Lossiness

Perhaps I didn’t give much thought when coming up with a name for these pages, but I’m accustomed to the term “lossy.” It’s a familiar term that refers to a general tendency towards irreversable loss. In my usual geek context, it refers to data. You can compress a video to a certain point and be able to get back the original data intact, but past that point it’s “lossy.” Or sometimes you get lossiness and “noise” when transmitting data over the air. This tendency is one of the hard truths you need to engineer around, kind of like “entropy” in physics. And funny, that word “truth.” Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness” to mean something that’s considerably less than “truth.” But “lossiness” is different. It’s more than just loss. “Loss” is a one-time event, but “lossiness” happens all the time. It precedes loss, and follows ...

I’d like to share a dream of my son, Aidan. I had this dream a bit over a year ago, a few months after we lost him, some time during the winter of 2017/18. I had a couple of other dreams of him before this one, but with very few words spoken that I could remember. In one, I got to hug him for a long time and tell him how much I love him and miss him. I don’t recall if he said anything back. While hugging him, I pressed my nose against his shoulder, inhaled, and was able to smell him. I recall that very clearly, because he was at that age where he was starting to smell like a man. (We already had the deodorant talk.) It’s a common belief that you can’t smell in dreams, but not true. In another dream, we were all together as a family, visiting Aidan in a sketchy ramshackle house where he was staying for some reason with a mysterious woman. The front yard was filled with a mix of toys of various ages and random junk. I got to hug Aidan again as he came out from ...