Prose's abatement

Blogging under

Deprivation of slumber

Hypomania's many hyper

Tendencies tend to be

Exacerbated, precipitated

A mist of words

Becomes a deluge

A news article has confirmed

The world's gone as mad as you'd heard

The only response possible -

Outraged loquacity, tumbles

Forth, unconstrained, with only the steady rattling

Of the Eee PC's battered keys to protest at the prattling

An aside, a brief build-up, mere foreplay to the climax of self-righteous indignity

Becomes much more of, shall we say, a tangent, gaining nuance, losing brevity

Til the point is reached, at which distraction from the judicial theme is wrought insufferable
Of course, such artistry must not be abridged - but mayhap, it is shuffleable?

So then, the post, once, in outline, contained sufficiently, by the ample boundaries of a mere few paragraphs

Is now possessed of parts - one and two - each more substantial than nigh any article to be found within the Daily Telegraph

But now stop the press, what's this? It surely cannot be true - that part two, too, asserts its "right to be serialised?"

Can we burden readers thus, when even part one, solus, is proving far too long for mine own weary old eyes?

This madness must cease! (Not the world's now, take note)

It's the blog that's diseased! (Not the way people vote)

An introductory sentence (Of the linguistic sort)

Now spans three separate entries! (Makes those gaol terms seem short....)

How does one conquer

Such prolific prose?

Could a poem deliver?

Grant salvation?

Who knows?

.........................

Please forgive the attempt at such an unaccustomed and ill-suited form, but my incompletable, uneditable blog ranting was really giving me the shits ;-)

I do plan to proceed with the original posts, eventually... once some substantial editing has taken place.

Also, a few other things

If anyone is in the market for a worthy charitable cause to donate to, may I commend to you the idea of deworming the world, which the evidence seems to indicate is ridiculously cost effective - perhaps the most cost-effective way of doing good for humanity, depending of course on your utility metric.

Personally, I'd like to see a charity that funds studies on the costs effectiveness of various forms of charity and aid. Would that count as a meta-charity?

Should your preference run to philanthropy more localised in its effects, and you are a fellow Sydneysider, then ROAM communities are an excellent choice. I have previously mentioned them in relation to Mental Health First Aid Certificates. ROAM's main focus is helping the chronically mentally ill, through traditional mental health nursing services like psychotherapy, but also in other ways such as brokering accomodation, educational and vocational placement, lifestyle advice and assistance, such as exercise classes (which are known to be a highly effective), and other such practical and effective aid. The organisation started as a project to find housing for some mentally ill homeless people, and has grown from there. Disclaimer: I am a client of ROAM, via my doctors at the BMRI. Toby and James are awesome guys, for whatever that's worth.

I'd like to formally welcome two excellent additions to my blog roll. Over at the insipring Meteuphoric, I may get around to posting a response in the ongoing debate on vegetariaism - or I may not, since doing so smacks a little of petty "Someone is Wrong on the Internet" oneupmanship. As for Capers of the Mind, I trust it will go from strength to strength after its promising introductory post, because I am intimately acquainted with the author's status as a philosopher of the first-rank (despite, or perhaps because, he has never come close to anything resembling the study of philosophy in a formal academic context).

On the topic of my blog roll, are you all reading Marginal Revolution yet? It's really very good - in fact it may well be at its best the more it strays outside the economics professors' natural home territory of the GFC and real aggregate demand shocks and the like. As a non-expert it's a little hard for me to say.

OK, enough sucking up to my fellow bloggers. I'm off to draft yet more posts of my own - hopefully, I can build up a buffer and thus get a regular schedule going here.

Possibly even more interesting than it seems

What could I be talking about? Well, really, a lot of things. As it happens, today I am talking about synesthesia.

Tyler Cowen over on MR recently linked to a study into time-space synesthesia, which stuck me as sounding even cooler than your more garden variety letter-colour synesthesia.

