text:
I was recently asked this on my FB group page. Answering without sounding so kookie people following the page who hadn’t heard the term might think definition meant answering it quite carefully! Some new age ideas are very old ideas but with new “jargon” or extensions of existing beliefs and ideas not new to all religions but somehow “reframed” out of context so they do come over sounding a bit far fetched!

It’s a criticism I have for the “New Age” in general. Lots of ideas without much basis and without any subjective or objective reasoning behind them…let alone citing sources that have existed for thousands of years that say the same thing in different words. I am also guilty of not citing sources. I have a really good memory (part of my aspergers – high functioning autism). But I draw a blank remembering faces. And apparently names too. When I am reading fiction I notice I almost blank names as I read them! So even if I remember the book…the cover…where I was when I read it etc, I won’t have retained the author’s name. My mind seems to consider names very unimportant which is why most people in my life have nicknames I’ve given them. It’s my weird “name blindness”.

Anyway…back to the topic…in answering the question referring to similar or associated ideas the person was likely to know instead of me rambling on with a lot of new age jargon, I feel I explained the concept well.

As a teacher of energy healing, attunement based spiritual development courses and meditation based courses, I am very aware of ensuring my writing is accessible to people who have no previous experience.

Also, I am not running a cult teaching new words for ideas that promote exclusivity…or fudge the details so people don’t realise they are not being told anything. Those are pet hates of mine.

Also, as a teacher I don’t want to alienate people who hold religious beliefs that may be different to mine. I don’t teach religion and I don’t like it when people dress ideas and philosophies as being facts. We can be as objective in our explanations as possible – but even the best articulated philosophical deductions are open to debate. (I do feel my Autism helps me to communicate higher concepts in a more accessible way because I have to do it so much as my normal life experience. It definitely helps rather than hinders my work!).

I promote freedom and empowerment so I won’t dogmatically preach theories as facts. I know some new age writers do this…but I think real understanding is only available when you digest information for yourself.

I may be hypersensitive to it…aware sometimes that a blog is addressed to people with a prior knowledge…I always try to pitch my writing so it’s useful to people without prior knowledge; defining terms sometimes makes all the difference!
Anyway…enough about my motivations for the way I addressed the question! In my own words, the answer goes something like this…

Some people believe in reincarnation. Some believe some of us had previous lives on other planets or stars perhaps in a different dimension not a physical body, but a life or origin that’s not of this earth and possibly not of this plane (dimension).

People who feel that often refer to themselves as “starseeds”.

For me personally, I think it’s very possible other worlds and types of existance are viable in addition to being a humans on earth with some kind of soul that exists beyond our biological reality.

I also do agree with the concept because as I child I recall feeling “homesick”. My Aspergers may have been part of that; some people also believe some “advanced” spiritual beings choose to reincarnate to help others achieve spiritual wholeness and that High Functioning Autism or some types of epilepsy are a part of that.

That’s not a new idea but the term “starseeded” is a new age term for it. They may also use terms like “earth angels”, “indigos” and “crystal children” etc…depending on the current trend in ideas or new ideas about old ideas!

I do feel I lived somewhere else before I came here as a human. And that it wasn’t like this. And I miss it. I think of it as being “homesick for heaven”. But I don’t claim to understand what it was or where it was. I do feel the work I do now in this life was chosen before I came here. And I feel it will continue when I leave (die). But I don’t have proof of that. It’s just something I feel so strongly it feels more real than real to me. And I have since met other people who also remember the “before life”.

Some people would suggest my feelings are born of delusion…failing to grasp that the Asper brain is not prone to delusion or irrationality; they are experiences more common to people whose beliefs are a reaction to their emotions. Rather than someone whose mind is hyper-rational. Our problems in being understood usually come from our capacity to naturally experience and express our experiences in a far more abstract way than our lower-functioning peers.

This capacity for abstract understand is why many High Functioning Autistics display unusually advanced language skills, may be drawn to mathematics and tend to show greater creativity. Not all share the same special skills or special interests. But I have no doubt that the work I do teaching energy healing and my magickal ‘career’ are advanced by my Aspergers in ways people of a neurotypical function wouldn’t experience. I wouldn’t trade my High Functioning brain for one that didn’t see music, feel colours or understand how to reweave karma (spells) the way I do. My work through www.mayastar.netand absolutely relies on my mind being as it is!

The long and short of it is some people believe people who are born with Higher Functioning Autism or Epilepsy (I have Temporal Lobe Epilepsy) were “god touched” thousands of years ago. That’s the phrase they would have used here centuries ago. And only relatively recently have the insights, perspectives and non-confirmity of people like me been negatively interpreted as a deficiency or fault.

This is beginning to change. With High Functioning Autistics being head hunted for their unique abilities especially in identifying problems quickly or irregularities in (for example) programming scripts that a Neurotypical wouldn’t be able to do so accurately or quickly.

And of course, the New Age has seen a revival in old spiritual and philosophical understandings that our uniqueness is a gift: an extra abilty not a disability!

If you would like to know more, I recently posted a new Whispering Witch Heart to Heart on this topic at:

Oops! While making a vid about Henna, I had a seizure! If you are curious what a TLE seizure may look like…please check it out! (I haven’t seen myself have one either – so it was interesting for me too!)

Unusual mini vid tonight!

I have temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE).

I was referred for brain scans and tests and prescribed drugs after having a few grand mal/tonic clonic seizures. But found out I had many petit mal partial seizures.

They can affect me in different ways but don’t appear seizure like to anyone watching. I lose my ability to understand what I see. Or I lose my short term memory. Mostly. Or those are the ones I notice.

But due to a v negative effect to an SSRI prescribed during a career change ( which clashes with the autistically wired brain and made me insane! Almost literally), in 2009 I saw my neurologist and said I would like to go drug free because of the mid to long term side effects of drug treatment.

He agreed with me…and we had a long conversation about philosophy where he recommended I read 7 years in Tibet and I recommended he read the Bhagavhad Gita (seriously…there is something about aspers that’s refreshing to those who think spiritually or philosophically…I never expect to have a conversation about it but people feel they can talk on a level with me!).

Anyway. I’m tired tonight and worked a long day so I was busy telling my viewers about my henna mix (hair dye), when my TLE struck. It happens when I rush or when I relax. Light, noise and reading can aggravate it. So I take care to minimise risks. I take valerian root and wind down for a few hours before bed. Wear sunglasses in the bedroom etc.

But fluke of flukes,  just had one when I was recording. This is interesting to me. I notice my hand goes to my head like it hurts. It doesn’t hurt. It feels like white noise explosion in the brain. But I don’t fall, I don’t slur, I don’t forget what I am saying even though I go off at a tangent. Most importantly, if I hadn’t told the viewers I was having one, you wouldn’t have known.

Which is why until I had a big seizure, no one knew I had epilepsy!

Listening back to it, I do notice I pause between words increasingly before I have the seizure. And in this tired state, I move my head a lot as if focusing my eyes is uncomfortable. Which it is. And which is usually my cue for a Hepburn treatment (oversized sunglasses indoors).

I am going to post this for epilepsy awareness. Epilepsy doesn’t carry the stignma it once did. For some reason people with aspergers are more likely than average to have epilepsy. Also, sometimes people grow in and out of it.

My autism and epilepsy would be considered disabilities by some. I don’t feel that way about them. Some people have stinky feet and cake addictions…far more debilitating! Also allergies…much worse. So I don’t consider my autism or my epilepsy as disability. Some people have bad manners…surely, that’s worse!

So, I am posting this up with the seizure included for people who don’t know about epilepsy (or henna). Not all epilepsy is grand mal seizures with thrashing about and blue lips. And not all petit mal seizures are the same! I can talk when mine happen but usually can’t see!

I could write more…but I don’t want to write a medical journal article. I just thought maybe it would be informative. If I have never seen myself have a partial seizure before, I expect most people haven’t seen me have one. So it’s sort of interesting…but also may help you understand a bit more about epilepsy in general.

Plus…anything about natural beauty products like henna powder and coconut oil are interesting in a whole different way! So there’s something for everyone!

And also, now you know why I wear sunglasses in the house at night. I am of course, that cool! But they serve a function too!

Protection Spells | Reversal Spells | Love Spells | Black Magick | Karma

Today’s bathtime blog taken from a client question regarding the karmic implications of protection spells…which relates to exorcism or reversals too as they have a similar structure.

Brought to you from a Yoga Bomb BathBomb from Lush hot bath…with red moodlights. Today extra long bath because I woke up with my head tipped back in my sleep. It’s a weird problem. If I sleep on my back I am fine. If I roll on my side I seem to tip my head back and wake up with a stiff neck. When I do, I now boycott my workout because I don’t want to risk injury.

I have considered sleeping in a neck corset (aka posture collar) to prevent me doing it. It’s such an irritation when I do it that I don’t think a posture collar would be a major hassle. It seems like a great idea. I wear corsets in bed (for rib contouring…also they help me relax as the hug emulation increases my oxytocin level. V handy if you’re autistic! Physiological differences in brain wiring means we make much less than neurotypicals and oxytocin counters stress hormones so tight lacing is actually good for my health!). But if I get a posture collar I definitely want one that’s made to fit properly and is breathable.

Pleased with myself for this new idea…wondering why I never thought of trying it before.

Anyway, for now a looong soak followed by a massage will work the kinks out!

