Things have changed a little bit. A lot, actually. So, like, turns out "I" am actually "we". As in a system. Which is to say multiple people in one body. I'm not sharing the presence or absence of any diagnosis, but it's most often associated with dissociative identity disorder. Do you remember Pneumonica mentioning several times ideas that "just came to them" spontaneously and almost fully formed?

Yeah. It wasn't really their work. No shade, it's not like they knew.

So anyway, now we all have open expression. I was just browsing about on DTRPG and noticed Sorcerously Advanced. And I had no clue why something was just tugging at me. Then I saw the newer ed of Sufficiently Advanced, and it really tugged at me. I had no idea what was capturing me. Then I heard a voice in back shout, "HOLY CRUD, COLIN'S STILL AT IT!" Apparently I was getting brain leaks. lol

Anyways, wanted to forward an old friend's remembrance, and say hi to all y'all. We might linger around here a bit, who knows?

Boogiepop
The Weaver's System

No guarantee I'm going to actually reject the idea…

Instead, I was recovering from a concussion. I fell off a stage and hit my chin on Thursday July 27th. Luckily there's no lasting physical damage, and my mental recovery is finally looking up this week. I want to give you an idea of what it was like.

The night of the injury I had a headache. I didn't realize all of the different places I had been injured - I knew I nailed my chin, my elbow, and my toe, but didn't notice my hip and collarbone until the next day. I iced my jaw, took some Advil PM (which might have contributed to the problem), and went to bed.

The next day I had symptoms that I recognized as being a concussion. I didn't know how bad it would become. I took notes at the last day of the conference, which probably exacerbated things. I flew home and tried to get some rest, deciding to see a doctor if things weren't better on Monday. They weren't. I saw a doctor.

For those who don't know, the symptoms of a concussion vary, but typically you have trouble with:

• Looking at screens
• Coming up with words
• Remembering things
• Thinking hard
• Thinking quickly
• Mental fatigue

Imagine that every time you think about something too hard, it feels like you just filled out tax forms for eight hours. Every time you have to try to remember something, you get a headache.

Severe concussions (which often result in loss of consciousness) lead to cranial nerve damage and all sorts of motor-neurological things, which is why they do that test when they move a finger in front of your eyes. Mine wasn't severe, but it was bad enough.

I tried to go into work half-time that week. I was useless after half an hour. I had to rest for at least another hour before I was useful again. It quickly got to the point where that rest time needed to be overnight.

At home, I tried to take "brain rest", which is all they can prescribe for you when you're recovering from a concussion. Here's what brain rest looks like:

• Limited screen use, including computing or watching TV or movies.
• Limited reading.
• Limited hard thinking.
• Limited exercise. Don't even walk too much or too far, as it can jar the brain.
• No drinking - it kills brain cells and you just lost a bunch of those. Also, if you drink enough that you fall down and get another concussion, just go ahead and mark all of your symptoms as "permanent."
• No driving. You cannot make decisions quickly. You also can't multitask or filter out distractions, like someone talking or music playing in the background. Do not kill someone by driving with a concussion.

I could write sometimes, but not for long, and I couldn't read what I had written afterward. I could cook, if I didn't need to look at a recipe. I could clean. My stove has never been cleaner. I could do martial arts forms slowly, but only the ones I remembered well. No trying to re-learn old forms.

This was the weirdest sick time I've ever taken in my life. Everything I would normally do while sick is on that list above. For much of the time I sat there in bed listening to podcasts until I realized that they, too, were giving me a headache. Then I just sat there in bed. Doing nothing. For hours.

The next week I took off from work entirely. (Hooray for unions and for sick time!) I went to my partner's parents' house in the Massachusetts countryside. I didn't even bring my computer. Things continued to get worse for a day or two. On the worst day, I could no longer listen to music. All I could do was to sit there in a chair in the shade, with sunglasses on, watching the clouds from when they entered my field of view until they it.

They say that depression can set in about a month after a concussion. I am not surprised.

After two weeks, things finally started looking up. I was able to read a few entries in Marvel's Guide to the Avengers without getting a headache. The next day I was able to read a few recipes. Reading from a screen was not an option, and screens are still difficult now.

I found that my symptoms varied widely while I was recovering. The feeling of pressure in my head and the fuzzy brain were common throughout. I also have trouble with fluorescent and LED lights, which are basically the only types we have in my house.

