Week #3: Taking Stock

It occurs to me that I haven't gotten around to doing the "first of the year taking stock of my life and projecting into the future" thing. I suppose I ought to get on with it. After all, it's required by common practice (you know what a slave to public opinion I am) not to mention the new regulations from the DOJ/NSA borg.

As you may remember, the Government made writing end-of-year life summaries a requirement after spending 63.8 gadzillion dollars and nearly two centuries worth of man-hours breaking into and surveilling the Internet only to discover that the only things they were actually harvesting was some truly disturbing porn, people bitching about their love lives, and kitty pictures.

DOJ/NSA is like a pack of teenaged boys who spend months punching a teeny little hole through the sheetrock to the girls' locker room only to discover nothing but stick-a-pistol-in-your-mouth-boring, drama-laden girl crap spiced with only the barest, briefest, near-zero-interest flickers of tits and ass, which virtually always involves someone who is, speaking charitably, best seen clothed. After awhile, the mischievous boys get bored and yell for a cheerleader to take something off, and the next thing you know, Snowden's living in Russia and everyone's in detention for the rest of the semester.

I'm pretty sure that's how it went. Who keeps track of this crap?

Anyhow, "What I Did This Summer:"

No, wait. That one's for my English As A Second Language class.

I'm getting straight "A's" in ESL by the way, even though they don't have any do-gooders who can speak my primary language. This lack of State resources to guide me in my First Language is widely acknowledged to have failed me in my needs. On the other hand, it's not completely surprising as I invented it on the spot. Anyhow, even without a native speaker teaching, I've made so much headway that I'm considered something of a prodigy. I'm expecting a "You Done Good" medal along with my graduation certificate, and I've already been asked to take a tenured position to teach others who speak my rare dialect. Or at least I think that's what the school's director said. Her accent is terrible.

Where was I?

Right. Taking Stock:

But first, I want to acknowledge that this is Monday Tuesday Wednesday of Week #3 of my New Year resolution to write once a week. It should have gone up on Sunday morning to stay consistent, but I'm still in the week here, so I think as a legal matter I'm OK, right? But I'll try to do better and actually put something up on Sunday from now on, since people seem to like schedules.

Besides, there's a lot to write about. Among other things, I've been collecting stuff for a project "On The Nature of Consciousness," which I was going to write about a year or so ago and about which there's a buttload of new information I need to include. All things considered, it turns out it's a good thing that I'm such a lazy-ass and never got around to writing about it. For example contained in http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.1219v1.pdf is a pretty good argument that consciousness is just another state of matter, like solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. I would have missed that completely even only a week ago.

In fact, being a lazy-ass is so effective at accumulating late-arriving updates on whatever I'm writing about that I ought to just make it policy that whenever I'm moved to write about something, I'm going to just relax until it goes away, at least the first couple of times. I understand Hemingway wrote like that.

In line with that, I'm going to give the "taking stock" entry a miss right here. I'll put up the updated version another time.

Won't be next week, though. That one's about "Deadlines."