Things That Fell Out of My Head

today's office: a ceiling-mounted papasan egg-chair, outdoors, being entertained by no less than a half-dozen housemates and their friends who are dancing and singing along with the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack

some people, when confronted with a problem, think, "I know, I'll misquote jwz."

Today I cleared out obsolete entries from my address book. There were some very, very dusty old things in there.

Just spotted this eggcorn/accidental word of the day:

contraditions

I'll define it as 'things that society demands we do about something which actually make it worse'.

Just noticed that if there's a word I can't quite recall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip_of_the_tongue), it actually helps if I reason about it out loud. I talked aloud, in a disinterested voice, about the particular concept as if explaining it to someone. After about a paragraph of this, the word became silently(!) available.¹

I noticed that I had a slight resistance to initiating the exercise of speaking out loud to prod the memory/clear the block/etc. I mean, I believed intellectually it would work, but not emotionally. The "stuck" circuit wanted to succeed "by itself", so to speak. (I guess that's a "wait, wait, don't tell me".)

I think whatever subsystem of my brain that was handling this request wanted that tiny "reward" of dopamine that you get when a mental effort succeeds. My talking-out-loud workaround gave me the word *without* any such reward. Or indeed any sense at all of where it came from.

Trip

[1] now that I think back on it, it may even have been a picture of the word. Or more specifically, the mental state that I might have shortly after seeing a picture of the word.

I just agreed to do some more Gallup poll things.

It's interesting to observe how difficult it can be for me to answer what I consider poorly-formed questions. And that I consider nearly all questions to be poorly-formed when the asker cannot add any additional context to the text of the question they are asking, because they are (quite understandably) reading the question from a list and are probably specifically trained to avoid "helping" the questionee parse the question, since this would bias the results depending on who does the asking.

I kind of wanted some help with "household", though. Is my household one person (me), or is it the 17 adults that I share common living space with? If there are kids in the house, but they aren't my responsibility, does that count? I decided to go with the IRS sort of definition and said that my household is just me, one person.

Do I feel that The Economy is getting better or worse? Okay, I can translate this by adding either "...for me as an individual taking into consideration only my own direct benefit" or "for residents of the United States of America considered as a whole", but in neither case does this really help me answer. What does the asker think The Economy is? What if I think it's something completely different, and thus give an *answer* that is meaningless to the asker? I suppose that really they just want a gut response of feeling based on the trigger words in the question. I feel like I'm being too flippant if I give that sort of answer, though. I want to *really* answer things, and in everyday life this means tackling deconstruction of the question more than it does the answer. The *question* is where the real content to be uncovered exists. (In everyday life, when a person brings you a question, they are usually bringing you their answer, which you can help them discover by mutual refining of the question.)

Yup, so I managed to get one of the HP Pre³ 4G phones at a *really* decent price. These were built to work cooperatively with the TouchPads. These phones work great, there just aren't and won't ever be very many of them. It's an unlocked AT&T-branded GSM phone, but I'll probably use it mostly for PDA features, games, and VOIP. I plan to get a pay-as-you-go SIM from AT&T, for the rare times I'm not in Wifi range.

the delicious ironing, it burns my tongue

Hello Internets,

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I got one of the $150 32GB units, the soft protective case, and a couple of the Touchstone wireless charging cradles. I haven't had a lot of time to play with it, but so far, I like it a lot.

UPDATE: And now it has a little friend