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oh, yes, also, i realized i'm hackworth, lost in mapping out drummer architecture, trying to compile the seed. neal stephenson, diamond age. perhaps i'm projecting my own architecture onto it, but it's uncannily similar. it was only a few weeks ago (hiking, i can take you to the spot it occurred to me, or at least the part where i wrote the next part) that i noticed: fuck. the diamond age. did neal stephenson have all this fifteen years ago? to quote steven levy from his book "hackers" -- one of my favorties -- no, wait, already i'm peter molyneux. steven levy, hackers, quoting peter gosper, who said something like: dammit. every time you figure out something cool, you find out that gauss or newton had it in the crib. you know what, though? stephenson is a genius, and if i've caught up with him simply by following my own path, that's almost as good as being the first hunter to the data. that's the worst case O(n). even more gratifying is the idea that i may have fleshed it out a tad more than he has. and the man is a hell of a boss dd-3. a frickin' balrog duul fits that last bit of wording; it's on now. duntduntudndaaaa. yes, mouse on mars, please see my track "stank bomb" off my album "human controlled" for the same sort of goofy sloppy high school metal band vibe, with respect to the snowflake's chance in hell you've been reading my thread since page one |
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i hunch that the increased multitasking (from none to some) is not just rhythm organizing my mind a bit better, but also left and right brain beginning to cooperate a bit. i had a situation with a pringle tonight. i had it stored in the door comportment, left, and for right robot claw to extract a morsel i had to reach aroundunderthru left arm's business zone, it was driving the car. left robot claw likes to dance and right claw drives, so... alright, you two. right has to drive, left is on pringle threading. right claw, we've seen you drive. left claw... dance me up a morsel. sorta. no. wat. left claw grabs two and stows the spare on my right thigh, as per protocol. then, driving took over for a bit. i forgot i'd had left stow the spare pringle and went to retrieve it with right, but... aphasia. left placed it, right didnt know where it was. the data was not shared. this gets from codex waesle to corpus callosium. inter-lobe bus between left and right. sever it? things work fine. it solves epilepsy thjngs, sometimes, so it's done bere ans dere. then word, weirds get ljne |
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tops my imaginary metal band name list for the week, with their album, "in a bag" |
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In addition, the resultant split-brain prevented some patients from following verbal commands that required use of their non-dominant hand.[9] perhaps they're not using the right tone of voice. |
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By exploiting a flaw in the part of the CPU known as the branch predictor, a small application developed by the researchers was able to identify the memory locations where specific chunks of code spawned by other software would be loaded. In computer security parlance, the branch predictor contains a "side channel" that discloses the memory locations. good to know that works on digital just as well as it does biological computation. |
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i've been approaching meditation/spirituality/etc through the lens of computer science and engineering metaphors, essentially because it's what i know. it's my field. it's my passion. it's pretty much my life. so, yes, why not feed it back on itself? feedback is an engineering concept that i've gotten a lot of mileage out of... when i fed feedback back into itself, the result was peter molyneux..... ...but, yes, that Lot of Mileage i mentioned. everyone knows the thing where you get in your car, get lost in thought, and then... hey, you're home! and you have no recollection of anything that happened on the drive home. like engineering, this is pretty much my whole life. i became fascinated with this and began to tear it apart. this essentially means consciously catching myself driving unconsciously, and then taking stock: what's going on? what muscles are tense, what are relaxed? what jarried me out of thought and back to reality? this was not a serious effort, until it was. i came up with a metaphor i call "freeze-frame." if something's happened before my conscious mind has zipped off somewhere else, i can replay part of my unconscious behavior back for the conscious mind to review. through and through, this is a skill, not an "ability" or something i wound up through luck or genetics. then it got proper weird: even when i am consciously focused on driving, there are a thousand things going on subconsciously: i don't have to think about how far to turn the wheel when turning onto a side-street. so, let's "freeze-frame" that last turn, there, and see what's going on. |
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it is analagous to a magic genie that i am allowed to ask three questions. the genie has every bit of data in my brain; all i have to do is ask. this sounds like a line to god until you get to the caveats: 1) the genie only gives you about 2-5 seconds before you lose your chance. 2) 3) if you don't understand something, your questions about it tend to be crap. 4) if you aren't aware of something, you can't ask questions about it at all. when i'd play back the turn i'd made (or whatever), getting anything out of it was like trying to have a conversation with someone going by in a freight train once an hour. a frustrating, erratic trickle: a visual image of the line by the curb. ok, sure, my brain went for that first to orient itself. then the genie's already gone; that's all i get. that visual image of the line meant little to me until i glued it into the idea that i can't stay oriented without references... then, perhaps, next time, i get something rather meta: my brain is now able to tell me when my subconscious mind decided to move my eyeballs from the road ahead to a precise little voxel of road as the start of making a turn onto a sidestreet. now i am free to consciously process this morsel: is that something i was taught, or is it just from practice/experience? elements of both. (vague question, vague answer) is this a good way to do things, or should i try to change it? it's fine for now. (better question, better answer) what happened at that point when i switched from "drive straight" to "turn?" probably a saccade eye movement.... (technical question, technical answer) then my three questions are gone and i get nothing more out of the moment. |
