Well, Andy was always a bit "eclectic" in his sexual interests, so even if he exhibited some previously unexpressed interests afterward, that wouldn't definitely established that he'd actually changed... just that he hadn't gotten around to going after a butch latino pre-op female-to-male transsexual before. {grin}
People can change in many ways because of a stroke. I was lucky that Andy's personality remained largely unaffected (except for an obvious accentuation of his flightiness), but that's not always the case. And stroke isn't the only thing that can make a person change; time and experience do that as well, but less dramatically. One way I've changed over the years is that I no longer care what determines sexual orientation. It is what it is, and even if it can change, that doesn't mean that it should.
I hope that you meet someone new someday and have another shot at love like that.
Thanks, all. I'm reasonably happy with my life as it is. And I'm a different person now, so I'd have to say that there's really no chance of me feeling the same way about anyone else.
But I wouldn't mind finding someone new who inspires me to feel for him differently.
Nope, you misunderstand the terminology. "Long-term memory" is where a person's memories of things that happened more than a few minutes ago are stored. He does remember his life before the surgery, so his long-term memory is intact. "Short-term memory" is for the memory of things that happened just in the last few minutes. He doesn't remember those things, which is why those memories never make their way into his long-term memory. Think of it this way: his write-cache in RAM keeps getting wiped before the data gets written to disk. That's not a failure of his disk (from which he can read data just fine); it's a failure of a segment of his RAM.
You could argue that my responses to people (as non-sensical as they were) were just programmed responses.
And how exactly is that different from a person with full cognitive function? We're all arguably just meat-based computers whose actions are based on our construction and programming (nature + nurture).
Ask a person with no short-term memory if they are a person, if they exist, if they're alive... however you want to phrase it, and they will respond affirmatively. Probably pretty emphatically. I've never been in that condition myself (and arguably, neither have you, since you don't remember it), but I've seen someone in much the same condition, and to me he's very much alive, and very much the person he was before. And I think that perspective also matters.
all it cost was the long term memory of one solitary man.
Actually his long-term memory (everything that had happened to him before the surgery) was unaffected. It was his short-term memory (and with it the ability to form new memories) that was log.
If you're going to criticise something, make sure you understand it well enough to get the facts right.
This has been an example of how linguistic memory is affected by the waking-up process. {yawn}
(And I can assure you that Andy's desires for food and sex were completely unaffected. At one point when he was regaining his ability to talk, the speech therapist was doing object-recognition drills with him. She held up a sheet of paper and asked him to name it. He hesitated. "A piece of..." she prompted him. "Man's ass!" he finished.)
Do you people actually see things in your heads? Can you picture a face/scene/object/symbol - and really look at it?
It isn't as clear or vivid as seeing something "live" (more like an SLP VHS recording of an off-the-air broadcast on pause) but yes, I can picture things I've seen frequently. Similarly, I can play an audio recording back in my head, not just reciting the lyrics and melody, but actually hearing the whole orchestra playing the opening theme to Superman. Unfortunately, it only works for music I've heard repeatedly and it's hard to do with distracting noises, so I still had to buy myself an iPod.
In 1996 my boyfriend Andy suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage from an aneurysm, and after surgery to repair it, had an ischemic stroke which hit his hypothalamus. End result: almost no short-term memory, like the subject of this article.
In the weeks afterward, Andy had some fairly classic stroke symptoms, including paralysis on his right side. He couldn't talk, even to say his own name. But he could sing songs with people, because that skill is located on the right side of the brain, rather than on the left side with our language centers. And when his nasogastric feeding tube was pulled out, he spat out a very intelligible "fuck". Evidently swearing becomes a reflex.
While he was still recovering the ability to stand and to walk, he had to be watched all the time, because he'd keep trying to get up out of his wheelchair... unsuccessfully. But the fact that he kept trying to use his right arm and leg - not remembering that they didn't work - probably helped their recovery.
