Holy shit, I just finished 100 integrals for my friend because he was strapped for time and he needed help, and wouldn't be allowed to take the final if he didn't turn these, and I wasn't doing anything else of much importance. I started doing them in LaTeX but realized there was no way I could finish 100 in LaTeX in only a few days. This is the first time I ever wrote down an inverse hyperbolic function as part of a solution to an integral. How exciting is that 
Banned from tagging for 3 months, *AGAIN*, and I have no idea why. Since they ban so readily, I think they should at least provide notifications for why, so that the error doesn't get repeated again next.
My dog (Scooby) is dead. I think was food poisoning. He was healty. The past few weeks alot of food was recalled by the company that makes almost all the various brands of dog food, apparently from some rat poison contamination. Past few days he's been pissing like a race horse, and whining for seemingly no reason. Last night he threw up alot and could barely walk when I took him outside for a walk, and struggled to go up two stairs. We were gonna take him to the vet today, but when I woke up this morning I found him dead. He was one of the few things I looked forward to everyday. I really don't know what I am going to do. Right now I wished I didn't exist.
EDIT: Though an autopsy hasn't been performed on Scooby's body yet, we are more or less certain it was poisoning. This is confirmed by the fact that he had basically all the symptoms of poisoning, and the cans of food that we have match the product and plant codes of recalled brands. He ate a whole a case of the fucking shit.
So much of my life involved Scooby... I keep imagining the little routines that we had throughout the day or the little things that he would do that I enjoyed, his facial expressions, his times of excitement, and the noises he would make such as snorting and sneezing when he got really exciting about going outside or getting some snacks.
Fuck... I am so pissed about it all.
I have long since known that corporations involved in pet food manufacturing were fucked up yet I have done nothing to apply that knowledge to change his diet and now he has suffered for it.
If any of you have pets and feed them any of the major brands (or really any corporate brands at all) moniter their behavior, and look for signs of poisoning (lethargy, appetite and thirst change, vomitting, excessive whining, excessive urination), check the recall lists, and go to the vet as soon as possible if you notice something out of the ordinary.
Inaction kills.
EDIT 2: So much for "more or less certain". He had liver cancer, and one of the many tumors in his liver erupted which was the cause of death. What caused the liver cancer? I'll never know.
EDIT 3: I have recently discovered that last year researchers at Cornell found that alftoxin, a fungal contaminant, had got into some food and was causing liver failure and other problems in pets, with the potential of long term liver cancer. I'm going to try and contact there someone who worked on that research. We still have cans of unopened food and a refrigerated corpse.
EDIT: Though an autopsy hasn't been performed on Scooby's body yet, we are more or less certain it was poisoning. This is confirmed by the fact that he had basically all the symptoms of poisoning, and the cans of food that we have match the product and plant codes of recalled brands. He ate a whole a case of the fucking shit.
So much of my life involved Scooby... I keep imagining the little routines that we had throughout the day or the little things that he would do that I enjoyed, his facial expressions, his times of excitement, and the noises he would make such as snorting and sneezing when he got really exciting about going outside or getting some snacks.
Fuck... I am so pissed about it all.
I have long since known that corporations involved in pet food manufacturing were fucked up yet I have done nothing to apply that knowledge to change his diet and now he has suffered for it.
If any of you have pets and feed them any of the major brands (or really any corporate brands at all) moniter their behavior, and look for signs of poisoning (lethargy, appetite and thirst change, vomitting, excessive whining, excessive urination), check the recall lists, and go to the vet as soon as possible if you notice something out of the ordinary.
Inaction kills.
EDIT 2: So much for "more or less certain". He had liver cancer, and one of the many tumors in his liver erupted which was the cause of death. What caused the liver cancer? I'll never know.
EDIT 3: I have recently discovered that last year researchers at Cornell found that alftoxin, a fungal contaminant, had got into some food and was causing liver failure and other problems in pets, with the potential of long term liver cancer. I'm going to try and contact there someone who worked on that research. We still have cans of unopened food and a refrigerated corpse.
Yeah, so I lied. I found some spare change in my bank account and decided to renew my account 
*PSEUDOUPDATE*!
(I posted this in the anarchists group, but I'm posting it here too because I think it is interesting as well as important for people to have at least an awareness of.)