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i've written about the freeze-frame thing before: the mind can be viewed as a hierarchical, tiered cache where relevancy rises to the top, and i've learned to peek into the cache. data is never in the cache for long, so i have to be quick... i have to be deliberate and specific with my queries, because i don't have enough of a window to go back and ask more clearly... then some musing that perhaps creativity is essentially like branch prediction in CPUs: my brain has not fully thought this tangent out, it just feels a lot stronger than the other tangents, so it's getting more juice. then, consciously, i just have a vague hunch that this thing here is a bit more special than the other things... By exploiting a flaw in the part of the CPU known as the branch predictor, a small application developed by the researchers was able to identify the memory locations where specific chunks of code spawned by other software would be loaded. In computer security parlance, the branch predictor contains a "side channel" that discloses the memory locations. this is from about a novel hacking exploit. the CPU scatters stuff around your RAM in a spastic manner for security -- in a metaphor, a dog buries a bone so the other dogs won't get it, and picking a good spot involves variety and chaos. this is called ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization). |
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from the article: A table in the [branch] predictor called the "branch target buffer" stores certain locations known as branch addresses. Modern CPUs rely on the branch predictor to speed up operations by anticipating the addresses where soon-to-be-executed instructions are located. They speculate whether a branch is taken or not and, if taken, what address it goes to. The buffers store addresses from previous branches to facilitate the prediction. The new technique exploits collisions in the branch target buffer table to figure out the addresses where specific code chunks are located. i was already hunching (branch-predicting) pretty hard as i read the start of the article, but that part just floored me. more or less, i applied computer hacking to my own mind and came up with a novel technique. a few monhts later, more or less the exact same thing shows up as a real security flaws in real computers. fucking surreal. |
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the same day i read that article, i was reading the wikipedia page for . my vague recollection is that i wanted to use the phrase "refractory period" as a joke on IRC. i said to myself: "self, you are not entirely sure you're using this phrase correctly, and you should look it up to be sure." not thought: will anyone even get this joke? is this worth the effort of looking up? should i even be on IRC right now? etc... from the mundane chore of fact-checking a throway joke that no one would get as part of an IRC conversation i shouldn't have been having, i then began to read wikipedia for an hour. this is my life, yessir. it seems like crap until it isn't. i get to the part about and i see this: his exploits both the place or tuning within the auditory nerve, as well as the phase-locking within each nerve fiber Auditory nerve. The first ALSR reprsentation was for steady-state vowels;[45] ALSR representations of pitch and formant frequencies in complex, non-steady state stimuli were demonstrated for voiced-pitch[46] and formant representations in consonant-vowel syllables.[47] The advantage of such representations is that global features such as pitch or formant transition profiles can be represented as global features across the entire nerve simultaneously via both rate and place coding. huge, massive brain-fart: ALSR? exploits? this is not where these things belong. this acronym goes with something else... eventually i realized: no, this is the same thing. ASLR and ALSR. yin and yang mirrors of the same thing. i think i'm digging in the right place. |
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that's probably about 1/3 too technical for mohamed, so i'll localize the phenomenon. in my re-entrant review i found myself squinting at some words i'd written: "...use gating to make all the timing snap like cher's bumhole." i got hung up: snap like... what? cher's bumhole fell out of some corner of my brain. sounds good; continue writing. later, it nagged at me. precisely as if it were a hunch.... which, really, it was. my brain was saying, "i am hunching that there is something worth consciously reviewing in this phrase." all i managed to get out of it immediately was: oh, well, it sounds like something someone on xlt would write, and it's funny. then something else caught my attention and i wandered off. from there on it's scrambled like dreamtime jams. once i got to the end, it made total sense, more or less all at once. you can see me progressively work it out in layers over in that thread: first i note the way i got hung up on it, and the little i figured out (above). then i start digging deeper: thoroughly british. this feels like a belb word: then someone's to lol dropped in to say, "yeah, out of all this stuff, this thing here, it's beautiful." then he's gone. left the thread. so, yes, bumhole is a belb word, but signeduptolol is stranded in london or something and he's on here enough to recognize a belb word when i wrote "stranded in london" i really just meant "in england" and the "stranded" was for style. or was it? it promptly brought signeduptolol back to the thread: "I do feel stranded here, like I can't get away." driving in the car, i get a hunch to google search xlt for specific keywords, and there's SignedUpToLol in a belb rap battle thread, rapping about being stranded in london, and using the word bumhole. i still can't tell you where cher came from, but i'm working on it. |
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i do not consciously remember reading that thread, or his post. my brain does not give me a "yes definitely" or "no, definitely not" or even "possibly." i am genuinely not sure if i ever read that thread before. if we tack over from "feeling" to "logic," however, parsimony is all "jeez, i must have. this is too specific and weird for it to be otherwise." inherent in a lot of this is being comfortable with hunches over proof. this works because they're just hunches, and they can be wrong sometimes, and should i encounter proof that a hunch is, indeed, wrong, i promptly throw it out. then, obviously, i'm always searching for proof a hunch is wrong. give me a reason not to, bro. c'mon.... ...well, what are the other options, anyways? perhaps SignedUpToLol recites that rap every morning and he was leading me down the garden path throughout the whole exchange. but, no, that's not how he does. it's too indirect.... next, uh... i never read the rap, but i read lots of his posts, and it bled in through osmosis. parsimony gets mad at that one. possible? yes. likely? hell no. in fact, even less likely than an impossibly complex, surreal joke at my expense. then, finally, it's sheer fucking luck.... sure, that's possible, but i stopped flatly dismissing these sort of things off as "luck" once they began to happen alarmingly often. i keep peeling off more layers of the onion: i made that review thread in the first place to branch of my rambling and stop larding up the real review thread, and of the two major points i ala carted off with, one of them belonged to signeduptolol, who usually has no time for my blather. did i put that in there to get his attention? possibly. bottom line: belb rap battle threads are now a part of my soul. bits of battle will bleed up to the surface and directly influence my thoughts and actions. a part of me will always be stranded in london, even though i've never been there myself. |
