Members' Journals

Scrabble hell, a neologism, and video editing

Had a game of Super Scrabble with catvincent and fragiletender last week, and it was torturous. Imagine the worst game of regular Scrabble you've ever played - and then add three rows onto the board in all directions and double the available letters. What can be Scrabblegasmic can also be sheer, unadulterated misery. We started out with DUMB, because nobody had any longer word - which meant the board was utterly cramped from the get-go. Then we all seemed to draw the most unhelpful letter combinations possible. I kept getting hands that looked like the names of aliens in crap Sci-Fi movies. Somehow, we soldiered on and actually managed to finish the game. I won, barely, and it still didn't make up for the agony. We've now all agreed that when the board is this bad, we're allowed to declare it a loss and start over.

The one bright spot for me was in coining the word "shamlet" - a fake hamlet, as in Celebration, Florida or a ski village. I suppose it could also be a really bad version of the Shakespeare play.

Right now I'm waiting for my video to encode. Yes, that's right. In a burst of possibly misdirected enthusiasm, I'm trying to make a 5-min video clip of an ayahuasca ceremony that I participated in while I was in Peru (it was filmed in nightvision). To do this, I have had to find a DVD ripper, rip the files, and convert them to MPEG-4 so that iMovie can work with them. Mind you, this is all before I've been able to clip the 5 minutes I want; I've had to rip the whole damned thing. This has so far cost me about 4 hours' time and $20 in software, and I haven't even been able to crop the footage yet. Argh. I hope that the folks who see my talk appreciate all this. I thought I got out of the rat-watching business so I could avoid having to do this kind of thing.

On the plus side, some fifteen people have already expressed intention to attend the talk. I've even sold one ticket already, to a regular at my Thursday healing circle. He even gave me an extra pound for my teacher, which is great. Let's hope it's the start of a trend.

I've also heard definitively that I won't be going before my healing certification panel before the beginning of October. They like to have at least 3 candidates before they bother getting a panel together, and I was the first of the new crop. Also, one of the examiners is away all of September. Bleah. But at least I know now and can plan accordingly.

Who will win Texas?

While I agree with some libertarian ideas, I'm not a big fan of Bob Barr. However, he claims that he will win Texas this November and here's why:

The Bob Barr presidential campaign has stated “serious legal consequences” will occur should Senators Barack Obama and John McCain be allowed on the Texas general election ballot after they knowingly missed the state’s deadline to file.

According to documents obtained by the Barr campaign, neither John McCain nor Barack Obama complied with Texas Election Code § 192.031, which requires that filings must be submitted “before 5 p.m. of the 70th day before presidential Election Day,” listing the “names of the party’s nominees for president and vice-president.”

“The Election Code of the State of Texas imposes requirements on a political party, which must be met if its candidates for president and vice-presidents are to appear on the general election ballot,” Russell Verney, Bob Barr’s campaign manager stated in a letter sent to the Texas Secretary of State’s office. “The Democratic Party and Mr. Obama, and the Republican Party and Mr. McCain, blatantly ignored the Texas statutory deadline.”

The deadline, which was set at 5 p.m. on August 26, passed before Sen. Obama was nominated and before Sen. McCain had even selected his running mate.

“The law is clear, and it was clearly not followed,” says Verney. “The Texas Supreme Court was emphatic when it stated that the law ‘does not allow political parties or candidates to ignore statutory deadlines . . .’ Senators Obama and McCain did not file by the deadline; therefore, Texas should abide by the laws it created. No political party or candidate is above the law.”

Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr represented the 7th District of Georgia in the U. S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003.

evangelicals need to stop leading from the neck.

Though it's from the Mormon church's teachings about female roles, it bears mentioning. The relevant teaching is 'a man is the head of the household, and a woman is the neck, and the neck tells the head where to go'.

Needless to say, white american evangelicals operate this way when it comes to the republican party. and it makes me so tired. sarah palin is unqualified, prone to open deceit and misuse of governmental authority, given to vanity (yes i said it), and extremely power-seeking. Her lack of ability in the offices she's held is a problem. And it would be with a man. And it is-- McCain has many of the same problems, and they are among the reasons I don't support him for president.

I really feel that Obama's the only person running for Prez or Veep (who's admitted to being a Christian) who has actually been behaving according to the qualifications for eldership laid out in Timothy and Titus.

