Plaidophile

My kitchen is almost done being rebuilt. So I'd might as well write up why it took a kitchen rebuild to get a working dishwasher again.

From Ars Technica, Literacy may have stolen brain power from other functions:

The decreased activity in response to faces seemed to occur in those who achieved literacy during childhood (it was one of the only differences between them and adult learners). The authors suggest that the area that responds to faces normally expands with age, and learning to read may limit this expansion by putting nearby brain areas to other uses.

This isn't to say that you're going to be worse with faces if you know how to read well, although the authors indicate they're going to look into that to find out. But it does indicate that literacy involves a new specialization in some areas of the visual system, which ensure that the centers involved with processing language become just as active as if they had heard the words spoken.

According to my mom, I taught myself to read at a very very early age (she says that at 18 months I got obsessed with letterforms and reading the cereal box and so on, and I certainly remember being able to read at the age of 3 and wondering why all the other kids needed the teacher to read storytime books out loud), and I am also profoundly bad at facial recognition. So, while an anecdote is no substitute for data, it's certainly something to think about.

Frankly, I feel that it's been a reasonable tradeoff for me.

deviantART, binarism, and transphobia: on LGBT Spirit Day, a user took dA to task for no longer allowing accounts to sign up with a gender set to "other/unspecified." The results were not good, and it ended up motivating a huge number of neutrois and neutrois-sympathetic users to disavow dA and leave.

One particularly nasty thread on the support issue also finally motivated several people (including the person who started all this) to start preferring "it" as their personal pronoun (as I have for years, at least in an online context).

So, I've always had tinnitus, my whole life. Of course, sometimes it's better and sometimes it's worse. But for the last few days I've thought it was getting really bad, especially when I'm at home alone in my living room where it's generally pretty quiet. But there was something not quite right about it: it had a direction to it.

Tonight I finally tracked down where it was coming from: the transformer on the cheap PS3 Move charging station I bought. Which was especially maddening since I had it unplugged from the charging station itself (to turn off the obnoxiously-bright obligatory blue LEDs) which only made it even louder. And it's at pretty much the exact same frequency as my tinnitus, making it really hard to track down or even tell if there's a difference between it on or off (because if I plug my ears, of course the tinnitus gets relatively-louder).

Also, as it turns out, when I have the Move controllers docked on it with it unplugged, it drains the Move controllers' batteries. So much for convenience.

Basically, I can't really recommend the CTA four-port Move charging station, especially if you have really good treble hearing, a case of tinnitus, and an aversion to REALLY BRIGHT LIGHTS.

Anyone have any idea where I should go about reporting an obvious, transparent, and possibly successful mortgage scammer? Unfortunately, the Internet is full of information about the scams (which are, again, obvious and transparent) but I can't find any information about who to report one to.

I have an accumulation of Stuff that I should get rid of. In particular, my old TV, my old netbook, the XO I got from OLPC's "give one get one" program, and a few random perfectly-functional cellphones and iPods and such. Does anyone know of any good charities to which I could donate them?

My criteria:

• Must not be faith-based (or if it is faith-based, must not use their charity as a platform for espousing rubbish)
• Ideally would use the item directly rather than reselling it or recycling it for scrap or the like (so, for example, I'd rather donate my TV to a homeless shelter than to Goodwill, and cellphones to a charity which provides phones to the homeless than to the "cellphones for troops" things that just recycle the phones for pennies on the dollar)
• Should be tax-deductible
• For the TV, should be willing to pick it up themselves or be in San Francisco

Right now I'm leaning toward Compass, who I donated a bunch of stuff to last time I did this sort of cull, since I really like their mission and they satisfy all my criteria, but maybe someone else has better ideas? I don't think the TV or the XO are a good match for them, though, so I still need ideas specifically for those. (For the XO I did find Aspirnaut which is my first choice, if they get back to me.)

So I appear to have bought a car.

Finally saw the doctor today, and described my symptoms. "You'd might as well be reading the list of symptoms from a textbook," he said. He put me on Zegerid (time-release omeprazole with an additional antacid) that works as both an antacid and an acid controller, and also takes care of the ulcer (by starving the extremeophile bacteria of the acid it so craves), and said that if that doesn't help after a couple weeks he could schedule me for endoscopy but he wasn't too concerned.

While I was there he also went over the results of my labwork from my checkup last year. My cholesterol is a little elevated but nothing to worry about, especially in light of the fact that both of my remaining grandparents are close to turning 99 and I have a family history of high cholesterol. He said that a few patients before me he saw someone whose cholesterol was over 1000. Holy crap.

Anyway, now to decide whether to spend the 45 minutes to get back to work just to keep reading boring API docs for a couple hours. I am thinking "no."

Yes, it's an ugly word and a neologism, and yes it should probably be avoided in favor of "irrespective." However, it is not necessarily the case that it is a double negative; the ir/in/im prefix isn't only a negative! It also means "upon" (irrigate, irritate, irradiate, irrupt, impugn) or "toward" (invigorate), and can be an emphatic (inflammable, indeed).

It's a less common usage of the prefix, granted, but that doesn't make it invalid.

"Irregardless" is a perfectly cromulent word.

So, earlier today, I got a phonecall from a New Jersey area code. I answered, they said something in a language I didn't understand, and I said, "You have the wrong number," and hung up. They called back, and I didn't answer. They left a message. Obviously it isn't intended for me, but I'm curious if anyone can figure out what they're saying if only because I want to know the sort of lengthy message that someone just leaves for a phone number which is obviously not the person who they are trying to reach.