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i have some rather odd problems. last month was batshit crazy. lots going on. i did it all pretty well, actually... but, by the end of the month, i was practically incoherent. unable to shut up. a thousand things rattling around in my mind. i've been here many times before. i am just loaded up with information and things and stuff and wat and it's spinning around until my brain chews through it all. until then, i am unable to shut up. mostly to myself, but if i have to talk to someone else, i go on tangents wait shit tangents wait shit topic change tangent sorry, what were you saying? internally, i am functioning, more or less. not my full percentage, but well enough. i just need a few days of puttering around the house, think everything through, driving around, thinking everything through, posting without thinking anything through, peter molyneux, u noe? peter molyneux grew and grue and made another peter molyneux grew and grue and made another peter molyneux grew and grue and made another peter molyneux grew and grue and made another fine cheddar. it's not a bad state of mind at all. not unpleasant, just weird -- like me, you know? i always write , too. the only problem is interacting with reality. |
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monday: i sound like a drunk linus torvalds crossbred with spam emails through a pimped-out kyma. not bad. in public, i stick to the minimal script and avoid smalltalk. this is for the protection of the rest of society. it's pretty simple: i can chatter along in my head and keep the mouth closed, and i can follow the script without being odd in any discernable way... but as soon as i get into a real discussion, i tend to confuse the fuck out of people. like, today: there's a squeaky thing in the floor, and as a man of many noises, i took the issue to the homeowner. it's these metal things against these wood things, ok. i suggest: wd-40? his answer is that it'd work for a bit, but then start again, and there are better solutions. fair enough. then i get to wondering: is wd-40 bad for wood? is there another type of lubricant that would serve better there? so i ask him: "is wd-40 the best thing for that type of situation, or is there another sort of..." and he cuts me off: "no, i told you, it'd work for a bit, but then start again..." i am not talking about the floor things anymore. i am asking a question about materials. wood, metal, what sort of goop to make it not frictionary? three or four minutes later, i am going mad. he still doesn't get it. finally i spin a yarn: some scientists in a lab are putting together wood and metal and it has nothing to do with that other problem and what lubricant? he says: oh! wd-40 is bad for wood. you'd want silicon lubricant. thank god. it's maddening, really. i'll make a leap. you can see how i got from A to B well enough, but it's not a leap that most people would make. too lateral bananas. then i have to either abandon the issue or catch them up. |
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that was today. i am mostly recovered. massive amounts of time driving around and working out. i was almost in tears because i couldn't get. him. to. understand. but otherwise it's been cool. but, back to monday: i sound like a drunk spambot through some inscrutable convolution transform. tight. in public, i stick to the minimal script and avoid smalltalk. this is for the protection of the rest of society. it's pretty simple: i can chatter along in my head and keep the mouth closed, and i can follow the script without being odd in any discernable way... but as soon as i get into a real discussion, i tend to confuse the fuck out of people. like, the old dude who works the gas station at some times but not other times is a nice man. he has the tempo of a deflated waltz, but he's very nice. i have to always be on myself to not talk too quickly and such. i usually manage. last sunday, i am unmanagable. untractable. there had been some huge wad of people in the square doing things, and nutty everywhere... and i was curious what the occasion was. i tried to ask molasses gasman. he wasn't working then, oh. he doesn't know. so far so good. he's curious now too, he says. and i'm off: it was synthesis of multiple factors. it's sunday, the election is soon, halloween is tomorrow, it's nice out and it was raining yesterday... yes, this event was clearly emergent complexity.... i cut myself off before even getting to the part about emergent complexity, because i tuned back in for a moment to see the smouldering remains of his brain. "oh, well, i guess it's just a mystery!" i say. "oh, yep..." i exit the store and resist the urge to slap myself. so, yes, on monday, in public, i avoid any topic of conversation that will get me thinking. hi, how you u doin. good, thanks. no, not today. thank you very much! you're welcome, cashier lady. thank you for not attempting to make contact with the layer of my brain beneath robotic social word waltzes. |
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monday: i sound like a drunk goat. on lsd. with a cybernetic interface to a planet made entirely of raisins. time for a work call! i know the guy very well, so it's not like he's completely unprepared. he's quick, like me. follows my leaps. if not for this, i would have just cancelled. i probably should have, really, but it generated fantastic data. i am able to write a bullet-point list of what i want to talk about and work down through it from memory... remember which we've covered... run over them all in my head and realize we missed one right as we're goodbye'n; blurt it out. save! i go on a million tangents and cut myself off and apologize. it is a thousand times worse than the silicon lubricant leap of context. i am shooting down stupid tangent after stupid tangent to the point where i'm having trouble speaking properly. plenty escape my mouth, anyways. i almost explained myself upfront, but decided against, because the explanation would have been a trainwreck. like the gas station, i am doing my best to stick to my script. and failing. he's wondering what's up, i half figure. in retrospect, i can sum it up well enough: i have a very exotic strain of nerd flu and my voice is funny, but no reason to stop the meeting, you know? i came up with this analogy afterwards, so i can play it back at someone as if i am a sampler next time in am in this sort of spot. |
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he's being polite. we're getting through the agenda, but it's messy. i am shooting down tangent after tangent. many escape my mouth. i start talking about driving for a while. a few times. usually cut myself off. pretty much, any of this stuff would be fine, if it weren't so much, so fast, on a work call. he decides to ask what's up in a unique way: he describes how, on long car drives, he stops being able to keep his internal monologue internal. anything he thinks, he says. do i know that sort of thing? a capacitor explodes in the back of my brain somewhere. whoa, rad. what was that? never mind. oh, yes: i'm battling a tangent hellstorm, trying to filter out all the wild tangents my mind is throwing at me, and i've just been asked if i have no mental filter. a capacitor explodes in the back of my brain somewhere inside my mind, i had to essentially say: yes, hello, mental filter? is it a good idea to talk about mental filters? and my brain said, "..." and then, "uhh, i'll get back to you." i have so much to say about voices, internal monologue, and i am wicked curious about what he's just described. tangents are shot down. then i have to think about how to explain that he is wrong but in neighborhood... a capacitor explodes in the back of my brain somewhere |
