Metablog

How much of the stability of our various economies relies on the relative rationality of the actors involved? I mean, it’s a common criticism leveled against economics that models fail to take into account ways in which humans are not rational actors. But this is a different point entirely. How much of the actual instability which we observe in economic systems is due to the stupidity of people? Could the housing bubble and current crisis have occurred in a world where people were more rational? Is trying to create economic stability hopeless with such irrationality to deal with?

Anders loves Maria is my new favorite comic next to Sinfest and Gunnerkrigg Court. Check it out. Awesome webcomic. The art style near the beginning isn’t too hot, but the artist really hits her stride later on. Check out this little interlude done in a slightly more artsy style. In fact, medium changes like this appear to happen frequently, as the artist gets tired of vector graphics, or her scanner breaks preventing hand-inking. But the underlying style is the same regardless. Human expressions are conveyed expertly, in a slightly exaggerated way that’s a bit offputting at first, but you later grow to love. The author, a Swede, is not prudish in the way many Americans are, which is refreshing. (It’s a webcomic, god dammit! I’m an adult! A little nudity won’t reduce me to a small puddle of mush! (Though nudity and sex aren’t the only ways this is exhibited in the comic.)) Updates are fairly consistent, though frequency has been all over the place. Currently it’s at 3/week.

The story explores the evolving relationship between its two main characters, Anders and Maria. We follow them through her impregnation, Anders’ affair and their breakup, and then the ways in which they eventually reconcile. We take trips into the past to explore the history of each character to see how it shapes their current character. Everything stays quite realistic, only asking you to suspend disbelief that Anders is the inheritor of a large fortune and a celebrity in Sweden. (Maria, on the other hand, hails from the working class.)

Oh, and I’ve linked to them before, but Gunnerkrigg Court is still awesome.

I got an Ipod nano last Christmas. I didn’t use it. Well, I finally got around to fixing some problems with my dynamic compressor so I can my classical music on there the way I like it, and extracting the contents of my old linux hard drive (which has been in my machine for a long time, but with its contents inaccessible) with lots of my mp3s on it, and getting a large backup drive to store everything on, and I think I’m almost ready to start using the damn thing. What a lot of work it is!

So I plug it in, and it doesn’t come on. No big surprise—the battery’s dead. I wait two hours. Nope, still dead. I look up how to reset the thing, try it, no results. I’m not seeing anything at all on the LCD screen. Not even the “recharging the graphic” battery you’re supposed to see. Well that’s just great.

So, two days pass. I take a look at the Ipod. Oh, look, it’s on. Interesting. Battery still dead, but at least showing a menu. Not connecting to ITunes, but it’s on.

Oh, look. Now it’s not.

Hmm. This is going to take some work.

Lack of posting due to depression, stress, and working on projects (Lojban translation, Isabelle theorem prover, dynamic compressor) rather than posting. The dynamic compressor’s about ready to release, once I get around to it. I have it as a standalone tool now that does batch processing and is much faster and more memory-efficient (well, except for the fixed overhead of .NET) than the old one.

My life doesn’t particularly suck—well, kind of, but—but the world does. Poverty. War. Global warming. Peak Oil and the energy crisis. Bowling alone, and the disintegration of community. Sexism. Homophobia. Racism. Sundown towns. Prison. The Drug Wars. The entire fucking justice system. The past eight years in the US. “Education.” Information overload. Healthcare in the US. Misunderstanding of mental illness, and discrimination against the mentally ill. The brokenness of democracy, representative or otherwise. Corruption. Terrible city planning in the past 30 years. [Update: List of woes expanded. Feel free to suggest your own.]

It’s pretty normal for these things to be a little depressing. But what about when they get really depressing? What about when when you’re suicidally depressed (probably not primarily due to the above-mentioned ills), and all these issues are just weighing you down? What do you do? Stop reading the news, stop following all of it? Put yourself in a cocoon and lead your own little life and don’t worry about the bigger picture? Try to forget, as much as possible, that there’s anything out there to worry about? But then, are you somehow deserting a duty to be socially involved? (After all, millions of people in the US doing just that are often given a big share of blame, perhaps deservedly, for the pitiful condition of politics here.) Are you putting yourself at risk of being personally harmed for not following these issues? What if something happens where then it really would make sense for you to move to Canada, if you really thought about it? (In my case, it’d be Spain or the Netherlands, but same diff.)

I’m afraid to stop reading about all this stuff, and afraid to keep reading. Afraid, perhaps, that without the higher narrative provided by politics, my life would completely lack any narrative, and without narrative, who am I? Actually, though, I think using the word “identity” (i.e. “who am I?”) to refer to the concept usually referred to by it is silly. It’s an awful way to describe what it describes. But then, “purpose”—what am I doing here?—, which describes the same thing, is still bad, though closer. I think I would need to understand a lot more psychology a lot better to precisely describe what it is that narrative provides one’s life that is so necessary for well-being. That is, to describe what “purpose” and “identity” really mean, without using vague, ne’er-defined terms.

God I hate living.

On a brighter note, I’m planning to ask someone out early next week. We’ve flirted a little so far, so I’m kind of hopeful, but I’m not even sure she’s single, so I’ll need lots of luck. I’m trying to decide whether to cut my hair in the meantime.

