Monthly Archives: September 2010

A Dragon reborn

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One Dragon in hand is better than pain in two wrists.

From my LiveJournal:

Today I received my copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11, the newest and best in speech recognition software. I use the home edition, which is theoretically priced at $99 at Amazon, but can frequently be bought at a lower price (especially after the first few weeks). The new version is said to be 15% more accurate, but you are not likely to recognize this right away since version 10 was already 99% accurate (for native English speakers).

If you are one of those people who habitually speak, this program is like science fiction. I can dictate text, of course. But I can also say “start OpenOffice”, and the Dragon will start OpenOffice (which is now supported in the same way as Microsoft Office). Or I can say “list all windows” and the Dragon we give me a list of all the open program windows and let me select one of them. Or I can say “switch to Opera”, “switch to OpenOffice”, or “search the web for cats and dogs living together” and Dragon will do just that. (Except it just thought I said “search the bed for cats and dogs living together”, which is still beyond its capabilities, I am happy to say.)

Unfortunately, Dragon NaturallySpeaking is not designed to run on Linux. While some people have got it to run under WINE, it needs to be restarted frequently, and of course it cannot execute operating system commands.

This is one impressive piece of software, and it gets better the more you use it. You can also allow it to rummage through your documents so it can get a better idea of the things you habitually write. You can also train it by reading texts that are prepared for that purpose, but this is not strictly necessary. It works decently right out of the box, and quickly learns from its mistakes when corrected (unlike some people!)

I already wrote a bit about it when I ordered it. My impression now is much the same, but slightly better. As you can see from my LiveJournal entry, I had some fun with giving commands to Windows. I know some of these where available also in the previous version, but there was no easy way to remember what was possible without thumbing through the manual. Now there is the “Dragon Sidebar” which presents a list of the most common commands right there on your screen.

Unfortunately, this sidebar has a bug: After I closed it, the icons on my desktop were moved out of its way. I have a row of icons on the left edge of my screen, where they are out of my way. That is also where I docked the Dragon Sidebar. It’s default position is on the right, and it is possible that it works as intended if you keep it there. Perhaps they simply never tested the other positions?

Another quality-of-life improvement is the ability to work with more programs than before. Well, actually it worked with a lot of programs already, but only to a limited extent. Mostly it only has full functionality in Microsoft Office and its own dictation box / DragonPad (basically a copy of WordPad). In other programs it had limited functionality: You might not be able to select text you had already written, it might not automatically capitalize the word after a period or exclamation point, or corrections might truncate the text. At least those where the errors I encountered most often.

These problems still exist, but not in as many programs as before. Dragon 11 supports OpenOffice and Google Docs, two popular free alternatives to Microsoft Office. It also has better support for other browsers than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, although it still has some problems with Google Chrome. (I am writing this in Google Chrome, for some reason. I usually have both Opera and Chrome open at the same time but pointing to different websites.)

Well, that’s enough for tonight. I can only speak a limited number of words in one evening, after all. Besides, I’m not used to thinking with my mouth, so it is slower than typing. And I still have to correct a mistake or two in almost every sentence. This version is said to be better at learning from its mistakes than ever before. If the same could be said of me, however, I would already be in bed now!

What is a High Spirit?

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Thomas Edison was hardly a saint, but his tireless efforts have helped millions of people even after his death, so he is portrayed as a High Spirit in “The Laws of Eternity”, a book and movie by Happy Science.

In the new Japanese religion Kofuku-no-Kagaku (Science of Happiness, also translated Happy Science) there is an interesting concept called “High Spirits”. Not in the English sense of someone being in high spirits, though I suppose there may be a connection by accident of language.

Let me explain in my own words, since I have never seen it defined.

In this life, a High Spirit is someone who wants to help many, and is also able to do it.

A High Spirit continues to inspire people even after leaving this world.

In the distant past, people may have worshiped such High Spirits as gods. Later they were venerated as saints (in Christianity) or Bodhisattvas (in Buddhism).  The many avatars in Hinduism may also have been the same type of person.  Outside religion, they may appear as scientists and philosophers.

