idm

Dreaming about being an expert troll on the Internets this morning tragically ended up with my imminently-awake self getting rickrolled. Tragically ironic.

Plotting my revenge… but how?

I have been told to blog about this.

waste:

1. v. to fail or neglect to use [negative].
2. n. left-overs; excess materials [positive].
3. n. anything not being used [neutral].

Triply conflated:

We waste [1] our waste [2] by dumping it in the waste [3].

True dream:

Through some unfathomable leap of imagination and confusion, a composer friend of mine has discovered a new avant-garde method of notating polyphonic music, in which haricots verts [the thinner, Frencher kind, of course] are arranged [you see?] on a cutting board, each representing a musical voice propagating through the two-dimensional domain of time versus pitch.

He calls me over to demonstrate his newest invention [again!], and — after a good deal of hand-waving and skepticism-banishing — manages to convince me of its validity.

He invites me to perform it.

I consider at length the lengthy greens.

Then, after producing a very large cleaver out of hammerspace [i.e. apparently nowhere], I begin chopping rapidly: vivacissimo.

“Stop, stop, stop, stop! You are doing it completely wrong! You have butchered my music!”

My /usr/share/dict wants to convince me that it knows the five longest words whose spellings are in anti-alphabetical order:

• wronged
• Tsoneca
• troolie
• sponged
• spiffed

Given that “troolie” is hardly a word, I’m not quite convinced.

Ever wonder exactly how badly a naïve Fibonacci calculator performs? Something like the following Py’let:

F=lambda n:n<3 or F(n-1)+F(n-2)

[... yes, it's bad manners to code like this.]

No surprises for the algorithmically-competent, but it turns out that calculating F(n) results in 2×F(n)-1 calls to the function F.

I giggled.

“As with programming stacks, a dreamer does not normally know about the next more-awake state.”

Any programmer uncomfortable with the vague promises of the above statement would point out the threat that static data pose to this abstraction. Yes! noticing violations of static invariants, such as the unpredictable passage of time, is a common reality-check that opens the gates to lucid dreaming.

I have a confession to make: my method involves trying to browse Wikipedia while dreaming and realizing that, despite having absorbed fantastic information, there is no physical way my brain is hooked up to the Internet [yet]. Unfortunately, I merely assume that my brain’s local copy is sufficiently synchronized with the canonical Wikipedia anyway.

Remember Word Disassociation? [... yes, it's still on the first page, due to my slothy blogging speed.]

Deep-lexicon’d reader snow has hit the jackpot: .

Let’s see if Google’s spiders notice the JavaScript encoding when they come crawling along.

This morning I must have “woken up” at least three or four times, in succession, and each time convincingly enough [i.e. with sufficient increase in mental lucidity] that I proceeded to tell my friends about it in the ensuing dream-state. In conclusion:

The sleeping brain machine appears to contain a dream stack, onto which one may push dreams and, accordingly, from which one may pop dreams, in the usual Last-In, First-Out manner. As with programming stacks, a dreamer does not normally know about the next more-awake state.

Typically only one dream-frame is pushed and subsequently popped, but what if a victim of sleep deprivation plummets through several frames at once? The psychological experience of becoming less lucid is not so easily countable. Nevertheless, the resulting slumber would require an equal number of pops to return to awakeness. Et violà.

As usual, exercise caution in the presence of recursive dreams; they might result in stack overflow.