Also, while some design patterns seem to be universal (structural patterns like facade, adapter and proxy, in particular, are necessary to make independent systems play well together), others indicate that the language you employ them in is lacking in features.
Visitor? If you have first-class closures, it's the most natural thing in the world to pass a function to a traversal function. You don't need a name for it or a specialized set of trigger terms so that maintainers can see easily divine your intentions. You don't name your closure "visit", you name it after what it does.
Singleton? Whatever for, if you can create object literals, or your classes are as first-class and polymorphic as instances?
Factory? In Python, you override __new__...
Learning other languages lets you determine the difference between unification and duct tape.
About the only really unique thing that CL brings to the table these days is conditions and restarts.
And a powerful macro system. Scheme's is interesting, and you can do most anything with it, but certain things require a great deal of hoop-jumping.
Aside from conditions and restarts, macros seem like the last thing that hasn't sneaked into popular languages yet. For the uninitiated: imagine being able to write a function that, at compile time, takes and returns entire syntax trees. Or imagine if the C preprocessor let you write #defines that were full-fledged functions that had the entire language and runtime available during expansion.
Imagine if C let you hook into the tokenizer and the parser! Why, you could invent your own language for solving your problem, and then solve your problem in that language!
It's worth learning Common Lisp just to play with this stuff.
That's the "Us vs. Them" mentality that every good cult^H^H^H^Hreligion has to install in its members. Once they have that, they have something worth fighting for and the people feel a sense of power since they are now directly involved with the outcome of the world.
Judaism and Christianity are very much at odds with the idea. "Treat everyone as if they were God himself" was preached from the beginning in Genesis. (For example, that man is made in "God's image" is the reason given for the prohibition against murder.) It's taught in the Mosaic temple rites if you know where to look and you know how they differ from the Egyptian temple rights that Israel was used to. (In Egyptian temple rights, priests served the gods. In Israel's, they performed exactly the same actions, but to serve each other.) Jesus taught from the Jewish scriptures. When he said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me," it was a restatement of this universal, timeless principle. The story of the Good Samaritan was a forceful illustration of this to people who Just Did Not Get It, and is still very much in use today among people who try to.
In other words, in Judaism and Christianity, there is no "Us" and "Them" - only "Us". The fact that you have missed this - especially with regards to Christianity - tells me you don't know much about practicing Christians or Jews.
FWIW, exactly the same advice applies to depression, even the diet advice. In particular, all protein-rich foods that are high in dopamine precursors are also high in seratonin precursors. (Those are L-tyrosine and L-tryptophan.)
Sleep can be tricky for people with depression, since they often self-medicate by not sleeping enough. (During sleep, seratonin is synthesized to melatonin. Not sleeping can keep seratonin levels up.) A couple mg of melatonin (available OTC, safe and inexpensive) can help.
Check your family history. Both depression and ADHD are almost completely hereditary.
I'm most scared of getting medicated and having it not go over well. I've got friends on things like adderol, and that stuff's like crack it's so scary.
Most doctors overprescribe, especially in cases where a prescription is warranted. This is well-documented with ADHD. Adderall (dextroamphetamine) is supposed to have the seemingly paradoxical effect of calming the person, but too much will push him right out the other side of calm and back into fidget-land.
If it's ADHD, the safest thing to do is fix your diet, regularize your sleep, exercise, and then only take enough medication to ease out of your mind's incessant need for constant stimulation. In fact, you can do diet, sleep and exercise now. That'll make diagnosis (either way) more likely correct, and could even obviate the need for any additional treatment.
Diet: high in protein and complex carbs, low in simple carbs, lots of B-vitamins. Complex carbs are for a more steady supply of brain fuel. Proteins contain amino acids that are synthesized into neurotransmitters you need to think clearly, and B-vitamins are the catalysts. (Look up L-tyrosine and dopamine for further information. People with ADHD tend to be low in dopamine.) Stay far away from fast foods and caffeine. Eat fish, poultry, and beef (those three are in priority order), eggs, whole wheat breads, potatoes, beans, green veggies, and dairy products. If you have cereal for breakfast, switch to a high-protein one.
Some research indicates that certain Omega-3 fatty acids are good for concentration. Plants have them but they're short-chain and have to be converted to long-chain before use. Fish have already done the work for you.
For dessert, stick to ice cream and chocolate. (Sucks, doesn't it?) Chocolate is a bean after all, and beans tend to have large amounts of those friendly amino acids.
Sleep: I shouldn't have to preach about this.:) But sleep-deprived people tend to act as though they have ADHD.
Exercise: besides shaping you up, it's a natural stimulant. People with ADHD have gotten PhDs by running four hours a day. I don't suggest this kind of overindulgence, but exercise does help.
