Have you seen Elizabethtown? Do you identify with Orlando Bloom?

did batman's voice bother you in Dark Knight?

Ecuador yes, but Galapagos no. It's on the list, of course — but now that it's getting commercialized and exotic species are a problem it's not quite so cool.

Top choice for a trip to see animals/birds as of right now is mountain gorillas in Rwanda (depending on the political situation, I suppose). I came very close to doing that a couple years ago, but my spinal surgery interfered and I never got back to it.

did you get laser surgery to improve your eyesight?

No, and no idea.

What's your mathematics background? Calculus? Differential equations? Analysis? Topology?

I don't remember.

I'm really not into movies — or really any part of popular culture. That keeps me from entering a whole lot of sheep games — I simply have no idea about almost anything involving TV, movies, popular music, or any celebrity.

What extracurriculars did you do in HS? In college and beyond? Any volunteer work?

Yes.

Calculus in tenth grade, then visited a local university to take mutivariable, difEQ, analysis and so forth while I was still in high school. (Actually was in one class with my mother, who was getting her MAT.) I finished my math major a couple years into college and then basically stopped, instead taking classes that were fun. It turned out when I graduated that I bumbled into an econ major along the line, and really hadn't known. (I liked it in part because I quickly got into the game-theory classes.)

My best math (maths, for TL) class was a topology class where I was the only student who wasn't intending to get a PhD, and every week someone new (a student) had to teach the lesson.

btw, I did win a statewide math competition in high school, which helped the Presidential Scholar effort a fair amount.

No, though I would have. they just got better. I don't know when my eyesight went south (the nadir was about 20/100 or so), but when I was a 1L I couldn't read the board, and got glasses. Because I was kind of old to be getting glasses for the first time i never really adapted (and couldn't ever make contacts work), so I wore them only when I needed them.

About four years later, I was in northern Minnesota and stopped to look at a great gray owl (incredible bird). I set my glasses down on the trunk — but forgot them... and when I drove away they fell to the pavement, I realized that fact, I backed up, I ran over my glasses...

A bridge partner of mine back in Pennsylvania measured me for new ones... and said I didn't need them. I thought he meant I didn't need them badly, but he informed me that my eyesight was 20/8 in one eye, 20/10 in the other. (It's not that good now, but still good, maybe 20/15 or so.) they had just gotten better while I was living in the woods of Pennsylvania.

What's your preferred way to define the Sine function? Power series, inverse of the arc-sine integral, or some other way?

Can you start with the ZFC axioms and then construct the real numbers?

This is a long answer; I'll miss some things but you'll get the point.

I wasn't diagnosed bipolar until just a few years ago, which means we wee never really treating the problem. I have been on lots of antidepressants, though, because depression is what manifested itself most clearly — but almost every antidepressant I've taken makes me feel (emotionally) messed up in some way because they bring out my manic side in some way — inducing panic attacks, for example. Given that I don't know there even was a manic side, my conclusion was that all drugs were horrible, pretty much.

It started with elavil, when I was an undergrad... and we got the first of my three near-suicides (not attempted, but seriously contemplated). Over time I would spend a long time between shrinks (et al), punctuated by another effort and another failure, and so on. I have long since lost track of every antidepressant I've taken. Oddly and annoyingly, the only one that actually helps my depression is good old boring prozac, but I can't tolerate it because it makes me fuzzy: on it I'm less intelligent (we've tested), and far less able to focus. Adding ritalin to the mix helps some, but not enough to make it worth it (because it doesn't do much more to the depression than take the edge off it).

btw, the most obvious manifestations of the fuzziness were that i would sometimes get lost in class (but was told that my teaching still looked fine), and that I was much worse at bridge. Bridge, incidentally, is by far the most intellectually challenging thing I've spent a lot of time at — far harder than Berkeley law or my math degree.