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monday: i'm so busy shutting down irrelevant things to say that i have trouble answering my collegue's questions. instead, i start blathering -- a stupid tangent slips past! -- and cut myself off repeatedly. sensing something is off, my collegue says: yes, i had this moment when i had no mental filter once, is that it? do you have no mental filter right now? the strangest thing happened then. it took me a solid two days to figure out what had happened. as i thought about how to answer, a sentence came out of my mouth: "oh, i know that one, too, but this is something else." the sentence and my inner monologue were one and the same. it's like fractal compression -- a whole paragraph of my inner monologue shrunken down into a sentence that came out of my mouth as my inner monologue chewed on how to answer. it was intensely disorienting because a hell of a lot of things happened at once. i had the sensation of the sentence coming first... trying to figure out drove me mad. circular references. baron von munchausen. eventually it dawned on me that neither came first: the sentence was "grown" simultaneously with the inner monologue paragraph as part of the same process. to me at the time, though, i had the sentence first, and then it unpacked itself into my internal monologue... as i was saying it... the unpacking was also all at once. a sense of two or three cores blowing up different parts of the sentence... you know how beavis/butthead will witness, say, firecrackers, and say: ... huh-uh. cool that was essentially my reaction: something has just exploded in my mind, and that was really neato! then, i told myself it was a tangent, and resumed making an ass of myself. |
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i have been doing all these weird experiments with automatic habits, metaphor programming, and multi-tasking. that last part is fantastic -- it's actually made it easier for me to interact with people. i can listen to what people are saying and reply appropriately while my inner monologue is chewing on the angles. if i get too tangled up, it'll just be dead air. me staring blankly as a person waits for a reply. this still happens, but far less often. this is now another mechanism that can backfire when i am tired and frazzled, yet still required to function. more or less, when he asked me if i had no mental filter, my mental filter began to evaluate itself. the process got stuck and never returned; infinite recursive loop. this jammed up the works. like a computer lagging when it's really busy... except, no, this is the brain, where everything is parallel. my mental filter going infinite loop landed me in a zone where i was directly perceiving a lot of subconscious machinery i've never been allowed anywhere near before. compression is one metaphor. calculus is another: the integral of the sentence is my internal monologue, and the derivative of my internal monologue is the sentence. the words in the sentence are effectively pointers to segments of my internal monologue. essentially, it was a little index of working data as i thought things through. the sentence was what my brain was using to keep its point in the internal monologue... i did a bit of damage with that rambly phone meeting, but now i know how a mental filter works in a neurological/technical sense. there are deeper implications regarding language itself, but that's a bit of a tangent and i'll leave it for later. |
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the same guy who just couldn't get that i was no longer talking about the squeaky thing and was asking a question tantamount to, "what about the horseshoe nail does my pinky finger?" my brain told me to write that. it did. make any sense? no. that's about what he felt -- what you felt just now, reading that. then... kerSNAP! he's on board and the answer falls out immediately. i didn't include the part where the precise same thing happened: is it conductive? no, i don't care if it's bad for the thing. here's a 45-second tangent involving the life-cycle of computer muffin fans and dolla forty from china i don't give a fuck nigga so i squirt wd-40 in about mid-way through the life cycle. can i squirt silicon lubricant in the same manner? finally: "oh, yeah" but it's bad for the motor i actually tried to enlist his help. is my approach wrong? like, did i explain this poorly? could i have phrased it somehow so you'd not have been as confused? thank god, he understood that i was now asking why i was so hard to understand. he laughed. so did i. yes, hello, mental filter? is it a good idea to talk about mental filter? ... "i'll get back to you." i did this as a little verbal schtick. you know, pause for the theatrical moment of deer in headlights. uhhh, i'll have to get back to you on that one |
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Is this place your shrink, or your blog, or your blog where people write creative shorts and moments? |
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I mean one of these blogs for shorts and 'meaningless' life moments. |
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my mental filter is a beast. a terrifying machine. it has to be. i am not a tolerable human being without the ability to do things like not attempt to discuss emergent complexity with the guy at the gas station. it's not like i park my car and think to myself, "the gas station clerk doesn't understand me if i speak at my usual pace; i have to slow down for him to understand. but, it's really important that i explain my theory about something he never saw in terms of a complex multi-system collision that created the grounds for a feedback loop." it was a complex ball of yarn that i tangled up in the car to explain why suddenly a small mob was in an intersection normally devoid of people: first beautiful day after much rain. a weekend. halloween tomorrow. election next week. people are full of weasels and bees after being cooped up. someone stands at an intersection with a trump sign. soon, a hillary sign walks up from a parking lot and stands on another corner. then, a very confused engineer drives by and the source of this mysterious explosion troubles him all day. the answer is convoluted, wonderful, strange, and as far as he knows as of this moment -- correct. i also didn't stop to say, "i'm not sure how to explain this to the guy at the gas station, to whom i have to very slowly speak the sort of cigarattes i want." i was just asking him if he knew what it was. he didn't. then he said he wanted to know, and, well, i don't think he knows. most days, though, he doesn't know i know things i'd like him to know, but know he can't fucking understand any more than: american. spirit. YELLOW but, god bless him, he tried. then i realized i'd slipped up and switched back to folk wordisms and everything was cool. he probably doesn't even remember it anymore. but i still began keeping a lid on myself a bit more firmly after that... yeah, it's that thing again. shields up |
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Re: Russell: in the post above this one, do you see how i'm essentially saying, "i know people don't understand this shit, let alone care, but i've gone and said it anyways?" well, now i've said it again. with itself. |
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do you work at a gas station, russell? |
