Word Cloud

The following link takes the last 3 days posts from any site with an RSS feed and turns it into one of those word cloud things. I did one on 1000 & 1 things, but because it only covers 3 days, it was mostly text from my editing. Which got me thinking... you can copy and paste random text into http://www.wordle.net/.

Might it be cool to post your book - or a chapter of your book - and see how it came out. The neatness of the result warrants a visit, in my opinion.

http://www.wordle.net/

Fat-free fools

It turns out, all that "fat-free"/"low-fat" food you see on store shelves might not only not help you lose weight (which we've known for a while), it might also be dangerous to you. All because the original understanding and testing didn't account for the particle size of LDL cholesteral.

The original thinking went that since eating fat raises cholesteral, and those with high cholesteral are at general risk for heart disease, eating fat raised your risk for heart diseaes. Turns out, only eating certain types of fat actually leads to an increased risk of heart disease. And this helps explain why cholesteral tests can predict only about 70 percent of those at risk for heart disease. Some people with heart disease might have LDL level completely within the "normal" range, but primarily comprised of the wrong type of particles.

So says this slate.com story.

I say this as I eat sunflower seeds, after having had almonds yesterday, and olive oil (the oil, not the girl) Wednesday. Oh, the good LDL comes from olive oil and nuts/seeds.

And these people want to run our health care? Oh joy.

The death of society by technology has been greatly exaggerated

I'm kinda a contrarian by my nature. I know that.

I wouldn't say I'm cynical, I'm actually pretty trusting. Almost to a fault. But I love when the facts and logic of a situation play out differently than the emotion or "common wisdom."

And I usually enjoy shouting it from the rooftops. Which doesn't always make me a great person with which to have a conversation. But I think its what drew me to news and reporting. At least in part. Also, I like to laugh at stupid people.

So, with this in mind, here is another contrarian posting that aims to dispute the "good old days of yore" meme and the idea that the world is falling apart, largely thanks to technology.

- Socrates warned his fellow man against writing (writing!). He thought it would "create forgetfulness in the learners' souls."
- He also thought (perhaps properly) that children couldn't tell fiction from reality, so he suggested that parents never tell them created stories and rely instead on stories from real life.

Wait, it gets better
- Conrad Gessner warned against the modern world and how it the overwhelmed people with information. He suggested this information overload caused confusion and damage to the mind. He died in 1565.
- A frenchman (0f course, right?) - Malesherbes - warned that getting news from the printed page would isolate readers. It was more uplifting, he thought, to get your news from the pulpit. This is the same newspapers that today are held as bastions of civilized society and whose demise is heralded as the end of the world by some.
- Even schools have been targeted, with some early studies suggesting that organized schooling exhausted children's brains and nervous systems
- Excessive studying was once thought to cause madness.

Its the same, but worse , from there on out. Radio is the dirge of a well-0rdered society ... TV will destroy the nice, wholesome radio-based community ... the internet will crush the wisdom we have all gotten from the TV.

Its worth noting that early worriers thought "Email hurts IQ more than pot." That's a Daily Telegraph headline, not National Enquirer headline.

So, next time someone laments the "shortened attention spans" created by TV, the internet, or the InterGoogle, or whatever is next, keep in mind that no studies show this to be the case. In fact, according to this slate.com article, not only does the evidence not suggest this, it actually suggests the opposite. Technology is making our lives better, with social networking sites providing better better offline social lives and video games allowing players to better absorb inforamtion information without a loss of accuracy.

And don't forget the studies showing that television viewing doesn't have a negative impact on our health. Or our ability to... um, wait, its on the tip of my tongue... if only I had been able to avoid schooling I could probably remem... of yeah, our ability to concentrate.

These fears about the ever increasing media, often fueled by the existing media, are exactly the reason why media isn't implicitly worth saving.

1) We are almost always better off with the new media
2) if the best you've got is "fear this new thing," we are better off without you.

That reminds me of the college acquitance acquaintance who was sure the internet was merely going to be a phase or trend. This was circa 1999, so it wasn't quite as crazy then.

Nah, it was just as crazy then.

Out of the mouth, into the ... belly of the beast?