Well, judging by the abstract, its not signficantly cooler after all, but then maybe it's more adaptive. After all, we devote substantial educational resources teaching people to visualise time as space, anyway: this is how to read a clock, this is how to read a displacement-time graph, and so on and so forth. In fact, it'd be nice to see some research done with young kids, or on heritability - to try and see how much of the effect measured in this study is genuinely "hard-wired" neural diversity, and how much is an acquired cognitive skill, akin to driving, or doing abstract algebra, rather than part of a person's genetic heritage. For that matter, if it is an acquired or at least acquirable ability, can we, and should we, set out to turn toddlers into synesthetics, of any variety? I'd say the possibilites are worth investigating, at the very least.

"OK, that's all great," you might be tempted to interject at this point, "but your post title implied that your subject was somehow more interesting than it seems, and yet you've just remarked that this fancy schmancy form of synesthesia is 'not significantly cooler' than the kind I already knew about. So what's so damn interesting about it then?"

Thanks for the interjection! It conveniently allows me to return from a tangent to the point I wanted to make.

Time-space synesthesia isn't all that exotic, perhaps. However, this study is yet another piece of the mounting evidence the synesthesia is actually rather commonplace in the general population. Which is really surprising, when you think about it. Surely mental differences of this kind that strike us as unusual can't be common - or else we'd grow up knowing about them, and they therefore wouldn't in fact seem unusual anymore than some other mild deviation from the norm, such as left-handedness?

Except synesthesia is such a pervasive part of a person's cognitive framework, that many synesthetics presumably grow up assuming everyone sees the world the way they do. Why wouldn't they? And, since they don't behave radically different from your average member of the population, why would anyone else think to ask the kind of questions and perform the kinds of tests necessary to detect synesthetics? Well, no one really has, until modern psychology took a a scientific interest in the phenomenon.

So, then, imagine a truly exotic synesthsia - just as difficult to detect as the regular kind, but rarer, and stranger. Given how long it has taken the "boring" synestheisas to gain serious attention, it is surely not beyond the realms of possibility that a truly rare version might exist which modern science does not yet have any knowledge of whatsoever?

It is fair to ask, at this point, just how exotic could it be? There's a limited set of senses to combine, right?

Actually, overlapping sensory perceptions here can be broader than the senses that might immediately spring to mind - as the time/space example shows.

Consider, if you will, what you might call the empathetic sense - a person's intuitive reading of other people's body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, and so on. This is an incredibly complex data source that the brain has evolved to devote many resources to detecting and processing; it sits at the threshold of may people's conscious awareness.

Now imagine a potential colour-empath synesthetic. They might look at an angry parent, and their brain would present that mood as a visible red colour. Or a distressed colleague might appear purple - perhaps with a green tint to indicate mild sleepiness. Or whatever.

You doubtless see where I'm going with this.

Of course, most people who claim to see auras are probably just cranks, or wishful thinkers. Certainly anyone who claims to see a person's aura through an opaque wall, for an example, is probably just as likely to claim to see the aura when no person is on the other side at all - as repeated experiments have shown.

There is an appeal, though, to the idea that in this case fact might be, if not stranger than fiction, than at least strange enough to surprise us.

Stay tuned for a later post in which I try to tie this into ideas about other forms of cognitive atypicality (most especially that staple topic of mine, psychosis....)

Attention Tim Flannery. Immigration is good for the environment.

Apparently there was an IQ2 debate at the City Recital Hall last night, on whether Australia should decrease its immigration rates. Attentive readers would already be aware my answer is a resounding no.

Those who are opposed to increased human population due to its effects on the environment, such as our esteemed 2007 Australian of the Year, have attained the honour of provoking a response from me today. (I might get around to applying a blowtorch to the even more terrible arguments about the labour force or social cohesion on another occasion.)

Its one thing to argue that the Earth can't sustain more people or indeed even our current population. I happen to think it is absurd to argue this; I won't respond to it, though, because the stated case I am refuting is even weaker.

Why? Because immigration does not create more people, magically, out of thin air (as of 2009 there is so far only one technologically mature process for doing so.) It simply moves them. And it doing so, it actually reduces the projected future population of the world. So if we really are approaching the limits of our finite carrying capacity, immigration is actually a Good Thing (TM).

How can immigration reduce future population? Despite popular stereotypes to the contrary, descendents of immigrants assimilate to the culture of their adopted home. Actually the culture also assimilates to them, but this effect is much smaller when immigration is low relative to the size of the population.

