from lj_policy:

Our policy on Non-Photographic Images of Minors is being removed. What this means is that we will no longer be requiring the removal of this content, or suspending people who have posted it. We feel that with the introduction of the adult content flagging system, we do not need to take any further action on this type of material.

About time. It was the start of a very slippery slope.

“Where do you want to go tonight?”

“Oooh. Why not that blue planet again?”

“The blue one? Why?”

Trelm blushed, skin turning a darker shade of chartreuse. “Um.”

“It wasn’t that interesting. Unevolved bipeds.”

“But … It tickles!”

“Tickles?!”

“Yeah. What are the five senses?”

“Touch. Sight. Smell. Taste. Electrcity.”

“Right. They don’t have that.”

“Yeah, but … what’s that have to do with it tickling?”

“You know how we communicate over long distances, right?” Trelm held up the small black box, just like everyone else’s, and mimed rubbing it along the sensitve patch on hir arms, just in case there was any mistaking hir words.

“Well, yeah, I know the principle. It amplifies the body’s electrical fields and transmits them. And receives them and converts them back so we can sense them. It’s a trivial device, just shifts the frequency up. Lets us have channels. Se we’re not all talking at once. And so we don’t have to touch.”

“Right. But the beings on the blue planet? They don’t have that.”

“Haven’t even invented simple technology like that?!”

“No! No, much more advanced than that.”

“Good, for a second, I thought you were going primitive on me.”

“They don’t have that. That sense. They can’t feel electrical fields at all.”

“That’s so .. so….” Hrml couldn’t find words for the mixture of pity and derision.

“They have this other sense. They can sense vibrations in the air.”

“Well, we can do that. When there’s a big truck. Or an explosion.”

“Not like that. They can feel each other move. They can communicate that way. Not terribly far, but they don’t have to touch. And no devices.”

Hrml nodded a bit more approvingly.

“So why does it tickle?”

“When they want to communicate over long distances, they use devices too. But theirs make vibrations in the air instead of touching the arms.”

“Yes, and?”

“It’s not a simple converter. It’s … complicated. And the signals, there are so many kinds. Some at frequencies you can feel. And billions of people on the blue planet. So many communicating at once. The blue planet tickles!”

A Mathematician’s Lament — anyone who loves or hates math, or loves or hates teaching should read it. It articulates what I’ve been thinking about math and math teaching for some time.

Today, our (upna, baileyjordan and my) pet spider, Guadelupe, (A Guatemalan Zebra-Knee Tarantula, discovered to be physically male somewhat after naming her) died. She was almost 4 years old.

Funny? Estonian guy insulting a Polish guy in English, misusing Yiddish words in the process.

“He’s a smuck”

Five minutes later in the same IRC channel:

“What language is spoken in polon?”

The stupid is burning today.

I had a thought while I was working on replying to a thread on whetherwoman‘s journal.

What are the things that you think most define how you interact with the world? As an example, “I’m a woman” is particularly relevant in that discussion. What informs your reactions to the world?

I have a list that feels as long as my arm in my head.

I live in a small town, and I actively try to keep the good parts about small town culture alive wherever I go. I’m acutely aware of the amount of interconnection between people in any group, and I’m happiest when I can either be in an internally well-connected group, or one where I’m introducing people to each other.

I am a comfortable, confident, happy transsexual woman, who feels no need to play a game of “passing” as a XX-chromosomed woman. It affects nearly every interaction I’ve had in the past years. It’s made my sex life, my love life and my body something that seems very public, and that people are quite willing to start a conversation on.

Within the queer, and especially within groups of transgendered folks, I find that my tendency to be calm, a peace-maker, and my willingness to be out without confrontation is distinguishing.

I’m a spiritual person, and I have a deep respect and interest to understand religious and spiritual traditions. In my teenage years, I’d taken my family’s habitual bashings of all things Christian, and it left a hole in my willingness to understand people, to feel and to relate. Now I’m finding that I have more in common in my thought processes and feelings about things with the average religious person who really thinks about their faith than I do with the atheist liberal culture I grew up in. My own beliefs align relatively well with a lot of Quaker beliefs, and a lot of the traditions speak to me deeply.

I’m white, of a lower-middle class family. My parents have no college degrees, though they’re very smart and well-educated.

I have cultural associations to Argentina, latin in culture and racially white.

I grew up in a family where taking care of things oneself was the normal way to do things. My father can fix most anything around the house. We never called a plumber, handyman or repairman for anything. We educated ourselves, we designed our house ourselves, we built our house ourselves. I’ve watched my father repair cars, roofs, sidewalks, computers, desks, faucets. My mother made a lot of our clothes when I was young. Asking for someone to do something for me is not something I think of first.

Oscar’s dad, Don, called every number in his cell phone, trying to find out what happened to his kid, starting at about 2am. Eventually raininglight7 calls me since Don’s called him a dozen times, and after changing his voicemail message to something cryptic, gets a voicemail sounding really freaked out. We together call him an tell him where his kid is. The only way to describe his reaction is Not Pleased. I’ve never had a less useful conversation with someone.

