do have a lot of interests in common. ..i think more than anyone else i have ever met. we don't have the history as some people i know. but we don't talk on the phone much. i get the feeling, she doesn't have so much interest in me as she just likes the attention. but she is nice. i told her that i was going to have a painful weekend with this project. and she told me about the stuff she was going to do. computer toys she would play with, and she might come in to work. and she said she'd be thinking of me. mmm. now i'm distracted.

  • November 22, 2001
happy thanksgiving

the walenda factor. there's some preacher guy that gives little messages on the radio in the morning. often it's some old joke told straight (or is it just poorly) to show some point. sometimes it's inspiring. and a lot of times i just don't agree. but it has become a habit. once he mentioned the walenda factor. one of the flying walendas, some circus performer, died in act. his wife said he was becoming more and more concerned with safety precautions. preacher took it that he wasn't spending enough time on practicing and gave it as a lesson not to let preparation for failure keep you from succeeding. well maybe. maybe that makes sense to say if you want to promote your no-risk, no-reward greedy materialistic outlook. but then again, maybe walenda was slipping for some other reason (getting old maybe) and because of that he both started spending more time on precautions and made the mistake that killed him. I take this as an example of people drawing unnecessary conclusions about what causes what to support their beliefs. the walenda factor.

general relativity implies determinism (!). for space-time to be curved, there must be enough time over some interval coexisting that space can stretch into it. so for some little stretch, the past and the present and the future all exist together (at the same time?). So for that little stretch, the past, present and future are fixed together. hence there is determinism (well, some at least), and i guess if there is some, there isn't any room for randomness to creep in. but quantum mechanics (which is a more precisely demonstrated bit of physics) is at odds with this notion. relativity has a lot of metaphorical baggage, that quantum physics doesn't share(which often just ignores a desire for interpretation). the notion of time is fraught with metaphorical reasoning.

  • November 19, 2001
i am way behind now. i stayed up till 6 coding up the bioinformatics. then i couldnt really get started. i have to do this computational intelligence project by next tuesday. i took two days off and one is about gone. i'm working on a system to use metaphor quality as fuzzy membership. i found someone who evaluates metaphores of mind, and reference lakoff quite a bit, but he has the user input metaphors from a discourse already put into the form of propositional calculus. it then does some type of symbolic reasoning from that. i probably won't do so well.

i tried going by to get an adviser. dr. nasrouie. they had pictures of everyone. i was thinking what i want to do a thesis on. i really want to create a talking computer system. language understanding. computer hardware has gotten just to the point where everyone has the horsepower for speech recognition. the quality and reliability isn't particularly good. there isn't much for them to say. but there is all that information out on the web to ask about. some of this metaphor stuff addresses what it means to have an understanding. an understanding is a way of relating situations and ideas to stuff we know. ther are some basic grounding metaphors that come from having bodies that serve as a basis for many concepts. we are containers. states are related back to containers. we are "in" a state. properties are things. i need to come up with a representation for the underlying metaphors.

so, in the bioinformatics class, the class decided not to have class on the wednesday before thanksgiving. i guess that's good for me.

i got a couple of books in from amazon. the dragon book on compilers and being nobody, going nowhere by some buddhist nun.

i'm sitting here at rp tracks.

  • November 17, 2001
harry potter was good. a little boring in spots. it seemed faithful to the book, though i hadn't read it. hermione had very big hair.

we went to ja ja's, a thai place for dinner. had trouble finding it because we were looking at a misleading map. but it worked out ok. the waittress told us what to have. we had egg rolls and pad thai. erin didn't finish hers and i ate the last of it, even though she has a sinus infection. erin is nice, and she seemed like she wanted to talk. but i am just not an interesting person.

eddie a daniel came by on their way downtown to the fire museum. i was just not interesting. and daniel used the bathroom, when i hadn't flushed it. blech. he probably doesn't think much of me.

i guess, on a good note, I'm boiling a chicken and i'm going to put in some rame noodles, instead of eatthe fri e d chicken i have left. and i started the day off at 174 pounds.

i have been able to stop writing to aimee. to be aware that it was only a mere physical attraction, and not even a mutual interest was helpful. the hard part was admitting it to myself. i guess i didn't even want to acknowledge it, i just rather preferred to think that i am being nice or encouraging or friendly. but she does not care, other than in that 'i'm a good person, so of course i care' self-image sort of way. it was only a matter of time before i gave up. i'm pretty patient or tenacious or obsessive, or however you want to put it, but things will be however they must.

all is as it should be.

how do i unto thee?
let me count the ways.
i do unto thee as i would have thee do unto me.
i do not do unto thee as i would not have thee do unto me.
i do unto thee as thou would have me do unto thee.
i do unto thee before thou doest unto me.
i do unto thee as thou hast done unto me.
i do unto thee as i want to do unto thee. i do not do unto thee.
i do unto thee as i do unto thee.
i neither do unto thee nor do not do unto thee, nor both, nor neither.

robert met his current wife diane at a get together from one of his buddies. i dont have any buddies to hook me up.

  • November 16, 2001
so that was two days without eating. i had sausage and eggs for breakfast. i have ended up at 175 pounds. when you dont eat you get a sort of deep body fear. that is a little reduced.

i got compared with Job a while back. does that mean bad things keep happening to me?

wei brought chocolate cupcakes in to work. i ate two. guess i have to skip lunch. i hope i'm not getting obsessed.

so i have tickets to harry potter at eight o'clock. i'm going with erin. i walked over and asked about if she was ready to go see it, without really thinging about going with her. and she just assumed i was there to ask her out to see it.

  • November 15, 2001
i made it a wholeday yesterday without eating. it has been a while.i am going to try to today as well. i dont even remember going two days. today is the thansgiving lunch here at work. not tempting.

  • November 13, 2001
how time flies when you're doing nothing.

wow. that was something. i had to take a break after that one. i wrote aimee and offered to listen if she wanted to talk about things were going. and she said she wanted to keep her life personal. i guess she was triying to put it as politely as possible. keep my nose out of her business. we just aren't friends. and if that were it by itself, it wouldn't be so chilling. but i just feel chilled. arctic. what does any of this stuff matter.

i got a lecture on ethics. actually erin came to ask me a programmer ethical question. there was some confused code and i told her to fix it. then i asked robert and he gave me the buddhist principles. do no harm. take nothing that isnt yours a be generous with what is yours. do not lie, or mislead, or speak harshly or inappropriately. do not perform sexual misconduct, or more generally, and greedy or selfish action, which may harm others. Do not intoxicate the mind, with drink or drugs or deleterious thoughts.

a gloomy day. an 'i just want it to be over' kind of day.

  • November 2, 2001
Spoon! there is a live action 'tick' series on fox. i only caught the last fifteen minutes, but that was the tick alright.

i'm sitting here at the steak and ale. newcastle. ribeye. was this cow orked by good people?

saw 'monsters inc.' disney. well-crafted. a bit ordinary. randy newman score.

got home doug had a message on the machine. something about being at starbucks at three. it was three. i came down here. no doug. had a venti chai. wasting a lot of money today. could be anywhere in the country. college kids. couple a blondes. dudes with a laptop. maybe i'll go over to bookstar.

anger and worry are unnecessary. at least, they are't things worth keeping.

it's days like this that make you want to call in an airstrike.

i really should be doing something.

so i get home. listen to the messages again. the next message, had i taken the time to listen to it, said that the meeting was canceled. oh well. adventure.

  • November 2, 2001
gellidonotology. geliontology. gelioncology.

happiness, schmappiness.

i think i don't have to worry about my happiness. that ship has sailed.

so erin likes shooting. she took an outdoors class, and shot skeet. she went duck hunting with her dad.

so tracy was supposed to have an exhibition of her work at java cabana today. i didn't see it in the paper. and i was tired and i went to sleep after dinner. and i was thinking the paintings would probably be there for a little while. and i was thinking i would maybe get up and go. but i didn't. maybe i'll try to tomorrow. so much for being her friend.

time as a resource is a metaphor. culturally enforced with all this paying for time. i'm starting to lose track of what it is supposed to mean to have "paid vacation". according to elizabeth brandt referred to by lakoff the pueblos have no way to say they didn't have enough time for something. they could say there path didn't take them there or they couldn't find a path to that. indian time. they dont see time like that. they come across as lazy.

  • November 1, 2001
no vandalism. gained two pounds, probably from candy. didn't get home till a quarter to nine, so i missed any kids, if there were any. i'm back at the emerald, awaiting some pad thai chicken. that was fast.

  • October 31, 2001
happy halloween.

i feel like carrying a knife around again. i couldnt find one.

ive gotten down to around 175 pounds. maybe i should celebrate ramadan. fasting during the day. i plan to stop eating very little at 160, but i hope mostly to get into the habit of just eating less.

on sunday, aimee didn't show. as predicted. i didn't check my e-mail, but she had sent a message in the morning that she had to decline. maybe some other time, at some place besides my house. i've felt variously. some anger. but i don't think i should ask her out anymore. i probably shouldn't have this time. but now i have a written reminder. what is this maybe some other time stuff? just being nice, i guess.

i'm tired. im going to get home late from school. i may miss the trick or treaters. i hope i dont get rolled.

  • October 26, 2001
i am stretched beyond reckoning.

i'm sitting here at le petit bistro. a french place. i ordered the duck. i invited aimee over to dinner sunday. said i would make a duck. she could bring george. she said george probably wouldn't be coming. she probably wont be coming either. but we'll talk. why do i think we probably won't talk?

i am feeling very tense. there is a big load to production sunday morning. wei and justin are about finished for the stuff for the end of november and i am hardly along. we already even gave justin some of my stuff. i am getting pitiful.

the war does not go well. they have taken this opportunity to empower themselves, and to take away some of the freedoms of the people. i heard a pundit say that there has been an increase in bloody-mindedness out in washington. fuck ramadan.

i updated my profile on travelocity so that it will tell me about cheap flights. to san fran or vegas under 200, or frankfurt, paris, or amsterdam under 300. paris is cheaper than san fran. frankfurt is cheaper than vegas. and amsterdam (with a direct flight) is more expensive than frankfurt.

the presentation, i guess, when pretty well on tuesday. chaotic self-organization and structure emergence in intelligent systems. it was kind of long. a little over an hour. and it stretch over a broad range of topics. emergence. cellular automata, complex systems. neural networks. the brain. consciousness. i'm not sure how helpful it was, but i tried. on thursday, Dr. Kozma did refer back to it.

finally, we found the algorithm that we are supposed to implement for bioinformatics. after we had given up and were searching for something else. but i took a shot and gave it one last look. dude who has the company posted a version of the paper that didnt have the algorithm. but we found it in a paper in ibm's archive. not very sportsmanlike, i would say.

place has filled up. maybe they want the table. i guess i must be on my way. something to say. something to say. infinity in a grain of sand. brad needs a new heart. here today. not here today.