I've been diagnosed with ADHD and I've made these changes myself. When I stick to it, it takes about four hours after I wake up for the fog to descend.
Feel free to email me about any of this. I think I've got my preferences temporarily altered to make my address show up.
A lot of my time is spent crawling around under people's desks or in the ceilings, trying to get broken network connections working (I'm glad to say I had nothing to do with the wiring in this building, so I can blame someone else. Instead, I wear nice (non-stained, non-faded, non-ripped) jeans and a button down shirt.
Not replying to your ideas, just your syntax to make a point.
People who are at least slightly fashion conscious (that is, most people) regard mismatched shoes and belt, or mismatched clothing and situation, as programmers regard mismatched parenthesis. It's just uncomfortable to look at.
For the past 4 years or so, it's been impossible for me to focus on anything. I've had a couple pretty simple programming projects I've been wanting to do and all I have to show for it are some mockups on how I'd do it and some makefiles. I was talking with a friend who suggested that I might be depressed. Outside of being really happy, a lot of the symptoms I see online for depression I have.
Could be ADHD.
How is your work? How do you do with things that aren't exciting, interesting, or engaging? In personal projects, do you often do all the exciting stuff and then discard them when all that's left is the boring stuff? Does boredom hurt? Do you fight back impulses to hum, fidget, squirm, or stand up and leave when you have to sit still for long periods of time? Do you have difficulty making eye contact for more than 5 seconds with people you're talking to directly when they're talking about something boring? Were you suspected of having ADHD as a child?
Some of that is based on my own experience, some from here:
Sadly the doctors think my depression is because I smoke a couple of spliffs a week...
Most likely you're self-medicating, and if the doctors don't immediately see that it may be time to get different doctors.
At the same time, try laying off the recreational drugs while you're on the prescription ones. Interactions between recreational drugs and prescription drugs have not been studied as well as prescription vs. prescription. Recreational drugs also tend to be more complex. In general, mixing the two can be pretty dangerous.
It's too bad this article is off the front page, because you're giving me a perfect chance to address a common objection.
Did you have trouble focusing on video games or other things that were "fun"? That's the main thing I see with people who are so called "ADHD". They have no trouble at all focusing on the "fun" things in life, but when it comes to stuff they don't want to do, that's where they have trouble. That's why I always call bullshit on ADHD. NOBODY likes to do things that aren't fun (no one I know anyway).
The short answer is that it's not what you like, but what you're capable of. ADHD people are barely capable of doing mental tasks they find unstimulating.
Here's the long answer. The neural pathways to the prefrontal cortex are loaded with synapses that require dopamine to function. In people with ADHD, this pathway is generally underactive. (All kinds of things - low levels of dopamine, low dopamine receptor counts, underfunctioning dopamine transport, overabundance of MAO enzymes, etc. - have been implicated.) Upon being exposed to something stimulating (which differs from person to person) the brain gets a general squirt of dopamine, which activates the pathway, and the prefrontal cortex starts working.
This happens to everyone. In someone with ADHD, it's one of the only things that works. It's why their minds seem to always be either "all on" or "all off".
It's not necessarily fun that triggers this, either. People with ADHD are very good in a crisis situation: generally calmer and better able to reason clearly than others. (This is a norepinephrine response, not dopamine.) If that's why the adaptation has stuck around for so long, it's clearly maladaptive now.
Looming deadlines can also do it, which is another reason people with ADHD get called "lazy".
"Hey, you can do anything you think is fun, and you can always perform under pressure. What you need is more willpower, not a diagnosis!"
It's not lack of willpower. I have plenty of that. The year before I was diagnosed I lost 50 pounds just by controlling my diet. It wasn't fun or pleasant, but it didn't require me to concentrate, either.
What, exactly, did you have trouble doing at 31 that you knew you were capable of? Now that you're on meds, have you accomplished those things?
Specifically, it was the thesis proposal introduction.
I quit work and came back to school for a PhD so I could teach computer science. Software development was a very bad fit for me, since I could only concentrate on things that were interesting or due shortly. I ended up meeting my deadlines, but it was an 85/15 situation: 85% nothing, 15% work. Do you know guilty it feels to pick up an 80-hour paycheck for 10 hours of work? Imagine the frustration, too: I've been programming since I was single-digits old, and business programming is particularly easy. I did it for five years before desperation took over and I quit.
Classwork was fine. I've become pretty good at making things interesting for myself (it's a survival trait), and it's almost always easy with computer science. Between that and staying up late the night before assignments were due, I managed very good grades. The thesis, though...
