dreaming and belief

hypothesis: it's possible to get the mind to enter an awake-like state while dreaming (lucid dreaming), and possible to get the mind to enter a dream-like state while awake (hypnosis, meditation, lsd).

hypothesis: two techniques to help train the mind to enter both of these states, are:

• practice really doubting whether "reality" is real
• practice really believing a non "real" thing (faith)

anecdote: I had a dream last night. Inside the dream there was some point where I was doing something precarious — I forget what — and later, still inside the dream, I thought "man, it's good I didn't doubt whether I was dreaming at that precarious point, because I might have fallen.. but wait, maybe I was dreaming at that point.."

hypocrisy ok

I feel like our culture values consistency. So if I say something about myself, like "I'm not embarrassed about using two forks" -- which I've said -- then I feel some compulsion to not be embarrassed about it. But the fact is, I am embarrassed about it sometimes. And it seems good to recognize that.

I suppose that given that realization, it makes sense not to tell people in the future that I'm not embarrassed about using two forks. But since I don't know myself perfectly well, it seems like I'll say lots of wrong things going forward, and I don't want that to stop me from discovering I'm wrong, even if it means people will think I'm a hypocrite, or inconsistent, which is something I've worried about and let stand in my way before, it seems.

believing things because they are said

Couple thoughts:

It occurs to me that I have felt like I'm doing something wrong whenever I feel stressed or depressed.. But I don't feel like I'm doing something wrong when I'm hungry, even if I decide not to eat.. I think stress and depression may be normal human processes, and as unpleasant and potentially destructive to the body they may be, I think they're not evil. I've just been told that, and believed it.

It occurs to me that I worry about hypnosis because it allows someone to control my mind. Yet, I have been controlled already, I think. For instance, I might fear that a hypnotist would make me sing and dance in front of people. But really, I've already been mind controlled to *not* be able to do that, even if I feel the desire to, by society telling me "it is bad to make a fool of yourself", and I've believed it, and internalized it deep in my subconscious, and now I'm effectively hypnotized in a trance where I can't perform that behavior.

being happy

thought 1: maybe it's better not to have a life goal, but rather to focus on being happy day to day.

thought 2: I'm interested in knowing what things and situations make me happy.

thought 3: it turns out that working on visually stimulating things brings me some happiness. I was working on this today (see below), which is going to be a JavaScript version of this.

Acorn

I just saw this on my screen, and thought it was funny:

It's like the guy is all upset that Acorn's trial period is up, and is trying to shout through a blurred window. But actually the blurring is from a bad camera shot, not Acorn.

just a thought: I worry sometimes that by becoming more aware and detached from my emotions, I won't be able to feel them as much, which might suck, since sometimes it can be fun to feel emotions strongly, but I think that an aware and detached person could still allow themselves to sink into an emotion, perhaps even further than they could go if they weren't aware and detached..

..I was thinking about fear in particular, which I've generally thought of as just bad, but now that I'm getting a better handle on it, it occurred to me that maybe I would want to feel fear sometimes, for fun, the way people get a kick out of watching a scary movie.

lucid dream

I had a few lucid dreams recently. The first was more-or-less normal, and the most recent two were very strange and short. One involved a bunch of balloons, and the other involved sortof seeing something different from each eye, and trying to "focus" onto the dream scene, but not succeeding.

I recall that the first time I had a lucid dream was the first time I read about lucid dreaming, and it was very much on my mind. And I failed a bunch after that, but the next time I had a lucid dream was when I read something new about lucid dreaming.. now of course I have had many instances of reading about lucid dreaming and failing to have a lucid dream, but I do think that there's a high correlation with thinking about lucid dreaming itself, as opposed to concentrating on some technique, and definitely as opposed to just hoping I'll have a lucid dream but secretly being tired and just wanting to sleep..

Anyway, I still can't do it on demand, and I still don't have a reliable technique, but I do seem to be having lucid dreams more frequently, so that's great! I'm now marking lucid dreams with a star in my star chart app thing:

I tried the Oculus Rift again, and this time I am really impressed and excited. I had tried it before, and the demo I saw wasn't very immersive, which is understandable, since the person was working on a prototype that wasn't meant to be immersive yet, but I figured the problem had to do with low resolution..

..but the demo I saw this time still had low resolution, but it was really nice. Things seemed 3d, and felt like they were really "there".

anyway

dropbox datastore

I kinda love Dropbox's datestore..

..I was using a regular file for pima, since I wanted it to be encrypted, and also replicated on my disk, and I think the datastores are only in the cloud.. not sure..

..anyway, for my progress helper thing, currently called "progressing with the stars", I used the datastore, and it was awesome. It was just so easy: I draw everything based on what's in the datastore, and when it changes, it automatically redraws everything, whether that change happened locally or remotely.

Unfortunately nobody else can use it yet, because the dropbox "app" is in developer mode, and to make it "public", it needs to be approved.. which I suppose is good, but it would be nice if there was an option for people with a big warning button saying "don't do this unless you're absolutely sure what you're doing!!!", which is what people have to click on anyway to get to the https version of github.io.

anyway, I put this together just so I could get a star for doing 10 minutes of dual spritzing, trying to read two things at once.. I lowered the wpm to 50, and it's wicked hard. I feel my brain straining, which I suppose is good? anyway, we'll see what happens..

dual spritz

source code

Bwahahahaha!!!
You can try to read Alice in Wonderland and Pride and Prejudice AT THE SAME TIME!

Why.. WHY!!! Because maybe learning to read two things simultaneously makes the brain smarter, which is a half-baked idea I got from not fully understanding an experiment I read about.

Anyway, I'm going to try it, and we'll see what happens. So far what happens is that I can pay attention to one or the other, but not both.

spritz

source code

so I'm probably the last to hear of spritz, but I love the idea, and I wanted an interface that let me paste text into it and spritz it, which is what I have above (based on the code for OpenSpritz, though I ended up rewriting it to suit my simplistic needs).

Anyway, the real reason I did this is that I read something in a book about the brain. It said someone ran a study on "brain exercising" games and found that they didn't seem to help people do anything other than play those specific games better, BUT it mentioned some other study where people were given a task of "keeping in mind two different streams of information simultaneously", and that that increased people's IQ. The book didn't say what these streams were, but I want to try reading two spritz streams simultaneously, so now that I've got one set up, I'm going to try and set up another right above it..