So…my customer raised an interesting question. If a spell returns negative intentions/actions (which create negative karmic bonds) back to their source, is that karmically sound? It does on the surface allow an interpretation of “an eye for an eye”. But there is no intention to retailiate. The spell works from the client out rather than focusing on the other person/people. It’s not akin to a hex or attack. But there is a very important reason why we don’t just cut the links. The main one being they tend to get reinstated by the other person. If someone considers you an enemy and projects negative intentions towards you, the situation may persist until they resolve the karmic link from their end.

An extreme example…if you had stalker and to avoid the stress, you moved house thinking “out of sight out of mind”, it wouldn’t necessarily change their intentions. Restraining orders would be applicable of course. But on a magickal level, you can remove the bond from your side…but over time they will reestablish the bond because it’s their issue. The only real way to stop it would be to resolve the karma and that’s why the spell works the way it does.

It doesn’t create negative karma. The key is the spell dissolves and resolves any negative karmic bond. The resolution of karma is in line with Universal Law – can allow the 3rd party to realign with Universal Law and actually solve the problem rather than fire fighting.

It may be the person at the source needs to resolve it to move on and develop and if you detroy the Karmic bond entirely, their option to evolve beyond it might be interrupted. Denying them their Karma would create negative karma!

The spell is bound to work only in alignment with Universal Law…so we have to trust to the Universe to resolve or dissolve as appropriate. We can’t decide what’s best for the other person. But the Universe can be trusted. We are all united by Universal Law (Dharma) which is the evolution spiritually of all things. All people. All creation.

Protection spells and reversals are not used to retaliate. I wrote them to ensure they couldn’t be compromised in any way by our emotions or intentions. Emotionally if someone hits you, you may want to hit them back rather than just protect yourself. So the spells are written to make sure we don’t inadvertantly cause harm in the heat of the moment. But instead work to establish harmony from the inside out.

It’s down to the Universe whether a bond can be dissolved or needs to be returned for resolution. If we think otherwise, it’s the ego talking. The Higher Self seeks harmony and balance; alignment with Universal Law.

All my workings follow this philosophy. I don’t use black magick. And I have studied and practiced magick for nearly 28 years…I don’t claim to be an authority but I definitely understand now principles I didn’t understand as a teenager!

I won’t do spells on 3rd parties or without the recipient’s consent. No spell should ever be done without the focus of that spell knowing about it. It’s very important – not only Karmically…but a spell done without someone’s knowledge or consent is far less likely to have any lasting result!

Even a spell for healing, if done without the subject’s consent would be black magick regardless of the caster’s intention; it would mean manipulation of their free will and that’s the kind of magick that always carries karmic debt. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions and magickally that’s something you need to know and understand.

Most black magick is carried out by amateurs in the “name of love” for what the mage/witch believes is a good intention. But the fact they consider they know best is testament to the fact it’s the ego calling the shots. Not the Higher Will.

A good test is, if you want to do a spell for a third party but you want to hide the fact from them, there can’t be a truly karmically sound intention. FB

A Magickal Info Blog | Is Lying Abuse? | Manipulation | Psychic Attack | Black Magick | Intention | Deception | “An it Harm None” | Ethics | Karma | Forgiveness | The Danger of Passivity

Today’s bathtime blog is about lying…what are the magickal implications of deception? What are the Karmic implications of lying from a philosophical stand point and what is the Magickal standpoint!?

Many will simply summarise magick and the philosophy of “real magick” (the path to Self-Realisation) in a few terms that they fail to qualify with definition or explanation, rendering them essentially meaningless!

I am endeavouring to ensure my blogs don’t make assumptions about definitions so sometimes I will reitterate basic precepts before providing an analysis on the subject at hand. The analysis is a personal and subjective understanding…these are original articles; not copies!

An example of an unqualified meaninglesd statement is the often banded about definition of Magick: “Magick is the art of causing change to occur in accordance with Will.” Without a definition of Will, that doesn’t explain magick at all!

Also the often parrotted phrase “An it harm none, do what thou will” – is equally meaningless unless we define “harm” and “will”.

So this blog will begin with an over view of magick. The definition of terms. And then elaborate on the conclusions we can draw. I may include a personal anecdote as an example…I will see if I think that would assist in my “analysis” and make some concepts a bit more accessible by looking at a recent situation that inspired this pondering!

Previous articles about my magickal work (Maya Magickal Spells & Personalised Initiation Programmes) have briefly described the actual definition of Magick. But in my blog I like to cover some more specific details. I think that way it helps to illustrate things that enable a better understanding.

So let’s begin with an overview of what Magick is…

Sometimes Magick is called a mystery religion or cult. Or “The Black Arts”. The latter may sound ominous but using the words “dark” or “black” around Magick refers to the secrecy and hidden or symbolic meaning around it. Not to any tendency to darkness. But to remind us that Magick itself is an abstract process that we undertake in order to advance spiritually.

The rituals and magickal tools common to Western Tradition Magick…even the words we use when describing Magick or practising ritual, need to be understood as symbolic of the reality they represent. Otherwise Magick would be a combinations of play acting and wishful thinking!

Magick is the path to Self-Realisation for those moved (or “called”) to reconnect in a personal sense with that abstract divinity that exists within us; without us; and in all ways transcends us.

Magick doesn’t refer to a specific method of achieving this. The whole life of a person is part of their development. Every experience is an opportunity to apply those principles that are an expression of our highest, purest and most perfect Self. The Higher Self.

Living out that Philosophy of Magick means we are striving consciously to align our actions, thoughts and feelings with our Higher Self. The Higher Self is the Source of our Will: Our Truth.

This is a major commitment to a process rather than a practice because there is no part of your life that doesn’t have significance. The most mundane elements of life are as important as the most transcendental when we consider them from the objective stance of the Philosophy of Magick. So as a path, it isn’t appealing to everyone. It isn’t a shortcut. It really is a devotion to the process of “refinement” and marked by the discipline to make our choices based on our Higher Will in all aspects of life.

Even for the most commited, this isn’t an “easy” choice. It’s a series of choices and it does become easier but it often means we’re required the right thing to remain in alignment with our intentions.

We will experience the same challenges with family commitments, work, relationships, making ends meet and social situations that may seem more easily solved in the short term by ignoring our Higher Will. We may struggle with dependence on drugs or alcohol. We may over eat or partake in other self destructive behaviours. All many of things can pose obstacles. But obstacles can provide us with the opportunity to exceed ourselves and may be a vital part of our development. But everyone will struggle sometimes with these things from time to time and it’s natural that sometimes we will lose perspective and need to resolve that later.

These things may set us at odds with our Will. Our apparently immediate needs may sometimes eclipse our ability to retain alignment with our Truth.

We may sometimes take time to recognise the state of incongruity we are in. And we may find we are very eloquent when it comes to justifying our bad choices over those we know instinctively would be a closer match to those of the True Will.

So The Will as far as Magickal Philosphy is concerned, is the Truth of our Highest Intentions. It requires a lot of discipline, dedication and development of Self Awareness for us to approach the realisation of that Truth. Anything that we do that isn’t in alignment with that truth is born of lower needs or desires. The “wants” of ego based consciousness.

Magick doesn’t mean destroying the ego, but it does mean making our Higher Will second nature and reconciling our ego to this; accepting it with a different perspective so we keep a balance on all levels.

Retaining balance isn’t easy – most will develop/evolve spiritually and emotionally throughout their lives with swings back and forth between our Higher and Lower intentions. Magick means being active in the process of seeking that balance in order that we may progress spiritually.

So we have covered Magick…and the Will and how that fits into the Philosophy of Magick, lets have a look at the second statement…

“An it harm none, do what thou Will” already has some clarification with the definition of Will.

However, this is often soooo badly misinterpreted as the idea of the freedom to hedonistic indulgences by the less self-aware among us! Those with a very ego based consciousness find such a concept attractive. But doing our Will doesn’t mean the same as doing what we “want”.

That would be very primitive and ego based interpretation of “Will”. It would define our base urges and wants as being our primary motivation in life. So the aspiring Mage’s first lesson is to learn the difference!

Those seeking to learn Magick would do well to additionally study Yoga (especially Bhakti Yoga which is very similar philosophically to Magick); and Carl Jung’s work on psychoanalysis and the process of individuation.

Now…”harm”. How would we define it…magickally. Magickally speaking the intention to cause someone harm is obviously unacceptable. Such an intention would have a hindering effect on the subject’s evolution consciously. Keeping them bound to an Ego centred state.

Ego based consciousness is an emotionally immature state that reflects a spiritually immature state. So hindering your own development would not be congruent with the True Will. That’s the first very basic problem with lying. But by far it’s only the start of the problem.

A famous man once said “Judge not, lest ye be judged”. An idea that concisely summarises the problem of negative intentions projected outward: the subject is affected by their intention far more than the object of their intention. Lying is an intentional act.

Projecting negative intentions can have a restrictive effect on the other person too. Negative bonds can be created through this and over time may affect the object on an energetic level. That creates a Karmic debt between the negative intender and the victim of one. A situation that is potentially increasingly harmful if it persists. (Reversal spells are used to resolve and dissolve negative karmic bonds however they are created – for example The Nataraj Dance of Destruction Tantric Shamanic Ritual).

Ego centred mindsets such as those in Narcissistic Personality Disordered people can create a lot of them too. Sometimes deliberately and sometimes unconsciously. The problem being they don’t have a sense of needing to resolve the imbalance they create – so people around them may find themselves manipulated or deceived because the conscience of the perpetrator lacks the normal conscience that prevents most of us directing our bad intentions outward.