Every time I talked to Andy, I'd tell him about my new apartment; he'd usually - but not always - react with surprise. During one phone conversation (which wasn't going very well because he was distracted by the TV in front of him), I asked if I could talk to his father (with whom he was staying). Andy put down the cordless phone, saw that Dad was busy, looked up at the TV... and forgot I was there. I had to yell from the sofa cushion to get his attention, so he'd pick up the phone again. Conversations were always difficult because "what did you do today?" would elicit either shrugs or he'd just make something up, his mind grasping at any random memory that might serve as an answer. I frequently fell back on retelling him the same stories about my life lately, just to fill time and stay connected to him, and hoping that maybe they'd sink in.
He did gradually form some new memories. His therapists accomplished some of this by chronic repetition. Living in an environment with lots of calendars and repeated quizzes about the month and year, he got fairly good at remembering that. By asking him over and over during our drive home from a restaurant what the name of it was (no, he didn't find it annoying; each time I asked he barely remembered that previous time), he was able to remember it an hour later. Once, in response to me commenting about my shitty finances, he commented about "the new apartment". After several months of telling him about the fact that I'd gone back to college for another degree, he seemed surprised when I mentioned it again, but on a hunch I asked him what the name of it was, and he remembered. But for the most part, he learned to compensate for short-term memory with habits and with a lot of clever guessing.
I wish I could tell you about Andy's condition in the long-term, but his family won't let me see or talk to him anymore. (They say he'd get overstimulated and unmanageable after I visited or called on the phone... and I never got along that well with them to begin with.) I fought this at first, but since they're better able to care for him (they have money and a support network; I'm just me and underemployed), and since he's painlessly unaware that I'm not in his life anymore (for all he knows, he might have just seen me yesterday), I finally had to let go. More of the personal sob-story details can be found here.
Here's a summary of major PC/MS-DOS revs and the key features they added:
DOS 1: IBM PC compatiblity:)
DOS 2: Hard drives, directories, loadable drivers
DOS 3: Networking
DOS 4: Hard drives >32MB
DOS 5: 386 memory management
DOS 6: Drive compression
All I have to say is that this guy has some seriously narrow-minded notions about what other people might love doing. There are people who would do lawyer-type stuff even if there weren't jobs doing it (the law is one of my hobbies), and there are people who would write papers analyzing literature even if it weren't necessary to get a job teaching English (I also review graphic novels for my own amusement).
These people might not do exactly the same work as an unpaid hobby, but neither would (his example) a professional mathematician do exactly the same kind of problem-solving work if he were doing it on weekends under his own direction. Just because Paul Graham finds dissecting literature or arguing points of the law tedious doesn't mean everyone else does.
That's one concern I have about the implementation of this. The "lower left corner" curve on the blocks that these headlines appear in, visually ties them to the article directly above them (with its "upper left corner" curve. I found this confusing at first, and I still find it disconcerting. Inverting that to the same "upper left corner" treatment (same as the featured articles) would make it much clearer that these are independent items, not footnotes.
No, I've double-checked my accounting, and yours is way off. (Hint: he only owns half of Pixar, not the whole thing.) He'll own 6.2% of the combined Disney-plus-Pixar.
To me the best possible case would be Steve somehow winding up in Michael Eisner's chair.
Hosting a new interview program on CNBC?:)
Re:MOD PARENT +INF INSIGHTFUL!
on
Disney Buys Pixar
·
· Score: 4, Informative
As long as a corporation is legally treated as a human being.
Except that copyright law explicitly does not treat corporations like natural people. For human-authored works, the term is life + 70 years. For corporation-authored works, the term is 120 years from the date of their creation, regardless of whether the corporation "dies" or not.
So (using this morning's market-capitalization figures) we'll presumably have a combined corporation with a value of about $49.5bn + $7bn = $56.5bn, of which Jobs will own $3.5bn, or roughly 6.2%. Nothing to sneeze at, and combined with his Reality Distortion Field it'll give him substantial influence at Disney, but it's not enough that he can walk around Mouse HQ like he owns the place.
Re:Jobs doesn't make $3.5bn
on
Disney Buys Pixar
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
He's also going from being a 50% owner of a $7bn company to a 14% owner of a $50bn company.