I often do this wrong: I want a number to bottom out at 0 — so that zero is the minimum value the number can be — so I do this:

number = Math.min(0, number)

Which is wrong. It should be:

number = Math.max(0, number)

But how to remember this?

sayings about suffering

"Remove desires." — I read Siddhartha in high school, and I recall a character saying that the root of suffering is desire. If we didn't have desires, we wouldn't suffer. Removing desires seemed like a good idea at first, but I tried it, and I found that I couldn't do it, and it seemed like if I did, then I wouldn't do anything at all.. I'd just lie there and die.. which seemed bad.

"Accept everything." — Another character in the book suggested this, and I tried it, and it has actually served me well for a long time. However, more recently, I've been troubled by what it means to "accept" something. For instance, there's that time someone backed into my car and sued me for it and won, and I was angry at them, and also at myself for failing to defend myself against them.. should I have not been angry? Maybe. Maybe "accept" means accept being angry? Not sure.

"Acknowledge everything." — Acknowledge as in look at everything and admit that it's there, as opposed to being unwilling to look at some things. Applied to the car situation above, I take this to mean: be aware of what actually happened, what I did, what they did, how I felt, etc. And that's it. I figure accurate information is good for the brain, giving it the best chance of accomplishing its goals.

"Accept what I cannot change, and change what I can." — Again, I'm not sure what it means to "accept" something, and although the original saying involves asking a higher power to grant me "the wisdom to know the difference", I don't think I've been granted such wisdom, so it doesn't seem good to be too confident about bucketing anything into the "accept" or "change" camps. Also, if something is in the "change" camp, am I meant to be "unaccepting" of it all the time? If it takes a long time to change, this seems like it might be very unpleasant.

sayings

I think sayings are programs that my mind runs, and I think it's useful to analyze them carefully and make sure they're good programs.

Sayings about Fear

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." — I assume this is intended to mean "we shouldn't be afraid of anything", but it's being cute. Being cute does not seem good for programs in the brain. I want my programs to be obvious and straightforward.

"Do not be afraid." — In general, I think I am too fearful, but it doesn't seem possible or reasonable to never be afraid.

"Face your fears." — This seems like a good strategy for training the brain to be comfortable with phobias, like walking in the rain on a stormy night to overcome a phobia of lightning, but it doesn't seem like a good strategy for all fears. I'm afraid that if I drive with my eyes closed, I'll hit something, but I think I'm right, so I'll die before overcoming the fear. Now some might say "you're not afraid of hitting something, you have good reason to believe you'll hit something, which is not the same as fear", to which I say "if I think about closing my eyes while driving, I tense up and feel anxious.. I'm pretty sure that's fear."

"Analyze your fears and make sure they're reasonable." — This seems good.

"Knock on wood." — I thought I didn't take this seriously, but I do, a little bit. I'm a little afraid to write "There is totally no chance there's going to be an earthquake tonight." First, it's not true. There is a small chance of that happening. But my fear is not of writing a falsehood, my fear is of the universe proving me wrong, and everyone else saying "you're getting what you deserve for saying that". But even if there is an earthquake tonight, I don't think I caused it by writing that.

By knocking on wood, I essentially tell the universe "I'm still afraid!" And sometimes it does make sense to keep being afraid. If I'm going hiking, and I say "I probably won't twist my ankle on this trip", that's true, but only if I pay constant attention to where I'm stepping — it would be bad to realize that I probably won't twist my ankle and use that as a reason not to worry about twisting my ankle, since without that worry keeping me paying attention, I probably will twist my ankle.

But since I have no ability to make earthquakes happen or not, it does not make sense to keep being afraid after I say "There is totally no chance there's going to be an earthquake tonight." Though it does make sense to revise it, for accuracy's sake, to "there probably won't be an earthquake tonight", which I believe is true, but I do have a little unreasonable fear now about it happening, which will hopefully be reduced tomorrow.. assuming no earthquake happens.

"I couldn't stand it if such and such happened." — I've felt this way. At one point, I worried about getting a girl pregnant. I feared that if it happened, my dad would be upset, and the world would end. But, I think the world would not end. I feel like I need to remove this "world ending" notion from my mind, since it doesn't seem possible. I mean, the world might actually end, but by "world ending" I'm referring to a sort of mystical incomprehensible badness, whereas I think all badnesses are ultimately comprehensible and non-mystical.

taxes
texas

in a sense
innocence

priming
theatre
masks
[ :) ]---
[ :( ]---

two types of meditation

I was talking with a couple people about meditation, and how there are sortof two branches of meditation, where one is about relaxing, and one is about self examination,

and a couple people came up with these names which I thought were clever: mellow-tation and meta-tation

surfing

so, when I was in Maui, I tried surfing, and..

..I was just not strong enough to do it. I felt like a dinosaur with ridiculously small arms trying to paddle the board out to sea, and by the time I got there, I could barely do anything, much less paddle at the speed of a wave and lift my body out of the water onto the board and balance on the board..

..but I could tell it would be fun! and I think it would motivate me to exercise if I spent a month there trying to surf every day.

The Embassy

for the past month, I stayed with a group of people in a big house in Hawaii, and it was awesome, and I want to live that way all the time, so now that I'm back in the bay I asked a friend if they knew of such a place here, and they asked a friend who knew of a place and put me in touch with The Embassy..

..I woke up this morning in my bunk bed at the embassy, and the house cat Pixel had camped out behind my legs.

Incidentally, the embassy is part of the embassy network, and the last few days I was in Hawaii I spent at Garrett Lisi's place in Maui which he has turned into a community space for sciency people, which it turns out is part of the embassy network — which is a bit remarkable considering that there are only about eight communities in the network at all..

..anyway, so I'm excited. I want this idea to grow and succeed.

