a fork in the road

the ivory tower, the ground at your feet;
talking to stars, marching down streets;
lying back on a boat, drifting – musing with the wind and clouds,
grabbing the rhino by the horns and steering it across the earth;

truthful yearning, mindless matter.

do you search for it, or stumble across it?

soft detachments

the captain is the conscious; the crewmen, the subconscious. sometimes the crewmen don't obey the captain. and your mind (the ship) is out at sea, drifting along as usual.

--

silence is soft when touched, at least in this area of the woods, this nightwalk by the ocean; a cloth draped as light silk streams from the sky. others peer through, and their eyes happen on you, but they don't see you. everyone holds a dark flower inside in obscurity.

it has become quite apparent - it is apparent - (why chain this way, drawing it out, vs brevity? there must be a reason, some information theoretic urging the mind inclines) that this budding plant has roots drawing water from a different river, not this gamely one that your peers seep from. absorb alone, as usual: the melodies speak.

--

to draw out tense and use language that supplants I and You for disembodied entities, ghost replicas, cracked mirrors that cast zis projection onto those walls. Zi need a new tense to express these detachments; perhaps prefix with Z?

--

the g# minor scale makes me think of a green frog leaping from e to g. synaesthetic tingling like this carves out an abode in this mind there, a niche to sleep in, on occasion awakening to bounce off the walls and stir a boiling broth. maybe play with a toy shotgun to shoot at mundane thoughts

--

quiet and driven. eras of your life, pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. we piece them together with passing hours and tastes of days, snapping our fingers to the rhythm of muses and treading water to the poseidic waves, streaming thoughts rolling over pebble-crumbled skittles, sand sprinkled amid a fresh spring scent in our nostrils, casting pi-light alight in grisly walls glazed with petal honey. bursts of flavor stream air through the calm caverns of your mind as nutrients replenish the charred paths; the stream whittles away the brook bend, carving out meanders as we grow up. what next era of life awaits? what unthinkable transformation will come next?

--

the poor lady who walked by: I'm so sorry. the pain isn't from lack of food; it's lack of prospect. lack of respect, even, in a deceitful world: 'if you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken / twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools...'

--

the fire inside does not burn from

lighter fluid dripping from your spirit; 

hydrocarbons bond from the tossing of words when we meet, and explosions of ideas in our exchanges; and that is what stirs the boiling pot, lights the crevices under the doors we consider, snaps sparks on bomb cords; melds inspiration with activity. to meet with you is quite necessary, then.

how nice it would be to dive on a whim deeply into some vast expanse and to thrash about the waters and sink into the sand with no restrictions on time - only the vast energy bursting, plunging you deeper as the earth's crust thins and you melt to join it, plumbing its depths with curiosity

temple

sometimes our hearts are vacuums, yet we still try to pump out silk and fabric - weave them together so blithely so, molecules of strings vibrating in a space of air; tranquilize that organ, steal that masterpiece: sweeter things are when lost, as dust they turn to when you hold it in your hand, while in your head they rise to the heavens when vaporized. it's enough to split the dust and examine it, wondering where the love went. it's still there. it's a trick of the head, the trick of false firings and waving white flags. a kind of dazed state of mind, a kind of heat. perspicuous arguments magnetize sweat from the forehead, perspicacious and penetrating judgement generates truths that "knaves may twist to make a trap for fools"; no shadows of talk can trick the child who fearfully hides under the blanket, yet fear is there nonetheless.

'this is an internal dialogue between you and me. something between a cry for help and a prayer of peace.'

the skull becomes more porous at night, even more so when you clasp your hands together and bow down to think to the universe (think 'to', the preposition, yes, because we are sending thoughts there, like the french 'y penser'). drums also slow their beat - esp. the one inside you, rims need tightening in sleep so the rim shot can sparkle tomorrow; narrow time and black words are plastered by the drumbeats and rhythms, and we read the words by feeling with our breath.

a gift of productivity - I am grateful, and you should be too, each time I think to you at night. unfortunately the feeling of the black words plastered across the heart string rhythms is one-way, non polynomial time, so one of us never knows if the other has felt the tune, tasted the rhythm, tapped the beat. all the more reason to continue singing, tapping, playing, so that silk and fabric might become a garment for the porous skull that thoughts keep dripping out of.

--

thinking too much of myself recently, imagining and dreaming; need to cloak my identity from my conscious, listen for the sound of brooks despite the waterfall.

--

poets search for humdingers in their works, to spellbound the audience; incantation in writing is a sin, but colored truths are acceptable.

