Since I've been in Argentina I've heard more Portuguese than I've heard ever before, and have been mistaken for a Brazilian actually once people find out I don't speak Spanish and then spoken in Portuguese too-- and I find Portuguese to just be hilarious sounding but also very beautiful and I'd like to learn it

The people who sound really weird are the Spanish-speakers who try to speak Portuguese, but pronounce everything exactly the same as it would be in Spanish.

I haven't. Good point about the analytical nature, except I'm really quite bad about addressing my issues formally (mainstream or alternative). It takes an enormous amount of psychological energy to go to a mental health professional of any sort, and then it never works out and there's a long period in between, and so on.

Meanwhile, I've learned to be much, much better than I used to be, on my own, and for all I know some of that duplicates some alternhative techniques. It's sort of meditative at times, but also involves mundane things like knowing exactly what I can and cannot ask of myself at any given time. (I worked this out for the first time whe I was Michigan — on depressed days I would give myself one, two, or three hours of pinball playing, depending on how bad it was...)

Anyway, I digress yet again. The short answer is no, I haven't. Should I?

No, you didn't. I simply haven't been able to do those posts — there's so much to say.

Brazil really wasn't all that important, given how young I was. When I was a sophomore in college I met (and dated) a girl I'd known in fourth grade in Brazil, and she told me that when they'd all gotten into high school (she'd stayed through age 16 or so) they'd started spending time out in the clubs and meeting Brazilians — that would have been far different from my experience, which was very isolated as I was too young to be independent.

More later on trips, if you care. Besides South America I've been to Europe a couple times only (with one more coming soon...), Kenya, the awesome Australia trip, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico a couple times, Belize (that second date I mentioned), several spots in the Caribbean, and I guess that's about it for international travel. I can give details if anyone cares.

I really enjoy NLP, I actually considered becoming a NLP practicioner but I don't think there is enough of a market for it where I lived, I'd have to move to a major metropolis and when I looked into it, I lived in Northern Ontario.

But I enjoy it, however I don't utilize it nearly as much as I could either though. I think I've adopted alot of its principles informally in how I have trained my brain to perceive things.

I've used it for anchoring (using a trigger) and reframing. It all depends on how indepth you want to go and if you want to train yourself to control your mind. I consider a form of self mind control.

I have other things that I use to refocus or regroup at times but I find NLP is a tool that I can use to move forward when you understand some of your past habbits, traits and tendencies.

where in mexico?

mcavoy and nlp would lead to nothing but trouble

Mac: where did you learn it, and/or is there a reasonably accessible (and cheap) way someone with no knowledge of it could learn enough to get some indication whether if helped?

Pinball Pete's?

Like most things, I'm self taught. I first looked into it about 5 years ago. I googled several websites, browsed them all and took information from different ones. Then I signed up to a couple of newsletters and I still get updates.

Most of the time, they are junk and using it as a marketing tool to try get you to buy something, but they often have good information and if its a topic that your interested in, you can research it further. But I look at the subject and give it a quick skim and decide if I want to go any further.

One of the first websites that I remember looking at was http://www.nlpinfo.com/ If you click on "Intro to NLP", it gives a really basic tour of what it is.

I don't know where the true origin of some stuff is but NLP also touches upon mimmicking to develop rapport, using eye movements to understand what part of the brain a person is using, aka to tell if they are lying, aka the creative side, or telling the truth, moving in a different direction to access memory.

So some of this kind of stuff is seen on TV shows like CSI and stuff but it has its roots in NLP and neurology.

I think that was it — down in the direction of the ice arena, I think?

Centaur. I used to play with two guys who seemed to be there all the time, it seemed. One retired, one who may or may not have been a lawyer... but we just played the game, over and over.

Y'all are great.

I've actually and two very serious offers to write the paper for me; I think anyone who has read this far understands that I couldn't do that.

But it's a nice thought.

I agree with most of the last paragraph, believe it or not. Excpt don't underestimate the influence of Archer Daniels Midland.

The rest — I haven't done or looked into this either. I could do it, as obviously I pride myself on self-disciple in some way and changing my diet should be within my range, but I've never given it serous thought. I don't eat much sugar (I mentioned earlier that things seem sweeter to me than to most people), but giving up pasta and pizza would be sad.

Weird that you say the first month was terrible, though — in what way?

And are you still coming to dinner even though you think I'm a fascist?

kinda strange to play so much pinball no?

good stuff.

have you sold rights to a biography yet?

Atak,

Did your feelings about equal opportunity for all bother you when tutoring tests for 'rich kids'. (Obviously, not all of them were rich, but I think you get my question.)

It was therapy. It was completely nonthreatening. I did it on days when that's what I needed.