We pick Oscar up at the bus station about 3:30. He’s dead tired already from not sleeping the night before he left, and not sleeping much on the bus. We talk, we hug, and try to be gentle. We pick up some groceries and a couple items we needed, got lunch at Pancheros (A little fast-food mexicanish place in Montrose, that other than the sterile atmosphere, is awesome.) Oscar is an amazing person. Charles Beckner, the less helpful of our two police officers shows up at our house about 8pm, and in no uncertain terms tels Oscar to go home. It’s so very obvious that Charles doesn’t want to deal with things more than he wants to help. He calls Oscar’s father, tells him he’s at the house with his daughter[sic] I can hear Don yelling through the phone at Oscar the moment Charles calls him and hands the phone to Oscar. It’s an unpleasant and frustrating thing to watch, having him try to reply calmly as he can to things, and getting yelled at more and more.

Oscar calls the National Runaway Hotline. They’re a pretty nice organization, and they have a few useful things to say. It’s a long conversation, though, and there’s nothing really conclusive. We’re freaking out a little, not knowing how things are going to play out. We’ve got the sense from Charles that as long as there’s no runaway report issued, nothing’s going to happen with the police, but at this point, we don’t know if Don is going to press that big red button, or Jennifer, Oscar’s mom (who we hear has talked to Don — something new for her in recent history), or what.

We talk. We try to chill out. We try to sleep. Some parts work better than others.

Woke up at 3:30, and I can’t get back to sleep. I’m excited and nervous and I’m not sure what all else

Oscar’s on a bus, out of california! We finally get the house clean. I swear, sometimes, that the only time our house gets thoroughly clean all at once is when someone’s coming.

Tomorrow, another transboy is moving in with Bailey and I. We’ve made a sort of standing offer for the spot on our floor, and this kid got kicked out by his dad.

We’ll see how it goes. I’m excited, nervous and hopeful.

We heard today through our friend who is actually talking directly to ovideater that he’s going to try to come out here to find safe space. We research the laws to stay clear of kidnapping charges and various other legal snafus. Colorado is thankfully sane: as long as you tell the parents where their kid is, or tell law enforcement, you’re pretty well in the clear here. You could still be held responsible for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, especially if the kid gets out of hand while living with you, but I think you’d have to be pretty antagonistic with the authorities to make that happen.

Bailey and I spent a bit of the day cleaning. It’s nice to have an excuse to tidy the house that last little bit.

baileyjordan and I heard that ovideater got kicked out, or at least had a very scary fight with his dad, where ultimatums came out. It sounds pretty bad. We’ve had a standing offer that if someone needs a place, they’re welcome to come out here, and have a place to sleep and enough to eat.

What if autoconf could be replaced by moving the configuration steps into makefiles, rather than vice-versa?

File paths and library lists can already be handled nicely with systems like pkg-config, with the only requirement that the pkg-config tool be in the path.

Why not move feature-detection and other configure sort of tasks into makefiles too?

A library of makefile pieces could be built that represent various autoconf tests, stored in a central directory like /usr/share/pkgconfig, ready for inclusion into GNUmakefiles. Rules might look like this:

include $(shell pkg-config gnuconf-make --variable=MAKEFILE)

all:    check-configuration


PKGCONFIG_PACKAGES=gtk2 atk lua-5.0.0

check-configuration: check-c-compiler check-cpp check-ld my-custom-check check-pkgconfig-packages


my-custom-check:

    do something here to check some part of the build

I’ve got a friend, and have had many more in the past who’ve been on SSRI and SNRI drugs like Prozac and Effexor, and had bad to horrible withdrawal syndromes.

These drugs increase availability of serotonin (and norepinephrine in SNRIs) in the brain by limiting the reuptake of the chemicals by the receptors. The drugs tend to create a dependance (though how bad varies from user to user pretty drastically), and discontinuation can cause some very serious side effects. There’s a ton of ongoing controversy about how the drug companies mislead consumers about the safety of the drugs, and adding to that that patients are often not able to get enough of a physician’s time for a conversation about possible side-effects, especially in low-income situations, and additionally when mental health issues — the very problem the drugs are to treat — are present, getting adequate support and information to make a decision is very hard.

The science of prescribing the right amount to treat a “chemical imbalance”-caused depression is nearly voodoo, since the tests to determine correct levels would involve measuring neurotransmitter levels, which would essentially involve a central nervous system biopsy. That’s not possible on a regular basis for any patient, and so diagnosis is by symptom only. The drug companies advertise a theme of “correcting chemical imbalances” so heavily that I’ve seen a lot of people leap to the conclusion that they have one, without any evidence.

In particular to the research at hand, one friend is having a very hard time discontinuing a drug because of the withdrawal syndrome. She suffers from it to the point where she has partial seizures. I’m researching ways to wean off the drugs, but it’s hard. XR versions are time-release, and the pills are not divisible because it breaks the time-release mechanisms.

As far as I’ve read, the primary reason for the withdrawal is a relatively sudden drop in the level of serotonin in the brain. I’m wondering about and looking for information on dietary supplementation of tryptophan (which is converted into serotonin in the body). Foods I’ve found so far that might help include turkey, black eyed peas, walnuts, eggs¹, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, almonds, dairy products (especially cheddar and and swiss-style cheeses), and to a lesser extent grains.

I’d love to hear more from people who’ve had success weaning themselves off of SSRI and SNRI antidepressants when it was difficult. Was diet a factor? What else did you do?

¹ I suppose that might be why I saw a relatively large positive effect on my mental health when I started eating eggs again. Other than correcting the complete lack of saturated fats and cholesterols in my diet.

Just do it. Surprisingly yum.