If Jobs went from owning $3.5billion worth of Pixar to owning 14% of Disney, that would mean he just made $3.5billion, because 14% of a ~$50billion company is about $7billion. I'm no accountant, so someone correct me if I'm figuring this the wrong way (does the market cap of Pixar get added to Disney's?), but I think his share of Disney is actually only 7%.
No, a "simple majority" is greater than 50%. Having a larger percentage than anyone else (but still less than 50%) is called a "plurality". There is no commonly accepted use of the word "majority" that would refer to 7%.
When I was hired to be half of the tech-support department for my art school, I set up a wiki on my PowerMac as a place to put whatever documentation I generated. Anything I might otherwise scribble on a piece of paper, or what I would have put into a WP document back in the 1990s, I can instead key into a web page, and it's accessible and updatable from anywhere there's a net-connected computer, including at home (handy for reviewing and documenting today's accomplishments or previewing tomorrow's projects with a strong drink at hand). It hosts lists of software in each classroom, a table of permanently assigned IP addresses, an exhaustive list of tasks to accomplish between semesters, a checklist for how to lock down the Windows boxes, software serial numbers (did I mention that the whole site is password-protected?)... basically any info I - or my boss, or my future co-worker - might want access to, whether in the office or not.
History of the Internet shouldn't be more than two sentences.
An extended explanation of how the internet began, how it grew, and how it became what it is now would be fascinating... well, at least it was to my casually-techy former boyfriend. But to most people it's about as interesting and useful as a history of ballroom dancing would be to your typical geek.
In other words, "I want one really good basket to keep all of my eggs in." What... did they stop teaching problem-analysis in the CS dept after I graduated from Hope? {smile}
Might I humbly suggest that you buy/build/salvage a pair of inexpensive computers, each with a fair amount of RAM, a hard drive (or RAID 0) of your desired capacity*, and the fastest NIC your switch can handle. (Forget the fancy RAID controllers, and of course anything better than a PCI VGA card is wasted.) Install the OSOS of your choice on both. Turn on Samba on one of them: that one's your file server. On the other one, set up a nightly cron job to synch (without deletion) the shared directory on the first machine to its local copy of that data: that's your redundancy.
This solution effectively protects you from fried electronics, accidental deletions, and even small fires if the boxes are in different parts of the house (and if the whole house is going up, you get your choice of which box to run back in and rescue), scenarios in which the really-good-basket approach will still scramble your eggs.
*Consider getting different brands to reduce the likelihood of near-simultanous failure. I've had multiple drives from the same lot start failing within months of each other, and you don't want to have a second drive failure while you're still browsing for a replacement for the first.
Slashdot Mirror
People can change in many ways because of a stroke. I was lucky that Andy's personality remained largely unaffected (except for an obvious accentuation of his flightiness), but that's not always the case. And stroke isn't the only thing that can make a person change; time and experience do that as well, but less dramatically. One way I've changed over the years is that I no longer care what determines sexual orientation. It is what it is, and even if it can change, that doesn't mean that it should.
Thanks, all. I'm reasonably happy with my life as it is. And I'm a different person now, so I'd have to say that there's really no chance of me feeling the same way about anyone else.
But I wouldn't mind finding someone new who inspires me to feel for him differently.
Nope, you misunderstand the terminology. "Long-term memory" is where a person's memories of things that happened more than a few minutes ago are stored. He does remember his life before the surgery, so his long-term memory is intact. "Short-term memory" is for the memory of things that happened just in the last few minutes. He doesn't remember those things, which is why those memories never make their way into his long-term memory. Think of it this way: his write-cache in RAM keeps getting wiped before the data gets written to disk. That's not a failure of his disk (from which he can read data just fine); it's a failure of a segment of his RAM.
And how exactly is that different from a person with full cognitive function? We're all arguably just meat-based computers whose actions are based on our construction and programming (nature + nurture).
Ask a person with no short-term memory if they are a person, if they exist, if they're alive... however you want to phrase it, and they will respond affirmatively. Probably pretty emphatically. I've never been in that condition myself (and arguably, neither have you, since you don't remember it), but I've seen someone in much the same condition, and to me he's very much alive, and very much the person he was before. And I think that perspective also matters.
