How Do You Know If You Fainted?

Last July, I picked a random doctor out of the nearest facility, to go have one of those things called an annual physical, which I had never had before, having grown up in one of the many Chinese American doctor families who never go to the doctor.

Some of the dialogue went like this:

Me: I fainted three times in a row.

Doctor: How do you know you fainted?

Me: (not thinking too much about the question) Oh, I woke up and found myself on the floor, before I could get to the phone.

Doctor: But how do you know if you were unconscious?

Me: (Hm...) Well, I don't remember how I ended up on the floor.

Doctor: But how do you know if you were actually unconscious? Because, you know..., if you were unconscious, how would you know, you know...?

Okay, is that supposed to be some sort of pseudo-philosophy? Fainting = fainting. And the doctor's interest seemed to stop there instead of addressing the fainting issue. Is that what I get for picking a doctor who lists "psychosocial medicine" under her interests?

Math and Logic Puzzles: Truth-tellers and Liars

A well-known logic puzzle that I first encountered during elementary school in one of the puzzle books that my mom bought for us:

You are traveling on a road to a castle and come to a fork in the road where it splits into two paths. Standing at this fork in the road are two gatekeepers, one who always tells the truth, and one who always lies, but you don't know who is the truth-teller and who is the liar. You need to know which road leads to the castle. What question do you ask to find the road to the castle?

***

If that's too easy, this one is not from elementary school:

The Truth-teller, the Liar, and the Ambiguous

The page includes the answer, and an interesting discussion. Which I haven't bothered to actually understand in detail yet.

If only real life were as clear as math.

"Sun" In The Eyes

My mom mentioned something about Chinese saying that they look to see if a person has "sun" (shen) in the eyes. I don't remember the exact context, but something about whether a person is truthful or good. My ABC interpretation of the word was something to do with energy, brightness, life, health. She said that the word means god.

That's interesting. That makes me think about how I always had this funny observation during undergrad that the "Asian Christians" appeared to me to have a certain shine in their eyes.

The Haunted House Next Door

The neighbors are building a huge haunted mansion next door, surrounded by a tall two-feet wide cement wall, and a lot of trees with little ovalish pasty whitish grey barely green leaves that look like a color that has no life in them. Every time I see the color of the leaves, they are even more pasty white and grey than I remember.

The mansion is blocking what used to be a clear view of (non-pasty white and grey) trees and blue sky. My mom says that they always wanted to be next to us so that some luck might rub off on them. The family history includes selling fake medicine. Also that once they bought the land, and then once they started building, not-so-good things started happening. How does one neutralize a haunted mansion next-door feng shui?

Two Pieces of Lettuce

My theory on why people don't get what it means to not be able to do anything except eat and shower (and occasionally spend a few minutes surfing the Web or blogging), is related to how people on a diet say they only ate two pieces of lettuce for lunch and that's the only thing they ate all day. Meaning they also ate two bowls of ice cream for dessert and a piece of pie. Or they had chips and several sodas between meals. And some cookies. Which is a whole lot different from actually eating only two pieces of lettuce in a day.

In everyday parlance, sometimes people say they haven't done anything all day or all week, but really, not doing anything actually means, they went to work, ran errands, cooked, ate, showered, sat around, talked on the phone, read some magazines, surfed the Web, painted their toenails, watched TV, listened to music, paid bills, and did yoga.

Not being able to do anything except eat and shower, in the context of describing illness or disability, is literal. Ie. eat, shower, and nothing else. Scratch out all the stuff in between. Not comprehending the literal meaning, is a perplexing case of not being able to imagine the literal meaning because one is putting too much imagined stuff around the words being communicated.

In addition, the description of lying in bed doing nothing. Sometimes people mean they were actually lying in bed watching TV, movies, reading books and magazines, listening to music or radio, and sitting in bed typing on their laptops. So much that people almost never imagine what it literally means.

So when trying to explain to the GP, I tried explaining many times that I meant completely literally and adding "like a 90-year old in a nursing home," but that still didn't work, because he wasn't taking it literally nor imagining a 90-year old in a nursing home. I think some of the CFS disability assessment forms that I sent him finally helped a little. They spell it out a little more, like itemizing some of the basic things the person can not do, except that it's not possible to spell out every infinite item that a person can and can not do.

