doctorbs (the b is for brainz, not bargain)

There's an article in the NYTM written by a psychiatrist about his transition from asking a checklist of questions and then prescribing the drug most likely to work to sometimes talking to his patients some: Mind Over Meds. He frames this as combining psychotherapy with psychiatry, as if the therapeutic talking is the main advantage. In fact, his anecdote points to what I, in my personal experience, have felt is the main problem with psychiatric treatment. Many non-severe mental illnesses are vague and nebulous, and I think there are more flavors of things like depression than psychiatrists have acknowledged. The questions one is asked when diagnosing depression -- how often are you depressed, how depressed are you (scale of 1 to 5, please), are you ever depressed for weeks at a time, do you ever have suicidal thoughts -- are hard to answer honestly and accurately. I don't know how to quantify exactly how depressed I was on an hourly basis over the past year. I do know that I feel inconsolably bad sometimes and I want to not feel that way, and I also know the answers to the checklist of questions that will result in the classification of depressed enough to warrant medication but not so depressed as to require hospitalization. I do not know that I want medication, but I do want some treatment, and medication is a treatment and maybe it will work. I don't know how non-me people feel, or would feel in my environment, so how can I tell if my mood is above or below average, and exactly how many standard deviations from average it is? This is a long-winded way of me saying that I think the problem with psychiatry is that (a) we don't know what is going on with the brain and (b) the checklist of questions is a total oversimplification of the diagnosis process. So I agree with the author, the psychiatrist should talk to his patients, in order to diagnose their problems better than a look-up table of answers to ambiguous questions. I've been to therapists as well as psychiatrists, and I've found the advice of therapists rather useless. The whole trying to rethink things does not work, as far as I can tell. I think my problem with it is that this type of therapy is suggesting that I consciously decide to perceive the world or whatever in a different way. I can conceive of other ways to perceive the world all on my own, but I can't perceive things differently. That's some kind of double-think thing they want me to do, and I don't appear to be capable of double-think yet. Perhaps I need a visit to Room 101. Anyways, therapy does not seem to work for me. But, it would have been nice to have a psychiatrist really try to figure out what my symptoms are.


[Image credit: Paleofuture]

High Violet by The National Streaming on the NYTM

The NYT Magazine is streaming The National's new album High Violet here. Don't read the comments, though. They make me feel like this guy.

getting root access to your ubuntu machine

 

Ultra Monster art by Takayoshi Mizuki, Pink Tentacle

so somehow i have managed to mess up sudo twice on my ubuntu desktop when trying to fix other problems, and i don't have the root password. here are instructions for gaining root access to your ubuntu machine (tailored to karmic, which works slightly differently than previous releases). these instructions of course require physical access to the machine so that you can do things like view the grub menu.

1. Reboot the machine. 
2. Hold down SHIFT during boot to see the boot menu (this is new in single-boot karmic). 
3. Press ESC at the grub prompt. 
4. Press e for edit. 
5. To the line that begins "linux ..." add:
       rw init=/bin/bash
6. Press Enter. 
7. Press b to boot. 
8. System will boot to a passwordless root shell. 
9. Do what you need to do as root. 
10. Reboot.

Heavy-tailed vs long-tailed

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg’s “Flickr Flow”
The other day (and I really mean like the other day cuz it was quite some time ago (does the more you emphasize the other day make the other day farther back in time?)) Kyle corrected me on my probability jargon -- I said that ... something ... was a heavy-tailed distribution and he corrected me that it was in fact a long-tailed distribution. Oh, I remember what it was. We watched (most) of Anvil: The Story of Anvil and were discussing how they could make money selling CDs/mp3s on the internet but probably not have big tours, cuzza the heavy/long-tailed distribution of musical tastes. Anyways, yeah, so the "it takes all kinds" idea -- is that heavy-tailed or long-tailed?

According to Wikipedia, that definitive source, a long-tailed distribution is a special case of a heavy-tailed distribution. A heavy-tailed distribution is any distribution whose tail(s) are not exponentially bounded, or
That is, we look really far to the side of a distribution (x → ∞), and consider the probability that we will see a value even more extreme than this value for this distribution and for the exponential distribution. The distribution is heavy-tailed if the probability of an extreme event is much larger for this distribution than for the exponential distribution (the ratio is ∞ as x → ∞).

For long-tailed distributions, the requirement is more extreme:
for all t > 0. That is, for large x, the if you're going to see something bigger than x, then you're going to see something much bigger than x.

So the commonly discussed "long-tail" distribution is the power law distribution,
with tail distribution
for α > 1.
So does the long-tailed condition hold? Well,
which indeed has a limit of 1 as x → ∞. So, indeed, the power law distribution is long-tailed.

Now, there is the question of whether Kyle was right/more exact than me. If all we're talking about is power-law distributions, then I suppose he is. Let me just emphasize that we are both technically correct, but he is more exact. According to Wikipedia (All hail Wikipedia!) there are distributions which are heavy-tailed and not long-tailed. I suppose the question is whether people in pop science are referring to these, and I suppose the answer is probably no.

“Fury said to
        a mouse, That
          he met in the
            house, Let
              us both go
                to law: I
                  will prose—
                    cute you.—
                  Come I’ll
                take no
              denial: We
            must have
          the trial;
        For really
      this morning
    I’ve
  nothing
  to do.
   Said the
    mouse to
     the cur,
      ’Such a
        trial, dear
          sir. With
            no jury
             or judge,
              would
             be wasting
            our
          breath.’
       ’I’ll be
      judge,
     I’ll be
    jury,’
   said
  cunning
   old
    Fury:
     ’I’ll
        try
          the
            whole
              cause,
                and
               condemn
             you to
          death.’”

Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

A special report on managing information: Data, data everywhere | The Economist

A special report on managing information: Data, data everywhere | The Economist: "Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, ... but also big headaches"

sand bubbler crabs

These things were all over the beaches in Ko Samet: Sand Bubbler Crabs. They are tiny little white crabs that peak in and out of burrows in the sand. At low tide, they are constantly rolling little balls of sand. I could not figure out what they were doing. At first we thought they were the by-products of digging their burrows, but then I saw that they were rolling many balls in a row while on the sand, not throwing them out from the burrow. Then, I thought that they must be like putting eggs in the balls or something, like maybe using the sand as a deterrent for other animals eating their eggs. It looked to me like they were excreting something and then the balls would form. Turns out that in fact they are sifting through the sand to find food, and this ends up with them making these balls (watch the video linked here). Anyways, the little balls make weird patterns on the beach. At night, it looked to me like the balls had been gathered together to form little igloos above the burrows, but I couldn't be sure. It was rather dark.


Photo credit: Stewf

while everyone is upset about google and privacy ...

I've been having issues with Google Chat for years. My issue is that I see people I don't want to see in Google Chat, and I'm pretty sure that people I don't want to see me can see me. Here are the settings I have for Chat:

Notice that I have checked "Only allow people that I've explicitly approved to chat with me and see when I'm online".

For each contact, the options for the "Show in Chat List" feature are "Auto", "Always", "Never", or "Block". For the contact "XXXXXXXXXXXX" below, I have selected "Never", and yet this person always shows up in my chat list anyways:

I get the same results with "Block" as well. Google Help tells me that the people who can see whether I'm online are those I can see, so I assume this means that random people I have exchanged emails with can see when I'm online?