I had a lucid dream this morning.

Some days ago I listened to an episode of RadioLab that talked a bit about lucid dreaming, and one thing they gave as an example for how to "rehearse" for a lucid dream is by often during the day just stop to think "is this a dream?" Sometimes I remember that episode and that idea of checking if you are awake or in a dream, and if I remember to, I'll do that. The idea is that if that thought occurs to you in your dream, you will become aware that you are dreaming (Inception, basically :P) and if you come to realise "hey, this is a dream I'm having" you can take control of your dream and have fun with it :P

I think I was pretty far along in the dream before all of a sudden I just went "is this a dream?" and then for a while all I could do was keep saying "this is a dream." In my dream I was at work, sort of, I was supposed to deliver papers to a building that I deliver papers to in my waking-life job too. But it was not dark, and there were other people around. And someone else had gone before me and but big rocks in everyone's door mailslot things. She couldn't get them all the way through, so it was incredibly annoying to have to move the rocks before being able to put the newspaper through. I met her in the corridor where she was trying to figure out if she could get the rocks in by turning them at different angles (in fact, she could :P) and she explained to me that she was doing this because she was celebrating... something. Like a holiday of some sort. When I came out of there, on the yard I realised that I should go back. And I was really annoyed that I would have to do that. And I wanted to convince myself that I didn't have to go back and do the papers again. There was also some other women talking to me in the yard. And that's when it hit me: this is a dream. And I told the women that this is a dream, but they didn't say anything to that. So I realised that since this is a dream, I don't have to go back to the building.

Not particularly exciting, I know :P But my dreams are often really stressful and compulsive, like there is something I have to do, I'm supposed to do something, and usually it's something really small and pointless or uncomfortable. More often than not it's work-related. So it was so nice to be able to say "...wait, this is a dream, I don't have to do that!"

The Feltron Annual Report:
http://feltron.com/ar06_01.html (this is for 2006)

Learnt about through 99% Invisible, of which I learnt about through RadioLab (of course)
http://99percentinvisible.org/post/7604541347/episode-31-the-feltron-annual-report-press-play

I got an email from Terry Gilliam XD

TERRY GILLIAM
South Quay Plaza
183 Marsh Wall
London
E14 9SR

I am Terry Gilliam, British citizen and Principal assurance manager for the HSBC in London. I have an urgent business proposal for your consideration and acceptance that I wish to discuss with you.. Should you be of interested in this business, please kindly contact me via my personal email to enable me furnish you with more information and modalities of this business. My Contact Email: tgilliam231@cap-skirring.com

If we can be of one accord, we should plan a meeting, soon.

I await your response.

Respectfully,

Terry Gilliam


No references to Monty Python or Brazil or even Dr. Parnassus? You're being too modest, Mr. Gilliam. Though I was under the assumption that you were American (or maybe he has finally got British citizenship and that's why he's so keen to emphasize it :P)

Y'know how there's all those questionnaires doing the rounds on the internet, where you put your own answers on them... Here's the ultimate, most difficult one.

A) What are your ambitions for your life?
I don't really have any as such. o.O The closest answer I can give you is "to be happy" in the situations that I end up in. Things that I would like to see change in my current situation are country of residence (this is really the only big one), and marital status. Aka I want to move away from Finland asap, and I'd like to get married some day (but if not that's fine too). I don't really have a dream job nor any huge achievements I want to do in life... Some little ones: I would like to have a Christmas tree where every decoration is different from all the other ones, I would like to eat ethically grown foie gras (it exists somewhere in Spain), I would like to have a lifelong membership in the Long Now Foundation, I would like to have a tower in my house (with a spiral staircase up it).

B) What are you doing about it?
Right now, in order to be happy, I am: working in a job that suits me for now, paying off my student loan (this will also lead to the change in country eventually), studying and reading books and writing and making art and thinking interesting thoughts, everything I do with my dog, developing an interesting relationship with an interesting person (which might lead to the change in marital status), talking to loved ones and friends, eating chocolate.
I am also gathering Christmas decorations for my tree, but the other small things have to wait in the back of my mind right now, their time is not yet.


