I am pleased to announce the release of the The 2014 Craig Report (Year 44). This is my first quantified (and qualified) self report, hopefully followed by a more detailed one next year, and many more in the years to come. The executive summary is duplicated below, the details (with graphs) are in the link.
One of the things I did early in my Zen practice was write down the Eightfold Path (or rather, my transliterinterpretation of it) on a sheet of paper. I folded the paper three times, so that each leg of the path was on it’s own eighth. I would keep it with me and tried to memorize it.
My faith has become more complicated since then. Read the rest of this entry »
rosy dawn backlight
of a city still glowing
from a pure, dark night.
Anti-theists believe religion is the problem. Libertarians believe government is the problem. Populists believe corporations are the problem. But they’re all wrong. People are the problem. Give them power in religion, government, or a corporation, and they will likely abuse that power. Especially since the path to getting such power is biased toward those who will abuse it.
I was back in grad school at UVa, studying statistics with one of the guys I used to play poker with. We were working together on a homework assignment. The poker guy had to leave, and I worked on the assignment a little more before taking it to the two teachers for the course we were in. They pointed out that we had done the first problem wrong, and that we had missed two problems at the bottom of the page. However, they pointed out that I had also turned it in early, so I had time to go back and fix it before it was due.
When I went back to where I was studying, I told the poker guy about what the teachers said. He became very angry, and started yelling at me for taking the work we’d done to the teachers. He stormed out in a rage, and I decide to go to the cafeteria and get some food.
I got a tray of food, but the cafeteria was packed full of people. I somehow managed to find a seat pretty easily, but everyone was talking really loud and the noise was bothering me. So I took my food and left, wandering around the building. The building was also full of people but it wasn’t that loud. Finally I found a spot near the top of a short flight of stairs. I sat down against one of those waist high metal poles they hook velvet rope to at movie theaters. It had some sort of sign on it, but I didn’t bother reading it.
After a while I got up, leaving my food and the book I was reading by the pole. I wandered down the stairs and around to the left, down some more stairs. Eventually I wandered back up and around to where the pole was, but my food and book were gone. I was very angry at whoever took them for a moment, but then I saw my book on top of a trash can to my right. I figured some found my food on the floor, threw it out, and left the book there for me to find. I calmed down and started walking over to get my book, but that’s the last thing I remember.
I was leaving a party and I had to climb up a hill through the woods to get home. Somehow I knew that Max Lancaster was stalking me through the woods. I kept looking left and right as I climbed the hill through the woods, but I didn’t see anything. For some reason I couldn’t twist my neck enough to look behind me. Then someone hit me in the back of the head and I lost consciousness.
When I came to I was leaving the party again, starting to walk up the same hill through the woods. Somehow I knew Max was stalking me again, but this time he was with Tigger. This time I had a six pack of Tru-Ade, with four cans left in it, that I was holding by the two empty rings. Since I couldn’t look behind me I was turning all the way around, swinging the Tru-Ade to hit whoever might be sneaking up behind me. But I was drunk, so whenever I turned all the way around I would stumble all over the place, screaming and muttering incoherently.
It took a long time to get through the woods that way, but when I did I found myself in McIntire Park. There was a gravel road going back and forth up the hill, but I was climbing straight up the hill. Up ahead of me was my sister Kara and some guy I didn’t know, but I had this feeling he was one of her old boyfriends. As I was climbing the hill two wolf cubs ran between me and Kara. I looked around and saw two more wolf cubs running up the hill to my right.
That’s when I saw the two animals chasing me. One was like a cross between a puma and Tigger, with a strange, narrow face. The other was like a small elephant with orange fur, that had all the fur ripped off it. The elephant was ashamed, and kept it’s head turned away from me.
To get away from the animals, I went down the hill to my right, where the shelters were in McIntire Park, but there was a house there. I went into the bathroom and got two pain killers from the cabinet behind the mirror, drinking them down with a glass of water. I went back into the living room, and through another door into a life-sized indoor Mario-Kart course.
I got into a kart and started racing through the kart. I had some friends behind me, but I couldn’t tell who they were. The second lap through the course one section went completely dark, and I had to navigate through it by memory. Somehow I managed it, and all my friends behind me were screaming “How did you do that? We can’t get through!”
On the fourth lap it stopped being Mario-Kart, and I was chasing some guys playing basketball around and around CHS. Again, one section of hallway was completely dark and I had to navigate through it by memory. After a couple laps I looked down and realized that if you did, you could see light coming from the baseboards.
Then I was able to see the basketball players, and I managed to steal the ball from them. But there was only one lap left to go, and I had to make a score to win the game. A couple times I bobble the ball, and it fell off balconies that were way high up. But just like when I was playing by myself as a kid that I had to make the last shot to win the game, I always got a second chance. The ball would go way down, and then bounce all the way back, with a totally unrealistic curve that went right back into my hand.
At the end of the last lap I came out onto the tenth floor of Bethesda Towers. It was under construction, and the front part of the building was a long balcony. Bill Maisannes and Mark Elliot were out there, looking out across the street. I heard a crash and looked down, and saw the elephant from earlier had gotten stuck out front in a gate like in a parking garage. I turned to Bill and said “Look! It’s the elephant!” But Bill was getting hit from behind by a wooden pallet. It was standing on end and smacking into him as he sat on the edge of the balcony. He kept pushing it away but the wind kept blowing back. Finally he shoved it away, but by the time he had the elephant hand wandered away down the street.
I looked around trying to find the elephant. On the right I saw a park and there were two guys talking as they walked through it. One guy was some sort of mutant, and he had a face like the puma/Tigger creature I’d seen in McIntire park. On the left I saw a pavilion set up, and Steve Ingham was down there talking to someone. I couldn’t tell who he was talking to. I watched for a little longer and they turned, and I saw that he was talking to Andrew Johnson. Andrew looked thinner than usual, with beard stubble and an army jacket, like he was on the run from something.
I turned to Bill and asked, “Hey, is that Droid?”
“It can’t be Droid,” Bill replied. “He’s dead.”
We both turned and looked again, and then Bill got up decisively, saying, “We better go warn Steve.” I got up to follow him, still a little unsure, and then the alarm went off and I woke up with the Benny Hill theme stuck in my head.
Okay, so I’ve been recording data on my moods. I think I’ve gone over the current methodology already, but allow me to reiterate. Skip to the the graph if you’ve seen it or don’t care. I have set up my Droid phone to ping me every hour using the Calendar app. I think that ties in to Google Calender, so I guess I’m shoving some screwy stuff into the data hoover that is Google, but I’m too small to affect them.
So I’m two weeks in to my mood tracking, and it’s not working out so well. When things don’t work well, you adapt (I made a T-shirt that just says “ADAPT”). So I am switching gears on the mood collection.
Okay, moving forward on Chess. I have decided not only to shift my work to my correspondence Chess, but also to run an experiment with it as part of my greater data collection.
Okay, I’m backing off from my statement that I am quitting Chess. Sort of. When I quit working on my Chess game, I was very relieved. But as I looked around I realized there were still some cleaning up to do. I’m in the middle of a fair bit of correspondence Chess: four tournaments, a pyramid, and a few assorted games. I also have some very nice Chess books I got for this latest foray into Chess, some of which have interesting information I have yet to peruse. Not to mention my numerous Chess sets, like my really cool MoMA set, and the Isle of Lewis replica set my brother got me for Christmas. What to do with all of that?
zen quaker 