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Yes. Your usual, Nevs? |
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if i think up something good and forget it, that bothers me intensely. i used to even say: i'm sitting in this chair until i figure it out. techniques evolved: memory goes along the timeline. what were you thinking before and after this missing link? what you were thinking before led to some other things led to your thingk. what you were thinking after resulted from your missing link. it's best to figure out the "what came after" first, and more or less stop as soon as you have something. working backwards is harder, but you need that endpoint as a trajectory. then you simply go back to the closest "what came before" memory and work forwards. the other day i was explaining this and offered an analogy: i don't remember the lyrics to that "condition" song from the big lebowski, but i could reconstruct it if i wanted to. not necessarily all, but way more than i have now. he didn't believe me at first, but it didn't take much before he was sold. then i described other, more subtle techniques: dredging up memories of the scene from big lebowski this was paired with is likely to get me more lyrical fragments. the more lyrical fragments i have, the more will come to me. spare pockets from the middle will connect up into flowing lyrics... again, not necessarily all, just more than i can run off from memory at the moment. |
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you can dive through the mandlebrot set in "fractal explorer" software forever. zoom forever. the computer, however, is limited. it renders a single frame for whatever fractal coordinates you request. coordinates not requested are not rendered. effectively, until you ask for it, that part of the fractal does not exist. it renders a tiny slice at a time. whatever you ask for is whipped up on the spot, and it gives the illusion of exploring something far more massive than the computer could ever compute. when i lost memories and attempted to recover them (previous post), the attitude was that the data is in there, just fragmented. like a hard drive. find the pieces and put it together like a puzzle, and you've recovered the lost data. i've now realized that the act of recalling a memory causes it to be computed. if you've never recalled that event before, the memory did not exist before you attempted to recall it. "what was i doing yesterday at lunch?" and your mind actively culls through all the data it actually has to produce a summary. a mental image of the cafeteria: oh, i ate lunch in there. then your plate: oh, a sandwich. the more you think about it, the more you can dredge up about lunchtime yesterday. if you try to dredge up lunchtime six months ago, however, most of that is gone. you get an image of the cafeteria, and your plate, and perhaps a sandwich... but, no, that was a while ago, and perhaps you're just conflating it with lunch today.... perhaps lunchtime yesterday was momentous: you finally asked the HR gal out. whether it went well or not, you'll be thinking about it: "what restaurant will she like?" (well) or "am i not her type?" (not). overanalyzing everything: how she stabbed at her green beans with a fork, was that a reaction or just a habit? the image of her prodding green beans is crystal clear six months later. meanwhile, you have lunch with the VP of Sales once a week, and you can't recall if he's ever had green beans for lunch. |
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the idea that a memory does not exist until you attempt to recall it does a bit to explain why it feels so bottomless. |
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like a movie on a disc is not a movie until you use a codec thinga and screen. |
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say, for some reason, you sit there and churn through yesterday. dredge up all you can, and then tell yourself: "yes, since epicmegatrax posted this bullshit, i'll indulge him and take a moment to close my eyes and run through everything i can recall about lunch today." whatever you come up with during this process of recall is filed under a label you can mentally reference, e.g. "how lunch went the day epicmegatrax posted that bullshit." six months later, if you ask yourself, "what did i have for lunch the day epicmegatrax posted that bullshit?" it will come back to you, minus a few details. you can almost remember... feel that something was here and you lost it... oh, yes, i remember now! and so on... if you try to remember what you have for lunch every day i post some bullshit, however, that's too many days. they'll start to blend together. you'll accidentally swap bits of similar days; eventually it will just be a vague gestalt: "i remember epicmegatrax posting some bullshit, i remember a sandwich in the cafeteria, but both of these things happen four or five days a week, and i'm pretty sure i'm mashing it up with a similar day six months ago..." all you need is a few more bits, though... oh, yes, that was the day an alcoholic vietnam veteran ran over my mailbox, lunchtime is coming back to me now... i ordered out, because i was dealing with that instead of making a sandwich... it's fair game to cheat with technology: what emails did i get that day? how did i reply? if you can gather up enough of the fragments to compute the memory, it seems like it was there all along, just lost in the couch cushions or such... oh yeah! i remember now. the memory "pops in" when you get closer, just like trees in a video game. |
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video link for epicmegabytes |
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like a movie on a disc is not a movie until you use a codec thinga and screen. the film's director storms into your current mental context, mad as a wet hen. "this is not a movie! this is some fucking direct to consumer youtube juke shit with michelle pfeiffer, and even though you're watching it on a shit TV with no contrast, i can tell whoever did the conversion from 35mm should be taken out back and shot.... apologizing for their crimes against movies...." bill clinton busts into your mental context like the kool aid man, and patiently reminds you: "it depends on what your definition of 'is' is." |
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i am not daniel tammet. here is how not daniel tammet, i is: 3.14159. that's all i got. you want more? i gotta look it up. i can't de-fragment it or compute it or synaesthetically navigate it or even remember how calculus works. which brings me to my current ramble context: if a fractal and a sphere had a lovechild, it would be consciousness. simultaneously crude and deep. perfect. except, no, that won't make sense to anyone, probably... i was yammering about the fractal explorer thing and now spheres are nagging at me. feels exactly the same as the nagging feeling you get when you worry you've left your car unlocked, and it progresses to the feeling that happens right as you begin to realize your coffee is absent because it's on your roof... a nice tangent, but we'll let it go. spheres! alright. ok. they're cool. i've been a sphere a few times; all of those times i was on drugs. point a video camera at your TV and sit in front of it in the lotus position and try real hard to be a sphere, and that's pretty much drugs in a nutshell. also a nice tangent, but we'll let it go... along with the avatar stages from the game rez... up floated the first time calculus really did something i thought was cool. i asked the teacher about it: "why is the derivative of the equation for the volume of a sphere the same as the equation for the surface area of a sphere? ...and, really, i only need this to set up my real question: why aren't any of the other shapes like that? the textbook cover had rhombuses and pyramids and torusus and all sorts of crap. none of the others were that satisfying. direct. not hard. you know? the teacher did not know, but he somehow managed to get that i'd latched onto something properly deep, because he actually tried to answer it (and failed). in the end, the answer is this: that's just how shit works. no, lulz, it's because calculus defines a sphere as an infinite set of surface area matryoshka shells of zero thinkness |
