health

A nutritionist in Brazil told me that I eat too much bread. I do, not because I like it, but because of its function, being the stuff in which I can put my cheese / chicken / fish. Likewise, the reason I used to drink too much milk was because I needed a medium for my cereal.

But, yesterday at work, having missed the regular lunch, I ended up eating too much bread during the "Friday snack" (bread was all they had by the time I arrived!). A few hours later, arriving at home, hungry, I thought to myself "Right now, I need more of the other food groups, namely the fruits/veggies group and the chicken/cheese group". Since I had tomatoes and mushrooms in the fridge, I decided to make tomatoes + mushrooms, using absolutely no bread and not even oil: just tomatoes and mushroom, fried in the pan. Surprisingly enough, it worked: it tasted good, especially with some cheese on top. I made me a repeat portion with chicken in it.

While cooking, I received an email from a Logic student who I met during a lecture on PhilSci, very nicely inviting me to a party of his girlfriend's, so after this great healthy meal, followed by a long shower, which made me quite happy and singing, I went to the party, and had fun talking about practical philosophical stuff... He had read my notebooks and halfbakery ideas, and we talked very enthusiastically about languages for expressing "pure thought", etc.

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On the other hand, my turbinates are still blocking my nose at night. I often wake up tired and unable to sleep again. The flixonase doesn't seem to be working well enough. I think I will go under the knife soonish... maybe I should wait until the summer, to do it with the company of my family in Brazil, and with good doctors.

self-expression & the lossiness of human communication / thought

Human communication is really lossy... even when the two people use the same logic and the same architecture. Maybe the goal of my formalization dreams could be couched in terms of bridging this gap: even if we both understand and use the same "logic of common sense", neither of us speaks a language that can express it easily. Hopefully, one day, natural language will seamlessly use metaphors from mathematics & programming languages (see Sussman's "The Legacy of Computer Science"). Not the mathematics & programming languages of today, mind you, but formal structures matching the common sense logic that we use in everyday life (I think that planning formalisms come close to what I want).

Why is it so hard to express oneself musically? I can hear beautiful music in my head, but it takes lots of training to communicate it to others, and even then there's a bottleneck. I can easily "see" a picture that I can't paint in my mind's eye. I can automatically recognize a known person's face, but I can't easily give this information to someone else.
I believe that this bottleneck lies in the brain itself: it's what happens when we convert information from parallel to serial. Since our communication channels are serial, communicating such "parallel" information with others requires us to first convert it to serial.

New media can do a lot to relieve many of these constraints, but I think that some of these constraints are fundamental.

Could one make a business out of creating software to let people express themselves and/or communicate better? What about software for people who have communication disorders?

Btw, has anyone modeled the tip-of-the-tongue effect? This seems exactly like the kind of thing that would not exist if our brains were purely serial. While in some examples of recognition-is-easier-than-production tasks (see also one-way-functions), one may accept several possible false matches, this does not seem to be the case with the tip-of-the-tongue effect (only the right word will satisfy the person).

See also: Thinking the Unthinkable

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Related to this issue of self-expression, I will soon become an emacs wiz.

finding old films

In my experience, it can be really hard to find classic movies to rent. They are also hard to find on the Internet. You probably have to go to a library to find them:

e.g. films like The Great Dictator


Did I ever mention that I like old films, especially musicals? At the last Museumnacht, I saw a long sequence of musical clips from the 50s and 60s, from many different genres... and almost all of it sounded good to my years.