Obviously not just any philosophy has the ability to help many people. Some may even do the opposite, as do many branches of religion.  Even a honest wish to save or help people is not enough, you also need to be qualified to do it. This is not something you can just shrug into like a coat.  It must be your being – who you really are.

I think this is an interesting concept because it is non-sectarian.  Normally a Christian would only acknowledge Christian saints and try to downplay all other people who have done good in the world, but is this really something Jesus, known as The Truth, would agree with?  There are obviously things that you cannot do across religions, but there are also things you can. Even a Muslim benefits from Newton’s discoveries, even though Newton was certainly not a Muslim to the best of his knowledge. And so on.

In any case, even though I am not a member of Kofuku-no-Kagaku, I have adopted this concept as a useful tool in my toolbox of thought.  I can’t say that I am such a High Spirit myself. But (here in Norway at least) we have a true saying:  “You will become like those you are together with.”  So I suppose it might still happen, if I live my 120 years… Well, perhaps a “Slightly Elevated Spirit”?

Back to a better future

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Modern, unhealthy food is making inroads in Japan as well.  Not a good thing, but at least it beats the Middle Ages.

There are those who say that we live unnatural lives today, and suffer for it. Our genes are those who survived thousands of years of physical labor and low-fat diet, so when we now have the opposite, our bodies don’t know how to react. The result is an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, hypertension and atherosclerosis.

Hogwash, say others.  The lives of our ancestors were nasty, brutish and short. Human life expectancy is at an all-time high and still increasing, even in the mature west, with about 5 hours a day. In the developing world, the progress is much faster, as people are fleeing in droves from the “healthy” life of backbreaking labor and periodic famine.

There is certainly a tendency to make the past more romantic.  The people who do so tend to be on the political left, but not all liberals hold this opinion. Some liberals have actually studied history, and it is hard to think of any period of the past that was not worse than our own time in numerous ways.

That does not mean we can learn nothing from it, however. You’d think it would be the conservatives who tried to conserve the few good points of a sad time, but even these tend to yearn for a glorious past that never was:  Only their imaginary good times were more recent, sometime in the previous century usually.  But the decades without condoms but with coat hangers were not a paradise either.

That said, there certainly are new challenges today.  Childhood obesity is rampant, and unless some solution is found, it will be very hard for them to reach the age of their parents and grandparents who put on weight later in life. Every process in the body goes much faster in childhood, and this includes the harmful effects of fat in the body.  We recently learned that fat has another effect apart from clogging up arteries:  It acts as a pro-inflammation agent. This seems to be why autoimmune diseases are rampant in today’s high-fat population.

(Notice that fat induces inflammation when it circulates in the bloodstream. As long as it is stowed away in the fat cells, it is more or less harmless, so a person with lots of fat cells can be obese and have very little fat in the blood, and a person with few fat cells can look normal but suffer from chronic fat poisoning.)

We should certainly do our best to avoid a return to the past, with its backbreaking child labor and tooth-breaking chaff-laden diet.  This does not change the fact that some physical movement each day is extremely good for your health. The question is, can we as a society do anything about this, without installing video surveillance in the homes?

Yes, we can, and we already do.  In Japan, physical exercise in schools is quite a bit more frequent and more strenuous than in the US, and while children there are fatter than their parents were, they are still lagging greatly behind on the obesity wave.  Here in Norway, it has become normal for schools to provide fruit for children to snack on as an alternative to bringing in chips and chocolate.  As long as the child does not already have a chronic disease, school is ideally positioned to boost public health. It is already a prison to most of the kids, after all, so a little extra torture in the form of running a few laps won’t cause an armed uprising.

For the most part, however, our lives are our own.  In other words, it is up to you and me to learn from the past and the present, then use this knowledge to build a better future.  This future should follow a middle way, I believe.  Moderation in all things.  Then again, there is a saying that “moderation is for monks”.  Strangely enough, monks tend to live long and healthy lives, but the option still remains less than wildly popular.

Less about happiness

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“He told us to use this to practice making money so we can be rich like him.” Probably a lot less popular than actually giving large amounts of money, but also probably more effective in the long run.  I suspect the same for happiness.