A thesis has no hard deadlines, except the last, and by then it's too late. I didn't find it particularly difficult, except the concentrating part. I took classes off for four months just to work on the proposal, but I didn't get any more done on it than when I had classes. I would sit down and read the last paragraph I had written over and over again... and finally, after four times through (my own paragraph!), I'd finally understand what it said and remember where I was going. Then I'd try to think of how best to write what came next, and nothing would come.
After struggling against this unpleasant mental fog for a while, I'd give up and try something else. These "mental breaks" never helped, though. Reading
That's what I find peculiar. As soon as they "discover" that the old adage "not everyone is wired the same way", they immediately declare these people "damaged" or "worthless". Such is the fate of those who entrust their families to the cookie cutter society... they get a cookie cutter family, and if it doesn't fit the mold, its declared "defective."
I'm reading a little anti-...oh, maybe anti-ADHD-diagnosis in this, among other things. Funny, this happened last time this story was reported here. Let me clear up a few things.
Lower output of dopamine (or some insufficiency of it in some way), which is what this article is about in the end, is implicated in ADHD. It's very well known that dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure, is one of the few things responsible for your prefrontal cortex getting a jump-start when you need to reason about something. (Another is norepinephrine, the neurotransmitter associated with stress.) The prefrontal cortex is responsible for executive function: integrating memories, learning, predicting outcomes - a whole slew of things. Presumably, the dopamine squirt is what gets babies to learn to eat. Chew food -> dopamine + good feeling -> brain kicks into gear to figure out how to get it again.
Most healthy adults can start up the prefrontal cortex on demand. People with low levels of dopamine can't. From a neurological perspective, low levels of dopamine is obviously a bad thing.
When I was diagnosed with ADHD, I did my own research, including reading relevant papers from neuroscience literature. ADHD generally shows up in brain scans as decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Taking medication brings dopamine levels up to normal - it's why they prescribe stimulants. For anyone else it's a bad idea, but for people with ADHD it's normalizing.
(I'd be very interested to know whether these researchers at Max Planck have discovered any ties between this mutation and ADHD.)
Nearly all of my grade-school teachers suspected that I had ADHD and told my parents, but they never let on to me. Instead of being labeled "ADHD" or "damaged" or "worthless" (as you say), I got labeled "hyperactive" and "annoying" and "arrogant" and "difficult". I was 25 by the time I understood that something must be objectively different. By the time I was 31 I was feeling "damaged" and "worthless" without anyone ever saying those words to me. I had started affixing those labels to myself because of repeatedly failing to do things I knew I was perfectly capable of that I actually wanted very badly to do.
Still want to withhold diagnosis and treatment based on your preconceived notions of normal variation?
I don't. My son, who is like me in so many ways it's scary, is getting all the relevant information as soon as he's old enough to understand it. He's entitled to the full knowledge he'll need to decide who he wants to be. I never got that option.
Knowing the roots of these behaviors gives us a way to short-circuit the negative ones.
Hear, hear.
I have ADD. I started medication a couple of months ago, and the effect has been dramatic. Before, the only way I could concentrate on something was when I was excited about it, very interested in it, up against a deadline, or the planets just happened to be aligned properly. Don't get me wrong: I can make myself stare at anything for as long as I want. Most people assume that's enough, but it's not. A lot of things need to come together to get the prefrontal cortex engaged and functioning at capacity. Being worried sick, undernourished, or sleepy can put anyone in a distracted fog. Imagine being foggy and distracted all the time for no apparent reason.
Now that the ol' brain generally engages when I want it to, all those techniques and tricks people had been swearing would help me get stuff done actually work. I get work done on time, even when I don't feel like it. I'm less irritable. I can put up with noise and chaos without getting cranky. I have more control over my thoughts. I have an easier time with empathy. I no longer wander into the kitchen looking for things to munch when I'm not hungry.
In short, anyone who says it ain't real is full of it, but they're entitled to their opinions. I was skeptical myself until I got that miraculous squirt of dopamine that put everything right.
Back on topic: there's no single cause of ADD, but everything in the dopamine and norepinephrine cycles has been implicated. It seems it takes the right combination of factors - too much MAO, underproduction of monoamines, underfunctioning monoamine transporters, not enough receptors including D2 - to converge and put someone over the impairment threshold. "Once bitten, twice shy," as the article is titled? Yep, that's me, and most others with ADD. I take responsibility for my actions, though. It's taken me years longer to learn what's supposed to come naturally - or at least more easily - but it is my life and I am in charge.
All the same, I'd done as much as I could and I'm finished with it. I'm keeping this minor personality transplant.
Yet again, another armchair commenter wants to clarify what Science Is. Summary says:
... seems to confirm and support current theories... The results lend support to the possibility of protons and nucleii being accelerated...
