Can someone explain cellphone texting to me?  I don’t get it.  It takes much longer to send a text (between typing and scrolling through menus to select actions and recipients and whatnot) than to just phone someone. And, if you’re expecting a response, it’s totally faster to just speak than to text and wait for a texted response.

Yet loads of people text.

So: why?  Is it a mechanism of social avoidance?  Is it fun?  If it’s not efficiency, then what the heck is it?

Oh for god’s sake.  I just lost the post I spent all morning working on.  I got up to go to the bathroom and Windows decided to restart itself to get some new updates going.  Fuck I hate that!  Is there some option I can enable that NEVER allows my computer to restart without my express permission?

Graaargh!

So I just got back from moving my little brother to university.  The trip was exhausting, not only because my little brother is going away, but because my dad was in pain and tired and that turns him into crabdad.  Crabdad is unable to see the upside of anything, particularly my brother’s decisions to forget some necessary paperwork and failure to scout out the campus in advance so we’d know where we were going.  Among other things.  The less said about this trip the better.

The other thing I thought I’d mention is a great little talk I saw on Edge today.  (I’m sorry, the link leads only to the introduction.  You have to scroll down past another little article to get to the actual video of his talk.  Sorry.  Edge has weird navigation.)  The speaker is a professer called Clay Shirkey, and he talks about how people like to produce and share in addition to merely consume, using Wikipedia and television watching as examples.  It’s really interesting for many reasons, but the one that stood out for me was the shocking, enormous volume of hours people waste watching TV every year.

I think TV is an enormous waste of time, 99% of the time.  Of course I find paying to be pandered to with advertisements unpalatable.  (Really television networks are selling audiences to advertisers, not shows to audiences.  The shows are merely hooks.)  Most shows are crap anyway, even so-called news or educational material.  There is almost nothing on TV you couldn’t learn better with the internet or a library card.  Or a phone and a bus pass if you’re gutsy enough to go meet someone who knows about the field you’re interested in.  And entertainment shows are worse - if aliens come to earth with a cosmic death ray and use TV programs as the criteria by which to judge our societies, we’d have no grounds for complaint if they blast us to mist.  There’s no way around it - most shows are mind bogglingly stupid.

But whatever, sometimes people just want to veg out or be mindlessly entertained, and I guess that’s okay.  I do that too.  What gets me is the amount.  Watching TV all night is such a disservice to yourself!  Watching TV all night, every night, and on weekends?  My god!  Think of all the things we could accomplish as a race if we didn’t spend sixty hours a week in front of the tube or using the computer as a TV analogue.  If we tried to learn, or do projects, or spend time with other humans in collective endeavours. Or if we relaxed by taking a walk with a friend?

I mean, what is your life for if you spend half if it in a state of passive reception for American Idol and its spiritual siblings?  Why are you here?  What will be your legacy to humanity? “Here Lies Bill: He Sure Liked CSI.”  Even if you are a talentless nobody who will never create beautiful music or art or cure cancer or anything of lage scale value, isn’t it better for you to engage with your life than drool onto the couch cushions every night?  Great societal outcomes are great, sure, but on the intrapersonal scale it’s your effort to be and to engage that engenders personal greatness.  I’m pretty sure I’ll never be written about in history books.  Lord knows no one would ever buy a painting I made.  But it’s really important to me to live my life in an active way.  That precludes spending five hours a night watching TV.  And that’s okay!  Crowding out TV to read and quilt and spend time talking with my husband is exactly the point!  (If you find this paragraph interesting, this is a neat book to start thinking more about related issues.)

Anyway.  It would certainly be a massive improvement if we all worked on projects like Wikipedia rather than spent all night watching TV.

And that’s what I think about that.

What do you do to handle assholes?

There has been a misunderstanding.

I got an email, clearly related to yesterday’s post about poop, asking just how long I spend in the bathroom, because ha ha, obviously I totally hang out there all the time.  How long?  Let me be totally clear: very little time indeed.

I think we can all agree that it is very important to have regular, healthy poops.  But it is not important to spend time with them.  It’s poo, for god’s sake.  I do not loiter in the bathroom.  I don’t even read in the bathroom, because 1) I’m a high-fiber vegan and it just doesn’t take that long and 2) why bother getting into a good paragraph when you might finish in the middle and then where will you be?  You either have to stop reading mid-paragraph, which as a slightly obsessive type I find excruciating, or you have to sit there and finish the section knowing a lump of poo is floating around bare inches from your bare parts.  Neither is acceptable.  (I do Sudoku, which can be abandoned at any second.)