  • October 20, 2001
a thing is true by virtue of what it means.

so what is it about them. well, first, i didnt know that there were any women that i would be interested in. that's just because what i'm interested in is somewhat rare and i just didnt know of any. then, of course, i got to know a few. so what's the deal. it turns out that there are basins of attraction as to what people's personality are like. personality types. i guess the intp list really opened my eyes. it comes from what kinds of things people look for to make them happy. in our case, it is ideas. and that's rare for people in general, but it is especially rare for women. that is, its more common in men. so women who are into that get slurped up pretty quick, and are usually involved. and sure, it isnt always an exclusive preference. aimee for example. she is into that, but looks in other areas quite a bit. so i'm somewhat into her, but i dont have the same reaction to her as to some who are much more into that area. but there are some. quite a few, actually, but somewhat hard to find, or maybe i just i wan't looking because i didnt know. most people are more into their service or controlling and dominating others, or physical activities. so i guess i was lucky enough to know erin actually because she was unlucky enough not to be interested in men. shame. lots of guys that would really appreciate her. i been thinking, it must would feel good to her. i guess i'm not smooth enough to approach the subject. i shouldnt have gone there. ok. personality types. rare, but they exist. so i guess i shouldnt worry. that does feel a lot better. michele really was a little young. and her anger i guess got in my way. i just didnt trust her, and i didnt open up enough, and took her for granted. i probably just wasnt any fun to her. ok, so i actually have a type. that's something.

i've gone out. i'm at the hideaway cafe on highland. lots of college chicks. ok, moved on to newby's kind of dead. man. this poor band. they are having fun, i guess. but an almost empty room. one spaced out blonde been dancing. some freakish medium older couple dancing. javier mendoza. vaguely latin. ok. theyre done. go the stones on the box. an improvement, really. help me baby, i aint no stranger.

so what are they going after. the whole concept of trying just young chicks, i guess at that age, they are usually just into the physical. and that can be good for the worfld weary warrior. who is that guy who that would make sense to. somebody damn frustrated. divorced. broken. really in need of something to renew his zest for life.

dig it, dude. i am very reclined. back at the hideaway. it's hard to find places where they let you sit this close to the floor.

ok, so i like writing. what's that about? i thing that's more about my just liking the ideas that i think about when i'm trying to come up with something to say. it seems like most of the people who are into journaling are into the whole sensory thing. that was trippy. i just let my head go all the way back and just touch typed. without eve looki ng at the keyboard. different. beer. ambrosia. not so good on this odd sized keyboard. ok. writing. mosts word painters are looking at it in a different way. it's more about creating an artificial world. and they get into the zone. lost. i guess they live in the little dream world they have constructed, for a little while. the same one theyre reader goes to. and i guess,if they are a hack, they are trying to make money off it. and trying to help the reader get off into their desired little fantasy. too weak an imagination to live in their own. or maybe the words concretize it enough to give it that extra bit of reality over the washed out world of the imagination. good old beer.

so it's closing time again. i just got out for a little bit. a couple hours. i think it was good. bar chick is bodacious. i asked the chick here playing solitaire if she wanted to play something. just wanted to play solitaire. clearly poorly done on my part. maybe poker. or blackjack. or fizzbin. but not "something". so it was a learning opportunity, perhaps. and i've gotten a little writing done. cute barchick said theyre closed. but i thought of something. i should have asked card playing chick to a hand. i didnt have the C. the C to her coming home with me. a real drinkers game. should have been texas hold'em.

well. that was cool. i was walking up to cks. and there was this chick talking to some scary looking dude. she was telling him it was halloween, and he needed to look scary. like this guy walking up. me. it's halloween. some goth chick in the corner. wearing a hood. a couple of old hub workers. good old memphis.

so i just read about the romance of mathematics. it is a higher truth. a way to approach the mind of god. mathematicians are heroes. with pocket protectors. i think of john at work. mousy little guy. writes his programs. tries to do brilliant work. it is pretty impressive. then goes to school to teach. valiantly saving the world from bad coding. what ( what a distraction. someone knocked over a sugar bowl. raymond said call the cops. ) a crock. lakoff is talking about how the ideas in maths are dependent on human embodiment. properties (classes) are containers, and we know about containers because we are containers-- we put things into ourselves.

that's what i'm talking bout. come my lady. so i'm sitting here at platinum again. i was driving down mt moriah. some poor girl was doing fifty and the cops pulled after her just after she passed me. better her than me. what could she have been hurrying off to at four in the morning? too bad for her. so i was sitting there writing this, and some dancer came up and looked at it. they are looking exceptionally skanky tonight.

ruby tuesday. in ck's. i guess it's a stones sort of evening. catch your drems before they slip away. it's just nice to be warm

  • October 17, 2001
so I woke this morning, nightmare-like. i guess it wasn't really much of a nightmare, but it was about maybe my deepest fear at present. and i woke up and just kept thinking about it, and can't go back to sleep. but i've slept almost 8 hours- the amount where if i wake up i have a lot of trouble going back to sleep, and if i go back to sleep, i always show signs that i've slept too much. but it's also an amount where i still feel tired, and i always believe that it isn't enough sleep (which is why i try to go back to sleep). anyway, the dream. i don't remember what was going on before, but i remember something was happening. then i am almost late for a cruiseiam taking. i get up to the plank just as the conductor is about topull it away, and ask him if this is 7165, the number of the trip. it is. i get on and it pulls away. i immediately get into a room, it looks kind of like a cafeteria, and there are a lot of people sitting. i'm carrying a roundish soft suitcase bundle, and wearing white sailors (swabby, like popeye, clothes), and a littlesort of navy looking one of those rectangular caps, white. i feel embarassed at the situation of being so late, and i take the cap off, and i look to get out of that room, and i go up right, up the stairs, to the observation deck. up here, i can see the coast flying by. we're really moving. there are a lot of people, sort of fullof chairs, densely packed, almost like a theater, but sunshiny (through some partial windows it is partly enclose, and up at the front is the steering "wheel" of the ship (traditional ship-looking), and the pilot. erin is sitting up there on a bench, and i go sit to her left, and on her right is joel, and she is rubbing his leg, as one might do affectionately. and that's it. it doesn't sound like much, not particularly nightmarish. but as i said it reflects my current deepest fears-- that of being unloved, having gotten on the "boat", but too late. obviously, it is the "love boat", so many other people have already gotten on, and i feel embarassed because i am so new at it. a swabby, because i try to serve. the thing with erin. i feel i am sortof invading her space, and i always am afraid i am unwanted. and the stuff with joel, i guess i am jealous of her closer relationship with him than me, and am afraid she really just cares more about him than me. but various forms of just plain fear.

i can't laugh at myself. maybe it hurts too much, i don't know. i don't even think of it as something to aspire to.

i tried to do some fancy stuff, and it just ended up confusing. pat says it's a mess. i did it to speed stuff up, but it didnt speed it up. though i was trying to break up a component into model view controller

  • October 13, 2001
so maybe i'm looking at this in the wrong way. who is she, and where is she hiding? exactly who would like me? and why isn't she married? not in memphis, it looks like, but then again, maybe.

just slammed through some books. read how to write a damn good novel ii. i'm not commited to the work involved. lakoff seems to be attacking a straw man in objectivism. a book on journaling was a little too touchy feely and obvious. some of these books i just decided to give up on.

i could use some work. letting go of the little self. taking care of the big self.

i'll probably just stay in aurora

  • October 10, 2001
  • October 8, 2001
another war. whar a difference a day makes. and how original, i might add.

at newby's again. bartender, jeff i think, knows my order. guinness. been here like three times in four days. me and hemingway. i ordered a few books from amazon on writing. one actually on the "healing power of journals". and one on journalistic writing. one on how to be a damn good writer. bruce wanted to take a writing class or something. i wouldnt even know where to begin or evaluate a program. learning about what was involved with learning to draw was quite a different experience. from what i've seen, learning to draw is more about learning to see than learning any kind of hand-eye coordination thing. so i suspect learning to write is much more about noticing what proper writing is than some constructive, word smithing skill. and i guess it isnt just a practice,practice, practice thing like learning tennis. one would never learn to draw but doodling and doodling. one would just tend to stay at that level. one of the books is a collection of essays about writing from authors. there probably is just a bunch of things i am just not aware of.

so, i went to sleep at like, 7. just tired. went to bed at maybe 1 or 2 last night. insomnia is tough. actually watched some freaky insomniac show on comedy central. dude really celebrated the drunk lifestyle in new york. some comedian or something. made sense to me. really made me want to visit new york. maybe the writing thing will work out. (yeah, and maybe aimee will fuck me). still, i could probably go visit. i say maybe the writing will work out. it would be cool if i could just go out there with my little pocket computer that i'm using here, and just go and write. but that's just self-indulgent. like all those damn kid bands who play moody music, like anyone cares what they feel. they just want to hear something to raise their spirit a little.

maybe i should take up the kerouac, benzedrine approach to writing. at least i dont have to change sheets of paper in a typewriter. he was a drunk. i think i mentioned once that some chick said i was like him in some kind of way.

dude got toasted. other dude said his girlfriend cheated on him. living with her six years.

of course, hemingway i ain't. nor kerouac. i'm not even a good writer. but more to the point. ernie wouldnt be writing in a bar. he'd be fishing. or something.

so jeff, or whatever his name is, asked me if this thing was on the wireless web. i was thinking i wanted to do that. but do i really want to be wired 24/7 to an infinite number of monkeys? here's one: an infinite number of rednecks shooting an infinite number of shotguns at an infinite number of stop signs will eventually produce the entire works of shakespeare in braille. i didn't make that up.

was i hearing that right? is she in law school? i come in to newby's, and go into the back room with the pool tables. there are these two babes sitting talking, next to a half-finished game. mediumish tall kid dark top, and short, short-haired babe, very stacked, in white top. and they finish their game out, going out to the bar. white is going to leave her stuff sitting next to me. dark tells her to bring her stuff. white tells me "she doesn't trust you" damn right. never get out of the boat. unless you really know the territory. or are going all the way. or whatever. she's cute though. they hooked up with a couple iof dudes or something. as i say, "saigon".

im o get me some hard-hitting niggers with some pliers and a blowtorch, and get medieval on his ass.

it's getting on toward 1. turn cranked on the cd is some odd hillbilly "after midnight".

everyone gets everything they want.

so, cochise, a dude working here, asked me what i was writing. what do i think of. i should figure that out. i didnt know what to tell him. very unreflective. asked me what goes through me mind. asked me if it was something philosophical.

they call him the breeze.

so nothing is really out of bounds. we're free. but at the same time, we are determined by causes and conditions. so we think we are free. we really are, but what does that even mean? we can't tell exactly what we are going to do, until we do it. is that a surprise? sure.

i wonder if cocaine pushed any good writing. i know comics dig on it.

cool, man, i can't count anymore. they say that it takes way higher cognitive functions, and well established skills take a little longer. so,where am i? a little perceptual deficit. the nine ball had it's yellow mostly up, so when i was counting stripes, i thought it was a solid, and when i was counting solids i thought it was a stripe. and there was this one solid that was off to to the side and i just missed. so what is the problem here. i have just decided to not be a part of the fun. aimee tells me things will be better. i just dont think so. she went into this whole save me mode after i dumped a whole load into an e-mail. why don't i grab it? here goes:
Hi Aimee,
I get the feeling you are doing quite well :) and i'm glad about that.
like i was saying, though, i don't get the feeling you really care about me. and why should you? i do understand that you want to feel good, and feel good about yourself. you probably wouldn't feel good about yourself if didn't care whether i was ok. i perfectly believe that to some extent you care how i am. but that's different from caring what i'm up to, or wanting to call me up and chat, or even wanting to do anything with me. what am i to you? it just that the feeling i've been when i've been with you has just really not been a reaching out to me personally, just a general sort of friendliness. and i really do like you, Aimee, but that kind of distant sort of casual relationship just doesn't work for me. and i don't mean that i need a romantic involvement. i have som friends that i've bknown for about 20 years. they've known me when i was totally insane. i've known the depths of their despair and the little joys they've seen. sit in the woods for a few days.
so it has been about my inability to make and hold a real connection. i think i just inherited those from before. but now i despair of making any more. i honestly don't think i will. and that is just getting intolerable. i have really just been holding on till i pay off my debts. may it sounds like misplaced loyalty, but the credit card people have made it possible for me to have a life without ever wanting for anything, and i have just wanted to be able to pay them back. but after that, i think its it for me. otherwise, it just hasnt been worth it. i guess i was hoping things would get better before i made it to that point, but it doesn't look like it's gonna.
and so, with all this, especially the way it has just seemed to me that you dont care about me personally, even though you are a sweet, caring person who cares about everyone, i have started drinking. and that's not good for me. i have a genetic disposition to being an alcoholic. and i had stayed just the safe side of the line. but i have stepped over to the other side. i'm a drunk. it's one day at a time from here on out for me. but i guess you meet interesting people in bars. i talked to jennifer at newby's this morning. she was saying something about going to hell. i asked her if she didnt think the idea of hell was inconsistent with a loving god. and she said no. something about free will and you can't have good without evil. i never bought all that stuff. purgatory maybe. but an eternal hell? i just can't see it. i would just find heaven intolerable if there was a hell. i would have to go to hell. maybe as nonviolent civil disobedience. when i was at hope presbyterian and that runner dude was talking about whether hell was a place or was it just hot in here i thought about that too. the little kind who did something wrong and the guy asked do you want to go to heaven and he said "no sir". i'd have to say "no sir" too.
anyway Aimee, i trust you are having fun with George. keep being wonderful :)
a

so it's confirmed. dude's name is jeff. the chef dude from the navy called out his name. dark works here. some pimp looking dude has some chicks around him. ok, maybe gangstah.

and i'm sitting here. a couple of night police are having lunch.

got buffy going on the tv. i think i'm dry

ok, so i heard that right. white is in law school. i asked her though, and she said yes, but of course, i had been listening in on her private conversation, so she was a little distant. good for her. and she said something. i was much too buzzed to hear it, though.

willie is the name of the navy cook. i knew that. stupid brain.

so, where am i? at a peak? at a minimum? am i sliding down? it isn'y anything that hasnt been done many times before. any solution that might have been worked out, though, is only approximate. and, i'm sitting at this bar, and there are a lot of people here, including a bunch of babes, and yet i'm sitting in the back room by myself. i am clearly trying to avoid thinking about something that i dont want to think about. the painfully unsuccessful habits i have developed? unable to get what i want. harumph.

