Monday 23-Apr-12

23/04/12 05:33 [Monday]
I have woken up early with a bit of an upset tummy, asking myself if the tummy upset is related to my prostate problem. I do tend to look for common explanations for things and try to simplify all causes down to a few all-inclusive causes, and I may be over-doing it here. After all, Dawn very often has tummy upset and in the female case it is not going to be related to the prostate. It is only a mild tummy upset anyway and perhaps will clear now I have been to the toilet: a possible explanation is that I am making too much of nothing due to the responsivity of my dopaminergic systems, causing an effect of amplification I mean.
Some of the symptoms I had before I was on this Risperdal medication were related to having insufficient sleep and lately the times I have woken up around 5 am later in the day I have found myself nodding off especially on buses with the rocking as the bus travels along. In the years before 2011 I used to imagine things went on when I nodded off in the daytime, along the lines of me being spoken to - on buses say - with ‘hypnotising’ words. In fact I used to imagine things might go on whenever I was unaware, that is including in the nighttime when I was getting my few hours of sleep. This led me to try to develop detection devices to record what went on (in the nighttime specifically) for example by logging the amplitude of any sounds detected (thinking sounds at night might represent the speaking to me of ‘hypnotising’ words).

I am in the Travelodge Edinburgh Rose Street - on my own as Dawn didn’t want to come - drinking a morning cup of coffee. I ordered a breakfast bag (as they call them) for 6 am being pretty certain I would be up early. Evidently Travelodge has gone down the route of paring costs to the bone - not supplying shower gel or toothpaste for example - and charging for extras such as breakfast and WiFi. I think this is a good thing myself as if you can resist the extras you can get a bed for the night very cheap, especially if you book the Saver Rate in advance and risk not being able to travel in which case you lose your money. Those with money to spare though - or those whose companies pay - would no doubt want to pay for fuller service elsewhere, but I am a great believer in the provision of a multiplicity of offerings to suit all tastes and all budgets. When I was writing to Tory MPs (in the years prior to 2011) I often went on about the desirability of pluralism (as I referred to it) and my belief is that it is philosophically a good thing. Socialists might wish to reduce every provision to a common denominator but sensible people approve multiple choices which gravitate through the market mechanism to match the things people want (because those in an initially random mish-mash of provision that people don’t want to pay for fall by the wayside and indeed very many new businesses do fail in the first year or two).

Speaking of things the Travelodge does not supply: I have brought a toothbrush and toothpaste but have left behind my deodorant. And I have not been able to resist some extras you pay for: I ordered a cheeseburger muffin last night (which they rustle up in a microwave in two or three minutes if you go and ask at reception) and as I said a breakfast for this morning. The girl on reception duly noted down my purchases on my account even though I paid there and then, so plainly Travelodge retains statistics of spending by guests so it knows which guests to plague with offers and inducements for the future. I am joking about this in fact as I believe recording such statistics is a way provision can be efficiently matched to what customers want, and (I presume) one can always unsubscribe from emails sent by Travelodge.

I had thoughts yesterday on the train in the region of Newcastle Upon Tyne about what I may subsume under the heading King Coal, but I shall (as in times gone by when despite my symptoms I enjoyed life) defer writing down those thoughts as breakfast should be here by now.

23/04/12 11:44

I am presently sitting under the Scottish National Gallery, outside the Garden Café, and as it’s started to rain can say no more.