Additionally, the abstract says their research "provide[s] a strong argument" for a theory. I suppose these statements are way too hard-line for Real Science. Sheesh. These are people who know very well they're doing inference rather than deduction - including the submitter! - and you take them to task for jumping to conclusions.
You say:
... yet another phenomenon which does not demonstrate the prominent possibility to be incorrect. It seems a minor distinction, but it's important to science that science can't "prove" anything - only attempt to disprove by null hypothesis.
The hypothesize/predict/experiment cycle isn't nearly as boolean as you make it out, even though we teach it that way in school.
If a result doesn't disprove a theory, it actually increases its probability among other possibilities. Bayesian statistics models this quite well, and scientists think about it that way but without such a rigorous foundation. For example, in all forces, we've measured the differential relationships among position, velocity and acceleration to ridiculous precision. Doesn't this increase the probability that we've got it right? In this area, if there's a conflict between predicted and expected outcomes, we regard the explanation that the theory is wrong as the less probable one - much less probable.
Part of the problem is classical statistics. Null hypotheses and tests against them are kludgy nonsense, everyone knows it, and everyone has their own way of doing it "properly". (Think about it this way: Pr(null hypothesis), where the null hypothesis has a continuous component - and this is done all the time - is ZERO.) Doing inference without priors is a misguided attempt at objectivity. These mindsets are well-preserved in scientific philosophy, and they've got to go. Nobody actually thinks about real inference the classical way. It'd be ridiculous to try it on any hypothesis of moderate complexity.
Over the past 20 years, your odds of dying in a commerical airline accident were about 1 in 5 million per flight (multiply by number of flights you take in life for net risk).
Better not take 5 million flights then.
Actually, your net risk is 1 - (1 - 1/5000000)^(# of flights), assuming your flights are statistically independent. (They'd better be, or there may be a pilot who's out to get you.) Your approximation is actually pretty good up to a million flights or so - I'm just being pedantic.:)
I see it that way, too. But the (American, at least) culture is focused on Winners and Losers to the extent that such rich meditations as yours are easy to miss.
Definitely just Americans. Or something. What was that all about?
Anyway, here's the real issue: humans have a natural bias to assume a zero-sum game first, even where none exists. It's the source of all envy. Maybe it was a good survival trait back in the poor, nasty, brutish, and short days when competition over resources was fierce, but it's clearly maladaptive now.
Minimized sugar intake in general as well.. and I'm haven't had a cup of coffee since May... and I'm still productive as a programmer.;D
After the initial, small withdrawal symptoms I'm feeling lot better too. My focus is sharper and I'm feeling more creative too.
Good job!
If people knew more about caffeine, they wouldn't drink it in such concentrated amounts, like, ever. Some people here know its chemical structure, but that's not nearly enough to claim to be educated about it.
Here's how it works. Your brain gets energy by breaking down ATP and ADP, just like every other system. Eventually, it ends up with a bunch of free adenosine floating about (that's the "A" in ATP), which binds to adenosine neuroreceptors. This binding has an inhibitory action on the synapse - that is, it tends to keep all but the strongest signals from getting across. This is what makes your brain feel tired and less functional after working it for a long time.
Caffeine works by binding to the same receptors but not having the same effect. (It's an "adenosine antagonist".) It doesn't directly make you think better - the buzz is physiological, from other effects - it just keeps you alert and functioning, even when you ought to be tired.
Here's the problem: when you ingest a significant amount and antagonize adenosine receptors too much, the brain re-regulates by exposing more receptors. Whoops! Those four cups of coffee just aren't doing it for you anymore... better make it five... Eventually, you can't function properly without it, and you'll need it just to feel normal. Ceasing caffeine intake is the only way to get back, and there will be a nasty withdrawal period while you wait for your brain to figure out that it's got too many adenosine receptors and re-regulate again.
I'm not touching the stuff. It's probably fine for an all-nighter or two every once in a while, but not for daily consumption.
Who says you get that much more learning in a graduate program? It's just two more semesters of school and maybe some "project" that doesn't teach you as much real world experience as a year on the job. Yeah, school is fine because it teaches you some nice theoretical stuff, but a graduate degree in computer science doesn't buy you a whole lot.
Sure, if you want to be a code monkey.
If you want a job in computer science that's not one of the TWO types you can get with an undergraduate degree (code monkey and eventually code monkey manager), you get a graduate degree. If you get an MS, you're more likely to get to manage code monkeys, but you can also do research, which means working on harder and more interesting problems than implementing Business Logic Abomination #1138. If you get a PhD, you can monkey, manage monkeys, do research and also teach computer science.
It's not about money, and it's not about learning theory, though those are nice benefits. It's about networking with lots of smart people and having tons of interesting options.