Magick is the path to Spiritual Maturity but it is reflected in our mental and emotional lives too so if someone seems badly adjusted emotionally, you can know that there is a spiritual and mental component to that imbalance.

So harm, in a magickal sense, is any action or choice made that has a negative impact on yourself or on another. A negative impact means anything that may inhibit the evolution of consciousness and self realisation for yourself or another.

Most black magick is carried out by amateurs in the form of healing spells or love spells which they believe are well intended. However, no one has the position of authority to decide what’s right for another person. If you have their permission that’s different. If you don’t, it’s black magick and is being used to manipulate another person to conform to your wishes as if you were the authority. So no matter how well intended it may be, Karmically you are doing a bad thing. Magickally your Ego is calling the shots and it’s liable to hurt you and others.

Everyone has the choice. And sometimes part of our soul development means we need to suffer in some ways. We may need to hit rock bottom from time to time to be able to realise our potential. And as much as it may be hard to see someone suffer, you never have the right to try to remove that without their consent. Nor should you. You wouldn’t inject an upset person to stop them crying. It would be wrong. Doing a similar thing using magick is the same karmically. Doing it by lying to them is the same. All are methods of manipulation and control that involve taking away someone’s opportunity to learn from a mistake or a painful situation. That might be the worst kind of harm you could do to them; deny them their potential.

It’s important for any aspiring magician, witch or mystic to learn to recognise these red flags in their own behaviour and to resolve them; not to passively assume they will sort themselves out. Passivity is also a choice. Standing by and doing nothing when you witness an injustice comes with a Karmic price. And choosing not to consciously deal with your own problems means your consciously accepting those problems.

Conscious neglect may be as harmful to the aspirant as it is to people around them. A habit of “opting out” can be a destructive habit. And choice to make no choice so there is a Karmic debt associated with it.

If you’re following this train of thought regarding the situation of lying…it’s a question that you have probably found an answer to a couple of paragraphs back!

Yes. Lying is manipulation and magickally synonymous with black magick as is any attempt by any other means to manipulate someone to conform to your wants (your Ego).

It requires a conscious decision to perpetuate such a crime against another; a decision defines you. You can’t be in alignment with your Truth if you’re able to lie to another person. It’s simply not possible.

We know the harm that lying does to the liar psychologically. They condemn themselves to exist in a world where everyone is a potential enemy and to an extent dehumanised. This means they can’t truly trust so cannot truly love. They are bound by their actions.

The evolution of consciousness requires honesty as basis. If we can’t be completely honest with ourselves, we’re kind of doomed to remain emotionally and spiritually stunted. Also over time such a bad habit can lead to paranoid thinking and delusion.

So before you try to justify lying by ommission or justify the use of “a white lie” to save someone’s feelings, consider the true implications of deception…

Drug addicts can justify self destructive behaviours till the cows come home. Then they can justify their self destructive behaviours to the cows. But did justification in the mind of any junkie or alcoholic of their own bad habits ever save them from an overdose or liver damage? Of course not.

Justifying your reason for lying is similarly pointless. Potentially dangerous because your trying to delude yourself. Essentially trying to brainwash yourself to make the unacceptable, acceptable to you.

I will use the personal anecdote to illustrate this…

Recently an ex got in touch with me. He claimed he wanted forgiveness for essentially scamming me two years ago. His crime was deception. But how this escalated and the conclusion of the story sort of illustrates how damaging it was ultimately to him and everyone around him.

His lies to me began as claims he was doing work for me. Learning software to convert my website. I paid him monthly for this. He was my fiance and I didn’t think a 40 year old man needed to be chased up. I didn’t consider he might just be nothing at all. I found that out later though that he had been accepting the money and not doing any of the work at all.

I am a busy person and I enjoy my work and my hobbies so I didn’t have the time nor the resources to babysit someone who didn’t have any initiative or principles by constantly being “on them”. Also, as a 40 year old man I expected him to have some ethics! A fair enough assumption but ultimately incorrect! So his first lies were by ommission and half truths.

When he left it was undoubtedly because he knew I would find him out.

But in order to leave he had to come up with lies for his family as to why he was “running away”. It was a mystery to me what he could have come up with that would even be believable. His family know I work for myself. I have my own home. I work hard and I enjoy my work. They know I am a bit of a hippie and a bit of a bohemian. But also that I am disciplined when it comes to my work and my life – I keep fit, I dance, I play music and study. And most of all, that information isn’t a secret. Because my work is primarily web based (Mayastar Academy Online Natural Healing & Spiritual Development Courses and Maya Magickal Spells & Personalised Initiation Programmes ) and has been since 2004, I have a significant online presence. I keep this blog of course…but also I use social media as part of my work and in my hobbies. So anyone typing “annalouisemay” into Google would quite quickly find out what I’m doing half the time!

So I guessed he lied to his elderly parents hoping they wouldn’t be computer literate enough to find out the truth.

Anyway. That was two years ago and I have a life…so I moved on. His email wasn’t expected and I was honest with him saying, you can email me and I will read it but I don’t know that I will be able to forgive you because I have moved on and I don’t think I care enough to be moved one way or the other by anything you have to say.

And he emailed me his “explanation” for his 14 month “long con”. He had a lot of excuses…nothing that would in any way justify his behaviour. And it came off as a list of excuses. Not an apology at all but rather an attempt to vindicate himself…to assuage the problematic “holes” in his story for his own benefit. It definitely didn’t indicate any sense of personal responsibility or genuine contrition.

It wasn’t even the truth in fact. He claimed he had lied to his parents about his life being at risk because of me a Witch. He didn’t elaborate on how that was put to his parents though. Did he claim I threatened him? That I was a satanist? That I was going to turn him into a toad? (Which in retrospect might have been considered “trading up” as I have never met a manipulative toad!). So even his “confession” had so many omissions as to render it unbelievable.

That illustrates very clearly the problem with lying. He was very paranoid for the last few months he was here. To the point I contacted his family to find out if he had a history of mental illness or something.

They indicated he didn’t. Looking back I expect the longer he strung me along the more worried he would have become that I would find out so his behaviour changed very gradually. And then hit the fan because we were due to visit his family that spring and he knew at that point he would be exposed.

Another point to mention is that whatever reason you consider lying to another person for, it’s always setting you up as responsible for the outcome and dehumanising your peers. A very lonely position to end up in. But an inevitable one when manipulation of another person or people in general, is legitised by the liar.

My example is sort of anecdotal – but the pattern of how “what goes around comes around” and how the deception may have begun as him lying to himself. Then lying by ommission to me. Then lying outright to me. But ended up with him lying to his whole family…and now being trapped by his own lies into living a lie. Two years on still seeking vindication from me to patch up his unstable mindset.

He does claim he lied for all kinds of reasons including undiagnosed mental illnesses. Unfortunately, once someone’s begun to lie like that, their reasoning doesn’t sound plausible.

So my advice would be, don’t lie! There isn’t such thing as a white lie. These things always come back around. Any form of deception is a form of manipulation and is by definition, harmful.

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Anna Louise May | Random Updates | Heels | Lighting | Teddy Boys | Silliness | Unicorn | Nights at the Opera | Motown | Spells & Work

Random updates…

Spent my evening sorting out stuff so my #dancestudio can convert to a (rudimentary) bedroom so when my brother visits he doesn’t have to clock watch. And sorting out the rest of the new #ledbulbs – for #energysaving & #moodlight effects that don’t mess w/ my #epilepsy.

It was a bit too late for paperwork by then…so I sent this pic to my #TeddyBoy to ask if he wanted a bath 🙂 It was my fave of the silly pix I sent as it not only includes my most spectacular #sparkly #swarovski #stilettos (my black velvet #gothic #princess #heels) but Lux the #Unicorn & #psychadelic lighting conspired to show my #delicate #ankles & my strong #ballet trained feet feet off perfectly. It’s all just soooo me.

So, me & spider had a bath…ate cold #pizza, watched #GhostHunters & spent a “night at the opera”, listening to #motown.

Tonight I will really have to #henna my roots, tint my eyebrows & eyelashes (I look so unkempt to myself!) & do my admin work for Mayastar Academy. Two #spells for #MayaMagickal – one reversal (as a preliminary working for a #prosperity working) and one #ArchangelMichael #ProtectionSpell.

Today’s fave 3 things…#pets, #chanel no19 and my #bellicon #rebounder! FB FB

Anna Louise May (Maya) | Mystic Muse & Artist

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LED Bulbs | Money Saving | Epilepsy | TLE | Eco-Friendly | Moodlights

This month, I have been converting my whole house to LED lighting. It’s like a revelation! I can’t recommend them highly enough.

The old energy saving bulbs affected my epilepsy but they have been criticised for emitting a grey light that causes headaches and possibly even mood problems. So LEDs…could be a really good solution for a lot of people.

All my rooms are lit from corner lamps. And because of my photosensitivity, I used halogen bulbs as an alternative.  The thing is, I am nocturnal and I have a lot of lighting! I didn’t ever stop and work out the costs though. Until now!

LEDs use v little electricity and give out a full spectrum white light that doesn’t mess with my epilepsy. These miraculous lights use so little electricity, they don’t get hot. You can touch them and they are barely warm. It’s almost bizarre.

