Tired

I've been unusually tired this week, and I'm not sure why. I think it might be either a minor cold or middling allergies. So while I'm working on waking up, I'll maunder a bit about my week.

Tuesday I fell asleep in the afternoon. I often take an hour nap on T/Th. When the timer went off, I was in some deep stage of sleep, and knew that waking up all the way would be near impossible, so I reset the alarm for 40 more minutes. Then when it went off again, I made some Yerba Maté tea, which kept me awake through my evening class.

Wednesday I woke up to an odd dream. I don't remember details now, but Tip from SkinHorse was the POV character, having issues with a talking lion (and there was a talking lion in the comic a month or two back). So far as I know, this is the first time I've dreamt about a web-comic or its characters.

Then last night was the last Symphony concert of the season. Also the last guest conductor. When Dr. George walked out, they didn't have time to find a permanent replacement, so they've been playing musical-conductors (no pun intended) this season, but it looks like they've got someone lined up for next season. He's got a good reputation, and the preview of the schedule looked pretty good. Also, they've moved the Symphonies to Friday night instead of Wednesday. On the one hand, I'll never have an evening class on Fridays to interfere. On the other, I always get up early on Saturdays to make it to my taiji class in IF. Ah well.

Anyway, I need some more calories if I'm going to make it to my first class and give them their last in class test.

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Chili's in Pocatello

I finally got around to trying Chili's. It opened...around Christmas, I think. It's one of the few national chains to be responsible about food allergies. The current menu has allergen information for all of the most common food allergies. Bear in mind that they update this quite frequently. I have no idea if the same link will take you to the updated version after 30 April or not. The updates are necessary because they may change suppliers, or suppliers may change ingredients.

I had the Guilt-Free salmon, and it's probably the best salmon in town right now. Sizzler's is extraordinarily dry and always tastes old. Red Lobser's ... is just bland, especially since the spices that they DO use contain gluten and I have no choice but to order it plain. My mom had the Guilt-Free Chicken and I tried a small bite. Not as good as the salmon, largely due to an excess of black pepper so far as I could tell, but not too bad.

The one dessert listed as gluten-free was described as a chocolate shake, and I was hungry enough to try it. It would be more accurately described as chocolate soft-serve ice cream than as a shake. Quite tasty, though.

The only thing I really didn't like about the place was that the music was about a notch and a half too loud. It wasn't quite loud enough that I wanted to blow up the speakers, but it was loud enough to be more than background. Still, it's nice to have another reasonably* safe restaurant to go to.

*There is always a risk of contamination at a restaurant that is not completely gluten-free. The simpler the dish, and the fewer ingredients in it, the less chance it has for contamination.

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Random Trivia

I played a game of Freecell for the first time in quite a while today, and then I remembered an old roommate telling me that every Freecell game was winnable. I wondered about this, and found that the claim is quite common, but not quite true. This site has the best summary of those I looked at.

First off, it is not the case that every possible deal of Freecell is winnable (first illustration at the link). However, it turns out that the game "only" produces about 32,000 deals (far less than the total number actually possible via random chance). Of those 32,000 deals, all but one is winnable: Game 11982. So every other deal that comes up on the Windows Freecell game is winnable.

Now I'm curious as to how many of the total possible deals are actually winnable... ^/^

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A Musical Interlude

The songs are all referring to Expelled, the bore-fest of a movie now facing litigation on at least two fronts.

Rhapsody in Lies:

I’ve got a little animation of a cell,
When in haste, copy paste, yes indeed that was the plan, though-
Copyright infringement lawsuit noose is tightening on me

Imagine B.S.:

Imagine there’s no science
So many people do
Nothing to study or wonder
The end of seeking truth
Imagine all the country
Dumber than a post…

via Pharyngula


Not quite in the same vein, I notice that P.Z.'s reaction to the pope's visit was rather similar to mine. All I could feel was mild disgust when I saw how much news coverage it was getting, and note that, yes, this pope looks an awful lot like the emperor from Star Wars. I particularly liked this part of P.Z.'s post.

I am often told that religion is a source of morality. I've read the Bible myself; I can see that there were moral philosophers at work behind that book, that we have a tradition of law in the Old Testament, with a fellow named Jesus adding social justice and concern for the poor and weak in the New that are actually rather commendable. I also see a lot of myth and error and misplaced obsession with the supernatural that rational people are willing to set aside to focus on the core humanitarian message … or at least they do so in the best of circumstances.

Yet what I also see in modern religion is a re-prioritizing: the secular concerns that should matter, the egalitarian word of a religious tradition that valued the cohesion of the social fabric and demanded equal treatment for even the least of society is ignored, given a little lip service perhaps, but made subservient to the intangible theological nonsense of prayer, of an invisible god, of submission to dogma and hope in an unevidenced afterlife.

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GF: Stuff to Avoid

I'll expand this at some point, but the primary reason I'm writing is a reaction to a cereal that was shelved with Fred Meyer's specifically gluten free products. The specific product was Health Valley's "Corn Crunch 'Ems" cereal, essentially like corn Chex, but with no suspicious ingredients, and no warning that it had been processed on equipment that also processed items containing wheat, which is probably the source of the reaction.
So for now the list is very short. Avoid any Health Valley cereals, whether they're shelved with the gluten-free items or not. The only possible exception is if you find one actually labeled as gluten-free, but make bloody sure that it says "gluten free" NOT "made with gluten free ingredients."

I'll also put in a few of the less obvious ingredients to avoid, so that I have a list of more than one item.

1. Caramel Color
2. Dextrin (if unlabelled as to source)
3. Dextrose (if unlabelled as to source)
4. Health Valley: Corn Crunch 'Ems cereal
5. Malt
6. Mono and Di-Glycerides
7. MSG (Monosodium Glutamate)
8. Starch (if unlabelled as to source)
9. Vegetable (*) (if unlabelled as to source)

Gluten Free Tips Index

Incidentally, this cereal is almost certainly the reason I was feeling so lousy on Tuesday. The trash truck carried away what was left of it this morning.

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Getting There

Amazingly, next week is the last "real" week of classes, then dead week, then finals' week. This semester has been a bit odd. Being sick for a full month has turned the beginning into a rather unpleasant blur in my mind. A very long unpleasant blur. Comparatively, everything else has gone quickly.

My entire Math123 class did very well on their last test. The lowest score was a 70%. However, my Math143 class did horribly on their logarithm test. I wound up curving it so that the average score was a 70% instead of being right around 60%. Last fall's class also did very poorly on that test, but they had the excuse that the test was the week after Thanksgiving Break. I'm wondering if it's connected to logs being taken out of the Math 108 curriculum so that they're brand new to nearly everyone in 143. As for stats, we're on hypothesis testing and confidence intervals.

Yeah, I'm rambling. Yesterday I got cold chills in the afternoon and started feeling very tired. This morning I felt wretched. After getting a decent lunch and an hour nap, I made it through my last class okay, and I feel semi-okay right now. Hopefully that was the worst of it and tomorrow I'll wake up feeling better. Which means I should head to bed.

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Meaningful

I have to recommend Greta Christina's article complaining about the phrase "Everything happens for a reason." I have a somewhat different take on it, but I definitely see where she's coming from. My version would be "Everything that happens has meaning." I prefer this because it does not have the same implication of a grand design. It also need not apply to everyone in the same way. And an event that has meaning to one person may be meaningless to another.

Perhaps more importantly, it avoids the passivity of "Everything happens for a reason." The meaning of an event may not be obvious. It's up to you to find it. It's all the more crucial because failing to find it means that you may miss something further down the line. Looked at this way, "Everything has meaning" is a prescription for paying attention to the things that happen to you. Are some bad events your own fault? There's a lesson in them. Are they unavoidable? Then learn from your own reaction to them. Is a good event because of something you did? Figure out what it was you did!

