Reacquiring a taste for hope

I was diabetic for 5½ years when I got a gastric bypass that cured it. A lot of foods that I had had to eschew for years were suddenly possible again, and it was an odd experience for a while. So many foods I had regretfully put onto the "never again" list and forgotten about. One by one I would think of them and have, all new each time, the realization: "hey, maybe I can have this again!" and the corresponding hope and excitement. It was like the new hope was made new again each time.

The same thing is happening now in a much different area of life.

Late Tuesday night as the election results were coming in my reaction was mostly just relief. There was a bit of hope but primarily that wasn't quite sinking in. But since then, periodically, I've had a sudden realization. "Hey, we might actually get out of Iraq." Or, "Hey, we might actually stop being a pariah on the international stage." Or, "Hey, we might actually take global warming semi-seriously." Or, "Hey, maybe we'll stop throwing away civil liberties." And so on. Make your own list.

Each individual idea was a separate blossoming of that almost-forgotten taste of hope, because each topic was something where I had long ago gotten used to the idea that these hopes were gone. After years and years of having stupidity rubbed in like ground glass, you get numb to it, you put away the hope. It becomes a litany, almost an anti-mantra of cynicism: "Obviously, we need to do X, but obviously, we're never going to, so let's just accept that and move on."

So the renaissance of hope in the United States that started Tuesday night is slowly sinking in not as a gradual awareness, but as a syncopated pizzicato of revelations. It's like rediscovering the taste of something I used to love but had to give up, and then a few hours later, rediscovering the taste of something else I also used to love but had to give up.

It's one thing to say "Yes, we can." It's another to slowly realize all the things that, now, yes, we can. One at a time.

Woodcutting

I've been thinking of a lot of stuff I haven't had anywhere to write or say, so maybe I'll revive this blog. But don't count this as a promise (as if there was anyone to be making the promise to); I might lapse into inactivity immediately again, if inspiration fails to continue visiting once I've vented all the backlogged stuff.

Recently I've developed an interest in woodcutting on my land, and I feel a need to explain why. Not that anyone's asking. It's just that there's more thought on it than might seem evident.

I suppose most people think of going out to fell trees with a chainsaw as something you do to get firewood. And we have a woodstove and we're trying to balance using it more (to contain heating costs) with keeping it comfortable in the house (the woodstove can sometimes make it too hot), so wood is valuable. And there's a strange, hard to explain satisfaction in felling, cutting, and splitting my own wood from my own land, and then burning it in the woodstove.

But in the end the wood is almost a by-product of the process. It's not what drew me to this. Instead, I have been feeling very strongly lately that my little almost-six-acres of Vermont is mine not as much in the sense of possession as in the sense of responsibility. I am its steward and caretaker, and it needs some caretaking. When we bought it four years ago it had not been tended in a while, and so it is now in dire need of tending plus four years.

Which begs the key question: does a piece of forest need tending? Forests were around for millions of years before the first human built the first axe. It's tempting, but superficial, to dismiss the idea of tending to one's woods as touchy-feely and ignorant of nature, but that is itself a reactionary idea.

Sure, forests can and do eventually rebuild themselves after disasters. Sure, nature doesn't have a preferred state of "healthy" in mind for a forest; whatever it changes into, that's nature. And yet, a chunk of six acres in the middle of Vermont is not part of a timeless forest unbroken in space or time, and it's ignorance to pretend so. Let's consider a few facts, not as a definitive list of how the forest needs tending, but rather as a representative example.

1. 500 years ago, my piece of land was part of an old-growth forest in which softwoods (pine, for instance) were interspersed with hardwoods (maple, for instance). 100 years ago, it was, and probably had been for a long time, clear cut farmland. It's surprising to many people who've seen what Vermont looks like now, but 100 years ago it was pretty much all clear-cut. The return to forest changed things.
   
   
2. When trees started to come back in, softwoods come in first because they grow fastest. They crowd out other kinds of trees and spread quickly. Hardwoods take far, far longer to move in, and at first they move in in segregated clusters. Today's sugar stands are clusters of maple; long ago, those maples would be more evenly distributed amongst the other trees.
   
   
3. When a softwood puts down roots in an old-growth forest with interspersed hardwoods, in order for its roots to get enough of what the tree needs, they have to work down deeper since they're competing with other trees. The roots tend to grow along the same paths that the previous generation of pines followed, and end up deeply rooted. There's an underground ecology of competition in the roots. But when pines come into clear-cut, they form very shallow roots. Why work harder than you have to? Those old paths that the ancient pines blazed for the roots are lost.
   
