2004.08.12
So FoSO volunteered to take a stab at some photos of me. I'm learning that I tend not to pose very easily, or at least not well. Still, I think a more interesting backdrop, getting in close with the zoom, and taking a LOT of photos led to some decent enough results...which ones do you all think are the best bet? (Click to Zoom)
Quote of the Moment
Intuition is not clairovoyance. It's not guesswork either. Intuition is executive summary, that 90 percent of the higher brain that functions subconsciously--but no less rigorously--than the self-aware subroutine that thinks of itself as the person.The trouble for me is, yeah it might be "rigorous" (not sure about that) but it's also heuristic, and hard to check the work. Meaning it uses a lot guesstimates...when we reach to catch a thrown ball, we're not doing calculus in our head, we're using some much rougher formula, and using some feedback loops..in general, I'm convinced intuition takes a lot of short cuts, and often it works out, but sometimes it doesn't. And when two people's logical deductions don't match, you can hash it out, but if two intuitions disagree, what can you do? This is an advantage (or, depending on your perspective, disadvantage) scientific inquiry has over religious thought.
Gist for the Neurosis Mill of the Moment
Volcano! Why America's coast could be toast. If this one big volcano goes, it could send a giant tsunami that would slam into the East Coast...the weird part is it would travel 4,000 miles in about 9 hours...I can barely imagine what trying to evacuate the vulnerable regions would look like. But as someone on Slashdot pointed out, these things are set to go off in geological time, which is a whole lot of human lifespans...
Tip of the Moment
Geeks: if you use the Windows command prompt a lot, and you miss the old unix "tab completion", you can get something kind of like it by running regedit and changing [HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software \Microsoft \Command Processor] CompletionChar= 9 (ASCII value for TAB) or PathCompletionChar= 9 (ASCII value for TAB) -- I only had the former on my system. It's a little different than the Unix shells I grew up with...as you keep pressing it cycles through different possible completions, rather than filling in what is unique and then beeping if there's more than one option.