But Palin's getting some kind of pass from people who would otherwise be quite irate that a woman was trying to raise five kids with a husband who travels for work all the time and with her own job that requires long hours away from home. And the loathing and disgust towards Obama, who has been nothing but honorable towards the competitors, conducting himself as a Christian ought, trying to campaign on issues and never speak ill of McCain or Palin-- it appalls me. He's the one living their freaking values-- living MY freaking values-- and they act like he doesn't deserve the respectful disagreement he has accorded everyone else in this process.

I would be much relieved if evangelicals were saying 'i don't agree with obama's politics, but he is a decent fellow'. It would be true, and it would be much more Christian than rejoicing in Palin's twenty minutes of vitriol, or McCain's attack ads, or just delighting in an entire convention devoted to rudeness.

Where's the Christly love in celebrating hours of rude words towards obama specifically and much of the country more generally?

Where's the realisation that you can't rely on secular institutions (ESPECIALLY NOT POLITICIANS) to further God's Kingdom on earth? The Bible warns and warns and warns against that hubris. Even evangelicals who should totally know better talk of 'electing leaders who will push this nation in the direction we as (white) Christians want it going in'. and that is clearly Biblically wrong, so incredibly wrong i just want to rent a van and drive across the US smacking sense into white evangelicals everywhere, with a copy of the Geneva, even (more accurate than the kjv among older translations).

I am sick of white evangelicals trying to lead from the neck and push some goofy non-Biblical agenda that has only to do with their self-righteous pride and nothing at all to do with God. And it's just exhausting me because there are two more months and i seriously want to confront them on this hypocrisy, but i don't know how to begin-- the prospect seems so exhausting.


bluh.

I like this post.

http://incognomen.blogspot.com/2008/09/who-would-jesus-vote-for.html

but then, i like my husband.

OFFLINE

I am offline until Mid/Late September.

Cell phone only.

If you need or want to contact me, see my stalker's page on my profile

*NOT READING LJ* if it's important, please contact me directly.


Back to your regular scheduled reading.

We are this stream

Your Daily Meditation </h1></div>

http://www.amidabuddha.org/news/04Sep2008.html

fall out boy's new song ♥

air buddy

You've probably seen those "personal air purifiers" for sale that you're supposed to wear around your neck on airplanes and other contained places. This NTSB report sums up the device nicely:

The device was described as an "Ecoquest Fresh Air Buddy Personal Air Purifier." According to a sales brochure, it "generates an intense electrostatic ion wind that charges floating particles in the 'breathing zone.' The particles are substantially repelled away from the wearer, creating an almost particle-free 'exclusion zone' for toxic allergens, smoke, dust, viruses, and bacteria. Perfumes and odors can also be minimized by the ion particle-charging-effect."

Why is the NTSB explaining what an Ecoquest Fresh Air Buddy Personla Air Purifier is? It caused the emergency landing of a Continental Airlines 737-800 when it blew up on the guy wearing it:

The passenger who was seated in 23A told airport officials he had purchased the personal "ionizer" approximately two months ago. He admitted he had taken photographs using his Sprint Trio 700 camera phone. He said he had put the camera phone away and was sitting in his seat when he heard "a hissing-type noise" and heard a "popping sound: with a flash "about 12 inches in diameter" directly in front of him. Smoke poured from the device and he pulled it from around his neck and dropped it between the seats. Examination revealed a quarter-size hole in his shirt and a red area on his chest approximately 2 to 3 inches in diameter.

The One Button Mouse

After upgrading to a 3G iPhone, Nugget was nice enough to lend me his 2G iPhone to see if I like it. I really want to like the iPhone. It is so small, beautiful, and fun. My Treo 680 (less than 2 years old) is ugly, clunky, and it's clear that there has been no development on the operating system this century. I love the iPhone, in fact, with the exception of the things I use a phone for the most -- email and text messaging. I've sent 553 emails and 3,000 text messages from my Treo in the past 90 days (I was on vacation for about 2 weeks of that). It is really, really, really good at that.

