This Is Just To Say

@new-ea-cause-area

Plane travel makes me high. No pun intended. When I’m in an airport, or on a plane, I get into a weird hypomanic state where I start feeling great about myself, making grandiose plans, feeling like the world is my oyster. I’m more creative, more ambitious. Sometimes I leverage this to get stuff done (usually write blog posts I’ve been putting off) at the airport or on the plane. Other times I feel confident that I’ll still be able to do all this great stuff when I reach my destination, and am invariably disappointed; a few hours after landing, I go back to being as cautious and unambitious as usual.

I think this kind of thing is why I’m so interested in psychopharmacology. I don’t need some sort of deep transformative advice to turn my life around. I don’t need to reconcile with my true self. There are predictable times when I’m already exactly the person I want to be. If I could be the person I am at airports 100% of the time, I could change the world. I know being that kind of person is possible, because it happens. But I can’t control it. And I always think that surely there must be some minor tweak that I can do to replicate it. There’s nothing magical about airports, it just has to be unlocking some possible brainspace that’s already there. But I just. can’t. find. the. key.

For his death. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it was an OD. (please no one take this out of context, I’m not conceding the point) Cops see a LOT of people on every kind of drug. From putting people in jail overnight for public intoxication to people on PCP trying to fly off buildings. Dealing with this is part of their job, just as much as dealing with criminals is. I’m not saying they have to be able to recognise every single drug reaction, but it IS part of what they routinely deal with. And being on drugs does not carry the death penalty in the US of A. So if someone’s actively dying of an overdose, (or an epileptic seizure, or a heart attack), you do not continue to kneel on that person, you stabilise them and call the paramedics. Again, because being high does not mean that you forfeit your right to life. Sure, if, hypothetically, he did OD it would have been a complicating factor. They may have been confused to some extent. But this isn’t an out-of-left-field occurrence they couldn’t possibly have been aware of. It’s a large part of their job. It wouldn’t absolve them.

for what?

Moses is gone, post Golden Calf

Me, a disgraced academic turned farmer, surveying my crops: Finally... I am out standing in my field

I have the two dumbest horses alive

though I still love Chronicles of Narnia the older I get and the more I learn the clearer it becomes to me why it would have driven Tolkien completely insane

So I was looking up a certain kind of cellular automata on Wikipedia out of curiosity, and then I ended up seeing a link for something called “billiard ball computers”.

So basically it’s a theoretical construction to show nature has results that can be reversible or something. You do have to let the billiards be frictionless, though. So it’s not like you could implement this in real lif-

Um…

This guy???

Wait,, just look at the pictures they have though. The captions refer to crab groups as “swarm balls”, which is a very endearing term IMO.

Unfortunately, these gates take up a lot of space, so to do big computations you’d need lots of crabs and several hundred feet of cardboard.

I used to believe exactly this. A couple was two, several was seven, and a few was three.

Flashing back to when I was a child riding in a car with my grandmother in the Texas Hill Country, insisting to her that just as having “a couple” of something meant you had two of them, having “several” meant you had exactly seven

A helpful guide to some common birds here in the western US

Yes, SO MANY contexts, possibly all of them

“This thing can be hard for some people and I get that, but unfortunately it’s still necessary, so here’s a few tips you can try that might help you deal with it” - You, dear friend, are a good egg and I’m listening intently.

“Urgh, it’s not that hard. You’re just weak and whiney. Just do the thing.” - OP, you’re being an asshole and I’m already three posts down my dash after having made very sure my eyes never alight on your bullshit again, and that’s true even if I personally find the thing simple.

(It’s probably rather obvious what this is about right now, but it’s actually a general point that comes up in multiple contexts. If someone says something is hard for them THAT’S PROBABLY BECAUSE IT’S FUCKING HARD FOR THEM! Maybe drop the “This is ideologically inconvenient for me, so it can’t be true” for two goddamn seconds and acknowledge that you have knowledge of only your own physical and mental sensations and can’t actually derive a full picture of other people’s minds by projecting those sensations onto everybody else. “It’s easy for me” =/= “It’s easy”)