To illustrate how much less they cost…a 16w LED bulb gives out equivalent light of a 100w bulb. My halogen bulbs for equivalent of 100w were about 70w.

The initial outlay was high due to the number of lights I have. But also because I’ve fallen in love with remote control colour changing bulbs! So every room now can change colour at the push of a button – literally. And every room can be lit  with white light too. No compromise.  Total versatility. Nothing bad I can say about them apart from at the moment they are still expensive to buy…so if you have a lot of lights or want a lot of lighting options, total conversion can be a bit expensive.

However, the initial cost really must be looked at as an investment. I’m a total nerd so I bothered to do the maths – to see how much my lighting costs in actual electricity use and excluding the cost of replacement bulbs was. And I could only be approximate but it was at least £500 a year. Might actually closer to £600 because being nocturnal does mean my costs are probably way higher than most. Probably closer to £700 if you consider the replacement bulbs over the year. Possibly more. I really have never kept track of it. Like if someone asked you much you spend on rolls in a year…most people would have no idea. It is necessity so we don’t think about it. I have no idea much I spend on loo rolls or light bulbs.

But in terms of electricity use, the new bulbs will cut the electricity for just lighting by two thirds. That’s a massive amount…saving £50 or £60 every month! It really adds up.

So…feeling the warm glow (no pun intended) of cool lighting (no pun intended), I bothered to check that my household accounts in detail.

It was enlightening (no pun intended!). In overpaid direct debits and overpayment of tax I got a big windfall (about £4000) and reduced my monthly bills by £180.

I have run my own household for over 20 years and was really surprised it could mount up like that. I do the accounts for my business. It’s nothing new. So how could I end up owed so much and with outgoing that could be reduced by a third with a couple of phone calls?

The last time I even worked out my household accounts were when my brother lived here and paid half of them. But of course a lot of bills are higher if there are other people in the house…more hot water, more lighting, more heating and the council tax is higher.

My (no-good, freeloading) ex didn’t work when he lived here but he was a massive expense while he did – over doubled my food bill for a start! So my cost of living did drop pretty quickly! (The emotional and practical side of living with someone who (claims) he is mentally ill (I say “claims” because he also claimed his parents manipulated him into moving back with them…and claimed he was having emergency psychiatric help…his family denied it so I think he was just a freeloader but on a number of levels in retrospect).

Anyway, the gist is…it was a long time since I sat down and did my household accounts in detail and last time I did, my living costs were inflated because I was paying for his living costs too.

I think the reason outgoings can slip by unnoticed is partly complacency – and partly because banking has changed a lot since I first bought my home. In the old days of paper statements, I would naturally pay more attention to my bank account because at the end of every month I would be writing cheques for bills. But now I bank online and all those bills are on direct debit so I don’t have a reason to scrutinise my accounts.

So not only do I want to recommend LED bulbs…but for those who don’t scrutinise their bank account, if you want to save money, have a proper look. Go through your direct debits and standing orders. And you might find similar to me!

First step in organising your finances should be checking your accounts…but if I am a total geek about these things and my complacency was costing me hundreds of pounds a year, I am sure I’m not the only one!

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Garden Church Gathering | Today at 3:00 p.m. | Join us!

IMG_6648On Sunday, November 23rd we will have our Garden Church Gathering! We have a beautiful collection of ways that we will work and worship and eat together this month.  It’s time to get our hands in the dirt as the Garden Church! Our work together will be planting pots of lettuce seeds that will be able to grow on your kitchen counter and provide fresh lettuce, as local as it gets, for months to come. Each one of us will get to take a bit of the Garden Church home with us. But more than that, we’re inviting everyone to make a second pot and give to someone you think could enjoy a little bit of love and food and goodness.

As we worship together, we’ll be blessed by a couple of guests from out of town. Two of them will be assisting with our music for worship and will be leading anyone who is interested in learning a song to sing as a mini-choir piece during worship. The sermon will be inviting us into a conversation about the dynamic between God and humanity, through the image of the Shepherd and the sheep, as we explore the difference between the goal of conversion or transformation. Our  worship time will culminate in a Sacred Meal (Communion/Holy Supper), which is open to all and where all are welcomed to feed and be fed.

Our Sacred Meal leads into our communal meal where we will eat together and enjoy the sharing of food and of conversations. Lorie will be making her delicious wraps again and we invite each of you to bring some kind of finger food to add to the meal. Fruit, veggies, drinks, chips, etc.

We are looking forward to being church together. Invite your friends, come on over, feed and be fed!

Directions: Our November Gathering will take place at the small park just down the hill from the Korean Friendship Bell in Angels Gate Park at Pt. Fermin in San Pedro.

*If you’re a GPS type, program it for Pt. Fermin Park. Then, drive past Pt. Fermin park, down below the Korean Friendship bell, and you will see a parking lot on your right (away from the water). You can then pull in and park in the parking lot there.  We’ll then gather at a cluster of picnic tables near the middle of the park. Take the path leading out of the parking lot and you’ll find us.

3 thoughts on “Garden Church Gathering | Today at 3:00 p.m. | Join us!

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Annelie on asthma, humor, and the world.

I blog so that you can learn. Asthma is a handicap possible to overcome with Your help, learn why. Search the Testimonies, Go Fragrance Free archive and product testing.Collected knowledge through many years. Read "About site..". for more information.

Flood in Sykkylven Norway

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It have been raining heavily for two days now, and tomorrow it is expected 60 mm in one day. I was in Sykkylven today, and I took some photographs. This is the most flood I have seen here ever.

Rivers are hugh.

First photos here are usually dry land and the rivers are usually half the size.

This river below is normally actually only 1/4 size.

I made the really stupid choise to try to walk to the other side of this in the video to get a good shot to the warehouse, to get both the water and the building in one photo, I got soked way up my legs and my shoes filled with water and mud. I got the photo though.

flood3-sykkylven-norway-19082014 flood4-sykkylven-norway-19082014

20. August 2014

26. August 2014

This was the rests of the tropical storm Bertha.

/ Annelie

Author: Annelie

I like canoeing, photographing, friends, movies, food, humor, and going on trips. I dislike rudeness, dishonesty, violence, nastyness, and people not caring for others. I do not drink much, I do not smoke and I do not do drugs. I love friends who are kind to me and stick with me. If you want to give me a gift, the best gift is to stop smoking and stop using fragranced products. Then you give me health and that dear friend, is the best gift a person can get. It is a gift of love. I got asthma and I am hearing disabled.

Please, leave a reply. / Legg igjen et svar. / Kommentera!

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Tag Archives: clazziquai project

Are popular idols killing Korea’s indie music industry?

Many people that are familiar with Asian pop culture, may know that the leading “musicians” in the Korean music industry are idols. From boy bands to girl groups, that’s all you see in the streets, television, movies, and magazines. And … Continue reading

Posted in -Country: South Korea, Casker, Clazziquai Project, Loveholic | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments


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The Twilight Saga

I reluctantly embarked in reading the whole series: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn. I don’t know why I was reluctant. Something about now being thirty and reading a young adult series discouraged me somehow. It wasn’t meant to be proper literature, and after spending a decade studying “real” literature, I felt disconnected. Of course, this attitude was rather hypocritical on my part seeing as to how I’m an avid Harry Potter fan and that way back when I used to devour the Ann Rice Vampire Chronicle books. But that was eons ago, a different time and a different world for me. I think another reason I evaded Twilight, though, was the response my (female) students had to the books and, particularly, to the movies. So much was the teenage frenzy that, quite frankly, I didn’t know if I could relate.

Well, I was sucked into this Twilight universe so quickly I didn’t have a chance to resist! I read the first book, Twilight, in a few days. I read the second, New Moon, in two days (but really, about 6 hours, 3 each day); I read the third, Eclipse, in about 6 hours of one day. I became a Twifan, or whatever it is they’re calling Twilight fans these days. Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final book in the saga, I read in a day. I became obsessed, donning a have-to-find-out-what-happens attitude that I think mimics the frenzy with which addicts take to their drugs. It was wonderful and disconcerting, all in one, and it resurfaced bits of me that had been long dormant, that I had pushed away in order to tend to reality.
It’s not hard to get sucked in, though, if you remember anything about being 17 and in love. The intensity of first love, the power of finding out what these emotions do to you mentally and physically, is so vividly described in these books that I literally felt like I was 17 again, all giddy and giggly. I loved it! They’re not perfect, but I loved them nonetheless.
So here’s my take *warning: may contain spoilers*:
I loved the characters from the beginning. There’s a lot of criticism about the character Bella Swan, the damsel in distress who always needs to be protected by either Edward or Jacob. She’s a hazard to herself because she’s clumsy and a magnet for danger and trouble, but the connection between her and Edward is wonderful and Stephanie Meyer did a great job in writing and building the romantic tension between the two. Jacob doesn’t have much a role in this first book. He’s still a kid who has a crush on Bella. The main story here is Bella and Edward falling in love and figuring out that while they’re so different (um, yea, one’s human, the other’s a vampire!), they still realize how much they love and need each other. It’s a selfless, innocent love.