I don’t understand you bathroom readers.  I can’t speak for everyone’s sofa, but mine is much cushier than the toilet seat.  Wouldn’t you rather sit on the couch?  And, I’m sorry to be crude, but doesn’t the smell get to you?  If it’s privacy you’re after couldn’t you just run a tub?  Or go to the bedroom?

Clearly we all have our little rituals and far be it from me to judge yours.  I’m just saying for me, hanging out with poo is super low on my list of things I like to do.

Freud said that neurosis is the price we pay for civilisation, which we can neither do without nor tolerate sanely.  With that in mind, let’s talk about neighbourliness and the unwritten rules of living communally in an apartment building.

First, a premise: Just because I share a physical structure with you doesn’t mean I thereby grant permission for you to commit offenses against civility and consideration for others. To explain: Some people seem to think that how they behave in their own home is no one’s business but their own, and insofar as “their own home” is restricted to the actual apartment they own, this is true.  The complication is that the way people prefer to live in their own homes is generally repulsive to everyone but their nearest and dearest (who are either blinded or live in a state of learned helplessness), and when they start to consider the entire building their home, and not just their personal apartment, we begin having problems.

Exhibit A: Stinky dogs.  My apartment building is home to a shockingly large array of pungent, ripe dogs.  I swear this is true: I can identify at least three different dogs by smell alone, and am alerted to the presence of probably twelve others simply by intensity of smell (if not differentiation).

(Aside: I can’t seem to stop myself from speculating on the character of people who choose to live with companion animals who wilt plants when they walk by: The owner is surely stinky themselves, given to frequent nose picking, eats ramen noodles and Ruffles to the exclusion of all else, reads nothing more complicated than the cover of the Province, and frequently says, with great seriousness, “Huh?”)

In any case, if you want to have a stinky dog, I certainly won’t try to stop you.  But you need to understand that your right to have a stinky dog infringes directly upon my right to have a nice elevator ride when you use that same elevator to transport Mister Stinkles out for his morning piddle.  This is what I mean by neighbourliness: a true neighbour would either wash their dog or keep it locked up in the bathroom.  Only an asshole traps it in a tiny box of a room which is shared by everyone else in the building, including helpless victims like me who have not becomed inured to the dog’s stench.

Exhibit B: The Bee.  In the apartment above us lives someone we call The Bee.  The Bee was here when we moved in and will probably never leave, because as far as we can tell all he does all day long is carry out elaborate and complicated construction projects that suggest a level of customization precluding sale of the apartment to anyone else.  We call him (or her) The Bee because of the constant buzzing that comes from up there - saws and drills and other things that go buzz in the afternoon.  When Husband comes home from work, he often asks, “What’s The Bee been up to today?”

I’m as pro renovation as the next person, but come on, two years of daily work?  This is more than normal neigbourliness should be required to tolerate.  I think there should be an absolute limit on renovation noise from any one suite: a six month window out of each year (December is off limits) is available in which to renovate, and renovation noises must neither start before nine in the morning nor continue past five in the afternoon.  A lunch break of no less than an hour is required some time midday.  Otherwise we shoot you.

There’s more, but since I recently had a little SNAFU with Chapters online I am getting three copies of all the books I ordered and I am awash in unneeded books.  I have to go return some of this stuff.  I’m switching to Amazon in the States because even with the higher shipping it’s a lot cheaper than any of the Canadian book sellers I’ve found.  Plus Chapters burned their bridge with me with this triple order business.

Here is the short version of the appointment: I am in perfect health and there is no diagnosis (which I expected).  There is no treatment, not even for symptom management (which I did not).

Here is the short version of the rest of my day: lots of blubbering and despair.

The happy ending is that I did consult a different doctor, and he says there are indeed a few things to try, which he figures my GP just wouldn’t have known about.

It was a bad appointment.  I was made to wait an hour past my time to get in, and when I did, the whole meeting took less than five minutes.  After telling me there are no treatments at all, which let me tell you, was incredibly awful and hopelessness-inducing, she then went on to give me the speech about how if she doesn’t know the cause of the problem, it can’t be treated, and medical science doesn’t know everything.  This is irritating because a) I already know the latter part, duh, and b) the first clause isn’t even true.  Medicine treats things which have an unknown etiology all the time.  Schizophrenia and depression come to mind as a couple examples but there are scads more.  The field of medicine advances largely through clinical work, where doctors just try stuff out and see if it works, not through research, where a bunch of scientists come up with something and then gift it to the front line docs.  This is not a first-principles-first sort of process - quite the opposite.  Induction, not deduction.  Her comment was largely designed to put me off and shut me up.  How annoying.