--

trills and vocals
why not mark our feelings with verbs? run, fall, dash, crumble. categorize your life into the slow directory and the fast trajectory. cd .. && rm -r destroy && mkdir destroy && cd destroy && cmake .. && make && ./destroy and rinse and repeat. sharpen your tongue with dialects only written, never spoken.

room number TBA

where narcissists meet, dripping tongues turning poetry into grease, saliva drenching the page with wholesale slaughter, red ink turning blue. crass undergarments toss and turn beneath silky fabric. the air is hot with humid words as they sit with their perfect posture and imperfect tense; with the implied tea on the table - as shallow as the ink on the page, depths plumbed nought. eyes glued to their own work alone; the egotistical disregard numbs their already callous hands, hands spent twiddling the pen and patting their own backs as they dabble words onto the page and stand back and smile. and now they meet, trilling to their inaudible tunes and hearing but not listening to the noise of others. symphonies lost in the chasm.

locks put on their hearts and veils over their eyes and ears and dented chests (punched by some ravage of the past), they throw away the key into the cups of tea and drink them to their veins and absorb the key into blood that spills on the page. quite chilling - the words they say, filling up their bosoms with triumph while disaster is the dew settling on the leftover glass, the previous day. slivers of ocean hearts and starfish wheels pillowed on moments of trinket-trades and glinted laughter.

a crazed spiral can be seen in their eyes, a worm wiggling its way around the brain, wrapping up thoughts and leaving trails of gush and gore on the membranes, the creases, the cracks; electricity is zapped out of it by then. frail and dry, ideas parched of rain water, puddles form at their feet as rain soaks them through the skull into dreadful locks. and they've swallowed the key, and so continue to wallow about in a foggy pride shadowed by shame, touching at the toes (they bow their heads to look). meaningless release of vehement despair and electric tunnel fraught with self-indulgence and blanket stares and a cataclysm of shouts and nightwalks alone, an earth-shaken peace that freezes the tongue that still drips with solipsist pride and suspicion and scorn of the paper slip ideas that glaze across their eyes. still trapped yet free in their vocal objectives and questionable merit. in the room, they meet and continue to drawl the slaughtered words they dug out of a pit and shined and hyped. but the words are still corpses, and they (the writers too) are shells.

try and try we might; it's a fluid war with slimed language ripped from dark corners of your head, visible if you beam through the gaps in your eyes. 'is someone there?' no. 'anything there?' no. fake tarnished ideals sullied by the self.

Benefits of learning to code

it teaches...

• patience
• persistence
• precision
• e.g., asking precise questions, being meticulous with what you write
• ability to play detective
• debugging
• creativity
• skill in filtering information
• deciding what's important as you scavenge the web for answers
• curiosity
• wondering, why does that work? as you scavenge the web
• ability to think high level and low level
• the little details versus the big picture
• prioritizing
• focus
• and once you're at it for a while, when and how to take breaks. how to keep your mind fresh.

Overloading << in C++

This error was pretty annoying in the linking stage as I was compiling my C++:

duplicate symbol __ZlsRNSt3__113basic_ostreamIcNS_11char_traitsIcEEEERK10Notation in:
    CMakeFiles/project1.dir/TwoTagExample.cc.o
    lib_notation_lib.a(Notation.cc.o)

I thought I was following all the rules and even thought maybe I was using a name already defined in some deep C++ library... I mean I was compiling with

clang++ -std=c++11 -stdlib=libc++ -g TwoTagExample.cc Helper.cc Notation.cc

(extra options for things like initializer_list and such).

Apparently I was overloading the << operator wrong. I thought I could put the implementation right in the .h file, but you have to implement it in the associated .cc/.cpp.

Bad Notation.h file:

class Notation {
  static const string GIVEN_DELIM;
  ...
};
ostream& operator<<(ostream& out, const Notation& n) {  // NO.
  return out << n.repr();
}

(The thing is this overloading works fine if you put the class and overloading function in a .cc/.cpp file, which was what I had in this hack of a project initially. But once I moved to a .h – nope.)

Good Notation.h file:

class Notation {
  static const string GIVEN_DELIM;
  ...
};
ostream& operator<<(ostream& out, const Notation& n);  // Yes.

(Good) Corresponding Notation.cc/.cpp file:

#include "Notation.h"

const string Notation::GIVEN_DELIM = "|";
...

ostream& operator<<(ostream& out, const Notation& n) { // Yes.
    return out << n.repr();
}

no one likes uninformative errors... but at least they make you play a good detective game.