Actually his long-term memory (everything that had happened to him before the surgery) was unaffected. It was his short-term memory (and with it the ability to form new memories) that was log.
If you're going to criticise something, make sure you understand it well enough to get the facts right.
This has been an example of how linguistic memory is affected by the waking-up process. {yawn}
(And I can assure you that Andy's desires for food and sex were completely unaffected. At one point when he was regaining his ability to talk, the speech therapist was doing object-recognition drills with him. She held up a sheet of paper and asked him to name it. He hesitated. "A piece of..." she prompted him. "Man's ass!" he finished.)
I tend to have difficulty with women's names more than men's. I figure the fact that I'm less attracted to them has got to be part of the reason.
It isn't as clear or vivid as seeing something "live" (more like an SLP VHS recording of an off-the-air broadcast on pause) but yes, I can picture things I've seen frequently. Similarly, I can play an audio recording back in my head, not just reciting the lyrics and melody, but actually hearing the whole orchestra playing the opening theme to Superman. Unfortunately, it only works for music I've heard repeatedly and it's hard to do with distracting noises, so I still had to buy myself an iPod.
This is correct. Some of it's because our emotions aren't just in our head: they're in our heart rate, adrenaline levels, etc.
Or maybe that's just my own misconception about you all. {wry grin}
In the weeks afterward, Andy had some fairly classic stroke symptoms, including paralysis on his right side. He couldn't talk, even to say his own name. But he could sing songs with people, because that skill is located on the right side of the brain, rather than on the left side with our language centers. And when his nasogastric feeding tube was pulled out, he spat out a very intelligible "fuck". Evidently swearing becomes a reflex.
While he was still recovering the ability to stand and to walk, he had to be watched all the time, because he'd keep trying to get up out of his wheelchair... unsuccessfully. But the fact that he kept trying to use his right arm and leg - not remembering that they didn't work - probably helped their recovery.
Every time I talked to Andy, I'd tell him about my new apartment; he'd usually - but not always - react with surprise. During one phone conversation (which wasn't going very well because he was distracted by the TV in front of him), I asked if I could talk to his father (with whom he was staying). Andy put down the cordless phone, saw that Dad was busy, looked up at the TV... and forgot I was there. I had to yell from the sofa cushion to get his attention, so he'd pick up the phone again. Conversations were always difficult because "what did you do today?" would elicit either shrugs or he'd just make something up, his mind grasping at any random memory that might serve as an answer. I frequently fell back on retelling him the same stories about my life lately, just to fill time and stay connected to him, and hoping that maybe they'd sink in.
He did gradually form some new memories. His therapists accomplished some of this by chronic repetition. Living in an environment with lots of calendars and repeated quizzes about the month and year, he got fairly good at remembering that. By asking him over and over during our drive home from a restaurant what the name of it was (no, he didn't find it annoying; each time I asked he barely remembered that previous time), he was able to remember it an hour later. Once, in response to me commenting about my shitty finances, he commented about "the new apartment". After several months of telling him about the fact that I'd gone back to college for another degree, he seemed surprised when I mentioned it again, but on a hunch I asked him what the name of it was, and he remembered. But for the most part, he learned to compensate for short-term memory with habits and with a lot of clever guessing.
I wish I could tell you about Andy's condition in the long-term, but his family won't let me see or talk to him anymore. (They say he'd get overstimulated and unmanageable after I visited or called on the phone... and I never got along that well with them to begin with.) I fought this at first, but since they're better able to care for him (they have money and a support network; I'm just me and underemployed), and since he's painlessly unaware that I'm not in his life anymore (for all he knows, he might have just seen me yesterday), I finally had to let go. More of the personal sob-story details can be found here.
DOS 1: IBM PC compatiblity :)
DOS 2: Hard drives, directories, loadable drivers
DOS 3: Networking
DOS 4: Hard drives >32MB
DOS 5: 386 memory management
DOS 6: Drive compression
An Amiga surfing the Web isn't so hard. In fact, you'd have a choice of browsers: AWeb Voyager, iBrowse, and perhaps even someday Amizilla.