... into its pancrease? Frying pan? Wouldn't the last one be absolutely backwards, I mean, who spits into frying pans? Wait, don't Italian spit on people for luck; or at them; or something? Something to do with the devil? You can't tell, but I'm squinting my eyes right now trying to work this out. Like this, or this. NOT like this. Insensitive bast@ard.

I'm desperately trying to tie this post's headline to the last one. Unfortunately, the analogy doesn't work very well. Maybe you could tell. Maybe you couldn't. I hid it pretty well, I thought. Keep that in mind while you're scratching your head wondering what the hell this rambling means: don't hold me to a strict interpretation.

Writing last night started off slowly, but by the time I was done had gone very nicely. I even had to write ideas down on paper after I quit because they just kept flowing. That's twice this week. My new goal is three times a week. The problem now is that I sit down to write one of the 14 pieces I have left, and I end up writing something leading up to said piece. Then my next "sit down" is writing the original idea. So while I'm writing frequently, and not really adding to my list of stuff to write, I'm not really making as much progress as you might expect. Thus the increased writing sched.

I FINALLY beat the boss I was fighting. I'm not exaggerating at all to say I probably died 40 times fighting this guy. Plus a couple times on the way to him. Although this guy claims, in a hilariously snarky walkthrough, that the boss is "quite easy" even though it might take a "couple tries" to get the timing right. Yeah, F that. I have choice words for him. A couple tries times, oh I don't know, 20, maybe. Maybe to the power of 4.5. Can you even do half powers? Did I even do the powering thing correctly? Who knows. Probably a math specialist, I guess. Then again, I'm probably better at Ninja Gaiden than a math specialist. Though, those math people can be pretty geeky, so maybe they are pretty good at it too.

Anyway, relieved to have written well. Relieved to be past the infuriating boss fight. SUPER relieved that its Friday. WEEKEND! I need it. Almost took off today with a touch of spring fever. Had the sun been scheduled for an appearance, I just might have done it.

Random wishes/thoughts:

- I wish Blogger had a strike command so I could strike out words. Or at the very least that I could find it. I could have some fun with that, I think.

- I also wish Blogger had one of those post-category box search thingies where the lables you post in frequently are bigger than the shitty little ones you never post too. Those are just cool. You know what I'm talking about. Or maybe you don't.

Success is completing something

I saw a piece on TV before I went to bed last night. It was a movie channel thing, not sure which one, though I could turn the TV on and probably find out. Anyway, this guy's kid was talking about his film-maker father and the movie "The World's Greatest Sinner."

I was going to bed and in that "half listening" state, so I'm going to slaughter this, but he said something along the lines of "success is completing something." I think, I think, he said it because his dad's movie, while not a commercial success, got done. He had to write it, direct it, and star in it himself - it was totally an Indie production. But it got done. He couldn't get noticed in Hollywood, and so he did his own thing. That's the success. The finishing.

That's my standard for writing my book. "Success is completing something."

Maybe "Me Run With Scissors One Day"

Finished "Me Talk Pretty One Day." I'm split in my thoughts. Good, but not nearly as good as Burroughs. Though very, very similar in style. Both are odd, gay, alcohol/drug dependent, possibly mentally-deficient individuals. Though on this last, its definitely Sedaris in a landslide.

I'm mixed on another area as well. A part of me is jealous. They tell these great personal stories. Some of that is being able to package stories well and fill in the normally fuzzy details with outrageous thoughts; and some appears to be, I think, great insight into themselves and the world around them. I think I have stories that could be funny and book worthy, if I was more introspective and embellished the fuzzy areas a bit. You know, added insights and what have you. I have a few bouncing around in my head. Maybe I'll post one someday.

But another part of me wonders this as well: Is that really insight that Burroughs and Sedaris have, or is it actually, pretty much the opposite? Do they have these stories because they never really did any introspection as they went along in life and thus have crazy, unreasonable stories stemming from issues that any other normal person would have worked out?

I guess it is insight of a kind, gained in looking back on years of absolute blindness.

I think some of my problem is that I've never been that "blind" to myself. Maybe being gay, and having to keep that secret, keeps you shut off from yourself, leading to great revelations later on. Maybe. Maybe the alcohol dependence is all tied up in that. Maybe. It is interesting that both are gay and addicts.