  • October 6, 2001
went to newby's. im' such a drunk. and now i'm doing the ck's breakfast after. trying the steak and eggs. they call it the half pound. i talked to greg dewitt who recognized me from mus. and i actually talked to some short haired brunette in a white top. i'm not sure i've ever talked to someone in a bar before. i asked her how she was doing. she said she was fine, how am i doing. good. robert is here, and rick. and there were these really cute young chicks playing pool. short haired brunette in a low-cut red top. she would bend over and truly be a woman. and and even cuter long haired brunette. she actually smiled at me. rick's a stoner. robert is working here. david was talking to some folk. hea . oed about how russian was similar to other languages. ukrainian. some dark haired dude (foreign) and a southern brunette. there was this exroveert babe, jennifer, who bsaid soething to me. and somehow i asked her if hell was inconsistent with the idea of a loving god. she said something about hell, mogden, ukranian. jennifer. she really reminded me of the devil. she said there has to be evil in order for there to be good. we have free will, so we must have the option to be evil. but i dont think it has to be eternal. an mis. who doesnt like programming, mogden, in cs, and his babe. indeterminate. it is as it should be.

so today i read from lakoff's recent book on embodied philosophy, specifically, the section on morality. the notion that morality is based on embodied concepts is pretty intriguing. morality is about seeking well-being. and well-being is wealth, so there is an accounting metaphor of morality. and well-being is health. a very interesting idea is that morality comes from familiy morality, and family morality comes in two main types. there is the strict father type, where the father tell you what to do, because he knows best. and there is the nurturing family, where through love, the child obeys because the parent explains why they should do things, and the child follows because of the love. ) i guess i'm not too familiar with the second approach. conservatives see things because of the first view, and liberals, through the second.

  • October 2, 2001
to the extent that i can breathe, i feel happiness. it's those times between breaths that are the trouble. and i dont think i can keep breathing for long.

so i've ended up here again. i think i'm finally a drunk. finally as in 'at the end'. that letter from aimee was something. she definitely loves george. and from what i can see, she actually does not love me. and i even wrote that i thought she did love me, at least a little bit. but i guess i was wrong. not even a little bit. so i am here. i said i was trying to life with myself. i should have said i'm trying to live by myself.

so what was the mistake i made? i'd say it was trying to pretend to be.t bmmeing selfless.

the avenging angels have come to claim me

ok, so maybe this doesnt make sense. but let it suffice that it makes sense to me now.

  • September 30, 2001
love is not possessive, in itself. people do, though, tend to get possessive of or greedy for things that give them pleasure, so this attachment does often follow, but part of love does act against this tendency. i think the old definition still works. love is a compound of three desires (wants, goals, whatever). desire to be with, to communicate closely (intimately, concerning personal, otherwise private things) with, and desire to help. i supposed i should re-evaluate this concept in light of the experientialist theory of categorization. it is not simply a matter of having these properties or not. but these are part of the default case. loving ice cream is an extension. a usage motivated by the main meaning, not determined by it, and now a matter of convention.

  • September 29, 2001
ok so i got over that big burst of anger. and things have gone pretty well. but i had a bit of strain that i'm trying to recover from. the server side of the application for a while has been failing to exclude multiple users of a given site. this would stop the release if it made it out, and we have already gotten past internal testing and we are a week into external testing. late on friday, i think found it, but i had a strained week and wasnt getting so much sleep.

last weekend i was studying extreme programming, a programming style that emphasize automated unit testing. in fact, the procedure is to write the test for the code first, then write the code, and when the tests work, you are done. sounds radical. and this was brought about because friday a week ago i went to lunch with erin and joel, and we went to borders buying books. i picked up a book on extern programming, something call "the pragmatic programmer", a cookbook of good programming practices, and a book called "software craftsmanship" that suggests that programming should be treated as a craft, with apprentices and journeyman and masters, with personal ownership of and responsibility over programs. this is in contrast to the notion of software engineering, which applies a mechanical engineer, bridge building approach to software. one thing that was mentioned in that, was that the software engineering appraoch was developed for big military projects, in which both hardware and software needed to be developed and freedom from mistakes is most important. people would have time to design the software and annotate requirements for a long time before there was even hardware to write it on. so there is the idea of having lots of design in advance and documentation. it has become a well developed appraoch, and it tends to be the only thing that people even have available to consider when they want a methodology. but it is costly, and has a slow cycle, and is really meant for large projects. it seems like this is the type of process we are trying to ue for our project. and yet they want us to have a fast cycle. the intial system really was pretty large, but now we want to keep adding new bits. extreme programming is all about fast cycles. its idea is that you constantly have new functioning builds. full tested. several times a day. it may be where that whole "internet time" concept was coming from. of course, the dot coms have gone away. i bet there are a bunch of really short cycle programmers out there.

as for my mood. that new programming process stuck in a bit of hope for an easier life. but then there's aimee. she's happy to give her x another chance (which he will mess up), but will take a few days to call me back. and then we won't get together. though she does say she wants to do something sometime. but if it really mattered to her, there wouldnt be a mountain high enough, as they say. and last saturday i called her. and sunday. and she couldnt get back to me till tuesday? the sensible thing for me to do is to accept that she is just being couteous, but is just not interested, and move on. sensible, of course. where does that leave me? rejected. i guess i simply persist as some kind of pride thing. too proud to admit failure.

i'm sitting here at the emerald. a thai restaurant. i wanted chicken pad thai. but i can tell the difference between fresh ( which i got the collieirville place) and warmed over. it was ok, though.

last week, i left a hundred dollar bill to the barbabe at hooters. the guinness tasted must less bitter than i've usually had it. very smooth. maybe i've just always been getting it very stale, and this was fresh.

i think of myself again
dragged to the curb
loser
398438
getting fat
eater of banquet frozen fried chicken, nuked
follower of the mountain path of non-dualism
wired, with phone and computer in pocket
a few things left to do
trigger puller
phD student (though i doubt i'll escape)
programmer, 9 to 5
jotter of notes

how did i end up here at hooters? they seem a little upset. throwing water. shouting through a megaphone. and a little blonde girl behind the bar with a name tag that says "andi". sounds auspicious. but i think this keg of guinness is getting old.

i fixed a bug in a programming language i had never seen before. there was a problem with a matlab script for the computational intelligence class in the fuzzy logic package. some functiion it couldnt find. i just told kiran to comment it out, and it worked. maybe i should join a guild or something. but i guess i'm just a journeyman. i haven't created a masterpiece yet. i guess i'm hoping that for the phD i will get to/be forced to create a masterpiece. and yet, i'm not really working towards it. what am i looking at for a project? i guess i'm still into the evolving pattern system, but lately, i haven't added any new ideas to the mix, and i was a little stuck with the situation that most systems dealing with patterns have their own alogirthms for dinding patterns, and don't need an evolutionary algorithm. but there is a competitive struggle in the mind for which idea makes it as the final decision, for every decision. lots of universal mechanisms for infinite flexibility. i guess the optimality comes from constant testing. whereas i suppose the optimality of static algorithms comes in the design, and doesnt get improved. the adaptive mechanism, though, uses whatever tricks it can come across to improve itself. i guess it must constantly be judging itself. evaluating what it knows. dreaming is an offline process of testing models. testing for what? there must be some metric being used for evaluation. there are basic goals, that somehow get encoded for. these goals get pushed back, and we learn secondary goals. we have to learn how to attribute the achievement of goals to certain actions we have taken, so we know what to do next time. we certainly have built in notions of causality, which help with our problem of attribution. but i guess, we must have a flexible mechanism, such that we can learn new ways of figuring out what we should learn from situation. language must be one tool we use to decide what means what. language is, of course, another way to learn more situations themselves.

i'm still trying to get through lakoff's "women fire and dangerous things" and its treatment of nonclassical (ie not objective) categories. i should probably be home reading that instead of sitting here drinking guinness and rambling into my computer. but i guess this is a distraction. and i think i need to be distracted right now. my cousins from canada came by today. i was waiting to eat dinner, because we might have gone out. but they went to a fish fry. and they only stayed maybe a half hour. i probably wasnt even worth that. but it was nice of them to stop by. and katie left me $25. so i guess i'll spend it. as for categories. there are "classical" categories, which, according to "objectivsim" correspond to real categories in the world, are hard edged, with no internal structure, defined by properties which all the elements have. one of lakoff's points is that categories are determined by experience, and do not simply correspond to categories that are "out there". while there may be some classical categories that have hard edges, there are also categories that are graded (he does talk of fuzzy logic, though it is still classical in the sense that it tends to assume that the patterns are out there, and not psychological constructs.), and also patterns that arent certainly defined, but simply "motivated", social contructed such that we have to learn what they are, but have some concept that makes them easy for people to learn. one example is the complex category of "mother". the main example is the woman who gives birth and raises us. but in there, we have seperate ideas of birth mother (for adoptees), surrogate mother (who isn't even the genetic mother), genetic mother, step mother, adopted mother. These are all under the concept of mother, but they dont have a common property that all of them share. this is supposed to be a problem for the objectivve notion of category. also, the objective notion of category is supposed to have problem with the fact that some things might be better members of a category than other. either something is in the category or it isnt. and then there is the category of bachelor. a classic definition of bachelor is that a bachelor is an unmarried male-- end of definition. but is the pope a bachelor? is a guy living with someone for 4 years and with kids a bachelor? is a gay guy with partner a bachelor, is a married swinger a bachelor? is a guy who is separated but still married a bachelor? some guy married for convenience to get into the country? fuzzy categories, with graded membership wish they could deal with this problem, but really, any fuzzy system depends on a person to decide what the appropriate membership level should be. and fuzzy systems dont really capture the psychological dynamic of motivated but not determined classes. that is, some classes make sense, but they are still somewhat arbitrary and not predictable. ok, what does all this mean to me? any system that we ant to pretend is intelligent has to be inclined to accept categories that make sense to people. it should be complete general, just happily taking whatever arbitrary meaning it might want to decide. it has to be very heavily filtered. some things make sense, and some things it just won't even consider. so if it is human-like intelligence, it will make human-like evaluations of what make sense. but intelligence is very filtered. it is not general.and that means intelligence is specific. there really are kinds of intelligence. so i guess i shouldn't look to general intelligence. or maybe i should look for a framework for building specific kinds of intelligences. and when i speak of specific, the notion of intelligence does inply that it is not restricted to specific domains, but is generalized to many areas. but they must be connnected through some system of analogy. so that's where the notion of general intelligence comes from. we have the ability to extend our experience from one domain to another by using analogy. maybe i'll find some examples of that. and we have a great capacity to learn lots of specific pieces of experience. what causes what in different areas. but it is all very specific, except for he generalization by analogy. and, of course, reasoning by anology is not guarranteed to be correct. we have to learn which analogies work. so we are constantly having to figure stuff out and evaluate. quite an impressive achievement. it is little wonder that it constantly fails. we are ignorant and frustrated all the time. i'm still not sold on the whole buddhist idea of relieving suffering by dissolution of attachment and ego. it may be some type of stable psychological state, but it involves a lot of work, and i haven't seen much evidence of benefit. ok. intelligence. not a general thing. a matter of accumulation of experience. specific. extensible via analogy. it looks general because people's experience is vast. and i guess it also looks general because we can't tell how it works. we don't know what the experience was that made us able to deal with the problem at hand. we lose a lot as our experience gets distilled into our ability to solve problems. there is much deception in the domain of intelligence. being cunning is about outsmarting other people, or maybe just critters. which is something that is really helped by trickery. magic. i know i've benefitted from smoke and mirrors. heck, i'm all about not being understood. the cunning ulysses. how his naked ears were tortured. ok. a framework on which to hang specific intelligences. is that not a general intelligence? so i guess maybe i better not look for that. or i need to re-evaluate general intelligence. chill, bitch, chill. ok. so i'm enamored with the idea of a general simple mechanism of intelligence. but there isn't an evidence for it. there probably is no general intelligence. in a universal sense. i just wish there was. maybe i'm proud. maybe i like to think i have general intelligence. that i can know anything. but i am really restricted to my experience, and really have a limit to what i can know. and like an aphasia, i cant even tell that there are pieces of my world that have big gaps. wow. so maybe i should just restirct myself to seeing what can be done with a particular architecture, instead of fooling myself into believing i am looking for a universal answer of how to do it. i am just adding to the body of knowledge. i am not approaching the one and only truth.i guess that is just pride again. and andi left. i was thinking i would try to buy her name tag off her. missed the chance. specific intelligence. does that mean i need to pick a domain. if i had my druthers it would be conversational english. and really that's not specific enough. how about business talk. or perhaps business appliction description. of course, it would be trippy keen to have a system that could talk in english and work out computer programs. i don't know, though. i don't really talk about computer programs in english. i guess i really think about computer programs in the actual computer language. what do i talk about in english? part of the intent of keeping a journal is that i would have a record of what i do write about, and if i wanted to write a computer program that would write like me, it would have examples of what i write about. i don't know. could anyone learn to write like me by reading this bunch of trash? i doubt it. maybe i should ask, what would they need to start with so that after reading this huge pile of bs, they could just pick up and run with it? now there's a goal. the whole idea of the cyc project, i guess the biggest ai project out there, was that they would get a huge database of knowledge in predicate calculus form, and at some point it would just be able to go off on its own and learn forever. heh. nice dream. didnt happen. but it had some mistaken concepts. they believed in general intelligence, instead of specific intelligence. all knowledge has the same general form ( sentences in predicate calculus, i think). knowledge just isnt even close to that. so what is knowledge? knowledge must come in a few specific types. there is knowledge in the form of remembered sounds. knowledge incorporated in our capacity to generate sounds. knowledge emodied in our responses. knowledge imputed in all the things we can do. so knowledge is something we just say is back there when we are able to respond effectively to different situations. so what what can we really know? i guess philosophers will say that we can "know" statements that have some kind of truth. i guess these statements really work when thrown into some kind of game of evaluation. and then there is the way big-titted girls make guys feel good, while doing nothing but being there. well, beauty in general. that's a whole area on its own. i'd like to know everything. i guess i want a short circuit. a simple way to know everything through some mechanism of general knowledge. but really, the only way to know everything is to have experienced everything. now, the non-dualist and various hindu traditions promise total knowledge. the only way this can happen is for them in some sense to become universal. so at some point, they must believe that they are everything. they are not their limited bodies. they are everything. that sure is how they seem to describe themselves. they are no longer bounded. not this, not that. there is no separation.