Anyway, at this point I will admit to doing something totally embarrassing, which was to start to cry in the office.  Honestly, this whole process has just been going on for so long and has taken on epic proportions in my life and to be told by my doctor that nothing can be done was devastating.  In addition to feeling crushed and scared I was feeling totally embarrassed, and all I managed to blubber out was an apology, then managed to choke out that the whole thing was just rather frightening.  At which point she prescribed me some sedatives to take at the next attack, and gave me a little talk about how we’d work on a solution together.

We need to unpack this a little so you can understand why this was intensely infuriating.  One, I have never once said anything about anxiety in relation to these attacks.  I don’t get anxious when I have them, I get pain.  Pain is uncomfortable and it can be scary but I’m not exactly hyperventilating over here.  So she’s prescribing not based on my presenting problems, and in fact she didn’t ask me about anxiety - what was going on there is she thinks my problem might be some sort of somatizing issue, and doping me up might resolve it.  This played right into my fear of that very thing, which okay, might be legitimate, but also managed to be deeply invalidating and insulting at the same time.  I just felt like she didn’t get it at all, didn’t get how terrible it is, how it entirely cripples and shuts down my life.  You can’t just say there’s no hope and send me away in under five minutes.

And what is this talk of finding a solution together?  Did she not just tell me, in no uncertain terms and repeated several times, that there are no treatments?  Which the fuck is it, there is no symptom relief or we’re working on a solution together?  What kind of solution, exactly, did she have in mind?  Either she was just spouting platitudes, which is retarded, or again she figures it’s emotional in origin.  The fact that I am at that very moment crying into my lap does nothing to help my case for saying it’s not a hysterical problem.  This appointment is the culmination of a year of uncertainty, fear, testing, and worry - after all that, to hear there is no hope, I imagine many people would break down.  This doesn’t mean I’m some sort of wandering womb hysteric.  And if she has some grand design to track my stress or emotional wellness or whatever, she is doing a shitty job of approaching it, because she didn’t ask me about any of those things.

Another possibility is it just kind of freaked her out that I fell apart, and she was trying to be reassuring.  Lesson one in therapy school is to not give false reassurance because people smell it a mile away and it tends to infuriate them.  Someone should give my doctor the head’s up.

Anyway, at this point, three minutes after her arrival, it was clear we had nothing more to talk about, so I left.  I was too choked up to really say much, I just accepted the script for sedatives, and collected my things and left.  On the way out, she says, brightly: “Have a nice weekend!”

I could have murdered her.  Kiss my ass, that’s what kind of fucking weekend I’m going to have.

Okay.  The good news is I now have rock solid proof that my brain and spine and nerve function is absolutely top notch, no problems at all.  I have written here several times “it’s not like I have a tumour” and that is designed to make it look like I’m not worried, most importantly to myself, but the truth is I have been really scared that there’s something growing up there.  There isn’t.  I am intensely, intensely relieved.

I also know that my GP is not the final word on treatment.  Hence my consultation with someone different.  And lo, there is hope.  Also intensely relieving.  But I didn’t know that when I got out of the appointment - at that time I was just freaking out, calling my husband and speaking in monosyllables because, I don’t know about you, but I can’t talk and cry at the same time.  It was actually pretty pathetic.  I’m embarrassed at how poorly I handled the whole thing - emotional breakdown, taking the patronizing doctor talk without challenge, just being a spaz.  Ugh.

Anyway, that’s all done with now.  Today I plan to finish my novel and try to just unwind a bit, you know?  Yesterday was an emotional wringer.  I’m wrung out.

I need a beer.

I know it’s stupid to get worked up over people being stupid on the internet, but sometimes I can’t help myself.  Like tonight.  I read a bit of a blog by a person with all kinds of mental problems who - this is the forehead-smacking part - takes enormous pride in being able to outsmart and defeat her therapists.

Yes, congratulations, Miserable Fucked Up Person, you have succeeded in thwarting the well meaning efforts of people who want only to help you be happier.  It must be rewarding to get to feel so superior.  Please, continue to ignore the fact that the only person you’re defeating is yourself.