Sunday 22-Apr-12

22/04/12 16:25 [Sunday]
I am on a train to Edinburgh and it is quite like old times: that is the escapism of travelling to distant places. I decided to go to Edinburgh when I found I could afford to do so relatively easily through discovering in travelling between Birmingham and Doncaster that it is true one can save money on the fare by booking in advance. Whenever in the past I have tried to do that all I have achieved was to pay the same fare online as I could have got at the ticket office on the day of departure. However one of Dawn’s sisters put me on to the idea of booking stages of the journey separately, so that I now travel when coming north: from Birmingham to Derby, from Derby to Sheffield and from Sheffield to Doncaster. It is a help to the train companies that people pick and choose to travel on less busy services (which I automatically find by choosing the lowest priced fares) because they are thereby using capacity better. This idea of a price mechanism for seats would not have obtained before Mrs Thatcher’s Government privatised the railways and while I don’t often mention political points on my blog I will say that the Labour policy of making prices for train travel the same whether you book online or at the ticket office is backward looking and inefficient. By booking online you are doing more than half the work of the booking clerk so as well as the mechanism of supply and demand driving down your fare if you choose a service helping towards efficiency (one fewer other people want to use) you deserve a reward for doing that work.
However in the case of Doncaster to Edinburgh I booked weeks in advance and got a cheap fare for the whole journey as a single trip. I think for certain very popular routes - like the East Coast Mainline or more generally trips from or to London - cheap fares are released for quite long journeys and not simply for single stages.

Monday 09-Apr-12

09/04/12 09:03 [Bank Holiday Monday]
I am presently using the ‘Pink Vaio’ laptop which now belongs to Dawn. I feel I ought to report events which have caused me frustration (by interrupting what I was doing). The true reason is they rise so powerfully in my mind so that I feel an urge - as I did yesterday with the ‘interesting’ notice on the train - to set down an explanation in words. I don’t know that it does me any good exactly to set out my explanations via the internet, but - who knows? - the explanations may find readers who feel kin to me in the experience because they have suffered similar frustrations. I suppose exchanging explanations of things is all to the good and is a natural function of human existence.
What happened was the computer unexpectedly shut down and then re-started, while I was in the middle of accessing internet sites using Chrome. This I thought can’t be right: even if the computer is set to install updates (and someone has set it to download and install updates even though this is a more noticeable cost when using a dongle than when using WiFi) surely it shouldn’t just shut down: surely it should ask the user first, to give him a chance to save his data. My initial guess was that the culprit was Vaio Updates, the reason being I have such a high opinion of Microsoft. But after the re-start a notice came up saying Windows had finished installing updates: in other words Microsoft are to blame. I have now reset the settings to ask before downloading updates.

Saturday 07-Apr-12

07/04/12 11:36 [Saturday]
I am sitting in the Caffè Ritazza on the concourse of New Street station in Birmingham thinking this is just like old times. The thing is, something cropped up on the train from Stourbridge which engaged my interest leading me to want to set down my thoughts in explicit language (and I thought of my PDA before I thought of this netbook computer but the PDA is not charged up).
The greater interest I find in things which arise in my mind - greater than the average person - is a function of the high level of dopamine transmissions in my brain (or more properly stated the high level of responsivity of dopaminergic neural systems). If the greater interest goes beyond bounds, as it did when I was not on any dopamine-blocking medication, I come to believe such things as that events around me have been specially designed to engage my interest: for example that the people around me are actors set on to entertain me (or that they are set on to accompany me for some other purpose although I was never able to concoct a believable theory why it might be).
All that happened on the train from Stourbridge was an automated announcement and corresponding words coming up on the electronic screen mainly used to show the train’s destination and calling points: Please be considerate of other passengers, do not put your feet on the seats. What engaged my attention was the mistaken punctuation in the typed version. Other thoughts followed along the lines of pondering why it is people cannot use English properly these days and whether most teachers would use the correct version.
To report my thinking on the correct version: if there is no relationship between considering other passengers and not putting feet on seats it should read
Please be considerate of other passengers. Do not put your feet on the seats.
If (as is more likely) we are enjoined to be considerate through the mechanism of not putting our feet on the seats it should read
Please be considerate of other passengers: do not put your feet on the seats.
I am pleased (having discovered that Blogger reports statistics) that I get quite a few readers for my blogspot blog, so I am trying to put all my new stuff on that. Before I can put this on that though I need to catch up by putting up (in arrears) the diary entries I have written in March and April so far and put (so far) on my own website colinbrough.co.uk.
07/04/12 13:20
Continuing that theme: I have been trying to upload a diary entry from 26-Mar-12 to my blogspot blog but I have got nowhere because I am on a train and keep getting cut off (trying to use a dongle). I am not certain the ‘3’ software was not infected with a virus, because it said it was connected to 3 via a 3G connection but still when I tried to start my Chrome browser it said there was no connection. Since then I have uninstalled the dongle software and reinstalled it (on plugging the dongle in afresh) and the browser - Internet Explorer as I also uninstalled Chrome - worked for a while before once again the connection failed. Thinking about it, this time the connection really did fail (rather than the ‘3’ software going wrong) because the dongle started flashing green instead of giving a steady blue light.
This sort of failure used to make me think I was being deliberately targeted (with spyware, my top suspicion) but now (on this medication) firstly I understand things more calmly and better (so that I can theorise that most likely the dongle software had indeed gone wrong but is now corrected through the reinstallation) and secondly I can understand the likelihood that the malware (likely something different from spyware) came from somewhere accidental and not some organisation deliberately singling me out.