What I find disturbing is people who find there to be, first, a difference between the pixlated backsides, and second feel affected enough by staring at the pixelated bottom of an animated avatar...
Your unconscious mind doesn't really know the difference. Either that, or it doesn't care.
A guy can stare at (pixelated) videos of naked women all day thinking "she's not really here" but he'll still get turned on, won't he?
...and in related news, Blizzard has announced that players will now have to prove they are Orcs before being allowed to play one in World of Warcraft.
Perhaps we should allow people to die earlier with dignity.
Most people I've talked to don't know about this.
Disease-free old people often just up and die for no reason. I'm serious - there actually is such thing as death from old age. It's a systematic thing. For whatever reason and by some mechanism we don't understand, the body decides that it's no longer time to be alive, and systems start slowly shutting down.
As far as I can tell, it's rather a nice way to go compared to the others. It's over in a few days and the pain is quite manageable. The more age-related diseases we clobber, the longer people live, and the more likely they are to die this way.
If we come up with a way to "treat" this one, though, you'll have a point.
How are they going to do it? Java? Flash? ActiveX? DHTML and JavaScript? AAlib and a text box? Something like Java and JOGL seems most likely, but I have a hard time imagining it rendering at any decent framerate.
At any rate, I'd guess they're targeting the casual gamers. I have a brother-in-law that spends at least two hours a day playing Flash games. Carmack must be going after those people.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah! You are absolutely correct, and I learned something new today. Apparently, that part didn't sink in when I read the GoF book. Thanks!
Also, while some design patterns seem to be universal (structural patterns like facade, adapter and proxy, in particular, are necessary to make independent systems play well together), others indicate that the language you employ them in is lacking in features.
Visitor? If you have first-class closures, it's the most natural thing in the world to pass a function to a traversal function. You don't need a name for it or a specialized set of trigger terms so that maintainers can see easily divine your intentions. You don't name your closure "visit", you name it after what it does.
Singleton? Whatever for, if you can create object literals, or your classes are as first-class and polymorphic as instances?
Factory? In Python, you override __new__...
Learning other languages lets you determine the difference between unification and duct tape.
And a powerful macro system. Scheme's is interesting, and you can do most anything with it, but certain things require a great deal of hoop-jumping.
Aside from conditions and restarts, macros seem like the last thing that hasn't sneaked into popular languages yet. For the uninitiated: imagine being able to write a function that, at compile time, takes and returns entire syntax trees. Or imagine if the C preprocessor let you write #defines that were full-fledged functions that had the entire language and runtime available during expansion.
Imagine if C let you hook into the tokenizer and the parser! Why, you could invent your own language for solving your problem, and then solve your problem in that language!
It's worth learning Common Lisp just to play with this stuff.
Judaism and Christianity are very much at odds with the idea. "Treat everyone as if they were God himself" was preached from the beginning in Genesis. (For example, that man is made in "God's image" is the reason given for the prohibition against murder.) It's taught in the Mosaic temple rites if you know where to look and you know how they differ from the Egyptian temple rights that Israel was used to. (In Egyptian temple rights, priests served the gods. In Israel's, they performed exactly the same actions, but to serve each other.) Jesus taught from the Jewish scriptures. When he said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me," it was a restatement of this universal, timeless principle. The story of the Good Samaritan was a forceful illustration of this to people who Just Did Not Get It, and is still very much in use today among people who try to.
In other words, in Judaism and Christianity, there is no "Us" and "Them" - only "Us". The fact that you have missed this - especially with regards to Christianity - tells me you don't know much about practicing Christians or Jews.
FWIW, exactly the same advice applies to depression, even the diet advice. In particular, all protein-rich foods that are high in dopamine precursors are also high in seratonin precursors. (Those are L-tyrosine and L-tryptophan.)
Sleep can be tricky for people with depression, since they often self-medicate by not sleeping enough. (During sleep, seratonin is synthesized to melatonin. Not sleeping can keep seratonin levels up.) A couple mg of melatonin (available OTC, safe and inexpensive) can help.
Check your family history. Both depression and ADHD are almost completely hereditary.
Most doctors overprescribe, especially in cases where a prescription is warranted. This is well-documented with ADHD. Adderall (dextroamphetamine) is supposed to have the seemingly paradoxical effect of calming the person, but too much will push him right out the other side of calm and back into fidget-land.
If it's ADHD, the safest thing to do is fix your diet, regularize your sleep, exercise, and then only take enough medication to ease out of your mind's incessant need for constant stimulation. In fact, you can do diet, sleep and exercise now. That'll make diagnosis (either way) more likely correct, and could even obviate the need for any additional treatment.
