// μ = m // dayvan cowboy // music is math

BTW I’m okay now. From that crazy desperate rant. I’m happy, plans for my birthday are going ok, etc. I think I had Ritalin withdrawals that day. My Ritalin schedule had been hectic the days before, so that explains most of the weirdness. Maybe I need some more clonazepam to make for the anxiolytic effect of Seroquel. I am excited about getting out of antipsychotics, but I’m also kinda excited about everything. I’m starting to feel like I don’t need sleep, et cetera. I’m glad I have a girlfriend to keep me in reigns somewhat. I mean, I’ll do my best, even if it means running away from the possible hypomania that’s attracting me like crazy, to be “normal” and good for her — she’s  been so good for me. But I actually thought of skipping Seroquel today because I couldn’t find the blister pack. Then I couldn’t sleep and found’em.  I don’t know how much clonazepam I’ve taken yesterday or today. It’s 02:19 and I still feel I can wake okay at 07:45 if it’s the correct music (right now, “Over and over” by Hot Chip). But taking Ritalin right (or kinda, I’ve been too much in a hurry to split the 10mg pill so I instead take the 10mg straight and take a half pill (5mg) five hours later.

Hypomania’s calling. I’m trying my best to ignore it. Go away. You’re not welcome. (Boy, I miss the really good manias but that’ll fuck me up right now, risk my relationship and my job). Go away. I have other ways to self-destruct that don’t involve superconfident hypomanias. I’m trying my best to self-destruct in a healthy way, in a way that leads to transcendence. GO AWAY!

IF YOU PLAN ON WATCHING THE OLYMPICS

(There are photographs I couldn’t bring myself to post because I just can’t look at them once again. I’m still shaking and shivering from having had a glimpse of a woman whose left breast is completely trashed out from electric torture — the right breast is blurred away, probably from being even more shocking. There’s a link at the end of this post that you must look at if you’re going to watch the olympics and rooting for your nationals. It’s a flash slideshow with pictures I can’t bear to think about again, let alone describe into mere words. These are just the soft ones.)

href=”http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ASA17/089/2008/en/824a9d66-5724-11dd-90eb-ff4596860802/asa170892008eng.html”>The olympic principle is betrayed by China’s broken promises.

Shortly after awarding the Games to Beijing in 2001, Jacques Rogge, President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) publicly stated his expectation that hosting the Olympics would improve China’s human rights record, adding that the IOC would act if human rights were not acted upon to their satisfaction.⁶Since then, the IOC has continued to maintain the public line that China is making progress on human rights.⁷On 23 March 2008, Jacques Rogge issued a statement reaffirming that the Olympic Games are a ‘force for good⁸

Rogge is full of air:

However, the IOC has shown a reluctance to follow up on such statements and speak out on human rights in the context of the preparations for the Games in a more specific, consistent and forceful way. Amnesty International believes it is not appropriate to publicly refer to progress in certain areas, while ignoring a marked deterioration in others. Most recently, on 8 July 2008, during an inspection visit to Beijing, Hein Vebruggen, Chairman of the IOC’s Coordination Commission for Beijing 2008, declared that the Chinese authorities had set a “gold standard for the future” with its preparations for the Games.⁹While alluding to the importance of broadcasting freedom during the Games, he failed to mention any specific human rights violations connected with the preparations, adding simply that “a very small number of open issues remain – such as some matters with our broadcasters and our need to see how temporary measures in the city will make an impact on air quality”.¹⁰

“Some matters with broadcasters” aren’t a minor issue.

Boicote às olimpíadas já! http://tinyurl.com/6da4n2

Exformation is, selon Wikipedia, “explictly discarded information”. Quoth the aforementioned.

“Exformation is everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when, or before, we say anything at all - whereas information is the measurable, demonstrable utterance we actually come out with.”

