Older blog entries for pfh (starting at number 41)

That damp pitter-patter sound you hear is the shit beginning to hit the fan. Anti-depressants make people feel agitated and suicidal. Not just children.

I feel the need to rant.

Medicine has always been pretty fucked up. It took ages to convince surgeons that washing their hands was actually quite a good idea. But now we fuck medicine up with creative statistics, thus taking things to a whole new level of fuck-up. A whole extra level of abstract, scientific, classical-statistics based, dogmatized meta-fuck.

The methods of Science are not a magic bullet. t-tests just aren't all that useful, one also has to observe and think. Insight and honesty are also required. Of course you will always invalidate the null hypothesis with enough data, but how much did you invalidate it by? Is there some simpler explanation for the results?

All those people once lying in bed feeling depressed, now up and about... did they consider that maybe that their fancy new chemical is just a stimulant of some kind?

Depression is a chemical imblanace in the brain? Pull the other one, it has bells on. Everything is a chemical imbalance in the brain. Joy and sadness and love and hate and fear, normal perception just as much as psychosis. It's all just chemicals in dis-equilibreum. To say something is caused by a chemical imblance in the brain is a statement that is both useless and misleading. Brain and mind are irrevocably entangled, thought can give rise to depression or end it... depression isn't just some physical disease. To tell people with depression such defeatist crap is really harmful and dangerous dogma.

"Quantum physicists do it discretely." :-)

Bleh. Haven't posted for a while here. Life goes on.

Feeling unmotivated, so i'm cutting back on the propranolol. Middle of last night, i woke screaming about being trapped in a giant mincing machine. Would have forgotten about that except my housemate mentioned it today. Today heaches, blood nose--neon red but short lasting. Ibuprofen didn't help headaches, taking a single propranolol did.

Note to self: next time got to remember to taper off the dose.

Too many parameters, hard to optimize.

Chris Wallace, resident demi-god of Computer Science at Monash, inventor of MML -- a mathematical formalization of the process we call "science" -- died the weekend before last. Everyone knew it was coming, but still a shock when it actually happened. He was in the process of writing the definitive book on MML. Have to wonder what ideas he never got around to writing down.

I had questions I'll never get to ask him, ideas I'll never know his reaction to. The world has dropped several IQ points with him gone.

I am taking: propranolol, zopiclone, modafinil (though all in moderate amounts). Oh well. I bought a digital metronome. It stutters and misses beats, slows down, speeds up. Unlikely behaviour for a digital metronome, so it's probably me that is stuttering, speeding up down, slowing down.

As promised, my essay on stress.

Seems to be working... I am taking: modafinil. Currently trying to reduce dose. I'm no longer taking clonidine, and only very occasionally taking zopiclone.

i 0wnz0red my b0dy :-) w00t

Epiphany. I now understand stress:

Your body has a clock rate. It can be overclocked. If it is overclocked for a long period, it can not cope and it becomes "stressed".

Your body can not adjust the clock rate instantly. Therefore the clock rate has to be high enough to deal with anything that might happen in the immediate future. Your level of stress is determined solely by the thing that requires the highest clock rate.

Stress is not additive.

Many consequences. Essay soon.

10-May-04: height 1.90m, weight 108.1kg ... i've lost a couple of kilos, and gained a couple of centimeters.

Ah, the marvels of correct posture.

There's an interesting correspondence between yoga and correct support for singing. Both involve a straight spine, relaxed muscles, and controlled breathing. Probably not a coincidence.

I have been trying to straighten my spine by sleeping on a harder bed. Getting less sleep, but it seems to be working.

Another thing about singing: the trick seems to be finding postural energy minima. It doesn't require great strength, but instead finess. Any tension squeezes the voice.

Australian Idol auditioners said, quite accurately, that I was too nervous. That was pretty much all they said (they had several thousand people to audition...)... Oh well, nervousness is just a parameter, i'll try again next year.

Amusing thought:

In response to bleeding, the body restricts blood flow by contracting blood vessels. This is opposite to the fight-or-flight response, which increases blood flow so that muscles and organs are well supplied to meet an immediate threat.

Therefore, cutting yourself would be a way to (partially) deactivate the flight or fight response. Even if one did not understand this, a link between relief and cutting might be conditioned. I think my psychiatrist mentioned at one point that often people find cutting themselves calming.

I'm perfectly serious: this is very funny. It's horrible, sure, but it is also funny. Humour is much undervalued as a mode of thought. It is useful for more than mere entertainment. One should always keep in the back of one's mind that what you are doing is most likely ridiculously stupid.

Of course, nowadays we have beta blockers, which are more convenient to use, and involve less stigmata. (hehe, stigmata, get it? Might explain some religious types's tendency to self flagellation. So much for disdaining the flesh and all that :-P)

Clondidine continues to work, no bad effects. Joy :-). Doctor measured my blood pressure today, found it was completely normal, told me to up the dose a little. Why are these drugs not more widely used in psychiatry?

Politics/ As a citizen of Australia, I am worried that our government has not denounced Israel's policy of assassination, and in particular the recent assasination of the Hamas leader. So I would just like to say: People of Israel, what you are doing is suicidal. This strategy has no good outcomes. It leads to exponential escalation. Take a deep breath, calm down, and do something sensible that doesn't involve killing more people.

People are people are people are people are people...

Well, that was easier than i thought. I now have clonidine.

I was dreading yet another fight with a medico and their catty authority. But my GP said OK almost immediately.

So, I am off propranolol, hopefully off zopiclone, taking modafinil+clonidine.

Observations, from one day's use (bearing in mind i usually have some placebo effect, lasting ~2 weeks): no more butterflies in the stomach, my mind is off permanent overdrive (big relief), i don't feel unnaturally calm (as i did on propranolol) but i do feel calm. On the negative, i have less drive/spark/holy-fire. Hopefully i can find a level of dose where i do have some spark and still be functional.

Singing/ I have been trying to develop my voice. I figure this is useful above and beyond a small chance of becoming some kind of religious idol -- useful for public speaking, or indeed private speaking. Major finding so far: posture is important, in particular the angle between the body and neck should be straight up and down. I find that i can hit notes a lot better if i do this, and that it sounds better. It is very easy to fall back into a slouch when not paying attention! Angle between neck and head, however, does not seem to be all that important.

Also important is the thing about opening up the back of the mouth and throat, as if there's a plum in there.

With these things, my voice gets a "metallic" edge, and a *lot* louder. I guess this is what is meant by "projecting your voice". The vocal cavity resonates a lot more, and thus does not need extra effort to be louder.

Another interesting thing is that by practicing *loudly*, i find my voice gains a nice edge to it even when soft. A sort of "i could be loud if i wanted to" quality.