Diet: high in protein and complex carbs, low in simple carbs, lots of B-vitamins. Complex carbs are for a more steady supply of brain fuel. Proteins contain amino acids that are synthesized into neurotransmitters you need to think clearly, and B-vitamins are the catalysts. (Look up L-tyrosine and dopamine for further information. People with ADHD tend to be low in dopamine.) Stay far away from fast foods and caffeine. Eat fish, poultry, and beef (those three are in priority order), eggs, whole wheat breads, potatoes, beans, green veggies, and dairy products. If you have cereal for breakfast, switch to a high-protein one.
Some research indicates that certain Omega-3 fatty acids are good for concentration. Plants have them but they're short-chain and have to be converted to long-chain before use. Fish have already done the work for you.
For dessert, stick to ice cream and chocolate. (Sucks, doesn't it?) Chocolate is a bean after all, and beans tend to have large amounts of those friendly amino acids.
Sleep: I shouldn't have to preach about this.
Exercise: besides shaping you up, it's a natural stimulant. People with ADHD have gotten PhDs by running four hours a day. I don't suggest this kind of overindulgence, but exercise does help.
I've been diagnosed with ADHD and I've made these changes myself. When I stick to it, it takes about four hours after I wake up for the fog to descend.
Feel free to email me about any of this. I think I've got my preferences temporarily altered to make my address show up.
Not replying to your ideas, just your syntax to make a point.
People who are at least slightly fashion conscious (that is, most people) regard mismatched shoes and belt, or mismatched clothing and situation, as programmers regard mismatched parenthesis. It's just uncomfortable to look at.
Could be ADHD.
How is your work? How do you do with things that aren't exciting, interesting, or engaging? In personal projects, do you often do all the exciting stuff and then discard them when all that's left is the boring stuff? Does boredom hurt? Do you fight back impulses to hum, fidget, squirm, or stand up and leave when you have to sit still for long periods of time? Do you have difficulty making eye contact for more than 5 seconds with people you're talking to directly when they're talking about something boring? Were you suspected of having ADHD as a child?
Some of that is based on my own experience, some from here:
http://www.adhd.com/adults/adults_add_screener2.jsp
Most likely you're self-medicating, and if the doctors don't immediately see that it may be time to get different doctors.
At the same time, try laying off the recreational drugs while you're on the prescription ones. Interactions between recreational drugs and prescription drugs have not been studied as well as prescription vs. prescription. Recreational drugs also tend to be more complex. In general, mixing the two can be pretty dangerous.
The short answer is that it's not what you like, but what you're capable of. ADHD people are barely capable of doing mental tasks they find unstimulating.
Here's the long answer. The neural pathways to the prefrontal cortex are loaded with synapses that require dopamine to function. In people with ADHD, this pathway is generally underactive. (All kinds of things - low levels of dopamine, low dopamine receptor counts, underfunctioning dopamine transport, overabundance of MAO enzymes, etc. - have been implicated.) Upon being exposed to something stimulating (which differs from person to person) the brain gets a general squirt of dopamine, which activates the pathway, and the prefrontal cortex starts working.
This happens to everyone. In someone with ADHD, it's one of the only things that works. It's why their minds seem to always be either "all on" or "all off".
It's not necessarily fun that triggers this, either. People with ADHD are very good in a crisis situation: generally calmer and better able to reason clearly than others. (This is a norepinephrine response, not dopamine.) If that's why the adaptation has stuck around for so long, it's clearly maladaptive now.
Looming deadlines can also do it, which is another reason people with ADHD get called "lazy".
"Hey, you can do anything you think is fun, and you can always perform under pressure. What you need is more willpower, not a diagnosis!"
It's not lack of willpower. I have plenty of that. The year before I was diagnosed I lost 50 pounds just by controlling my diet. It wasn't fun or pleasant, but it didn't require me to concentrate, either.
Specifically, it was the thesis proposal introduction.
I quit work and came back to school for a PhD so I could teach computer science. Software development was a very bad fit for me, since I could only concentrate on things that were interesting or due shortly. I ended up meeting my deadlines, but it was an 85/15 situation: 85% nothing, 15% work. Do you know guilty it feels to pick up an 80-hour paycheck for 10 hours of work? Imagine the frustration, too: I've been programming since I was single-digits old, and business programming is particularly easy. I did it for five years before desperation took over and I quit.
Classwork was fine. I've become pretty good at making things interesting for myself (it's a survival trait), and it's almost always easy with computer science. Between that and staying up late the night before assignments were due, I managed very good grades. The thesis, though...
A thesis has no hard deadlines, except the last, and by then it's too late. I didn't find it particularly difficult, except the concentrating part. I took classes off for four months just to work on the proposal, but I didn't get any more done on it than when I had classes. I would sit down and read the last paragraph I had written over and over again... and finally, after four times through (my own paragraph!), I'd finally understand what it said and remember where I was going. Then I'd try to think of how best to write what came next, and nothing would come.