With this attitude in mind, it could also be phrased "It is possible to learn from everything that happens." Maybe not from the event itself, particularly if it's an event we have no control over, but from our reactions to it and from the way people around us deal with it. It's also important to acknowledge that the event happened. We can't learn from an event if we're in denial about it. As Greta Christina points out, however, we can't learn from it if we assume we never have any control over it, either.

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West Mink Creek

YAY! Hiking! Warm! Snow! As in, it's now warm, but Mink Creek hadn't melted off. yet. More than half the trail was still covered in snow. Squishy snow, so it wasn't very slick, but there was the potential to sink down in it. Several times I sank down to my ankle. Once I sank clear to my knee. In most places, there were dry patches you could walk on to avoid sinking in the snow, but not in all of them. As I got there at 17:00, I didn't make it very far. I got to the bridge over the water and turned around. I think that might be a half-mile up the trail. Possibly three-quarters of a mile. Anyway, there are a few pictures below the fold.


Here's a nice view of the creek itself. Don't be fooled by the snow. It was quite warm up there except in one shadowed spot. I was wearing a very light jacket at first and quickly removed it.


This is the view back down the trail from where I turned around. It kinda looks like someone ought to do some work on the bridge this summer. Certainly by next summer it'll need it.


And this, this, is me! Or my shadow, at least. `/^

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Dexter, Season 1

I watched the first season finale of Dexter today. Wow. Impressive. And while I had figured out that the ice truck killer had some connection to Dexter's past, the actual connection hadn't occurred to me. It now seems quite obvious, but it certainly didn't occur to me before the reveal. No, I'm not going to spoil it here. I'm sure that someone else has posted it if you really want to know without watching.

I love seasonal plot arcs, where each episode still has a mostly self-contained plot, but there's an arc linking the season together. In this case, the link is the ice truck killer. I can't think of an episode without at least one minor detail connected to him. Most had more than one. Dexter is absolutely fascinated with the killer's work; it's beautiful to him. The killer seems equally fascinated with Dexter, as he keeps leaving him gifts and hints. At the end, killers collide in a battle for, er, well, that would be spoiling it, now, wouldn't it... `/^

Overall, I loved the series. Main edits for network television: language, minor violence cuts, and some nudity. The nudity is worst in eps 5 through 8, makes a minor repeat appearance in 11, and that's mostly it. Some of it was plot-relevant. About half of it was clearly, "Hey! We're Showtime! We get to show naked people!" And now... Now I have to wait for the second season to come out on DVD. Apparently it's possible to download for $1.99 an ep, but lacking a DVD burner, I'd just as soon wait. But for anyone with a morbid sense of fun, this is a good series to check out.

Okay, one minor spoiler, or preview, as it pertains to the second season and I haven't actually seen it yet. Apparently Dexter's body cache will be found, and he'll have a heckuva time keeping one step ahead of his own department. Now that sounds entertaining.

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Coming Back to Life

darkness returns
once driven away
by too bright light

embrace darkness
balance out light
let freedom ring

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Better Day

As I seem to have figured out what was causing the chills/swings. I have severe sensitivities to artificial fibers and materials in my clothing. It seems to have gotten worse recently. The sweater itself was cashmere, but the zipper was plastic with metal bits. This was enough to cause me problems. I don't blame anyone for scoffing; if it hadn't happened to me several times already, I'd scoff too. *shrugs*

First incident: I was sitting and reading before heading off to teach and started feeling... odd. Not sick, exactly, but sort of on the verge of being sick. It occurred to me that the shirt I was wearing was polyester, and that Don had mentioned that some taiji practitioners wound up having trouble with artificial fibers. I took the polyester off and instantly felt better. Okay, I got rid of all my more than 50% polyester clothing and went on with life.

Next incident was worse. I was wearing a 100% cotton T-shirt, or so I thought, and started feeling feverish with horrible nausea. This cotton T-shirt had a plastic design going all the way around in places. I was feeling utterly and completely miserable, on the floor in the bathroom, wondering if I needed to go to an emergency room. I took off the shirt. Five minutes later, I was fine. So I got rid of any shirts with plastic designs covering significant portions of them, or stopped wearing them if they had sentimental value, and went on with life.

It's gotten progressively worse, unfortunately. I can't wear metal jewelry either and don't like plastic jewelry. A leather cord with something wooden on it seems to be okay, but it's hard to find pretty examples of that. This is the first time that something on an external piece of clothing, worn over other clothes, has caused a major problem. I'm not particularly happy about it, but at least I know how to avoid a repeat now. Question is...can I remove the zipper without ruining the sweater... I like cashmere.

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Rant

What arrogance to presume knowledge, most especially knowledge about something often described as unknowable. Such desperate, fearful, clinging arrogance. It's a front, of course. The more desperately we cling to something the more terrified we are that it is going to go away, be revealed as a fraud. The more desperately we cling to something, the less faith we have in it, and the more we fear that it is not worthy of such faith. What good is an intricately constructed house built upon a foundation ready to crumble?

If there is such a thing as a conscious, willful, creator god, then the entire universe should in itself be revelation. At every term, every event must reveal such a god's handiwork. What arrogance, then, to place the works of humans above the works of such a creator-god. What arrogance to presume that one's own interpretation of this work of humans is the only valid one. What arrogance to place such limitations on this creator-god.

But the arrogance doesn't stop there. It only gets worse. When the creator-god's handiwork doesn't live up to believer expectations, rather than see this as reflecting the creator-god itself, it's transferred onto humans. Assume the conclusion; distort any thought-process, any evidence, any god, to make the conclusion fit. Is it not the most supreme form of arrogance to shape god rather than try to discover it? A creator-god requires a bigger box than the vanity of human presumption. Let it out of the book, already. Haven't you done enough damage?

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Annoying Day

Most annoying, I'm not sure why. I've been having cold chills and mood swings which seem to be connected. Not particularly severe mood swings, as they're the kind I can step back from and watch without much difficulty, but still annoying. That's the reason for the bevy of quizzes: distraction. I don't know if it's a cold, a response to my first large quantity of chocolate in several weeks, off-kilter hormonal fluctuations, a reaction to phenylephrine (most recent replacement of pseudoephedrine; only tried it this week), or something else entirely. It seems to have lifted somewhat at the moment.

However, I will say that Dexter is a good antidote to intermittent minor depression. I found the entire first season at Wal-Mart (yes--wal-mart--on a Sunday--don't ask--ICK). I'd already missed a few eps, as I tend to forget that there's actually something to watch on Sunday nights, so it's been handy to catch up. And I was half-wrong about the editing for tv. Yes, they edited out language. Not really any nudity thusfar, which is surprising given that it's a Showtime series. They did edit the scenes with Dexter carving up his victims, and cut out some of the in-station subplots that didn't directly involve Dexter. The last was most likely an issue of timing rather than rating.

I think, though, that the episode that aired tonight has to be my favorite so far. Several high-profile women who committed suicide in the same way had the same therapist...so Dexter goes to therapy! He finds it surprisingly helpful, to the point that he almost regrets killing the guy. Almost. Favorite line: "I can't kill him tonight; I need another therapy session."

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Can't complain here...

Can be puzzled, but can't complain. `/^ Honestly, I figured I'd match up as Willow.

Which Buffy Character Are You*? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Spike Congratulations, you are Spike- the Vampire. Spike 75% Daniel (Oz) Osbourne 67% Buffy Summers 50% Angel 42% Rupert Giles 33% Willow Rosenberg 25% Tara Maclay 25% Xander Harris 8%

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Elemental, My Dear Watson

Note: Spelling errors are theirs. Also, I haven't quite figured out why "lightning" is supposed to have lots of friends...