   
4. When we build roads and houses, we change the flow of water in fundamental ways. These changes encourage the trees to grow in different places and to put roots down in different ways. In effect, they further exacerbate the tendency towards shallow root systems.
   
   
5. Roads and lawns also break what was an unbroken swath of forest hundreds, even thousands, of miles across, into little patches. This has a lot of effects but the most germane to this point: it causes root structures of trees to be inadequate to supporting those trees since the trees depend on their neighbors to help hold them up.

Put it all together and you find that the forest we have today is, due to human interference, far more fragile. Literally, a good wind can blow it over. This isn't good for me: it threatens my house, my water table, my access to my garage. But it also isn't good for the ecosystem of my six acres. It's bad for the animals and the plants. Yes, given a few hundred years, despite the continuing impact of roads and water diversion and pollution and global warming, the forest would regrow and eventually end up strong. But we can expect human interference to increase, not decrease. And in the meanwhile, everything that lives in the forest is far too vulnerable to fire, wind, ice, heavy rains, and simple bad luck.

I don't really have the choice to say "the forest doesn't need my help" while, at the same time, living in the middle of it, affecting it. If I'm touching it, if I'm changing it, it's my responsibility to make sure the net effect I have is neutral or positive. So that means I need to get in there and actively, proactively, tend it. Not as a garden per se, I'm not trying to maximize results of a particular species or anything, I'm not in this for the harvest (though the harvest will be used and appreciated), but for its own health.

Thus, while some fallen dead trees and even some standing dead trees are okay, too many is bad. Someday I may even have to fell living trees in order to encourage more growth, but for now, I have far more than enough higher-priority work to do, far more than I can keep up with. There's years, maybe decades, of neglect to catch up on; and I'm only one man in not-great shape, working alone, just learning how to use a chainsaw, only able to spare a weekend here or there to the work. I'll be lucky to even keep up with continued degredation for a long long time, let alone get ahead of it. But every bit I do is progress. It's satisfying.

WildBlue has googlified me!

As with many ISPs, WildBlue provides email, Usenet, and basic web hosting as part of its accounts. However, with no choice given, they have recently suspended all three services and replaced them with only the Google Apps free equivalents.

Gmail is a fair email service and I didn't have to change address (not that that would matter since I go through a PObox.com front end address anyway), and it does offer POP3/SMTP support (though only through SSL; fortunately Agent's SSL support is solid). However, its spam filtering cannot be turned off. Inexplicable; how hard could it be to add a simple toggle to the settings? Agent's spam filtering is far more robust, with automatic whitelisting tied into my address book and a smarter content analysis. But with Google filtering mail before it even gets to Agent, it means false positives all over the place, plus a decrease in the ability of Agent to train up its corpus effectively. The only solution so far is to periodically go to the website and manually mark all the spam as not-spam, and unfortunately while Google claims this is training the spam filter, it never seems to make a difference. Such a great tool so entirely crippled by one poorly thought out function.

So far the web hosting hasn't changed over yet, but we were warned to back up our website completely and that we would have to rebuild it "with Google's tools". I already have perfectly good HTML; I am not looking forward to trying to coax some web-based GUI into looking like what I already like, or to wasting time doing it.

And Usenet? "If you participate in newsgroups, your new tool will be Google Groups." In other words, WildBlue just removed a significant service from their offerings flat-out and offer no real replacement. What do you think the odds are they'll reduce my subscription fee in recompense for reducing what I'm getting for my money? Though Usenet is nowhere near as important to me as it once was, I'm still profoundly disappointed that this is all they can be arsed to offer.

I suppose these days fewer and fewer ISPs are still offering any Usenet, though. Still, absolutely the only reason I still use WildBlue is the same as why everyone else does: we have no alternative, really. Why should they bother to care about service levels? The minute wireless, DSL, or cable modems get here, I'm gone. Soon, I pray! Save us, FairPoint; you're our only hope!

TLA Bands

How many rock and pop bands can you think of whose name either is a TLA, or is commonly abbreviated as one? Note that it's not enough just that it could be abbreviated that way; no one calls the Marshall Tucker Band "MTB", but Bachman-Turner Overdrive is very commonly called "BTO", so they count.

So far I have these:

• XTC (doesn't actually stand for anything!)
  
• REM (stands for something but the band doesn't use that)
  
• ELO (Electric Light Orchestra)
  
• OMD (Orchestral Manoevres in the Dark)
  
• ELP (Emerson, Lake, & Palmer)
  
• CCR (Credence Clearwater Revival)
  
• BOC (Blue Öyster Cult)
  
• BTO (Bachman-Turner Overdrive)

I was also informed of one called TLC, but I don't list it because I've never heard of them myself. There was also mention of a punk band called something like AFI, but we weren't even sure what the right letters are.