Now Australia is in the 5th phase of what's known as the demographic transition. Our natural fertility rate is negative. People immigrating here are typically from countries in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th phases of the transition. If they stayed in their home countries, they would ultimately have far more descendants than if they move here, where many of their great-grandchildren are likely to end up childless.

Of course, Australia's natural resources will end up a little more strained, certainly relative to the rest of the planet. I hope it goes without saying, though, that we all care first and foremost about the global environment, and aren't just seeking to keep our own little island free from populaion pressures. It does go without saying? Excellent.

"Ah", the environmentalist now argues, "but rich people - such as immigrants in a first world country - are far worse for the environment than poor people, such as their cousins left behind."

This rebuttal, for the time being, is true. It is morally abhorrent - it implies that to protect the environment, we should actively seek to prevent the world's poorest people from becoming any richer, while it is implied Westerns be allowed to continue to enjoy tremendous wealth (even the most eco-concious Australian is both far richer and more polluting than most Ethiopians) - but it is nonetheless grounded in fact.

Except the rest of the world is steadily becoming richer, regardless of whether we let people migrate here or not. China and India will eclipse the West's ecological footprint relatively soon, and other developing nations are sure to follow. Meanwhile, the West has actually started to wake up to the issues facing our environment, and furthermore has the luxury of being able to sacrifice some of its vast wealth on attempts to try and save the planet from oblivion.

What is more likely to save the world from climate change? An argument to convince the populations of third world countries that they don't need electricity? An enlightened political consensus leading to enforcable international laws that constrain our carbon emissions? Or scientific breakthroughs, funded by Western economic growth, that lead to both cheap, clean energy sources, and the ability to extract exisiting anthropogenic greenhouse gases from the atmosphere?

You don't have to believe technological progress is a panacea for the world's problems; just that it has a better track record than self-righteous moral preaching or complex political compromies.

Without loss of generality the argument holds for shrinking bio-diversity, loss of arable lands, etc.

Sadly, Malthus remains an influential voice in today's public policy debates, despite more or less 200 years of consistent empirical evidence refuting his ideas. I guess all that's left to be said is: Bring on the next lot of people to add yet more nails to his theories' coffin, and maybe one day people will get the picture.

Here's hoping they include plenty of Indian computer scientists developing smart grid technology for Google in California, Brazilian geneticists engineering algae to convert C02 and sunlight back into fossil fules for the CSIRO in Canberra, and Ghanian economists at the LSE publishing solidly researched papers backing up the case made here with scientifically rigorous evidence.

Some things you might not know about my political views

I've been toying around with my draft first political rant, and find I can't bring myself to post something inspired by anger that no longer seems entirely fair or measured... so instead, since you were all promised politics, here's an arbitrary set of opinions on some issues. Yay!

Abortion: I'm Pro-Choice, but not militantly - my moral intuition fails so poorly on abortion (once I start to reason about it in any detail) that I default to letting the mother's conscience take primacy over mine, since its her body and all. Incidentally I believe Roe vs Wade is appallingly terrible law - there is a gaping hole in the U.S. constitution concerning exactly when a human obtains rights, but I don't think it was the Supreme Court's job to fill it.

Political Hero: Is, these days, Thomas Jefferson. I'm by no means a libertarian, I'm just in awe of his intellect and convictions. How he put his ideals into practice in the messy world of real politics is a truly fascinating topic - having only really read his Wikipedia page, I'm keen to get my hands on a biography or two. Australian political hero - I'll go for Bob Carr, because nerds have to stick up for one another, no?

In the next Federal election: I don't especially want to vote for Labor, largely because Rudd is overreaching with certain elements of his socially conservative agenda - the main bugbear for me being the appalling internet censorship scheme. I could vote for Turnbull - regardless of his less than appealing personal qualities - but certainly not for the Liberal Party, who to add to mynatural inclinations against their right wing politics, have recently presented an appallingly incoherent and often frightningly irrational policy plaform. The Greens are even worse than the Liberals on policy, and will never win my vote until they purge their party of the influence of ideologues who are so deluded they are capable of opposing things like Nuclear Medicine isotope production at the Lucas heights reactor. If the Democrats were still a viable force with actual political talent, I'd consider voting for them, although it'd involve spending a lot of time figuring out what they actually stand for, since that part always seemed a bit murky.