Copy and paste with your own answers :3

I listened to an older episode of RadioLab called "Unraveling Bolero". It's an incredibly fascinating story about a woman who had the same thing happen in her brain as Maurice Ravel. She even got obsessed with the Bolero and then made a painting of it - and the researchers reckon she and Ravel had the same deadly disease and that in a way Bolero was a symptom of it. Part of the progress of the disease is that one forgets words.

It was a well-timed episode to make iippo paranoid, because some days ago I had a real struggle remembering words Armenia and Argentina, and all last night I could not for the life of me remember the name of the city of Västerås. I actually didn't remember it at all, I looked it up on the map of Sweden, and... I didn't recognise it. At all. I re-learnt it. Somewhere along the line my brain has decided that the name Västerås is useless information and dropped it. Which makes me sad because it featured quite prominently in my life at that time because our district leader was there when I was in Örebro. I remember the names of all the other cities in Sweden where my district leader was (Visby, Örnsköldsvik, Kungsbacka (though I did have to think really hard to remember the last one, but then again I wasn't that close with the DL who served there...)) plus the names of a whole bunch of other less prominent cities in Sweden. But not Västerås.

I guess the more upsetting part of this is not that I'd forgotten it (I forget stuff all the time), but that it didn't come back with that "Västerås! Of course! :D" Instead, when I looked at the map it was "huh, I would never in a million years have been able to remember that, it doesn't look even vaguely familiar... But it must be true, since it's right there and I do remember people saying that word at times..." It's strangely distressing. Usually I have this happen when my mum says things like "you did this, don't you remember, when you were in high school" and I'm like "I haven't the faintest, it doesn't even sound familiar" - but that's fine since high school is something I'd rather erase from memory all together anyway, so the more bits of it that go missing the better. But the mission is something I want to remember forever, all of it.

Now obviously I don't have progressive aphasia or anything that Ravel and this woman had, just in case you were wondering. It was just very interestingly timed.

http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/jun/18/unraveling-bolero/

Here, have some Bolero: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWcpw3GAAms

My monies came - apparently it was some sort of a bank glitch. *sigh* Electronic funds transfers: providing easy access to heart attacks since #### -_-;

Yesterday I listened to an episode of RadioLab shorts, about Argentine ants. It was quite fascinating - apparently Argentine ants are basically a world-wide super-colony of ants that won't fight each other, because they are racists and don't breed with other colonies, ever (listen to the episode yourself to make sense of this) - but the episode started with them describing the practical way this research is done: they find some ants in the wild and put them in a bowl with an ant from the lab. Usually they smell each other and then leave each other alone (they are from the same super-colony and therefore are friends). But in this description - so this is a person talking on radio, telling what he sees - they were at the warzone, at the edge where two separate Argentine ant colonies meet, and they put an enemy ant in the bowl with the lab ant and they had at each other and ripped each other to shreds. And this kind of curious sounding voice describing these ants murdering each other almost made me cry.

And today, I started listening to another one. I have it paused midway at the moment, because the person - a man who studies crickets (I know right, what's with the bugs, RadioLab?) - just described how he accidentally wounded one of his lab crickets, and the cricket, noticing there was innards, started eating itself >.< Not sure if I want to listen to the end of this episode.

Where r mai monies?!?!? D: It is the 15th, I am supposed to be paid on the 15th, there are no monies on my account! And I really needed it to come today in order to sort out travel for September >.<

Consistency is all I ask! And yet it is too much to ask :/

"...humans are incorrigibly inconsistent in making summary judgments of complex information. When asked to evaluate the same information twice, they frequently give different answers. The extent of the inconsistency is often a matter of real concern. Experienced radiologists who evaluate chest X-rays as 'normal' or 'abnormal' contradict themselves 20% of the time when they see the same picture on separate occasions. A study of 101 independent auditors who were asked to evaluate the reliability of internal corporate audits revealed a similar degree of inconsistency. A review of 41 separate studies of the reliability of judgments made by auditors, pathologists, psychologists, organizational managers, and other professionals suggests that this level of inconsistency is typical, even when a case is reevaluated within a few minutes. Unreliable judgments cannot be valid predictors of anything."

Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking Fast and Slow"

When I buy second-hand books on Amazon, I always check if the particular place I'm buying from has any of the other books I have put on hold, and then if they do, I get a bunch all at once. I don't know if this saves in shipping, but it saves in waiting time and hassle when you get only one packages of many books, rather than many packages with one book.

So I'd done this and ordered five books. And since stuff comes from the USA, it takes ages to get here. To the point where I've usually forgotten about it before it arrives (and then it's a pleasant surprise! :D) But instead of five books, I got three. >:C So I contacted the seller saying "I only got three of these, these two books were missing. Are they for some reason in a different package? If not, I'd really rather you send them to me now." Ah well, at least the two books intended for a birthday present arrived, so I can proceed to wrap them up, all ready for September.

I'm still not really into this internet thing yet. It's strange. I think (hope) it's the heat. It's too hot in here.

I have a sad again. :/ I thought I just had one really recently.
Thank goodness my sister doesn't want to do anything but watch movies either. Being blue is the best mood for me to watch movies in because no movie will suck. I am completely unable to be critical about movies when feeling low. Any blinking, colourful light will do to keep me from just bludgering in my mind.

Online fasting.

Last Wednesday I was on a bus and I decided to not get on the internet anymore for a time. So for the last week I've been rather diligently keeping away from here. In this time I finished reading "The Diary of a Nobody", the play "Abraham Lincoln", Jane Austen's "Temptation", a 12-story collection of Sherlock Holmes stories (I forget which collection it was, I'll check later) and started "Moby Dick" and am absolutely loving it so far. I've made progress in my black-out poems, in the adaptation of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Hamlet Are Dead (that shall be the title I think), helped my mum and aunt to put threads in the loom again, helped the missionaries, and have come across a book called "The Eternal Woman" which is a culture-historical research about the roles of women written by some pre-1950s German man (and it's delightfully insanely politically incorrect and old-fashioned and I'm not sure if it can be read as science at all but it's just... delightful). Oh and went to work too, of course. And knitted. And I think I drew Jason Isaacs during this time too.

Anyway, my point is, I'm loving my freewheelin' ways of not logging in that much, so if I seem scarce again, this is why.

Also, it is way too hot in here. I hate summer, please to be autumn now?

Amg more awesome science :O http://www.delanceyplace.com/view_archives.php?2018

Excerpt:
"But what our work demonstrated first and foremost is that you don't need to shoot a chemical up someone's nose, or have sex with them, or even give them a hug in order to create the surge in oxytocin that leads to more generous behavior. Fortunately, all you have to do to trigger this Moral Molecule is give someone a sign of trust. When one person extends himself to another in a trusting way, the person being trusted experiences a surge in oxytocin that makes her less likely to hold back, and less likely to cheat. Which is another way of saying that the feeling of being trusted makes a person more ... trustworthy. Which, over time, makes other people more inclined to trust, which in turn ..."

Wait. It's mathematics but not arithmetics? >.< Consistency, dammit!

Here's some real science for you: http://iopscience.iop.org/0143-0807/33/5/1321/article

Do you have a flag? >:P

Have you seen the new Batman yet?
I have to make a comment, I can't keep it in. Don't necessarily look if you haven't seen it yet.

The awesome folks over at Planet Money also decided to play "imagine a new system of taxation" and they did it much better than I did.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/18/156928675/episode-387-the-no-brainer-economic-platform

My suggestion for the bumper sticker: "Don't vote with your wallet. Vote with sound economic principles. Vote for {Planet Money's fake candidate}!"

It's so interesting that Britain is not in the euro (and therefore not as much in trouble because of the Euro crisis as the rest of us) but still managed to have their own banking crisis at the same time. So the City is losing its face and the trust of the public at the same time as the Eurozone gets more and more distrustful of each other. I dunno, it just seems kind beautiful, sort of a "we're in this together, and if you try to avoid our problems, you'll have your own." By beautiful I of course mean scary and sad. But beautiful nonetheless.

