Dreams
SundayAug 09, 2026
I'm going to try to document my dreams from here, in a new section of this website. I will try to make it a habit of writing my dreams down before they fade from memory. While dreaming, our memory networks must be offline, operating functionally like the patient H.M. (Henry Molaison), a widely known case study in neuroscience who suffered permanent anterograde amnesia after having undergone bilateral mesial temporal lobectomies for intractable epilepsy.
That makes me wonder. Perhaps the reason why our dreams are so hard to remember, is that they are in fact not meant to be remembered in the first place. Though I've heard that REM sleep and dreaming are important for memory consolidation, recalling the dreams themselves might pollute genuine memories. On that note, I've heard that the act of recall itself will degrade the memory in some ways... perhaps like repeatedly saving an image through a lossy compression algorithm.
I wonder if we can draw an analogy between remembering our dreams, and AI models training on synthetic data that has been produced by a generative AI model. This cannabalistic training method will apparently promote "model collapse" whereby the AI becomes progressively erratic and inaccurate. Perhaps the analogous human outcome would be mental instability and psychosis, which literally features the inability to distinguish between reality and internally-generated hallucinations.
Perhaps it is because certain aspects of dreams can be at times traumatizing, at times compelling... even intoxicating... that nature has found it useful to diminish their memories, lest we become paralyzed in our waking lives by mere visions... because, I know that under the right circumstances, I would choose the blue pill.
Resurrection
ThursdayAug 06, 2026
HOOOOLY SHIT. The website lives again. It's been 16 FREAKING YEARS since the last update. Last you heard from me, I was a young and ambitious neurologist with a toddler. Now I am counting the years until an early retirement and funding that same toddler's lavish college lifestyle. Day-um time flies!
The website initially went belly up after a software update crashed my code, and I was too preoccupied with the career to fix it. Then I was forced to migrate webhosting companies after my old one (Webfaction) went out of business. After migrating, my new forward-facing site was the "hello world" WordPress default for a few years. Until today!
This site was running back in the day on Python 2.5 and Django 1.0. Now it's running on Python 3.13 and Django 6.0. While Python is still basically the same, it's the random little bits that have changed that drive you nuts trying to figure out what little piece of code broke the entire site! But OMFG, Gemini is scary good at debugging. I've spent the last decade forgetting my Python. There is no way I would have been able to update the code... but with the AI it took less than a day! If I think this is impressive, I can't even begin to fathom how the frontier models are able to prove new mathematical theorems. Wow. WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE!
This site is a time capsule from the earlier internet, a more innocent age. Lots of links are broken! I have to update the whole thing stylistically! It's gonna be a bit archaic and wonky for a little while!