I wanna see where my money goes, especially since starting my sabbatical thing.
Downloaded all my transactions from Mint.com.
Processing with javascript-eval..

function chop(x) {
    return x.slice(1, x.length - 1).split(/","/)
}
var lines = _.lines(input)
var keys = chop(lines[0])
var ts = _.map(lines.slice(1), function (line) {
    return _.object(keys, chop(line))    
})
_.each(ts, function (t) {
    t.Date = new Date(t.Date).getTime()
    t.Amount *= 1
})
ts

that's gives us things like:

    {
        "Date": 1394006400000,
        "Description": "Starbucks",
        "Original Description": "AuthorizationTo Starbucks OGGKahului MauiHI",
        "Amount": 8.54,
        "Transaction Type": "debit",
        "Category": "Coffee Shops",
        "Account Name": "PayPal Account",
        "Labels": "",
        "Notes": ""
    },

(man, $8.54 at Starbucks? what did I buy?)
Anyway, now let's get just the ones since October 2013..

var ts = eval(input)
var cutoff = new Date('10/01/2013').getTime()
ts = _.filter(ts, function (t) { return t.Date > cutoff })
ts

..good.. now.. hm.. there are 465 transactions in that time.. how can we make some sense of them?
first, maybe group by description, and see if some descriptions are very common..

var ts = eval(input)
var bag = {}
_.each(ts, function (t) {
    _.bagAdd(bag, t.Description)
})
_.sort(_.pairs(bag), function (x) { return -x[1] })

hm.. the most common thing is "PayPal", which is not quite descriptive enough. Hm.. I do see quite a few transfers from my bank to PayPal, which can probably be removed, but I also want to remove the corresponding gain in money in PayPal.. maybe I can just remove all "income" anyway, since I want to know where I'm spending money, not earning it..

ok, so 446 after removing transfers to PayPal,
and 306 after removing income (so much income! sortof.. not sure what all those are.. for some reason Mint.com shows a credit associated with most of my PayPal transactions for the same amount as the transaction — I don't know why.. it's not because they gave me the money back, that's for sure)

what next.. ok, I see some investments, which I shouldn't count as "spending money", since I still own the investment (even though, in point of fact, the value of the investment has already gone down, as my investments typically do)..

hm.. I see that I'm paying for Netflix twice.. I am paying for my mom's account, as a gift, which I want to continue, but I think Netflix may allow families to share accounts, so I should look into that.. probably they mean for the people to be in the same physical house, not sure..

ok, let's pull out Netflix expenses into an aggregating spreadsheet..
pull out phone bills..
pull out Spotify..
pull out virtual mail thing..
blah..
blah..
more stuff..

hm..

some takeaways..

first, I'm spending $100 a day, which happens to be the budget I was allowing myself, but I thought I was well under it, especially considering that I didn't pay for lodging at all for two whole months while I was staying at my dad's house..

second, I'm spending a lot on car rental. Somehow I thought that was cheaper. I spent more on car rental than on lodging..

here's the breakdown, more-or-less:
22% on car rental
17% on lodging
15% on stuff (whatever that is.. groceries, and paying apple for a developers license, etc..)
13% on food
11% on air travel
7% on health care
7% on services (including phone)
6% on cash.. who knows what I did with that..
2% rounding error

so.. don't rent cars so much! and maybe eat less?

I summoned an uber car, but didn't notice that the pin was not quite where I was. I ran toward the pickup location, but I could see they were beating me, so I called the driver. A woman picked up and I told her where I was, and she said she'd come there.

A moment later, I see a guy wave to me from his car, right where uber says his car should be.

I get to the car and he tells me he is deaf, and hands me a bluetooth Mac keyboard. I type where I want to go and see it appear on his phone attached to the windshield, and he starts driving.

A bit later, I see on his phone "how are you doing?", and he hands me the keyboard. I type "great, by the way, were you on the phone with me earlier?" He nods. "how does that work?" And he launches an app on his phone and calls my number. My phone rings, and I can see on his screen a split view showing him, and a guy sitting in a room somewhere. He signs to the guy, and I hear him speak on my phone. I talk, and he signs to my driver.

Very cool.

I was describing pima's encryption to someone, and they mentioned that I might consider using b-crypt or s-crypt to generate the AES password from the plaintext password provided by the user, since the plaintext password is likely to be relatively small.

I'm considering doing this, but there is a time consideration in JavaScript. That is, JavaScript is slow, so I wonder how long it will take to b-crypt or s-crypt a password, especially on the phone.

So I tested b-crypt with "12 rounds" for the hardness parameter, which is just a number I've seen thrown around the internet. This gives us:

MacBook Air: 1.798 seconds
Droid Razr Max HD: 10.379 seconds

I also tested s-crypt with "2^14" as the hardness parameter, which I've read is appropriate for interactive logins, whereas "2^20" is appropriate for file encryption, which is what I want, but "2^20" fails to run at all:

MacBook: 0.835 seconds
Droid: 2.379 seconds

Hm.. I think I'll go with s-crypt for now. It will at least be better than what I've got, and not too slow on the phone..

right to die

I have taken to the idea that people have a right to die.

The biggest argument I've heard against suicide is that it hurts other people, presumably by causing them a sense of grief and loss. But when someone chooses to move away for a long time, they also cause a sense of grief and loss, yet their friends and family believe it is their job to accept this loss because they love the person moving away, and want to let them do what they think is best for themselves. So when someone says "I've decided to commit suicide", it seems like their friends and family should say "aww, we're really gonna miss you! but we support you in your decision."

It also seems like cruel and unusual punishment to keep someone alive who wants to die. In fact, it is blatantly thought of as such in movies when the heroes rush in to the bad guy's lair as they are trying to commit suicide — because the bad guy knows they've lost — and the heroes prevent them from doing so with a line like "we're not gonna let you get away that easy!" That is, we think of life as punishment for this person. And it is. And it's cruel and unusual.

Also, we all do things that might kill ourselves, or reduce our life expectancy. We drive. We live on fault lines. We drink alcohol. We do challenging things that cause stress. We're not always optimizing for length-of-life, and it seems fine that we don't. We don't actually care about long lives as much as we care about great lives. Many influential historical figures committed suicide, or died pursuing their interests, and in any case, we don't rank historical figures by how long they lived but by what they accomplished.

And sometimes accomplishing great things is dangerous. And sometimes it alienates people from the society they live in, and they don't want to live there anymore. And sometimes the source of great inspiration in the mind is also the source of great depression, yet we cherish artifacts and knowledge drawn from such sources even though they may have ultimately led their creators to kill themselves.

volcano

I mentioned before a regret of not going with some people to see lava. I was afraid it might be dangerous.

Some people went again, and I went with them. After walking for an hour and a half through rainforest and mud, and then an hour and a half over brittle lava fields with stream coming out at various places through cracks, we saw the main active point.