“In 1862 the author Victor Hugo wrote to his publisher asking how his most recent book, Les Misérables, was getting on. Hugo just wrote “?” in his message, to which his publisher replied “!”, to indicate it was selling well. This exchange of messages would have no meaning to a third party because the shared context is unique to those taking part in it. The amount of information (a single character) was extremely small, and yet because of exformation a meaning is clearly conveyed.

Kottke posits that “the more exformation you generate, the better your writing, design, art, photography, or blog blog journal ging blog journal -keeping blog journal-keeping will be”. Yet I felt exformation was the problem before I knew I was manic-depressive (yes, the kind you medicate; that should be exformation and yet I have to explain lest someone reads just this post and thinks I’m a self-diagnosed poser kid or something) and got around the introspective period where I figure out what went wrong in my social life given that new piece of data. I thought I was high-functioning autistic — a different brand of person,  neurodiversity yadda yadda yadda — and thus carried much exformation when communicating that wasn’t received by other people. A good friend actually draw a picture where two people were exchanging information with two arrows, back and forward, while I was someone whose arrow pointed upwards where no one could reach it.

Now I know I carry too much exformation because I’m manic-depressive. Meh.

For the longest while, I wouldn’t write about bipolar disorder at all. 300mg lamotrigine + 4 mg clonazepam + 100mg Seroquel had gotten me “cured”. Then it became clear I had nonmanic ADHD symptoms and Ritalin was added to the mix. Another month on 300mg lamotrigine + 4mg clonazepam + 100mg Seroquel + 15mg Ritalin divided in three daily doses. I’m fine, I’m better than ever, my mind is working, I have intellectual hobbies again. I reduced my clonazepam to 2mg on my own. I’m going so well my doctor suggests weaning off the Seroquel. It’s a neuroleptic, after all, and as rare as they are, neuroleptic malignant syndrome and tarditive dyskinesia are both permanent damage that won’t go away if they happen — even if the neuroleptic is taken off. So we reduce it to 50mg.

Clever hack: a 42 kb .zip file that decompresses unto your hearts’ content.

Quoting freely from various Wikipedia articles in italic, the specification for ZIP indicates that files can be stored either uncompressed or using a variety of compression algorithms. However, in practice, ZIP is almost always used with Katz’s DEFLATE algorithm, except when files being added are already compressed or are resistant to compression”; where DEFLATE is a combination of the LZ77 algorithm and Huffman coding.

Whille DEFLATE, the LZ family and other compression systems are often referred as algorithms, what they really are is file specification standards. It’s theoretically possible that the standard DEFLATE algorithm isn’t the most efficient in terms of final size/uncompressed size such that the resulting file is a DEFLATE standard stream. Which is why such clever hacks as the 42kb zip bomb that uncompresses into petabytes of nonsense data are possible.

This extends in general to all kinds of compression systems, and even more for lossy ones. It’s actually  widely-known that there exist competing MP3 encoders which will produce a varying range of “qualities” while still generating valid MP3 files. (These qualities might be multi-dimensional — not “better”, but better for rock or classical music, or perhaps a spectrum between “best for a wide amplitude range” or “best for a wide frequency range”).

There’s a Dijkstra-like lesson on the importance of provability for reliability in this 42kb bomb story. As far as a cursory research could go, it was never proven that the MP3 spec does not allow for a byte bundle that will decompress into a very large byte bundle, thus crashing MP3 players and perhaps exploiting buffer overflow vulnerabilities in cell phones. I mean, the DEFLATE spec is very simple, and nevertheless “correctness” in full was never  proven^{not only of the DEFLATE scheme!}, hence launching this clever zip bomb scare. And while actually writing a zip bomb took a long time despite the simplicity of DEFLATE, the combined ingeniousness of such very talented bit-level twiddlers should not be underestimated.

Be strong. Be wrong.

Novas fotos no http://bitpunk.org/

What if I gave it all up and started again?

Right now, I have two long-running computational-intensive processes running in two laptops in my desk. Granted, one of them is my home computer running a personal experiment on neural network fitting, but the other one can be construed to be work! This is a GREAT feeling! The saddest thing in the world, {53 words, estimated 13 secs reading time}