After struggling against this unpleasant mental fog for a while, I'd give up and try something else. These "mental breaks" never helped, though. Reading
I'm reading a little anti-...oh, maybe anti-ADHD-diagnosis in this, among other things. Funny, this happened last time this story was reported here. Let me clear up a few things.
Lower output of dopamine (or some insufficiency of it in some way), which is what this article is about in the end, is implicated in ADHD. It's very well known that dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure, is one of the few things responsible for your prefrontal cortex getting a jump-start when you need to reason about something. (Another is norepinephrine, the neurotransmitter associated with stress.) The prefrontal cortex is responsible for executive function: integrating memories, learning, predicting outcomes - a whole slew of things. Presumably, the dopamine squirt is what gets babies to learn to eat. Chew food -> dopamine + good feeling -> brain kicks into gear to figure out how to get it again.
Most healthy adults can start up the prefrontal cortex on demand. People with low levels of dopamine can't. From a neurological perspective, low levels of dopamine is obviously a bad thing.
When I was diagnosed with ADHD, I did my own research, including reading relevant papers from neuroscience literature. ADHD generally shows up in brain scans as decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Taking medication brings dopamine levels up to normal - it's why they prescribe stimulants. For anyone else it's a bad idea, but for people with ADHD it's normalizing.
(I'd be very interested to know whether these researchers at Max Planck have discovered any ties between this mutation and ADHD.)
Nearly all of my grade-school teachers suspected that I had ADHD and told my parents, but they never let on to me. Instead of being labeled "ADHD" or "damaged" or "worthless" (as you say), I got labeled "hyperactive" and "annoying" and "arrogant" and "difficult". I was 25 by the time I understood that something must be objectively different. By the time I was 31 I was feeling "damaged" and "worthless" without anyone ever saying those words to me. I had started affixing those labels to myself because of repeatedly failing to do things I knew I was perfectly capable of that I actually wanted very badly to do.
Still want to withhold diagnosis and treatment based on your preconceived notions of normal variation?
I don't. My son, who is like me in so many ways it's scary, is getting all the relevant information as soon as he's old enough to understand it. He's entitled to the full knowledge he'll need to decide who he wants to be. I never got that option.
Hear, hear.
I have ADD. I started medication a couple of months ago, and the effect has been dramatic. Before, the only way I could concentrate on something was when I was excited about it, very interested in it, up against a deadline, or the planets just happened to be aligned properly. Don't get me wrong: I can make myself stare at anything for as long as I want. Most people assume that's enough, but it's not. A lot of things need to come together to get the prefrontal cortex engaged and functioning at capacity. Being worried sick, undernourished, or sleepy can put anyone in a distracted fog. Imagine being foggy and distracted all the time for no apparent reason.
Now that the ol' brain generally engages when I want it to, all those techniques and tricks people had been swearing would help me get stuff done actually work. I get work done on time, even when I don't feel like it. I'm less irritable. I can put up with noise and chaos without getting cranky. I have more control over my thoughts. I have an easier time with empathy. I no longer wander into the kitchen looking for things to munch when I'm not hungry.
In short, anyone who says it ain't real is full of it, but they're entitled to their opinions. I was skeptical myself until I got that miraculous squirt of dopamine that put everything right.
Back on topic: there's no single cause of ADD, but everything in the dopamine and norepinephrine cycles has been implicated. It seems it takes the right combination of factors - too much MAO, underproduction of monoamines, underfunctioning monoamine transporters, not enough receptors including D2 - to converge and put someone over the impairment threshold. "Once bitten, twice shy," as the article is titled? Yep, that's me, and most others with ADD. I take responsibility for my actions, though. It's taken me years longer to learn what's supposed to come naturally - or at least more easily - but it is my life and I am in charge.
All the same, I'd done as much as I could and I'm finished with it. I'm keeping this minor personality transplant.
Additionally, the abstract says their research "provide[s] a strong argument" for a theory. I suppose these statements are way too hard-line for Real Science. Sheesh. These are people who know very well they're doing inference rather than deduction - including the submitter! - and you take them to task for jumping to conclusions.
You say:
The hypothesize/predict/experiment cycle isn't nearly as boolean as you make it out, even though we teach it that way in school.
If a result doesn't disprove a theory, it actually increases its probability among other possibilities. Bayesian statistics models this quite well, and scientists think about it that way but without such a rigorous foundation. For example, in all forces, we've measured the differential relationships among position, velocity and acceleration to ridiculous precision. Doesn't this increase the probability that we've got it right? In this area, if there's a conflict between predicted and expected outcomes, we regard the explanation that the theory is wrong as the less probable one - much less probable.
