Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2020-02-04T16:40:26Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com February 4. http://ranprieur.com/#f0d4fcb565f2f31bc2fa462ef575d6e3b36eb1ba 2020-02-04T16:40:26Z February 4. Bunch o' links, mostly stuff that I'm happy about. Coyotes Poised to Infiltrate South America. Growing up in Pullman 40 years ago, I never heard or saw a coyote. Since I've been back, I've seen two, and last summer there was a pack howling inside town in the middle of the day.

Sand dunes can communicate with each other, further blurring the line between alive and not alive. Related post from a year ago: Is the sun conscious?

Last week I stumbled on this 2012 View from Hell post, Enhanced Running, about running on cannabis. Those are two things I already do, but I'd never done both at the same time, so I finally tried it. I didn't get the wonderful experience described in the post, but I can confirm what everyone says: I felt like I could run forever. I ran twice as long as I usually do, and not only wasn't I twice as tired, my heart and lungs were not tired at all. But two days later, my quads (the big muscles at the front of my legs) were really sore.

Interesting Hacker News thread, Not everyone has an internal monologue. Personally, I'm good at thinking in words and also good at thinking in pictures, but some people go through life only doing one or the other.

Brain Gain: a person can instantly blossom into a savant - and no one knows why. I'm envious of these people, not so much because they're suddenly good at something, but because they're suddenly highly motivated.

Lately the only thing I'm highly motivated to do is play Starsector. My favorite thing in the game is testing ship loadouts in the simulator. It's basically science: running experiments with different combinations of weapons and defenses to find one where the ship can beat stronger opponents. Here are two good videos about the game, Starsector Review and How to Play Starsector.

]]> February 1. http://ranprieur.com/#a556431e2bf83ff646d926e2684af3c9e2cdcf5e 2020-02-01T13:10:11Z February 1. Continuing from the last post, over on the subreddit Gene comments from the front lines, on the idea that autism will turn out to be multiple things:

It already is. In fact, there are a number of cases I have seen in which "autism" has been used in place of "we don't know what the fuck to call this, but we need to give it a label so this person can get SSDI". Now that I'm active in prehospital emergency medicine, the takeaway is that if the term "autistic" is used in the initial dispatch, be prepared for fucking anything.

He also says that aspies prefer the company of neurotypicals to other aspies, but that's not the whole story, because in this TEDx talk about autism, around the ten minute mark, Jac den Houting mentions the theory that autistic and non-autistic people communicate better among themselves than with each other, and this was confirmed by a study using the telephone game with three groups: "The all-autistic and all-neurotypical groups were equally accurate in their information sharing, but the combined autistic and neurotypical group was significantly less accurate."

I also want to say, I haven't been diagnosed with anything, and I don't want to be, until such diagnosis can get me benefits like free therapy or better drugs. And I understand the danger of making my limitations part of my identity, because then the ego doesn't want to get better. There are stories about people going from being really bad at something to really good. I've actually been practicing walking around the apartment doing complex moves without bumping into anything, and what happens is, when I'm trying to do something tricky with my right foot, my left foot hits something. So I need to work on being aware of more than one body part at the same time.

That's something I'm already doing when I practice swimming or playing piano. By the way, I finally figured out how to get midi files from my keyboard to my computer, and convert them to mp3. So if you're curious, here's an mp3 file of an 80 second bit I did a few months ago. It's more rudimentary than it sounds. My usual method is to keep eight fingers fixed on the same four notes, an octave apart, and then just jam on those notes. My biggest influence is Steve Reich's Piano Phase, and I love to phase the rhythm between my left and right hands.

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