Early on I felt incredibly mentally fatigued. I slept so much that my body was probably the best-rested it has ever been. However, this was also when the sleep apnia started kicking in. If you're not familiar with sleep apnia, it's where your body stops breathing until your brain wakes up to kick it back into action. It can be terrifying. I found that doing 10 minutes of exercise before bed cleared this right up for me.

Once that started wearing off, I became hyper-aware of my brain chemical levels. If I was hungry, I was unable to put off eating for more than 5 minutes without getting a headache. The same was true if my blood sugar was low, if I hadn't had enough salt recently, if I needed water, if I needed caffeine, or if I needed protein. Each of these had its own distinct type of headache that I came to recognize over the course of about a week. This is subsiding right now, but still present.

At this point, after 3 weeks of recovery, I'm back at work part-time, hoping to go up to full sometime next week. I have some special glasses that my partner got me to cut out some blue light, which helps with screens. I can think pretty well again, though my memory isn't perfect. I can read, though I need to hold back, because I can easily read enough to give myself a headache. It'll probably be another week or two before I'm at 100%, assuming that I get there.

90% of people recover from a concussion within a month. Of the remainder, most recover within three months. Some people never recover. I am very grateful to be on the track to recovery.

http://time.com/nasa-scott-kelly-year-space-lessons/

Spoilers below, click to read.

http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1991/TempComp.html

Excerpt:
Suppose it is easy to send messages to the past, but that forward causality also holds (i.e. past events determine the future). In one way of reasoning about it, a message sent to the past will "alter" the entire history following its receipt, including the event that sent it, and thus the message itself. Thus altered, the message will change the past in a different way, and so on, until some "equilibrium" is reached—the simplest being the situation where no message at all is sent.

Chronotech assumes that the simplest version still has a message being sent, but other than that this is a fair description of how it works.

In case I hadn't mentioned it before, I'm running a course on exoplanets and the search for life outside our solar system. It's called Super-Earths and Life, and it's on edX. You can sign up here for free if you're interested in seeing it:

https://www.edx.org/course/super-earths-life-harvardx-spu30x

The faculty member is Dimitar Sasselov, who did an AMA on Reddit recently:

https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2vfsd0/i_am_dimitar_sasselov_harvard_professor_of/

I've noticed some errors in the current PDF version/things that might be worth mentioning, which I did't put the effort in to record (Namely because I didn't notice the forum until after words.) but would be willing to toss together a list as I continue use, which forum sections should those be posted in?

• The data you have submitted contains following errors:

Guests and low-karma users are not allowed to publish links on this site.

Not so much for Cage, but for Rita. Cage gets cumulative input from multiple runs through the same time and gets to keep them all; Rita, on the other hand, gets just the information culled from those runs. It's the minimum stuff that can be fed to her, in the time she has, to keep her alive - to give her the one "perfect" run.

As for the actual movie, I liked it fairly well. It's sort of a cross between Full Metal Jacket, Groundhog Day, and the first season of Red vs. Blue. It has better time travel mechanics than most time travel movies, and makes good use of them both overtly and in the background. On the down side, it spectacularly fails the Bechdel Test, and there are a few moments when someone says something that makes no goddamn sense whatsoever. In general, I enjoyed it.

The production values are very nice, and it's a great look at what you can do with even just a limited Mesh.

It has a plot hole, notably in that the digital intelligence here wasn't prepared way ahead of time for the terrorists' trump card. However, this can be excused in light of the more important point:

Transcendence is not an anti-technology/anti-science film, contrary to what many reviews and previews would indicate. The forces working toward the Singularity are benevolent; the forces working against it are murderous terrorists. The film doesn't make this clear until about the very end, however.

So overall, I'd say it's a great piece of cinematography and a decent story overall. It is also, more importantly, a refreshing aversion of the many technophobe messages prevalent in film.

It's also a film with the dubious distinction of having Morgan Freeman as one of the villains.

The full release can be found here.

Like all his many fans, my thoughts and condolences will be with him.

For me at least, it's the simplest, almost painfully intuitive perspective on what is going on that I've ever seen.

I know Colin's a physicist, and I suppose there may be one or two more hanging around. So: is the explanation correct? Is the intuition I think I'm gaining from it accurate (although not remotely precise)?