So at the moment, the ALP wins my vote by default. I'd like to see the Labor left pushing internally a bit harder on issues that matter to me, and not on protecting the thugs in the CFMEU who give the Australian union movement a bad name.

Free Markets or Planned Economies? Both. Our current best knowledge of both economic theory and practice seems to point towards best results from a mixed system - something like we have in Australia. There are without a doubt better ways to run economies, but we haven't discovered them yet. However the dawn of the Information Age is promising in this regard (IMO the massive, distributed computing power of the Internet, product of the Silicion Valley entreupener, may quixotically be the Marxist's last great hope for signficiantly more centralised economic decision making becoming truly viable.)

Taxes - up or down? The level of taxation as a proportion of GDP is a matter of fiscal policy, and rightly changes depending on economic circumstance. As a rule I think we should be redistributing more wealth from the rich to the poor, but I believe we should do so via fewer mechanisms - higher but fewer taxes, and higher but fewer forms of welfare. In fact, if I were in power, my main economic agenda would be to simplify - and probably even merge - the tax and welfare systems, in a revenue neutral fashion. Of course that's far from easy to do, but I'd like to see it nonetheless.

Immigration rates: Should go way, way up. Mainly in the form of unskilled labour and refugees, not just poaching the few doctors the third world has (skilled labour from the first world is fine.) Its an economic, demographic, and moral imperative - with our massively aging population we desperately need more young people, and bribing our own middle class to have babies just isn't that cost effective. The added bouns here its freer immigration is basically the best means of global wealth equalisation, since the immigrants will get richer by being here - not because they end up taking our wealth but because they benefit from our positive externalities, so essentially, they get wealthier for free. Also, they tend to send a fair bit of the money they make back to their home countries where it is usually desperately needed.

People like trot out the usual, largely flawed objections to this one. Society has coped before and can cope again, and so can the enivornment. Really.

ETS: Yes, there definitely should be a price on carbon. The science is kinda shaky - we're almost certainly making the Earth warmer, but by exactly how much and with what effects is much more open - but the economic modelling that is the best argument against acting is even shakier. In the face of this much uncertainty, play it safe and cut emissions. We know we can afford the hit to GDP - civilisations have never ended because the government introduced a moderate tax hike. As a bonus, it'll lesson the economic shock when we actually do start to run out of fossil fuels (which isn't for ages, but hey its nice to be prepared.)

Criminal Law: Soft on crime! Ha. I'll advocate purely selfishly in this matter, in favour of whatever minimises the likelihood that I ever end up a victim or perpetrator of crime - and to hell with the rights of current victims or criminals ;-) This involves weighing up, more or less, the deterrence value of strong punishments, the recidivism reduction of rehabilition, and the option of spending public funds in the broader productive economy instead of the justice system - which reduces the odds myself or my neighbour will ever have to steal to eat, become drug dealers and addicts, etc.

Evidence seems to point to spending more money on rehabilitation for criminals, and less on building new gaols. Perhaps the government should outlaw the media's lying portrayal of crime being out of control due to weak-willed judges, when in fact we live in a remarkably safe and peaceful society by any historical or global standard. I mean freedom of speech is all very well and good but what about my freedom to live in a society goverened by reason rather than the hysteria that happens to make newspapers more profitable?

Actually, I don't have to renounce my values quite that much, because I'm confident the internet will, sooner rather than later, send newspapers and television stations in their current form out of business. Good riddance. Whether what ends up replacing them is any better is an open question. I'm an extreme optimist about the future, though.

Miscellany

There are several shorter things I want to blog about that I don't merit think posts in their own right... so you get an assortment today, readers.