What is YOUR Element? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Lightning You are lightening! Similiar to fire, you are sometimes random, can be bad, but in other ways, can be very useful! You are extremely unstable when angry, but it takes a lot to get you angry, and when you are, you destroy swiftly. But as with lightening, your anger appears and dissappears, and you never tend to hold a grudge. People interest you, and people are interested by YOU, causing you to have a lot of friends. Lightning 96% Wind 83% Water 46% Earth 42% Fire 29%

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Progress?

I've had a few solo taiji lessons lately, where Melissa's been out of town and Mark's either overslept or not been feeling well, so Don took the time to try and improve my push hands, among other things. It seems to have been time well spent, as about halfway through our usual push-hands time slot Mark stopped, bowed out, and said "You push with Teacher a while." It could have meant many things, but judging by the tone of voice, I think he was frustrated with me... i.e. I wasn't giving him as many openings as he was used to. ^/^ That's not to say that he didn't push me out a few times, but I think it was more (mental) work than he was used to.

One of many interesting things about good sensing-hands is the amount of mental concentration it takes, though concentrations really isn't the right word. It's awareness. Pure awareness. No thought. This state of mind is both difficult to attain and difficult to maintain. It's similar to the state of hyper-awareness that can come with an emergency, except that it's calm; there's no urgency. My current weakness is surfacing from that calm when I have something and putting more effort into a push than is actually necessary, but it's much improved from a few months ago.

Another interesting thing is that there is always progress to be made. Always further to go. Always more to learn. Even the great masters report that they still have more to learn, and that is as it should be. A path that comes to an end serves no purpose; it is a dead branch. A path that continues to grow and shift and change, now, that is something worthwhile.

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Spring

It's finally starting to feel like spring 'round these parts. Time for me to get back in shape. I know that a big part of the reason I've been having more problems with my asthma is simple lack of walking. Walking a fair distance opens something up in my lungs that nothing else seems to, and vastly improves my breathing...if I do it on a regular basis. I'd also like to get back up to a decent walking speed, even with Buster in tow. Not so long ago, I could make it from my dad's house to Chubbuck Road and back in just under an hour (roughly 4 miles). Today I made it from my dad's house to the interstate and back in maybe 80 minutes (roughly 3 miles). Admittedly, that included time to stop and play with Buster, and to give him a chance to romp, but I'd like to do better. If I can get that down to an hour, then I'll try tacking on the extra distance to Chubbuck Road.

And no ducks today, sad to say. The canal was dry where Buster and I were walking. He was quite well behaved on the way out, and got more unruly as we headed for home. I think he was trying to conserve energy on the way out, and figured he had plenty to spare once we'd turned around. Ah well. He's still vastly improved from last spring when I first started walking him.

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Not Cussworthy? - Redone

Apparently "gods-bedamned" doesn't count as cussing. ^/^

(Found this at Apostate's Chapel)

As for today... nothing much of interest happened. Rigid motions in 123, quadratic formula with applications in 108, quantifiers in logic and Heidegger in Phil/Lit. When I think it won't give me a headache, I'll post an excerpt from Heidegger. He can be quite unintentionally amusing. Yes, he's trying to describe stuff for which no adequate words exist, but still...

??? Er, I think the meter's broken. Matt's blog also scored 0%, which is...somewhat inaccurate. *shrugs* Seems to be working now; Matt's still only scored 33.5%, though.

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Floodgates

Mom's water heater went ker-splash today. Well, more like, ker-glug-glug-glug. Better than ker-boom, I suppose. We discovered that the basement slopes to the northeast, which is a spare bedroom that is currently storing tons and tons of cardboard boxes...many of which were sitting directly on the now-soaked carpet. We sort of suspect it had been leaking since Saturday, when I went over and smelled something that, at the time, reminded me of rotten peas; I think it was just a touch of the damp, mildewy smell that was horribly obvious tonight.

So she's got a new water heater now, and I helped her carry some loose rugs outside to dry (or freeze; whichever happens first). On the plus side, that one bedroom was the only one that was strongly effected. More than likely, she'll need to replace that carpet, but it was a recycled one anyway. When Grandma first moved into that house, that carpet was in either the downstairs or upstairs living room, and got swapped into that bedroom when she replaced stuff. Pretty blah, imo, but it was better than the patchwork mosaic that was peeling off of the floor when she moved in.

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March Searchlight

First up, anyone here looking for gluten free info should just go to my gluten free tips index. I won't list out the relevant search terms as that would only divert traffic to this post. As for the rest of the search terms that led here... Read on:

flower printouts: surprisingly popular search term. It took me a while to figure out why it might lead to my blog... It was from Mom's birthday three years ago, when I printed out flowers and stuck them all over her wall. She actually left most of them up until she switched rooms.

sporadic hair loss: Better than consistent, I suppose... If it were me, I'd look for a correlation between foods and/or medications.

"overconsumption of tea": Can't say for anyone else, but, in large quantities, anything from the tea plant (camellia sinensis, iirc) makes me ill. Dizziness and nausea mainly. Basically, one or two cups a week is about all I can handle any more.

"what happens in a brothel": Ummm... You mean you don't know? Do your parents know what you're searching for? `/^

accidental dyeing clothes: Three options, (1) Live with the new color (most often my choice); (2) Re-wash it, putting bleach in the machine if there's no change; (3) Look next to the fabric dyes in a store; there's often a color-ridder product there (as I've never tried it, I can't say how well it works). Btw, if it's already been run through the dryer, you're probably stuck with (1)

ancient creatures: Much older than recent creatures.

chicken and leak stew: I suggest you buy a new stewpot...unless you meant the vegetable, leek.

dogs sporadic breathing: Unless your dog is undead, I'd suggest taking him to a vet.

explain the mathematics behind searchlights: ??? Er, the mathematics of the searchlight pattern, of the way the device works, or what?

om carved rock: Well, I have one... but I picked it up at a store in Boise. The closest I found online is this, which is nearly 8 times more expensive than the one I got.

origami paper with philosophical sayings: I've never seen it, but it sounds awesome!

ricinoleate rash: Next to gluten, ricinoleate is my biggest pet peeve as far as being put in products. It comes from the castor bean, whence ricin, a deadly poison, also derives. If you think normal processing can get out all the ricin and leave only the...whatever ricinoleate is...behind, you're dreaming.

squirrel flingers: ??? All that comes to mind is a bizarre anecdote that Hawkeye told on M*A*S*H. Found here

so this happened during my first year of medical school and i was in the middle of a test in my anatomy class, and it was really tough! It asked me questions like "how many bones are there in the human hand?" and I kept asking myself "how many bones are there in the human hand?" and out of nowhere i heard this little voice that said, "24!" and i looked around the classroom and there sitting on the windowsill was this little grey squirrel, with a very intelligent face, and it pointed at its hand and said "24" so i wrote it down. and right afterwards i ran to the library to check. And would you belive it, that stupid squirrel was off by 4 bones! So i ran all around the school campus trying to find him, i wanted to kill him! And i finally found him, he was sitting on a bench, next to the psych department. "You were wrong!" I screamed at him! "theres 28 bones in the human hand." and he said, "Oh! I thought you meant a squirrels hand."

the bacchae color theme: There was a color theme? My pages were in black and white...

use of purple in the living room: Just pair it off with good contrasting colors. Just like any other room in the house.

what it means to dream of bugs under your skin: It's a sign of a guilty conscience imploring you to make amends or it will make you suffer and squirm endlessly. That or it could just be that a limb was getting numb and tingly while you slept...