New Moon
I started New Moon eagerly, wanting to know what happened to the Edward and Bella, knowing that somewhere I was going to understand the whole Team Edward and Team Jacob thing. And sure enough, when Edward leaves and Bella is plunged into the rawness of a broken heart, here came Jacob. I was a little annoyed at times in this book because the relationship between Bella/Jacob very much paralleled that of Bella/Edward in the first book. The same song and dance was going on. He (now turning into a werewolf) claims he’s no good for her while she neglects reason and safety just to feel loved. The dialogue gave me some deja vu. Still, it was endearing seeing their relationship grow from friendship to something more, even if Bella wasn’t admitting it. I do think if she’d never jumped off a cliff, and if Edward hadn’t thought she was dead, and if he hadn’t gone to the Volturi and she to go save him, Bella would’ve ended up with Jacob. As a human, Jacob was for her. But the events happened the way they did and, of course, there has to be some action other than just the romantic triangle. I was sad for Jacob in the end.

Of course, once I started with the series, I want – no, I need – to finish all books involved. In between getting the books, I read anything online I could get my hands on. I read the summaries, I read Stephanie Meyer’s website. I wanted more. I needed to know more about the characters. It was fun. 😉
So Eclipse I anticipated much more than the other two. The first, well, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. The second, I saw the movie first, so I had more of an idea of what was happening (more on the whole movie/book thing later). But when I started Eclipse, I had only an idea of what was going on because of the movie trailers (the film had come out recently, on June 30) and Stephanie Meyer’s website. So I took to it like air for my lungs and I read. This was my favorite of the saga. The raw emotions in this book were fabulous. The romantic triangle came around full force as Bella realized her true feelings for Jacob and, even though that didn’t change how she felt about Edward, it brought vulnerability to her character. The despair she feels when she has to tell Jacob good-bye is real and fresh. I was sorely disappointed that Kristen Stewart couldn’t give that same emotion in the movie and that those pivotal scenes were left out of the movie. Of course, the whole vampire + werewolf coalition was great and the fight scene was pretty well done. But my favorite parts of this book had to do with the way the characters really came to life while making sense of their feelings.

Breaking Dawn
Ah. Breaking Dawn. I read it because, in my mind, I had to. I could not start the series and not finish it. I liked it, sure. It gave me closure. I didn’t hate it the way some of the critics raged about it. I didn’t mind that they didn’t fight in the end; in fact, I agree that the symbolism behind the cover (the queen in a chess game) and the idea of mind over brawn was pivotal for this book. But I was disappointed. I wanted more. The romantic tension between Edward and Bella was so strong in all three previous novels that I was expecting more in this final installment where they actually get married, go on their honeymoon and *gasp* have sex. While I didn’t want to read porn, I did expect a little more build-up to the “sex-scenes” – if they can even be called that. I wanted more romance.
The birthing scene was a little too graphic, but it didn’t bother me as much. It’s hard not to have a graphic birthing scene with the type of pregnancy/birth that this was: a half-vampire, half-human that developed and grew at an alarmingly accelerated pace. I mean, she was ravenous the day after their first time together! Her pregnancy lasted a couple months, and it broke her, literally. I do like that this was how she became a vampire, though, because it was an act of love in a way.
I have mixed feelings about the whole shift in point-of-view in the second section. I like it because I love hearing inside all character heads. I read the part of Midnight Sun that Meyer has on her website, which is Twilight told from Edward’s perspective, and I loved reading The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner for precisely the same reason: I want to know more about all the characters. I have so much invested in this story, in these characters, that I want to know more about them. However, I don’t think that the voices are distinct enough. While reading Jacob, I still thought at times I was reading Bella. Still, it was nice getting that other perspective.
The third part of the book is probably my favorite for Breaking Dawn. I loved seeing Bella transform from clumsy human to agile vampire, and I loved that she was able to skip through the whole “newborn” phase. She had control; whether it was her own will or whether that was part of her natural power can be contested, but it was great. I loved the introduction of all the other vampire covens and seeing Bella become the savior for her family. She was no longer the damsel in distress but the knight, ready to defend her family and thinking logically for the best move. I am undecided yet about how I feel about the whole Jacob imprinting on Renesmee, though. I thought that was an awkward resolution to the Edward/Bella/Jacob triangle. I guess the magic of imprinting erases all past strings, and I know that’s what was being alluded, but still… I don’t know. It didn’t work great for me.
But I did get closure, sort of. I want to know what else happens to the new, happy family throughout eternity. 😉
Thinking ahead, I see so much possibility for using these books in my classes. It makes me giddy all over again! From making connections to the “classics” Meyer references in all four books, to philosophical questions about whether we really have free will to choose between right and wrong (or between what we’re born into/with and what we want to be), to the history of all the vampire characters and important historical moments they cover. It’s a goldmine!

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Author Archives: dkoontz

Mapping OO patterns to FP

Scott Wlaschin goes through many common OO principles and discusses how functional style languages solve the same issues.

Error handling with Option/Maybe

Have you ever encountered the Option or Maybe type? It’s a pretty common thing in the Javascript world, especially around the Angular community, but it actually comes from the world of functional programming. Option/Maybe provides a way to communicate the possibility of an error occurring. In this talk Scott Wlaschin goes over a model for how to handle error cases in those pipelined operations in a way that is clean, composable, and unobtrusive.

At one point DDD or Domain Driven Design is referenced. See this presentation for more info on that.

Using values in a mutable system

Andy Matuschak explores how to use a value oriented approach to data within a system that is built around mutable state.

For more on the idea of what Andy calls the value layer, and perhaps a different framing I would suggest Gary Bernhardt’s talk Functional Core, Imperative Shell.

Functional Principles for Object-Oriented Development

Jessica Kerr presents some great topics that help frame why functional programming concepts are useful even within an object oriented system.

You can read more at her blog

Same old tools, new uses

In case you missed it: Part 1

This is part 2 of my series on functional programming concepts for OO / imperative developers. If you’re a not really clear what imperative means, I’d direct you to Part 1 where I attempt to illustrate some of the conceptual differences between imperative and functional programming. In this part we’re going to take the two tools we established in the previous post and start doing things with them.

How the *%^@ are you supposed to iterate without mutating a variable? This was my first reaction as well, I think it’s a fairly universal reaction. Let’s take a look at our arsenal of traditional tools for dealing with iteration.

For loops

for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i) {
    // do something interesting here

We declare the variable that should be used to keep track of our progress iterating through the sequence. I’m sure you’ve written such a line thousands if not tens of thousands of times throughout your programming career, it’s canonical, it’s idiomatic, it’s simply the way things are done. It definitely involves mutating a variable many times.

If we wanted to do the same thing to a collection that supports direct indexing such as an array or List<T> then we could basically do the same thing.

int[] numbers = new [] { 43, 75, 6, 2, 91, -5 };

for (int i = 0; i < numbers.Length; ++i) {
    // do something with numbers[i]
List<int> numbers = new List<int> { 43, 75, 6, 2, 91, -5 };

for (int i = 0; i < numbers.Count; ++i) {
// do something with numbers[i]

This sort of fails though for any collection beyond your standard lists and arrays. Stuff like LinkedList<T> or any tree type structure won’t be indexable this way and although Dictionary is indexable, it doesn’t use a pre-defined sequence. There’s a pretty standard solution to this, the Iterator pattern. Sure enough, all the collections in C# implement IEnumerable which has 1 method, GetEnumerator which returns our iterator. We call MoveNext on the IEnumerator and it knows how to go to the next element in the collection and we call Current to get the current element out of the collection.

LinkedList<int> numbers = new LinkedList<int>(new [] { 43, 75, 6, 2, 91, -5 });

for (IEnumerator<int> iter = numbers.GetEnumerator(); iter.MoveNext();) {
    int num = iter.Current;
    // do something with num here

Not quite as nice as the for loop with all that getting of the IEnumerator, but it works for Arrays, Lists, LinkedLists, Dictionaries, and well, anything that implements IEnumerable (which is everything collection’ish). This version like the last has a counter type variable that we keep doing an operation on to move to the next element. Where with the for loop we were incrementing the i variable, with the Enumerator we’re calling MoveNext. You could argue that this is a lot nicer since the actual mutation bits happen inside the Enumerator but it’s still pretty clear you’re telling an object to mutate to the next value. In C++ you actually use the ++ operator to move the iterator to the next element.

Now perhaps your language has gone out of its way to wrap up this concept in some syntactic sugar, C# foreach is a good example of this. This allows us to use the IEnumerator to traverse the list without having to see any of that gunk.

LinkedList<int> numbers = new LinkedList<int>(new [] { 43, 75, 6, 2, 91, -5 });

foreach (int num in numbers) {
    // do something with num here

This is much nicer, and has a lot less boilerplate than the initial for loop. This version doesn’t have variables floating around getting updated so that part is cleaned up. Generally I would be fairly happy with this solution in a language, it is certainly “good enough” for every day iteration needs.

Loops without loops

We still haven’t answered the question of how you iterate without ticking some type of counter up and up and up until you hit your end condition and stop looping. The answer, and I’m sure you’ve seen it before, is recursion. Before you look at this code, know that this is not how I would advocate writing all your loops, as if you should ban for and foreach and copy paste this little snippet around everywhere. This activity is about spotting patterns so that we can leverage some proper reuse of concepts not about writing the most optimized version of this particular iteration.

void DoSomething(int[] numbers, int index) {
    if (index == numbers.Length) {
        return; // if we are at the end of the list, stop recursing

    // do something with numbers[index] here
    // recursively call ourselves with the next index
    DoSomething(numbers, index + 1);

var nums = new [] { 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 1 };
DoSomething(nums, 0);

So what on earth is going on here? We have a function that checks to see if the value of its index variable is equal to the end of the list, if so it returns without doing anything. If not, then we can proceed to do whatever it is we want to do as part of this iteration. We then proceed to go to the next element in the collection by calling the same function again but with an index of index + 1. You’ve probably seen something like this before as a canonical definition of recursion, usually it’s factorial but it comes up a lot when iterating over tree type structures as well. It’s not the prettiest thing, but hey, we iterated over a collection and did not in fact mutate a variable! What we did was allow the local state of the function we called over and over hold the current state for us. If you think of the stack as we recursively call the DoSomething function over and over, each stack frame is effectively what the i variable was in the for (int i = 0; i < numbers.Length; ++i) example.