We could see redness, like a furnace, 100 yards away, maybe less. That's as far as we went. It was just to scary to proceed. We didn't know how lava worked -- might we break through the brittle surface into lava, or a deep air pocket? The surface seemed to get more brittle closer to the redness, and there were many large stream vents around it.

Anyway, we headed back. I broke through the surface at one point, scrapping my knee, our group's only injury. We had a scare on the way back -- we felt heat. We hadn't felt it on our way up, and for a bit it seemed that there was no safe way back, but we managed to go around the hot place. It was probably safe, but we didn't know how this place worked.

I thought it would be dangerous, and I think it was. We were all grateful to get back to the rainforest alive.

Part of me wishes we had gotten closer, so we could clearly see molten flowing lava.. Part of me is glad we didn't.

I would still like to see flowing lava before I die. Perhaps a safer opportunity will present itself someday.

NOTE: you probably want Control instead of Command —

this image is for MY machine which has those buttons switched

Ho ho, so I like to lock my screen when I leave my computer, and I couldn't find a hotkey for it on my mac, so I made moving my mouse to the lower-left corner bring up the password protected screen saver, but I always felt like I needed to wait a second, because if I moved my mouse right away after the screen saver started, it would go away without asking for a password..

..but I learned of mashing control, shift, fn, and the power button — which on my machine is command instead of control since I switch those buttons — which instantly puts the computer in a password protected state :)

it's ALIVE!

PIMA works on the phone! I pushed back todo items while walking around, and in the Bathroom!!
Bwhahahaha!!!!!

And it has a life of it's own! It's hosted on github, though people need to press a scary "Proceed anyway" button:

..because github.io has https, so it will serve encrypted content, but the certificate is for github.com, not io. I've heard github wants it this way so people aren't fooled with phishing sites hosted on github.io. Anyway. Whatever.

And it needs to store data, but it's stored in Dropbox, so I don't need to host file storage for people, and they don't need to trust me with their precious personal data, and they don't even need to trust Dropbox, since the data is encrypted and decrypted client side.

And it even fetches starred emails from gmail using a Google Apps Script that I don't need to pay for or maintain :)

It's just ugly:

I love the red "https" with a slash through it.

blah! BLAH! I mean.. I just started using pima-online!! It still has quirks, but I can work through them while using it — hopefully ;)

quirk the first: doesn't work on phone yet. Or rather, it does, but isn't optimized for phone. I think it will help to get it on the phone, since then I can sort of go through todos while waiting for stuff on my phone..

I need a word that means: "I'm writing an idea here just so I can get it out of pima and have it somewhere that maybe I'll see it again." And it might be nice if I could search for it. Actually, a friend uses "NIDEA". I'll just use that.

NIDEA: password thing with pictures — generate xkcd style passwords, e.g. 3 or 4 random words in a row drawn from a large dictionary, say 5000 words. It would be great if it could generate the password, and also show the password in pictorial form to help me remember it.

programming strategy note

I wrote some code to merge todo items in pima. It is about 44 lines — no need to read it, I just put it here so I can copy from it if I need — but the story continues after the code:

function mergeCards(c1, c2, parentC) {
    if (!parentC) {
        if (c1 && c2) throw 'how could two cards get generated with the same id?'
        return c1 || c2
    }

    function cardDiff(c, parent) {
        if (!x) return { deleted : true }
        var d = {}
        if (x.text != parent.text) d.text = true
        if (x.createTime != parent.createTime) d.createTime = true
        if (x.showTime != parent.showTime) d.showTime = true
        if (x.touchTime != parent.touchTime) d.touchTime = true
        return _.keys(d).length > 0 ? d : null
    }
    var d1 = cardDiff(c1, parentC)
    var d2 = cardDiff(c2, parentC)

    function merge(d1, d2, c1, c2, func) {
        if (!d1 && !d2) return c1
        if (d1 && !d2) return c1
        if (!d1 && d2) return c2
        return func(c1, c2)
    }
    return merge(d1, d2, c1, c2, function (c1, c2) {
        if (d1.deleted || d2.deleted) {
            if (d1.deleted && d2.deleted) return null
            var c = _.deepClone(d1.deleted ? c2 : c1)
            c.text = 'CONFLICT----DELETED\n' + c.text
            return c
        }
        return {
            id : c1.id,
            text : merge(d1.text, d2.text, c1.text, c2.text, function (c1, c2) {
                return 'CONFLICT----\n' + c1 + '\nCONFLICT----\n' + c2
            },
            createTime : merge(d1.createTime, d2.createTime, c1.createTime, c2.createTime, Math.min),
            showTime : merge(d1.showTime, d2.showTime, c1.showTime, c2.showTime, function (_, __) {
                return c1.text == c2.text ? Math.min(c1.showTime, c2.showTime) : 0
            },
            touchTime : merge(d1.touchTime, d2.touchTime, c1.touchTime, c2.touchTime, Math.max)
        }
    })
}

Now I was proud that this code seemed like it would handle lots of merging cases in elegant ways, but I was concerned that it would be hard to test, especially since the most smarts were in the least likely things to happen..

..so I decided to make it less smart, but easier to test — no need to read this either, it's about 33 lines — story concludes after the code:

function mergeCards(c1, c2, parentC) {

    if (!parentC) {

        if (c1 && c2) throw 'how could two cards get generated with the same id?'

        return c1 || c2

    }

    function dirty(c, parent) {

        return !c ||

            c.text != parent.text ||

            c.createTime != parent.createTime ||

            c.showTime != parent.showTime ||

            c.touchTime != parent.touchTime

    }

    var d1 = dirty(c1, parentC)

    var d2 = dirty(c2, parentC)

    if (!d2) return c1

    if (!d1) return c2

    if (!c1 || !c2) {

        if (!c1 && !c2) return null

        var c = _.deepClone(!c1 ? c2 : c1)

        c.text = 'CONFLICT----DELETED\n' + c.text

        return c

    }

    return {

        id : c1.id,

        text : 'CONFLICT----\n' + c1.text + '\nCONFLICT----\n' + c2.text,

        createTime : Math.min(c1.createTime, c2.createTime),

        showTime : 0,

        touchTime : Math.max(c1.touchTime, c2.touchTime)

    }

}

Anyway, I find that I do this a lot. I write a bunch of complicated code, and then decide that it would be easier to rewrite the code to do less stuff than to test the code ;)

lucid dream! again!

An external observer may have forgotten that I'm even still trying to have lucid dreams, since I mainly fail, and it just looks like I sleep more.

