Solipsism

Study proceeds as planned. Prognosis cautiously positive.

One of the things that's worked in my favour is that I've exceeded my monthly download cap and have been throttled back to 64k. This is fast enough to use wikipedia to check stuff, but too slow to waste time on facebook or watch people falling over on failblog.org or any of the other things that I find myself doing instead of studying. It's funny that my connection being so slow as to waste my time prevents me from wasting my time. Whoa - deep...

However, I am a resourceful chap, so I've found alternative ways to distract myself. What's working well for me at the moment is engaging in idle speculation about stuff. For example, at the moment I'm attempting to review (or more accurately, to learn) neurology. Lots of things about various parts of the brain connecting up to other parts in different places and making them go zoink. (Terminology: if it goes zoink on the same side as the bit of brain that's doing the zoinking, it's ipsilateral. If it's on the opposite side, it's contralateral.)

So I started wondering about those words. Contralateral makes sense - it clearly means opposite side - contra-lateral. Contra- is pretty common word root, like contraband or contrary or contrast. But ipsi- is more unusual. If something is legal, is it ipsiband? If someone is agreeable, are they ipsary? And so on. I can chew up a lot of time thinking about stuff like that.

To solve this urgent curiosity crisis I busted out the online etymology dictionary, which is a great site because there's no high-bandwidth crap to slow it down and hence drive me back to my work. Sadly, ipsilateral is not in it. But when I searched for ipsi- I found that it's part of the word solipsism. Sol-ipse-ism = alone-self-belief. It's the belief that you are the only real being in existence. This is a belief that often occurs to me during swot-vac when I'm glued to my desk for a week and don't see anybody else. Maybe there's been a war out there and the world is over but I didn't notice.

Nah, I would have read about it on facebook if that was true. Sigh - back to the work...