<DoSomething index = numbers.Length>
<DoSomething index = 2>
<DoSomething index = 1>
<DoSomething index = 0>

Obviously having to create a method and pass in 0 as the start point is not very nice, although the 0 for the initial parameter is pretty analogous to the int i = 0 we use in the for loop. Now I’m not advocating that recursive iteration is the only way to do things or that it is inherently superior to say, the iterator pattern used by C#’s foreach, but it is a way to iterate without any of your mutable state “leaking out” of your iteration. A very common misconception about functional programming is that it contains no state and that it doesn’t allow any mutation of state. A more accurate way of describing the functional approach would be that state is contained in the local scope of functions. Once you’re in that world where your functions aren’t having side effects and you can get values in and out of those functions, the immutability of everything inside that function becomes rather academic. So, we could move forward in a functional style and still use foreach and everything is hunky dory as long as we stick to the pure function and only working with values parts.

And now it doesn’t even have a body

In all of the examples we’ve done so far, whether using for, foreach, or a recursive function, one thing has been constant. We’ve done a lot of ceremony and work just to execute our actual logic. Wouldn’t it be nice if we never had to write a loop again, if we could boil down the essence of iteration to its bare essentials and then when we need iteration we could just say “hey do this for each thing in the collection”. Well good sir or madam, you are indeed in luck this fine day. C# 3.0 introduced a language feature called lambda, it’s going to be your new best friend. A lambda simply put is a function that you can declare and use without needing to give it a name. You can give it a name, but you don’t have to. In this sense it is sometimes called an anonymous function. Really this sort of thing isn’t all that strange. In the above example, what name did we give to the int[] we passed into DoSomthing? That is an anonymous int[] and since C# has the concept of delegates, we can pass in an anonymous one of those as easily as you can pass around an anonymous int[].

Fortunately for us C# has developed some very good functional tendencies in the last few versions and as a result this whole process is much smoother than it would be in, say Java which does not currently have lambdas. Ruby has good support for lambdas and Python has a fairly limited version of lambda that is restricted to single line expressions. Still, better than nothing.

For those of you not up to speed on these new fangled “delegates” and “lambdas” things, let me give you a brief introduction. Delegates in C# are like a variable that points to a function instead of your regular variables that reference a piece of data. Like regular variables, delegates must have a type, specifically they must match a type signature of some sort. You may see C# code that looks like this

delegate int MyDelegateType(int a, string b);

This declares a new type MyDelegateType which is a function that takes an int and a string and returns an int. You may see this written as (int, string) -> int or (int * string * int) which both mean, “this is a function that takes an int and a string and returns an int”. C# has already defined several such delegates for us, and apart from creating your own for the sake of conciseness, you can go a long way with just the built in types. Action, Action<T>, Action<T1, T2> and so on represent a function that takes nothing, T, (T1, T2), etc. and returns void. So Console.WriteLine is an Action<string>. As we move forward, we’re not going to write many Actions as they tend to not return values and anytime you’re calling a function and it doesn’t return anything you can be sure there are side effects, otherwise what possible purpose could it serve? The other delegate type C# has for us is Func<T>, Func<T1, T2>, Func<T1, T2, T3> and so on. Unlike Action, Func always returns a value. If you specify a Func<T> then you are saying this is a function that takes zero parameters and returns a value of type T. If you declare a Func<T1, T2> then you are saying it is a function that takes a T1 and returns a T2.  The int version of Math.Min is a Func<int, int, int>, it takes two ints as parameters and returns an int. We could create a new variable of type Func<int, int, int> and assign Math.Min to it and then invoke the delegate and it would in turn invoke Math.Min for us. In this way, we can pass around functions as pieces of data which it turns out is really handy. We can also create a new function (a lambda) and assign it directly to our variable. Using the Func<int, int, int> example from before we could do the following.

// this is our variable of type (int, int) -> int
Func<int, int, int> intAndIntToInt;
// notice we're not calling Math.Min,
// we're assigning the function to our variable
intAndIntToInt = Math.Min;
// this calls Math.Min just a sure as if we wrote Math.Min(6, 3)
intAndIntToInt(6, 3);
// creates a new lambda of type (int, int) -> int that returns the
// sum of the params and assigns it to the variable
intAndIntToInt = (a, b) => a + b;
// this return 9
intAndIntToInt(5, 4);

As you can see, we made up a new function on the fly, one that takes in two parameters, named a and b and returns the sum. C# has special syntax for one line lambdas that allows you to omit the return statement. Written out the long way (and the way you must use for multi-line lambdas), we would get the following.

Func<int, int, int> intAndIntToInt;
intAndIntToInt = (a, b) => {
    return a + b;

If you squint and turn your head to the side a bit this really looks pretty close to your normal everyday function, except there’s no return type and it’s got the => between the params and the function body. If we can just make our own functions willy nilly and pass them around like any old variable, then perhaps we can make “hey do this for each thing in the collection” actually happen. Since we’re approximating foreach I’ll name the function after that keyword.

void ForEach(int[] numbers, Action<int> action) {
    foreach (var num in numbers) {

var nums = new [] { 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 1 };
// parens around the parameter are optional if there is only 1 param
ForEach(nums, num => // do something with num here);

So we call ForEach, passing in the num and our Action<int> that will be invoked for each element in the array. This of course only works on int[], but if you’ve ever touched generics in C# or Java or templates in C++ it’s a short hop skip and a jump over to a nice generalized version.

void ForEach<T>(IEnumerable<T> values, Action<T> action) {
    foreach (var value in values) {

The usage of ForEach doesn’t change one bit and now the majority of the code on our single line is the business end, not the “make the compiler happy” end. This is incredibly powerful. While we have not introduced new syntax into the language, with the power of C#’s extension methods, we can get fairly close.

static void ForEach<T>(this IEnumerable<T> values, Action<T> action) {
    foreach (var value in values) {

// this allows us to do
var nums = new [] { 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 1 };
nums.ForEach(num => // do something with num here);

Even less non business cruft to get in the way*. As you may have suspected those smart people who work on C# have already implemented ForEach as part of System.Linq which also was introduced in C#3 (although only for the List class which seems like such an oversight). Thanks to Linq and a few other extension methods I wrote, I have not written a foreach loop in a very long time. This is not a coincidence.

*Note this example is slightly simplified. Extension methods must be declared as part of a static class.

These functions that take functions are called “higher order functions” and functional programs are absolutely chocked full of them. There are functions that take two or more functions and make a new function that runs all of them in sequence. There are functions that take in a function and wrap it in some functionality such as logging or caching or communicating over a network without the wrapped function having any idea it’s being used in such a context. Higher order functions are very cool, and they are the reason we can build reusable structures when we follow a functional style.

Different but the same

Iterating over collections sometimes feels like the only thing our programs do, so naturally we run into situations where just a foreach style loop by itself isn’t sufficient. There are only so many cases where you want to “do something” directly to each value in a collection. What if you wanted to do an operation that spanned multiple values, or all the values. The simplest of these is probably summing the numbers in a collection. In C# you could implement it this way.

int[] numbers = new [] { 43, 75, 6, 2, 91, -5 };

int sum = 0;
foreach (int num in numbers) {
    sum += num;

or using the magical new extension method

int[] numbers = new [] { 43, 75, 6, 2, 91, -5 };

int sum = 0;
numbers.ForEach(num => sum += num);

Now wait just a second here. The lambda that we’re declaring takes only a single parameter, num, but we’re adding it to sum, how the heck does the lambda have sum in scope? Even though we are declaring a new function, because it is a lambda the scope of that function includes all the variables in scope at its declaration. So since sum is visible where the lambda is declared, sum can be used inside the function, even if our lambda isn’t run until after the function that declared sum terminates. This is known as a closure and it’s quite important for some of the more fancy things that are done with functional programs (such as the aforementioned higher order functions). For our purposes it means we have to pass one less variable into our Action.