Self sabotage: it’s what’s for dinner.

Lately it seems there are a lot of people who are riding their bikes on the sidewalk.  I hate this because they invariably manage to scare the crap out of me.  One does not expect things to be moving any faster than about six or seven kilometres per hour on the sidewalk, so when something does, it’s alarming.  I don’t like to be alarmed when I’m just walking somewhere.  And I feel justified being a jerk about this because, hello, bikes belong on the road where they can get killed with all the other fast movers.  Us slow moving walking types are entitled to the sidewalk, where we expect an alarm-free stroll.

Is it bad of me that I fantasize about shoving a stick into their spokes when cyclists ride on the sidewalk?

There are two basic requirements of findings in order to call them scientifically obtained: they must be both reliable and valid.

Reliability refers to the stability or consistency of our finding over time. If we apply our test more than once, will we get the same result each time? If repeated applications of the test cluster closely, we say the result is reliable: every time I eat watermelon I enjoy it, so this is a reliable finding. Every time I take a certain online personality quiz I get a different result, so the finding is not reliable.

Validity refers to whether our results actually measure what we think they’re measuring. Checking the colour of your socks is not a valid manner of determining your intelligence, but scoring your results on a Stanford-Binet intelligence test probably is. (A finding cannot be valid unless it is reliable.)

And this is precisely why Wikipedia is not usable if your end is to claim your findings are scientific. It is neither reliable nor valid; more precisely, it may be reliable and valid, but we have no way of knowing this for sure. Entries can be changed at will by anyone, at any time. Therefore we cannot count on reliability. And there is no system of fact checking or peer review or editorial procedure which ensures that the information entered is correct; therefore we cannot count on validity. (Also, without reliability we can’t have validity anyway. We could stop at step one!)

Three arguments need to be dispelled here: One, you may say that just because it is possible for information to change or be wrong doesn’t mean that it in fact is either of these things. This is true – but so is the opposite. Since we have no reason to believe that reliability and validity are always preserved, we must be conservative and assume they have not been.

Two, you may say that many articles provide citations, which resolves questions of validity. But simply entering a citation does not mean your interpretation and summary of it in the body of the article are correct, or that in the time after you posted it that no one has altered the information without removing or changing the citation. Of course we can check the sources if we want to make sure, but this leads to the obvious conclusion that checking is in fact essential, otherwise how will we know if we have achieved reliability and validity? So we have not gained much, if anything, by using Wikipedia. We should have gone straight to the sources themselves in the first place.

Three, you may say no system is perfect and erroneous information finds it way into books and journals also. What differentiates these other sources from Wikipedia is a system of controls that minimizes error, and that seeks in good faith to preserve reliability and validity. Experts in methods are the gatekeepers to, for example, publish your findings in a journal. This system includes, for example, peer review. There is no comparable system for Wikipedia. It is true that informed people may correct errors as they come across them, but we can’t count on this informal version of The System to find each article (perhaps not even most articles). This is a problem of reliability. On the other hand, books and particularly academic journals are utterly beholden to The System (which brings problems of its own…). There is no natural selection of Wikipedia articles to weed out the stinkers. In fact, I suspect it is probably the case that the people best equipped to supervise and correct Wikipedia articles (such as academics and other highly experienced folks) simply don’t bother. Why would they? Not only is there no way to protect their work (meaning some jackass can just delete it any old time), but they know that other people know not to count on Wikipedia information – what is the incentive to put effort into it? If you’re an expert in a field, you’ll try to publish somewhere with credibility.

So what is Wikipedia good for? It is good for casual research when your interest is superficial enough that it doesn’t matter if it’s wrong or sort of wrong some (or more) of the time. It might be a good place to get oriented to a new problem, so you know what areas might be good to look into more seriously. It’s an interesting cultural phenomenon and should be studied in its own right for this reason.

What this means is that Wikipedia is extremely useful to the layperson who can’t be bothered with carrying out a literature review. And that’s fine! Most of us aren’t writing a thesis, we just want to find out some basics about the topic at hand. All that is required is assumption of the risks inherent in getting your information from a place with unknown reliability and validity. So if you’re serious about your research, if you really care about its accuracy and want to say your findings are scientific, then you need to ditch Wikipedia and get yourself a community membership to a university with online access to academic databases. And take a course in research methodology so you can intelligently assess what you read. That’s science.