Patri's Peripatetic Peregrinations

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Read this...eventually
Slate special issue on procrastination

Reality testing
Some new habits to practice!

Reality testing ... involves performing an action with results that will be different if the tester is dreaming. By practicing these tests during waking life, one may eventually decide to perform such a test while dreaming, which may fail and let the dreamer realize that they are dreaming. Common reality tests include:

* Looking at one's digital watch (remembering the time), looking away, and looking back. As with text, the time will probably have changed randomly and radically at the second glance or contain strange letters and characters. ...
* Flipping a light switch. Light levels rarely change as a result of the switch flipping in dreams.
* Looking into a mirror; in dreams, reflections from a mirror often appear to be blurred, distorted or incorrect.
* Looking at the ground beneath one's feet or at one's hands. If one does this within a dream the difference in appearance of the ground or one's hands from the normal waking state is often enough to alert the conscious to the dream state.

(wikipedia on Lucid Dream)

oww
Tough CrossFit yesterday evening[1] + late to bed + bad sleep 2nts/row + still haven't quite kicked my cold = slow, sore, sleepy Patri.

Managing to be somewhat productive, though. But it will be nice to not be sick.

[1] But still fun, of course. 5x (7 pullups, 7 thrusters 65#, 7 ring dips (assisted), 7 burpees), 12:47.

Seasteading Snippets, 5/12/2008
here

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Chains Of Love - Erasure

MeeplePeople
via

ejwu, a site with great shirts like "Got Wood For Sheep?" and (my purchase) "~~Werewolf~~ Villager"

So weird
You mean, all these laws protecting workers actually screw over the young and make it hard for them to get jobs? It's almost like people respond to incentives and economists aren't just anti-poor capitalist apologists:

In 1973, only 6 per cent of recent university leavers in France were unemployed; now the rate is 25 to 30 per cent; salaries have stagnated for 20 years while property prices have doubled or trebled, though the overall proportion of French people living in poverty has not changed. Whereas in the 1960s the poor were mainly the old, now they are the young; in 1970, salaries for 50-year-olds were only 15 per cent higher than those for workers of 30; the gap now is 40 per cent.

'Some talk of a war between the generations, but that's a little simplistic. It is more that the system means that the haves are keeping what they have and no one is helping the have-nots,' said Chauvel. 'The big determinant in France now of success is not your educational level but the wealth of your parents, if they can support you during your twenties as you fight your way into a closed employment market.'

French economists speak of 'insiders and outsiders'. The insiders are those who already have a job and are well-defended by the battery of French laws protecting the workforce and the unions. The outsiders are those without work which, naturally, include newcomers on the job market.

(how Europe is fucked)

But are they learning from it? Hell no:

Many feel that Germany's middle class has not benefited from the nation's recent economic recovery. The result has been political pressure, with trade union activism and a wave of industrial action aimed at securing higher wages and enhanced benefits as well as lower taxes for average earners and higher taxes on the rich. Germany's political parties have reacted by boosting public spending and are considering wide tax cuts.

'There is a political swing towards what were once considered the ideas of the political left such as minimum wages, benefits and so on,' said Holgar Schaefer, labour economist at the Cologne Institute of Economics. 'It is a tendency that is only likely to become more obvious in coming years.'

Current Music: Deep Dance 74 Der Summermix 20 - VA

Streaker love
NSFW. Posting even though it's in several places on my flist, b/c it's just that cute.

Current Music: Deep Dance 74 Der Summermix 20 - VA

Your mom
Today seems like an appropriate day to post Dickipedia's entry on Your Mom.

Current Music: Deep Dance 74 Der Summermix 20 - VA

Childrens discovery museum
omfg the water room at CDH in SJ is AWESOME!!! The open ended vortices and Bernoulli effect streams are amazing. I want! Tovar is having fun too, although his tastes are simpler than mine (slightly :) ).

The Venus Project land is for sale
They wouldn't let me use their pictures b/c I was skeptical of their wacky alternative economics. Now their research center is for sale. 10 buildings including 5 domes, workshops, wells, septic tanks, and 21 acres, all for $550K! Man, we sure pay a big premium to live in urban California...

Why is NONDEM.PRES-TROOPS.IRAQ < DEM.PRES-TROOPS.IRAQ?
The InTrade contract for troop levels in Iraq in 2010 if a Republican is elected president is predicting about 66,000 troops, vs. 84,000 if a Democrat is elected. WTF?

I mean, I can imagine a point of view that says that the Republicans will successfully prosecute the war and then get out. But I can't imagine anyone being stupid enough to put money on this viewpoint!

Are Obama's promises of troop withdrawal really such hot air?

Ted P. - what do you think?

Current Music: Deep Dance 74 Der Summermix 20 - VA

sigh
I felt like I was kicking the cold for the first few days. But now I feel worse.

I think it might be b/c I got sloppy on taking my echinacea+umcka. I was doing it religiously for the first few days, and it was when I stopped that my progress stopped. And now I'm out of umcka and waiting for more to come. Sigh.

Shannon & Tovar are sick now too, so it's possible that, rather than them being sick with what I had, we're all sick with something new.

