when i die, my body's never going to get buried. i'm proud of this.
i realise how fucked-up that sounds; i ain't gone nuts, though, and i'm not doing the whole viking pyre thing (as cool as that would undoubtedly be.) i don't go in for the valhalla scenario, and i ain't so sure i've exactly distinguished myself enough in combat to get there... what i do go in for is science, and that's what my body's gonna be for once i'm dead. it's gonna be preserved in formaldehyde and dissected by professors, then put back together and prosected time after time by medical students - people who can actually get some benefit from it - and eventually, bits of it will be plastized and put in the University's anatomical museum, and the bones will be wired back together, both for use by more students, for decades. this is a good thing.
so why does it get such a visceral reaction from non-medical students? i've been trying to get other people to do the same thing - either become organ donors or anatomical ones - and so far, all i get is That's fucking disgusting, Lepht or Oh, you'll change your mind about that soon enough, once you've thought about it. the registrar at the Anatomy Department asked my proxy about three times if i was "sure i wanted to do this": i even got "You know they'll cut you up with saws and scalpels, right? You know you're not going to be left in one piece?" from one particularly moronic onlooker. i have a vague idea of what's going through their heads as regards that process, but it's totally fucking illogical - those reactions make no sense.
for a start, yeah, i do know what's gonna happen to the corpse. i'm not going to be there: ergo, it doesn't phase me. i'm the collective function of a brain's multiple systems, and once the brain ceases to function, i will cease to be. my knowledge will have been passed on to the larger matrix of what humans know, my job will be over, and hopefully, i'll have taught as much in life as 'i' will after it, but i'm never going to feel those bonesaws; i'm not going to be there while people poke over my open chest. i won't be hurt by any scalpel.
second, it's not disgusting. it's science. you can't learn about the human systems if you don't have the balls to examine them in vivo, and even though i can't watch anatomy videos, other people can, and they need cadavers more than i need to protect people's pathetic victorian-era concepts of "eww gross". if no fucker donated their bodies because it's "nasty" to cut them up, we'd have no doctors.
third, i'm not gonna change my mind about this. this is the logical lead-on from my (much) earlier logical conclusion that there is no afterlife - my reasoning is as sound as human reasoning can ever be, and unless someone shows me repeatable, solid evidence that i could a. exist independently of my own neurons and b. might somehow need to keep their useless rapidly-decaying mass untouched after death as a result of this, i'm not gonna feel the need to revise my logic.
so i'm not gonna be buried. i specified in my will that i don't want any christian funeral like cadavers are usually eventually given, either: i don't want people thinking i ever subscribed to that bullcrap. i'm honoured to be able to be of use without it. all i want is for, in a hundred years' time, someone to look at my flayed and plastic-infused hand in a dissection room and be able to marvel at its workings, like they would anyone else's; that, and for me to not be the only one with enough sense to have let them see that. i just want people to benefit from medicine while they live, and benefit it in kind once they die.
is that so fucking disgusting?
L
tramadol fuck you up?
"windows scripting host\settings\timeout"
how much tramadol fucks you up
will tramadol fuck you up
does tramadol fuck you up
solpadol
does Tramadol fuck you up ?
YES, for fuck's sake, tramadol fucks you up. it fucks you up bad. you won't be able to program properly, you sure as shit won't be able to do maths, you won't even feel like trying to do sports or anything active, you'll throw up all the time, you'll look and sound like an authentic pothead and you'll lose any interest you ever had in anything but sleep.
[kudos to the guy who kept looking for the Registry setting that messes with the WSH's timeout, though. it's under HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows iirc, and its main malicious use is to get rid of the timeout completely so viruses can run free and never be killed because of inactivity.]
mang, i hope i don't get readers who hate profanity.
L
straight after i say it can't get stupider than using no AV, no less. this month, people have been mostly searching for:
4. solpadol - i'm not even on Solpadol anymore.
5. ilove you - i get the feeling this guy might want my underwear or something.
6. ilove you 2 - he should just get together with this guy.
7. tramadol fuck you up? - i heard this in a Chinese accent. oh ya, fuck you up real bad, really sick, fuck you guts up nasty, mm.
8. anonym for understand - not when you talk like that i fucking don't.
9. can i crush solpadol tablets? - categorically, no. crushing them results in something that tastes like a sluice farm smells, i can tell you.
you gotta wonder, don't you.