Regarding the last post

A Facebook reader (hi Catie!) expressed interest in Mental Health First Aid Certificates. The elevator pitch: MHFA is a multi-award winning course designed by leading Australian psychiatric researchers. It is supposed to be a very rough equivalent of a (Physical) First Aid Certificate - like those run by St John's or Red Cross - for Mental Health. For example, learning how to identify and respond to a potential emergency, such as a psychotic episode. Having experienced psychosis myself, and having witnessed others under its effects (I mean on the street, on the bus, in my workplace, and so forth, not just during the time I spent in a psychiatric ward), I'd like to see more of the general public educated about it, and of course other mental health issues. I'm trying to push it as a training agenda item in my workplace at the moment; I personally receive a lot of help from ROAM communities, one of the Sydney-based organisations who offer the course, and since I know from first hand experience that they're awesome guys I feel no hesitation in recommending friends, family and colleagues to take the class with them.

More High Fidelity Antics

Current topic: The Greatest Feminist Anthem in History, so far

I've quizzed a few people about this. There seems to be a paucity of opinions amongst people I know about the great songs of feminism; this is probably because I don't know enough feminists, which is a shame. I have my own choice which so far nobody else I've asked has picked. Please throw your opinions into the comment thread (assuming I can actually get a comment thread for this post) and I'll see if I can compile something more resembling a personal top 5 in place of my current personal top 1. Massive bonus points to anyone who makes a suggestion which displaces my current favourite. I expect players to abide by the same rules of the game I do - no use of Google, Wikipedia, iTunes, or in fact any source of information except the brains of yourself and the people you happen to come into immediate contact with. Think pub trivia.

Finally, for a nice tie-in of the previous two mini-posts,

The top 5 songs that personally best capture my experience of Mania

Songs are important to us partly because they evoke certain moods and emotions, right? Mania is a pretty damn significant mood, by any standard, and there are definitely songs that I associate with it. Here's a "naked" top 5, without the accompanying explanatory music geekery :

5: Territorial Pissings by Nirvana, 4: Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles, 3: Breathe by the Prodigy; 2: Its the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine) by R.E.M; 1.....

will wait for a follow up post, pending receiving some guesses from others. Yes, I'm trying, as I often do, and probably just as ineffectually, to coerce readers into giving me some feedback. Sometimes the stark truth of blogging - the endless shouting into an empty room - is hard to simply accept and live with.

This is a rather diverse list, which is intended; I want to convey that mania isn't a simple cut-and-dried affair - any more than say, happiness, or love. The list is subject to change of course - in fact just about any song can seem overwhelmingly significant and relevant during mania itself, but these leap to mind as appropriate songs about mania when I'm not feelings especially manic.

I hereby promise to post part I of my current political rant series within a week of getting 6 or more distinct people commenting on this post :-)

Another written off day

Add it to the extensive lifelong list - 22/08/09 was a day that didn't exactly go as I'd planned.

I normally prefer to blog about abstract ideas than my day-to-day life - draft philosophy essays rather than journal entries. Its more comfortable territory for me.

But a sizable portion of the known readership of this blog will know I took the day off work today, and it seems some explanation is in order.

I've been "elevated", which is a nice euphamism for hypomanic, for the best part of a month and a half now - those who know me well can usually pick up on the signs of this and figure it out without being told.

For a long time, it was pretty much "all positive" from my point of view - yes I was more irritable, more "intense", less patient, never able to shut up, etc etc etc. But I had tremendous amounts of energy and felt like I was getting a hell of a lot of good stuff done in my life, professionally, socially, and personally, especially in contrast to the shitty mixed depressive

symptoms I had immediately after my return from New York City. And I was managing to still get enough sleep, get out of bed reasonably early, eat well, exercise a lot, and so on. Some negativity remained of course but I was doing my best to use it for its evolution-given purpose: as an ongoing catalyst for healthy, positive change.

Over the last week, though, I became more mixed - I could speculate a lot over the exact triggers but suffice to say behavioural red flags started creeping in. I missed a critical "lets start planning for how we move forward from here" kinda appointment with my psychiatrist on Monday, having gotten wasted the night before. I was late to my exercise session with my mental health nurse on Thursday. The apartment became rapidly and noticably messier. I missed some of my planned morning walks. I was staying up til stupidly late hours reading pointless flame wars on the internet. Etc, Etc, Etc.