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Experimenting with Strawberries

I couldn't figure out what sounded good for dinner tonight, but I had some strawberries around and wondered if it might be possible to make a sort of protein-drink-dinner out of them. I found this page of suggestions, and more or less based my concoction after the first one. I added in a touch of vanilla, maybe a tablespoon of rice protein powder, and some coconut. Note: the coconut doesn't really seem to add flavor in flake form; coconut milk or flavoring might have been a better choice. But it's drinkable and tastes okay. If I try this again, I'll cut down on the rice protein powder. It's a bit...noticeable.

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Paradoxical Art (and Book)

I picked up a book called A Brief History of the Paradox today. I haven't made it very far yet, but so far I like it. But it was the cover art that inspired this post:



The artist is Rob Gonsalvez. I'd seen this picture somewhere-or-other before, but not with an artist name attached to it. I found several galleries, and liked over half of the images. There's lots of overlap, but I think each link has at least one image unique to that gallery. I love these pictures. Very reminiscent of Escher, but with a more naturalistic focus that appeals to me even more.

But while I was searching for Gonsalvez, I stumbled across another artist with a similar flair, Jacek Yerka.



I don't like his stuff quite as well as Gonsalvez, mainly because there's a stronger element of fantasy I think, but I still enjoyed looking through the gallery. At the link, the most stuff can be found by clicking on "My Worlds" and then "Pastels" (or click here to go straight to them).

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Clearance Sales

I wandered over to Dillard's today, and for about $45 I got two very nice pairs of khaki pants, a pair of wool pants (that I shall have to cut the nylon lining out of) and a yellow linen shirt. By way of comparison, each pair of pants was about $60 by itself before it went on clearance. Not sure about the shirt.

I was trying to find something not entirely ratty to wear to the ISU donor appreciation dinner. That's not its actual title, but I'm too lazy to look it up, and the name I gave it is accurate. My mom purchased 4 seats at the symphony this past year, which merited her an invite. She didn't want to go alone (and my dad wouldn't have gone even before he lost his mind), so we pestered the people in charge about getting a gluten-free meal. It was a decent meal. I couldn't eat the roll, the cupcake, or the sauce on the meat (so they brought me a plain one). It was also one of the most ridiculously boring 3.5 hours I have ever spent. And we even left before it was completely over. For all I know, they're still up there yammering away.

We sat at a table with a lawyer, a realtor, two University promoters, the Dean of Graduate studies, and a spouse who probably had a job, but I can't recall it. The lawyer was determined to make small talk through dinner. Decent guy... a bit odd. I happened to bring up statistics and he wanted to know how one would go about showing that the winds in Pocatello have gotten worse in recent years. I mentioned the basic process of gathering data and running a significance test. Problem is... I don't know how much variation is actually normal, or how long the cycles of variation might last. If there's a 100-year cycle, for instance, and we only have good data for the past 50 years, the results will be useless.

Anyway, I need sleep. *wonders how coherent this post actually is and decides she doesn't care*

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Unbreaking the Buddha

There are two windows in my meditation room/ashram/dojo. The kittens like to get up into both of them, and, of course, managed to knock several items off of the side table in front of the north window. Two of them broke. I have since rearranged, so that there are no breakables near windows. They broke... more than a month ago. I was gluing the Buddha back together a piece at a time before I got sick, then gave up for a few weeks, and finally finished this week. The new tableau is in the corner, away from the kitties:




I honestly don't know if I got all the pieces to the Buddha. The glue filled up some of the room for the pieces, so that at the end I had an irregular piece, not quite rectangular, about half an inch by three quarters of an inch, that was too big to fit in the remaining empty spot. I wound up breaking it into smaller pieces to fill up the room as best I could. Then I filled in the remaining gaps with wood-fill. Incidentally, I discovered that the statue wasn't wood, as I had thought. It was plastic. As it was fairly cheap and came from Target, this wasn't a huge surprise...except that they did such a good job on the paint finish that it had never occurred to me that it might be plastic. Below is the patch-job:


And here is the undamaged side, for comparison:


So why fix it rather than replace it, since it was cheap? Sentimental reasons, I suppose. The statue has been there ever since I started my 108-days thing. Replacing it, even with a look-alike, wouldn't feel right. *shrugs* Besides, it was kind of fun trying to get it back together. And the other thing that broke was an onyx bowl. I think it was onyx. Some rock, anyway. It was much easier to fix. I had all but one piece, and that blank spot I filled with clear glue tonight. You can kinda see it, maybe a dime's diameter below the dime. It's up-side-down so that the glue can dry without sticking it to the little fair-trade bead-bowl it's sitting in.

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PZ-ification

You have Matt to blame for this one. I made up a word in passing and Matt insisted that it was worth publicizing. So I give you (the mildly edited version; Matt will probably put up his non-edited version):

PZ-ificate (v.) to discuss at length the reasons religious people are all ridiculously idiotic and need to just realize it and die so the rest of us can get along nicely

Basically, if you've read one PZ-ificatory post, you've read them all. Do a word substitution for the party being attacked, change out a few derogatory adjectives here and there... the only interesting variety is if he includes some science critique along with the diatribe. There haven't been as many of this style of posts lately, for whatever reason. But I dug around in the archives for some typical examples:

On Ann Coulter
On the pope
On GW

These are actually fairly tame ones, but they were the first ones I found.

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Monday Project

Whilst cleaning over Christmas, I managed to misplace my Tibetan mala. It's much easier to keep track of chanting with it, so on Saturday I wandered over to the craft store in Idaho Falls (Michael's; we used to have a branch outlet of it here in Pocatello, but it got bought out, and the new place isn't even a quarter as good). I found some decent wooden beads, and even lucked into a sale. Instead of $4 for a fourteen-inch strand, it was $3. Overall, including the beads I have leftover, it cost me about $13. I did wind up wandering over to the local excuse for a craft store after getting 99.9% done, just to get some beads with a larger bore to finish it off:




I had planned on using the disc-shaped beads every 36 or so, but it didn't look like I had quite enough round beads to make that pan out. They're currently every 12, though I think I could have gotten away with every 18. It's kind of nice to have a marker to go past on the mala. When I had to restring the other one (which will probably show up this week now that I've made a replacement), I put a knot every 36 beads for the same purpose.

I wound up using green garden twine to string it...primarily because I couldn't find my plain white cotton string. Naturally, it turned up a few hours after I was done. ^/^ Anyway, here's a closeup of the twine:



It adds an interesting color, even if it is a bit rattier than string would have been. To close it off, I tied a knot, then unwound the twine, rewound halves from the opposite ends together, then wound both of those together, put the larger bore beads over it, tied another knot, and frayed the end. Finally I put a drop of glue in each of the knots. The unwinding/re-winding wouldn't have occurred to me if I hadn't run across a show on rope making at some point in the last few months. I have no idea how well this twine will hold up, but I'm pretty sure that my finishing will hold together for a good long time.

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IDiocy (Update: Spin attempt III)

Surprise surprise. The cdesign pronentsists can't even keep their story straight. Now apparently PZ was thrown out because the dear producer couldn't stomach the thought of such a vile atheist being allowed to see their precious movie for free.

Links with summaries for those who want to avoid random clicking:


Amused Muse with the latest on the saga.
A bit of background
The Expelled Atheist himself
Greg Laden defending PZ (against a fellow Scibling who apparently has never heard the maxim that laughter is the deadliest attack)
Richar Dawkins' review of the movie and account of PZ's expulsion.

So let's recap. What did the producers of Expelled do wrong, hmm?

1. Lying: they misrepresented their movie in order to obtain interviews with prominent scientists.

2. Hypocrisy: in the name of academic freedom, they Expelled one of the interviewees from the movie.

3. Lying: They then lied about why he had been expelled.

4. Crowd-packing: they planted pre-planned questions in their so-called Q&A session, with a plentiful helping of yes-men to boo anyone who asked INTELLIGENT questions (see the link to Amused Muse above)

Why, you'd think that they didn't have any scientific evidence to support their ideas and had no choice but to use dishonest tactics! [/sarcasm]

Update: Not content with two contradictory stories, the marketing people behind Expelled have released yet a third version of the Expulsion of PZ Myers:

Recognizing the opportunity to make a point of the inconvenience and pain that they, and others like them, have caused to numerous scientists and educators, the decision was made beforehand to deny Myers access to the film if he actually showed up.