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it's like something in me said: yeah, this is all the calculus i need for the next fifteen years. on this very internet anachronism, my rambling has progressed from "i've largely forgotten calculus and it feels great" to "i don't miss calculus at all but it seems handy sometimes" to "it'd probably help if i learned calculus" to "calculus would help and i should re-learn calculus" to "i need to re-learn calculus" to "i need to re-learn calculus" to "i need to re-learn calculus" and then it just kind of drifted like that for the last few... things. as soon as i got from "why spheres" to "if below this fill line, please insert more calculus" i promptly said to myself: "ok, now it is time to learn calculus." after posting about. obviously |
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Now, with a flake type of cereal, Randy's strategy would never work. But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken treasure related shapes that the cereal aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard to pin down striated pillow formation. The important thing, for Randy's purposes, is that the individual pieces of Cap'n Crunch are, to a very rough approximation, shaped kind of like molars. The strategy, then, is to make the Cap'n Crunch chew itself by grinding the nuggets together in the center of the oral cavity, like stones in a lapidary tumbler. Like advanced ballroom dancing, verbal explanations (or for that matter watching videotapes) only goes so far and then your body just has to learn the moves. --Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon i more or less cited the gist of this passage when a friend got on about "how do you optimize the packing of spheres?" and i got it precisely backwards, which is sort of right. anyways, like calculus, i never sat down and dug it up until just now. |
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it's time to talk about context, in the context of context. that fractal meltdown in whatever in my brain constructs sentences has certainly kept me iterating. it came down to a point where i was sure the word "this" correlates to an integral. integration. it is difficult to verbalize why. it is not even worth it to try. it is about trivialities deep in the guts of my analysis processes. it's sort of like how the invention of the air conditioner killed the hamptons. wut? you said it. some guy invented the aircon, and suddenly no one needed to go to the hamptons to chill. like, yo, we got swamp coolers down to arizona. when you talk about the decline of an area, you're looking for something satisfying. grand. socioeconomic whatever and the decline of sternly misunderpaying women to run industrial towel machines creates an inflection point in human culture... no, someone invented a household appliance. suffice to say, i'm feeling pretty sure, and i can't verbalize it. once i figure out how to explain it, i'll figure out if it's still looking like a... i dunno. whatever mechanism that lets me deftly pluck marbles from all the colored yarn in my cerebral cortext. |
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the context: spheres are bothering me. i find that moment at the end of the chain of neurological botheringness, some writing. some deliberate calculus jokes, some... well... "thinkness" was originally a typo. then i looked at it. squinted, like steve jobs reviewing whatever turd some new guy had cooked up. then i decided: no, this is not a typo. it seemed like one, so i loaded up the context of examining typo-or-notness and went to town. it was then filed under the context of "i meant to do that, honest." later i realized: fill line... area under a curve. oh, that's calculus too. i meant to do that, honest. then i realize: getting stuck at "i need to re-learn calculus" infinitely... until i'd integrated the existing data i had on it... shit, this is a cheeky joke about limits. it also essentially implies that calculus determined when it was actually relevant for me to re-learn calculus. then, it seems, perhaps i've known it all along. at the very least, there seems to be more calculus alive down there than i realized or expected. my process is this: i arrive at this abstract synthesis of math, life memories, and puns. i am certain that either this will explain the thing about this being an integral in the context of context... or it won't, but when i get to the article, the article will explain why it doesn't explain this being an integral in the context of context.... oh, er, sorry, Russel. yes, usual cigs. what i meant to say is this: either calculus will solve my problem or send me off in a direction that will. i exit the gas station and continue: i started with context and spheres were ballin' beyond neurological limits, right, so i switched context to spheres. this led me to calculus. now, i understand the trajectory -- how i got from context to sphere to calculus, and how to connect this back to my original issue.... but, twelve hours later, this is a hard thing to define. drink and drive? never. think and derive? often |
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in this context, a sphere is all points radiating out from a single point (on an x,y,z axis). is this context, context is all neural connections radiating out from the point, at the center. which i never do seem to get to anyways, i promptly began visualizing them like the fluffball-stage dandelions. just sort of popped in there, like context, or remembering something you forgot... "this" referrs to the current context. so, when you say, "not this... that!" you are saying: the thing you meant has nothing to do with the thing i meant. what is this. i don't even |
