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Jim Kent's Home Page by mojo-raisin · 2001-02-12 20:08 · Score: 2 · on Genetic Stone Soup

I tried to find the source for GigAssembler, but the closest I got was the author's home page: http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~kent/. He has posted the code to some previous projects, but I don't think the one for the HGP is here.

Re:easy question by caffeineboy · 2001-02-12 02:19 · Score: 1 · on Ask the Man Behind the Legend - Cowboy Neal

WHY I can't tell you, but for those of you non hippie-music fans out there, cowboy neal is probably a Grateful Dead reference from the song That's it for the Other One first published on the album "Anthem of the Sun" (1968).

"...there was cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to never ever land."

It seems that people think that this is a neal cassidy/ken kesey furthur acid bus reference.

But yes, why this name is still a decent question.

Emacs Source Made Me Decide to Remain a Programmer by goingware · 2001-01-24 11:11 · Score: 5 · on Where Can I Find Beautiful Code?

I was in and out of my University physics studies a number of times, and having a generally bad time, because of a serious illness, and at some point decided I should get out and get a programming job because I figured I'd be better at that than school.

I didn't really know how to program, I knew a little FORTRAN, C and Basic from doing data analysis during summer jobs, and I didn't really like it all that much. I used to really have to struggle to spend several weeks writing a 500 line program, and I'm sure I'd be embarrassed if I had to look at the source code to those programs today.

I figured I'd program for a while because it paid the rent (I was making $20k a year doing Sun administration and writing image processing software), but when I figured out what I really wanted to do for a living I'd quit programming and get a real job.

That was in 1988. Then some consultant visited and installed GNU Emacs on our machines (two Sun 3/160's, one diskless, both with terminals and no workstation monitor, but with frame grabber cards and NTSC color monitors). He explained about the GNU manifesto.

I thought it was pretty cool but didn't see it affecting me personally in a big way. I was mostly annoyed that I had to wait up while the consultant installed the software on what was supposed to be my day off while a ladyfriend was visiting from away.

Then my friend Jeff Keller, who went to MIT for a while and vaguely knew Richard Stallman, spent an evening with me singing the praises of Emacs. What I really wanted was VI with macros you could program to include conditional branches, and he said it had all though and much much more.

So I learned to actually use Emacs, and soon learned that it was quite extensible, but it wasn't made too clear how to extend it. The online manual was useful mainly to people who already knew what they were doing.

So I read the source code. One thing I was interested in doing was writing C functions that were callable from Emacs lisp as lisp functions. There are many such functions built into Emacs (usually for performance) and you can add your own. There's this big DEFUN macro that even makes the C API look like Lisp.

I learned that and a lot more. I learned what an eloquent statement of software architecture Emacs is.

I learned that there really was something worth my while doing in the way of software.

I wanted to write a program like that someday. Not another big editor, but a program that would someday strike other young programmers the way Emacs struck me.

During the course of reading the source code, one day I stayed at my terminal 24 hours straight, arising only to get coffee and use the restroom, not even eating. I only realized how much time had passed when I started to fall asleep.

That was when I started to take programming seriously. I began to put serious effort into studying programming, and studying it deeply.

For example I would read Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming on the bus on the way to work and I would stay up all night after work learning to program better on my Macintosh at home.

For many years I selected all of my jobs based mainly on what I could learn from them.

I've become a very skilled programmer. You can see this from my consulting business website, my resume (on my resume the place where I first encountered Emacs is the Programmer job at Verde Technologies) and my programming tips pages.

So in a very direct and profound way I owe it all to Richard Stallman and Emacs.

I still haven't written my great program yet. I don't even know what it will be. One project I've worked on peripherally is the ZooLib cross-platform application framework and a project I've just started up but not gotten too far with yet is the Linux Quality Database.

I did finally get my B.A. in Physics, from UC Santa Cruz, but only after being out of school working at a programmer for a number of years.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

Error Checking the Human Genome? by theflattman · 2001-01-12 10:28 · Score: 1 · on A Genome Mark-up Language

It's nice that the genome has been "sequenced in its entirety" and is presently undergoing "error checking" which should "continue for the next year".
Last time i checked at ncbi the genome was at 30.4% finished. and the rough draft assembly is in 148307 pieces according to the golden path.
And of course the finished target for the human genome is three years from now!