Anyway, after I got diagnosed as bipolar (really I self-daignosed but got confirmation, based on Prozac starting to induce regular panic attacks which made me wonder whether maybe...) I started on various mood stabilizers. depakote got me another brush with suicide, and this time I was close enough that i actually checked myself int the psych ward of a local hospital. (Very weird signing away one's right to leave, which is what one does under Texas law.) I later discovered that the suicide rate for bipolars on depakote, the most commonly prescribed mood stabilizer at the time, is far higher, like 2.5 times as high, than that for those on lithium. But of course no one prescribes lithium, really, because ether's no money in it — it's been out of patent forever, it's a cheap compound (lithium carbonate), I mean, it's practically free while I was paying $180 per month at the Sam's Club pharmacy fro that damned depakote that tried to kill me. (There are other issues with lithium, I admit — it's dangerous, basically — but this taught me to hate drug companies passionately.)

After that I did wind up on lithium, which helps a bit but does the same fuzzy thinking thing that prozac did (without the panic attacks, though). I was on it for a couple years, during which time I learned to control the mania, to direct it as it were. But I don't take it any more because it really never helped with the depressive side at all and I'm able to control the other side.

So that's where I am.

It's been so long I don't even really understand the question.

The answer to the second question, I'm pretty sure would have been yes, once upon a time.

Why and where did you live in Brazil?

Interesting - not everyone with bipolar would change it.

São Paulo. My father, an auto industry exec at the time, was transfered theer for about three years when I was almost eight.

More about this later.

Apparently it doesn't make them miserable or destroy their lives. They probably like the great things they can accomplish; maybe I believe I could have done them without it (to the extent I've ever done anything great).

I'll have to get some of the newer lsat tests off their website. thanks. i just read this on a website and have trouble believing it's accuracy.

i don't see that being true. thoughts?

We have tested and there are deviations from randomness that are statistically significant. I forget what it was, though — I actually think the website is right about E being best (though not by how much) — also, this doesn't work on the games section, where there is in effect a different formula which favors A through C. Still, it should matter only on questions you don't even read, as even a cursory reading of the answers should allow you to eliminate one or two.

Speaking of which: I once took the entire arguments and reading comp sections of a complete LSAT without reading the reading comp passages or paragraphs on which the questions were based, and scored an extrapolated (because no games section score) 165 or so, I forget exactly how high it was. There is huge value available in working out what the answers never look like, and which can be eliminated as being very unlikely based on LSAT-type passages.

ive been reading this thread for an hour. would u mind giving me your aim?

too much to filter through, maybe you already gave it somewhere.

also:

- will u play bridge with me? i havent played in a while, but used to love it.

- can u critique my WW game. i would like to get better.

My AIM is atakdoug.

______

I'll answer the other questions later tonight.

Almost certainly not. I don't have the data myself so I have to trust those who study it, but essentially everyone agrees the Earth is becoming warmer, rapidly.

The disagreement among scientists, to the extent there is dissagreement, is over what's causing the warming (actually, he realtive weights of the various causes). The big questions: Is it man? Can we stop it? Also, Is it bad? Details such as the relative importance of CO₂ versus methane and the like are silly relative to the big questions.

On the first two, there is very broad consensus that man is the principal cause of what's happening — so many scientists around the world agree that it almost can't be a conspiracy. Most seem to agree that stopping it within a century or two is impossible. As for whether it's bad — well, that depends on one's metric, of course, but regardless what one uses it is clear that it isn't clear, if you will. In general, however, it appears that the changes will be, if not necessarily bad over all, at the very least hugely disruptive to billions of people, and devastating to the environment in many areas.

So basically, yes, I believe it. But I'll say that it is also not just that I'm trusting the scientists. I have seen it myself. I know that my grandmother's crocuses flower earlier than they did when I was a kid. I have seen in my very own records that the bird migration along the Mississippi and Atlantic flyways is happening much earlier (as in, a couple weeks earlier) in the spring than it did when I started birding in the late 70s. I have seen polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba, waiting for Hudson Bay to freeze at a time of year when historically they would already have been heading out onto the ice. I have seen Glacier National Park in the mid-70s, and seen it now, and it's hard to miss the fact that the glaciers that used to be there are just plain gone.

No conspiracy theory will make me ignore that. Conspiracies don't just invent the disappearance of glaciers; dozens of species' migration patterns that are believed to have been largely unchanged for centuries don't just change randomly. It is happening.

qft

what do you think of BC atak?