Right, so... it was because he had no ticket! Er, wait, no, it was because they wanted him to have to pay for a ticket! Er, wait, no, it was to make an academic point, yeah, that's it! Uh-huh, suuuure. Lemme tell ya a story about a Little Boy Who Cried Wolf...

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Equinox

Yes, it's also Easter. And it's "blog against theocracy weekend". And probably dozens of other holidays beside. As for me, I'm happy that the vernal equinox has passed. To celebrate, here's a poem I found here. Technically it's for the fall equinox, but I liked it well enough not to care:



Deer drift among the trees, a slow brown fog.
And I have way too much time now on my
Eyes, that wander from my work and gaze outside.

Here on the balance beam of the equinox
We teeter into fall.
The weather tilts and pours my garden out.

Where's the balance in this equinox?
"In the destructive element immerse," the poet said
Meaning an ocean - but every element sustains and

Destroys us, at the whim of god knows what.
Let's bring the fire-wood inside
And practice fire forgiveness. For it's time.

Forehead to forehead, the does push back and forth
Under the glance of their three-point fiancé.
Their coats are changing now to winter grey.

They keep some kind of calendar in their heads:
Come October, they'll be gone.
I warm both hands upon a cup of coffee,

Waiting for words to come.
I'm feeling for another equinox:
To balance on these parallel bars of faith and doubt,

Resist and yield. The deer
Are often close like this, it's no surprise
To see them just outside the window now: three does,

Their noses up from browsing, point northeast
Staring at what? Some element of danger.
I'm caught in the perfect symmetry of their stillness

(Just so, I'm caught in the creation of a poem,
Staring inward, waiting for an element of surprise) --
A triptych of attention

Until they one by one shake heads, flap ears,
Resume their secret lives
Along the secret highways of the grass.

                                                         ~Elisabeth Hallett

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Atheist Spirituality?

On this, the day most people celebrate as the day their god-man rose using pagan fertility symbols, I finished reading an excellent book: The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality by André Comte-Sponville. It was one that I happened across at Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago, picked up...and didn't want to put down. Comte-Sponville has a decidedly mystic outlook on things despite choosing the label "atheist" for himself, and this book is just a joy to read.

There are three sections. The first one deals with the question of whether religion is necessary to humanity. Comte-Sponville concludes that some find it necessary, but not all, and pretty much leaves it at that. The second section deals with the reasons that he does not believe in "God." I put it in quotes, because he is specifically addressing the traditional Judeo-Christian God. He goes through 6 arguments for why he does not believe in that particular god. (Somewhere, and I wish I could remember where, I ran across a quote that said 'Describe for me the god you do not believe in; I do not believe in him either.') Specifically, he goes through the classic existence "proofs": ontological, cosmological, physico-theological. Then he explains why he doesn't find them convincing. The weakness in these arguments is only the first of his 6 reasons for not believing in this particular notion of God.

The third section was the most enjoyable, and illuminating, for me. It deals with his attempts to define an atheist spirituality, rooted in the reality of his own mystical experiences. It contains probably the most lucid and well-thought-out descriptions of such experiences that I've ever encountered. A few quotes from this section to give the flavor:

Mystics are defined by a certain type of experience ... They see. Why would they need dogma? Everything is present. Why would they need hope? They live in eternity. Why would they need to wait for it? They are already saved. Why would they need a religion?

When you feel 'at one with the All,' you need nothing more. Why would you need a God? The universe suffices. Why would you need a church? The world suffices. Why would you need faith? Experience suffices.

Also, he shares this quote from Henri-Marie cardinal de Lubac:

The prophet recieves and transmits the word of God to which he adheres through faith; the mystic is sensitive to an innter light that exempts him from believing.

I would recommend this book to anyone with a sincere interest in spirituality. It expresses thoughts that I had thought unique to me (much more eloquently, I might add). The first two sections took me the longest to get through, mainly because I was only reading a single section every night. Once I got to the third section, I didn't want to stop. I made it almost all the way through it today. Seems like an appropriate celebration of Easter to me. `/^

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Nietzsche and Plato

For the midterm in Philosophy/Literature, we had to pick two philosophers that we'd read, discuss their views on tragedy, and then apply them to the plays we'd read. The philosophers are Plato, Nietzsche, Aristotle, and Hegel. It was a bit too structured for my tastes, but I would recommend to anyone else not to do Nietzsche and Plato together. I'll give a short explanation of why.

Plato doesn't care for tragedy because it exposes the deep feelings the people have and generally suppress in polite company. He considers this a failing of tragedy. Nietzsche loves it for exactly the same reason, and thinks that the deep oneness at the heart of the world is, by it very nature, tragic. My head hurts from trying to write from both perspectives in one night. But the paper's done...unless I reread it tomorrow and hate it. Technically it was due by whenever they lock up the liberal arts building, but he offered us the option to e-mail it to him by Monday...so long as he gets a hardcopy on the following Monday, as demons usually eat his e-mail. Or so he says.

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Curse of the Golden Flower

Interesting tragedy, with subtitles. Curse of the Golden Flower has the same director as Hero and House of Flying Daggers, and a very similar flavor. The emphasis is on lavish sets with flamboyant color. Oh, yes, and extremely twisted characters. There are aspects of Romeo and Juliet, and of MacBeth and of Hamlet in it. It's well-crafted, and haunting, but...I didn't really like most of the characters, and the ones that I did like, well... it's a tragedy: you can figure it out.

The story centers on the imperial family: Emperor, Empress, their two sons, and a son from the Emperor's first wife. Think of every possible soap opera plot of a scheming family, stir them around and keep the most sordid bits, and you've got a good idea of what the family is like. It's very nearly accurate to say that everyone is plotting against everyone else. And then there's the Imperial Doctor's family... I don't want to spoil details, so I'll leave the familial relationships at that.

I think the main thing I didn't like was the ending. Now the question is whether I can describe why I didn't like it without spoiling it... Lemme put it this way: the worst "bad guy," while he'll be miserable for the rest of his life, is not sufficiently destroyed for my tastes, and the character for whom I had the most sympathy is in no way freed at the end. I would have liked some resolution on both of those issues.

I'd recommend it for the flamboyant atmosphere, and the nicely interwoven plots... I'd just like to rewrite the ending a bit.

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Who's Expelling Whom?

Background: Expelled is a movie paid for by the so-called "intelligent design" crowd, "explaining" how scientists who speak up for the idea of design are expelled. I'm told it makes the stronger claim that all theistic scientists are also expelled and discriminated against, etc. So you'd think that such people would be open and inclusive and welcoming to all points of view, right? You'd think that they'd want to preserve open discussion to show how much better they are than the evil, nasty evilutionists. Well, they've proven once again that, when it comes to free inquiry and discussion, they demand rigidly defined off-limit areas. P.Z. Myers was expelled from a screening of this movie. You'll have to click to find out the best part, though. ^/^

UPDATE: Here is a post from someone who did make it in. Apparently the cdesign proponentsists are trying to spin this as PZ causing a disturbance and harassing people whilst trying to "sneak" in. Uh huh. Suuuuuure. How exactly is it "sneaking in" to put your own name on a list and show your own photo-ID, hmmm?