I just feel that, if you go around saying "candlestick" to everyone you meet in France because its the only French word you know, its a good story, but its either heavily embellished or you are kind of an annoying moron. I just wouldn't do that because, well, I have the sense not too, frankly. At least I'd like to think so.

And frankly, for all the glowing descriptions of Hugh in the book, he's either so severely damaged that he can only keep Sedaris, or he's a saint. It's funny to read, but I have a hunch I'd kill Sedaris if I lived with him. Maybe that's part of it. I tend to shy from that level of borderline "needs to institutionalized" behavior and thinking and thus don't have the crazy stories I would otherwise.

And that probably ruins lots of my stories. I think I could be a straight, married, normal, well-adjusted Burroughs, if I was willing to not be so well-adjusted. If I let my 3 on a 10 scale stories spiral out of control they could become 8 on a 10 scale stories.

The Mind-emotion parallel

Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project, being blogged on slate.com says...

Although we think we act because of the way we feel, in
fact, we often feel because of the way we act. For example, studies show that
even an artificially induced smile brings about happier emotions, and a recent
experiment suggested that people who use Botox are less prone to anger because
they can’t make angry faces.

Interesting. What else?

"Philosopher and psychologist William James explained: “Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.” Although this “fake it ‘till you feel it” strategy might seem fake or inauthentic, I’ve found it to be almost creepily effective."

I hate this whole line of thinking that leads to the conclusion that actively choosing a path outside of your "instinct" or comfort zone means you are somehow fake, that you should "be who you are." Why not be who you want? What's creepy about actively choosing what you think is right rather than being affected by your upbringing?

I like the "action and feeling go together" part. Yeah, if you take the right actions, you will feel the right things.

It takes great presence of mind, and a lot of self-discipline, but whenever I can manage to act lighthearted or friendly or receptive to criticism or whatever is the opposite of my grouchy, gruff, defensive instinct in the moment, I really transform my mood.

Yes, exactly. It takes "a great presence of mind" and a lot of self-discipline. The key here is that it requires this work only at first. Man uses his mind for survival. To the extent that our choices further our survival, happiness and contentment are usually our default or "instinct" state. If we make choices that don't further our existance, our subconcious knows that our choices aren't furthering survival and the resulting contradiction creates tension, conflict and feelings of unease. Rational decision makers, people who actually consider a problem and make a reasoned choice, seldom are uneasy. They may agonize over a decision, both before and after making it, but they seldom have an overwhelming sense of "unease." They know they can use reason to correct most, if not all, situations they face. Unease comes from knowing that you don't have, or more accurately, don' t utilize, the means for their own survival. Thus, they survive mostly because we have advanced where we far enough from death that each decision isn't a mortal one.

Back to the original quote. As you employ the proper reaction more and more, as you put the proper thinking into effect again and again, you'll find that its becomes your default "instinct," and not that gruff part.

Aristotle's on point thoughts have been summed up thusly: What we need, in order to live well, is a proper appreciation of the way in which such goods as friendship, pleasure, virtue, honor and wealth fit together as a whole. In order to apply that general understanding to particular cases, we must acquire, through proper upbringing and habits, the ability to see, on each occasion, which course of action is best supported by reasons.

And it was Rand who said "Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values." Of course, as I explained, "values" can't be just anything. They have to flow from the furthering of our existance.

This led Rand to conclude that "Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values."

Are you more Tigger-ish or Eeyore-ish?

I'm more of a "Tigger" type.

I recently ran across this quote from a respectable figure ...

"Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination"
~ Mark Twain

It made me cringe. I was kind of working up to a post about it, but hadn't really fleshed it all out and didn't want to write about it right then. Partly because of this, and partly because I didn't want it to be a rant against Twain, or the quote, or a rant at all. I wanted it to be a more disciplined analysis, I guess. Something real and solid. And real. So what did I do? I added pics of stupid cartoons, that's what.

Then I (re)stumbled upon Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project at the always excellent Slate.com. She spent years looking at and studying happiness for her book and hypothises that its a myth that happy people are annoying & stupid. I can't encourage you enough to read this first one. It notes that happiness has nearly everything going for it as far as outlook, friendliness, success, life fullfillment, work success, etc. Yet people still make comments like this one...