Doesn't it seem like there should be a lot more?

(Extra credit: how about FLAs -- four letter acronyms? All I came up with is AC/DC and TMBG.)

Falling behind and catching up

Life's been too busy to blog about it, and there's not really anyone reading the blog who doesn't know everything going on already, so I'll be very brief in catching up.

Recovery from the surgery has been going pretty much perfectly. Last night we made our first venture into Stage 3 (foods that can be mashed with a fork), and it was also my first time losing a meal, but that was due to an egregious tactical blunder. I was scheduled to try fish, and we ended up with the wrong kind of fish; I didn't hate it but I didn't especially like it either. The fallback was just mac-and-cheese, and therein lies the problem. I'm sure I could handle mac-and-cheese, but not without some protein first. The fallback should have been something else, even if only some canned chicken or tuna, with mac-and-cheese on the side. Today's experiment will be ground buffalo (very lean) enchiladas -- just the lean meat, some beans, some chiles, and a bit of Cabot's exceptionally good 75%-fat-free cheddar (it's amazing how much like regular cheddar it tastes), in soft corn tortillas, with a bit of enchilada sauce. My weight's down to 392.6, from a high of 487 last May and 420 at the surgery. My blood glucose is doing good but it's hard to tell if it's changed much because the strict diet-and-exercise regimen I was on before the surgery also had it in about the same place. And goodness knows my diet is restrictive right now; but my exercise is minimal and I'm off metformin.

My father-in-law is in palliative care, or to put it more bluntly, on his deathbed, and is likely to pass within the next few days. He's no longer conscious or aware, and for all intents and purposes in a coma. Fortunately we were able to get clear input from him about his wishes in a situation like this, and this makes it a lot easier to be at peace with this as a conclusion of a life, not merely as a loss of a life. This is both an increase in stress for us, and a promise of a reduction, and we're definitely in a phase of life where we need to reduce stresses.

And on that subject, the roommates we have had the last three months are moving out today, and that is another stress reduction, not because they're bad roommates but because we're just not made to have roommates, and three months is about all we can take. One can't help feeling bad for not being able to help them more by having them stay longer, but it's the same feeling as feeling bad that, even if you give to charities generously, there's always more needed; even if you take in a few stray cats, there are always more cats needing homes. You can't drive yourself crazy agonizing over what you can't or don't do; you just have to do your part, and be comfortable knowing it's enough -- it's more than most people do, right?

I've been more active in SecondLife again recently, and one of the things I've gotten involved in is a tiny little game called TinyEmpires. It's sort of a game-within-a-game (even though SecondLife isn't really a game) because you play it not by going to places in SecondLife and doing things, but rather, in a tiny little pop-up window on your HUD (heads-up display) which is there in the corner of the screen all the time, while you're doing other SecondLife things like chatting, dancing, shopping, etc. In TinyEmpires you are a feudal lord trying to advance in ranks by gaining acres and subjects; every three minutes is a game-month in which you earn income from your acres, receive homage from your subjects, pay homage to your liege (all of these happen automatically), and usually get one or more "offers" which are how to actually play the game. Offers are things like buying or selling land, recruiting new subjects, chances to change liege, puzzles to solve for reward gold, and other things. This is what keeps the game so simple: you can't actually do anything until an offer shows up, so all you really do is, every few minutes, click Yes or No on a couple of things. It's completely unintrusive and undemanding but fun, and it also leads to socialization opportunities since you get to meet and talk to the other people in your kingdom.

While we were in North Carolina, the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD war finally ended. Two years ago when we bought the HDTV and associated accessories, we didn't have enough earmarked to cover the cost of both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, so I went with just HD-DVD because all the movies available on HD that I wanted were on HD-DVD. But I knew I would eventually need Blu-Ray, so I started putting a few dollars a week aside for it. (Slow going, but it's been very hard to save any money lately. But it's a sensible fiscal policy to always have a few dollars going to the Fun Stuff Fund: it helps you get those things you really want as part of a planned budget, purchased at a sensible opportunity, rather than on a whim at a bad price when you can't really afford it. It's just not practical to pretend you can't ever buy fun things; temptation always wins, so it's best to make it a budget item.) After two years of savings we had enough for a PS3 (only about $30 more than a comparable Blu-Ray player, so even though we're not console gamers, why not?) and a bundle of Blu-Ray DVDs. But we're so far behind on TV after our two weeks away we haven't had time to watch any of them yet!