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for reference: this integral thing was a thing by tuesday's stuff, and you know what i said on tuesday? "i need to re-learn calculus." at that point, it's just a promising metaphor. chasing down calculus really hasn't been warranted. to my immense relief. no, i'm just using calculus as a metaphor for word-y stuff at a sort of sarah palin level, thanks. this does collapse the waveform anywhere near hard enough... later on tuesday, i'm on to context... but, then, oh, some things. iterate on XLT about memory, even though i know that itearing on memory is a process that can continue forever. knowing this makes that scenario easier to avoid. a block of real life. my ability to string coherent worderblapples back together has returned, and i'm running all the errands i was dodging. god knows how many hours watching a friend play skyrim. yes, skyrim: low stimuli; almost too boring. especially if you aren't playing. so we chat. this means i have to keep an eye on something tedious and boring and also completely out of my control, and keep an eye on it well enough to know when to shut up -- monsters jump him out of nowhere; talk stops. at first, it didn't. then there was lag. three or four words. then quiet. somewhere in between four words and quiet, it all almost went to shit. i was starting to shut up without having to actively remember skyrim was across the room. my brain immediately said: yes, sir, these are the same neurons from driving that do that, we're sure of it. those "neurons from driving" are responsible for one thing: spot patterns where i need to shut up, snap out of my mental ponderings... drop fucking everything and focus. immediately. so, i realized: you know, i can shut up... but only when driving requires my absolute focus. like, a car cutting me off. or all those red lights i used to run before music and rhythm fixed driving... yes, now driving is officially fixing the rest of my life. along with fucking calculus. |
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so, yes, i thought of that, and it almost exploded out of my mouth. there is about sixteen million more things going on to that moment: i've talked about music neurons gluing themselves into driving. one day i just noticed: lanes... faders... a little moment, where, for a brief glitch, my brain was all: why is this thing here? some neurons got confused when they were fed a lane instead of a fader, because they did the faders. like an autistic child making sure that all seven types of recyclable plastic go into the proper bins... what a pain, right? then one day there's a huge problem. this doesn't fit in any of the bins. i go down to the sortery to see what the ruckus is about: this is not a bottle. this is not any of my recycle number. it is the most awful thing i have ever seen. it's like every adjective H. P. Lovecraft used in the vicinity of the phrase "non-euclidian" at once. get rid of it at once. what is it? the ipod richard d. james lost on the plane so, yes, i was so excited: my actually-working driving things soaking into my badly-working everyelsethings. even better, i caught it in the act. the fader thing i just noticed, eventually, for whatever reason... but, no, now i've caught the gluing in action. that's inroads to how the process happens... what the glue process is itself, which things glue together and how... and, shit, this is great, but he's fighting a dragon now i managed to hang on to it, though, and i knew exactly why. |
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a sphere has the minimum surface area you can manage on a 3D shape. say i think of the word "glue." a little grenade of computation is set off at the proper coordinates, and results fire off: super, neuronal, sniffing... then the results fire off results, and i wander off into iterating over my recollection of airplane. i picked a hell of a day the query and the result and the record of the transaction are all the same thing. that grenade of computation changes the structure of your brain forever, every time you think of anything. those changes change other nearby structures... the subconscious mind slash memory is probably best metaphorized as a , or a distributed ledger. every bitcoin transaction ever is available on the internet. no one owns it. multiple copies everywhere. that's how bitcoin is decentralized and doesn't rely on a central bank/server. all the bitcoin crunching is checking and double-checking the financial transactions flying around, and this is done through the blockchain. the blockchain is essentially every bitcoin transaction, ever, encrypted. it is, in theory, possible to work backwards from this: first, you throw massive amounts of computation into working the encryption backwards, and then you have a small handfull of bitcoin transactions: one anonymous number sends another anonymous number these bitcoin things. some guy who posts his number on the internet will be easy to find, but there are also sites that money launder the thing through dozens of addresses. at that point, well, even the NSA begins to say "fuck it" |
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in the brain, a blockchain (distributed hashtable/ledger) sorta structure is a cost-effective way to get most of the benefits of linear time without actually having to be aware of it. it's sort of like a wall that enterprising chaps are always graffiti-ing and re-graffiti-ing: someone does it up one night. later, someone adds a hat to the man in his mural. the next day, the original artist touches up the hat, and adds more hats to the other men in the mural... eventually the thing has been effectively painted over hundreds of times, slowly, in bits and chunks and metaphors, as various people snuck up and modified tiny parts as a kind of slow, distant dialogue with each other... or, fuck, let's just compare it to those things that spin. they spin, right? and you squirt paint on them. it makes swirly designs. more paint goes over the old paint, but you can still see the current paint... man, this stuff ain't easy to type up if it hurts to move your arm, you do it by accident a few times. less and less. gradually you stop doing it. if it heals up, you're not sure when it happened; you forgot about it. you also have to keep reminding yourself it doesn't hurt any more and deliberately, consciously, begin to use it again... or, perhaps, you forget about it entirely, and there's a little oddness in your movement that's never enough of an inconvenience for you to consciously notice and address... new patterns overwrite existing patterns, and the process leaves a graffiti wall where the newest patterns are right on top; unblemished. you can see yesterday's graffiti underneath, kinda. bits of last week's graffiti poke up, here and there. finally, there's a spare corner that's remained unchanged for a year, but, nope, there, just overwrote it when you realized the arm is fine, now, and why are you still acting like it hurts? jeez. stupid brain this is why the subconscious mind has no sense of time in an active sense, but still reacts to it just fine. |
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this is also why yoga focuses on holding positions for extended periods, and meditation is essentially about focusing on a single thing: if i type the word "glue" over and over, it'll probably only take about sixty or seventy glues before i become unable to type the word "glue" for a moment. wait... how was it it spelled again? gleu? weasael? focusing on the structure, iterating over it repeatedly, making its neurons pump out data to every other word/metaphor glue connects to... memories and mental images... eventually, the concentration of fire in that one single spot cascades over into neighboring concepts. for a moment, the word glue is just a brain fart. it's like it's gone from your brain. the circuit has overheated, essentially, and the flash of it going kerpow illumunates neighboring circuits. this is aphasia, and it's a good moment to be mindful. it's important to note that the word/concept "glue" is not actually living in some particular spot. it's distributed across your brain. it is a gestalt that arises from every connction that fires off when the airplane guy talks about quitting sniffing glue, and i talk about it. on the internet. focusing on that gestalt lights up the whole network until whatever it connects to begins to receive overflow. then, weird shit happens. you get a brief glimpse of the workings, like some closed-source app core dumping. once you're able to get things to feedback and core dump it's assumed you didn't get that far without a pranayama yogi or something, and so you go to your guy for that and he tells you how to law down a proper architecture. or whatever passed for algorithmic optimization in medieval times. like galen's humours, i respect the work, but you'll forgive me if i walk away with the equivalent of differential diagnosis. and, there's calculus again. fuck |