so i guess that's the difference in this degree. in all the other ones, it was certain that i would succeed. the hs, the bs, the masters. but this one, the phD, i really have no idea. it really doesnt even look like i will see it through.

  • September 13, 2001
i am in a really angry mood. this classwork for school is really nice as a distraction from thinking about all the shitty people out there. i guess TV is good for that two, but there are mostly shitty people on that, too. there is the thing with the freedom fighters. and i don't care for people who say they were cowardly. vicious maybe. cold, calculated. but don't try to push cowardly. when you have pointed the gun at your head, come talk to me about cowardly. not that i like this action. but let's not pretend that the us is good beyond question. how many people died in afganistan because of the US? how about all over the world? does the US really need to consume most of the wos prouction? do we honor our parents? are we nice to each other? are we going to take this as an opportunity to be extra nice to people, or are we just going to try to hurt people? why are we trying to starve people in iraq? why are so many black people in jail? one thing i noticed this morning, the only radio stations this morning playing music were black stations. is this a nation of islam unity thing? it sounded almost celebratory. the 'attacks' were pretty much on the rich white establishment. kiss reparations goodbye.

and then there's erin. she was nice enough to come visit me today in my pod. she didnt want to do anything tomorrow (it's her 30th birthday). she ended up talking to robert, she just bought a book on metaphysics. and she borrowed a book from him on operational research or some such. i hung around and was almost late for class. i actually called her after and asked her if she wanted to go to dinner tomorrow. damn, did i really ask that way? that is just the right way to put it to get a no answer. hmm. and i know this. now i'm thinking, well maybe i'm getting sick of this and am just looking for a wedge to keep me away. I've goee now. After that i was just pissed. i had to settle a little before i could even concentrate on the homework. i was thinking Gia. Gia once got upset with me for something, and told me not to talk to her for a month. I could handle that. in a month i wouldnt care a bit. so in my thinking erin has done a Gia. and i could be understanding. i would be able to forget about it. train me to call, i call. train me not to call, i dont call. It was just that she was kind of annoyed when i asked the first time, and that might have been just from having to explain to me. and when i called, she seemed annoyed again, like i hadnt paid attention when before she had said she didnt want to do anything. she could have changed her mind. in fact, that was probably more what i was looking for. to see if even for a moment she had reconsidered, and clearly, she had not, as the cliche goes, paid it a second thought. not worthy of a second thought. sounds like a good epitaph. so what do i do. clearly i forget about erin. more's the pity. i liked her, and at times, she did like me. but times change. anyway, i am very angry right now. and just in time, they are rereleasing apocalypse now in theaters. tomorrow. wolfchase, like way in cordova. some re-cut. fuckin' savages. blow 'em to the stone-age, son. and i guess, i feel kind of abandoned. i mean, who does anything for me anymore?

  • September 12, 2001
more confusion

some freedom fighters crashed some planes. "terrorist" is too hateful a word. and they just had knives. or maybe it was pointy sticks. anyway, no more world trade center. call a nationwide agent (someone who cares)

  • September 10, 2001
confusion.

  • September 8, 2001
a deer hunter, chris walken "one shot"

odd little mood swings happening.

thursday would have been the day. i never could get the hang of thursdays. and i broke out the hitchhikers guide and started reading in. but it seemed pointless. anyway. thursday. so since i did i nice job with the class notes in computational intellignece. ree to do it all the time. i never to get a little faster at it, on thursday i was confused because it was a lot of formulas, with greek letters. and the student present would just stick up a slide of formulas, which i would try to write done, but i couldnt get down the commentary. so i felt a little stuck, and i wanted to talk to erin. i called and she did answer, but when i askeed her if she had time to talk, she said she was about to eat dinner. maybe later. i really needed it right then. and i was procrastinating. but now i have these sort of abandonment feelings. and the silly moodswings.

and of all places, i'm sitting at the hope presbyterian chapel. this is aimee's church, which i am visiting. i started on matt flickstein's _swallowing the river ganges_. he has a description of what happens when you achieve "acess consciousness" and jhanas, that was just humbling. i am not there, and won't be there soon. you get a counterpart sign, a vision of a bright light, flower, or gem..

i did have a nice time with aimee though. she was in a chatty mood, so we went to starbucks. girl can talk. very nice person.

  • September 1, 2001
man, i had a soul-searching date with erin. saw ghost world. i tried to find out if she was interested in men. she first said she had dated men. somehow i took that as a yes. but later i realized that she hadnt answered it. i know i really didnt want to hear it. and she said she was gay. and somehow i still thought she might be bi. but she said she would have said she was bi. and then she said it was a fuzzy thing. a preference. some people are just too nice to say things that people dont want to hear.

so i was explaining what the point is of religions. i put this in an email to aimee. the common goal in religion is surrender to or unity with the divine. with this, the ego is left behind, with much of the selfish bondage that ties people to their misery. this result appears as a deep love for all things. but religions are left with the problem of how to direct people who are not sufficiently dissatisfied with things of this world to seek the final solution. one of the typical answers is to simply suggest that people try to be nice and love each other, but this is really just a shadow of the central message, which, really, most people are not ready to grasp.

and im sitting here at platinum again. trying intermittantly to practice mindfulness. i had a few pints of guinness with erin. i did tell her that she is one of the two people i have found that i really like. shame about the not liking men thing

  • August 31, 2001
made it through the first week of class. bioinformatics seems challenging. the fist day was basic dna biology, but the second day was a review of very hard computational problems in protein, rna, and dna structure and pattern recognition. textook still not in the bookstore. the evolutionary programming class got canceled, and i found out at 5:30. but twenty minutes late, i found the computational intelligence class that i also wanted to take. but he was really upset that i was late. fuzzy logic, neural nets, a little genetic and evolutionary programming.

and i don't know what was going on this morning. i just had lucid dream after lucid dream. i dont even remember what was happening anymore. but bunches of them.

lately i've been hearing people having their computers down. at the bank. at the police station where i paid a ticket.

  • August 27, 2001
had a car wreck. andrea wanted to pay for gas for me at the chevron at park and white station on her chevron card. across the street was a perkins that we wanted to go to. turning left was going to be stuff. she told me to pull between the stopped cars, which was something i didnt want to do, but i tried it. and sure enough, there was a van in the left turn lane. he tried to stop, and i almost made it past, but it scraped the left rear. not serious. drivable. his bumper was dented. that's going to cost. i was thinking i was just going to leave it and get a new one. unibody. it would be too hard to take off. but i looked in the trunk, and it looks like it can easily be hammered out.

went to abra, a car body shop. they want $900. bunch of cons.

  • August 20, 2001
sort of a subdued anger.

most of the cannibalists have a child's religion. they believe that other people are responsible for them, and they submit and obey and are cared for. but we can be responsible for ourselves.

so,james at mike's monday night football party. prayed before eating. now i'm thinking that the next time i have to sit through that, i'm going to ask whom they are talking to. do you see them in the room? do you hear them? i dont know how it works. are you just pretending they are there? maybe they are, maybe they arent? are they invisible? are they hiding? if we cant see them? if you say you believe, do you mean you really do believe, or are you trying to believe, or are you pretending? did someone tell you they were here? if so, why did they tell you that? are you convinced? did they give you any evidence or reason to believe it other than that's what they were told? is it just a metaphor? and image to think about? were you just rewarded for pretending? maybe by pretending, you got to meet nice people. and maybe you actually think you see them.

or perhaps i should object. i might object on the grounds that i have seen them show anger, i will not find absolution in the words of an insincere seeker. there is a reason that the church has seekers. dedicated to their cause to lead. if you cannot be reverent, do not make me listen. better be silent. and i fear that pride will let you presume that you speak for me. and worse, your conviction may weaken your humility. ok, so maybe the cannibalism is starting to get to me. is it submission practice? more hazing. a test.

  • August 19, 2001
the band's on the bus

ok, so maybe she dumped me. i guess i didnt notice it. i described what she said to mike, and yeah, i guess that's what it sounds like. and she hasn't called me back. oh well.

so i'm sitting here at hooters again. just needed to get out of the house. getting toxic. hey hey hey, goodbye.

i think i'm just going to quit exercising. i just don't care. i need to join international house of pancakes.