Update 21-Sep-09

21/09/09 05:43 [Monday]
Last night I got my ‘blackdensity’ prog debugged to do without error what I have now got it doing. As I have mentioned in previous notes on my website, the prog is finding a suitable value for dParam from a scan presented in greyscale which is presumed to represent a document of text. The basic methodology involves counting fragments for the ‘ideal’ value of the grey-value ‘cutoff’ distinguishing black from white, for a range of trial values for dParam.What I got the prog doing last night was to perform the computation I have just explained briefly, for a number of different resolutions imposed on the greyscale scan. The scanner has supplied an image 1460 pixels in height (by 1024 wide) (and I am using a resolution as regards greyscale of 0 .. 255). To ‘impose’ a resolution corresponding to a document height of (say) 500 simple averaging of greyscale is used through the VB function PaintPicture. Obviously the processing the prog does to find values for dParam and ‘cutoff’ takes longer for higher resolution.
Whether the processing is rendering anything useful (and in nature such processing would, if ‘useful’, decrease the probability of termination of the organism doing the processing and thereby increase the probability of its propagating its genetic composition down the generations) can be estimated by noting whether the fragmentation resulting when the fittest values for dParam and ‘cutoff’ have been found corresponds to analysis of the greyscale field (the scanned ‘document’) into a helpful number of blocks of comparable size. In fact for the resolutions the prog tried (up to a height of 400 cells) nothing helpful resulted. The reason is the scan I was using on this occasion was from a somewhat ‘technical’ book published originally in the 1950s, and in those days publishers (and readers) did not shrink from packing text tightly in a format little different from small-print legal documents.






















Thinking further how this type of processing would be useful in nature if a similar situation arose in which the visual information was packed so densely that it could not be processed in any meaningful manner with a single glance, it seems to me this follows: the response of the organism in such a situation would involve shifting the gaze or equivalently ‘zooming’ the attention onto a smaller portion of the visual field in such a way as to reduce the quantity of information in the presentation requiring processing. In the context of reading a document of text a human reader would follow taught conventions, that is in English he would zoom his attention initially at the top of the document and at the left-hand side, and have expectations of an arrangement of text in horizontal lineages.
To briefly bring in the subject of schizophrenia what I would mention is that with schizophrenic brain wiring the reader (or any schizophrenic taker-in of information in any equivalent context) is not led to respond in a successful way to the fed-back demand to reduce the quantity of information up for processing. He is all the time floundering in a sea of excess information from which he can escape only by fleeing (that is, not by restricting his attention there and then in the context he finds himself in). Finding himself in a quiet and/or familiar environment he has less need to flee.
In the context I find myself in (trying to get this computer prog advanced) the way to go is to guide the zooming of attention which the prog must engage in through the principle of locating blocks of text in a scan which may represent a page in a newspaper or magazine. One little practical point I may mention here is that in locating blocks of text a human reader does not only consider the outline (that is, looking for horizontal lineages) but also samples from small subregions of the visual field thrown up from automatic pre-processing done by packets of neurons within the retina, and in this case helpful if they report the presence of blocks looking like letters of the alphabet.