I'm confusing myself as to whether the misunderstandings are caused by too much or too little imagination. I'm concluding that the imagined extras are not actually due to imagination, but due to assumptions. And assumptions are often due to lack of imagination.

Search Multiple Labels in Blogger Feeds

For lack of writing of personal post topics, here is some more filler material.

As people have found it useful to be able to search multiple labels in GMail, I spent a few more brain cycles figuring how to hack multiple label searches in Blogger. Here is a functional approximation using the blog feed. For more details, see the Google Data APIs Protocol Reference.

This requires a browser that displays feeds nicely, such as Firefox or Netscape.

To find posts labeled with all of multiple labels:

http://<subdomain>.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/<label1>/<label2>/.../<labelN>

In other words, the blogspot feed URL, followed by /- to indicate the beginning of a list of labels, followed by the slash-separated label names.

For example, to find all posts on this blog labeled both dance and fashion:

http://waltz.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/dance/fashion


Negations (exclude a label) and disjunctions (or) are not supported yet:

http://waltz.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/dance/-fashion

http://waltz.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/dance%7Cfashion

Math for Tailgaters

I had a bunch of stuff to mail, so I drove to the post office to drop them off, in my once or twice per month driving outing. When I thought to myself, the driver in front of me is going kind of slow, I thought that must mean I'm improving health-wise. Of course, I didn't do anything stupid, like the driver who ended up behind me a little while later.

I found myself behind a motorcyclist on the freeway, so I decided to leave about 50 feet of clearance. Not only because my sister's young friend was recently killed in a motorcycle accident, but because that is always the common sense thing to do. 50 feet to me is a rather normal spacing between cars on a freeway. For motorcyclists I leave more, because I ask what if he slips, because they do.

The driver behind me thought it would be cool to tell me that I'm doing some great wrongdoing to him, by first honking and then passing on the left and practically driving through the front of my car (at least that's how it looks from the driver's seat) right before he exited the freeway. And the point is...?

Sometimes it's tempting to make a bigger gap or drive slower when being honked at by a tailgater. But that's almost resorting to similar stupid behavior.

First of all, when going any speed anywhere, it doesn't matter if there's 5, 10, 20, or 100 feet of space in front of your car or the car in front of you. You're still going the same speed, and won't get anywhere any faster! (in any relevant units of time)

A Wily Blog recently posted how math is useful for pill poppers. Here is an even simpler math problem of everyday life:

If I were to have ridden on the motorcyclist's butt, leaving a mere 10 feet instead of 50 feet of space, and the cars on the freeway are moving at 50 mph, how much sooner would the tailgater on my butt get to his destination?

(50 - 10 ft) / (5280 ft/mi) / (50 mi/hr) * (3600 s/hr) = 0.54 s

It would save half a second. This doesn't change no matter how long the tailgater is riding on my butt, if other cars and especially cars in front of me are going the same speed. Unless you think you can drive through cars, which apparently he did try to do.

According to the three-second rule mentioned in drivers' ed, how much space should I leave between cars, when traveling at 50 mph?

(3 s) / (3600 s/hr) * (50 mi/hr) * (5280 ft/mi) = 220 ft

I would also argue that if drivers in general didn't tailgate as much, traffic would actually move faster, because driving too close causes more stop-and-go which slows everything down, if you notice the delay time domino effect between acceleration of a line of cars.

"Nested" Labels Search in GMail

After I complained about not being able to drill-down to find the intersection of multiple Google Labels, the bright idea appeared in my mind that there might be a way to "hack" it. Indeed, you can do it in GMail.

Click on a label heading and the Search Mail search box will show label:<label>.

To find the intersection of multiple labels, search for:

label:<label1> label:<label2> ... label:<labelN>

For example, if I want to find messages labeled both dance and pictures, type into the search box:

label:dance label:pictures

Label names with multiple words are separated by hyphens, such as:

label:Danse-Libre

Well, Blogger has a different user interface for searching for labels, and I haven't yet figured out a way to hack Blogger URLs to do the same if possible. The blog search box doesn't take the label keyword.