Here is an interesting documentary, being hosted on information clearinghouse in four parts on the history of the propaganda/public relations industry; about the strength that it lended to corporate, state, and business power, the notions that it has engendered in the minds of citizenry - or "consumers", if you will - about their own roles as citizens.
All four parts are available for download or viewing from the webpage-- I've watched the first as of now.
The first part deals primarily with "Eddy" Bernays, Freud's nephew, who applied Freud's theories (as well as popularized his works) of unconsious desires and psychoanalysis to manipulating crowds. One could regard him as a psychotherapist of the modern private corporation; he improved their health through improving their bottom line, by increasing sales through engineered campaigns designed to convince people that they desired what the manufacturers were manufacturing.
Interesting stuff -- I had long been familiar with the ideas of Walter Lippman, Ed Bernays and the effects they've had on the political climate of democracy and corporate capitalism, but this documentary gives alot of intimate and personal insights from people who actually interacted with these guys as well as from historians.
EDIT:
Alright I've watched parts 2,3 and 4. Lippmann is only mentioned once in that Bernay's claimed to have devised practical techniques which implimented his ideas-- Lippmann thought the public was irrational, couldn't be trusted to know its own interests, and was needing of a educated source to direct them adequetly. His term for the public was "The Bewildered Herd".
The second part looks at Anna Freud her ideas about conformity and socialization and the influence, again, of those ideas on public policy, and business practice as well as the rise of the "mental health" profession in the United States. It's not as interesting as the first but some fun facts are mentioned such as Bernays role in the campaign for United Fruit in Guatamala, which orchestrated a coup that dismissed with the populist nationalist leader making the nation safe again favorable for American business interests and dictators, under the rubric of Soviet containment and anti-communism. The second mentioned is the memory wiping programs of the CIA and their quest to create fresh and moldable slates out of human beings, and what a failure the program was (in terms of molding). This episode culminates with mention of some failures of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy (in particular Anna Freuds treatment of two children) and criticism by Herbert Marcuse of the Freudian view and its mass application in business and politics.
The third episode looks historically at the 60s-80s and in particular the "human potential movement", and some of it's psychological sources (namely Maslow and Reich), it's relation to the "new left", how the "new left" eventually filtered into and emphasized that self seeking individualistic strain of thought of human potential and how psychologists and marketeers ultimately capitalized on and succeeded in apply reductive techniques to characterzing the trends of "inward directed self-actualizing people". The consequences of this for corporations and business are looked at and in short it seems as though those type of people, while they started in the radicalism of the new left. ultimately ended up being a boon for what they once opposed, as they had turned the opposition against the external power structures inward toward liberating "the self". Also mentioned is how the reductive characterizations of individualistic "inward directives" allowed researchers to predict which political candidates one would vote for based on "lifestyles and values" being identified . In Britain and the UK respectively conservatives (Reagan and Thatcher) touting individualism and personal freedom, "free markets" and a hands off with repect to government in individual lives won elections around the same time as "the self actualizing" human potential movement had thoroughly been flirtered through culture and was being capitalized on and understood by/for business interests.
Briefly put, the fourth segment looks at the development of PR and marketing techniques as well as increasing consumer individualism in the UK and their filtering into political practice. Clinton's administration and the Labor Party of UK are concurrently looked at as particular examples of the marketing approach being used sucessfully in swaying swing voters, and setting future party policy.
The century of the self: how politicians and business learned to create and manipulate mass-consumer society
(I posted this in the anarchists group, but I'm posting it here too because I think it is interesting as well as important for people to have at least an awareness of.)
Here is an interesting documentary, being hosted on information clearinghouse in four parts on the history of the propaganda/public relations industry; about the strength that it lended to corporate, state, and business power, the notions that it has engendered in the minds of citizenry - or "consumers", if you will - about their own roles as citizens.
All four parts are available for download or viewing from the webpage-- I've watched the first as of now.
The first part deals primarily with "Eddy" Bernays, Freud's nephew, who applied Freud's theories (as well as popularized his works) of unconsious desires and psychoanalysis to manipulating crowds. One could regard him as a psychotherapist of the modern private corporation; he improved their health through improving their bottom line, by increasing sales through engineered campaigns designed to convince people that they desired what the manufacturers were manufacturing.
Interesting stuff -- I had long been familiar with the ideas of Walter Lippman, Ed Bernays and the effects they've had on the political climate of democracy and corporate capitalism, but this documentary gives alot of intimate and personal insights from people who actually interacted with these guys as well as from historians.