Current Music: nightrain - Guns N' Roses

Bonding while working

stereotype441 posted about how his life is too busy and he can't make the reunion.

ideath responded: "Also, FWIW, i like hanging out helping with chores. Remember how fun it was to pull up the weed-trees? Doing other people's chores is always fun, and many hands etcetera."

So true. I think one of the downsides of our less communal modern lifestyle is that we get less "productive hanging out" time. Work, home, and friends are all separate, so when you are working you aren't hanging out with your friends, and same goes for when you are doing chores. As opposed to the traditional tribal structure where you worked, lived, and hung out with the same set of people, without the rigid distinction between sectors of life.

Obviously there are a lot of gains from the specialization in work and friendship that comes from our current system. But there are some losses too. Many hands make not only light work, but also good bonding. Perhaps one thing that will happen on seasteads is that, as small intentional communities, they will restore some of this lost balance.

Current Music: welcome_to_the_jungle - Guns N' Roses

Michael Moschen at TED
At about 5min in, he does a 3-2-1 multiball contact juggling routine...with PVC cylinders. It's awesome.

Michael Moschen: performance lecture excerpts

BTW, there is now a multiball CJ book. I've bought it, but it may be quite awhile before I have time to try out the moves.

Current Music: Ambient Chillout Mix 3 - Summer 2004_www.djriver.com - DJ River

cool new word
I have a micrognathic mandible.

Dental appliance felt good last night, although hard to tell for sure b/c it was my 1x/week sleeping pill sleep-in day. Only hurt a little bit, and I didn't feel apneic. But we'll see what happens over the coming weeks.

Current Music: Homebase - dZihan & Kamien - Cafe Del Mar

Advice to billionaires: try poly
From a fun article giving advice to billionaires: Time Bandits: Yachts and jewels are all well and good, but nowadays the ultimate luxury is extra time. Here’s how to get some.

Don’t divorce. When will people learn? A divorce is the surest way to waste time, emotion and money. Instead of trading in your spouse for a new model, just stay married and have affairs. Jimmy Goldsmith had it right when, during his third marriage, to Annabel Birley, he said that marrying a mistress just creates a vacancy.

The French have understood this for centuries. I wonder if it decreases their divorce rates?

On danger

"At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man's power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant."
--Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace"

Very similar to

xleste's maxim, which goes something like: "When presented with an uncomfortable truth, you have two options. Face it, or ramp up your level of self-delusion." Sadly, we humans seem to have only so much capacity for facing reality, so we can't always take the wiser option.

First successful meditation
During my first-ever hour table massage at work today, I had my first deep meditative experience. Or so it felt - I still haven't been formally trained in meditation, I've been learning about it here and there, and trying to take a mindfulness class at work, but it keeps getting postponed. But based on things I read in places like "The Power of Now"[1] and what I've heard from Shannon, I've come to understand it somewhat. I see it as a process of clearing your mind, that is, silencing the chattering Narrator, by focusing on the present moment and some element of the senses. Commonly, this is the breath, but I instead used the massage, music, and tinkling water fountain.

I've been trying to do this occasionally at other times, with mixed success. I've been able to stay present more than usual, but not enough to have a deep effect. Being a deeply verbal and intellectual person, it's very hard for me to silence my Narrator. And since my thoughts are usually not negative or ruminating (except when driving[2]), I haven't had the incentive to try really hard. Massage seemed like a great place to try again, since it is a good time to be present and feeling the sensations, rather than off in some stream of thought. And it's meant to be a relaxing environment.

At first, I tried just focusing on the physical sensations, but that didn't work - thoughts came too often and were too hard to banish. It turned out that the key was focusing on the music or water fountain. I think what's going on is that since my Narrator is a voice, auditory stimulus occupies the same part of the brain. That made it much easier to let the thoughts pass through me and return to the sounds and the sensations. It was wonderful - I was deeply relaxed and in the moment for most of the second half hour.

Afterwards, it took me an hour and a half to be able to work again! I was relaxed and contemplative and mellow, so I took a walk outside, where colors seemed brighter than usual. Other physical sensations were also more noticeable (wind, sun). Even after I was able to get back to coding, I was more reflective, noticing more what I was doing and when I was distracted. I don't know that I was able to manage my distraction much better, but I was very conscious of it.

My mind still feels different, hours later. Powerful stuff!

[1] Or rather, the free Kindle sample chapters :).

[2] Where I've discovered that my regular mellow self turns into a fuming stress-case, and so I've had the most positive impact from cognitive interventions. Mainly I rephrase things like "Why the fuck is he driving so slowly?!" into "I'm annoyed that the car in front of my is slow. I want to drive faster", which somehow defuses the annoyance.

Sahana is...
<i>...a Free and Open Source Disaster Management system. It is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effectively between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves.</i>

Not how I usually think of ending that sentence, seeing as how Sahana is also my neighbor, but it's cool that this project exists.

Flow
driving fast with the top and windows down, cooling the sweat from a good workout, blasting the stereo, rushing to make a dentist appt that may help my apnea, so that I can make my first hour-long table massage at work, while my car worries about navigation.

Life good!