Monthly Archives: October 2016

Facebook quizzes

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(From August, 2014, and I just wasted several minutes trying to figure out if this should be on bricksscience.com or bricksbrain.com.)

Every day on Facebook is a bombardment of What Whatever Are You? quizzes. I think they’re a little creepy. All they do is feed data to the data miners. That’s what they’re designed for. Every time we answer one of those questions, we have described a little more about ourselves. It’s that data that data miners with their incredibly sophisticated algorithms sift through to know what kinds of ads to show us, what kind of politics we prefer, and if we have criminal or terrorist proclivities or not. There is not a quiz we take on Facebook that is not used for data gathering. Selling that data is how Facebook makes its money. And to everybody freaking about the NSA knowing everything, where do you think they get the majority of their information?

You’re looking at it. (Well, you are if you’re looking at this on Facebook.)

Whenever you hear news about Facebook altering its privacy policy or profile policy or requesting information, it is about getting more access to your data for the purposes of data mining.

Not understanding data mining is like watching television without comprehending advertising. Imagine watching TV and thinking that every single commercial you were watching was true and shown for your own benefit. Imagine having no skepticism whatsoever about ads on TV. It’s unimaginable.

Well, that is Facebook. People refuse to become skeptical. But think of it this way…the data mining industry knows more about you than you do. They know our thinking and behavior and how we respond to certain stimuli (such as questions in quizzes.) And they are already shaping our behavior. Five years ago none of us would have bothered taking those What Kind of Whatever Quizzes, stupid as they are, over and over and over. Now we can’t stop. They’re stupid, they’re a pain in the ass, they’re a waste of time, yet Facebook users love them. And the only reward we get is being told we are Napoleon or Bob Dylan or Star Wars or Rhett Butler. Maybe three seconds of pleasure. Tell me the data mining industry isn’t controlling our behavior.  And that is just one example. I’m still trying to figure out what algorithm is involved in those moronic “Think of a city that does not contain an A. 90% of people wiil fail” quizzes. A zillion people respond. Why? It is so subtle it must be brilliant. And why is “will” so often misspelled? It was wll–no i–for a while. Lately they’re wiil (two i’s). Why?

90% of you reading this will say so what, I don’t care, I’m not worried about it. Think about that. Why is your natural skepticism neutralized? You probably distrust just about everything else. Even the most paranoid leftist and tea party people you will ever meet, people who see conspiracies everywhere, know What Classic Rock Band They Are.

Styx

I got Styx.

 

Panic in Seizure Park

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(Between health insurance in 2014…I spent over $8,000 on seizure meds that year.)

Off for more solid gold epilepsy medicine. This is like a heroin habit. Panic in Seizure Park. I prefer to go to 24 hour pharmacies late at night for the creepiness factor. Scoring Tegretol from sleazy pharmacists. OK, they’re not sleazy, but this shit is expensive. If I were Philip Seymour Hoffman this would be considered cool.

Sometimes the brain has no clue how confused it is

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(From a note to a friend suffering from a mysterious and incurable vertigo and damn if the doctors could figure out why.)

A clean bill of health does not mean the problem could not be neurological. It might just mean that somewhere in your neuro network a few neurons, or maybe a mess of neurons, are out of whack. I found that studying neurology helped me to make it through the randomness of epilepsy, with all kinds of neurons out of whack, and see it as not so much a medical problem as an engineering one. Whenever the brain began perceiving things wrongly–as in your brain still being convinced you have a balance problem–I learned how to work with it and either correct my brain’s incorrect assumptions or work around them. Just coming up with fixes and work arounds. Thus I was able to function successfully (more or less) in a world full of normal brained people. The neurologist V.S. Ramachandran‘s wonderful (and wonderfully readable) book The Tell-Tale Brain, in particular, was a real help. Brain patients are always fascinating anyway, mistaking wives for hats and all, and Ramachandran has come up with some extraordinary fixes (a jerry rigged box full of mirrors, for instance) for his patients that oft times just got the brain’s sense of self  (i.e., the parts of the brain that connects the mind with the body that holds it) to realize that it was actually the problem. More often than not looking at the carefully placed mirrors so that the  brain could see the missing arm from the brain’s point of view (and not a mirrored reflection) cause the phantom pain to disappear instantly.  Your phantom vertigo–caused either by a virus or statin drugs, both done with ages ago–might be like those who suffer phantom pain in a long lost arm or leg.

Incidentally, some of the exceptional skills and capacities your specific brain has–the way you can hear and transcribe vast orchestrations in your head perfectly, as if a symphony is playing in front of you–could actually be the root if the problem. You never know. But extraordinary cognitive abilities usually lead to unplanned difficulties at some point. Which is probably the reason that not everyone has those abilities–they have been selected against through natural selection. Genius does have its downside.

The brain ain’t having it

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It is getting harder and harder to do paperwork. The brain ain’t having it. Lots of confusion. I couldn’t remember what month it was, either February or March. My wife points out it’s October.

I’ll have to have someone fill out these forms for me. Short bus here I come. Think I’ll lie down for a bit till the skull and limb tingling passes, the fog melts away and I alight again in the middle of October with the rest of you.

Sometimes I miss the old me.

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Having your executive functions slip away is crippling. There is so much you can’t do anymore, basic fundamental stuff, it drives you nuts. Or it doesn’t, and everything is every pleasant, and then someone reminds you that you forgot to do almost everything you were supposed to do. The weirdest thing of all, though, is how everything is increasingly in the present tense. I quickly forget most things beyond a day or so, and I can’t see into the future at all as far as planning… anything. I just sort of wander along in the now, and the whole concept of time as a continuum from past to future disappeared somewhere a few hundred thousand missing neurons ago. When I’m hanging out with people you all talk about your lives in terms of things you did and things you plan to do. And I know that I used to be able to do that and just sit and marvel at the wonder of it. I think to myself that when I go home I will write about it, but I usually forget, and write about something else. Now I’m looking at this stack of papers on my desk and know that there are things I was supposed to do in there but can’t remember what. I lift up the keyboard and there’s an unpaid parking ticket and a jury notice I was supposed to call about. And a neurologist I was supposed to call. I forget his name. What a weird mess this is becoming, in tiny increments, a few damaged synapses at a time. Sometimes I miss the old Brick, but mostly I can’t remember much about him.