These people might not do exactly the same work as an unpaid hobby, but neither would (his example) a professional mathematician do exactly the same kind of problem-solving work if he were doing it on weekends under his own direction. Just because Paul Graham finds dissecting literature or arguing points of the law tedious doesn't mean everyone else does.
That's one concern I have about the implementation of this. The "lower left corner" curve on the blocks that these headlines appear in, visually ties them to the article directly above them (with its "upper left corner" curve. I found this confusing at first, and I still find it disconcerting. Inverting that to the same "upper left corner" treatment (same as the featured articles) would make it much clearer that these are independent items, not footnotes.
No, I've double-checked my accounting, and yours is way off. (Hint: he only owns half of Pixar, not the whole thing.) He'll own 6.2% of the combined Disney-plus-Pixar.
Hosting a new interview program on CNBC? :)
Except that copyright law explicitly does not treat corporations like natural people. For human-authored works, the term is life + 70 years. For corporation-authored works, the term is 120 years from the date of their creation, regardless of whether the corporation "dies" or not.
So (using this morning's market-capitalization figures) we'll presumably have a combined corporation with a value of about $49.5bn + $7bn = $56.5bn, of which Jobs will own $3.5bn, or roughly 6.2%. Nothing to sneeze at, and combined with his Reality Distortion Field it'll give him substantial influence at Disney, but it's not enough that he can walk around Mouse HQ like he owns the place.
If Jobs went from owning $3.5billion worth of Pixar to owning 14% of Disney, that would mean he just made $3.5billion, because 14% of a ~$50billion company is about $7billion. I'm no accountant, so someone correct me if I'm figuring this the wrong way (does the market cap of Pixar get added to Disney's?), but I think his share of Disney is actually only 7%.
No, a "simple majority" is greater than 50%. Having a larger percentage than anyone else (but still less than 50%) is called a "plurality". There is no commonly accepted use of the word "majority" that would refer to 7%.
"largest single shareholder" != "majority shareholder"
If my math is right, Jobs will own about 7% of the company. That happens to be more than any other one person owns, but it's way short of a majority.
When I was hired to be half of the tech-support department for my art school, I set up a wiki on my PowerMac as a place to put whatever documentation I generated. Anything I might otherwise scribble on a piece of paper, or what I would have put into a WP document back in the 1990s, I can instead key into a web page, and it's accessible and updatable from anywhere there's a net-connected computer, including at home (handy for reviewing and documenting today's accomplishments or previewing tomorrow's projects with a strong drink at hand). It hosts lists of software in each classroom, a table of permanently assigned IP addresses, an exhaustive list of tasks to accomplish between semesters, a checklist for how to lock down the Windows boxes, software serial numbers (did I mention that the whole site is password-protected?)... basically any info I - or my boss, or my future co-worker - might want access to, whether in the office or not.
An extended explanation of how the internet began, how it grew, and how it became what it is now would be fascinating... well, at least it was to my casually-techy former boyfriend. But to most people it's about as interesting and useful as a history of ballroom dancing would be to your typical geek.
In other words, "I want one really good basket to keep all of my eggs in." What... did they stop teaching problem-analysis in the CS dept after I graduated from Hope? {smile}
Might I humbly suggest that you buy/build/salvage a pair of inexpensive computers, each with a fair amount of RAM, a hard drive (or RAID 0) of your desired capacity*, and the fastest NIC your switch can handle. (Forget the fancy RAID controllers, and of course anything better than a PCI VGA card is wasted.) Install the OSOS of your choice on both. Turn on Samba on one of them: that one's your file server. On the other one, set up a nightly cron job to synch (without deletion) the shared directory on the first machine to its local copy of that data: that's your redundancy.
This solution effectively protects you from fried electronics, accidental deletions, and even small fires if the boxes are in different parts of the house (and if the whole house is going up, you get your choice of which box to run back in and rescue), scenarios in which the really-good-basket approach will still scramble your eggs.
*Consider getting different brands to reduce the likelihood of near-simultanous failure. I've had multiple drives from the same lot start failing within months of each other, and you don't want to have a second drive failure while you're still browsing for a replacement for the first.