Preparing for the surgery

I let this blog go fallow because the time seemed better spent on other things, given how pretty well the only people who read the blog were people I knew in realspace who already knew most of what I would write here. That hasn't changed, so I don't know why I'm writing again, or whether I will continue. But I don't want this post to be entirely meta; I can write another time about what I wish I could get out of the blog vs. what I did get. If I think I can get what I want from that conversation. (Didn't I just say I was trying not to be too meta?)

Instead, the news for today is that Cigna has finally been persuaded to authorize the MGB surgery about which I have written so much, and furthermore, High Point has also been convinced to put us on the schedule. So on February 12th, we'll both be getting the surgery. Travel arrangements have been made, time off scheduled, airplane tickets purchased, etc.

I think all the preparations have completely failed to really make it sink in yet, what's going on, what's going to change. I know everything that's supposed to happen but so far, it still feels like something I'm writing down, which might be about a character in a story I'm writing. The whole detachment in my head is, as it always ends up being, that I haven't quite attached all that stuff I know intellectually to myself.

The one bit that is sunk in is the diet I'm on now. When I started this at 487 pounds I was told, and read in High Point's patient manual, that 450 pounds was the required size for them to be able to complete the procedure, and for many months I held fast to that. I told my dietitian that, I wrote about it on my blog, and I held it in mind as my target. Cigna's requirement was only 462 (5% off) but I congratulated myself to think I could do that and push on to past 450, and indeed, I got down into the 430s. Was feeling pretty proud of myself and confident about being well under High Point's requirement. They said "keep it up, get as close to 400 as you can" and I took that as general: always better to get lower, sure, but I'm still well within the requirement. Then when it was time to get scheduled, they dropped a bombshell on me: they were unwilling to put me on the schedule, for fear I might not be able to get my weight down far enough in time. And here I'd been thinking I already had done that months before and everything after was (pardon the inappropriate idiom) icing on the cake!

There's no sense dissecting precisely how this communication gap occurred (though after this is all done I might ask them to read their own patient manual). Instead, I'm doing what has to be done. I've more than doubled my exercise: from two 10-minute sessions a day with occasionally a third, to three 20-minute sessions a day, on the recumbent bike, without fail. I'm sore all over, my knee hurts, my back hurts, and I am not sleeping as well, but I can live with that for a month. Also, after a few brief experiments, I'm on the Atkins induction diet. Occasionally having a craving for a cookie, but it's nothing I can't easily fend off. I can put up with anything for a month, and if that's what it takes to make this happen, it'll be well worth it.

Truth is, I could probably make it without going to these lengths. But I want to be sure. If I took a less aggressive diet for two weeks and it wasn't getting me there in time, it might be too late to use a more aggressive diet to get there. So I'm starting out aggressive now, and if I get there at 395, that's just as well.

It's hard to overestimate how much of my life this will change. It's hard even to speak about it without sounding like an overused cliché, like one of a million commercials telling you how a new brand of dish soap will change your life. Compared to a change like that for a whole lifetime, what's one month of being tired and sore and cookieless?

Rick Stein: Survivorman

The wife just finished watching an episode of Survivorman, a reality TV show in which Les Stroud gets dropped somewhere with virtually no equipment and supplies, plus a bunch of cameras, and has to survive for seven days while simultaneously being his own camera crew.

Then she switched to an episode of Rick Stein's Food Heroes, a foodie show from the BBC in which Rick Stein wanders around England to find people making good authentic English food, and occasionally does recipes from the stuff he finds. Rick is a bit pompous at times as he rails about the virtues of good old-fashioned food, but he certainly believes in what he's doing.

The idea of a trading places scenario came immediately to mind. I imagined Rick Stein left trapped in a modern American shopping mall for a week, and forced to find ways to survive. He certainly wouldn't deign to look at anything he could get at the food courts, so I imagined him scavenging for ways to swipe what few fresh ingredients those mini-restaurants get, supplementing them with forage from the potted plants. I pictured him buying a camp cookstove at a sporting goods store and trying to cook up a traditional steak and kidney pie, all the while moaning contemptuously about how hard it is to get proper ingredients in this desolate wasteland. All the while, busy shoppers bustling around him, casting odd glances at him now and then.