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Time Warp, II

Mental time warp, that is. Everyday this week, I've kept thinking that the next day was Friday. Well, it's finally Thursday, so the next day really is Friday, and I'm down to one lecture to give before break, and one test to give tonight. The test is already written and printed out. Okay, so I've got a philosophy paper technically due tomorrow, and a logic assignment due after break. Those are more fun than they are work. Anyway, I thought I'd share this LOLCroc:

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Timewarp and Taiji

No, not the song from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Also, not a Star Trek plot. It's a new show on the Discovery Channel that uses a high-speed camera to slow things down so that we can see what's really happening. Some absolutely fascinating shots, especially when they compared what a normal camera would catch to what their 1000-frames-per-second camera could do. On that one, they popped a balloon. On the normal camera, the actual pop happened between frames. In one frame it was still whole; in the next, it was popped. The high-speed camera had 16 or so frames in between those, and you could see that the balloon had been 2-ply: there was another balloon inside, which popped a thousandth of a second later.

The first demo, though, was of what happens in a fight. They had two fighters (at a guess I'd say they're from Discovery Channel's martial arts reality show, but I'm not sure), and took shots of them banging on each other... mostly with protective padding on. What we can't see without slowing things down is that there are shockwaves that resonate through the body at each impact. Bodies, actually, since the attacker also gets shockwaves from the force of impact. Newton's Laws an' all.

Now, the thing about taiji is that, when it's done right, there is no force, and hence no impact. I'm getting this more often than I used to. When it's really right, the other person goes out and I feel nothing: no impact, no force, nothing. Oftentimes, I don't even know why the other person went out. We often hit the rewind button to figure it out (and to give the other person a chance to find a way out). But by using no-force, there is no corresponding equal and opposite force to damage the attacker (on the other hand, every attack leaves you vulnerable...).

So what makes it work if not force? Depends on whether you ask a mystic type or physics-type. The mystic type will smile and say "Qi." The physics type will talk about allignment and torque and other such things. As I don't know what qi is, it may well be nothing more than the result of alligning the body properly so that the (physical) force can flow directly through it. I can feel something that I would describe as energy flowing through my body when things are working as they should. It may be nothing more than some sort of body-mind feedback, or maybe it's really a mystical energy field. Honestly, I lean more towards the latter, but I can't rule out the former. It's easier to talk about it if we treat it as actual energy, if nothing else.

One anecdote that relates. My teacher has taken several workshops with Henry Wang, and seen some very impressive stunts. In one of them, Wang will have say 10 guys in a line pushing on him, and, barely moving, send the one on the end flying off. Then he'll send the next one flying off, etc. My teacher was allowed to put his hand between Wang's and the next person in line during the push. He felt no force whatsoever as the last person in line went flying off. Again, that could be explained by allignment and speed, and one of Timewarp's cameras might be very illuminating. But Wang also practices pushing at a distance.

My teacher, in fact, was pushed in this way. He said that he tried to resist, and could not. Here's the interesting part: it only works on people who are sensitive to qi, and the more sensitive the person is to qi, the better it works. My teacher was impressed that it could be done, but considered it very nearly useless. He used to be a cop, and often says things like "When I see him push a 300-pound guy high on amphetamines, I'll be impressed." He wasn't very interested in learning the technique, as the better you got at it, the more vulnerable you were to such a "push" from someone else.

So why does it work at all? I'm inclined to call it qi. I suppose it could be self-hypnosis or something on those lines. It might also be an exaggerated sensitivity to another person's intent. That is, so aware of what the opponent is about to do that you react before it occurs. If I ever have a chance to experience it in person, then I might have more to say about it. As is, I consider it interesting that it can be done, but, like my teacher, don't really see much use in it if it won't work on 99.9% of the population.

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Testing...

Just testing a few html tags to see if they're blogger compatible


            "& # 160" to get a space in html mode (deleted if you switch to compose)

x² - sup

x₁ - sub

li

ol

strike

u

ul

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Meaning

At various discussion groups with Dr. Levenson and fellow students, the topic of suffering has come up. He made a very good point, that no matter how we view it, applying our theory to specific instances offers no comfort. Karma. God's will. For the greater good. It will balance out in the end. Random chance. For a rather potent example of that, read the comments here. If the supposed purpose of a religion is "comfort," the idea that anyone in the tsunami somehow deserved his/her fate is anything but comforting: it's revolting. It's no better than the gods-bedamned evangelists blaming every catastrophe on homosexuals.

Do I think there was a purpose to the tsunami? Not in the sense that most people would mean. It was an event. It had consequences, the most obvious ones horrific. That was its "purpose." Its purpose was not to wipe out human life. That was a consequence of time and place. There's no sense in asking "why?" There's no comfort to be found in reasons: quite the contrary, in fact. The more you hear them, the more they become meaningless platitudes. Looking for an overarching, universal meaning is futile.

But looking for a personal meaning, that just might get you somewhere. What does the event mean to you? How does it affect you? Was there any sense in which you contributed to it, or worked against it? Was it something completely out of your control? And, yes, these are fundamentally selfish questions, but they're far less selfish than foisting meaningless and empty platitudes upon the grieving. The last thing a grieving person wants to hear is that it was Fate, or God's Plan, or Karma. You may as well slap them in the face as tell them that.

And if the event had no personal effect on you, find something useful to do, rather than serve up useless platitudes.

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Happy St. Patrick's Day

5. September 1913


WHAT need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave;
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were,
In all their loneliness and pain
You’d cry ‘Some woman’s yellow hair
Has maddened every mother’s son’:
They weighed so lightly what they gave,
But let them be, they’re dead and gone,
They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

                       ~W.B. Yeats

link to this poem found here

Yesterday's Poetry Sunday was also quite good.

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A Dragon, A Dragon!

And they say dragons aren't real. Pshaw. `/^

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The Legend of Bagger Vance

This one made quite a stir when it first came out, but at the time the previews didn't interest me at all. I became vaguely interested when I read a review that mentioned it was a modern take on the Bhagavad Gita. In fact, the name "Bagger Vance" is almost certainly tied to "Bhagavad". The protagonist is Rannulph Junuh, as in R. Junuh = Arjuna. When I saw it was on TNT this morning, I decided to give it a try. Very nicely done. It's a bit slow... and a bit heavy on golf, but still enjoyable.

Junuh (Matt Damon) is a local golf-hero who went off to WWI and lost himself. He disappears for 10 years, and when he finally does return, he has no interest in his former life. Then he gets sucked into a golf tournament, and Bagger Vance (Will Smith) shows up and offers to caddy for him. On the one hand, there's a touch of "wise black dude" syndrome...on the other, there's no sense that Smith's character knows all this because he's black, and in the Gita, it's clear that Krishna can take any form he feels like. I think if there hadn't been so many movies where the one non-white character was the font of all wisdom, this wouldn't bug me. It just gets overdone.

Anyway, back to the movie. Even though most of the movie is focused on a golf game, it's not really about golf. It's about the "game you can never win but can only play," i.e. life. Arguably, it's about golf as meditation, but that's too narrow. It's about life as meditation, as practice; about being aware of each and every moment in that life and responding as needed. It's about being in the game and participating rather than making a show of it. It's about being in the game for the game, and not for your ego or for the people watching the game.