I realize that my previous post, “Can happiness be shared“, was a bit rambling and branching into diverse topics. What I really wanted to say was this:

We can try to share our happiness with others through a smile, a gift or some friendly words. But how well this works depends greatly on the person who receives. Each person has a “capacity for happiness” of their own. This capacity seems to be partly inborn, possibly influenced by upbringing, and slowly altered through our life choices over the years.

If the other person has a high capacity for happiness, your “gift of happiness” is likely to ignite happiness in the other person as well.  That happiness can then continue to burn for a long time. Eventually as they gather happiness they may become “permanently happy”, throughout their life (and even beyond, but I cannot possibly prove that even if it should be true.)

If the other person has only a moderate capacity for happiness, the happiness you share with them will only burn briefly, like a matchstick (for those old enough to remember them).  After a little while, it is gone.

If someone has a low enough capacity for happiness, they may get envious at seeing you happy.  So your happiness actually makes them unhappy.  And even if it is not quite that bad, they may quickly get used to your gift of happiness and become angry if you don’t keep “feeding them happiness”.

It is this “capacity for happiness” which I believe cannot be given away, but is like health or stamina, part inheritance and part lifestyle.

I hope it was clearer this time around! It was to me, at least.

Can happiness be shared?

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“I cook because I want to make others happy” says this ideal girl from a Japanese cartoon. I suppose this is more or less why I write as well, it certainly does not pay my bills.  But do people actually become happy when you do something for them, or is it the one who does something for others who becomes happy?  Both? Depends?

“Can happiness be shared?” sounds like a crazy question, but I do not mean to ask whether two (or more) people can be happy together. Rather, my question is more like “can a happy person give away some of his happiness to others?”

This is not a completely theoretical question for me. I am actually quite happy most of the time, pretty much except when I am sick and getting sicker, or when I have just made a mistake. On the other hand there are many unhappy people in the world, and a few of them are my friends. There are probably many more who are not exactly unhappy, certainly not to the point of complaining about it, but who feel empty and dissatisfied or frequently experience boredom in their everyday life. Could I transfer some happiness to those who need it more?

This seems easy enough if you believe that happiness is a matter of money. Simply give them money, and they will be happier than before they got it. Certainly this seems to be the assumption of most of the world’s governments, and it is not entirely pulled out of Marx’ behind. At a low level of income, where you cannot afford life’s necessities, money makes a huge difference. So if some people have plenty of money and others are starving, it makes a certain sense to steal from the rich and give to the poor, at least if you can somehow convince the rich to continue collecting riches that you can steal. This is a pretty big part of the “art of politics” in our time, but the time for this is probably about to end, because people are gradually realizing that happiness is not quite that simple.

There is a whole new “economics of happiness” being crafted now, based on studies of large numbers of people. For instance, happiness for men is strongly tied to marriage, and somewhat less to employment. For a man, in terms of happiness, a wife is worth years of hard work. This should not really come as a surprise to anyone, I guess. Now as we are moving toward economics of happiness, imagine the chaos if the state were to try to ensure maximum happiness in this regard. Especially since there is no such strong link for women. (Actually, it is totally possible that women marry happy men and avoid the unhappy ones – the statistics would look the same without a control group forced to marry at the behest of the scientists. Let us hope we’ll never know, then.)

Others look at what kind of people are happy. They find that those who do something for others, without getting paid for it, tend to be radically more happy than those who don’t. Again, this is rather old news: “It is more blessed to give than to receive”, as was said almost 2000 year ago. But there is also the possibility that happy people are more likely to volunteer than their depressed brethren, and again the only way to find out for sure is to try it for yourself and see if you feel happier.

So, it would seem that happiness is a bit like stamina: There may be a genetic component, but if you are even vaguely healthy, you can improve it by doing certain things that may seem unpleasant at first. Happiness exercises, in this case. But if that is so, we cannot send other people our happiness, or at least not to a great extent. They will have to grow their own happiness by walking the path that leads to it.

The truth is probably that you can do both: Give a man a fish, and he has food for the day. Teach a man to fish, and he has food for a lifetime.

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EDIT to add:  Since some may not be familiar with the research, I will point you to this little BBC article on happiness which drops some names that are useful for your further Googling. In particular I am thinking of Professor Oswald on the economy of happiness (he assigns price tags to various things not buyable, so as to compare them) and Martin Seligman on how to live a happy life individually.