ok. so the issue at hand is what the pattern recognizer's output and how they communicate. neurons have one simple kind of output. each one has one really complicated pattern that it listens for, and then says i got it. part of what it does, though is learn what pattern to look for. and to a certain extent, it can keep firing in proportion to how strong its pattern is, and whether it continues to see it. and for neurons, there are lots an lots of units, connected to lots of other ones. how can large pattern recognizer units perform to same function? well, first, the output of one big unit must be able to be used as the input to the next (come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now). and that output must have enough content that the system can evaluate its quality. and i guess for learning purposes, it needs to be able to become stronger on repetition. (g-l-o-r-i-a). there has to be some additional structural information, like where to send the output to, or get the input from. it seems like this structural information might be quite open to evolution: an input descriptor could be an ordered list of tuples (recognizer index, start position, length) ->(w,x,y) from the output of recognizer w, starting at offet x, get y bits. it seems like there has to be some type of weight or valuation effect. perhaps the weight should determine which pattern to look at. and what would be the advantage of a big recognizer? it could have lots of different patterns that it tries to look for, and maybe which one it looks for should be determined by the strength of the individual pattern. in addition to evolving the source for the pattern, the patterns looked for by the recognizer have to be evolving. and i guess, it only make sense to look for a pattern for some matching input source. if you were to switch the source, i guess the pattern would be meaningless. unless there were tendencies to have things that correspond to sensory maps. in the brain, there are are actually several different regions that are maps of the retina that handle different visual functions, like colors, motion, texture, form, lightness. the strength of a pattern increases each time it gets used and especially when rewarded, or maybe strengthened when seen again, and either has positive or negative associations. am i building a castle in a swamp? (lately things don't seem the same). ok. what is the output going to be? in one idea of neural networks, they are content based memories, and just regenerate the initial pattern based on an incomplete set of inputs resembling it. that just seems like such a limited thing to do, though. pattern recognizers, though, are able to find patterns in input, instead of just storing patterns and giving them back. so what am i thinking of, by evolving patterns? the evolutionary algorithms are a means of searching the input space for patterns, but the pattern matching algorithms are themselves a means for searching the space for patterns. maybe the evolution should be restricted to the input source patterns, and for the "structure" thus generated, the pattern recognition and clustering algorithms are then applied. the input pattern can then be replaced by the center of the cluster that it exists in. so each module tries to answer, what is this thing i'm seeing, that i have seen before, and thus know something about. and it must be able to determine what things are related to it, and who else might want to know, or maybe not who wants to know. maybe it just writes it's answer down, and interested parties check it out. wow, that was a cheetah. a small buzzing object, lets grab it with our tongue. somehow the input must map to an output. ok. so there have to be some capacities added. nothing useful starts from a blank slate and learns all it needs to know. an important capacity, actually a very advanced one, is the ability to mimic the behavior of an external "person", and map it to oneself. maybe that's going a little far. i mean, that's way down the evolutionary ladder. it just isn't going to evolve in a system like this. so i'll have to build it in. and again, what domains should the behavior be open to such that there could be imitation. speech, vision, translating scenes into description. color commentary? (trying to mindful, zoned out for a while, is this just an excuse to get lost in thought? probably). ok, for review, the influencing ideas are that perception is analogy, recogition is a basis operation, minds use an evolutionary process, such that successful recognition activities are repeated and combined with others. at a very high level, with lots of functional and structural support, people are able to copy the ideas of others. unfortunately, the mimicking idea is not really related to the recognition architecture, so it's a tough connection. and an assumption i'm making is that there are thing like a clumps of neurons that form the function of recognizing large patterns, whereas the structures are quite variable. but one thing that might be favorable, neurons, i think, tend to just duplicate functions. for detecting features in a sensory map, instead of having just one detector for yellow that scans across all postions, it has thousands of slow detectors working in parallel, so this system can use scanning with speed instead of parallel cheap components. and neurons use a lot of redundancy. of course, sensory maps somehow map onto some fixed map, as the world doesnt jump around with our eyes, kind of an advanced process, i guess. and it isn't just the patterns being recognized that are evolving, it's the resultant behaviors that evolve. and i dont like the idea of lisp codelets being activated, because it seems like it uses an objective notion of symbol that is just too far removed from sensory input. and i should clarify some of my goals. i'm not looking to find out how the human mind works. i'm trying to get done the kind of things the mind does, in a manner appropriate on a computer or machine, using some principles that can be seen in the function of the brain, specifically pattern recognition, evolution, and mimicking, and metaphor as extended pattern recognition. mitchell (copycat), holland, edelman, blackmore (memes). glancing through holland, i'm talking about creating a complex adaptive system, an agent. it needs a performance system, a credit-assignment algorithm, and a rule-discovery mechanism. the performance system is the system of recognizing the inputs and creating outputs, the rule discovery system is the combination of the pattern clustering algorithm, and the evolution of the responses. a recognizer sees a pattern, an somehow picks an output. i guess mimicry can be a source of output. and then a credit assignment algorithm. hmm. this has to come somehow from a feedback mechanism. edelman seems to suggest that there are a lot of cycles in the brain, and that the evolution is about the cycles that continue to re-enter. edelman and tononi have a chapter on selectionism, neural darwinism, theory of neuronal group selection. neurons cluster in groups and strengthen with activiry, together. connections strengthen. reentry is not feedback, which is a single fixed loop of instructional info. re-entry takes multiple paths with no prespecified info content. they write of modifiable value systems. the brain uses variability, differential amplification, degeneracy (different components with the same output), and value (selected contraints, hand shape is given as an example or desire to move toward the light). brains do not have representational (but computers can be give us representations, because we are good at interpreting), memory is not a representation, but a change in the dynamics that also a repeat performance. matching, and repeating. constructive recategorization. a global mapping relates different processing regions with motor and sensory maps. perhaps one pattern that is recogized could have a weighted probability to activate some other known pattern somewhere, patterns being found by clustering, and operations on maps. and again, mimicry can be a source of pattern. looking at holland again. for a performance system, he seems to say that given some conditions, the output should be an arbitrary symbol, and some other agent can react to the arbitrary symbol with an action. blech. but he does have a nice credit assignment system, the bucket brigade algorithm. it doesnt seem to be quite as nice as reentrant signaling.

man, word just flipped out on me just now. boo

  • August 17, 2001
started on women, fire, and dangerous things.

ya got yer good days, and ya got yer bad days. this was a bad one. or at least it's bad now. or maybe just boring. i'm really tired. but i didnt have much for dinner, and then i decided to try to just go to sleep. but then i just felt i was starving. i want duck. but i was also thinking of some chicken pad tai. so i got up and tried going to the golden wok, which used to be a couple miles away. used to be. i went by there and it was closed. so i went by the chinese place on getwell that michele took meiie no duck. so i went the mandarin place on highland. they have peking duck for 20, cut up at the table. but it wasnt on the menu they had inside ok . d dude was talking on the phone. so i skipped its. iwas thinking of going to see a movie at 9:45, which wasua hour away. i felt like checking out cafe society. drove by. no place to park. better to starve perhaps. so now i'm at the theater. what a loser. youmayfindyourselfbehindthewheelofalargeautomobile. same as it ever was. maybe it's because erin kind of snapped at me. she was staying late with some kind of problem. she said she wasnt feeling very social. and i said it was kind of nice seeing other people having problems and not having to deal with them. and then she said she didnt want to talk about it. it shouldnt have happened. but she was really irritated. i dont know. it made me feel bad. i really just feel like not being with myself. just spacing out. i can totally see anaesthesia. drifting, on a sea of fo rgotten teardrops. naybe i should follow my bliss. shit. i'm still only in saigon. they have an apocalypse now poster over there. i need to go over and look at it. apocalypse now redux. some new cut. in the screen room now. couple thisof old faggots.three chicks, one sounds german. maybe here for dead elvis week. i'd rather be in central america killing communists. just a load of self-indulgent nonsense. sh, it's starting.

women don't feel love. maybe it takes a kind of strength they don't have. i don't know why i thought they did. i don't remember any indication that they do. maybe it was just wishful thinking. or maybe because they often seem like men. and maybe i just didnt believe it because i thought it was too horrible to believe. but it can't be that horrible. they don't feel love, and the world goes on. i guess it's just not necessary.

  • August 16, 2001
"mimicking behavior by recognizing evolving patterns". in some sense, our minds are a system of interacting models, plus goals (is a goal not just another model that reaches in to effect decisions?, or maybe it's more of an agent). anyway, a model of something behaves like the thing in some ways, for some kind of transformation, there is some type of pattern in common. so, part of the thesis is that mimicking is an essential and valuable activity. and the rest is to show how an mechanism that evolves patterns that are recognized can implement a process of mimicking. one domain for mimicking is statements of language mimicking visual seens. "representing" as mimicry. is this just an odd word game? i'm hoping is shows an insight into how a "thinking" system might operate. to explain a thing, a description must move beyond synonyms into ideas that are more precise, and i think "mimicking" is more precise than "representing", even if the analogy has to get stretched out a bit. does a description in a real sense "imitate" a thing in the world? it could be said to if in the mind this description causes similar results as a direct perception. and anyway, what we think of as a "perception" must be in some sense merely a mental description. but of course, probably a much more obvious domain for mimicking behavior would simply be actual physical mimickry of actions, maybe a robotics thing. also, the development of language and grammar is much a matter of copying what words to use in a particular context, and the word forms and types, and always saying please. social customs. but of course, much behavior is individual and adapted to the whole internal system of models. in the end, there are actions. what exactly is the role of mimicking in determining actions? certainly, there must be other sources of action (like goals aforementioned), but these will have to work along with a system of mimicked behavior. actually, perhaps the goals are needed as part of the evaluation method of the evolutionary process.

i had a really long lucid dream this morning. maybe i'm not sure how lucid, because i cant remember so much of it, and i didnt try to control it very much, if at all. and i guess i always have thought it would be pointless to be lucid in a dream and not try to be in charge of the content. this time, instead of trying to change the things happening around me (which i guess i have trouble with) i simply had a little mental "space", as it were, which let me better think about what i wanted to do. it seemed like i was playing a role playing game and following this woman around in a building. but it was like i was practicing mindfulness in the dream, and paying attention to being aware of things in the dream, and knowing it was a dream, but just watching what was happening. and i'm not sure why usually my lucid dreams just fall apart, but this time it just kept going on and on as i just stayed mindful. it was pretty trippy.

and it turns out i did have the right phone number, and i tried again and talked to my friend

  • August 15, 2001
how can patterns combine? logic is a system for tranforming formal symbols using reliable position. having a system for producing combinations is perfectly compatible with an evolutionary procedure. typical genetic algorithms use simple combination systems, which, i guess, keep the search space from being restricted by the rules. but i dont see that rule generated combinations are totally limiting. perhaps some combined procedure of really random plus rule generated combinations

  • August 14, 2001
its tuesday morning. i have to go back to work. i wonder what's in store.

an ok day, actually. some troubles from the network having problems. got time off monthly very close. and procrastinated, but i think i got the build script going.

got a phone call from someone very nice. but silly me, i've left too many message on the machine, and i think it made it garble this one. there were odd dropouts in the message, and it wasnt clear. and i didnt get the work number at all, i dont know if i got the other number right. grr. i tried a reverse lookup on two possibilities. no help. maybe they can try me at work. 263-4415. very frustrating

so i've got to watch that. when i like someone, i get nervous. instead of just telling erin a wanted to see her, i told her i wanted to try some french food, 'babian' being french, and would she like to go. pitiful. i must endeavor to be a little more mindful. one cute thing though. there was an exercise class at 5:30, one which uses steps and barbell weights-- "body pump" i think. well, i got in there just as it was about to start, and asked erin what i needed to do it. she, being sweet, suggested that i take the techniques class for it, where the instructor 'splains stuff, which is at 5:, but if i wanted to try it, i needed the step things and weights and so forth. she's told me before to try the training class first, but has encouraged me to get in there. but i looked at the different ranges of weights that people had, and realized that i would not have time to figure out the right weight for me, and i kind of brushed it off this time. and after running 3 miles in 38.5 minutes, i was soaking in the hot tub when they were done. erin looked in through the glass, but she didnt stop to say hi, and i hadnt gotten to talk to her yet today. yesterday, i actually kept from calling her, to see that i could, but it was tough. i've gotten pretty smitten. anyway, so i called her up, and she was busy, but she felt bad about turning me away from the class. somewhere in there, though, she has said that she cant get too involved. huh? i still dont know if she likes guys (and i thought she didnt.)

mimicking as an essential intelligent process. in a certain sense, the ability to create internal models of how things happen is a mimicking process. our thoughts are _like_ the real world in the sense that they in some sense act like, or mimic their objects. I have a book from melanie mitchell about copy-cat, that is called "analogy-making as perception", which i haven't read yet, but i guess i need to. i think this might be a good thesis topic. mimicking behavior by recogizing evolving patterns. i need a problem domain. personally, i am quite taken with the notion of language, or speech acts, as models of the world, and that might involve visual representation somehow tranforming (i guess by this pattern evolution) to description. i need a procedure for the evolution of such patterns. that requires a method for the patterns to be randomly altered and combined with others. and it requires a means of evaluating their "quality" and ensure that the "better" ones have a greater likelihood of propagating.