"Happy people are idiots." Thank you Charles de Gaulle - you idiot.

Rubin asks...

"I often wonder why happiness has such a bad reputation. It's more pleasant to be happy, and it's more pleasant to be around happy people, and it's more challenging to be happier than to be less happy—why is happiness so often maligned and seen as lazy and easy?"

Anyway, I pretty much agree with her. Being unhappy, unfulfilled or disgruntled is always cast as the "cool" attitude. Its Leo DiCaprio in Revolutionary Road, its the theme of a host of suburban angst movies starting in my mind with, but I'm sure much earlier, American Beauty. Meanwhile, the happy guy is always borderline mentally damaged, ala Forest Gump. But happiness is a much harder state to achieve, especially in these trying times. As Rubin asks, why the bad rap?

A few reasons, really. Its bad form to brag. Since happiness is like money - while distained its still sought after as more ideal than not - its not polite to point it out that you've got vaults full of the stuff stored at the bank. As a corrollary, happy people are by their nature content with themselves and probably don't find a need to point it out.

Unhappy people on the other hand, have a natural, or learned, disposition to see the negative. Negative infers conflict, and great conflict makes for great books, movies, plays, et al. Thus, the most unhappy person gets an audience and viola, he's a respected voice on nearly any topic he wishes to spout off on. Happiness included. Twain, for instance, was a great writer and sometimes wise thinker. But honestly, what gives him any rep as far as happiness goes? Quiet honestly, the quote alone pretty much exhibits his lack of familiarity with happiness. As does De Gaulles.

I'll end with these two things....
A) look around you. Things, no matter how bad they are, could be worse, both on a macro, and generally, on a micro level. We live in a prosperous, thriving time, even considering the recent downturn. There is almost NO circumstance where you couldn't have it worse, either today, or sometime in the past. (Wow - happy people really are idiots! And annoying! lol.)

B) the remainder of the Rubin's 10 myths..

people are unable to raise their level of happiness
Venting anger relieves it
Insisting on "the best" makes you happier
A treat will cheer you up
Money can't buy happiness
doing "random acts of kindness" brings happiness
"you'll be happy as soon as..."
Spending time alone will make you happy
Its selfish to try to be happier.

I'll probably blog these more over the next couple weeks, but that's it for now.

*** The images in this post are not my own. These images may be protected by copyright laws. I'm probably in violation of one copyright law or another for using these images. Not something I relish or support, but if someone confirms that I am, or asks that I take them down, I will. Right now, I'm considering them used under the "fair use" doctrine and thus legal. ***

Two new thoughts from Curious Minds - PLUS a bonus: Push up update!

Marc D. Hauser gets it pretty close to how I feel about myself with this quote:

"I'm intellectually promiscuous - and proud of it!"

Unlike some people who find one topic or another boring, or a whole bunch of topics boring - or conversely have one area of interest - I'm interested in just about anything factual about anything. I can get interested in just about any sport, even if I can't play it, any topic, even if I could never fully grasp it. Thus, though I love chess, I don't play nearly as much as I'd like, because I frequently find myself diverted to other activities. On the bright side, TV is never boring, because inevitably there is something on that I haven't seen.

I've always been interested in ideas, and facts, really, of any kind. Thus I couldn't settle on a single topic for this blog and it became 1000 & 1 Things. The other good thing: I can strike up a conversation with just about anyone, because the chances of what they have to say being boring to me is a scintilla.

But the main thing that got a post percolating was this sentence from Ray Kurzweil:

"To this day, I continue to be convinced of that fundamental philosophy: No matter what quandaries we face - business problems, health issues, relationship difficulties - there is an idea that can enable us to prevail. Furthermore, we can find that idea. And when we find it, we need to implement it."

I'm convinced too, Ray. This all sounds somewhat familiar. This meshes well with my belief - "borrowed" heavily from Ayn Rand - that all life on earth has certain courses of action that it must take to survive. Man's is intellectual/rational. Thus we can (indeed, to survive we must) perceive the hard evidence and facts around us and act accordingly. If we act properly in line with what is objectively best for us, good results occur. If we act contrary to our nature and the factual world, bad results occur. The very concept that there is an idea that can solve our problems, we just have to find it (but we are able to do that!) is pretty optimistic and somewhat contrary to the current worldview. Being that Kurzweil is a tech guy, he might have been talking about "ideas" as more of a concrete phenomenon than I am, but I think the point is the same.

