A Splintered Mind

Update 2016: This article was featured in my book "Saying NO to Suicide" , with added commentary. Recently Apple has made changes to Siri to address the problem of suicide. Let’s take a look at those changes and see if they will be effective. Using Siri can be fun and even useful, but one of the downsides to Siri is that everything you ask her is sent to a server out across the Internet through the wires, switches, and tubes where your question is parsed by Apple’s servers before an answer is sent back to you. This is a downside because the “conversation” is often a stilted one like those you have on walkie-talkies. You need to keep your query simple so Siri won’t be confused, and you have to wait for her to get back to you. If the internet is down, you’re out of luck. The upside to all of this is that Apple gets to look over the types of questions people are seeking answers for. Apparently, a lot of people are asking Siri for help with suicide. Saying “I want to kill my b...

I may have been kidding in the above video, but I do like to walk & read at the same time. I especially like to do it when I feel bored and antsy late at night. It's a trick I learned from an ADHD advisor in college. He had found he concentrated best when he was in motion (hence our mutual ADHD love for pacing while talking on the phone), so he would grab his text books and go out to the track and walk around it while studying. I've achieved the same result on treadmills—an activity usually so boring I'd rather have my ears pulled off with dental floss than do even five minutes of it. I found, though, that when equipped with a good book on my iPad (or with a very loaded Instapaper account), I could walk for 45-60 minutes on a treadmill without even noticing. When studying Japanese or other material, memorizing while also walking briskly was very effective. I found clarity and peace while doing both tasks. You can read more about it here . Hey, if it's on Wikiped...