Meanwhile, what do you suppose Les Stroud cooks at home after a trip to the farmer's market? Probably very little by way of raw slugs and dried moss, but one can't help imagine him buying the worst produce at the farmer's market, cutting away the good parts, and then explaining patiently to the camera how you can make a surprisingly nutritious casserole out of the moldy bits from the potatoes, as he stands next to his unused Dacor stovetop and Subzero freezer, cutting up vegetables with a multitool and cooking them in an old coffee can held over a crude parabolic reflector fashioned from a discarded piece of a shipwrecked boat.

I would so love to watch those two shows.

Notice of public record

Notice is hereby given.

The world is permitted 1,000 more "there are a lot of Starbucks" jokes, and then that's it. Please make an effort to make the best of them.

Thank you. That is all.

Over and out

If walkie-talkies were invented today, and someone proposed they be called "walkie-talkies", they'd be laughed out of town. It's like a baby's name for something! How does that leverage any synergy?

Instead, we'd end up with some terrible acronym like PZIMCD (Personal Zero-Infrastructure Mobile Communications Device), or some almost-meaningless, "how does it make you feel" marketing "funky" name like Yuni (it's a commYUNIcation device, get it?). Ick.

The Trial of Telemachus

One bad thing about having a floor-cleaning robot for garages (and other rugged floors) is that when you run this robot in the garage, you need to be very sure to remember to pick it up afterwards, because there's cars going in and out; and yet, it's very easy to forget, because you're not in the room with it while it's running, and can't hear the beep when it's done.

Sure enough, I left Telemachus running one evening, forgot about him, and went to bed. The next day we got ready to go shopping and started to back out of the garage and... crunch. Poor Telemachus looked broken, with his whole front bumper/handle assembly canted at about a thirty degree angle, and I doubted he could be saved.

Last night I did some fiddling about with screwdrivers and tools and managed to get the bumper back into its usual position. Charged his battery up overnight and let him go this morning, and he's been cleaning the garage ever since. He moves like he's had a very slight stroke, and gone through enough physical therapy to get most of his mobility back. He gets around fine and does the job, but he twitches a little oddly now and then, tends to move too quickly, and drives in an uneven arc on the straight stretches. You can't help feel sorry for him, and impressed at his pluckiness. (Silly anthropomorphizing.)

Mi corazon

Today's challenge: find a bit of Spanish-language popular music that doesn't include the word "corazon" in the lyrics.

By Spanish-language I mean a song originally written in Spanish. By "popular music" I mean any category of popular music, not just pop. Rock, dance, rap, country... I'm just looking to exclude things like opera, medieval chants, etc.

This is probably not impossible. It's probably not even that hard for fans of Latin music. But it's harder than you'd think. You'll go through dozens of songs at least before you find one.

I'm sure English-language songs use "heart" a lot (and a few other words like "love") but I don't think there's a single word (discounting things like "the") that appears in the majority of songs, let alone the vast majority. I wonder why it's so different in Spanish-language songs.

New new phone, old old problem

My new RAZR is having the same trouble holding a charge that the old one had. I can't possibly have gotten three bad batteries in a row! Or two bad phones in a row. But what else could it be?

• My settings are fundamentally the same as Siobhan's identical phone, which is a year and a half old and still holds a charge at least a day, usually more.
  
• I've tried several chargers. (Next experiment though is to use her charger.)
  
• I barely use the phone. I haven't had a call or even a text message in days. Siobhan uses hers a few times a day on average.
  
• Could it matter where I am, which cell towers I'm communicating with? Could my office somehow drain it more?
  
• I have more pictures on mine than she has on hers, but we both have an MP3 ringtone.
  
• Hers connects by Bluetooth to something for an hour and a half every day, but mine rarely connects to anything by Bluetooth, even though it's been bonded to more things in the past. But the extra things it's been bonded to don't even have Bluetooth turned on.
  
• If all else fails maybe I'll try swapping batteries with her phone and see if the problem stays with the battery. I can't imagine it will since this is the third battery I've had.
  

Thank you, Irving!

For many years we've been customers of Gillespie Fuels for our propane. This year, however, their pre-buy price was higher than many competitors, and more importantly, our credit union set up a special deal with Irving Oil to get propane at a more reasonable price for members only. They kept the price low through a close partnership with the credit union, so they could draw directly from an account set up for this purpose there, keeping their costs down. It was a great price, so we decided to switch.

Propane dealers aren't allowed to fill each other's tanks, so Irving needed to make arrangements to switch our tanks. We asked Gillespie to stop filling our tank so we could run down the propane that was still in it, and when they finally picked up the tank, they could reimburse us for what was in it at that time, along with the credit we still have with them from last year's pre-buy. Irving said they'd put in a new tank on August 24th.

