This is a conclusion reached by Anatol Rapoport, a fellow who was studying these things (he is the author of tit-for-tat, among other things). He provides some examples in his book "Certainties and doubts", which is a very interesting read. Here is a relevant excerpt (this is a public album, you don't need a Facebook account to see the pics)

I am sorry to hear that. I have had a similar experience, after a very painful breakup I went through the same process.

The thing that caused it was the fact that I had no idea why it happened. So my days were spent asking "why? why? why?" - this was not very productive, the inner voice had no reasonable answer except "I did something wrong". Then it became "What did I do wrong?".

What worked for me was the ability to understand what happened. I had to ask some really direct questions and get some really direct answers (from my ex-partner and from my best friend, who is an ex-best friend today). As soon as I understood what happened, I knew it wasn't something that I had done wrong - so there was no reason to worry that I made a mistake (and that I could repeat it in the future).

I could sleep, I could eat, I didn't feel like the most evil wrongdoer on the planet and most importantly - I began thinking about building new relationships.

A few poems later, the case was resolved and I was involved in a new relationship and became a person again.

I guess it worked for me because I like to analyze things and understand the causes of every effect.. Without understanding, I find myself worrying about things that are outside of my control. I hope this helps.

There is a university in Texas that works on a solution to this problem, please consider making a donation: http://www.utdallas.edu/~kilgard/tinnitus.htm

What you write makes sense, and this is the approach taken by the researches mentioned above. I suspect that the method should work, because there are similar stories (related to other types of issues) discussed in:
- the brain that changes itself
- Dr. Ramachandran's stories about his patients

How long did it take you to learn to influence it that way?

I've done some similar experiments and I sometimes can make it less loud, just by imagining that it fades out into silence. I was never able to shut it off completely, at least not yet.

What caused the bruxism?

I have it too and I've been experimenting with various methods of living with it. It does not bother me during the day, when there are various ambient sounds, but it becomes a problem when I am trying to fall asleep.

The method I found reasonably effective is falling asleep while playing an audiobook or podcast, for details: http://railean.net/index.php/2012/11/30/tinnitus-and-audiobooks

On a side note, there are quite a lot of comments posted by people with this condition. Does it feel that Tinnitus is a common "feature" among Slashdot readers? Perhaps there is something in our life-style that causes it?

I have been to a few music concerts in my life (say, 10) and I never go to discos, I am quite puzzled by the origin of my Tinnitus.

Languages have a lot of quirks and edge cases, how about 'gist'?

You should also:
- watch Nice guys finish first by Richard Dawkins, then
- read "Evolution of cooperation" by Robert Axelrod (the organizer of the tournament), then
- read "Certainties and doubts" by Anatol Rapoport (the submitter of tit for tat).

Hi, can I read some of her stories?

One of my pet projects is an initiative to write stories for children. I wonder what subjects she writes about, who the protagonists are, etc.

Can you provide more recommendations of this kind? I've recently moved here and I would love to expose myself to all the cool things Seattle has to offer.

Thank you!

I don't see a reason for perceiving the term in a negative way.

You and I are humans, and we also know that some humans are assholes. When I call you a human, it doesn't mean that I lump you into the same category as "asshole".

"Atheist" is just a word that means "without god". Whether you want it or not, the description fits. For everything else, there are other words.

No one forces you to attend any meetings, you are just a person with a reasonable point of view. That doesn't change the fact that "atheist" applies to you, does it?

One way to look at the problem is to take into account the knowledge a civilization can gather while exploring the world. As long as you keep discovering new things and laws - you're either in:
- a 'real universe'
- or in a simulation

Assuming that the 'real universe' does not boil down to some discrete elements, it means it will always have some undiscovered secrets, there will always be a way to 'zoom in' and find something new.

If, at some point in time you realize that you haven't discovered anything new for a long time, and you can formally prove that there is nothing else to discover- it means that you've reached the boundaries of a simulation.