I used to have a pretty good ear for languages, but I can't really tell what this is. My gut says it's either Hebrew or Farsi but I'm probably way off.

Hopefully this doesn't turn into the Somalian thing all over again (although since this call originated from the US I can at least expect it to not happen in the wee hours of the night).

So I'm thinking about getting a car again. Even though I'm pretty sure it's not worthwhile.

My friend Rachael (who posts here and other places as R343L) is about to move up to Seattle and it would mean a lot to me if people were to accept her into their social circles as they were so readily accepting of me. <3

Tonighht I went to the Cartoon Art Museum to get my Perry Bible Fellowship book signed. Nick Gurewitch is a nice, talkative fellow.

While I was there I wandered around the exhibit a bit (very briefly, since it was getting crowded due to the signing — I will definitely go back later to actually explore the museum in the future, possibly this weekend), and on my way out I ended up chatting a bit with Andrew Farago. Unfortunately, all I could really think to talk about was his wife's comics, and also hamfistedly thanked him for accepting my stuff into the exhibit. (I think I come across as a bit of a jerk and/or creepy weirdo when I'm overcompensating for nervousness due to my whole "uncomfortable when not with at least one friend" thing.)

Anyway, Andrew did mention thinking about having some sort of group thing for local web cartoonists, so hopefully that will give me another avenue for my social life.

Perhaps a year ago I had misplaced my right wrist brace, although I knew where my left one was. This wasn't a big deal until my wrists went bad again, and I looked high and low for the right brace but couldn't find it, and ended up just buying a new pair, since I figured that since the left one was kind of worn down I should just have a nice fresh pair.

So a month later (i.e. just now), I thought it would be nice if I could find my noise-canceling headphones, which have similarly been rather hard to find for quite some time. I started looking for them, and thought, "Wait, I shouldn't do that, because the law of irony states that if I do, I will immediately come across my missing right wrist brace."

But I thought that was silly, so I started rooting around for the noise-canceling headphones...

and immediately found my missing right wrist brace.

I'll be turning 31 in a couple weeks (eek!) and I need ideas for what to do. Right now the top contenders are:

• Have another lame little gathering at my place
• Invite friends to go out to karaoke at either Nap's or The Mint (preferably Nap's since they're in stumbling distance of my home and not as popular, although The Mint serves sushi)
• Try to ignore the relentless march of time
• Go see a movie? I've been wanting to see both Up and Terminator Salvation.

Let me preface this by saying that I have absolutely no problem with jury duty, and I actually look forward to serving. I'd like to think that if I were implicated in a crime or a lawsuit I'd want the decision to be made by people who care about justice being served, and so it's only fair that I be an agent of serving that justice myself. So when I got a jury duty summons for this week I was actually a bit excited at the prospect.

Apparently, in most of California (and in most states in general), jury summons work by them saying exactly what day and time you'll be reporting on, and you may or may not go before a selection committee. San Francisco works a bit differently, however; you are given a summons for a particular week and a group number, and the night before every business day there is a lottery for which groups must report the next day, so potential jurors have to check a website or call in to find out if their group has been called for the next day.

i drank some juice which was kind of old and it tasted funny, and then half an hour later I started to feel numb and weak, so I called 911. the paramedics came and asked me a few questions and even though I'm feeling bad they decided it was just 'bum juice' and that I shouldn't worry, even thoughmy face is pretty much completely numb. I don't think that's a good sign and I'm feeling a pretty weak, and also annoyed that the paramedics were kind of insulting about it.

anyway i am definitely dumping the juice (except I would hope that they'd have wanted to test it for botulism toxin or something)

so if you do't see me post to twitter for a while you'll probably know why (i hope this isn't my last entry)

The outdoor temperature is higher, so computer fans and refrigerators run harder, which raises indoor temperatures more, so people run fans or air conditioners which produce work which raises the outdoor temperature more, and which also put more pressure on the electricity distribution infrastructure which generates more heat and more CO₂, which raises the outdoor temperature.

The higher CO₂ levels make the grass grow longer, faster, so the people who insist on having lawns run their lawnmowers more, which generates heat and uses more fuel and puts even more CO₂ in the atmosphere (as well as other nasty emissions because lawnmower engines aren't at all clean).

The more we struggle to keep comfortable, the harder it will become.

For a long time I've been aware that I have trouble recognizing faces that I'm not familiar with. Usually I'm at least okay at faking it (like, if I don't recognize someone right away I pretend to know them until their identity comes to me), but today after lunch, a person who I met in Japan a year ago and had lunch with just once came to me and asked if I remembered who he was — and got a bit offended that I didn't immediately recognize him until he prompted me a bit (and after that he seemed to think that because I didn't recognize his face I wouldn't remember the lunch, which I did quite well).

Anyway, this led me to find an online test (made by actual real prosopagnosia researchers so it's not like a Myspace WHAT COLOR IS YOUR INNER FURRY thing or whatever), which I scored 67% on (65% is their threshold for "you are almost certainly faceblind"), and there's probably enough of a margin of error that I am comfortable saying that this shows I'm probably faceblind. Hooray.

So, the three remaining pre-Seattle fillings (one from grad school and two old silver ones from when I was a kid) needed to be replaced. Today I went in to get the first two (on the right side of my mouth) done. My dentist has everything in his office set up to try to prevent at least a veneer of relaxation, and one of those things is a continuous slideshow of vacation photos on a swing-arm-mounted monitor.

So, of course, while I was waiting for the numbing agent to kick in, I had "Be A Dentist" from Little Shop of Horrors stuck in my head. And then a little bit later, a photo came up of some weird plant which looked rather a lot like Audrey II.