Ftrain, by Paul Ford

Weight on its way down again. While it's annoying, as always, to learn, re-learn, and re-learn, it's good that I can evaluate past results and adjust behavior to meet appropriate goals.

J.R. Licklider and Douglas Engelbart, two computer pioneers, in their work for [D]ARPA, researched ways that the computer to augment human intellect; their work was associated around the moment--machines, they thought, could become symbiotic with humans and enable us to make better decisions more quickly. Databases, video. The social network and Facebook and twitter are the pinnacle, so far, of this sort of instantinanity.

This site, I observe, is something different. Smaller, private. It has made me into a very slow cyborg and assists me in regulating a basic process of my organism--that is, consumption. So while I quantify myself in the moment, tracking meals and exercise, any bit of that data is meaningless. It's only over time that we see value, and only over my time; this data, while of tremendous and life-altering value to me, has almost no value to anyone else. I'm not even a particularly good example; as I well know, what works for one in this department, the department of ginormity, works not as well for someone else. While it used to be an adolescent fantasy of mine that a psychiatrist might take particular interest in my depression, assuming as I did that there was some uniqueness to me, it would be similarly adolescent to think a doctor would take interest in the banality of my bicycle rides. So it is just me and you, on a site with seven readers, and the only feedback between me and myself, the very opposite of Facebook.

More deaths TK. I am resistant to writing them. Thus must. But here is the opening paragraph from a short-story, which is about a future in which everyone is sued all the time by computers:

Susanne finished washing the great pots and hung up her smock, and walked beneath a fine moon over fallen leaves to the dorms. Yawning she opened her wooden door and was surprised, in the predictable tidy order of the room, to find upon her small pillow an envelope. A message! And more importantly a message intended for her alone. Her mouth opened in wonder. But when she lifted it off the pillow the grainy heaviness of the paper stock gave her pause. She thought, with the now-ingrained reflex of the last four months: "Be mindful." Sighed, and sat on the bed, and considered this envelope. It was of handmade green rag paper. On the campus there was a workshop where they made their own paper and sold it. Sometimes they pressed leaves and flowers into the paper for greeting cards; she had thought of buying some to send to friends, announcing her new life in the hills. So the envelope was possibly, likely, made a few hundred yards from her bed. "Imagine the hands," she thought, "and the hands that touched the hands." Another bit of advice from morning class a few weeks back. Indeed, washing the pots as part of her work-exchange she often had time to contemplate hands and all the hands that touched her hands. Her old life had resulted in more handshakes; the center, though, was a place of embraces and massages. Her peers were two old female sculptors, a couple, and a fat male divorced puppeteer with long stringy hair, and a bony young carpenter who was living in a tent in a field behind the dorms and reading Nietzsche by an LED bulb that he strapped to his shorn head. She could look out her window and see the glowing tent at night. And anachronistic housewives and the refugees, mostly female but some men, who were aiming for a much larger life and then found themselves here taking meditation classes and contemplating oneness and stopping to smell the incense.

Weight: 312.5 lbs