Here's the deal with email:

Unlike the Blackberry or Treo, there is no LED on the iPhone to indicate if you have a new email -- you can't glance at your phone and know if you should check it. You have to click a button, do the slide thing, click the home button again if you're not already in mail, look at the Mail icon to see if there's a red circle with a white number in it. If there is, you click on it, then navigate out of the message you were last in to your Inbox. Oh, and IMAP IDLE doesn't work, so even if it says you don't have mail, you should probably go through the whole exercise anyway to force it to check your mail.

If you (like most people) have multiple email accounts and want to view a second inbox, you then have to press four buttons to navigate to the other inbox. Click on the account you're currently in (why?), click on "Accounts," click on the other account, click on "Inbox." There is no way to view multiple mailboxes at once like you can do on your Blackberry, Treo, PocketPC, or whatever. I'm just glad I don't have three accounts.

On my Treo, if the light is green, I click the mail button above the keyboard and it takes me to the summary view of emails in all accounts. It's infinitely easier and you only have to glance at the phone to know if you should bother looking any further.

Since there is no keyboard, you don't have keyboard shortcuts. When in my inbox or viewing an email message, there is no shortcut to group reply vs reply, delete only on device, flag for reply, mark junk, lock, etc. I don't even think those things are possible. You have to click graphical icons to do even simple tasks like move a message to a folder. Oh, and if you do a ton of email and have lots of folders, expect to scroll through all of them every time since there doesn't appear to be a way to select favorite folders, collapse trees, etc. Again, no keyboard, so I can't enter the first letter of the folder I want to jump to. I can type "m-p-[enter]" on my Treo in about 1/3rd a second to move a message to my "Payroll" folder. On the iPhone, it takes about 6 seconds to click "Save to folder," scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, and then click on the folder. Only 18 times slower.

If you're wondering about the keyboard, the iPhone's keyboard is the new "one button mouse" -- an unusual decision that people will vehemently defend and argue that they prefer until Apple releases a phone with a real keyboard.

Ultimately, if you don't have to deal with a lot of email for work or are satisfied with the functionality of the AOL mail program, the iPhone is for you. Sadly, I think I'll have to put my SIM card back in my Treo 680 tonight.

Reading the mind in the eyes

Is literature necessary? What is its evolutionary function?
Recent studies suggest that reading fiction enhances our social skills and capacities for empathy and personality change. After assessing how much fiction participants in one study routinely read, investigators Maja Djikic, Raymond Mar, and Keith Oatley, of the University of Toronto in Canada, asked them to take a "mind-in-the-eyes test," which measures empathy and social acumen. Fiction readers showed substantially greater empathy and interpersonal perception in the test than non-fiction readers did. "I liken fiction to a simulation that runs on the software of our minds," says investigative psychologist Keith Oatley. "Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories, and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life." See the Journal of Research in Personality 40.5 and the Creativity Research Journal 20.4. You'll find the mind-in-the-eyes test here.

i want the MSM to focus on palin's alaska-secession like they did michelle obama's america comments.

pretty much. if they could pick on michelle's comments about being proud to call herself american, they should be ready to ride herd on palin's desire to secede from the USA, which is just way more unpatriotic.

less babygate, more secession-gate!

Book review: Nine Ways to Walk Around a Boulder, Juliet Erickson

subtitle: Using communication skills to change your life

In this book, Erickson outlines strategies for overcoming what she calls "boulders" - seemingly immovable objects that get in the way of achieving goals. They can range from a fear of public speaking to not knowing how to deliver bad news or how to clear up a misunderstanding. Much of the time we try to avoid these boulders or push and shove against them, even though we know from past experience that it won't do any good. Erickson offers simple, straightforward advice on how to deal with such things by working around them. Her nine ways include:

- Fix the physical - posture and gestures may be getting you into trouble
- Confrontation is an invitation - it doesn't have to end in tears
- Knowing when not to - invaluable and rarely taught
- Getting comfortable with silence

She is not concerned with deep psychological causes of behaviour, rather with concrete strategies for identifying and changing unhelpful patterns for more useful ones. Identification is, of course, key.

While the book is very much intended for business situations, the lessons within are equally applicable to everyday life. I'm going to reread it carefully.

