Pans - the power of thoughtful gifts

Today I used one of my lovely/amazing cephalon pans (as I do most days) to make my eggs and I felt loved :)

Fruit Bowl :)

Today after I finished my show at the AGO a little girl came up to me to show me her drawing that she had done at the drawing station. She was adorable, maybe 4 years old. I wish I had a picture of her drawing! She pointed at different blobs of colour that were contained by a brown circle and told me all the different fruits that they were and then we talked a little bit about which fruits were our favourite. In her drawing of the fruit bowl (that she said she might fill in with more brown later so it looked more bowl-y) there was a cherry, a blueberry, a strawberry, a banana, a tomato and a chocolate chip (!). And then she told me: "I brought this over for you since I thought you might be tired and hungary after your perfornance."

:)

There...I Fixed It! :)

Heat!

My building finally turned on the heat today....mmmm...warm.

Good thing since my personal furnace is in Nova Scotia.

Scientific Sonnets

okay, I might be in love with some of the philosophers on artificial intelligence, or at least their writing.
Consider this argument concerning consciousness: "Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain-that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants." ~Professor Jefferson's Lister Oration from 1949.

Jaja says she hopes I am never wooed by someone who writes scientific sonnets. hmph.

Hello my fellow mansions for souls

In 1950s when Alan Turing responded to the idea that artificial intelligence was sacrilegious and impossible because thinking was a function of human souls, which God had not seen fit to bestow upon animals or machines, he wrote, "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."
I find that sentiment to be beautiful poetry, and a very cosy philosophy.

Down the Garden Path and into the Bushes

We learned about ambiguity in psychology of language today.
I really like reading example sentences.

from the headlines:

EYE DROPS OFF SHELF

KIDS MAKE NUTRITIOUS SNACKS

CLINTON WINS ON BUDGET, BUT MORE LIES AHEAD

TORONTO LAW TO PROTECT SQUIRRELS HIT BY MAYOR

RUMORS ABOUT NBA REFEREES GETTING UGLY

from a medical record:
"on the second day the knee was better, and on the third day it had completely disappeared."