On July 24th, an Irving truck came and filled up our Gillespie tank and left us a bill, which would be automatically debited from our account. Whoops. Seems someone in customer service hadn't told someone who actually does the filling about the status of our account (not yet active for another month), and that person also didn't notice the big Gillespie logo on the tank. Big problem, because now there was no way to tell how much propane in that tank was Gillespie's.

We called. They were stumped for a bit but came up with a solution. When the guy came out to set up the new tank on August 24th, he'd transfer all the propane in it to the new tank. We'd already paid for it all, after all. Then Gillespie could pick up an empty tank and reimburse us for only the amount we'd overpaid last year. Okay, a bit of a hassle, but no problem.

I was home on August 24th so I could make sure this all got done right. The guy who put the tank in had never heard anything about this situation. He radioed back to base and then told me, sorry, they didn't tell me about this and I'm not scheduled for it, someone will have to come back next week to do the transfer. So we're delayed another week or so before we can get the money Gillespie owes us from last year, but we can live with that.

He suggested that this transfer would be scheduled for me, but we didn't trust it. Today, Siobhan called to try to get a firm idea of when it would happen. No one at Irving could answer, but they said they'd know by tomorrow.

Tonight we got home to find a $575 bill from Irving. Apparently, someone came out and filled the new tank. Now they're going to debit our account again. And we have one full and one almost-full tank in our backyard, with no way for them to transfer the propane because there's no room to transfer it into. Naturally, there's no one at Irving who can even speculate about what will happen next. We can call first thing in the morning and try to beat them to processing the bill.

They really need to figure out how to talk to one another.

Next step to the MGB

Cigna's response to the letter our doctor's office sent them was more positive than we expected, suggesting maybe there'll be fewer rounds in the fight than we thought. I've no doubt they're going to be more difficult than this eventually, but so far, we're off to a good start.

However, they will only approve this as an out-of-plan surgery, which means we're going to have to fork over $2500 per surgery out of pocket (on top of travel costs). That's not going to be easy, but the far bigger question is how we're going to float the total cost of the surgery, $17,000 each, while we wait to be reimbursed. High Point won't bill insurance; they require payment on the day of the surgery. Assuming we have written commitment to reimburse us from Cigna, we still have to cover the $34,000 plus travel costs ourselves for the weeks or months it takes to get reimbursement. I'm not yet sure how we're going to do that, but I know I'll find a way. It's just a question of how good or bad a way I end up with.

This also means I have to dig into doing their Getting Started packet, which includes, amongst other things, a ten-page essay on what the MGB is. Being on the MGB YahooGroup I can certainly see why they require this. It's mind-boggling how many people don't know anything about the surgery or its impacts on patients, even as they're nearing getting it. Even some people who've had it! And these are the best-informed group, too. It's even worse for other surgeons and groups. But for me it's a bit perfunctory. I could spill out ten pages worth of information about MGB with my eyes closed. I know more about it than my doctor. But I don't relish the time I'll have to spend writing a book report to prove it.

I've been so busy with so many projects lately, but at work and at home, that I've been for a few weeks in a "no new things" mode: no new projects, no new items on my to-do list if I can help it, just try to winnow things down. Hahahahahah. Now I have a whole new set of things to do! Time to take some more time off from work -- making my work to-do list get more cramped.

In other related news, my weight dropped below 450 for the first time. I've lost 37.4 pounds since this program started in May.

Testing the math solution

I couldn't post this as a comment in response to the comment posted on my previous post because of the very limited formatting allowed in comments. Frank posted in response that the expected value should be (1-X)/X, which provides some results we both agreed seemed counter-intuitive -- though in the way that these kinds of probability things often are. (In fact, this problem is kind of related to the birthday paradox, now that I think about it.) So I whipped up a little C program to test it by brute force.

Here's the program:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <ctype.h>
#include <conio.h>
#include <time.h>

/* Macro to get a random integer within a specified range */
#define getrandom( min, max ) ((rand() % (int)(((max)+1) - (min))) + (min))

int main() {
  int probability, count, result;
  long total;

  /* Seed the random number generator with current time. */
  srand( (unsigned)time( NULL ) );

  for (probability = 50; probability >= 1; probability--) {
    total = 0L;
    for (count = 1; count < 1000; count++) {
      result = 0;
      while (getrandom(1,100) > probability) result++;
      total += result;
      }
    printf("%2d%%  calculated=%6.2f  simulated=%6.2f\n", probability, (100 - (float) probability) / (float) probability, (float) total / (float) count);
    }
}