Book review: The Shaman's Last Apprentice

This is the autobiographical account of a British woman who went to the Peruvian Amazon in 1997 and became the last apprentice of a shaman there. She starts out in Machu Picchu in the tourism industry, but it goes sour for her and she has a vision directing her to Iquitos (the same area where I spend my time in Peru). Once in Iquitos, she waits around, feeling less and less convinced that she is in the right place. She plans to leave for Colombia, even gets waitlisted on a boat, but then meets a guide who introduces her to the shaman she will be working with. Over the next six months or so, she goes through a kind of accelerated apprenticeship, as the shaman is in poor health and doesn't expect to live much longer. On the way, she encounters a variety of obstacles to be overcome. She has a website and apparently is now organising trips to the jungle to visit her teacher's family.

I was interested in this because my experiences in Peru have been at least grossly similar. It was useful to get another perspective on the experience of being a female apprentice to an Amazonian healer. A lot of it rang bells with me while some of it was wildly different - which is to be expected. I really should get on and write up my own stuff, though I feel like I should wait until I get back from my next trip to Peru this (northern) winter.

Science snacks

Fatty food cravings linked to childhood ear infections

Ruins of ancient Amazon cities discovered

Dogs not just stupid wolves

Evolution in action

( Keep your head when others lose theirs )

i got put In Charge at church

i'm not a member, but my husband (who is a member) and i were picked to lead a ministry we both are regular participants in, and one that is apparently needful to the church.

i don't like being in charge of stuff, nor does my husband, whose battle cry is that he's subversive, not authoritative. i feel like God is not letting us run from responsibility here, but I don't have to like it right now.

i have said the campus i go to is like a church plant, but the phrase 'baby church' is more accurate (the current deacon's wife phrased it that way).

as husband said, 'we have some immature white people here'. they literally will not pick up a piece of trash unless someone tells them to.

and that's part of why i hate being assigned a lead role. i worry about being the church mammy, since i am quite literally the only black person there on a weekly basis (and the only black woman there on a quarterly basis).

although God speaks in strange ways. after being appointed a co-lead (it is actually not usual for them to assign a couple as lead, but in our case it is actually optimal), i found out some really relevant information about another lead, something i could give counsel on. so maybe there's other reasons we are called to lead here.

it's just tiring right now. people are not very take-charge, the obligations keep changing (the joys of a leased space), and all the 'reliable' people are reaching burnout stage (including ourselves).

we just need strength to get through the next few months.

Gustav

Hurricane Gustav has the Gulf Coast in its sights. The forecast is currently showing landfall sometime tomorrow morning. It appears that the storm will be either a strong category 3 or a weak category 4 hurricane upon landfall. While this storm is weaker than Katrina was a few years ago, the difference is that this time New Orleans will be in the NE quadrant of the system. The NE quadrant is where the strongest winds and storm surge usually are since hurricane circulation is counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere. It is my hope that we've learned some lessons from several years ago.

Political Leadership?

I'm taking a bold step and applying to the Michigan Political Leadership Program. I have no idea where this could lead or if I've even got a shot, but I could become an academic-turned-politician.

Games: Castle Crashers

As I mentioned before, I bought an xbox 360. I think I am now dating it due to the sheer amount of time I have spent with it in the past month. Look forward to save-the-date cards with Mr. and Mrs. Johnstone-360 in the near future.

That being said, there are many great titles that I need to play through. I finished Halo 3 on legendary (with a little help from my friends), got the "completionist" achievement on Mass Effect, and the Chewnicorn on Viva Pinata. I have started GTA IV, BioShock, Assassin's Creed, Forza 2 and Too Human.

So what game do I chose to play?

( Castle Crashers )
* I did not make the dancing knights and I have no idea who did. If you know, please tell me so I can credit them.

Been busy...

Haven't been posting much, and here's why:

In the past week, I have

- given one private healing and one public one

- found and booked a room for my next Peru talk (1 October, Westbury-on-Trym Village Hall)

- designed and printed a flyer advertising same

- arranged to borrow a projector for the talk (thanks to vogelbeere and partner)

- begun the process of opening a business bank account for the vast sums that will doubtless accrue to me when Malabar Wellness starts to take off

- committed to translate my teacher's new website into English

- also promised to try and find someone to organise group trips to Peru to see my teacher

This is along with working out 5 days a week, etc.

Still not much by full-time standards, but it's plenty for me.