  • August 13, 2001
went by the u of m. there was nobody there to advise me. the secretary asked me if i had a thesis, and tried to help me with whom to go to. if it's pattern recognition, then dr. frigui. but he wont be back till the 27. everyone is supposed to back by the 21st. i guess i'll have to come back.

i went by the cog sci library/lab thingie. bianca and shannon were standing in the doorway talking to someone, so i just walked past. totally didnt want to speak to them. its been like that for a few days, seeing people i know but not talking to them. saw wes at seesel's with some tall blonde babe. saw lindsey this morning at seesels. i suppose i'm offending the gods of chance. and why do i keep winning little fedex trucks at the door prize drawings at meetings? van, though has won more of those than i, i really should pass, like that one time i won, but didnt claim it. it was just so awkward. maybe i just wont take a ticket.

so, a thesis topic- a system to mimic behavior based on the recognition of evolving patterns. i need to work on it

  • August 11, 2001
i skipped the exercise yesterday. i spent most of the afternoon with rick and steve looking at some networking issues, and just before 5 i got to working on the time off monthly report. i was kind of stuck, because there would be runtime errors, but for some reason, the code got into some state where it wouldnt indicate where there error was, though normally it would. i was trying a different approach to finding the error, stepping through it in the debugger line by line, but even with that, the debugger somehow crashed. i did find one problem with that method, but it was painful. i finally thought to put the questionable code in a try-catch block (a way of manually detecting runtime errors), and suddenly i could see where the errors were again. so i made quick progress after that. and i got it to print out a calendar with names, though it isnt finished. i need to run or something tomorrow-- maybe i should go to the Q. and i'm going to take a day off from work on monday, so it would be 4 days of loafing if i dont go tomorrow.

i was really panicking. i called erin wednesday, thursday and friday, and she didnt pick up or call me back. actually, on thursday, i talked to her. i called her wednesday to bring a bathing suit so she could hang out in the spa at the gym, which they just opened this month. ive been sitting in it by myself when i get done early enough. and i asked her if she had on thursday, and she said i looked as if she should have known what i was talking about. i guess she doesnt check her machine that much. thursday, i had decided to skip, but she helped me to change my mind, but i put it that she had made me feel bad about it. i said that to her and tim, and that just started to bug me, until finally i called her and left a message on her machine that it didnt come out right (i dont think i used the 's' word though), and i was really glad for the opportunity and thanks for getting me to do it. but yesterday, i just wanted to do something, and i just lamely said "call if you want to do something sometime". i was pretty much tired of it. i was giving up. today i was weakening though. i was considering something lame and soulful, like i dont know why she hasnt called, or i dont know. i was thinking i problably just shouldnt. anyway, at like 1:30 in the afternoon, she did call back. got in too late. was just getting up. her allergy medication was keeping her up. there was an earthquake. a terrible flood. anyway, today she was busy, since last week she didnt get much done. shopping, car work, housecleaning. maybe some other time, i suggest. (let me hold my breath. one hippopotamus, two hippopotamus, three hippopotamus...)

so i finished a book--living the mindful life, by charles tart. it was very slow going. dude is not especially enlightened. it seems like for him, enlightenment is constantly being aware of your body. whereas, the sense i get from others, is that midfulness does give you a little emotional distance so that you arent tied by anger and greed, and can let them go. but mindfulness is more of a tool that allows you to see the impermanence, and egolessness of all the things that we try to attach to ourselves. we might then see the wider nature of existance, that we are not these thoughts that arise, we are not bound and limited. he seems oddly caught up. but being more aware is probably a good thing. i guess it seems like he has oggten hooked on the idea of nirvana as "awakened" and the image of everyone being asleep. this of course, is not consistent with the notion that everyone already has a buddha nature, and it is simply clouded with extra stuff. of course, i'm intellectualizing about something that shouldnt be intellectualized about, but in searching in the dark, it is nice to have the feel of wood paneling

  • August 9, 2001
what's the buzz. so yesterday i made 3 miles in just under 40 minutes. the first miles was in 12 minutes, and my heart rate wasnt all that high at the end of it. i was lucky about the random incline. but i did slow when the incline went up. today, i went a shorter distance, just 2 miles, but i kept up the 5mph pace without slowing down, so i did it in 24 minutes, which i think was a good result too. i was going to just skip, and i told erin that i was going to skip. but i felt bad about it, and went to see if she had gone yet, and she hadnt, and i decided to go. i like that girl.

so i was thinking that i'm seeing enough in common with these women that i could put together a composite of what kind of woman i want to be with. she's smart. she draws. she has a masters degree. she works in computers (help me! help me! i'm stuck in a computer!). she has studied philosophy. she likes astrology (this is a tough one. im pretty opposed to astrology and i think i would get into conflict because of this, i just seem to find women that i like who are into it). she has spots. she works out. i'm not sure if she's thin-- i really think i like that, but i guess when it comes down to it, it really isnt so important to me. she has been clinically depressed. she likes to read.

  • August 6, 2001
that look! it was a beautiful look. just as i was leaving, i stopped by erin to say hi, and caught her on the phone. even, still i ask her how she was and gave a weak "ok" and asked if she could talk later. but the look. it was a worried look. not the look of someone happy to see someone else. certainly, she was taking care of some pressing and urgent matter. but that look. like i'm already a problem. but i was oddly in a good mood. to be rejected is to be free. i know that look.

i like bread and butter. i like toast and jam. hey hey we're the monkees. (ok, so that might not have been the monkees). when i was walking out of the gym, the radio was playing (and i'm sitting here at hooters again. i've given up and gone back to tipping $20. erin payed the the tip saturday, and i added $5. i was telling her that my tip philosophy came from here. you dont come here for the food, though in this case today, i just felt like chicken. when i got home i wasnt very hungry, and mom had deer goulash, which i didnt feel like, so i didnt eat much. anyway, i put 20 in the jar, but i'm having to tip $1 so the waitress (i couldnt quite read her name, 'aloha' or something, tall brunette.) wont think i just stiffed her. i hate when they do that). anyway, the radio was playing that monkees tune from shrek. why cant i think of it now? i was walking behind some woman. and as she got outside, she started singing it. what the heck is it? (heck is for people who dont believe in gosh. i told aimee that one as we were driving over the dam in heber springs) i thought love was only something in fairy tales. hrmph for someone else but not for me. yada yada. i'm in love -ooh- i'm a believer. heh. actually, i'm more of a skeptic, but i do believe in love. been there. not all that great, though. "alisha" is it. only _true_ in fairy tales.

  • August 4, 2001
i like to think i had fun. i guess it was fun having someone to talk to. perhaps somewhat i am compensating or rationalizing or misapplying or sublimating or something. i was thinking in terms of get to know you date. so i was embarassed or angry (i actually felt flushed, whatever that means), when i found out she prefers women. so from her perspective it was just trying to get to know a friend. so it was my mistake. but now i have to deal with it in some way. i'm not convinced that i want a woman who is just a friend. im not sure i can do that. though, it did seem like i didnt consciously think of sex when i was with her. hmm. i must ponder this. my first feeling is that i should just not make a big deal of it, but should just not be interested. fogettuboutit. but that was it. that was the last girl i know about, for now. i suppose if she was available, she wouldnt be available

  • August 3, 2001
3 miles in 42 minutes on wednesday. and soaked in the hot tub. 41:41 today. seems like i can hardly take the soak in the tub. and the treadmill got me. i set the incline on random, and this time, at the end, the incline was small, so i increased the speed to 4.6 mph. normally, for the cooldown period, it slows down to 3.0 mph for 30 seconds, and 2.5 for 30 more. this time it went down to 4.5 mph for another minute and then 30 seconds more at some slower speed. grr. oops.

a semi lucid dream. by taking naps with the snooze alarm. i remember thinking that we cant see how things really are because we are tied by assumptions about space and time and theories of mind and innate concepts of number. i tried togo out of the double door in our living room, but when i would open it, there would be another set of doors behind it. somehow i managed to get through, but it felt like i was wasting time, and i think i knew i didn't have long till the alarm went off, i felt angry and tried to imagine some monster to hack up, but that didn't work. and then i tried going into my bedroom. some time later, maybe another dream, i just went looking for a girl. found one in a house across the street. kind of thin. vaguely hispanic. got her pants off, but was caught by the alarm.

it was very odd. i was taking a break, and i was going over to see erin. i didn't really have anything much i was wanting to talk about, i just wanted to chat a little (and that seems kind of odd for me, as i think about it). i was thinking about the epistemology thing from the dream. andi had some time before looked up the movie the princess and the warrior (der kreiger und die kaiserin), from the guy who did run lola run, which i really liked, and wanted to go see. so i go over to erin, and ask her if she's busy and how she's doing. she actual seemed to have a lot of stuff to do, so i didnt think i could talk much. and that got me into a kind of business-like mindset (as in "get down to business"). i asked her if she had seen "run lola run" and she said it was great or something. and i said there was a new one out from them, and she said she heard about it and was it here yet, and i said yes, its at studio on the square and would she like to go see it. and i dont remember how exactly she said she would (seems like an important detail) whether it was a sure, or how enthusiastic it was, because i pushed on an suggesed tomorrow. and the theater is right near her,and we could meet there, and i got her to look up the times (kind of an oops to not have the times already, but this wasnt planned, i just kind of slid into it), and i picked the 4 oclock. at least i remembered to be commanding and decisive. i'll see her there. but it just seems odd. and to have asked her out right there in those open pods right next to everyone she works with. i really felt too self-conscious to go by there that day. it was friday though, and everyone left at 1, but she was still around. still, i figured i could just talk to her tomorrow. and i was getting a lot done with everyone gone. got into the programming zone. it seems like maybe it's hard to get there when i am expecting interruptions.

  • July 31, 2001
i jogged 3 miles in 45 minutes. well, not quite jogged, robert tellsme a jogger would do a 10k in an hour (6mph), a runner would do a 10k in 45 minutes. more of a fast walk, then, but robert also says he does even jog. and i just wasnt hungry when i got home.

and it was a horrible monday. the download on test quit because a filesystem filled up. in the afternoon, edison, a sun box, locked up. thats twice recently.

today was much better. lois, our manager, got back from a working (taking care of a family reunion) vacation, and didnt even yell at me. plus, its payday. went out to lunch with erin and joel, and she talked about her epistemology stuff from grad school. saying that a dog knows that his master is coming home is equivalent to saying he knows that the train is leaving the station at 12:00. same conceptual apparatus needed, and yet he couldnt know something like the second. but i'm not convinced of their equivalence. a dog, as a social creature, does in fact have a concept of "master", being used to a social hierarchy, and a concept "is coming", some predictive ability, is surely there. and being territorial, it knows about "home".

  • July 27, 2001
i was ready to quit today. i mean it is really a mistake to quit a job without another one lined up. if you can find another one at all, (and with the economy slowed down, it would be tough) you'd probably end up with one worse. and i might have been looking at unemployment for quite a while. and it would be tough with still $17k down. but even with that, i was just about ready to have down with it. it's the people. but this was friday, and for the summer, they are letting people who choose to come in at 7:30 and leave at 1:00. so everybody left and it was better. to be a numbered employee. 398438. how are you today, 398438? still, i'm not sure i can stay with it. i might try working from home some time. but i've already started to slip. not following "procedure". from dust i come. and as luck would have it, i come home and find that a headhunter has left me an email. i guess it's time to start looking. and there's always finishing school.

and at the gym, after work, it looked like beth was talking to the manager. and they were sitting behind the counter. maybe she's going to work there. maybe she'll be teaching a yoga class. [then again maybe it was someone else]

a friend of my dad's-- buddy ruffino-- just died. his daughter called and anted to talk to him. i said he was out of town. somehow i didn't think to give her the number, and she gave me hers to give him. there was one point were she told me to hold. she sounded like she had been crying. then later, little buddy called, and asked for it.

pork schnitzel for dinner

  • July 25, 2001
bad news. nastiness even. i can hardly brush my teeth without gagging. something about the toothpaste. maybe i'm allergic. starting to lose my breakfast.

cable has added the sci-fi channel to it's regular setup. i was thinking of getting digital just for that. but then i tried watching it. total junk. boring, if not stupid. other people's fantasies. and they just don't make sense to me. but sunday morning they show a classic star trek. transporter malfunction and the captain is split into good and evil twins. and there are people stuck on the surface. and finally it hits me (it's been a while, but i must have seen them all half a dozen times at least). "hello? what about the shuttlecraft?" this has been one of my pet peeves, conveniently forgetting technology for plot reasons. but i guess i developed that dislike after i stopped watching classic st. this bodes not well.

grr. so erin is going to turn 30 in september. too young. throw her back in the water.

so i did 12 reps of pull downs at 190 lbs. i weigh 190lbs, so i should be able to do pull ups if the machine is really accurate. i dont think so. but, i guess i need to try it.

