Never been one to let the carrier drop

At some point, I faced the conclusion that I don’t have the same model body as the rest of you.

In school, they called this ADD and tried to give me a stimulant to help me behave. This worked, from a outside point of view, but at the cost of massively distorting the way my mind worked. Not in ways i liked.

You see, ADD in my case basically adds up to having two processers and a interrupt scheme.

Most people have a single viewable workspace within their brain.. you’re thinking one thing, and you’re only thinking that thing. When you play the piano, you think about all of the notes, not half of them in one processer and half in the other. This coherence is probebly a nice feature most of the time.

But, every once in a while, mother nature chuckles, spins the dice, and decides not to include it. Instead of one processer, you have two – each half as powerful. One better at creative work, the other better at logic solving – almost like one has less noise immunity than the other.

To switch processers, I switch eyes. This isn’t something I can describe, but I can decide which eye to view the world out of. Probebly a bizarre side effect of vision training. Probebly not what the people training me intended. 😉

However, when I do a eye-select, something else happens as well. I can’t describe this, exactly, because it isn’t really describable – I still have access to all the same knowlege and memories, but I see them in a fundamentally different way. This defies description.

I suspect there are two nearly-fully-developed personalities inside me, and they fight for control of the ‘wheel’ that is me. I’m not normally aware of this, although I did become very vividly aware of it once when I didn’t sleep for seven days and then used certain hallucinagenics. Allow me to spell this out – I do NOT recommend the use of any recreational drugs while one is sleep deprived. When sleep-depped, you’ve already suffering from not enough gain on your neural net. Add some other chemicals playing with the levels, and you’ve got a recipe for the mental ward.

Anyway, I got to thinking about this because recently I’ve had a few discussions with people about feminism. I’m not against feminism – I beleive that females are not being treated equally in this country, and they should be [I’d really like to see a black, gay female president next. Brenda? She’s just outrageous enough to make a good president, and she’d be quite a refreshing change from the rather horrid men that we’ve had of late]

Anyway, one of the subjects of discussion has been why females excel at different academic subjects than males [i.e. why algebra makes sense to me and the tax forms make sense to my significant other]

I think it’s because all people have the duality I’ve described to a certain extent, and females are encouraged to spend more time using their ‘creative’ [noisy] processer while males are encouraged to spend more time using their ‘logical’ [clean] processer.

A word about the noisy and clean part – it seems obvious that in order for a new idea to occur, noise must be present. If you’re not grokking this, try making a computer generate a truly random number. You’ll figure it out sooner or later. 😉

Anyway, if this unlikely theory were true [and I admit that this, like many of my theories, is unlikely] it would bear out what I’ve always insisted, that females have the same mental capacities.. in the same areas.. as males. Look at Drachen, my ex-SO [who decided to become male, which I think may be the ultimate statement in how badly we repress females without being aware of it], as concrete proof that females can master technical skills with the same facility as males. Sometimes more. 😉

Okay, so given that, why don’t they? Well, I suspect a lot of it is sociological.. a lot of communciations humans do are nonverbal, and for the most part unmeasurable by modern instruments. Or at least unmeasured. Fathers spend more time passing design skills on to sons than daughters. Mothers spend more time passing on cooking skills to daughters than sons. Cooking is a inherently creative activity, by the way, and if you think it’s easy, you haven’t tried it in a while.

I firmly beleive that our brains, mostly unused capacity and with automatic self-wiring of new neural nets, will do whatever we ask them to. However hard you push yourself, especially when you’re a child but throughout your entire life, is how far your brain will go. Ask it to do more, you get more from it. Sit in front of the TV and veg, and you get less.

Anyway, if ANY of that makes sense tomorrow I’ll be impressed.

Jammed some tonight.. even did some of those blues riffs that Dave & I were working on togeather. Got to get him back and get the recorder set up.

Proteus has a dropout in the right channel on the ‘phones, but [thank god] line out is still okay. But a little bit of hum in something or other. Must ferrit out. Everything needs cleaned and reseated.. there are just soo many dammmnn wiiiireeessss!

[thank god for lightpipe. I want consumer gear with lightpipe. damn it, I know how to build this stuff, someone hire me to make miricles! ;-)]

I’m pretty happy with the mk3 regbus. Sent data to a actual PC and back! woo hoo! Also wrote ‘ping’ though I haven’t yet debugged it. [always fun to debug assembly]. Next have to write win32 app that will send messages. Starting out with console app – we’ll go pretty after we get everything working.

Still need to do a serious noise test with the boards powered off the batteries. Rich has a charger for me, but I have to go out to the islands to get it, which is like a 3 hour round trip. Annoying.

On the other hand, getting out of the house might do me good.

Felt kind of sick this morning, but eccanacia & orange juice have perked me right up.

As usual, need to sleep now.

It’s interesting.. I’m torn between feeling like I’m writing for a audiance and feeling like no one at all is listening. Was listening to Indigo Girls earlier today.. Virginia Woolfe.. that song still rings true. And speaks to the purpose of this web site. I hope they stay in business. I really should get a paid account, I guess, to help sponser them. But I don’t have a job, you know.. 😉

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 30th, 2002 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.