Book review: The Field, Lynne McTaggart

subtitle: The quest for the secret force of the universe

This 2001 book has excited a fair amount of controversy. It summarizes research by scientists working at some well-known institutions who have encountered data that don't fit into most conventional models of the universe. Starting with Edgar Mitchell's participation in ESP experiments while orbiting the moon, McTaggart covers a variety of topics and labs, from Bernard Haisch and Alfonso Rueda's work on inertia to Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ's studies on psychic abilities in the 1970s, through controversial biologist Jacques Benveniste (who in 1988 published results that seemed to provide a mechanism for homeopathy) to a host of others. What all of them have in common, she argues, is that they are looking at the effects of "The Field" - the zero-point energy field that results from minuscule perturbations in the vacuum.

Zero-point energy was first proposed by Einstein and others in the context of black-body radiation, before quantum mechanics were elaborated. The idea languished under the quantum shadow until the 1960s, when British physicist Trevor Marshall and, separately, American Timothy Boyer resurrected it by considering which quantum phenomena might be explained using solely classical physics plus an assumed classical representation of a zero-point field with zero-point energy.

Science writer Marcus Chown puts it this way:

The best understood of all the fields, and the one with the greatest bearing on the everyday world because it glues together the atoms in our bodies - not to mention all other normal matter - is the electromagnetic field. The electromagnetic field can undulate in an infinite number of different ways, each oscillation "mode" corresponding to a wave with a different wavelength . Think of the waves at sea, which can range all the way from huge, rolling waves down to tiny ripples.

Naively, the vacuum of empty space would be expected to contain no electromagnetic waves whatsoever. And this would be true but for the small matter of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. According to the principle, every conceivable oscillation of the electromagnetic field must contain at least a minimum amount of energy. This seemingly innocuous rule has dramatic and profound implications for the vacuum because it means that each of the infinite number of possible oscillation modes of the electromagnetic field must be jittering with the minimum energy dictated by the uncertainty principle. In other words, the existence of each mode is not simply a possibility, it is a certainty. Far from being empty, the "quantum vacuum" is a fantastically choppy sea of fluctuating fields .

These quivering fields, known as "quantum", or "zero-point", fluctuations, can manifest themselves in a truly remarkable way. Recall that fundamental particles are nothing more than localised hummocks in nature's underlying fields. Consequently, the choppy sea of the vacuum is continually conjuring particles into existence like microscopic rabbits out of hats. Known as "virtual particles", they have only a fleeting existence, popping into existence for far less than the blink of an eye before popping back out again.

Haisch began thinking about the intriguing possibility that the quantum vacuum might have something to do with inertial mass in February 1991. The trigger was a talk he attended by Alfonso Rueda of California State University in Long Beach. It was about "stochastic electrodynamics".

According to the idea, first devised in the 1960s, the quantum vacuum is absolutely central to the creation of the world. Ultimately, all the bizarre "quantum" behaviour of microscopic particles can be traced back to the relentless buffeting they receive from the ceaselessly churning quantum vacuum.

And it looks like the "rubber sheet" model of the universe can be seen as a direct correspondent to the ZPG (though, as the physicists will point out, it's not all that accurate, either). *

So far, so straightforward. The fun (and controversy) starts when McTaggart begins speculating about the implications of the ZPF. If there's this field permeating the vacuum, bumping particles around, then everything can be conceptualised as flotsam in the quantum sea. Therefore, everything must be connected to everything else at the fundamental level. This could explain extrasensory and paranormal phenomena, as well as more common experiences like creativity - some people just have more developed abilities to tap into "The Field", which is equated with the collective unconscious. It would go a long way toward explaining how many complementary therapies work, and I for one would love to believe it.

McTaggart is a good writer, and she imbues her subject matter with personality. It's an enjoyable read, and I was very excited about some of the ideas she put forward. Then I started looking at the science. McTaggart makes no claims to be a scientist, so perhaps she is unaware of the need to distinguish her speculations (and those of the scientists she writes about) clearly in the text. Though the speculations are fascinating - I was especially interested in the possibility of exposing water to the electronic signature of a chemical and then using it in place of the chemical, with identical results - she should have been more cautious in her statements. There is still a lot of interesting food for thought here, although it has been sensationalised a bit. It certainly makes me want to go check out the original papers.


* In the "rubber sheet" model, an object placed on the sheet invariably forms a gravity well. In fact, it's the curvature that's important - it could just as easily be a hump.

NB: I got a lot of the physics info from here and here.