Notes from today's success:

• I wasn't trying to have a lucid dream, I was trying a form of meditation where I just maintain non-judgmental awareness of what's happening in my mind. I'm pretty sure I eventually fell asleep, and then became lucid inside of a dream. I'm not sure what triggered the lucidity.
• Maybe I should keep a dream journal. I feel like I recall dreams pretty well, but I think I could do a lot better. I don't recall as much from this one as I hoped I would.
• A few interesting things that happened in the dream:
• I was trying to put on a sort of hat for some reason, but it was very heavy, and I couldn't lift it, but I kept trying and it was frustrating, but eventually I just decided to stop trying, and I set the hat aside — this may have been when I became lucid.
• At one point I was walking, but my visual of my foot was that it was still, which was strange — I suppose the visual was more accurate than the proprioception in this case, except that my eyes were closed.
• At one point I was outside a door, and I willed a person to be inside the room that I was entering, but I was a bit concerned about who I would meet, and nobody was there, and I had the thought: "I'm too afraid still to will a person into existence here."
• At one point I stepped into a place that was vividly and strangely colored with purples and greens, with strange smooth rock formations, and trees.

..ever closer to online pima.. ooh, it seems cleaner to keep track of a parent and do a merge with the parent as a reference, rather than trying to keep track of "dirty" cards..

I've been dancing, not in front of people, but where people could, and have seen.. getting closer to feeling completely comfortable doing that :) ..

..ugg, logistics.. the month is nearing an end, and this house will vanish

notes

still working on integrating pima-online with a google apps script to fetch starred gmails.. I had intended to redirect to a page to authenticate with google, but I just realized that going away from the original page may lose data, if it hasn't been saved.. I could make the button just warn the user if this is the case, but it seems a bit fragile.. I could open the authentication window as a separate window, but I currently want it to send a token when it redirects back to pima, which it wouldn't do if it didn't need to redirect back to pima.. hm..

ok, this is a bit silly, but I can have the new window redirect back to the original page, but with a token parameter, and when the page sees that parameter, it can set it in localStorage, and then tell the user to close the page..

hm.. jQuery is magical, somehow it knows when a jsonp request has returned, even if it failed..

sweet! phew.. got some subject lines from gmail successfully into pima from the google apps script :)

..time to eat

notes

..I'm trying to get PIMA online, so I can access it from my phone. I have it working with Dropbox — more-or-less. Now I need it to work with Gmail, since I like to import starred gmails as todo items.

..I'm planning to use a Google Script for this.

note: here's where to create a google script: https://script.google.com

..ok, now I'm not sure how my page hosted on github.io is going to access to the script.. even if google scripts support CORS, which I'm guessing they don't, the script is going to need to ask the user to authenticate with google anyway, so it sort of needs to be displayed as a webpage..

..I suppose I could create an iframe with it, and the iframe should be able to reach "up" in the DOM, giving the results to my page.. let's see if that works..

note: command to run local web server: http-server -p 5000

ugg.. X-Frame-Options: DENY

DENY
deny
:(

..thoughts from the porcelain thinking throne:

• I could open a new page which could automatically redirect back to the original page with the email information in the url.. though this might cause a very long url.. how long of urls are google scripts happy to send, and github.io pages happy to receive?
• I could have the google script itself authorize with dropbox, and put the information into dropbox, and then redirect back to the original page.. the problem is that dropbox apps require me to enter the urls that they work on, and I'm not sure what to put for a google script, since the entry point is one url, but then once it is authorized, it seems to redirect somewhere else..

..wait, maybe the X-Frame-Options:DENY is just for the login page when the user needs to authenticate!.. nope..

hm.. JSONP requests work, so long as the user has already authenticated the script, so hopefully I can figure out a way to detect that.. also, JSONP has the issue that malicious webpages could run it — not that PIMA is popular enough that it would ever happen, but in principle, it would be nice to know people couldn't trick me into letting them see some of my e-mails..

..oh, I could redirect to google scripts and redirect back every time, just in case authentication hasn't happened yet, and if it has, it shouldn't waste too much time.. assuming I can't figure out how to detect whether authentication happened, since I'm not sure how to detect whether a SCRIPT tag has loaded it's script. Maybe there's a method for that? Hm.. it's not immediately clear from StackOverflow.

..hm.. do google scripts put the requesting domain in the doGet(request)? Looks like no..

..ok, an ugly solution, I redirect to the google script and have it redirect back, but only redirect back to a whitelist of places, and have it send a temporary token back.. hm.. let's see how easy it is to make a temporary token..

..oh good, there's a UserProperties https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/properties/user-properties thing, so each user can have their own token..

well.. it's ugly, but simple enough I suppose, let's give it a try..

hm.. it seems like req.parameter.auth is not allowed, like a reserved word..

arg, it seems like my redirect is not working.. but why? I feel like it's not spitting out the html that I requested.. as if it has some "filler" html around it.. hm.. it does have some extra html that I didn't request.. it also said something about a "sandbox", and I could see weird grey rectangles on the side which make me think that some mysterious "cruft" is happening.. I want it to spit out exactly what I say!!

humph, I tried <script>window.location = 'http://where-I-want-to-go'</script>, and I get "Caja does not currently support assigning to .location".. so they're using Caja to "sanitize" my HTML.. who are the protecting here? Me, from myself?

..someone suggested popping up this window, and after it authenticates, calling "close". Let's give it a try..

..and now "ignoring window.close(…). ". Great. So secure. And what is this "Sandbox mode: EMULATED". Why am I in a sandbox? I don't understand!!

..I can't find any settings related to sandboxes.. maybe it's done with code.. ahh: setSandboxMode(HtmlService.SandboxMode.NATIVE) .. let's give it a try.. nope.. still "ignores" it. Maybe it's because it's in a tab?.. nope..

..ok, what if we create a <form action="http://go-here"/> and call submit on that.. hm.. didn't seem to work.. I wonder if it will even let the user submit the form.. nope! it adds onsubmit="return false" to the form.. can I even let the user click a link? nope.. oh, wait, I used "src" instead of "href".. ok, I can click it manually, but clicking it programmatically doesn't seem to work "Object [object Object] has no method 'click' ".

hum.. hum..