  • July 15, 2001
being mean to get attention. hmm.

consciousness turns out to not be such a big deal after all. most of what happens in the mind is not conscious. much not even accessible, though some can be focused on. the kind of things that do happen consciously are that a situation which is basically a problem is brought to light, some image of something or a goal, the hidden mind will deal with it, and then some answer will be revealed, which is of course, just another situation or problem to be dealt with, and on and on. new things popping up all the time. consciousness, then is a spotlight that brings resources to bear. an important aspect of consciousness then, is that it is all about interaction and interference, getting things churning, as it were, and is not meant for efficiency, but flexibility. doing figures in your head then is not reliable, because the consciousness is meant to make it flexible and reactive to disturbable, just basically unstable. things that are automaticare much more reliable and stable, precisely because they are not interactive. practice makes automatic,which is reliable. the "idiot savant" calculator, i imagine, is very effective because his processing flows undisturbed. and after practicing, i guess, the unneeded connections just die away. but as for consciousness being unimportant, once we learn the right way to do things, we can just go to sleep and live in oblivion. zombies. works very well for most people. im not really sure what the value is in awakening, other than maybe an openness and flexibility, which may not really be all that valuable, unless the patterns we have are really poor ones that are not making us happy. i suppose it is common enough that people are convinced-- told outright, even-- that they arent happy. keeps the economy going, i guess. seems a little silly, though. exactly why do you think you aren't happy?

  • July 13, 2001
happy friday the thirteenth

disturbing. justin was reading books at borders. so rick said he must not like being at home. and i said he's all by himself. and he said katrina was at work. hmm. he's just out of school in december, so maybe 23. moved here in january. does he have a girlfriend living with him already?

went to see a hypnotist. i dont think i went under any 'trance'

saigon. i'm still only in saigon.

there was this south park episode. cartman gets abused by an eighth-grader and plots his revenge. it looks like its going to be stupid and maybe mess up. but it turns out that cartman arranges for dude's parents to be killed, he cooks them into chili, and feeds them to him. and i really enjoyed that. and then it bothered me. i even started talking to erin about. i asked her if she watched south park, and she said sometimes. she likes its subversiveness. she thought the movie was one of the best that year. but that was the year of fight club. she said she hadnt seen it, and i said i had it on DVD, and she suggested that she might borrow it. i brought it to her today, and she said it would save her four bucks, because she was thinking of renting it. conspicuously absent was any hint that i might join her. it doesnt look good for the home team. so i brought the south park up again. she wondered why i brought it up. i said i enjoyed it too much. she might catch it on saturday. astrology. i think of the word, and i'm just not interested. but, also, i fear what i have become. michele was so sweet. vegetarian, pro-life, anti-violence, not desensitized. to hear them pleading and kill them anyway... he reads poetry out loud. it's just an uneasiness. guilt, maybe. a kind of unworthiness

so, it looks like i got a bonus and can just about pay off citibank. maybe $50 shy. that would leave me at about $17k.

broken

  • July 5, 2001
I guess i still needto make time to write.

i am seriously depressed. i am pretty sure it will get better with time, but depression can take quite a while.

i really didn't want to go work out. i did go though. i decided that it would be better to go for a fixed distance ( 2 miles) rather than fixed time (30 minutes), because it keeps up the incentive to go faster to use less time, and keeps me for just going slower. and it ended up taking just shy of 30 min, anyway.

I ate way too much watermelon. maybe around 4 quarts (which would be, what, maybe 5 or 6 pounds).

I looked up the lucid dreaming people again. they really suggest keeping a dream diary to help with it. i think it helps one analyze "dream signs" or things that would indicate that i am dreaming. i never wanted to keep one because turning on a light would wake me up, and it would be hard to go to sleep. maybe i could type it into the palmtop, which i might be able to do in less light. and then i could publish it. that would be freaky. as i have been trying to remeber them, i have been able to remember quite alot immediately after, ut of course it fades later. and i always thought it was better to forget dreams, because i thought they were part of the forgetting process. i dug out "exploring the world of lucid dreaming" which i got with my dream goggles, but have not yet read. there is a chapter on using lucid dreams for spiritual insight. it can help one experience the illusory nature of the self, or the "true" self. also, people try asking themselves questions, like what is the meaning of life. it sounds to me like this second use could only reveal your own expectation, and not anything really true. but it is suggested. and it seems like a powerful source of insight. that one semi-lucid dream with me meditating in a group still gets me. an odd thing about remembering dreams lately has been how ordinary things seem. some things look like i'm watching a show, but a lot of stuff seems like it might just actually happen. maybe. i guess i should write them down and pay closer attention. i guess i'll open a file and have it waiting.

  • June 30, 2001
finally i got the ftp working on the palmtop. so i can finally upload pages without having to transfer the file to another machine. this has been enough of an inconvenience that it is an excuse to not write. there was some problems with the "port" command, which is used in almost all transfers. this may be an issue with the router. i could log in ok, but couldnt get directories or transfer files. but if i use "sendport" to toggle off the use of port commands, it suddenly works. yay!

i dont mean to obsess, but it was an odd thing. erin was done running maybe five minutes after i started (and i went for 30 minutes, 2.1 miles), but she was hanging around a long time. at one point, i thought i saw her out in the parking lot, but i guess it was someone else. and then i finish the jog and she goes to the ocker room before leaving. I go to lift a few weights, i just do one set each a set of vertical press, pull downs (i do 15 reps of 150lbs--maybe soon i'll be able to do pull ups again, though 190 is a long way from 150), and horizontal press. and then i look up, and she's going out the door. i guess i could have call out or something, but its pretty clear. she could easily have come over and visited. she did go over and talk to joel. joel by the way got it up to 8.6mph for a bit. seemed like it inspired me to a little sprint in there somewhere, but i don't know what i got to. anyway, it just seemed like the timing was odd. and then i was down and left, and when i got out to the parking lot, it seemed like she had been going really slow, because she was still there (putting stuff in her trunk), and if i'd hurried, i could have made it to over talk to her, but i missed it by maybe 10 seconds, and she drove away. previously that day i sent her a message (at some point i need to tell her i dont just go up to talk to her because she said she didnt like always being interrupted) that i missed her on thursday and was she going to see the movie a.i. and i'd like to talk with her about. she said she'd like to. i'm guessing she realized that if she talked to me, i'd ask her out, but she wasn't interested and didnt want to deal with it.

so i saw spielberg's movie a.i. i was annoyed by a lot of it. i really dont like when "sci fi" movies restrict the technology in order to add dramatic elements. why would a robot be irrevocably imprinted? and why restrict him to loving just one person? why not everyone? or just most people? and at least give him enough sense not to pull someone under water and drown him. for shame. and please give me engineers who are not social morons. the beginning of the movie at the factory, i found extremely distasteful and i managed to blot it out mostly, later. i could see that i was in trouble when dude tells mecha babe to take off her clothes, and she just casually starts unbuttoning. the very notion, the assumption, that because they aren't flesh, the mecha's are not "real" had the exact feeling of racism, and maybe that was the idea, but i was sickened. and at the end of the movie, creator dude (played by william hurt, who tried very hard, but was handed some miserable writing) somehow conflates obsessive delusion with a noble human quality (maybe imagination or inspiration or love, it's hard to tell). i would have taken the boy straight back to the factory. why on earth did she feel like keeping such a pest, or making it obsessed with her. and let's make this clear. undying obsession is not love. i speak from experience. another thing in the beginning i also found disgusting. they selected as the recipient someone who had a kid in a coma. people love identities, and you cant just substitute someone. could anyone think of trying to give a mother a replacement son? i guess there is the whole learning to love again thing. of course, i think owning pets is morally degrading. and the boy was just creepy. no blinking. and he doesnt talk at first. that would have made me send him back as defective. and then he laughs maniacally at the spaghetti thing. i would have been going for that off switch. data had one. and data had a little pinocchio thing going to. he cant sleep? what crap is that? can you say 'privacy'? but maybe the worst foolish plot device was the whole thing about not eating. we have dolls today that can eat. i is guarranteed to alienate him. i value the shared experience of dining together. it is terrible to think that anyone who wants to make an artificial companion would exclude him from this vital ritual. and it's especially silly since it is an artificial son. i have yet to see a mother who wasnt always trying to feed her little baby. it's what motherhood is about. it makes her feel good. important. this slug really has no use for her. how exactly is she supposed to care about him? bedtime stories? unthinkable. commander data could eat. i know spielberg was trying to go somewhere with it. the whole cleanup operation with the "it doesnt hurt mommy". but there it went to far. melodrama. from then on i was constantly aware that they were just trying to play with the audiences feeling. it wasnt science fiction. it was robotic fantasy. and the bit at the end how everything in the universe is recorded and they can bring people back to life for one day. pseudo religious wishfuless. i guess you got to expect such tripe from spielberg. i mean, we had the whole glorious kubrickesque 2001 ending, and it had to be messed up by personalizing it. maybe they will get some good merchandising out of it. i did like gigolo joe. he was so fresh and unpretentious, even if he was a clown and a ham. and an einstein logo as dr. know, the information database, oracle who likes to cheat people by answering the wrong question. must be a jewish thing (and i stayed for the credits to verify that robin williams played the voice, and thus saw that meryl streep was the blue fairy). i get tired of einstein being the image of a know it all. his theories are surprisingly unimportant. and he couldnt remember his own phone number. and he married his cousin (after divorcing his wife). and there's the whole quantum mechanics thing. i guess i dont forgive him for starting the nuclear arms race and thus personally threatening my life. should i try to find something good in this movie? well, at least the robots arent mostly treated like slaves or property. at least they have the status approaching animals or pets, though they do get tortured. not quite pets, i guess. they have the ability to "live" independently. and it's optimistic enough just to think that it is possible to have human-like robots. some say that it would be impossible, and they wouldnt be conscious, anyway. rouge city was fun. some of the action was fun. the effects were very seamless, and played a powerful support role. a good escape. and the starbaby ending was a touching homage to kubrick (the film was produced by his company). The idea of artificial children is really quite old (ancient greek). it makes sense with the theory of meme machines in blackmore. It's not so important to us to recreate our flesh (cf adoption). We want children to share our feelings and dreams and ideas. though this was largely missed as a theme, there is still some element of this deep wisdom. there was a powerful piece where joe raises doubt about david's dream, but as a friend and seeing david's conviction, supports him anyway.

  • June 26, 2001
Let's get together and do something sometime.

snerky face

so i came home for lunch because i had forgotten my shoes and stuff for working out. that's going pretty well, too, i've gone nine times so far, generally going about 1.3 miles. anyway, a red sports car kind of went slowly by as i was about to leave, so i followed it. it was kind of making a loop and stopped, so i went around, and it was my mom's friend liz. i knew she had a red camaro, but i hadn't seen it, and maybe i saw her but it didn't register. i was thinking it was suspicious. but i said, hi, and she was just checking if my mom was there. i'm getting addled in my old age.

and so working out. i've got tim for support. and joel and erin were there again. erin ran 2.5 mi in 30 min, and was finishing when i started. she didnt seem too happy to see me, but i pretty act the same way when im working out. but she was kind of hanging out with people after. i saw her talking with joel, and she came over to talk to tim. i do have a point here. she then said she was going to go home, take a shower (and it seems like i hear about women bathing more than seems appropriate), and go to bed. it seemed after i thought about like she might have been lonely and looking for something to do. or at least bored. and my point: do i do anything? no. maybe its inertia. maybe i'm repelled by people who are into astrology (or am repellant to). whatever, i could have at least been friendly and suggested something. i'm not real friendly, though. and she didn't actually come over to me. perhaps its a shame. couldnt be helped.

  • June 25, 2001
read julian jaynes's origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind there were a couple of references in it to stuff he had written, but which would be in his next book. there was also an afterward written ten years laters where he says there's some stuff he 'hopes' will be in a new book. He never got another book published. too bad, because it was pretty interesting. it seemed to have some factual problems, and i\'m not sure anyone buys it. the fatal flaw, i'm guessing, is some seriously antisemitic bits. like an assertion that the biblical history was all faked in the 6th century BC. rock on!not a good way to get follow-up book deals, though.

his main point is that consciousness is a product of language, which developed late, around 10,000 BC. But at that time people were not fully conscious. They had 'bicameral' minds. The brain sections which on the left perform linguistic function, on the right today dont do anything, but up to 1200 BC acted as a source of divine voices which guided people, as a kid of voice of society or superego. schizophrenics are like a vestige of that mindset. i think the point is more that there wasnt the unified self that there is today. the ability of an ape to recognize his body in a mirror is not the same as having an internalized narrative self, ans jaynes seems to say this is a recent social construction. hypnosis might provide some access or be related.

in the afterword, he talks about the simple affects, like fear, shame and anger, excitement which through reflection in the new self become more persistent in anxiety, guilt, hate, and joy. no longer just reactions, but personal qualities.

one intriguing discussion was about the mating response becoming a constant drive through conscious fantasy, which fans the flames and keeps them constantly going, instead of just being a response to certain conditions. it isn't a 'drive' that just builds up, like thirst or hunger. or at least, didn't used to be. be thinking makes it so.