I think I just gave them away to Mason and company. Damn.


Yes, a lot. It was particularly difficult with tutoring students, because anyone who could afford $300 and hour (or rather, whose parents could) was not likely to have had a hard life. It usually took me a while before I started liking them (which did usually happen).

One story along these lines: I had a GMAT student who was the son of the owner of a chain of restaurants. They had a mansion in the DFW area, and I mean a mansion — gated, many acres, palm trees, gargantuan house. I tutored at the house, and the first time I arrived I thought there was no way I'd be able to stand these people.

I rung the bell and the father answered and let me in. He was chatty and as far as I could tell completely unpretentious, and offered me juice and seemed to care what kind I wanted – seems small, but my anti-plutarchy prejudices run deep. Then I met the student. He was behind in his student because he'd been a professional baseball player, at the A level. It developed that his parents had been fine with his decision to try to play baseball (he'd lasted a year and a half, I think, but injuries were a problem) — but they had made him live on a a single A salary (about 10K a year, I think) the whole time. And he wasn't pretentious at all, and seemed genuinely thankful every time I met with him. And the father — he was always there, and the next time he remembered what kind of juice I and had, and had gotten a couple others he thought I might like.

None of this should be surprising, except it was.



Along a different line, I never thought I was changing the world or even making it a better place with my teaching. When one of my students gets into med school, someone else who didn't have my help doesn't. And it's not that the more qualified one gets in — in fact, the whole point is that my students can be less qualified fundamentally and still make it.

However, it still almost always felt good, because I almost always came really to care about, and often to like, my students. The global situation wasn't altered, but locally, I made a difference and it was good, and that made me happy.

I'm curious, how good at you at adapting? I'm a chamelion, it is one of my specialties, I've dined with Presidents, but I've also seen the underbelly of the world and survived.

For me, it was always about the challenge, to see if I could do it. I grew up middle class but I was miles smarter than everyone so I was put with the rich kids, who I didn't really connnect with completely but I wanted to fit in.

And when I was young, I was more concerned about my image than I was about morals, but as I grew older and my values changed, I realized, I had them backwards. So I stopped caring what people thought, and did what was right in my mind / heart.

So now today, I don't conform to society's standards, I do what is right in my mind / heart.

But I know that you know that who I am irl is different that my persona.

So I'm curious, about how you think about the two?

I was wrong, I do know. It suck in — of course it's batman.

But winding up with Elastigirl would be pretty great, so I suppose I might reconsider....

Thinking about it, the biggest thing is that sometimes, some games, your (village) game is somehow off — a combination of lazy and angry, almost. The really villagery chimp approach is great, but when it isn't there you antagonize people and don't get clear — in part because that looks like your wolf game.

I can't point to any specific examples, unfortunately, but I know that's how it feels to me.


In LOTR it took me a long time to work out that you were village, and I can't remember why — but I mean a long time as in ten days. OF course I was in paranoid mode, in part because of the masonry, so that might be part of it. I think your judgtement was fine. I have to look back, though. Remind me in a bit — I do intend to do these right.


I suck at movies. Key Largo and The Maltese Falcon are all that come to mind; I prefer the former.

I don't know which is environmentally sounder (yeah, I know about renewable versus non-renewable resources, but paper production is really nasty), so I go with the ones that are easier to carry (plastic). I do have a few cloth bags, which I keep in the trunk so I usually have them, but it's not like I never waste stuff. It's hard to be perfect, or even good, sometimes.


Because... that's what I started doing. My father took me out to look at ducks, the second weekend of March 1978. We used the book he'd used back when he was a boy scout. And I pretty quickly was hooked on the puzzle aspect of identifying them, and later of finding them. And that, mostly the finding, continued off and on for many years (much less now). I made lists, because I like records. I have lsist of what I've seen and heard in every state and province, and every country I've been to since I started (so no South America, except fort Trinidad and Tobago). My spreadsheet has thousands of records. (I kept it up to date until Australia, when the data entry was just too much, as I had stopped caring quite enough to do it.)

It's gotten me places I'd never have gone; it taught me things I'd never have known. It got me to go to nature camp when I was a kid (ages 11-17), which had various salutary effects, including social ones. (I may never have lost my virginity, or at least not until well into college, had it not been for camp...)

Also, birds are accessible, and nearly omnipresent. Because they can fly they don't need to hide — there are lots of species of rodents, but you meet very few mousewatchers because they're simply not visible. They're colorful and interesting and one can identify most of the 9000 or so species in the field. One can hunt out rarities, or just notice what's there. Even when I'm absolutely not "birding", I cannot help but notice and identify what flies by, and something's always flying by.