Good movie. Good interactions between the characters. I find the context of a golf game slightly odd, but it was good in spite of that `/^ ... Actually, what I found odd was the extreme excitement people were expressing at this golf tournament, though I can sort of see it since Junuh was a local and the other players were the best of the best. *shrugs* I'm not really into sports, so I can only relate in an abstract fashion. Still, it's one I'd recommend for when you're in a thoughtful mood. If you want something fast-paced and exciting, this isn't it...on the other hand, it might do you some good if you constantly crave speed and excitement. `/^

I'll post one exchange from IMDB to give the flavor:

Bagger Vance: What I'm talkin about is a game... A game that can't be won only played...
Rannulph Junuh: You don't understand...
Bagger Vance: I don't need to understand... Ain't a soul on this entire earth ain't got a burden to carry he don't understand, you ain't alone in that... But you been carryin' this one long enough... Time to go on... lay it down...
Rannulph Junuh: I don't know how...
Bagger Vance: You got a choice... You can stop... Or you can start...
Rannulph Junuh: Start?
Bagger Vance: Walkin...
Rannulph Junuh: Where?
Bagger Vance: Right back to wehre you always been... and then stand there... Still... real still... And remember...
Rannulph Junuh: It's too long ago...
Bagger Vance: Oh no sir it was just a moment ago... Time for you to come on out the shadows Junuh... Time for you to choose...
Rannulph Junuh: I can't...
Bagger Vance: Yes you can... but you ain't alone... I"m right here with ya... I've been here all along... Now play the game... Your game... The one that only you was meant to play... Then one that was given to you when you come into this world... You ready?... Stike that ball Junuh don't hold nothin back give it everything... Now's the time... Let yourself remember... Remember YOUR swing... That's right Junuh, settle yourself... Let's go... Now is the time, Junuh...

It's worth mentioning that in the Bhagavad Gita, the context was a war rather than a golf game. Most modern readers seem to interpret that war as a metaphor for life, and in this case they've used golf as the metaphor rather than war.

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Three Days to Never

Last Saturday, I discovered that Tim Powers had a new book out in paperback, Three Days to Never. Interestingly, it looks like I may have missed some of his books between this one and Earthquake Weather.

I was slightly disappointed in this book, primarily because it seems to be a sort of synthesis between Anubis Gates and Expiration Date. But, the thing is, Tim Powers at his worst is better than many authors at their best, so it's still a very good read. It's only because I expect to be completely blown away with new ideas in Tim Powers' books that I was somewhat disappointed.

Tim Powers is particularly good at integrating outrageously mystical ideas/devices/things with everyday, ordinary life, without making it seem that the world itself has to change in order for these things to occur. He's also quite adept at integrating historical figures into his plotlines in...semi-plausible ways. That is, my inclination is not to dismiss the integrations out of hand as completely ridiculous, even if at the back of my mind I may be scoffing. In this case, the primary historical figure is Albert Einstein. He's not a direct character, except at the seance, but his fictional descendants are, as is a device that he supposedly constructed.

It's hard to make a plot summary of this book without dropping major spoilers... But I'll try. We've got two groups after Einstein's device. One group at least tries to be the good guys, though doesn't always succeed. The other is perfectly happy to sacrifice random strangers to jump onto a spiritual, fifth-dimensional highway. Then there are the people who actually have the device, without knowing that they have it, and they're not having much fun at all... particularly after the daughter accidentally watches the last surviving copy of A Woman of the Sea by mistake and a "dybbuk" tries to take over her mind. What's a dybbuk? Well, that's not explained until sometime in the last 100 pages, so I'll leave it at that. But here's a nice summary from the Publisher's Weekly review at Amazon: "In typical Powers fashion, his characters' spiritual need to undo past sins or mistakes propels the ingenious plot, which manages to be intricate without becoming convoluted, to its highly satisfying conclusion."

To sum up: Possibly not as good as some of Tim Powers' other books, but still very well-written and highly enjoyable.

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Titanic Puzzle, with Monsters

Weird weird dream, verging on nightmare. It started at "the" mall, which vaguely resembled the local Pine Ridge Mall. I was there with the Scoobies from Buffy. I went outside in what would have been Shopko's parking lot, only there was no Shopko, to check out some loud noises we'd been hearing. I was actually expecting it to be monsters, but it took me a while to spot them. They were on the western horizon, slowly coming towards the mall. I ran back inside.

"Uh, guys...? You're not going to believe this." Er, why not? They were the Scoobies, after all??? Or maybe they didn't have an identity in the dream until I'd seen the monsters, and then they became the Scoobies by default? *shrugs*

At any rate, once they'd decided that, yes, monsters were coming, we ran around in unproductive circles in the mall. My POV character became Willow at some point and she/I yelled at Xander for running around in circles...and then ran and hid under bed. No, I don't know why there was a fully made bed in a room immediately off the mall that did not seem to be a mattress store

And while she/I was hiding there, we saw this huge HUGE spider shadow, and I thought that one of the monsters was a giant tarantula and it had followed us under the bed...only it turned out to be a trick of the light, as the actual spider was about an eighth of an inch in diameter, and we squashed it with a book for scaring us. Naturally, at that point, one of the semi-humanoid monsters made it into the room.

Despite being under the bed, I had a clear look at him from above. Think zombie/Frankenstein-like monster, about 1.5 times as big as a human, with greyish skin, tattered clothes, and lots of stitching. He/it seemed to know that I/Willow were under the bed, and I had a "memory" of this "episode" and was waiting for the knives to come tearing through the mattress to get us. They didn't. If anything, it seemed he/it was going to bounce on the bed as hard as he could and hope it crushed us.

*half-wake-up*

I wake up enough to see that I'm on top of a bed, not under it, and that my alarm clock has just started glowing (the light gets brighter and brighter for a half hour before it goes off, simulating a sunrise). Then I drift back into sleep, but not quite into the same dream.

So I stay on top of the bed in the new dream, and Bataan (one of Cheng Manch'ing's students, who leads the summer taiji camps that I go to) is there, directing a tour of a very weird Titanic museum. The bed floats by a table of artifacts and two catch my eye. They're both pendants, maybe 2-3 inches across. Before I pick them up, they both look like glass cut/faceted to look like a gem. One looks that way after I pick it up; the other, when I turn it over, has a glowing, spherical amber stone set in the middle. It feels like the stone is looking at me, so I hastily put the pendant down.

Meanwhile, a large puzzle has been put together to cover the entire floor. I say the bed must have been floating, because otherwise it would have torn up this puzzle. Parts of it were of fish and things swimming by the wreckage; parts were probably bits of people's lives who had died aboard the Titanic, one part was this, for no obvious reason... And either the floor was uneven, or the puzzle didn't quite fit, as it's starting to go up a wall in at least one corner.

I'm sure there are some details I've forgotten, but not long after I noticed the corner-thing, my alarm went off.

Incidentally, last night I had an odd dream, but there's less detail-recall. My mom and I were heading into a new restaurant in a dark, omnious brick building. I was hoping there was a menu posted, so I could see if they served any food I could eat. But as soon as we walked into the building, the dream changed. A woman was standing in Jeremy Irons' office, smiling at him. Apparently he was a dentist, and she was supposed to be bringing her young son to see him.

"He'll be here in a few minutes," she said.

"If you wouldn't let him run around in traffic, he'd be here now," Jeremy Irons retorted.

Meanwhile, in one of the pictures on the wall behind the woman, her little son was peeking out at a man in a chair. There was a sense that this had been going on for hours, this game of hide and seek in the pictures (think Harry Potter pictures), and that the boy was deathly afraid of the man in the chair...

And that's all I remember of that one.

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Turkey Sausage?

WinCo has this strange habit of not carrying the sausage that I like in warmer months. I have yet to figure out why, but it's rather annoying, as the only other sausage that I've found in town that I like and doesn't have questionable ingredients can only be bought frozen, which doesn't work so well if you want to cook it for a meal as soon as you get home. So on Thursday, in a mild fit of desperation, I decided to try some turkey sausage that WinCo did have in stock.

I expected it to be mediocre, edible but not very good. It's quite a bit better than that, actually. It's certainly in the top 50% of sausages that I've had. The texture is just a touch off from pork-sausage, likely because it has so little fat (in fact, I had to add some oil to the skillet when I cooked it). The flavor is pretty good. Better than low-end pork sausage, but not as good as the really good pork sausage. That, though, probably depends more on the spice mix than on the meat itself. The only way to be sure would be to have them use an identical spice mix on pork sausage and compare.