EDIT:
Alright I've watched parts 2,3 and 4. Lippmann is only mentioned once in that Bernay's claimed to have devised practical techniques which implimented his ideas-- Lippmann thought the public was irrational, couldn't be trusted to know its own interests, and was needing of a educated source to direct them adequetly. His term for the public was "The Bewildered Herd".
The second part looks at Anna Freud her ideas about conformity and socialization and the influence, again, of those ideas on public policy, and business practice as well as the rise of the "mental health" profession in the United States. It's not as interesting as the first but some fun facts are mentioned such as Bernays role in the campaign for United Fruit in Guatamala, which orchestrated a coup that dismissed with the populist nationalist leader making the nation safe again favorable for American business interests and dictators, under the rubric of Soviet containment and anti-communism. The second mentioned is the memory wiping programs of the CIA and their quest to create fresh and moldable slates out of human beings, and what a failure the program was (in terms of molding). This episode culminates with mention of some failures of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy (in particular Anna Freuds treatment of two children) and criticism by Herbert Marcuse of the Freudian view and its mass application in business and politics.
The third episode looks historically at the 60s-80s and in particular the "human potential movement", and some of it's psychological sources (namely Maslow and Reich), it's relation to the "new left", how the "new left" eventually filtered into and emphasized that self seeking individualistic strain of thought of human potential and how psychologists and marketeers ultimately capitalized on and succeeded in apply reductive techniques to characterzing the trends of "inward directed self-actualizing people". The consequences of this for corporations and business are looked at and in short it seems as though those type of people, while they started in the radicalism of the new left. ultimately ended up being a boon for what they once opposed, as they had turned the opposition against the external power structures inward toward liberating "the self". Also mentioned is how the reductive characterizations of individualistic "inward directives" allowed researchers to predict which political candidates one would vote for based on "lifestyles and values" being identified . In Britain and the UK respectively conservatives (Reagan and Thatcher) touting individualism and personal freedom, "free markets" and a hands off with repect to government in individual lives won elections around the same time as "the self actualizing" human potential movement had thoroughly been flirtered through culture and was being capitalized on and understood by/for business interests.
Briefly put, the fourth segment looks at the development of PR and marketing techniques as well as increasing consumer individualism in the UK and their filtering into political practice. Clinton's administration and the Labor Party of UK are concurrently looked at as particular examples of the marketing approach being used sucessfully in swaying swing voters, and setting future party policy.
The century of the self: how politicians and business learned to create and manipulate mass-consumer society
I just started reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and I must say that I love the structure and authoritative tone of the work as well as the quasi-crypto-mystical flavor of some of the assertions-- but from the start the logical atomism is wrong, wrong, wrong 
The Picture Metaphor / Theory of meaning is really quite vivid and titilating though. Here is an excerpt-- it's an exciting string of claims which peaks with an important semi-conclusion:
The Picture Metaphor / Theory of meaning is really quite vivid and titilating though. Here is an excerpt-- it's an exciting string of claims which peaks with an important semi-conclusion:
2.063 The total reality is the world.
2.1 We make to ourselves pictures of the world.
2.11 The picture presents facts to us in logical space, the existence and non-existence of logical facts.
2.12 The picture is a model of reality.
2.13 To the objects correspond in the picture the elements of the picture.
2.131 The elements of the picture stand, in the picture, for the objects.
2.14 The picture consists in the fact that its elements are combined with one another in a definite way.
2.141 The picture is a fact.
2.15 That the elements of the picture are combined with on another in a definite way, represents that the things are so combined with one another. This connexion of the elements of the picture is call its structure, and the possibilty of this structure is called the form of representation of the picture.
2.151 The form of representation is the possibility that the things are combined with one another as are the elements of the picture.
2.1511 Thus the picture is linked with reality; it reaches up to it.
(my italics there)
Anyway, if any of you are interested in logic, the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of language, or any of the like you'd probably find the Tractatus to be an enjoyable read. The gist of the book seems like it could be grasped even though there is a bit of arcane looking symbolism interspersed in some sections (mostly symbolic logic).
So, what books are you reading right now if any?
One problem I notice that I have with books is picking up and trying to read several books at the same time (broad minded + lack of focus/wandering attention); and often it ends up with me putting them all down and starting another one which I may or may not end up finishing. 
Is this a problem for anyone else?
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