1. I'd finish the damned alw school writing requirement, when it was initially due.

An alternative: I might have stayed at Yale even though I found ita miserable place full of pretense and classism (admittedly colored by my being miserable all on my own at the time). It is hard not to fail in life with that kind of pedigree: even toady, people seeing my resume notice the freshman year at Yale more than the double major in math and econ, with honors, in just two and a half years (on top of the Yale year), at U of M.

Or maybe if I choose Harvard or Stanford, the other two schools I applied to — but I doubt I'd have a been a whole lot happier there. (Somewhat, though — Yale was undoubtedly the worst of the three choices.)

But realistically the law school thing is the one that most dramatically improves my life.

Of course the one that most dramatically changes it is using birth control the night K was conceived, but I'm not going there — without him life would be lots easier but I don't think I'd have much in the way of purpose... and I wouldn't have him.


2. Stop worrying about the law school at all (it bothers me every day, and has for I guess going on fourteen years) and just teach something useful, for free. Or build houses, or try to interfere with the aboriginal bowhead whale hunts. But mostly, stop worrying about whether I was successful in a financial success, and focus on trying to be happy with who I am.

When you derive your energy primarily from proteins and fats, it forces your body to process things differently. The extreme of this is ketosis, lauded as a requisite on ketogenic diets ala Atkins, who was a hack and possibly a fraud, but got lucky in that a ketogenic diet works great for weight loss, type 2 diabetes, and a host of extremely common food allergies and incompatibilities resulting from sugar and grains.

Wouldn't miss it for the world.

It's a problem, for reasons beyond just what you cite. Something unappreciated is that in a system tin which bargaining is rife, it becomes a repeated game for the repeat players — the prosecutors and defense attorneys. It seems to be inevitable in such cases that they will sacrifice equity in one iteration in order to increase their long-term utility — but that "one iteration" was someone who was entitled to the most vigorous defense possible or who should have gotten a tougher sentence for what he did. That it works in a large sense doesn't mean those individual results are acceptable.

(Note that what I just described is unethical, but it's also impossible to prevent and certainly common.)


Did the movies.

I think looking Ansel Adams's photographs as a kid made me want, maybe need, to see mountains. They're not really great art — predictable magnificence, again and again — but still...

Faulkner's Light in August somehow made me feel I understood religious faith a little better, even if I've never had any of it. It's grat in a thousand other ways as well.

Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is the most creatively entertaining book I've ever read. None of his other works really does it for me, though.


Once upon a time, none. But more and more. Either I'm becoming flakier, or my knowledge base is getting used and augmented in less linear ways — I sure hope it's the latter.

Basically, when something "feels right", I do it. I don't really know what that means, of course.



I'm not a great wolfhunter, so I'm really not the best one to ask this. Sometimes I just know, even though that's not at all how I present my cases itt.

Most wolves, all but the really good ones, don't go through and build cases that clear villagers or lynch wolves in a way that shows a logical progression of thoughts, not just from one to the next but over time. It is a rare wolf who can build a case that is helpful to his team (because it's wrong), by following the facts where they lead, in a a way that makes it obvious how the thinking should have developed had it been by a villager.


Yes, but differently:

• I'd have been more aggressive with it, so I could get more credit if it happened to work while I was alive and so it would be taken as clearing her if I died first. Now, I was fairly aggressive as it happened, but I backed off at key points.
• At the same time, I'd have made it less good by leaving a piece or two (missable, so this wouldn't be wolfy) out, so it would be less likely to work — and not that "work" means cast suspicion on her at some point, not necessarily immediately, as actually happened. It gnawed at you, and affected your decisions down the road; that was exactly what I wanted. And she been a wolf I'd have wanted to get it out of the way immediately, so the case would have been simpler and more compact, or have some important weakness.

I didn't win that game by any means, but the honeybee case was at least a contribution.


I think I still know your village and wolf games apart, though there haven't been good opportunities lately. (Everyone asking about his/her ww game: I apologize, but I have been only partially aware of the games I've been in for a long time, dating back to this past spring. I'm sorry if my thinking is sometimes fuzzy.) You are more thoughtful and more active early in the data-gathering parts of the game as a villager. Until you learn to do the same as a wolf, people will spot you.

Well, at least I get a pretty high percentage of my diet from non-carbs as it is, because I like meat so much. I guess the question is how far one has to go before it does any good (if there's good for it to do). If it's radical only, approaching Atkins, then yuck.

What are your thoughts about the meaning of things like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the meaning behind quantum mechanics?

I know that you aren't religious, but when I started learning about such things it opened my eyes to other possibilities and brought religion and spirituality into my life. I'm wondering if your atheism is just due to the fact that you don't properly understand particle physics.