PUSH UP UPDATE - I'm going to stop posting after every day, there's just not enough interesting stuff to post on about the challenge and trying to time the posts to not push out the other posts is a challenge unto itself.

Having said that, Day 2 went very well, and I thought I might complete the whole set. As it was, I got 25 after taking 1:30 off, resting 30 more second and then doing the final 20.

How broke would you have to be to revert back to dial up?

gamercircle.net raises the question here.

My answer: Well, pretty broke, actually.

Its funny, probably almost exclusively to me, since my parents still HAVE dial up. Not for lack of wanting, but for actual lack of any alternative.

The article notes that sub-$10 subscriptions to dial up have increased in the wake of the stock market melt down and appropriately concludes "This recession has just gotten serious."

I agree. I often try to wrap my brain around what I would do with a dial up connection, and remember back to the days when that's all I had. I really can't do it. I'd say the XBox Live account, most of my TV service and my landline phone would all go first, second and third. Then I'd consider other things I could cut out, like cutting back on exercise to use, and thus need, less calories and forgoing eating altogether.

OTHER: Push up update coming this afternoon, that is if I don't kill myself shoveling snow.

New feature: Interesting thoughts

I'm going to, periodically, post interesting thoughts I've come across in my travels, on my own (those will be infrequent), and in books I'm reading.

Here's the first, from Curious Minds about "speciesism," the assumption that humans are superior or deserve special treatment over animals:

"Doctrinaire antiabortionists who blow up clinics and murder good doctors turn out on examination to be rank speciesists. An unborn baby is by any reasonable standards less deserving of moral sympathy than an adult cow. The profiler screams 'murder!' at the abortion doctor and goes home to a steak dinner."

Yes, BUT... Richard Dawkins is an atheist, and some of his views are therefore perhaps not surprising. His use of the word "good doctor" implies a bias to the piece, because you simply can not know that. I'm not sure what "standards" he refers to, but if given the option of saving a baby, even an unborn one, or a cow, even an adult one, I'm pretty sure most would choose the baby. If this is speciesism, and I think this specific case almost certainly has some aspects, I think its culturally ingrained. And also not nearly as evil as Dawkins makes it out to be. In fact, I'm pretty sure that "reasonable" is up for debate, since Ayn Rand-following Objectivists would probably argue, reasonably, that the human is ALWAYS more deserving of moral sympathy than the cow.

I think Dawkins' big mistake comes in saying a cow is "more" deserving. I guess you can make the argument that they are equally deserving, but "more" seems a stretch. Equating an unborn human as equal and on a similar level as an adult cow (and thus both can be killed) is one thing, assuming it is LESS than a cow, that's another, in my mind.

I realize you can't necessarily consider their future "upside" when considering moral sympathy - otherwise you end up on a slippery slope to comparing the handicapped with those of us without noticeable handicaps, and that lands you in a sticky situation.

I have an internal battle with myself over the killing of animals for food for more than survival purposes. If some smarter alien race came along, could they kill us just because they could think in a different, more advanced way than us? Would they be justified? I feel, somewhat, that its that argument that we use to support our superiority over cows. But I also feel that if put in a purely "natural" situation, for lack of a better term, that we would end up being prey. I think our ability to think and reason like that, but more than that, our ability to create a system of laws and determine and assign rights, gives us a moral superiority. Also, if cows are off limits, then worms and bugs and ants probably should be as well, and then, well, the house I'm living in and typing this from is probably a mass murderer, as an I.

Its certainly not a fool-proof thought on my side, as I said, I battle with it, but there it is.

Ever wonder what to do if you find yourself falling out of an airplane?

This guy apparently did, and he wrote a book about it and how to survive just about anything else that could befall you. The link is to the Slate.com article on the book and explains what the book, and experts on sky diving, recommend, both from an overall strategy (don't panic, that helps) to more situation specific stuff (don't forget to pull your cord - seriously, it apparently happens).