Life is really fucking hard sometimes. Really goddamn hard. My life has been nothing but pain for quite awhile now. There are moments where it’s enjoyable, I suppose. But every time I finish an activity, when my mind has a chance to recenter for a second—even during lulls in otherwise happy conversations—it’s right back to that hopelessness, that apathy, that feeling of being paralyzed and overwhelmed and sometimes even anxious, even panicky. It’s the feeling I live with.

I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist for six months now, and we’ve tried several different medications, and none of them have really worked, except maybe for one, Lamictal, that we had to stop because of some side effects. (There are still a few options to try, though.)

I have what they call treatment-resistant depression. It’s a formidable adversary. I’m in the 15-20% of people with major depression who aren’t helped by the first few medications they try. I have a few bipolar II-type symptoms that complicate treatment decisions. I have many ADHD-like symptoms, (though a clear diagnosis doesn’t seem to be possible in my case). I have delayed sleep phase disorder. (The prevalence is around 0.15%, lucky me, though it’s much higher in the teens and tends to get better over the years, usually. I’m pretty young yet, so it could improve on its own.) DSPD is both very hard to treat and very disruptive to normal lifestyles. In fact, in the cases where it doesn’t respond to treatment, where symptoms are moderate to severe, it’s starting to be regarded as an occupational disability.

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¡Aprender español! (Y no me digas que dije eso mal.) I’ve been learning dozens to hundreds of words a day, using Supermemo. So far I’m at around 3200 items, (where common words have many items for different senses and idioms,) and still have a long way to go. But I think I’m at the point now where I can start practicing actually using the Spanish. When I was learning it in school (I’ve had about three years of classes, all told) I was always so frustrated by having an extremely limited vocabulary that I never enjoyed using what I’d learned, and of course I couldn’t understand a damn thing any native speaker said anyway. But by learning gobs and gobs of vocabulary using this great program, I think I’ll be able to get past that point easily now.

Oh, and how could I forget to mention WordReference, whose neato lookup will tell you if the word is a conjugated form of a verb, has a conjugation reference, and a fairly complete inventory of idioms? Pretty neato.

By this point I can actually say quite a bit, and even hold non-trivial, if limited, conversations with other intermediate learners. But when it comes to understanding the language spoken by native speakers, I’m still mystified. I can maybe catch 10-15% of the meaning on average, even though I know 80% of the words being used. ¡Qúe coñazo! So I plan to start reading a lot of Spanish, starting maybe with El Blog del Capi, which uses a lot of good varied and colorful non-specialist language, and is occasionally funny. Then maybe go to a bookstore at some point and pick out an easy read in Spanish, like maybe a Harry Potter translation. (If the bookstores here have anything in Spanish, they’d have that, right?) Once I get to where I’m only coming across unfamiliar words once every few hundred words or so, then maybe I’ll be good enough to start listening? And I guess I should learn the subjunctive mood at some point. And the future tense. And imperfect, and conditional, and the perfect moods. Yeah.

Damn, it takes a hell of a lot of memorizing to learn a language.

BTW, why is it that 95% of the most active blogs at es.wordpress.com are porn or warez or otherwise complete fluff? Oh well, I guess English blogs aren’t any different, I just haven’t had to look at “most popular” lists in forever.

Anyway, look for this blog to become Spanish language only in the near future.

This.

I took a methylphenadate pill this evening. I feel like I’ve been un-zombified. Night and day difference. I’ve been on Concerta in the past (that’s why I still had some) but it didn’t really seem to work for me. I wonder why it’s working now. Could be a combination of medications, or it could be I’m observing myself differently and so I see the difference now where before I was just blind to it. Or it could be something else. That’s the problem with these damn medications.

Well, it’s still not an ideal option, because of sleep and heart rate issues. But now that I know it makes such a huge difference, maybe I’ll see about getting something else that’ll work better, and maybe I’ll actually start blogging again.

Meaningless rage. Undirected. Unfocused. Sporadic, containable, and not altogether noteworthy.

Except that it’s consistent. Regular. Familiar.

It appears for a moment, and then it’s gone. I observe it come and go, not as a victim or vessel, but as a disinterested party.

Contained. Redirected. Channeled. Dispersed.

It will not give me peace.

I’ve decided it might be neat to write a compiler, so I’m going to try writing a lisp compiler, from the ground up. I’m going to start from assembly language, and write my own assembler, and work my way up, building more abstractions and more safety into the assembler until eventually it becomes more of a compiler, and more features into the compiler until I get happy with it. It’ll be self-hosting all-the-while, and probably more-or-less impossible to port to another architecture. Not sure about the platform aspect, though. It won’t be Common Lisp, because that sucks, but it’ll be something along those lines. Most of the same features, none of the all-caps, silly-names weirdness. Probably a number of conventions taken from Java/C#/etc. since that’s what languages are doing nowadays. That is, if I get that far with it.

In the meanwhile, I’m terribly depressed. I was on Lamictal, which was helping quite a lot, but after about 5 weeks of treatment I got a tiny little rash, which apparently can be a first sign of a more serious, deadly rash. My doctor took me off it immediately, which I think was overly conservative. So for the past week I’ve been off my rocker. We’ll see tomorrow if he gets me on something else that will help.

In related news, I am still single.