I haven't yet tried this sausage just cooked on its own in patties; that will be the crucial, final test. But it is very good on rice cake pizza, and pretty good in my staple "sausage-with-tomato-sauce-and-GF-pasta". Pam called it "goulash", but as I don't use beef in it, that name seems inappropriate. There I particularly notice the texture difference. It's not bad...just not quite as good as it could be. Still, I was pleasantly surprised. It was definitely on the high end of the spectrum for sausages.

On a completely different note, I bought an iris at K-Mart tonight. There was no tag. The cashier couldn't find a tag at the display, and had to run an override and just type in the price. So my iris showed up as "socks" on the receipt. I suppose that might be the default label, but who knows...

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Free Rice

I keep coming across this site, playing for a bit, and forgetting about it, so I decided to put a permanent link in the sidebar. What do they do? They donate grains of rice for every correct answer you give to a vocab quiz. It's for real: the first time I encountered it, I wondered if it was a scam, but they really do donate rice for playing. You will notice ads run across the bottom of the page as you play; that's where the money for the rice comes from. But if you need to play a game for a while, why not play one that accomplishes something in the real world?

(15 minutes later) Okay, that color clashes with my blog... so we'll try this one:




Ah... much better. (Modified using Printmaster Gold 17, "frosted sepia" effect.)

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Two Years

I slept on the sofa
And did not sleep
But roused fitfully
Too soon called up.

Too frail to stand, to walk...
Yet Grandma breathed.
Once more we carried her
Back to her bed.

Fearfully wakened by
Mom's tear-stained face:
Grandma's body empty,
Already cold.

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Incongruity

On a parking meter near ISU's new Rendezvous Center:

Cars may park on this street for no more than 2 hours in any 3 hour period.

Time limit: 4 hours.

Since the LED time displays do, in fact, go up to four hours, I'm inclined to believe the latter and ignore the former.

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Letters and Sayings of Epicurus

I just finished my first read-through of a the Letters and Sayings of Epicurus (Amaxon; Barnes and Noble), as translated by Jean Makridis. It's quite an enjoyable read, especially as it is clear that the Greeks were starting to work their way towards a scientific conception of the world. They aren't quite there yet, as they're relying heavily on "thought-experiments" rather than actual observations, but Epicurus comes close. He even gets some stuff almost right, surprisingly close to right for the time period. I'll try to give a brief run-down by section.

Letter to Herodotus
This seems to be a primer of the minimum that students should know by rote. First is a summary of current beliefs/knowledge of the structure and origin of the universe. "Nothing comes into existence from what does not exist." Later Epicurus uses this to argue that the universe must be infinitely old. "[T]he building blocks of bodily natures are the atoms or indivisibles." He argues to these by reason, that if matter could be infinitely subdivided, it would have done so in the infinite time span of the universe and there would be no substance left to comprise the world.

He goes through quite a lot relating to the ways we perceive the world, then comes very close to one of Newton's Laws: "[T]he atoms move with equal velocities when they move through empty space because nothing collides with them there to block and retard their motion. And the heavier things will not move any more quickly than the smaller and hollow ones whenever there is nothing to meet them in their paths. Likewise, the small things will not move more slowly than the large ones ..." Some of his reasoning is just a touch off, but he has the basic idea that, lacking interference, objects will move at the same rate independent of size.

Epicurus also maintains that the soul is the source of the ability for all varieties of sense perception, even if the body itself is required for said abilities to function. He believed, also, that the soul perished with the body. He equates the idea of an incorporeal soul to empty space, which, he argues, "cannot make anything happen and cannot itself be affected by anything in any way. ... So those who say that the soul is incorporeal are speaking in vain."

Another point of interest: he believes that the words used to describe things were not chosen randomly, but developed from perceived properties of objects which had some association with a particular sound. The only detail I remember from something I read discussing language origins was that the vast majority of languages have a word for mother that starts with "m", possibly because this is the easiest sound for a newborn to generate, and so that sound would become associated with mothers.

The rest mainly discusses "meteorological phenomenon", which includes weather, lightning, meteors, eclipses, phases of the moon... pretty much anything that happens in the sky. In his discussion of methods, he verges on the scientific method: "take an all-around survey of the many ways in which the same phenomenon [is observed to] take place." He has the first step, at least: gather data. In his Letter to Pythocles, he also admonishes against favoring one interpretation over another when both are equally supported by the evidence. What he lacks is the idea of testing the validity of these ideas by any means other than theorizing.

Letter to Pythocles
This letter is a deeper discussion of the "meteorological phenomenon." This is simply a fascinating read. I won't go into a lot of detail, because it needs to be read in its entirety to be appreciated, but here are some interesting bits: Volcanoes erupt and earthquakes happen when "winds become confined within the earth." Though with earthquakes he adds, "also because small masses of earth, which are situated adjacent to each other, move constantly." Ice is produced when "the rounded configuration is squeezed out of the water-mass" and triangular particles in the water "happen to converge". Comets occur when "flames gather and are nourished together in one place."

Letter to Meneoceus
I probably enjoyed this one the most, as it is a discussion of Epicurus's views on philosophy. The entirety is well-summed up in this short paragraph:

It is indeed imperative to attend to all those things that produce well-being and happiness. For, when happiness is ours, we have everything; and, when happiness is absent, we do everything to acquire it.

Epicureanism is often oversimplified to pursuit of pleasure, but it stresses moderation. Note the emphasis on "well-being." Pursuit of unhealthy pleasure will not result in well-being, so there's a built-in safeguard.

I also rather like his views on the Divine:

[T]he divine is a living entity which is indestructible and blessed*—a view that is indeed underwritten even by the commonly held view of the divine.
And never attach to the divine nature any [characteristics] which are incompatible with indestructibility or are not akin to blessedness.
...
And [don't think that it is] impious to reject the gods of the many. What is impious is to adhere to and internalize the common beliefs about the gods.

*He uses the same words to describe heavenly bodies, like the sun and the stars.

As far as death, since Epicurus believes that the soul perishes with the body, his emphasis is on living this life to the fullest and not worrying about death. "So, death exists neither for those who are alive nor for those who have died: because it is not an actual present thing for the former and the latter do not exist themselves." Recently, and I didn't bookmark the page, I came across a critique of Epicureanism that suggested this near indifference toward death was the primary reason that Epicureanism did not really catch on: people wanted reassurance rather than rationality.

The largest discussion concerns pleasure and pain. Short version: pursue the former and avoid the latter. When it's shortened this far, critics have a tendency to equate Epicureanism with hedonism, but it's nothing like that. It's pleasure as in 'that which leads to an enjoyable life.' The translation uses "pleasant" rather than "enjoyable," but I think enjoyable fits the spirit of the passage better. Binge-drinking, for instance, produces pain as well as pleasure, and thus is to be avoided. And this passage sums of that idea:

Prudence teaches that it is impossible to live pleasantly without leading a life of moderation, honorable civility, and justice; and that it is impossible to live such a life without living pleasantly.

Principle Doctrines: Diogenes Laertius X
Roughly the first half is a summary of what was in the Letter to Meneoceus, then there's a detailed discussion of the Epicurean notion of justice. I'll just share one passage: "Injustice is not a moral evil in itself: what is bad about injustice consists in the wearying apprehension that one might fail to escape detection by those who mete out punishments."

The rest of the book consists of short fragments. The first section are those that have been attributed to Epicurus, not necessarily with certainty, and the second section consists of comments made by other philosophers about Epicurus. Amusingly, he's called an atheist for not believing that the gods interfere with earthly matters.

I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in Greek philosophy, particularly Epicurean thought.

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