Ah, Education.

I came across a few quotes from TA's that made me giggle as I was going through old school notes:

"Let's not confuse ourselves with the facts."
"A cow is useful as a cow, I mean, you could ride it."
"I found out that amaryllis when they get scared, don't curl up, but jump high into the air." (he meant armadillos, but I loved the idea of the luscious flower of the amaryllis leaping at loud noises, or curling its stem up and nesting in its pot.)


I appreciate this quote:

"To argue with a fool is to prove there are two." ~Doris M. Smith


and I find this fact interesting:

If trying to sneak up on animals, approach from the right side, because then the animal is more likely to catch a glimpse of you out of its right eye which is connected to your detail-orientated left hemisphere of the brain, and wont activate the right-hemisphere as strongly which is better at processing big picture stuff like movement.

The joy of being alive

"There are elements which, if added to one's experience, make life better; there are other elements which, if added to one's expirience, make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. . . The additional positive weight is supplied by expirience itself, rather than by any of its contents."

~Tom Nagel, Mortal Questions

found in Nicholas Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness

I like the idea that life is at base positive, not neutral. It makes me more inclined to get up in the mornings and wander out into the world.

Playing tonight at the Rockabilly Soundstage

My favorite scientist duo are Needham & Begg. Don't they sound like a 1950's rock band?

When I woke up this morning, the day belonged to me

I woke up this morning, and Kryptonite was online, so I messaged him and asked if he wanted to ride downtown together, as I had some stuff to hand in. I was somewhat late getting to the streetcar stop, so I thought I'd missed him, but he showed up with a hot chocolate for me that he'd bought while he waited.

The trees have little green pom poms on all the tips of their branches.

Bulbs are blooming all over the place, bright splashes of rich green leaves and happy flowers.

A man with two ferrets on leashes entered the subway at the same time as me.

Raccoons that wander about my backyard, digging in the dirt, climbing trees, and smelling their hands like wollen teddies.

I find little notes of things my prof said that I thought were funny scrawled across the top of my lecture notes:
"I don't know what the function of parties are. I like to have conversations in depth and parties make that very difficult."
"He ran the roman empire. You try to run the roman empire." (raises eyebrows).
"Tell them you're allergic to placebos."


"When I opened my eyes this morning,
The day belonged to me.
The sky was mine and the sun,
And my feet got up dancing.
The marmalade was mine and the squares of the sidewalk
And all the birds in the trees.
So I stood and I considered
Stopping the world right there,
Making today go on and on forever.
But I decided not to.
I let the world spin on and I went to school.
I almost did it, but then, I said to myself,
'Who knows what you might be missing tomorrow?'"
~Jean Little

My New Mantra

This is very important and very great.

"...the beliefs that foster the growth of talent and even genius over time [are]: the belief that intellectual potential can be developed; the idea that current performance simply tells you where you are and what you need to do now; and belief that everyone needs sustained effort to realize their potential and make truly noteworthy contributions."

Different Aspects of a Unified Whole

One of the things I like best about cognitive science articles and textbooks is that the authors are as likely to use female as male pronouns when referring to characters that don't have a specific gender such as "the reader" or "the average person" or "the main character of the story", it's refreshing and exciting.

I also like the silly examples they use. In a recent paper Daniel Dennett, a highly influential figure in the field, made a lengthy example of his vacuum and then descibed "Dennett's lost sock center: the point defined as the centre of the smallest sphere that can be inscribed around all the socks I have ever lost in my life."

I also find in the writing moments of insight into the incredible beauty of the world, "The most admirable and crucial feature of human intelligence that I see around me is not any ability to be right all the time, but an amazing competence in getting things on the right track once our beliefs, plans, or actions, have gone astray. As Joerg Siekmann once said, the most admirable moments in a mathematics seminar are not when someone presents a well-oiled proof, but when he discovers a mistake and recovers on the spot." My favorite moment of any ballet performance I saw was when Rex Herrington lost his balance doing fouetté pirouette and rolled out of it to come up on one knee, arm extended to his beautiful leading lady as if he was about to propose. Now that is grace.

My essay for a cognitive science course, is not coming together as I would like; but on the bright side, when I wrote to Code Yeller in alarm "I started talking to Mum about my essay and suddenly realized I am fucked. Oh shit."
Code Yeller wrote back, "Awesome. You are closed to finishing then. :) You've reached a critical stage, just pass it and you're done!"
So basically, I have to be like Rex Herrington, roll up onto one knee and extend my arm to my leading lady. No probbrem.

Singing Meat

The first chapter of my textbook finished with a story. Only one more reason for me to love cognitive science. The chapter discussed the possibility of computers having intelligence, and what it means for something to be intelligent rather than being neat and going bing! in interesting ways.
The story was extracted from a longer story by Terry Bisson called "Alien/Nation".

"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."
"They use radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea of the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of they, since they do have meat heads like the Weddelei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"
"So. . . what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Concious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"So what does the meat have in mind?"
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're suppose to talk to meat?"
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home? That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used the radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multi beings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favour. Unofficially, I advise we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who've been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they wont remember?"
"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so we're just a dream to them."
"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."
"And we can mark the sector unoccupied."
"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"
"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again."
"They always come around."
"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone."

Adventures in Rubber

I happily quote my textbook, "There is much that is unclear, much that is ill understood, and much that will, no doubt, soon prove to be mistaken. There are places where it is not yet clear what the right questions are, let alone the answers."
"Philosophy of cognitive science has something of the flavour of a random walk on a rubber landscape. No one knows quite where they are going, and every step anyone takes threatens to change the whole of the surrounding scenery."
~Andy Clark, Mindware.

How could I not be excited by a discipline with so much adventure? :D