Time to do this one. I'll add details that a kayaker would already know, so the whole thing is coherent to everybody.

When I was in California I was a class IV+ kayaker whose friends were class V kayakers. I've done some amazing rivers (and some incredibly beautiful ones), some of which were beyond my skill level.

But let's back up, to a run on the easy part of the Kings, the class IV run there. I hit a little (I mean, no more than a foot high) breaking wave sideways, low braced on it with my right hand — and felt my shoulder go. The leverage get from an extended arm plus an extended paddel is considerable, and my imperfect form put my shoulder in a vulnerable position. Later it would turn out that I had torn the capsular ligament, the labrum, and one of the two halves of the biceps tendon.

But at first that all wasn't clear, and for months I kept kayaking. My shoulder kept coming out of place, essentially constantly, until it got to the point where I really couldn't brace on my right at all. I also could rarely roll successfully using my right, which was bad because my left roll had always been terrible. Basically, I'm not a completely natural athlete — i can easily get good at things, but great just isn't within my range in most athletic endeavors, and kayaking was no exception: my skills were incomplete.

So I ignored all this and kept boating. The next spring we did the Toulumn — the Cherry Creek run, which is the classic Class V run. (The normal class IV run is great fun, but needs a lot of water to work well, but I digress again...) One of the rapids on that run is called the miracle mile. It's about a mile of literally continuous rapids, dropping a stunning (to someone who knows) 220 feet over that mile. It's not big drops, either; rather, it's a solid mile of twists and turns... and death traps.

It comes toward the end of the run, too. By the time we got to it, I was exhausted — i just wasn't good enough for the run, and kept having to use power to get out of spots where my friends could use finess. And then came miracle mile, and toward the end of it I made a mistake in a drop and needed to ferry right pretty rapidly... and my shoulder couldn't do it. tbh it really wasn't even the shoulder any more at that point, I think — I just didn't have anything left.

The result was that I washed broadside (left side) into a house sized rock. this would have been no big deal except that the rock was undercut — that means the water (much of the river, in fact) was going under it. With about 1200 cfs (cubic feet per second) in a pretty small river bed at the time, this was bad.

The above statement is the epitome of understatement: what I just described means death. Basically, water + rock = death, if one isn't careful and sometimes even when one is. The river wants to kill you — and undercut rocks are the way it does it. (one of the best, anyway)

My boat sank, with me in it of course. And then it got pinned under the rock, several feet down — broadside to the current and wedged in, it was under thousands of pounds of force. It was not going anywhere for a while, so I had to get out of it, or I would die.

I was in a Perception Dancer, a pretty maneuverable boat that unfortunately has a fairly narrow cockpit. Kayaks are plastic, basically Tupperware (there are fiberglass ones too). Tupperwear bends. Under that force, my kayak pressed down onto my thighs, pinning me there. I couldn't move. It was at this point that I though the thoughts I related earlier: "I'm probably about to die." No fear, really, just a sort of a calm surprise, and disappointment.

I thought about this for a bit, decided that "can't move my legs" wasn't an acceptable answer, and started to wiggle rather than pull, and I was able to start working my way out. It ripped up my shins some on the way out, as the boat kept compressing, but once my knees were free I knew I would live. After getting out of the boat I still had to work my way hand-overhand, in the current, along the bottom of the rock to the edge, but then I was finally able to let my life jacket do its job and get me to the surface.

My friends were obviously stunned at it all. they were experts in rescue but there was absolutely nothing to be done about this, and they were all convinced I was gone. (Some had been present a couple years before when another kayaker, this one a real expert, had died in a silly little rapid on the Kings, so they'd been there before, as it were.) They swore that I was under for about a minute, though frankly that doesn't seem likely — but I have no solid sense of the time myself, so maybe.

My boat was under there for about half an hour, at which point something must have moved under there and it worked its way free. My paddle popped up after forty-five minutes. I hiked out — there was no way I was getting back in the boat that day, nor that my friends would let me.

And I was left with the knowledge of what it's like to know you're about to die.


(There's a followup to this, which I'll type up after dinner.)