Part of the problem is classical statistics. Null hypotheses and tests against them are kludgy nonsense, everyone knows it, and everyone has their own way of doing it "properly". (Think about it this way: Pr(null hypothesis), where the null hypothesis has a continuous component - and this is done all the time - is ZERO.) Doing inference without priors is a misguided attempt at objectivity. These mindsets are well-preserved in scientific philosophy, and they've got to go. Nobody actually thinks about real inference the classical way. It'd be ridiculous to try it on any hypothesis of moderate complexity.
Better not take 5 million flights then.
Actually, your net risk is 1 - (1 - 1/5000000)^(# of flights), assuming your flights are statistically independent. (They'd better be, or there may be a pilot who's out to get you.) Your approximation is actually pretty good up to a million flights or so - I'm just being pedantic.
What's more amazing to me is that they can patch up all those planes and nobody knows the difference.
Wait - did you really mean one crash per plane per year?
I get them every two weeks or so now. I didn't get them at all, even though I had excellent karma, until I metamoderated a few times.
Definitely just Americans. Or something. What was that all about?
Anyway, here's the real issue: humans have a natural bias to assume a zero-sum game first, even where none exists. It's the source of all envy. Maybe it was a good survival trait back in the poor, nasty, brutish, and short days when competition over resources was fierce, but it's clearly maladaptive now.
Good job!
If people knew more about caffeine, they wouldn't drink it in such concentrated amounts, like, ever. Some people here know its chemical structure, but that's not nearly enough to claim to be educated about it.
Here's how it works. Your brain gets energy by breaking down ATP and ADP, just like every other system. Eventually, it ends up with a bunch of free adenosine floating about (that's the "A" in ATP), which binds to adenosine neuroreceptors. This binding has an inhibitory action on the synapse - that is, it tends to keep all but the strongest signals from getting across. This is what makes your brain feel tired and less functional after working it for a long time.
Caffeine works by binding to the same receptors but not having the same effect. (It's an "adenosine antagonist".) It doesn't directly make you think better - the buzz is physiological, from other effects - it just keeps you alert and functioning, even when you ought to be tired.
Here's the problem: when you ingest a significant amount and antagonize adenosine receptors too much, the brain re-regulates by exposing more receptors. Whoops! Those four cups of coffee just aren't doing it for you anymore... better make it five... Eventually, you can't function properly without it, and you'll need it just to feel normal. Ceasing caffeine intake is the only way to get back, and there will be a nasty withdrawal period while you wait for your brain to figure out that it's got too many adenosine receptors and re-regulate again.
I'm not touching the stuff. It's probably fine for an all-nighter or two every once in a while, but not for daily consumption.
Sure, if you want to be a code monkey.
If you want a job in computer science that's not one of the TWO types you can get with an undergraduate degree (code monkey and eventually code monkey manager), you get a graduate degree. If you get an MS, you're more likely to get to manage code monkeys, but you can also do research, which means working on harder and more interesting problems than implementing Business Logic Abomination #1138. If you get a PhD, you can monkey, manage monkeys, do research and also teach computer science.
It's not about money, and it's not about learning theory, though those are nice benefits. It's about networking with lots of smart people and having tons of interesting options.
Your unconscious mind doesn't really know the difference. Either that, or it doesn't care.
A guy can stare at (pixelated) videos of naked women all day thinking "she's not really here" but he'll still get turned on, won't he?
That shouldn't be hard for about half of them.
Most people I've talked to don't know about this.
Disease-free old people often just up and die for no reason. I'm serious - there actually is such thing as death from old age. It's a systematic thing. For whatever reason and by some mechanism we don't understand, the body decides that it's no longer time to be alive, and systems start slowly shutting down.
As far as I can tell, it's rather a nice way to go compared to the others. It's over in a few days and the pain is quite manageable. The more age-related diseases we clobber, the longer people live, and the more likely they are to die this way.
If we come up with a way to "treat" this one, though, you'll have a point.
It's too big for its mass!
:)
No, it's not heavy enough for its size!
I've got a better explanation: it's not dense enough! Wait... don't all those say the same thing?
Thanks for the numbers, though.
How are they going to do it? Java? Flash? ActiveX? DHTML and JavaScript? AAlib and a text box? Something like Java and JOGL seems most likely, but I have a hard time imagining it rendering at any decent framerate.
At any rate, I'd guess they're targeting the casual gamers. I have a brother-in-law that spends at least two hours a day playing Flash games. Carmack must be going after those people.
Who cares as long as we hear that awesome cha-cha-cha-cha-cha when he jumps?