..what if I load the target webpage in an iframe, and then have the iframe "bust out" to be the main window.. nope.. iframes are not supported..

ugg.. so much wasted time trying to do something that should be simple, but has been made deliberate obtuse by someone in the name of "security"..

ok, hacking the redirect seems hard — it seems like google doesn't want to allow redirects — so how about we try checking to see if the ajax call is succeeding. We could wait a certain amount of time, but it could actually take a while to grab the e-mails, so maybe we could make a special API that just returns right away, and put a timer on that.. and even if it does return after the timer, it will just mean that the user is sent away to go authenticate when they didn't really need to, and hopefully that will be rare..

oh shoot, I forgot, I need the authentication page thing so it can set a token, and hand it back to github.io, to protect against malicious jsonp use.. arggggg!!

ok, maybe I can save the token in a cookie, or localStorage, and use the new special API to verify that the token is correct..

hum de dum.. ok, I think this strategy will work-ish.. now we just need to incrementally add a few things on the pima side and the google script side until it grabs emails the way I want..

regret

I like to think that I don't regret things, but I do. In principle, I tend to think that regret doesn't make sense, since I don't believe in freewill, so I don't think I "could have" done things differently.

Nevertheless, I do feel regret — I have the feeling of wishing I had done things differently.

Here are some of my biggest regrets:

• I went to Scotland for a bachelors party that I was accidentally emailed about, because my email was similar to the groom's email. I've been meaning to put that story on this blog. It is where the name "real gl" comes from. Anyway, the regret is: I didn't go to the wedding in Ireland.
• I hired a Ukrainian singer to sing some songs I had written, and I felt she did an incredible job, and we started talking on skype. I had an opportunity to fly to Kiev and meet her, and I regret not doing so.
• I regret not going with my friends today to see an active lava flow.

just read something on "goals" vs "roles".. an interesting notion.. "roles" do have the nice property that they aren't achieved, and then require a new one to replace them..

..in the 80/20 spirit, here's a doodle..

80/20 rule

a friend got me thinking about the 80/20 rule recently, and I was thinking about it with relation to art.. I'd love to see people posting/exchanging art that's 80% done — and more of it.

apparently suggesting faces out of plants is a thing

a couple notes:

• I heard the concept of "social translucence", which I hadn't heard before. An analogy that explained it for me was a door with a window in it — when a door has a window in it, you feel more comfortable opening it without worrying that you'll hit someone on the other side, since you can see if they are there or not. Email is not very "socially translucent" for me, since I have to say quite a few things before getting any feedback about how the other person is reacting, so it takes a long time to write an email.
• I'm increasingly convinced that one-on-one mentoring is awesome, and a really good way to spread certain kinds of ideas, like ways of thinking about things, that are difficult to express in, say, a book. I felt like my friend was mentoring me about how to express myself, and I feel like I learned much more in that brief interaction than I have in hearing about self expression in general over the course of my life, in large part because it was interactive — I danced — and some of the learning could only happen by engaging in the activity, but with someone there that I could ask questions of in real-time about my concerns, and to say things like "reach as high as you can", and also suggested that we spend some time "screaming", to break down barriers of vocal expression.

when birds walk, they move their head forward and back, and it always seemed strange, but I was looking at some birds doing it, and I recalled some video of a chicken where someone was moving the chicken, but it's head was staying in place, and I watched the birds, and they pushed their head forward when they walked, but then it stayed in the same place as they moved their bodies forward.

pop culture

so, the guy I mentioned in the previous post and I both like pop music,
and another friend didn't,
and we had a discussion about pop music, or pop culture in general,

and a few interesting things came out:

I have an emotional connection with some pop songs,
and if someone else also has an emotional connection with the same song,
then emotional bonding can take place over the song — just like I imagine it would happen talking about sports, if two people happened to like the same sport,

And I could have an emotional connection with some indie song — which might be arguably, in some people's minds, "higher art" than pop — and I do have such connections with many indie songs, but I very rarely meet anyone who has heard any of them, much less emotionally connected with them,

so.. maybe this makes pop culture useful for meeting people quickly and building an emotional bond to serve as a foundation to talk about deeper stuff..

self expression

I was talking with a gay friend in the co-living group I'm in for the month,
and he had mentioned some of his experience "coming out" as gay when he was young,

and so I told him that I was having some trouble "coming out",
not as gay, but.. being more expressive in general..
and I am a pretty effeminate male,
and I mentioned that I was wearing some polar bear pajamas,
and that I would tell people they were just what was available at the thrift store,
but really, they were as expressive as I thought I could get away with,
and if I could, I would wear My Little Pony pajamas. Which is true.

and he asked me to name a couple flamboyant pop songs that I like,
already knowing that I like pop,
because we had sung together on a previous evening,

and I said "Tik Tok" and "We Can't Stop",
which he put on,
and then suggested we dance,

which was totally awkward for me. I've danced before, alone, and I actually love dancing, alone, but I was extremely uncomfortable dancing with him, but I voiced those concerns, and he did a fantastic job reassuring me that he didn't care..

and I had a thought about "self expression".
I usually think of "self expression" as someone expressing themselves to other people,
but another way of thinking of it is: expressing myself to myself.
That is, when I dance, even with other people, I — my slow thinking / system II / left brain / whatever — is watching another part of myself dance, and learning from that through the experience itself.

and I am increasingly convinced that at least a major part of the "drug experience", at least for me, is seeing that expressive side of myself, since the drug lowers my inhibitions — and somehow alcohol doesn't do it for me, perhaps because it makes me so tired that I'm not having meta thoughts about the experience of being drunk..

..which also means that I'm increasingly convinced that the "drug experience" can be reproduced without drugs, by "expressing myself", and I've had some success testing this, including today with this dancing thing.. and maybe there's more to it, but the self-expression thing is definitely there, and I feel like I want to understand it first before trying to assess whether there's something else as well — so, more self expression is in store, more pushing my boundaries, and possibly overshooting and offending people, but the benefit of being self expressive — of knowing the things that my fast thinking / system I / right brain / whatever wants to tell me — seems.. good. I think I'll be able to think better, and probably also feel less depressed.

bridging?

I feel like I'm connecting better with myself,

but I wonder if I'm just catching up to other people..