This works, it’s not overly complex, and it gets the job done with only 1 extra line that can be located right next to where the iteration occurs. So far so good, let’s try something slightly more complex. What about finding the largest number in the list?

int[] numbers = new [] { 43, 75, 6, 2, 91, -5 };

int largest = numbers[0];
numbers.ForEach(num =>
    if (num > largest) {
        largest = num;

This looks pretty similar to what we did before, it’s just our action that has gotten more complex. If we wanted to find the smallest element we would write the same Action but just flip the > to a <. It seems like those are really the same logic with a teeny tiny difference, the kind we could parameter’ize away. What we want is some iteration type construct that at each element asks us, should this new element become the one we’re going to return at the end?

static T Pick<T>(this IEnumerable<T> values, Func<T, T, bool> selector) {
    // do error handling here, if values is null, if selector is null, etc.
    IEnumerator<T> iter = values.GetEnumerator();
    T current = iter.Current;
    while (iter.MoveNext()) {
        // if the lambda returns true, the user wants to use the
        // iterator's current value so save it
        if (selector(iter.Current, current)) {
            current = iter.Current;
    return current;

int[] numbers = new [] { 43, 75, 6, 2, 91, -5 };
// returns true when the current value is smaller than the current smallest
int smallest = numbers.Pick(num, currentSmallest => num < currentSmallest);
// returns true when the current value is larger than the current largest
int largest = numbers.Pick(num, currentLargest => num > currentLargest);

As you have surely encountered in your own work, once you generalize a solution to being able to implement 2 solutions, it’s generally pretty easy to make n different solutions as long as your constraints don’t change very much. In this case the constraint is that the function will accept a lambda that it invokes at the right time during the iteration process and then either pays attention to the result of or not depending on what kind of operation it’s trying to do. Basically everything except a ForEach will care about the result and do something with it.

For an example of some of the awesome ways this manifests, you should become acquainted with Linq. Working with collections will never be the same for you in C#. Here are some examples of things that are vastly simpler than their foreach implementation would be.

Find all words that are less than 6 letters long and sort them in descending order.

string[] words = new []	{

IEnumerable<string> descendingOrderedWords = words.Where(word => word.Length < 6).OrderByDescending(w => w);

Convert a list of strings that represent ints into a list of ints

string[] numbers = new [] {
IEnumerable<int> parsedNumbers = numbers.Select(numberString => int.Parse(numberString));

Count the number of occurrences of an element in a list and then order the elements of the list in order of number of occurrences descending.

int[] numbers = new [] { 9, 27, 8, 3, 12, 27, 6, 8, 9, 8, 27, 1 };
IEnumerable<int> numbersOrderedByFrequency =
    numbers.Aggregate(new Dictionary<int, int>(), (count, number) => {
        if (!count.ContainsKey(number)) {
	    count[number] = 0;
        return count;
    }).OrderBy(keyValuePair => -keyValuePair.Value)
      .Select(keyValuePair => keyValuePair.Key);

As you can see, these sorts of things can get fairly complex, and certainly functions like Aggregate deserve a nice sit-down with the documentation page to really grok what’s going on, but hopefully you’re getting a feel for the shape of these things. We’ve got functions that take other functions as inputs and produce new IEnumerables as a result that we can then chain together to get a whole lot of functionality for very little noise. Whether these functions use recursion or an iterator internally doesn’t particularly matter as that detail is totally hidden away from us and unknowable. Since Linq functions don’t mutate any state themselves (although the lambda you pass in certainly could), they are quite functional and thus composable. Composability is a big buzzword you’ll be hearing about more, it’s one of the reasons for pursuing a functional approach (apart from all this cool Linq goodness).

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Every journey begins with a single step

I started this blog because I wanted to understand functional programming better. Having taught traditional programming for over 7 years now I firmly believe the best way to really understand something is to be forced to explain it to someone else. Secondarily, I feel that there’s a lot of interest in functional programming concepts but not a lot of good text on the subject that doesn’t presuppose a lot of terminology, concepts, syntax, and even language constructs from the functional world. My aim here is to introduce as much as I can about functional programming but through the lens of a traditional OO programmer. If you use Java or C# you should feel right at home here. Ruby and Python practitioners will also be able to follow right along although I’ll be using the curly brace and semi-colon syntax of the C lineage.

Another problem I often see is that as soon as anything functional gets mentioned it’s approximately 0.21 seconds before the author then says “so since it’s soooooo much easier to do this in Haskell, I’m going to show all my examples using that now”. While this may be convenient for the author, it is rather unfortunate for the intended goal of communicating any useful information to the reader who almost surely would not be reading an “intro to functional programming” post if they already knew Haskell well enough to read your code example. Sigh. So, my intent here is to use C# as the lingua franca of learning about all this fancy pants functional business.

Some context

Let’s get to it then, what is the “functional” in functional programming about? Honestly it’s nothing radical, no new keywords or libraries or such things, just a different application of the tools we already have. You probably are familiar with many of the concepts I’m going to talk about, but perhaps you’ve never heard them presented as a cohesive set of techniques. I would liken it to the shift that took place with structured programming, a development that took place long before I was born.

The TL;DR version is that at one point, it was common practice to use goto statements to jump all around your program as needed. You can do some nifty things with your control flow and clever individuals loved to squeeze extra little bits out of their machines, both by making smaller programs and by consuming fewer CPU cycles. The downside to this approach was that reading such programs became very difficult. So it was decided, although you lose some flexibility in how you put your program together by requiring that every subroutine (aka function/method) must return to the point in the program that called it when finished, the maintainability upside was pretty huge. This did not mean that the usage of goto disappeared. Your compiler is free to (and does) make great use of such a construct to achieve all sorts of optimizations and even the very structures that were advocated as replacements for goto as a technique, but you never see this part. To you, goto statements probably don’t exist except as the internal business of various tools you don’t need and/or want to know the internals of. We don’t maintain the binary output of our compiler, we instead compile a new version from our source code, so it really doesn’t matter what the compiler does in the process of converting our source to something runnable, as long as the meaning of the instructions is not altered.

Today we don’t even bat an eye at the concept of structured programming, “of course your method returns to where you called it from!” you might exclaim, how could it be any other way? Madness! However, to the goto-loving programmer of 1968, the idea of doing things differently might have seemed as if it was a bad trade, after all they were giving up precious control over their program and perhaps even believed it to be impossible to write certain types of programs under such draconian restrictions. Again, a laughable position from a modern programming viewpoint but I hope you can empathize just a teeny tiny bit. We are that goto programmer of the 1960’s.

Part 1: The function

Being named functional programming, you may have had an inkling that functions might play a role, and right you are! Lest I be guilty of the sins I have accused others of above, let me start at the beginning. I promise I’m not trying to be patronizing to anyone here, I just want to be super clear on the way functional programming sees functions.

In the beginning, we had instructions that came one after the other. This is machine code, which was then slightly abstracted into assembly code. Your program starts at the first instruction and proceeds down the program unless something redirects it (that would be the goto statement). So a totally unrealistic made up example program might look like this

..more instructions here..

Now you may have noticed that that some of those instructions are repeated. It seems rather wasteful to have to keep putting the same instructions in over and over each time we might want to use them so we can instead put them in a single place and then go use that chunk of functionality on demand.

:subroutine // this is a label and is the target of a goto statement
goto place I was called from

:main // program starts running here
goto subroutine
..more instructions here..
goto subroutine

Of course the “goto ” would need some information to actually work, clearly we can’t just use a single goto here as we need to return to 2 different parts of the program (and possibly many more). This idea of how you wire up the going to and coming back from different parts of your program is a good part of what structured programming was about and in the process we got the concept of a function in our programming languages.

So there’s the classical view of functions, they’re nice little containers for parts of your program so you don’t have to copy/paste them everywhere. Well, that’s one view of functions, one specifically in the imperative line of thinking. Imperative programming is about meeting the computer half way. We write programs that are kind-of-sorta doing what the underlying CPU will actually do and the compiler takes care of bridging the gap. When you say:

int x;
x = 5;
int y = x;

You’re being fairly explicit with both what the computer should do (bind the name x and y to the value 5), as well as how the computer should go about doing that (allocate 2 int sized areas in memory and write the bits that represent 5 to those memory locations). In assembly the gap between what the CPU does and what your program tells it to do is very small, in C it’s a bit higher, and by the time you get to languages with runtimes such as Java/C#/Ruby/Python/Perl/PHP you’re at best dealing with generating instructions for a virtual machine that then get taken and converted into the real instructions your computer knows how to understand. Still, even with all that abstraction we’re still fundamentally telling the computer to allocate memory, put values in that memory, copy that memory to other places and so on. Object oriented programming puts yet another organizational layer on top of all of this but does not fundamentally alter how you view your relationships between yourself and the machine. The difference between Assembly and C# is conceptually less than the difference between C# and a functional language like Lisp. C# and Lisp will look syntactically more similar than ASM and C#, but how you go about building your app will be a much wider gap. This is one reason people find learning functional programming so difficult, it looks in many ways to be so similar syntactically but requires you think about your problem in a whole new way.

There is another view that comes at the whole business of writing programs from the opposite approach. You may have guessed that this is indeed functional programming. In this view, a function has nothing to do with memory and CPU opcodes and registers and such, a function is an algorithm that takes in one or more values and produces a result. Of course, to be useful this algorithm must be expressed in some sort of form that can be translated to bits that do indeed allocate memory and care very much about registers and CPU opcodes, but from the programmer’s perspective that sort of thing is an implementation detail. In the same way you probably don’t fret over not knowing exactly how the JVM or CLR interfaces with the operating system to enable “Hello World” to be printed out, a functional approach to programming doesn’t care about how exactly the runtime allocates memory and in many cases even how most of the functions in the program work.