L
here are five ways to keep yourself the hell awake, from your resident insomnia veteran:
1. don't take powernaps. seriously, i tried it between lectures last week and ended up passed out for three hours. not good.
2. screw coffee, get some kind of instantaneous caffeine - i suggest you start at the Utopia of caffeine, of course. particularly good are SpazzStick caffeinated lipbalm (i'm told "lipbalm is for pussies", but i get away with it through being a programmer, apparently) and Bawls candy - get yourself some Bawls soda too, it's good shit.
3. got music? get music. preferably something loud, vocoded and kickass.
4. listen to professors in tutorials. take notes in lectures with the keys, not the dictation software; if you're not paying attention or you just downloaded all the lecture overheads, you run the risk of falling asleep in the theatre - and you might as well stay in bed if you're gonna be snoozing.
5. pain is not real. pain is only in your mind. you can't sleep if you're wearing one of those, right?
actually, forget that last one. damn programmer's compulsion to fill lists.
L
i'm short, i'm jug-eared, i'm bulldog-nosed. i've always got a hood covering my eyes. i've got far too many tattoos. i don't work out enough. i'm not good-looking in any sense of the word, and i don't give a fuck, because my worth doesn't come from what my body looks like.
now will you fucking stop telling me two mysterious crushes think i'm hot?
L
ed. to further the point, Google, would you call "hot" someone whose left eye is drooped shut half the time because of their meds? i think not. assholes.
yes, it is i you see march into the laboratory foyer at 1639 determined to grab a Snickers. it is i you see shoving coins into the vendi and kicking it when it doesn't work, and it is also i who can then be observed using a high-grade Southord C2010 pick set to get both the coins i lost and the coins everyone else lost outta the damn slot where they're all stuck. for the three minutes or so it takes me to do that, you may also observe three security guards walk right past me, one of whom stops and immediately walks away after i give him the explanation (and i quote) "Locksmith."
and that is why i am now £5.25 richer, and also have both Snickers and much less confidence in you guys. i mean, you're in the damn lab building, for fuck's sake.
i'm in the labs, looking even more drugged-up and rough than i usually do (and possibly thereby convincing the freshers who've started turning up that i am, in fact, the campus crack dealer and not the campus hacker), and i have a clear view of the printer from where i'm slumped in my office chair. station's attached to a little win98 box, to which you have to logon, as the box's monitor states. clearly. in bright fucking size 20 purple.
the same woman just went up to it twice, sat down, pressed random buttons on the printer, and each time gave up and walked off. she's just this minute sat back down again. it's like being Bill fucking Oddie or something - i can sit and observe these, uh fresh new minds, but one move on my part and they'll run the fuck away. so i'm stuck observing them needing three tries to work a machine that has neon instructions right the fuck there on the screen.
i think i just temporarily gave up my faith in students.
Lepht
a haiku:
Solpadol is a
white analgesic tablet.
For God's sake don't chew!
if anyone wants me, i'll be trying to get the fucking taste outta my mouth.
Lepht
things i have been doing in my laboratory that i should not be doing at my age:
1. refusing to get off my wheeled desk chair and instead using the walls as kick-off points to propel myself across the room to the waste bin
2. building ten-can stacks of Pepsi cans
3. logging on to as many of the hundreds of terminals as i can in a vague attempt to satisfy my curiosity as to whether i can DDoS my own network with local access rights
4. laughing at these guys
5. forgetting to turn the lights on, so that Security turns up on its rounds and sees me sat alone in the dark, bathed in the glow of five flatscreens like some sort of mad professor, giggling, and has to see my University ID before it'll believe i actually work here and am not some sort of insane swipe-lock-cracking meth-swigging hacker hobo
ah, the holidays, the bane of my entire existence. i can't believe people like these things. this is another one of those progress report posts, just to convince anyone i've sent here that despite being roommateless for a good few weeks now, i have not been committed, arrested or hospitalised, and i have not killed myself. nor have i gone on an insane rampage and gained administrator access to the med campus in order to create my own twisted modifications of human beings so that i may amass an army of soulless beings to take over the world in the name of atheism and computer science.
i think i'm dealing with it quite well, actually.