  • June 17, 2001
been a while. not that i haven't been thinking about stuff. i guess i just haven't wanted to write anything down.

i'm at hooters "reaffirming" my basic anger at women. i guess i have been obsessed with them. it's come out as a series of individual obsessions, but it now seems that it's more an obsession with the species in general. but i'm having to reevaluate it, and deciding that they aren't so good as i pretend.

i saw pearl harbor. that really made me start reevaluating. how faithless the woman could be. (i don't blame dude, he was only a shadow of a person,anyway.

the initial kicker was a statement from aimee: "thanks for staying in touch" as she described a weekend with her ex-fiancee, with whom she said "there could never be anything". since i heard that she broke up, i've tried to be nice, saying good things about her. she has said she wanted to get together for coffee, but somehow it hasn't happened. the last thing i wrote her, was about how i think i would no longer be critical of her beliefs.

somehow, it has always been the same. women have been unceasingly faithless.

in any case, it seems i have an opportunity to return to one of my core values: anger.

after getting back from the movie, i finished up "the good, the bad, and the ugly", and took a nap. it seems like in falling in and out of sleep, i was thinking it was morning, like i was trying to forget that this day had happened.

i am striving to be good to myself, just this evening. i've been falling into these self-destructive habits.

it has been really nice having direct internet access from this palmtop (through the ethertnet card and road-runner). i'm using it as my main computer at home now. the instant on has been really nice. it's a pity that since the vpn doesn't work on it, i can't access work on it, or i'd use it exclusively.

i wasn't going to have any beer, but they finally have guinness on tap. stephanie said it was warm, though she didn't know what i was talking about. and it wasn't very fresh. but still, it's guinness.

did i really see something on espn just now about a "zen masters" tournament?(this was before i started on the stout).

i really feel bad about drinking beer lately. bad for me, and it clouds my thinking. probably the guinness wasn't a god idea. a temptation i just gave into.

i started working out at the gym from working. i have twice run a 15-minute mile. an anemic start, but at least a start (again). it's quiet after work. i don't feel so self-conscious. erin helped get me started, but i haven't actually been there at the same time as her yet. of course, i haven't had problems getting started, only keeping with it. now i have two other people on my side-- erin and tim.

i started on dale carnegie. and i read something from richard brodie on "getting past ok". it seemed mostly about self acceptance and finding a purpose, and suggested listing out your successes and wants and finding a common theme to guide you. he made a distinction between purpose--which is ongoing-- and goals, which end when reached.

i also read a profoundly influencing book, "the meme machine" by susan blackmore, an ex-parapsychologist, stoner Buddhist. she expands on dawkins idea of memes. she asserts that memes have become a selection pressure independent of genes. we have bigger brains and fine language ability because increased mimetic ability was a selection pressure. memes and genes are similar because they are both forms of a more general darwinian principle: what is copied and selected evolves. the important aspect of memes is that they are copied. we don't have to define exactly what is copied as long as there is copying, and there is a difference between copying instructions (which are digital) and results, which are not (and which would be subject to much greater error in transmission). people are really the first to have the ability to copy "apeing" is actually rare among primates. susan is a little disappointing in proposing experiments, but not showing results from them, and otherwise making just-so explanations. still, some of the problems that more traditional sociobiology (everything developed because of direct benefit to genes) has trouble with, she finds answers to in this meme theory. specifically, celibacy, adoption, and altruism. altruism spreads not because of its benefit to the individual, but because (once people developed pressure to copy) it was very visible, and was performed by people who were likable, and thus more likely to be copied (it was also kick-started by kin-selected altruism and reciprocal altruism). celibacy and adoption (which can only be seen as mistakes in sociobiology) make sense as ways that people can spread memes. celibacy frees up a person's time to spread the "word". memes exists as colonies of mutually supporting memes, just as genes exist in colonies and could not exist independently. adoption also provides an opportunity to spread memes in people, for whom the spreading of memes has become an independent pressure. rock stars and politicians and celebrities in general are attractive because they a very powerful meme spreaders. it's quite an informing point of view. as a zen practitioner, susan is interested in enlightenment, which she claims is "waking up" from the illusion of the self, which is a very strong collection of memes. it ends up being quite useful to abandon this set, and instead of causing one to be ineffective, it actually frees one up to be much more effective, by releasing a great deal of unnecessary baggage. it is quite possible to act in one's best interests without believing there is some type of persistent entity with certain defined qualities. in fact, i would think it would free one up, not being bound by one's self-image, to make the best decision at the time, an increase in flexibility and removal of inhibition.

mediate?
a ball in flight.
a borrowed pen.

to continue the affirmation, im at platinum. and it isnt even anger. it has become emptiness. the caffeine in the mountain dew upset my blood pressure, and the carbonation has upset my stomach. i asked the waitress for something without bubbles, and she looked at me like i was stupid, so i said no coke or beer, and she suggested a wine cooler. for that good alternate, i tipped her a dollar extra.

if i work as a writer, i could do it at places such as these. too bad i cant compile java on this thing. who was that meme spreading writer with marilyn monroe?

  • May 4, 2001
can a computer be sentient? can a zombie dream? robert said there is nothing but consciousness. a zombie is something that acts (and takes input) like a person but has no conscious experience. a dream is conscious experience without action(or input), so a zombie should not have any dreams. a zombie is thus a kind of an opposite to something beind conscious, if a computer is conscious, then it won't be a zombie. if it can dream, then it is conscious. it seems like all a computer ever does is a dream. and nisargattada says we are always dreaming. i think nisargattada in this sense means we are dreaming in that, like in a dream, we take our experiences to be real,as if they are really "out there", when they never are. to be awake is then to see that we were just dreaming. to recognize what was there, and see consciousness as it is-- a screen onto which everything is projected.

  • February 26, 2001
the cia didn't know the soviet union was going to collapse. the cia thought saddam husein would fall after the gulf war.

i got the last piece of my computer from the mail. i need to go to the store for some more pieces.

  • February 25, 2001
this morning i was at the young avenue deli seeing big ass truck with doug and his girlfiend laura. they were really drunk. laura really looked like she wanted to get laid. she was actually trying to get to know me, and even kiss me on the cheek when i said i also went to christian brothers. i think doug has been failing to keep up his end of the relationship. i hope he did better. it reminded me of one time at school when there was this one girl, maybe a little tubby, that just went out and made it public that she wanted some affection.

christianity is a little deceptive. when christ said "they can only get through the father through me", or however exactly it was put. this was in fact true. the problem of course, is that people misunderstand that "me" to be some physical individual, or even a physical individual, and do not understand that it is a shared Self that we all have in common. we all have a christ within. the historical jesus, if there even was one, was not the important object, but people have a tendency to take it that way, and it seems that many churches don't do much to dispell such false notions. they appeal to the human social need to follow a dominant male.

i have taken down my server until this road runner thing is cleared up. that means most off my pages are gone.

  • February 24, 2001
well, now there's a trippy claim. sri maharshi says that the enlightened (well, he uses the word jnani, which means someone who has realized the Self, the Atman), sees everyone as enlightened.

  • February 21, 2001
she's cold in a dale carnegie sort of way. she can have casual(superficial) social contact so readily that she doesn't get much further.

roadrunner is accusing me of running ports scans. first i've heard of such a thing. like being accused of shoplifting. i don't want to lose my connection. i looked up dsl and i can't get it at my number. it could be that some of my software is messing up. linux could be getting confused about it's identity and is polling some other machine. and i do use ababian.yi.org, which gets out of date whenever they drop my ip.

  • February 18, 2001
cool new word: Creatrix

  • February 17, 2001
sri ramana maharshi really emphasizes that we are still around during sleep. we naturally identify ourselves with our thoughts and consciousness and body awareness, but these are gone during sleep. clearly those things are not all there is to us. i really have been misstating it, that we aren't these things. we just aren't limited to being these things. they are actually created out of what we truly are.

being on call has really sucked. stuff not working, and my starting up on the weekend has meant that i while i'm just getting started, i don't have anyone to ask about stuff.

  • February 12, 2001
today isn't staring off so well. i taped star trek voyager last night, since it came on at 11:30, and i was watching it this morning, but the recording had stopped maybe 5 minutes before the end(even though the timer had given it 4 extra minutes) maybe they started at 11:35. so i missed the ending. the klingons were just trying to take control. and then i found that the cable modem line is down again. argh.

  • February 11, 2001
liberation is freedom in this sense: to be acting at all times with total awareness of one's self, and not to be ever acting out of mechanical habit, and thus being chained to past behavior, even the past of just a few minutes ago. now this liberation has to be squared with the fairly obvious truth that everyone and every thing is in fact bound by cause and effect. how can we be free? well, we simply aren't these things that are bound. we aren't the body or the mind (though mostly we believe that until we finally see better). what are we?

we aren't even doing anything. the actions just happen.

we are the spirit. not a bunch of spirits, but the spirit.

  • February 10, 2001
the I is not real. look for itand it will disappear and you will be left with your true nature

gotta go party

saw hannibal. actually a little boring. and just not as good without jodie. what's her name's southern accent was just painful for me to hear at first. and i guess i could see why jodie wasn't interested. lots of just silly violence. and nobody would go way out of their way to save hannibal. though i suppose i was kind of disturbed by it, which may have been the idea. natural born killers was trying to be a paraody, and maybe this is too. during the movie, the gory bits really didn't bother me. same old stuff, though i guess my reaction may have been a little different in that i didn't really like it the way i used to when i was more angry. and then after it, thinking back on it, i did actually feel bad about it. i think it was because i was thinkiong about how michele would think about it. she does not like violence. and i would like to be more like that.

maybe i should have studied a brass instrument. i have a problem of not being able to read music properly, in the sense of seeing the notation and hearing the notes. i would also then have to learn how to go from imagining the sounds to playing them, so clearly this would have been harder. and i found that i have gotten a really lazy messed up hybrid, that i can hardly get the timing from the notation at all. i use more rhythmic memory to get the timing, and maybe just initially find out the timing from the notation. but the sad thing is that from the notation i simply get finger positioning. perhaps learning through singing would be good. but with a brass instrument like a trumpet, i think you have to regulate the sound more by ear.

  • February 3, 2001
i am really cut off. we just stopped getting the paper, and my internet connection is down. i suppose i should try digging out the modem. i don't know which movies are out.

i tried some soy milk. at about $3.50 for a half gallon (i got a quart of chocolate) it's about twice what regular milk wasgoing for there, though that seems way overpriced. it was also about the same price as the lactose free stuff. it was actually pretty good. i might have to start getting it, since i have lactose troubles. it says it's organic, and yet it has added calcium and presumably synthetic vitamins -- A and D.

but as to what got me to get back to the journal this time. there is a recurrent idea in the realm of religious experience that the awareness of the divine is always there, but is just covered up and the impediments need to be removed from it. it seems like the more natural interpretation is that the kowledge isn't there and then at some point it is, but i think i always see phrased more like they just don't see it yet. "the kingdom of heaven is all around and they don't see it" according to Thomas. but more specifically where i'm seeing it is in the non-dualists (advaita vedantists) who, in seeking to know the true self as a not separate from the world, say that the self is always know. a quote from sri ramana maharshi "The Self is eternally realized". i almost said that the self was _already_ realized, but that would have been wrong. the point is that there is no beginning or ending to it. it isn't just continuing on from now without end. it is without beginning or end. eternal is supposed to mean both without beginning and without end. the whole of a one-directional notion of heaven as an unendingly happy place after the point of death seems to have missed this idea. anyway, about point of view that the divine state already exists and we simply have impediments that need to be removed (cf. hh the dalai lama on removing anger and fear), this view that there is no beginning is logically needed to establish that it is eternal, and it wouldn't be truly divine if not eternal. (I mean 'divine' here in the sense of awesome instead of godly. i haven't suddenly become a theist!). also, there is a belief or assumption that anything that has a beginning will have an end. i'm not sure that that's a true or valid assumption, but it's there. i suppose it's the idea that we can break everything up into things that are eternal (your ideals, i may have to break down and look at kant, but plato said something similar), and things that exist in the world, which are all subject to change, and which always have beginnings and endings. clearly the mystics are wanting to put the divine knowledge in the class of eternal ideals, even if they may actually just be temporal experiences.