Re:They are one in the same to me by SVDave · 2000-12-27 00:30 · Score: 1 · on CS vs CIS

Likewise at U.C. Santa Cruz. When I went there ('89-'95), CIS (Computer and Information Sciences) was exactly the same as Computer Science. There were no business or accounting classes that would count towards degreee requirements.

The reason it was called CIS was because one of the founders of the department was Dr. David Huffman (one of the pioneers of information theory). In '96 or '97, shortly after he retired, the name of the program was officially changed to "Computer Science". Nevertheless, officially my degrees (BA & MS) are called CIS. If any hiring manager looks at my resume and thinks I'm a glorified accountant, my job history (in compiler development) should quickly set him straight. If not, well, that's his loss.

Definitive guides on Linux/BSD laptops by Anonymous Coward · 2000-12-25 23:32 · Score: 4 · on Didn't Get That Linux Laptop for Xmas?

Okay, here are the links you'll need when picking out a free software laptop:

Linux:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/linux-lapto p/
http://www.linux.org/hardware/laptop.html

FreeBSD:
http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~dkulp/fbsd/laptop.html
http://www.jp.freebsd.org/PAO/LAPTOP_SURVEY/index. html

OpenBSD:
http://www.openbsd.org/i386-laptop.html
http://www.monkey.org/openbsd-mobile

NetBSD:
http://www.reedmedia.net/misc/netbsd/laptops-and-n etbsd.html
http://newsletter.toshiba-tro.de/netbsd/

X window system LCD configs:
http://www.sanpei.org/Laptop-X/note-list.html
http://www.sanpei.org/Laptop-X/Laptop-X/

Notebook survey for graphics/PCMCIA
http://hci.ucsd.edu/dsf/notebooks.html

If anyone has any other links for other free software OSes, please post them :)
--posted anonymously to avoid karma whoring.

I thought that I was the only one that hated java by scum-o · 2000-12-03 11:22 · Score: 1 · on Why Linux Lovers Jilt Java

I never learned java - I always was waiting for it to become more stable and/or faster and more "native" - I stayed with C, C++, Perl and pretty much everything else, while my other programmer-buddies all gravitated towards java without any questions. Since then, I've become a sysadmin and I know that java is very fragmented already and will just continue to become more so. I know that this is a totally religous argument, so I won't go on an on about why one language is better than others, but most programmers, once they learn java, use it for everything no matter what the problem or task at hand and I think that's just ignorant - there's always a "best" tool for every job and java isn't it in a lot of cases.

Here's a link that I found to be particularly elightening, although a little out of date, check it out: Things that suck about JAVA (not written by me).

Here's the rant by Jamie Zawinski (author of xscreensaver, xkeycaps, among many other linux greats, ...): java sucks.

See, it's not just me!

--
Steven Webb
System Administrator II - Juneau and TECOM projects
NCAR - Research Applications Program

Try Geneva and CERN by goingware · 2000-12-01 01:15 · Score: 2 · on Will Americans Have Trouble Finding IT Jobs, Overseas?

Try Geneva, Switzerland, which has a number of big tech companies like IBM, as well as CERN - the big european particle accellerator facility and home of this newfangled thing called the World Wide Web (perhaps you've heard of it).

I'm not sure, but I think only citizens of CERN member states can be CERN staff members, and the U.S. is not a member state, but many american universities participate in CERN experiments and so you can go as a staff member of an american university - I did, as an undergraduate student, I did my senior thesis work at UC Santa Cruz at CERN this way.

Physicists have some strange ideas about what constitutes good software practice though. I try to politely correct this in this paper which I wrote for my experiment at CERN, proposing we scrap our FORTRAN codebase and rewrite it in C++.

Geneva's a little expensive to live in but if you work at CERN you can live in either france or Switzerland. (The particles have to show their passports twice each time around the accellerator ring as it crosses the border). I lived in France and found it very affordable.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

Re:UC Santa Cruz Knows Who Will Win by Dr.NickRiviera · 2000-11-07 12:24 · Score: 1 · on Election Wrapping Up (Part 2)

The fishrap is mainly satirical. pretty funny stuff. check out their website.

One of the distribution points for the fishrap was at my polling place (Porter College). I believe they had to put the issues face down because of the headline and close proximity to the polls.

hardware vs. software genomics by scotfree · 2000-09-08 23:34 · Score: 1 · on DNA Repositories?