A more elaborate version of the story is here: http://railean.net/index.php/2010/12/31/simulated-universe-argument-limitation

I recommend that you read "Replay" by Ken Grimwood, it is very interesting and it covers the scenarios you mention.

Hey, thanks for the elaborate reply. What you write makes sense and it is clear to me that you know what you're talking about.

The "language problem" is a very big deal to a large number of people here in Moldova, which is why I took some time to dig around various resources and build a picture by myself, instead of relying on what the media wants us to think.

Before I go further, I must point out that Russian is my first language (even though my family is not of a Russian descent and Russian wasn't my parents' first language), I then learned Romanian. I have no special feelings for either of these languages, they're just a way to encode and decode an idea when interacting with another person...

I once embarked on a quest to figure out the story behind the diacritics used in Romanian and understand why they sometimes write "î" and other times ”â”. That is how I stumbled upon Neacshu's letter and the fact that all religious texts at that time were in Cyrillic.

There are some ideas that I'd like to discuss with you. One of them is the "biased sample" aspect.

- If I were an alien who landed somewhere in Russia after an uber-nuclear war that wiped out pretty much everything on the planet... and if I stumbled upon some pieces of source code, I would look at something like ``import this; for item in range(10): print item``. I would then conclude that the people who lived in this area wrote their texts using this type of symbols. I would extrapolate from one data point, which is not very good; but if you have no other data samples - then "what the heck, why not?"

Then there's a "survivor's bias".

- The church is a powerful entity that can afford to store their records and update them, transfer them to new type of storage media, make backups, etc. Books were very very expensive back in the days, which is why the church tried very hard to preserve them. A mere mortal, on the other hand - was probably illiterate. If they knew how to write, would anyone go out on a limb to preserve their records, when they had more important problems to take care of?
This could explain why you only see Cyrillic script in the books.

A few other ideas:
- Neacshu was a fan of "security through obscurity", that's why the letter was written in Cyrillic :-)
- If somehow one would manage to stumble upon "gr8dude's letter to his sister" - they would observe that it is written in English with Latin script; even though both people involved in the interaction are a part of a culture that uses a different language and is pretty far away from England.

Another aspect to keep in mind is that when you read about this problem, say, here - http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortografia_limbii_rom%C3%A2ne, you find out that there are claims that Romanian was originally written with runes, and over the years it has shifted from to other forms. I never managed to find any evidence about it being written in runes, but there's an episode that can be traced back and verified.

The transition to Cyrillic was the result of a church-related matter, caused by the split of Christianity into Catholicism and Orthodoxism. To a modern person, such disputes are like arguing whether Terminator will defeat Robocop in a fight, or whether Spiderman is stronger than Batman... However, back in the day when the average person was uneducated and literacy was scarce, all this church business was of a great importance, for no one wanted to end up burning in hell, where there was gnashing of teeth and crying.

The turning point is somewhere in ~1400, when Alexandru cel Bun ordered all the books to be burned and replaced with ones that used Cyrillic script. I know it sounds crazy, burning all the books - a non-trivial mission. But... with books being so rare - it was a very easy job. Just iterate through all the churches, and you're done.

Pulling this off today would be much much more complex, I'm not letting anyone into my house to burn my books. Back then the picture was different. As the article says, the idea was suggested to the king by a church official - so there's no reason to believe the church would be uncooperative and try to hide some of the books.

Having said all of the above, I really can't tell for sure which writing form was there first, because there are different arguments and clues that are sometimes contradicting. If you've analyzed this problem, can you share some of your findings? I'd love to interact with you more and see if we can exchange some ideas.

p.s. I swear to dog, all the diacritics were rendered correctly when I hit the "preview" button :-)

Are you talking about the conceptually new BolgenOS and its aesthetically pleasing wallpapers?

> The only failing it has is that it uses letters similair to
> latin letters to mean completely different things, which
> leads to an inevitable amount of brain bonk when you
> are trying to learn it.
Yeah, this can be tricky.

To a beginner this feels like looking at code that has `#define True False` somewhere in the fine-print.