I feel like I'm a pretty conservative, risk-averse, repressed person..

and not everyone is..

so I wonder if that repression has caused my mind to feel like two "people",

and only now is that repressed side making a big push to "come out"..

notes

so, deviantART seems like a potential solution to the google image search problem, and they even have a nice api, though I think I actually like google's search results better. Here's google's results for "interesting art" versus deviantART's results for "interesting":

google images for "interesting art"

deviantART images for "interesting"

hm.. thinking about synchronization timing issues is much easier drawing lines for time, and dots for events, even if they're just in my imagination. I think I'm finally happy with my understanding of how pima's dropbox synchronization code will look.

huh, this person can create a face with a realistic branch looking thing better than I can create a face at all:

huh, while uploading this image, I saw google's upload slider move backwards as I changed my wifi connection :)

anyway, this is a google search for "yellow art". I like putting on a song that I like, viewing some art, and letting my mind start to make connections and form a meaningful story.

Google image search is pretty great, but I want an even better service, that keeps out bad art, or images with watermarks.. perhaps when people click to enlarge images, that can act as a "vote" for those images as being better art..

bridging model update

old theory: part B is a separate sentient entity inside my head
new theory: part B is experienced as "me", but has some continuity of thought not shared with part A, e.g., a partially separate sense of "self"

old theory: part B communicates with part A through interpretive pattern matching
new theory: part B experiences its own thoughts as interpretive pattern matching

old theory: part B is processing all the time, and wants to share it's thoughts with part A
new theory: part B isn't processing all the time, and wants to get more time-share of attention

thoughts on feelings of transcendence

• perhaps the feeling of becoming self aware is a feeling of transcendence
• perhaps self awareness requires seeing patterns of one's own thoughts, which requires:
• enough working memory to see patterns
• enough "play" time to spend looking for such patterns
• perhaps self awareness is easy for part A, since it has a lot of working memory, and happens at an early age, but hard for part B because it has little working memory, and:
• it is usually used in short bursts, and doesn't have enough working memory to recall what it did in previous bursts
• if it is used in a longer burst, like mulling over a problem, it doesn't have enough "play" time to waste examining it's own thought patterns
• perhaps prayer, meditation or drugs can provide enough contiguous play time for part B to see itself operate, and hence induce a transcendent-feeling "aha!" moment, which can be interpreted in many ways, like hearing God, or feeling connected with a new-age Source, etc..

thoughts on people talking a lot, or writing or drawing as they think

• when a brain is in part-B-mode, and wants to have deeper/longer thoughts, perhaps it makes up for having little working memory by saying or writing or drawing what it thinks as it thinks it, so that it can hear or see it a moment from now, and have a greater chance of remaining "on track"
• it seems useful for a part-B-mode-brain to say things to another person so that it not only hears itself say the thought, but also may get to hear the other person repeat the thought back a bit later, like being able to look further back in one's notes

living on the edge

figure from http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.1219v1.pdf ..

That black spot is a blister filled with blood. The blood has dried, and I'm told it will be reabsorbed by my body.

Incidentally, if one happened to be trying to smoke pot with a lighter, and they weren't good with lighters, and repeated lighting attempts had caused a blister on their thumb, and they then managed to get high right at the exact moment that the blister on their thumb started filling with blood, it might be scary and disconcerting if such a one had never had a blister fill with blood before, and didn't know whether it required medical attention or not.

It doesn't require medical attention, it turns out.. at least this one didn't.

note to self: in javascript, 1 is greater than null, but not greater than undefined

Dropbox, thank you!!!

Man, I sorely wanted the ability to upload a new version of a file, but only have it overrwrite the previous version if the previous version was the one I thought, as opposed to someone else having put a newer version there between when I read the file and now.

And it didn't seem like they had it. The writeFile method had a lastVersionTag option that it just said was "used for conflict resolution", but I wasn't sure what that meant, and I should have tried it out, but I assumed the net result was successfully overwriting the file.

But I discovered, from the documentation for a non-JavaScript version of the API, that if the lastVersionTag didn't match, dropbox would NOT overwrite the file, but rather add the uploaded file to the same directory as a conflicted version.

Anyway, yay! I'm so happy.. I almost resorted to writing code that could have lost data, after writing code that was sure to not lose data, but involved creating a "lock" file, and was slow, complicated, probably buggy, and vulnerable to either a slight chance of deadlock or a slight chance of inconsistency.. all my options seemed dirty and complicated.

bridging

I tend to think of my mind in two parts: A and B, and I usually think of myself as A, and I think of my subconscious as B.

This distinction is roughly the same as when people talk about things like: left brain vs right brain, or thinking slow vs fast, or thinking logically vs intuitively.

New Theory

• whereas I usually think of part A as sentient, and part B as a sort of helpful external processor, maybe part B is also sentient.
• whereas some messages from part B are essentially solutions to real world problems, like which project should I work on? hm.. that one "seems good", where the sense of "seeming good" is the form of the answer from part B — maybe some messages from part B are essentially saying "Hey! part A! I'm not 'unconscious' in the way you think, I'm intelligent, and I want to talk and be heard and such! Let's chat!"

Channel of Communication

maybe the only way part B can communication is through recognizing patterns in raw sensory inputs, like seeing faces in clouds, and maybe the channel of communication is increased with the following:

• high ratio of ambiguous sensory input to literal input, i.e. "open to interpretation", like: vs 
• ..where this high ratio can also be achieved by relaxing in a quite place with eyes closed, such that the dominant sensory inputs are random static from the body, eyes and ears.
• ..ratio can also be increased by increasing modalities of input, like looking at ambiguous visual art while listening to ambiguous music
• ..ratio can also be increased by being in an environment with a wide selection of inputs, so if the mind isn't finding good patterns in one place, with a simple turn of the head, it can search for patterns somewhere else, or find patterns between images and other things in the environment
• ..ratio can also be increased by looking at inputs that have lots of details at different levels, like fractals, and nature, as more fodder for the mind to find patterns
• relax, seems helpful for allowing for the next two things:
• focus, e.g. keep looking in the same place for a while, giving part B time to find patterns that communicate the message it wants to convey
• open, non-judgmental attitude, since the patterns found by part B will be strange, and will interpret scenes in unusual ways, and it will be easy to reject these interpretations as "not what's actually there"
• "listening", which is sort of the opposite of judging.. actively trying to hear what part B has to say.. I think some religious people may call this "faith", an expectation that a message will present itself, because it's so easy for part A to sort of put a message somewhere that wasn't generated by part B.