And here are the results:

50%  calculated=  1.00  simulated=  0.97
49%  calculated=  1.04  simulated=  1.07
48%  calculated=  1.08  simulated=  1.09
47%  calculated=  1.13  simulated=  1.09
46%  calculated=  1.17  simulated=  1.19
45%  calculated=  1.22  simulated=  1.22
44%  calculated=  1.27  simulated=  1.22
43%  calculated=  1.33  simulated=  1.37
42%  calculated=  1.38  simulated=  1.41
41%  calculated=  1.44  simulated=  1.54
40%  calculated=  1.50  simulated=  1.52
39%  calculated=  1.56  simulated=  1.67
38%  calculated=  1.63  simulated=  1.64
37%  calculated=  1.70  simulated=  1.66
36%  calculated=  1.78  simulated=  1.71
35%  calculated=  1.86  simulated=  1.97
34%  calculated=  1.94  simulated=  1.89
33%  calculated=  2.03  simulated=  1.95
32%  calculated=  2.13  simulated=  2.20
31%  calculated=  2.23  simulated=  2.30
30%  calculated=  2.33  simulated=  2.33
29%  calculated=  2.45  simulated=  2.41
28%  calculated=  2.57  simulated=  2.55
27%  calculated=  2.70  simulated=  2.78
26%  calculated=  2.85  simulated=  2.81
25%  calculated=  3.00  simulated=  2.91
24%  calculated=  3.17  simulated=  3.17
23%  calculated=  3.35  simulated=  3.38
22%  calculated=  3.55  simulated=  3.73
21%  calculated=  3.76  simulated=  3.77
20%  calculated=  4.00  simulated=  4.07
19%  calculated=  4.26  simulated=  4.19
18%  calculated=  4.56  simulated=  4.70
17%  calculated=  4.88  simulated=  4.93
16%  calculated=  5.25  simulated=  5.38
15%  calculated=  5.67  simulated=  5.52
14%  calculated=  6.14  simulated=  6.11
13%  calculated=  6.69  simulated=  6.66
12%  calculated=  7.33  simulated=  7.29
11%  calculated=  8.09  simulated=  8.41
10%  calculated=  9.00  simulated=  9.20
 9%  calculated= 10.11  simulated=  9.97
 8%  calculated= 11.50  simulated= 11.09
 7%  calculated= 13.29  simulated= 12.98
 6%  calculated= 15.67  simulated= 15.47
 5%  calculated= 19.00  simulated= 18.58
 4%  calculated= 24.00  simulated= 24.61
 3%  calculated= 32.33  simulated= 33.43
 2%  calculated= 49.00  simulated= 47.77
 1%  calculated= 99.00  simulated=101.59

Close enough that I'd say the difference is likely due to not doing enough trials (I did 1000 for each probability) and inaccuracies in the floating point math and random number generation I used.

A new new phone

After replacing the battery, and sending it in for five weeks of repair, failed to make my old Motorola RAZR able to hold a charge through the day, I finally got them to simply replace it. As an extra bonus, this time, they had the black RAZRs in stock, which not only looks slick and matches my clip, it's visually distinct from Siobhan's silver one.

I had the foresight this time to go through the menus and take notes on all my settings, so the new one is now loaded up with the same address book pictures, the same ringtones, the same wallpaper, the same configuration. Let's hope this one holds a charge!

Doing more reading

Life is full because there are so many enjoyable things to do, that every minute I can spare has a list of things I'd like to be doing during it. One of the things that tends to fall by the wayside when I'm really busy is reading. But one good thing about my current exercise program is that it lets me do more reading. Audiobooks, mostly, which I get from Audible and play on my Palm while I ride the recumbent stationary bike.

I recently finished reading Entanglement by Amir Aczel, a very thorough tour of quantum mechanics focusing on entanglement and its role in the history of quantum theory. I've read a lot of books about quantum mechanics and sometimes feel like I almost, but don't quite, understand it as I'm in the thick of one of these books, though by the end I feel it's slipped away again.

This book was perhaps the first time I understood, at least a little, Bell's theorem, or at least the alternative three-particle-entanglement version. Specifically, how it's possible to prove mathematically that there can't be a hidden-variables theory, something which had always puzzled me before. Of course, it's already feeling like it's melting away. But at least I can recall that I have known it, and been convinced, and could review it at any time, so I no longer just have to take it on faith that the proof is real.