There's an intersting ambiguity in your question.

Yes, 'hardware' gene banks exist, where the actual molecules are stored in solution for posterity. This isn't my area, but it looks like some other posts cover this.

Also online are 'software' databases of the actual basepair sequence, mostly searchable via web, Xwindows interfaces, and often downloadable as SQL or other DBs. For instance, GenBank has increasingly complete coverage of organisms ranging from Yeast through Fugu to Yo Mamma. I guess that sounds kinda bad.

Of course, if you're interested in Yo or Any Mamma, or humans in general, you can download the current 'draft freeze' from the public Human Genome Project via UC Santa Cruz.

Remember, when using the new GNU Genome Cross Compiler, to Save Early and Often...

Re:Not yet... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-08-30 00:26 · Score: 3 · on More Threats From The MPAA

Re:Reverse by Kaufmann · 2000-08-03 23:51 · Score: 3 · on Using Fractals To Classify Music

Been there, done that. David Cope has devised a symbolic AI program in Lisp called Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI) , based on the linguistic technique of augmented transition networks (ATNs).

Basically, you feed the program a set of pieces in the same style (say, Beethoven sonatas or Bach cantatas or Chopin Nocturnes), it processes them, abstracts from them the defining characteristics of this style and then proceeds to recombine them to create a new piece which, while noticeably different from all the the originals, can often easily pass for one of them.

Re:Such insolence! by Kaufmann · 2000-08-03 23:43 · Score: 2 · on Using Fractals To Classify Music

I take it you've never heard of David Cope's work. Cope is a rather well-known contemporary composer, as well as a great computer scientist in his field. He has devised a symbolic AI program in Lisp called Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI), based on the linguistic technique of augmented transition networks (ATNs).

Basically, you feed the program a set of pieces in the same style, it processes them, abstracts from them the defining characteristics of this style and then proceeds to recombine them to create a new piece which, while noticeably different from all the the originals, can often easily pass for one of them.

Sure, music has "soul"; it just so happens that this "soul" is mathematically representable. That doesn't make it any less important.

i want one, no ten by oliverthered · 2000-07-25 21:39 · Score: 1 · on SETI Accelerator Hoax Revealed

is this a hoax though?

It has to be said... by jbarlow · 2000-07-20 13:39 · Score: 1 · on Apple Cube Confirmed

... Beowulf!!
Check out the Wall of G4's

aNG|LLe
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

No robots.txt! by Pseudonymus+Bosch · 2000-07-09 22:53 · Score: 2 · on Download The Human Genome

There is no http://genome.ucsc.edu/robots.txt. And we are talking of an enormous database.

You'd better keep your robots off the site.
__

Fun and games by potsy2 · 2000-07-07 18:06 · Score: 1 · on Download The Human Genome

Go Here and search for "GATTACA".

Product Placement? by localman · 2000-07-07 14:42 · Score: 1 · on Download The Human Genome

Hey! The title of the movie Gattaca appears 20 times in this tiny sequence alone!

I had no idea that Sony or Columbia Pictures had these kind of connections...

What Possible Use Would Anybody Have For This? =) by citizenc · 2000-07-07 12:49 · Score: 2 · on Download The Human Genome

I'm not looking to troll here, but, honestly, what possible reason, (besides being able to bring a chick over to your house and say 'hey baby, wanna see my source code?') would anybody have to download 1500 megs? I dug around the site, and I found a sample of what is contained in those mammoth files; you can check out what's contained within the zips here .

Again, I'm not looking to troll here -- I'm just curious, that's all. =)

Re:Compression by GigaGoogle · 2000-07-07 12:33 · Score: 1 · on Download The Human Genome

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

Huffman would better compression algorithm in my opinion. Huffman uses a tree to determine which encodings to use for each symbol. The encodings might be similar to this:

G -- 00
A -- 01
T -- 10
C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

Re:Compression by GigaGoogle · 2000-07-07 12:33 · Score: 1 · on Download The Human Genome

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

Huffman would better compression algorithm in my opinion. Huffman uses a tree to determine which encodings to use for each symbol. The encodings might be similar to this:

G -- 00
A -- 01
T -- 10
C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

Re:Compression by GigaGoogle · 2000-07-07 12:33 · Score: 1 · on Download The Human Genome

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

Huffman would better compression algorithm in my opinion. Huffman uses a tree to determine which encodings to use for each symbol. The encodings might be similar to this:

G -- 00
A -- 01
T -- 10
C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

Already exists...with Linux drivers by tylerh · 2000-06-08 01:50 · Score: 3 · on Build Your Own 10Mbps Microwave Data Link

I think it's great this guy has such a cool hobby, but products similar to this have been around commercially for years -- and they typcially don't need the FCC license.