Now this is the point at which you probably think that functional programmers are lazy or stupid or some amazing combination of the two. Why would willful ignorance be of any use to a professional who needs to build real applications that solve real (and hard) problems? It does indeed seem as if there is something magical about controlling where your data goes and the ability to alter it at will. But consider this, we don’t (generally) fret that our for loops won’t get turned into efficient jump statements when translated to opcodes. The compiler has demonstrated the ability to do this competently for so long that no one worries about it anymore, although this was not always true. I can recall reading over many threads of argumentation where programmer A claims that the compiled output of compiler B is not as efficient as their hand rolled assembly and thus they should continue using assembly over C/Pascal/etc. This same argument happened with the transition from C to C++ and then from C++ to Java. At each point, we as programmers gave up some control over the specifics of the execution of our program and got in trade a lot less things to have to worry about. In the functional world, things have always been this way, the problem was always that enabling a blissfully ignorant view of the program’s execution was not particularly feasible for quite some time leading to dreadfully slow functional programs. Thankfully this problem has largely rectified itself thanks to the amazing work of our electrical engineering brethren who give us faster and faster computers to run our terrible bug ridden programs on. This excess computing power has allowed traditional imperative programming languages to take on more aspects that functional languages once embodied such as garbage collection and conversely has allowed functional languages to become fast enough to participate in our everyday computing needs.

TL;DR – Imperative languages started off fast and then got good, functional languages started off good and then got fast.

Clearly it’s not just the functional programming converts that naturally abstract away parts of their systems so they do not have to deal with the complexity, that is a fundamental requirement of programming a large complex system using a human brain (or team of human brains). A functional style adopts the mantra of “I don’t know, I don’t want to know”, if I may steal the phrase from Rich Hickey. Now of course in a functional program you do have the capability to go look under the covers and see what every part is doing, but the point is that you don’t have to do this when you don’t actually need to. What is the secret to this amazing way of building programs you ask? Ah young padawan, you already know the answer, it is indeed the humble function.

Part 2: The function

Wha? You just spent like 10 minutes talking about functions in imperative languages and how functional has a better way of doing things and now you’re telling me it was that same thing all along? Pretty much, with one eensy teensy little modification. Functions in a functional language want to only operate on their parameters. This may seem like a tiny stupid distinction, of course functions operate on their parameters, why on earth are you passing in the param if you’re not going to use it? Ah, but the distinction here is only operate on their parameters. We can easily write a function that operates on the parameters but also operates on some other variable along the way.

// assuming a C style language where globals exist, or
// alternately assuming all this is inside a class for a
// Java / C# style language
int x;

int Sum(int a, int b) {
    x = a;
    return a + b;

As you can see, even though x was not passed into the function, it was modified as a result. This sort of thing is referred to as a “side effect”. When functional languages talk about functions, they usually mean “pure” functions, which are side-effect free. Some languages such as Haskell even go so far as to prevent side effects at a language level. Once you have functions that are pure, you can then begin to make assumptions about them. Given the same input they will always produce the same output, so adding memoization is safe and in many cases trivial to implement. Also, when you need to dive into a function to figure out why you’re getting the color Blue when you fully expected to get the color Red you can safely confine your searching to the function itself. Since there can be no outside interference from other functions or variables, when something breaks inside a function it is contained to stay inside that function. Needing to look at less lines of code to understand what is happening is a pretty big motivator for our industry. It could be argued that this idea is one of the primary drivers for the adoption of OOP, grouping all the related functions (aka methods) and the variables they operate on in one place where you can see them as a whole. Pure functions sort of do that on a per-function level.

Part 3: Values

We’ve been talking about variables and functions and I hope it’s beginning to become clear to you now how a function in the imperative world is different from a function in the functional world, however there is still one more bit that functional languages want to stick their oh-so-mathematically-pure fingers into, your variables. This again is an area where imperative and functional viewpoints differ. In the imperative world, a variable is a label for a location in memory. You can use the variable to get at the bits it is referring to and to send new bits to reside there. The bits that you get or set at a particular memory address (aka variable) comprise some sort of data, at the simplest they are things like the number 9 or 5.2. There’s a good reason our languages let us do things like

int x;
x = 5;

but not

int x;
5 = x;

Assigning the bits that represent 5 to the memory address referred to by the name x makes sense. Changing the value 5 to be a different value does not.  5 is 5, it can be no other way. This sets up a variable/value dichotomy. We often conflate the two (often referred to as identity and value), but as you can see they are very different. For any given variable we can put a new value in that memory location and now x is 7 instead of 5 or 23 or … well whatever bits conform to the type rule of our compiler. Functional languages do not generally operate this way. In a functional language, a variable name is bound to a value, and from then on, that name refers to the value, not some memory address. Yes of course under the hood that is exactly what is happening but conceptually we don’t care about that, we care that if I say x = 5, then as long as that variable is in scope, it will be 5. Of course there can be other x’s in other functions or in different calls to this same function each with their own values bound to them, we’re not talking about some magical global variable that exists throughout your entire program, just a variable that is only assigned to once. In C# you can get values for primitive types, just add the readonly keyword and voila. Paired with functions that don’t rely on any outside variables to do their job and now you really have something. Unfortunately readonly only works on member variables, not local variables so while we’d like to do this

int DoSomething(int a, int b) {
    readonly int x = a + b;
    .. hundreds of lines of code, please don't actually write functions this way..
    // I know for a fact that x is still a + b, it can not have changed

That is unfortunately not possible. You can see though, that if we could guarantee x never changed (either at the language level or via our own discipline and standards), that knowledge would allow us to look at a very small part of our function and reason about it more clearly, we wouldn’t have to be concerned with the preceding lines (except the one that set the initial value of x of course).

The terms you will hear for these concepts are mutable (as in changeable) and immutable (as in not changeable).

It is now that I will direct your attention to

by the aforementioned Rich Hickey who will do a fantastic job of explaining why concept of values is so powerful and desirable in our applications.

No seriously, go watch the talk, it is amazing.

Part 4: Recap

Ok, so it’s been about 3000 words now and so far we’ve covered … functions… and um, variables. Yeah! Off to a good start I’d say. All joking aside, functional programming is way less about new tools than it is about a different approach to how you think about your tools, and how you put them together. Hopefully you have lots of questions like, how on earth can you do something as simple as add up a list of numbers if you can’t change the value bound to your variable? That is indeed a fantastic question and will be one of the topics in the next post.

Continued in part 2

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text:
The Importance of Socialization

Socialization is important to the overall well-being of your dog because it will provide him with the ability to develop skills to cope with new experiences in a positive way, therefore reducing your dog’s stress.

What is Socialization?

Socialization is the process of exposing dogs to new environments and situations. It helps them to feel more comfortable when encountering new things, animals, people and experiences. Socialization is especially important during puppyhood with the first critical socialization time as eight-twelve weeks of age.

Socialized pups are typically happier, friendlier, more predictable and able to handle stress better. Under-socialized pups often grow to become fearful, shy, anxious, and sometimes even fearfully-aggressive adult dogs because they lack the skills to cope with new situations.

Socialization should not end with puppyhood but is more of a lifetime journey. Though the foundation for your dog’s behavior is laid during the first few months, responsible pet owners reinforce social skills and continually expose their dog to new social experiences throughout the dog’s entire life.

Ideas for Socializing Your Dog:

There are tons of ways to socialize your dog. You just need to be sure to make time to socialize your pup or adult dog by actively seeking new experiences that will be positive encounters. Here are a few ideas to get you rolling:

  • Puppy Kindergarten or Obedience Classes: Every dog should learn to be well behaved around other people and dogs. A structured class will give your dog a chance to practice obedience skills while meeting and greeting new dogs and people.
  • Parks: Visit your local parks. Take plenty of treats and when children ask to pet your dog, ask them if they would like to give your dog a treat too.
  • Nature trails: These are great for both exercise and meeting new people. You’ll also likely encounter different kinds of animals.
  • Outdoor events: Don’t be afraid to expose your dog or puppy to youth sporting events, small festivals, or dog events like fundraising walks.
  • Puppy Parties: Have a puppy party and invite over a few friends each time.
  • Pet Stores: These can be a great opportunity for seeing lots of new things but use caution about unknown dogs you come across. Not all are friendly to rambunctious puppies.
  • Downtown: If you live in a city with a nice downtown area, take your dog for a stroll or visit the local Farmers’ Market.

These are just a few ideas for socializing your dog. Always keep your dog under control, carry lots of treats, and keep it positive. Don’t force your dog into anything! Instead, keep it light-hearted, and if your dog appears overly anxious or overwhelmed, keep it short.

Lifelong socialization is the best way for your dog to learn how to respond with less fear and stress to situations he will encounter throughout his life. It will help him to be an overall happier, more balanced pet.


text:
Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2008 November 24
See Explanation.  Clicking on the picture will download
 the highest resolution version available.

Radar Indicates Buried Glaciers on Mars
Data Reconstruction Credit : NASA/JPL-Caltech/UTA/UA/MSSS/ESA/DLR/JPL Solar System Visualization Project

Explanation: What created this unusual terrain on Mars? The floors of several mid-latitude craters in Hellas Basin on Mars appear unusually grooved, flat, and shallow. New radar images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter bolster an exciting hypothesis: huge glaciers of buried ice. Evidence indicates that such glaciers cover an area larger than a city and extend as much as a kilometer deep. The ice would have been kept from evaporating into the thin Martian air by a covering of dirt. If true, this would indicate the largest volume of water ice outside of the Martian poles, much larger than the frozen puddles recently discovered by the Phoenix lander. Such lake-sized ice blocks located so close to the Martian equator might make a good drinking reservoir for future astronauts exploring Mars. How the glaciers originally formed remains a mystery. In the meantime, before packing up to explore Mars, please take a moment to suggest a name for NASA's next Martian rover.

Tomorrow's picture: above earth

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