Lepht
ed. today is Friday the thirteenth! sit back and watch as ordinary bad events happen, which will then be blamed on the date by woos of all varieties. oh, the meatspace is such fun. - L
or, why must you morons deny your IQ? this is a soapbox of mine, so bear with me.
i'm always bitching about something or other on campus. it's really not as huge of a disadvantage as it might sound like sometimes - for a start, i have free net access, and access to all the labs and equipment i could want is coming my way soon. it's safe, too.
its biggest disadvantage is the mouth-breathers who've somehow shoved their way onto the science courses here. my classes are full of them; you can actually sit in the back of something like elementary stats (for people like me who don't have any formal maths qualifications beyond age 16) and watch them not understanding it. they don't get functions. they don't get tangents. they don't get the Gauss distribution, for fuck's sake, they don't even know what a fucking distribution is, and yet they're still here, so they must be able to do at least something.
if you're thinking there's more to this, you'd be right.
it isn't limited to stats and maths, either. they're all over the fucking place, asking your ML tutors what a verb is again, demanding that the demonstrators in the guided Java labs give them "the answer", refusing to understand what a variable is. i've taken to sitting right at the back of logic lectures purely because these idiots sit at the front, collectively not getting it and adding to the emanated cloud of their stupidity by whispering to each other that this is all "just too hard".
so why are these tards still here? and why do i talk about them with this much vitriol?
because they've all passed. that stupidity is fake. for a start, the tests are easy in the first place, and you only need eight marks of 20 to pass most of them. for another thing, these people are not inherently knuckle-dragging, cheerleading tards. i don't flatter myself by thinking that this is the best they can do; they're university students, for fuck's sake. (you've got minds, haven't you?)
of course they have. this is my question. is it that i'm just not seeing something here, and they're actually expending all their effort on something else, meaning that these low barriers are necessary because CompSci classes are their chance to kick back and act dumb? (sure doesn't fucking look like it.) or is it that the low barriers are just not pushing them, to the extent that they don't even bother trying when they don't need to? is that why they act like this, just out of laziness?
i'm not an egotist. i don't honestly think they're that stupid; i know they could do anything i can do - same brain capacity, same structure, same human intelligence. we're all human, even if our abilities aren't precisely the same, and half are explicitly training to be computer scientists.
so why, why, don't these fucking morons use their brains? why spend more time reading Playboy than actually doing something worthwhile? why join in with this dumbfuck, hairspray-and-lipstick, football culture instead of realising what an adaptive, smart human being you are and using that intelligence to your advantage? in short, why deny your IQ?
i just don't get it.
Lepht
(whose isolation from reality is, perhaps, affecting its mood and opinions just slightly; otherwise it is very sedated, and thus fine)
i am beginning to wonder if this isolation isn't bad for me. i've been completely by myself, through no fault of my own (flatmate, depressive episode, refuses to see anyone) for about three days now, maybe more. it's starting to make me think differently, and that worries me; it's becoming more difficult to see the good side of things and to enjoy stupid-ass stuff like i usually do.
like i said, this worries the shit outta me, more so because i know why. we're evolved from social primates, and there've been experiments with social Rhesus monkeys and isolation that drove the poor little fuckers insane; we're simply not adapted for dealing with everything by ourselves. even writing this is making me feel a little better; but that don't mean i can deal with loneliness.
i think hackers are probably a more at-risk group than most for this, too. we're isolated by nature - it's not easy to date someone who spends ten hours or more at a time doing something you know nothing about, which forces them into secrecy lest they get arrested or persecuted and glues them into their rig for days - and often we don't have many friends. i'm a prime example of that. but that kind of social predisposition doesn't exactly prepare us for utter, complete aloneness: that's something else entirely, something dangerous. like i said, humans aren't meant to do this.
then again, i guess i'm hoping that the fact that i've got more experience of it than, say, the captain of the rugby team or the head cheerleader, will make me better equipped to deal with it. i'm hoping that what i've learned from before - and it's simple shit, things like you shouldn't listen to sad music or read manga where the characters keep dying (unless it's High School of the Dead) - will keep me safe from any nasty shit this time round.
but i've never done it for this long before, and this time there's nobody in the meatspace either. nobody's on campus, nobody's in the lab, nobody's in my flat when i get there; it feels like nuclear winter sometimes. i honestly don't know whether this is safe enough, or what the fuck i'll do if it turns out not to be.
i don't know what's gonna happen. that scares the shit outta me. i'm gonna post something every day, just to kinda anchor my head to reality; if anyone does lurk this blog, just do me a favour and comment. any kind of contact would be good right now.
as a last note, i guess you could call this an experiment. we'll all see what happens when people are left alone for this long.
"Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich staerker." ain't never been so true.
Lepht
i do wonder sometimes if this Net addiction business ain't in the same class as electrosensitivity: that is, the psychosomatic one. sorry folks, but 30+ clinical studies with decent methodology say you're not allergic to electricity, and zero say you are - the fact that you're experiencing the symptoms nonetheless means you need to figure out what actually is causing them, pronto.
(there's an appropriate Randi insult here: You're so open-minded your brain has fallen out.)
i'm wondering if anyone's made a clinical case study out of any of these guys. i'd be really fucking interested to know the root cause of it - the Net's not heroin, it isn't physically or neurochemically addictive sitting on your arse all day cabled into your rig (and i say that from experience, believe me) - so what does make these guys keep coming back? what does 24-7 connection give them that it doesn't give me?
i'm no shrink - i don't know enough about people even to be an armchair one, even if i did possess any armchairs or the time to sit in them - so i can't begin to guess. but i'll be chuffed when someone does.
what i do know is this - the reports of the Beijing clinic all show the poor shites hooked up to drips, and the staff refused unanimously to tell reporters anything about the IV fluid. a nurse let slip to Wired in 2005 that the drips are meant to "rebalance the brain secretions", but after that, nothing.
i'm slightly skeptical as to the efficacy of this unknown medicine, if only because it's unknown. the secrecy surrounding it smells distinctly of woo; occam's razor is telling me it isn't the case that they've discovered a neurological root, isolated the neurochemical imbalance that's the heart of the problem, developed an IV solution that really does work on the imbalance and for some unknown reason refused to publish any data, make any international journals aware of the discovery or capitalise off it in any way whatsoever, including just making themselves look good...
in any case, i'm liking the 17" TVs and Pooh comforters. maybe i should just check into one of these places and find out for myself what the fuck's going on in there (assuming my country even has anything that panders to the addictions of technologically-literate scum such as myself).
if anyone wants me, i'll be in the local hospital, trying to get the NHS to prescribe me a T1 line.
Lepht
yesterday, walking under an underpass in the city where i live, i saw this graffiti in simple red hand on the concrete:
How dare you paint over these walls when you have bigger fish to fry.
Re-educate the racist, avenge the battered wife, house the poor, end the tyrannies of war and religion and sickness over our lives, then wipe my paint off the walls.
For then it will not matter; I will have everything I ever wanted.
We will have won.
it is rare for my city to spew such beautiful reminders of humanity and intelligence. i only wish i had a camera.
Lepht
i really don't like this holiday fuckaround. everything in the whole of your average university shuts down, leaving people like me the only fuckers on campus - and in the case of yours truly, the only fucker on campus. it's bizarre - the cafes and shops close down, the labs are empty, professors and tutors stop checking their email, all the experiments you can usually earn a good few bob from stop running and you're left to sort shit on your own. i hate summer vacation.
this means two things: one, i can eat cornflakes in the lab, and two, i have a lot of time on my metal-filled little hands. (there's a half a cannula in my left hand where the NHS suck.) thus, i have time to show you cool shit like the contrapositive implication.
in propositional logic, the IMPLIES operator looks like this: -> . if P implies Q, the implication can only be false where P is true and Q is false. the contrapositive is the reverse and NOT of an implication; that is, where P->Q, the contrapositive is !Q->!P. interestingly, it always gives the same truth value as the original implication.
you can prove this with a truth table:
P Q P->Q Q->P !Q->!P
--------------------------------------
t t t t t
t f f t f
f t t f t
f f t t t
the rows for P->Q and !Q->!P are the same, so the contrapositive is the same as the implication. cool, huh? so the next time you see a nasty-looking thing like !Q->!P, you know you can simplify it to P->Q.
man, i really gotta get a hobby.
Lepht
in my lab at a random time between 0250 and 0310, all the machines in the building reset. if you stand right at the back of the lab, with all the lights turned off, you see a beautiful scene - sixty or seventy screens lit up pale blue, surrounded by the sparkles of HDD indicators, the little dots of red emerging from underneath the optical mice, the status LEDs in bright yellow on the CD drives and the glitter as the blue glow reflects off the silver of the deactivated ceiling panels. it's wonderful - the closest thing i'll get to the Aurora Borealis. i've never seen anything so beautiful.
Lepht