As with most books about quantum mechanics, the author plays up how the book will talk about the fantastic possibilities for technological advances made possible by our advancing understanding of quantum mechanics, but in the end, he really doesn't talk about them. I want to know what quantum computing is, how it works, and what advantages it has, but all I get are news article blurbs that just say that there's a huge advance, but not what or why, let alone how it works. I want to know how "spooky action at a distance" could be used for superluminal communications, or more to the point, why it can't! I want to know why we couldn't have lasers and microwave ovens without quantum mechanics, and what else we can expect to get in the years to come.

Currently I'm reading Against All Enemies by Richard Clarke, read by the author. He does an amusing, and surprisingly good, impression of the voices and accents of the presidents and other public figures he's served under and with. His from-the-inside view of the history of modern terrorism has been shockingly enlightening, particular as I see the roots of our current situation with Al Qaeda in the events of the Cold War's end.

I always had a vague sense that there was the Cold War, then a decade or so of relative peace and safety, during which terrorism gradually became an issue, and eventually came to replace the Cold War in the role of making us all feel terrified and powerless, and giving Hollywood a source for villains. And I knew that some elements of terrorism had roots in the Middle East conflicts revolving around Israel, as well as the global oil trade. What I really never understood before this book was how the rise of terrorism, and particularly Al Qaeda and the Taliban, are not merely something that came after the Cold War, but were birthed in the same events that brought the Cold War to an end. Now I see that the events at the end of the Cold War are at least as responsible for the advent of modern terrorism as anything about Israel or oil, if not more so.

Probably the next book will be some bit of science fiction, maybe a collection of short stories. Then back to science.

Mr. Mojo Risin'

Listening to some songs by The Doors this morning, it occurred to me that while their songs are firmly rooted in classic rock, there's some of the same quality of "texture", an ethereal, atmospheric effect, in their songs as in some trip-hop stuff, like Portishead. If Jim Morrison were alive today, I wonder if he'd be into trip-hop.

Memetics versus memecrobial infection

You can't understand what a meme is without understanding the principle of the selfish gene. We usually think of genetics as a function of organisms; that a species survives because its genetics work to make it able to survive. Dawkins turned this on its head. The genes are what are trying to survive and procreate, and the organisms are just complex, effective tools that the genes use for this purpose. Genes are what really matter, though. That's why, the minute your body can no longer procreate -- can no longer pass on genes -- it tends to fall apart. There's no longer an advantage to keeping it working after that point, because the survival of the organism is irrelevant, only the survival of the gene.

The idea of a meme was an outgrowth of this idea. Memes, as they were originally defined, were ideas that did the same thing that genes do. The canonical example of a meme is a religion, or an ideology. A meme is a long-lasting thing which struggles for survival against other memes, and the minds it will inhabit along the way are important only as a means to continue and spread the meme. That's why martyrdom works: the meme doesn't mind losing a host, as long as the process gets it into other hosts.

But these days if you say "meme" on the Internet odds are what people will think of is not a meme at all, but just a momentary fad. Nothing about the genetic model of the meme really applies to how these fads propogate or survive, nor is there really anything fundamentally different about how they spread today than how they used to spread 30 years ago -- it's mostly just faster, and can happen with less investment, but these are differences of quantity, not of kind.

What is mistakenly called a meme on the Internet today is more aptly compared to a microbial infection. It passes from person to person by contact, a person suffers it for a short while and then gets over it, and that's it. It survives by finding more hosts, but that's where the comparison to genetics ends, because it doesn't have any long-term survival. It doesn't have a consistent identity over time. It survives not through tenacity or ability but through sheer numbers.

It's always a pity when a really powerful, really meaningful word, which is the only way to express a unique, insightful concept, is devoured by the grinding engine of word-trivialization. Especially when it's co-opted to mean something we already had perfectly good words for. The language is lessened, and so is the scope of human thought. Having thought this through, I now regret my own contribution to the misuse and erosion of this sublime word.

A math problem

Consider this game. I've got a die with sides marked "win" and "lose", such that the probability of rolling "lose" is X. You roll the die; if you roll "lose", the game ends. If you roll "win", I give you a dollar and you roll again.

For example, if X is 0.15 (a 15% chance of rolling "lose"), the odds of you getting nothing is 15%. The odds of getting $1 is 85% * 15%. The odds of getting $2 is 85% * 85% * 15%.

Put generally, the probability of any result n is:

P(n) = x (1-x)^n

The question: How can I calculate the average expected payout for a given value of X? All I can figure out is it would be the sum of this infinite series:



Once upon a time I might have been able to figure out whether that converges on something I can express as a simpler formula, or at least calculate for a few selected values of X. But I don't even know where to start now.