Two I am familiar with are Breezecom and Aironet , just bought by Cisco. If you poke around, you'll find many of these products have Linux drivers .

Moved from Santa Cruz to St. John's Newfoundland by goingware · 2000-05-30 21:09 · Score: 3 · on The High Cost of Valley Living

I lived in Santa Cruz, over the hill from Silicon Valley, until about a month and a half ago.

I paid $1275 a month for a two bedroom one bath house (half a duplex). It wasn't a very nice place, had no back yard and only a tiny front yard. One car garage and tiny kitchen.

I'm getting married to a woman from Newfoundland and am staying here for a few months until our wedding. In St. John's we're renting a three bedroom house with a large kitchen, two and a half bathrooms, front and back yard. There's both a large living room and a family room.

The rent is US$500 with a US$133 deposit (no last months rent down). In Santa Cruz one of the things contributing to the homelessness that is so common there is that it requires several thousand dollars to move into a place, for first, last, plus a deposit.

But what was getting me about Santa Cruz wasn't the expense. It was the crowding. You couldn't drive across town at 5pm.

I thought that by becoming a consultant I'd get away from those insane Valley freeways, and although I didn't have to commute anymore sometimes I'd want to go downtown to the store or a cafe or something and it would really be a drag.

Housing is so tight that UC Santa Cruz houses students at the old Fort Ord Army base and Monterey and transports them in on buses, an hour's ride.

I used to live in LA and hated it there. I stayed in Santa Cruz because of the rural atmosphere and tight-knit community feel. That's not really there anymore.

We'll be heading back to the states after the wedding but for sure we won't go anywhere near Silicon Valley.

I'm very adamant, and have been for a long time that I will only accept work I can do "from my own office" - which means my home office. You can do this too. Screw the cubes at the valley, stop working for the pointy-haired boss. Throw away your flip tie!

Read how I do it at Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Consultants

You don't have to move to Newfoundland but you'd have the choice to at least not drive on the freeway anymore if you stay in the valley, or at least move somewhere reasonable that you can afford.

Mike

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Re:Unisys is evil by mprudhom · 2000-04-18 14:46 · Score: 5 · on Unisys Cracks The Whip

Use libungif: it does not use LZW compression, so there are no patent issues.

I've heard that the resulting GIF files are a bit larger than usual, but it beats paying $5K.

Finding mental health services by goingware · 2000-04-10 15:54 · Score: 1 · on Manic Depressive Geeks

(There seems to be a massive bug in the HTML processor on slashdot now). The preview is all screwed up, the "Allowed HTML" note below is empty.

It depends greatly on where you are. In the US, most states have public mental health services which are free or low-cost with a sliding scale. The service isn't all that great but you can see a psychiatrist and get medication and such things as lithium level blood tests for free.

I did this for years through the Santa Cruz County Mental Health Department, but there were two big problems - only one 20-minute session a month with a doctor (so if I was having trouble there wasn't a lot I could do), and the antidepressant they wanted me to take caused a immediate and severe anxiety attack (I was warned this might happen). The one I ended up taking as an alternative, ludiomil, worked great for me but the state wouldn't pay for it because the cheaper one that caused the bad anxiety was available.

(I understand the Alliance for the Mentally Ill had to sue the state of New York to cover the $9000/year it costs to treat a schizophrenic with clozapine - many cheaper drugs are available but clozapine works for many people where no other drug will and has had miraculous effects on about 30% of those who take it. But it's an expensive drug and even more expensive because it has a rare but fatal side effect and weekly blood tests are required by the FDA for everyone who takes it).

If you are a college student, you may be able to see a doctor for free through your campus. I did at UC Santa Cruz and CalTech. There may be a limit on the number of sessions and the medication won't be covered.

