Thanks for the education, Internet!

Firefox has this wonderful option to open the tabs I had last time when I start it again. Things I think are potentially fascinating but too long for my fatigue level are left there in the stack until I manage to go through all the items in google reader (because we can't have RSS feeds in China) and the list of comics I read every day ("open all in tabs" is another wonderful feature) and check my various and sundry email accounts.

So today, I finally managed to get back to Pablo Defendini's article on faster-than-light travel and related topics. It made for interesting reading, though nothing I hadn't seen before. Then I noticed some of the words were hyperlinked and clicked on "noosphere" (though it's properly spelled with an umlaut). That led to wikipedia, which is outside the great firewall, so I copied the word into the search bar on The Free Dictionary (which includes a wikipedia mirror).

I was searching through the explanation of noosphere, and saw mention of Stewart Brand and, in the references, Serial Experiment: Lain. Now, I've watched Lain some number of times I'm not comfortable disclosing, but I still read the entire article, on the chance that it would give me yet another angle of looking at the story I hadn't noticed before. It did, but that's not the point here. One of the themes mentioned in the article was Dissociative Identity Disorder. I wasn't familiar with that term, as I only studied psychology for a brief time, back when your parents were still in middle school. So, off we went to another page, and I saw mention of "Borderline Personality Disorder" which led me to another page and then several ancillary searches, and now I have a fairly confident diagnosis for an acquaintance I've had entirely too much interaction with.

A character in Alice in Wonderland said "I try to believe ten impossible things before breakfast." Before I finished my morning coffee, I feel as though I had lessons in Postmodernism, Literary Theory, and Psychology. If I could keep up this pace until lunch, I might consider grad school.