So hey you know how there was a point when everyone was doing those questionnaires in their diaries? Here's a really cool list of questions though it isn't quite like those questionnaires.
http://www.marcandangel.com/2011/12/04/95-questions-to-help-you-find-meaning-and-happiness/

I'll probably try to answer them all eventually, they're kinda hard questions.

Homigash! http://zoom.it/l3dq
And then another homigash! at the service that website provides! A really easy way to access humongous images? :D

Dear junkforumites: I had no forum replies at all when I logged in today. This is a worrisome thing considering I have a lot of the threads on watch and I wasn't here at all on Sunday. You guys are getting lax. Except Viking, because he doesn't like fish.

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Tate Modern has just become even cooler :O They have that astonishing Turbine Hall turned into an exhibition space of ginormous proportions, and now they have started using the underground oil tanks for performance/installation/stuff in dark space. And while the tanks are huge too, they have an intimate feel.
http://www.visitlondon.com/events/detail/24069906-tate-oil-tanks

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Weird: today I looked up the etymology of 'egads' (in case it's too rude to use - it's not) and ended up in the Wikipedia article of minced oaths, and then few hours later on the radio was the Thought for the Day and the person talking did his entire bit on minced oaths. o.O I go from not knowing anything about this concept of minced oaths to learning it twice within 3 hours.

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Imagine if the government would adopt the kickstarter approach to taxes. You choose yourself what you want to support and by how much, and according to that you get the services. So in order to get a library card, you need to donate amount to the library tax, in order to get your bin emptied you donate amount to that tax. If you support the subsidies for the farmers, you get cheaper food at the shop, if you support the railroad tax, you get cheaper travel. Maybe the fire fighter tax would have to be non-optional, seeing how letting your house burn down might make the fire spread to other houses... <_< But the police tax would work, if you want help from the police if you get crimed on, you need to pay your tax. Even if that Kickstarter approach was combined with a tiny basic tax percent from which money can be put towards important things that don't get their funding through their kickstarter.

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The second issue of the Racket is up. http://theracket.com/ Its theme is exile. The first one's was Self-improvement. I think they are following me... >_> Anyhoo, will link to specific articles if I come across some that need specific linking.

Also, Kimbra's new video Two Way Street: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SH0pVVBmN0
I love her. She puts to music and words the things that I feel.

My aunt gave me a violin. Noise is about to follow.
And I know violin is one of those instruments that you need to start young in order to get anywhere blabla. My mum was really surprised when I said yes when my aunt offered it to me. But it's not really so much about that I want to learn to play the violin in any kind of serious way. It's more the fact that I want the object to be near me. I want to be surrounded by objects that live. Musical instruments do this very much so. People touch them and they come to life. Art does it too, except not by touch but by sight. Books come to life, they are imbued with life through and through. I don't even care if a book is written in a language I can understand, it breathes, that is enough. Machines live, even parts of machines. Clothes live, especially second-hand ones (everything second-hand is more alive than new things). Things made out of bone, out of wood, out of stone. Some things made out of glass, some things made out of paper. Very few things made out of plastic. Is it selfish to want to live amongst living things, even if I can't make them come alive? Maybe it is.

I want to live in a house where there are as few plastic things as possible. Also, wanting the violin was a little bit selfish, in a future kind of sense. If/when I have kids I want them to be able to try everything. Every instrument, every sport, every art form. Try all the things! So having an old violin in the house, that the kid can look at, touch, be charmed by and eventually say "mum... I want to play the violin". That's the point, I guess. My house never had a violin. We had a piano. I ended up playing the piano as a kid. I want to provide options. And if at the time we are too broke to buy the kid a kid-violin, then s/he'll just get to learn on a hundred-year-old one :P

I also have been watching a lot of Sherlock. So maybe an appearance of the violin was a little bit too serendipitous to let just slide :P