If you live in an enlightened country like Canada, psychiatric sessions are completely free, although finding a doctor and getting an appointment may be hard. (Only M.D.'s are paid for, not psychologist or non-M.D. "talk therapists"). Also medication is not covered. Lithium's pretty cheap and so are most antidepressants but some things are real expensive, my risperdal runs me well over $100 a month and I only take a tiny dose.

If you live in a place with publicly funded medicine where there is no prescription drug coverage, you would do well to apply immediately for supplemental insurance that does. A friend in Canada gets blue cross for CDN $30 per month - and besides covering her psychiatric medicine at a couple hundred per month it also paid for a $700 two-week ulcer antibiotic treatment (to kill H. Pylori bacteria).

I'm afraid in the vast majority of the world there is little public support for psychiatry, if you can find a doctor at all. But in many of those countries, you can buy medication without a prescription - pretty dangerous yes and I wouldn't suggest it without actually seeing a doctor but at least you wouldn't have to keep seeing one to get refills.

michael@geometricvisions.com

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Michael D. Crawford

Reality::Reality() - Read This if Nothing Else by goingware · 2000-04-09 07:40 · Score: 1 · on Manic Depressive Geeks

Here's something I've learned and used in my life that is a fundamental fact of existence. Please try to understand and take this with you if you take nothing else from this discussion.

This applies to everyone, not just the mentally ill or computer geeks, but all humans, even people from other cultures, and animals too. Even if you choose not to apply this to your own life, knowing this and understanding it will help you to deal with other people, especially difficult people who don't make sense or who don't understand you.

Most people feel that reality is something that just sort of happens to them. In fact the vast majority of people believe this so deeply that they don't even know that they believe it or ever consider the question of whether it could be otherwise. Things that are, just are because they happen that way.

But that's simply not true. There is an objective, absolute physical reality, but it is too vast, too complex for any living being to comprehend. This objective reality is also devoid of any significance and meaning.

The reality we experience is something we make. We do not have complete control over it, but everyone has influence over its general course, and it can be changed with time. Further, in conducting our construction of reality, we are constantly making choices, usually unconscious, and there is constant opportunity to choose, far more than most people would believe without really spending some time contemplating it.

Many people are satisfied with their lives, but many aren't, but believe they have no choice to have it any other way. Some people struggle constantly to improve their lot but consistently fail and live miserable lives - it's not for lack of trying, it's because they live in a reality that is not effective for them and they do not see the way to change it or even know that's what they should do.

I didn't invent this concept - I learned about it in an anthropology course at UC Santa Cruz. It has been "discovered" repeatedly over the ages and written about by many people, and the concept is expressed and taught in many different ways, and understood differently by many people. But however it is expressed the fundamental idea is common and widespread and very old.

I'll describe it the way it was taught by Prof. Stuart Schlegel in Anthropology of Religion, where we concentrated on studying the world views of some other cultures - and the social and mental processes by which they constructed them.

The objective physical reality I mentioned was termed Nouminal Reality by Emmanuel Kant. Nouminal reality is the physical universe in its entirety and complexity. There is no conscious perception of nouminal reality because it is both too detailed, too complex and our senses are physically incapable of perceiving it - most light is to long or short in wavelength to see or feel, much sound too quiet or lost in noice, most objects to small to see or too large to comprehend.

Nouminal reality is all there is, and it is completely true and absolute, but it is also meaningless.

For example, in nouminal reality there is no boundary between physical objects. Where one thing stops and something else starts is an artificial concept; in physical reality the quantum wavefunctions of almost all particles in the universe decay exponentially into infinity but never fully reach zero, although the wavefunction may have zero points it will almost always (except in a black hole) come to a non-zero value on the other side.

In the nouminal world there are events (too numerous to imagine) but they have no significance. The Kennedy assassination and the atomic bombings of Japan occurred but were no more important then events in some nearly-evacuated patch of empty space out between the galaxies somewhere. At best they could be described as complex particle interactions, and the events did have consequences but the consequences were only more particle interactions.

Nouminal reality is the raw, unfiltered and unformatted data that we use as a raw material to sample, filter, interpret and distort the information that we actually experience.

Subjective Reality is what we actually experience happening to us. A lot goes on in the process of transforming nouminal reality info subjective reality.