Thoughts

• all these activities seem to increase the medium of communication with part B:
• viewing art, hearing music
• being in nature
• meditation
• prayer
• psychedelic drugs — increased focus, lower inhibitions/judgment
• dreaming / lucid dreaming
• hypnosis — though part B's message may not be heard, since the hypnotist will be sort of telling part B what to say
• religious gatherings or motivational speakers — similar to hypnosis, can open communication channel, but because part B can only communicate by interpreting the raw inputs available, the preacher or speaker can manipulate those inputs to influence the interpretation by part A about what's going on
• maybe when people say these things, they're actually hearing part B:
• "this art speaks to me"
• "I prayed, and God spoke to my heart"
• "I meditated, and I could see a deeper connection between things"
• "when I looked at the grand canyon, I was struck with a sense of awe"
• "when I heard that song while high, I felt like it was speaking directly to ME!"
• maybe the "hole in the soul" I've felt, described here, is part B wanting to be acknowledged, and this hole was filled with religion, because part B could masquerade as God, but was left empty when I left religion, because I no longer acknowledge part B as an entity, but rather as a tool

Misinterpretations

If this theory is true, I could see it being misinterpreted in these ways:

• notion of God
• maybe part B just wants to be heard, but doesn't mind being thought of as external to the mind
• super-natural theories, astrology, psychics, conspiracy theories, etc:
• since part B is "only human", it can be wrong
• since part B can only communicate through patterns matched on raw inputs, its messages are open to misinterpretation by part A, and are influenced by the available raw inputs
• since the sense of truth itself is a feeling, it can be generated by part B as a pattern matched on inputs, where part B might invoke the feeling as part of a message, not to be taken literally, or just in a wrong place that it thought was right

Consistent Interpretations

If this theory is true, it seems consistent with these other ways of saying it:

• "you need to let lose and express yourself" — this may be literally true: part B can only communicate and express itself when I "let lose" in the sense of relaxing and opening my mind, and it very much wants to express itself, meaning that if I don't do it, part B will be unhappy and trapped, and may generate feelings of depression
• "you need to love yourself before you can love others" — maybe part B wants to be heard and acknowledged and before that is done, most input will essentially be translated as "hey, I'm this other part of yourself, pay attention to me!"
• "I'm trying to find myself" — usually when someone says this, they don't know quite what they mean, at least I didn't, but according to this theory, it's pretty literal, I need to discover that there's another me inside my brain that wants to be acknowledged as an entity and acknowledge it.
• notion of "living in the now" and "stop and smell the roses" — maybe part B doesn't have memory the same way, where its "memory" is algorithms for solving problems that we might call "understanding" or "intuition", so it's only possible to really "hear" part B in the current moment, and it helps to "stop and smell the roses" to give part B sensory input to pattern-match on top of as a means of communication with part A.

Conclusion

There may literally be another sentient entity within our brains that we don't realize is there, and that wants to be acknowledged and communicated with.

Working on putting pima online so I can access it from my phone. Discovered the Dropbox API, which is accessible from JavaScript — this is very cool — I think it will allow a number of things I've had in mind that require storing data, but I've been worried that people won't trust storing their data with me, since my server might die.

Current issue with Dropbox API is concurrency.. in general I probably won't modify pima from my computer and phone simultaneously, but if I did, I wouldn't want to risk losing any data.. but I'm not sure how to do it elegantly. I'm currently creating a lock file, and the whole operation requires about 6 ajax calls when it should be about 1 or 2..

I tried to find some new music. Usually I take a recommendation from last.fm and try to listen to the whole cd. But not this time. This time, I would listen to one song, or maybe less, and kept going through bands until I found something new that I liked:

Haim!

through the fire and through the flames
you won't even say your name
only I am that I am

but who could ever live that way?

~vampire weekend

thinking through some discussion questions from a friend on right, and thinking through my pima todo items on left

listing todo items by what desires they satisfy, and trying to figure out what I'm stuck on for different todo items. doodles around.

I didn't draw this — a friend drew it. He was teaching me to draw. This was a while ago, at Thanksgiving time.

note about hypnosis: I wonder if I have managed to hypnotise myself, but didn't recognize it.. I've been in a state where my body is going along with suggestions, but my mind knows what's going on, for instance, I tried once to suggest that I wanted to pick up a tennis ball, but couldn't see it, and I did walk around "looking" for the tennis ball, but I could see where it was, and I figured I was just pretending to look around (which I was, in a sense, because I could also stop if I wanted to, and I know that because I did stop at some point thinking I had failed to hypnotise myself because, although I could pretend to walk around trying to find it, I could see it).

But this has happened a number of times, and it is, in some sense, easier in this state for my body to pretend to do whatever is suggested.. and it would also be consistent with what I've seen in hypnosis shows, because all I'm seeing is what people's bodies are doing, not what they themselves are thinking about it, and talking to people, I feel like most people say they were just going along with it for fun, but that they weren't "out of it"..

hm..

a friend's description of the essence of awakening: recognizing that whatever I'm thinking now isn't the final word

note to self: the thing I want to know about the elliptic curve public-key cryptography used in bitcoin is: can you do the same thing with the public key that you can do with RSA, namely, encrypt something such that only the person with the private key can decrypt it? It seems like no, since the public key for bitcoin is essentially just a hash of the private key, rather than a number with a special mathematical relationship to the private key..

notes

I worry about being evil → what is the correct ethic? → what do I want? → when I think I want to be "good", what I really want is respect from people around me (this desire for social approval seems hard-wired), and also not to be punished by having various desires taken away..

I identified various desires, most of which are standard, but a few new things for me:

• the idea that different desires have different extents for pleasure and pain, for instance, the desire for air ranges from extremely uncomfortable if I don't have it, to essentially neutral if I do, whereas the desire for sex ranges from a little uncomfortable (though persistent) if I don't have it, to extremely pleasurable if I do have it.
• sights and sounds in themselves can be somewhat pleasurable, but they can be extremely pleasurable in the form of art and music, but that pleasure seems to tap into other things, beyond the pleasure intrinsic to the sight or sound
• I'm not sure what the raw desires around learning and progress are, but I think two of them are: 1) a desire to realize things I imagine, and 2) a desire to get new input to process

I've been trying a meditation where I try to clear my mind and simply count my breaths. However, thoughts often intrude, but these thoughts are often good, which is why I'm distracted from counting my breaths, so I'm using this as a technique to think.. I'll try to clear my mind until the next idea presents itself, and then I write that down.