These day my insight is usually pretty good for someone with my condition, and I could see the regression long before anyone else had a chance to notice the extent of the subtle shift, but I wasn't really sure how to take action. So I took the standard plan of attack - doing absolutely nothing, but just willing myself to go back to how I'd been the week before.

Then last night I stayed up late, again, having had less than 5 hours sleep the night before. I knew I had to go to bed - I needed a really solid night's rest before going to work in the morning. I resisted, fucked around, didn't go to bed. A friend of mine IM'd me at 4:30 in the morning to ask what the hell I was still doing up. A very good question.

I was now caught in that tired old trap - even if I could get a couple of hours sleep and get up, I'd be far worse than useless at work, and make all my colleagues life actively harder. But if I didn't go to work, I would sleep til some stupid time, my whole circadian rhythm would be devastated for days to come, and over the medium term things might deteriorate even further.

In the end, I didn't sleep at all. This is a risky "strategy" because the (hypo)manic symptoms can get worse the longer you go without sleep. But if you can go the entire next day without sleeping, then go to bed as soon as you start to feel tired in the evening - before you get a "second wind" - you can get back on track for an early rise the day after and thus resestablish a proper sleep cycle.

I called in sick - hopefully not causing too much disruption. It took 3 attempts to do so - I would pick up the phone, and then literally get distracted and not make the call.

Then I thought, right, I need to get out of the house, get some fresh air, exercise, stay awake, without getting more elevated. So I'll call a trusted friend, meet up, go for a walk around a park or something. Chat, but try to lay off the more heavy duty flight of ideas babbling. This was a genuinely good plan. Here's how I carried it out:

Where's my phone? In my pocket? Oh the other pocket.

Oh, the charge is about to die. I should go back and charge it. OK, walk towards the apartment.

No wait, if I go back home, I'll got to bed and fall asleep. Bad idea.

I'll go for a walk down to the oval.

No, wait, I shouldn't go wandering off on my own without a means of contacting someone. And its stupid to go walking before getting breakfast. I'll go get some noodles for breakfast, the shopping centre is open now.

No, before I should do that, I should call someone - keep an outside party in the loop.

No, wait, its too early in the morning, I'll be waking people up. And making them panic unnecessarily.

No, I should call them. Its important.

Wait, my phone isn't charged. That's right. If I go back and charge it, I can spend some time on my computer, which will keep me awake.

No, the interent will just stimulate me more. Maybe just 1o minutes of lying down would be good.

No...... etc.

This kind of Executive Dysfunction is actually in a sense a mild symptom. It makes you utterly unable to get anything done - and I mean get anything done, I've spent hours trying to start to do something as simple as the dishes while in this state - but its not actually really dangerous at all in its own right, except to the extent it make you oblivious to your own surroundings.

After a good solid couple of hours of this crap, I managed to get a breakfast of a springroll and a Vietnamese pork roll (which I barely remember eating), and eventually succumbed to the temptation to "briefly rest". I wokeup about an hour and a half ago, which was 8:00 pm, local time.

Hopefully the drugs will knock me out tonight and I'll be able to get to work and have an ok day, and turn around this briefly bad patch.

Anyway, that's my "a day in the life of someone with Bipolar Disorder" post. I don't really want to make a habit of them - I prefer to read about people's ideas than their lives, and so this blog implicitly assumes the same about you, Non-Existent Reader. Also, Bipolar Disorder is genuniely quite boring a lot of the time.

However one of my recurrent "Big Important Ideas" that's been at the forefront of my mind lately is using my own experiences and insights to try and help contribute to a world where mental health problems are less debilitating, not just for me but for everyone. Spreading awareness is a big part of that. (Mental Health First Aid Certificates, anyone? I'm going to keep pushing and pushing that one with friends, family and colleagues until long after I've been asked to shut up.)

The 500 ideas for other blog posts I've had recently are bearing some fruit - hopefully a couple of the more polished ones will see the light of day soon. The first installment in my latest series of political rants is starting to get dated, and I've actually drafted a pretty big portion of it, so that's my next current top priority. But I make no guarantees. You might get 50 blog posts over the next month, or zero. That's just how it is, I'm afraid.