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no, i'm sorry, calculus. really. something you do with that dimensionality collapsation yonder really makes my brain, like, work. then you quite pointedly step aside until you have a job to do. unlike the internet, which spirals out of control until the motion of reality disrupts its hold. all that wikipedia out there. a thousand things i could write. all of mankind's things at our kerklackity. pocket fondleslab. digital times. london herald. see? i wrote that. it's useless. like a man poking a campfire with a stick. that's the internet... but, no, it's both the cure and the disease all at once. my overwired, overthink-y everythingish all the time, kinda mostly brain is just smacked out on wikipedia in no time. a hundred years ago, however, the basis for what i've been working on did not exist. twenty years ago, the data was buried in library basements, and essentially not available. now, it's all here. and there's more of it than there ever was before. i adore it, really. i could read esoteric things about the indian head test image from the 50s or how audio is encoded for movie theatre analog projectors or... calculus. and, go figure, wikipedia is pretty shit for calculus. i need to go dig up my textbook. the intro to it went on this nerd ramtble about how TeX was the fucking bomb man you got to try this shit, we would not have this textbook if not for TeX. this is what i remember about the book, from high school -- which, yes, i still have. that, and the fucking thing about spheres. |
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turns the charming concept of memes into an arms race of nerd scorekeeping. it is a mental game where the objective is to avoid thinking about The Game itself. Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss, which must be announced each time it occurs. It is impossible to win most versions of The Game. Depending on the variation of The Game, the whole world, or all those aware of the game, are playing it all the time. Tactics have been developed to increase the number of people aware of The Game and thereby increase the number of losses. context: i just lost the game. probably not for the last time. almost certainly not, in fact. also fact: i've more or less got the gist of the neurological mechanism behind every time i've lost the game. also also fact: now that i've lost the game in the context of getting the gist of the aforementioned neurological mechanism in the aforementioned fact, i realize i may actually be able to win the game, someday. but it will take calculus |
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from the moment you awakinate (de-inceptionize) you're laying down neural connections. your dreams, if you remember any, are confusing. it's as if a fractal and a sphere had a love-child... no, that makes no sense. of course not. let's cleave dreams as a separate thing from sleep in general. next, let's say dreams could be a multi-purpose thing, but at least one purpose is data mining. your brain says: hey! this data point sticks out. it involves a bunch of disjointed meta-strctures that recognize patterns of patterns of patterns or some shit... and, hell, i'm just a pattern myself, but i know an almost-pattern when i see one... so you awake to find some trainwreck of things that seem to be going somewhere, but maybe not... just maybe, you know? and it's vague and confusing. tuna loaf soap in your email inbox and then mom calls with the compound interest and what is [this context] i don't even [have a frame of reference (context)]. then this odd data point troubles you throughout your day, and anything that matches it will grab your focus. mom emails about compound interest! what does it mean? what did the tuna loaf represent? why am i asking myself about this shit? it bothers you all day. other clues drop in, but no real answers. like, kind of... these three things... maybe? whatever. that night, you go to sleep, and all the pondering over What That Dream Meant influences the dreams you have, thus establishing a feedback loop between dreams and reality that pushes you towards greater informational coherency. dreams are probably there for other reasons, too, remember. and dreams are not the same thing as sleep. |
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meanwhile, i suspect my car has a slipping metaphor in its serpentine belt. serpentine belt. i loved that name. then i got down to business: how many subsystems does it run? what are they? power steering, oil pump, brakes, compressor, altergigger... water pump? oh, no, it's that shit where the owner's manual explains to you what the steering wheel is for and the service manual is not on the internet. fucking fuck. how is power steered, anyways? more or less, i decided it was time to start learning cars. i hear this problem in there and it's not a real problem yet, just a noise that shouldn't be a noise at this stage in the car's lifespan. even taking my approach to driving into account... but, yes, here's the joke: what makes the engine work? the serpentine belt. the engine would die without the oil pump... it'd need a jump without the altergigger... it'd overheat without a water pump, if yours does that... if not, the altergigger does that too; same thing... brakes? who needs those yes, saying consciousness is what makes the mind work is like saying the serpentine belt is what makes my engine work. it's better than saying it's what makes my car move (oh, god makes the sky blue, dear) |
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if dogs learned words, most of their metaphors would probably be related to smell and sound. the word for nervous grows out of the smell humans make when they begin to break a sweat. the origins of the word get buried, and the grammar eventually goes something like "i'm a bit human sweat smell about this, because it smells like the time the crabby neighbor yelled at me." like the serpentine belt, consciousness is essential to making the mind work, but it's just one part of an incredibly complex machine. all sorts of things could be vastly different without taking away the core of what consciousness seems to be, to me, at the moment: a mechanism to distribute power to various subsystems. you become conscious of a problem, you fix it, you move on to another problem, you forget the previous problem, and whatever you did there is buried until you come around and poke it next. it's a bit like the air conditioner killing the hamptons (cite: a few posts above). it's almost disappointingly mundane. it's alright, though. the mind is still wonderous and, well, mind-blowing overall, even if this part is not as profound as one would hope it'd be. |
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