I've been fucking busy and vice versa!

Yesterday eve Cass and I went to Specs after months of waiting and bought an assortment of specialty beers. After spending an hour perusing the beer aisles accomplishing nothing save increased levels of bewildered excitement, an employee approached with information and recommendations. After a few minutes with him, he went into the back (of a specialty store, remember) and produced the sole possessed bottle of the Great Divide's Chocolate Oak Aged Yeti Stout, which I'm understandably excited about.

Speaking about excitement, Hobgoblins! It's all in the name - Hobgoblin Dark English Ale. Evocations of fantasy, wildness, magic, mischief, you know, all the good things in life. Wychwood has cool graphics on their labels too. So I'm christening or coining (interesting terms etymologically) new slang: a hobgoblin - something you get excited about.

NPR (National Public Radio) is great. Usually the music is good, the discussions on "All Things Considered" are always well articulated on interesting topics, and the humor is on. I'm leaving it on full time in the car from hence forward. Is this post merely an endorsement of NPR, is this what you get for waiting all week? Yes. So long from Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the children are above average.

Polyphasic sleep! Remember this awesome craze? I do...and it was awesome. IT IS AWESOME! Many phases of sleep, like a baby, sleeping in intervals ad nauseum. Cult blogger Steve Pavlina popularized the idea of adults returning to this sleep schedule as it would allegedly provide more total waking hours with the same amount of restfulness - all resting on the explanation of increased sleeping efficiency. The general idea is to have six 30 minute naps every four hours for a total of 3 sleeping hours, or, alternatively, 21 waking hours each day. Pavlina tantalized readers with the new lifestyle's perks: picking up new hobbies, engaging in activities that time constraints had hitherto precluded, having more social time during the day, working left for late night hours, having increased funds resulting from more total hours worked (self-employed), etc. Ultimately Pavlina returned to a normal monophasic sleep schedule as the detrimental social and family effects began to outweigh the benefits. Putting aside the paucity of long term effects research and the ability of a person to successfully transition to the schedule itself (supposedly a real bear), are there not some people who could benefit from polyphasic sleep?

John and nicotine R.I.P. July 15, 2009. I've quit for good. Well, for a long time. I won't say I'll never smoke another cigarette cuz that would kind of suck. But I've smoked around a cigarette a day for the past year and that is something I am stopping. Nicotine is addictive for sure and I understand what the addiction feels like, where exactly it gets you. But we're done now. Force of will always prevails IF the desire to execute the will actually matches. I'm confident enough that I will a hang potential public ignominious reputation in the balance (so many readers of this blog!). Or maybe by declaring my will to the public thousands I embolden said will? No, seriously, it's the former.

The problem with psychology is lack of specificity. The discipline really could be split and absorbed into both philosophy and biology, but the intersection is important and certainly interesting, thus the field. Nevertheless it suffers from this wishy washiness, either ending in abstract conclusions that could be reached philosophically or in concrete conclusions that could be reached biologically (history actually also suffers from this problem, that it could be subsumed into other disciplines, history of politics in politics, history of theology in theology). Of course, life is wishy washy itself and to a certain extent, results direct and consistent may or may not provide salient insights into the question at hand, and surely psychological inquiries often fit this mold - indeed results that encapsulate the flux and inconsistency of life may be psychology's greatest value.

Lack of specificity in psychology often emerges in the form of experimental data. You can find experimental results that both refute and support a psychological hypothesis and the solution of narrowing the hypothesis has the lackluster effect of producing hypotheses of less and less interest or import. The bane of psychology may simply be that its field hovers over the mind which is the least understood, least quantifiable, and possibly most abstract thing to attempt to subject to science. We should by no means abandon psychology, rather we should further encourage the pursuit of psychological questions and the field itself, but psychology does suffer from this lack of specificity, and as such, must further become a highly interdisciplinary, interdependent field.

Blue Planet is so exciting and good.

I've neglected posting for a while because I've been busy travelling. On the 4th Cass and I went up to the Eagle's Nest, a secluded alcove of a spot high high high up in the Bavarian Alps. Martin Bormann conceived of the idea as a 50th birthday gift for Hitler. The mountain that it's built on had no previous structures; it's a gorgeous area, untraversable during winter, prone to sudden fog and showers, with fleeting sunlight, all which gives the whole place an ephemeral atmosphere. Hitler used it for official occasions, entertaining/impressing ambassadors and diplomats, etc., a grand total of 14 times, with perhaps as many private visits. The inflation adjusted cost of the project - $150 million, which means his visits cost somewhere around $5-6 million each. I wonder if Bormann thought about this five years later when Hitler was encouraging Berliners to cut basic supplies to support the then failing war effort. When Bormann told him about the project initially Hitler said, "Oh well, I probably won't use it much," which was true.