In the soul of the beholder

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Since sometime yesterday, I think it was before I got sick, I have had recurring pains in my lower left side. Not the right side, where the appendix is, so that’s something.  It came and went through the night and the workday and on my way home, so it has me a bit worried, even though it is not horribly intense.

But as I sat on the commute bus home and we drove through a mixture of fields and woods, I was struck by the beauty of the land, both in its natural state and where shaped by men. Albeit the two forms are different, they were beautiful and harmonious together. Looking up at the sky, where the sun shone through although most of it was covered with clouds, I enjoyed the light of the sun.  Looking around me, this world was so full of life, and I felt privileged to have lived so long on this planet.

Not that I won’t be happy to stay here longer, mind you.  But even now, I felt gratitude and satisfaction well up inside me, quietly but wondrously. And I thought to myself, certainly this is a good thing, that my soul is able to see beauty.  The world is both dark and light, but not all can see it.  My pain is – for now at least – rather ordinary.  But there are those in prison who sing songs of praise, and there are those in palaces who are driven to madness by envy. The soul certainly has a lot to say.

I realize that this one thing alone is not a guarantee that I go to paradise, but at least it should guarantee that I recognize paradise if I come there!  So that is something.  A little ray of hope.

There is a tradition, which I believe goes all the way back to Dante, that above the entrance to Hell there is a sign: “Abandon hope, ye who enter here.” That seems a reasonable admonition, I have always assumed.  But today I briefly wondered:  What happens if someone fails to comply? Don’t ask me, but it was a strange thought, don’t you think?

A liver am I!

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Have you ever thought about this: Someone who loses is called a loser, someone who wins is called a winner, someone who quits is called a quitter, but someone who lives is never called a liver. What were the people thinking who named our internal organs?  Well, they seems to have had high thoughts about the liver, and so do I.  Anyway, here I am again to live the day, Light willing.  Yess!

Suddenly sick

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Shortly before midnight, I suddenly began shivering and shaking even though the room was pleasantly warm. In the past several years this has been a fairly sure sign of fat poisoning (I think it is fat that triggers it, at least) but I have not had that in months, and I don’t remember eating all that much fat the past two days compared with the rest of the summer.  I suppose it could be some other poisoning.  The only strange thing I have eaten this evening was a stir fry of carrot slices, pasta, fried and dried onion and cheese.  Not something you’d expect to threaten your life.

I am shaking badly now, even with a thick winter jacket on.  My heartbeat also changed while I was standing up, though I am not sure if this feeling comes directly from the heart or from the falling blood pressure. My guts are starting to hurt as well, and gradually my stomach.  So far it is the same symptoms as what I used to call “darkening” but renamed “fat poisoning” after I thought I found the connection.  The symptoms always occurred in a somewhat random order except at the very end. The fear is setting in gradually now, as well.  The muscles of arms and legs are stiffening in involuntary contractions, and presumably so are the intestinal muscles:  Intense and often painful bowel movements are also part of the set of symptoms that almost always occurred.

Of course, it could be something else this time, given that I have not had a sudden influx of fat that I can think of. Well, there is the ice cream, but it is not THAT fat, and I had more of it in less time earlier in the summer.

One difference from usual is that my body temperature was not lower than usual at the onset of the attack.  It is usually at least half a centigrade too low for the time of day, sometimes a whole centigrade or even a little more. This time, it was perfectly normal.  As part of my Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (a completely different condition) my body temperature is at its highest at bedtime – in most people it is already creeping downward when they head to bed and reaches minimum early in the morning. In my case, it reaches minimum late in the morning, around the time I must wake up.

I now feel glowing hot in my winter clothes.  This is usually the last stage before the sudden onset of irresistible sleep, from which I have so far always woken up after 10-30 minutes to find the attack pretty much gone.  Here’s hoping I will wake up this time as well.

EDIT 01:30: Woke up from mandatory dreamless sleep in my chair.  Have a slight headache but the attack seems to be over. If I die before I wake, it is probably from something else.  Thanks for watching this weird and unique syndrome, live from Riverview! Perhaps historians of the future will know what it really was.