Other reasons you might be getting the "duplicate symbol" error: more likely than this, you reused a method or variable name somewhere in the .h (shouldn't be defined twice) or across header files. Or you forgot your header guards (those #ifndef #define things that should be in header files but I left out for brevity here).

torn

things are tearing at each other, as usual: a fuse lit there, a dreary walk under the moonlight, soft sounds to your ears; music doesn't burn but it does set on fire, in some calm way, sparks bouncing about; occasionally one flies out and stings and the water begins running, but other times it's the soft nothingness that suffocates the air dry of beauty. so you have to make an effort to paint the walls green and the floors flowery colors while you dance about with that silver in your hand, each breath a musical sigh, even the inhaling a rhythm that snaps together deaf colors around you; a spitting mess of walking about alone, crumpling seams – the ground doesn't shake when you play, but you feel the earthquake with each thunderous thought, spontaneity popping out of your fingers and grilled dry napkins left to clean up the mess; we are too much shaped by that tunneling sound of planes overhead and walls pushing in, but you hide in the corner with your book or instrument or pen and paper and express the hell out of that nightmare wound imploding everywhere inside and everywhere invisible too; "don't make thoughts your aim" as you scribble about knowing the paper will vanish just as each musical note vanishes with ...

your breath. my breath. it's all the same, recycled about in the waste of expression – to capture that taste again and feel it yank all the life out of you so you are dead but your work is alive; "to be great is to be misunderstood"; no more boundaries, no more soft light pilfering the darkness, a droplet of thoughts in an ocean; what does it take to boil it all and shoot it up to the sky to rain upon the billions who miss all the beauty here – fireworks

Flute piece position to reduce wrist pain

I found that my left wrist had been hurting more and more after holding the flute for a while. It turns out (according to http://www.jennifercluff.com/lineup.htm#align) a good number of professional flute players recommend aligning the flute mouth piece in this manner:

"align the far side of the embouchure hole (the striking edge, where the air splits) with the center of the flute's keys."

In my case, my flute has a little arrow/notch indicating the center of the flute keys (highlighted in yellow here):

This is new to me: my mouth piece used to be tilted farther away from my mouth, making my left wrist strain uncomfortably. I had no idea for so long =/. This way, the wrist doesn't have to bend as much.

(Also I feel like I can hit lower notes better now...)

Keep in my mind, as the article linked above says, that this is recommended for most flute players, but doesn't apply to all; it depends on "the formation of the lips, chin, hands, arms and the level of the player's development."

But it works for me.

chains and mountains

the soft mellow tones of my surroundings, the patient air that seeps into and out my lungs. thankful, absolutely, for the new research opportunity: script deciphering with math. "Write for yourself..." this model of peace and quiet churning out thoughts and meditations of the heart, blithely scrapping away thoughts and melting together ideas that were nothing but electricity to begin with; I wonder what will become of thotdrop, really. so many memories to analyze, to search for meaning through.

command-chaining: a novel idea, applied to human habits: could I pull that off? Map our behaviors statistically and provide patterns that easily let us grow and improve – chaining together thoughts infinitely until our physical limits, the jail bars that we stretch our arms through, imprison higher orders of thought: nope, still trying to escape. a hundred years to reach, hundred years of happiness to continue spreading before the vice (virtue?) of life rains upon the imprisoned; when the jail bars melt, the door opens, the chaining of infinite thoughts becomes possible.

mountains upon mountains of silence: a search for utility, shadows in a land with no light: those mountains should be dug up, or buried, or shredded.

but those mountains are right here, growing with every word.

meditations of mind and matter

"To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders."

or sleeps, perhaps: in a wistful, rocking-chair sort of way – the grandmother knitting quilts of reality, the fabric of the intangible noumenal world we'll never see, hear, taste, touch, smell;

but maybe we can feel it.

eyes closed, ears plugged, mouth shut, skin cloaked, smell diluted, striving to be as independent of our physical selves as possible - don't think, feel.

--

Is it a skill to find every task interesting? To not be bored by whatever you face... yes.

need to magnify differences so the model carries more decision-making power

mandarin audiobooks would be a good idea. sound is enough

singing techniques: word painting, overtone singing (octave, perfect 5th, then 4th - oscillates, hard to control, like wind chimes)

Is entropy occurring in language? Is language, with its underlyingly precise rules, becoming more chaotic? Or are we approaching equilibrium?

a living response

I feel like a living response to the clockwork that set the universe ticking; a fleeting result of the butterfly effect;

As though everything I do is based on a response to a deterministic set of events. Every breath, every scratch, every thought - a chemical reaction activating physical behavior and certain neural nets in the brain, dominoes toppling over in precise sequence -

Underlying reality

...the ultimate test for how much you put in and the value you get out for eternity; the structure of the human mind as elegant as a tree in the forest, branches swaying with the universe's wind, leaves drifting off with the seasons to be replaced by newfound veins with time.

If you were a god – a creator – you would want the world to be structured. Precise.

(When I write computer programs, I want the code to be structured. Precise. However, I also have an objective in mind, and often, that goal outweighs code cleanliness; so maybe the universe has bugs in it, and we silly creatures are fighting wars as a result, as the ultimate creator threw pointers around and incremented i by one here and there, trying to achieve some bigger purpose that we are slowly crawling toward in the execution of time. I taste the idea but don't swallow it.)

At the same time – even with the grand value you create with tremendous effort, the world may not appreciate that value; it may not reap material rewards. Which is why you must maintain a balance, as usual, for the extant world and the underlying reality you are curious about.