August 10th, 2009 by False Prophet
Fifth day of the Ritalin experiment.
| 1:30 |
pm |
Took first pill (Methylin, 20 mg). |
| |
|
Spent the afternoon at the library. Scattered, irritated, dropping mental thread constantly. |
| 5:40 |
pm |
Took second pill. |
| 6:45 |
|
Doing so-so. |
| 7:30 |
|
Getting brain-scrambled again. |
Bottom line: No effect.
Research:
I spent most of yesterday and today reading up on basic pharmacokinetics. (Last year, I had a mathematician girlfriend who worked in drug discovery. She explained enough to me that I was able to get a running start researching the details.) Tomorrow, I’m going to simulate a 30 mg dose by altering the timing of when I take two 20 mg tablets.
Posted in Drugs | 6 Comments »
August 9th, 2009 by False Prophet
Fourth day of the Ritalin experiment.
| 8:45 |
am |
Took first pill (Methylin, 20 mg). First day at new apartment. |
| 9:15 to 9:45 |
|
Felt very sleepy. |
| 11:00 |
|
Brushed my teeth. I mention this because it took me about an hour between deciding to brush my teeth and actually doing it. I kept getting distracted after starting to move in the direction of the bathroom. This is the same as before trying Ritalin. |
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Posted in Drugs | 1 Comment »
August 8th, 2009 by False Prophet
Third day of the Ritalin experiment.
| 8:30 |
am |
Took first pill (Methylin, 20 mg). At home. Today is clean-up day before vacating the old apartment. |
| 10:15 |
|
Got into an IM chat with an old friend. |
| 11:30 |
|
Remembered that I was going to clean the carpet before the housecleaners come over, and they’re due in half an hour. Abruptly broke off the chat. Have not noticed any effect from the Ritalin. |
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Posted in Drugs | 1 Comment »
August 7th, 2009 by False Prophet
People like making things complicated.
This is sort of obvious when you think about it. The common scolding to “keep it simple” is an attempt to directly oppose the natural urge to make things complicated. Hence the tone.
People want to make things as complicated as they can handle. The musician wants music as complex as he can possibly play, the dancer wants a dance that’s complex enough to be a challenge, the mathematician wants complex puzzles that are just at the edge of his skill, the French cook wants to make dishes that require complex techniques, the gymnast wants to learn more-complex routines, etc. The drive for complexity is just part of the drive to excel. By pushing your talents as far as they can go, you naturally create complexity.
People want other people to keep it simple.
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Posted in Productivity | 6 Comments »
August 7th, 2009 by False Prophet
Third day of the Ritalin experiment.
| 8:30 |
am |
Took first pill (Methylin, 20 mg). At home. Today is clean-up day before vacating the old apartment. |
| 10:15 |
|
Got into an IM chat with an old friend. |
| 11:30 |
|
Remembered that I was going to clean the carpet before the housecleaners come over, and they’re due in half an hour. Abruptly broke off the chat. Have not noticed any effect from the Ritalin. |
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Posted in Drugs | 1 Comment »
August 6th, 2009 by False Prophet
I’m going try Ritalin for two weeks, and then Adderall for two weeks. Hopefully I’ll get drug and dosage tuned before the start of the semester. I’ll post each day’s results here.
My first day taking Ritalin:
| 6:00 |
pm |
At a coffeehouse. I took my first Ritalin tablet: 20 mg, a generic called Methylin. I took it with a mango smoothie, not the recommended “half an hour before eating”. I hadn’t eaten all day, though. |
| 6:15 |
|
Felt a little sleepy. |
| 7:00 |
|
Slight headache. |
| 8:00 |
|
I tried estimating 4100 and made a dumb arithmetic mistake. I came up with 106 when the correct estimate was 1060 even though I did the estimate on paper. |
| 8:15 |
|
Felt a little bit dizzy. |
| 9:15 |
|
Walked home from the coffeehouse. I noticed that I felt somewhat calm and unhurried. |
| 9:30 |
|
Felt a little hungry. |
| 10:00 |
|
Wanted to clean the bathroom in preparation for the move tomorrow, but didn’t feel like I could gather my focus. |
| 10:30 |
|
I could feel the light-headedness wear off. |
| 10:45 |
|
Fell asleep. |
At the coffeehouse, I mostly wrote a post for a discussion list.
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Posted in Drugs | 423 Comments »
August 2nd, 2009 by False Prophet
Of course grad school could be fixed. Even undergrad could be fixed. Here’s how.
Posted in Grad school | 10 Comments »
July 22nd, 2009 by False Prophet
People told me that grad school is hell because you have to go into depth into your subject to a degree beyond anything you could imagine. To me, that sounded like heaven. I figured grad school would be loads of fun, because I like going into something as deep as it goes—total immersion, exploring down to the most fundamental explanatory principles, seeing how they shape the subject at all levels. But that’s not how things turned out. I just did two semesters, and they were unspeakable agony.
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Posted in Grad school | 22 Comments »
May 19th, 2009 by False Prophet
The proposition:
- Programmers who master Scheme, plus some appropriate powerful, refined libraries (yet to be written), become much more productive (at least 2x) than programmers who use “those other” languages, even for regular, workaday jobs like what most programmers get paid for.
I don’t know if the proposition is true, but there it is. If it is true, that would be wonderful. It would provide great opportunities for haps (high-abstraction programmers, i.e. programmers who design in layers of simple semantics). We could develop software faster and better than the faps (flat abstractionless programmers, i.e. programmers who code everything at the level of the base language), and the faps would never be able to catch up, since Scheme doesn’t fit their brains.
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Posted in Scheme | 12 Comments »
April 14th, 2009 by False Prophet
Maybe the key to “thinking in Scheme” is to see everything as a closure. And maybe the key to seeing everything as a closure is to mentally break down complexity first by distinguishing between what the algorithm knows “now” vs. what it can’t know until “later”.
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Posted in Scheme | 3 Comments »
April 5th, 2009 by False Prophet
Here are 15 ways that projects don’t get completed—everything from a homework assignment to a web site.
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Posted in Productivity | 42 Comments »