Reality construction is a layered protocol, like a TCP/IP stack. You might get a sense of nouminal reality by wiring an audio speaker into an Internet backbone cable; subjective reality is the formatted web page with styled text and nice JPEGs and maybe some streaming audio. It looks pretty automatic to the naive user but we all know the decades of process and engineer-millenia that went into making a web page happen.

And protocols can change. And you can choose what web pages you're going to look at. Some parts of it are easy, but significant change is a difficult process in life, as in standards development and implementation.

The first layer in subjective reality construction is physical selection. We can only experience the things our senses are sensitive to - we see a limited range of light wavelengths and hear in a narrow spectrum of audio frequencies. We can only see things that occupy a solid angle in our visual field wide enough to resolve in our physical eyes.

There are evolutionary and biological selections and interpretations applied. Part of the processing of visual signals in the nerve from the eye to the brain transform visual pixels into edge information and movement - our vision is much more sensitive to distinct edges and motion than to broad, stationary featureless fields.

I'm sure a lot of this filtering results from evolutionary processes not just to make us see well but to allow us to survive to reproduce. Loud or high-pitched noise, bright lights and flashes get our attention quickly because through most of history they've signaled danger or injury.

Once we've constructed a vision of an object we have to choose which objects to pay attention too and what to consider significant. Look at the room around you. See the objects in it. Now try to see all the objects all at once in their entirety. Pretty difficult, isn't it - a mental strain at best and not something you can do for any length of time.

The choice of what to see, and what significance these things have start with our culture. Us geeks will walk into an office and see computers.

A Tiruray on Mindanao in the Philippines will walk into the forest and see homes for spirits, and take care not to walk to close to any tree lest they disturb the spirit. This isn't just their belief - this is their reality, their universe. They'd see one of our offices and probably be thrown right into a panic or severe depression.

We have significance applied by our upbringing and by our personal preferences. You're friends and loved ones capture your attention much more reaidily than random strangers on the street - and we see humans in general much more readily than animals or plants because we attach such importance to other humans.

A whole lot of selection, filtering, whittling down and built-up significance is applied before a sensory perception is spit into our conscious mind for us to think about consciously. The part we normally get to consider consciously is only a small part of the object and most of what we experience is created by our own minds.

The most important thing to understand is that during the vast majority of those filtering processes, choices are being made - choices as to what to point your eyes towards, what sounds to focus on, and most importantly what significance to apply to the things we perceive.

This process exists for purely internal experience too, and this is particularly important for people who are unhappy with their lives. If you can come to understand the processes by which experience is created, both external experience and in your own mind, you can alter it in a way that will tend to be more positive and effective.

It's also important to understand that biology has a vast influence over what you construct. You can choose consciously to absorb a new trait into your personality, but there are things about being human that are too deeply wired into our brains to be able to alter through conscious will.

That is why I, as a manic depressive, choose to medicate myself with psychotropic drugs. Manic depression's sympoms have too profound an effect on me to be able to control them through better living, but I can choose to affect the biological component with medication.

The choices made in subjective reality construction are mostly automatic and unconscious - but they are still choices. They have to be automatic because there are too many choices to make for your conscious mind to be able to keep up with them all. But you can decide to alter the process and make a conscious decision to change your experience and then there are processes by which this decision can be implemented in the subconscious over some time, sort of like pushing a new STREAMS object down on the stack, or removing one.

I'm not going to go into how this is done. I can recommend some reading later. But this is basically the process taught to psychiatric patients in mental hospitals. It's not usually couched in these terms but I've found that the shrinks are quite comfortable discussing it this way with me when I bring it up.

The problem for mental patients is that they are in a very difficult and desperate position when they are asked to effect this change. They don't have the tools any more - it's like working with a stone chisel that's been smashed to bits. But there really is no choice and it is a long and difficult process to create the mental and emotional tools needed to do this and to heal.

If you're having an argument with someone who just doesn't seem to grasp your point, consider that they may have more than a different opinion, they may live in a different world. Jack Valenti doesn't just think DVD hackers are vandals - they are sapping the very foundations of his world. That may help you to understand the desperation of some people who work to oppose you.

And understanding these processes, and the process by which changes to reality construction are effected, may allow you to live a more satisfied life and to be more effective in gaining the support of people who might otherwise oppose you.

michael@geometricvisions.com

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.