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McKinnon told The New York Times that nothing makes her laugh harder than farting. She continued, "It's such an insult that foul gas comes out of a hole in our butt with a sound to announce itself. It's the ultimate bad thing about being a person."

So, since late February I've been reading Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary" - 600+ pages (and while admittedly a large fraction of those are the endnotes, it's a very dense read). I've been reading about a section a day, generally after a chapter of something else.

The book takes on the difference between the Hemispheres - first from a physiological point of view (and trying to get much more firmly planted than the 80s/90s pop-psychology left brain/right brain stuff) and then the cultural ramifications, with different periods of history featuring different levels of balance. (And different cultures; near the end of the book he muses on how many Asian cultures seem to have less predominance of the left hemisphere, see things less in isolation and more in context.)

Even if you're skeptical about the physiology of the split, I think there is much to the concepts of holism vs reductionism, whatever the cerebral substrate!

But he definitely makes a pitch for the physicality of it - I think what most stuck with me was the idea of bird brains during feeding, the research showing the right side of the brain keeping track of the whole environment, ever watchful for predators, while the left side focused in on the task at hand. In this model, the Right Hemisphere is holistic, takes things in context. the Left Hemisphere categorizes and isolates. I would put it as, the right hemisphere accepts the world as it is, the left hemisphere focuses on how the world as it can be manipulated.

Anyway, here are the quotes I scraped, with some further thoughts.

The right hemisphere deals preferentially with actually existing things, as they are encountered in the real world. Because its language roots things in the context of the world, it is concerned with the *relations between* things

My interest in this book coincides with trying to understand the difference between me and another class of computer programmer, a theme I'll get back to. Here is an early thing - I have alway been more concerned with how parts interact rather than what they are. But, from the rise of Object Oriented programming on forward, this view has been a bit on the downslope.

The separated hemispheres in split-brain patients each have a distinct personality, with characteristic tastes and preferences, according to one of those most closely involved with the study of such patients. The unconscious, while not identical with, is certainly more strongly associated with, the right hemisphere.

Such a striking idea! This goes along with "parts" thinking in psychology, like "Internal Family Systems"- IFS is much finer grained and dynamic than the two hemisphere way of thinking about things, but still. I often feel there is a singular other - my inner child or what not and I've often thought less of that other - maybe even more like an "inner unruly pet" having me grab snacks than even a child - but now I have to understand that my linguistic, Left Hemisphere side maybe takes too much credit.

Strikingly, I realized that probably my flare ups of temper- rare, but loud - aren't my silent, sullent Right Hemisphere, but the fury of my smart but emotionally stunted Left Hemisphere rebelling against the world that's defying its categories of how Things Are Categorized, how they should be.

At the 'bottom' end, I am talking about the fact that every word, in and of itself, eventually has to lead us out of the web of language, to the lived world, ultimately to something that can only be pointed to, something that relates to our embodied existence. Even words such as 'virtual' or 'immaterial' take us back in their Latin derivation – sometimes by a very circuitous path – to the earthy realities of a man's strength (*virtus*), or the feel of a piece of wood (*materia*). Everything has to be expressed in terms of something else, and those something elses eventually have to come back to the body.

I do wonder about this. Can all cognition be traced back to being an embodied actor?

Before there can be harmony, there must be difference.

Lovely line.

Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede.

Another good pithy observation.

According to the latter vision, that of the right hemisphere, truth is only ever provisional, but that does not mean that one must 'give up the quest or hope of truth itself'.

And here I see a tie-in with my spirituality, such as it is. That I feel the by-definition necessity of "best description of what should be" - that Truth is ultimately subjective, a shareable reality, not just an objective personal experience - but that we can NEVER be certain that our own view is the most accurate one. but it's important to keep striving.

For Heidegger, truth was such an unconcealing, but it was also a concealing, since opening one horizon inevitably involves the closing of others. There is no single privileged viewpoint from which every aspect can be seen.

I think of this in comparison to my metaphor of "the view from God's Throne, but the impossibility of reaching it" - in fact the very real likelihood that there can never be a divine End in that chair.

[In the 20th century] themes emerged from philosophical debate which, unknowingly, corroborate the right hemisphere's understanding of the world. These include: empathy and intersubjectivity as the ground of consciousness; the importance of an open, patient attention to the world, as opposed to a wilful, grasping attention; the implicit or hidden nature of truth; the emphasis on process rather than stasis, the journey being more important than the arrival; the primacy of perception; the importance of the body in constituting reality; an emphasis on uniqueness; the objectifying nature of vision; the irreducibility of all value to utility; and creativity as an unveiling (no-saying) process rather than a wilfully constructive process.

Good general overview of the concepts.

This is what I have expressed as the left hemisphere's way of building up a picture slowly but surely, piece by piece, brick on brick. One thing is established as (apparently) certain; that forms a platform for adding the next little bit of (apparent) certainty. And so on. The right hemisphere meanwhile tries to take in all the various aspects of what it approaches at once. No part in itself precedes any other: it is more like the way a picture comes into focus – there is an "aha!' moment when the whole suddenly breaks free and comes to life before us.

Boy O Boy do I see this in programming. Unit tests, strong typing, functional programming - they are all very Left Hemisphere, reductionist ways of trying to achieve better and better control. So I'm thinking my view must be more Right Hemisphere - I see these others as looking to 1,000 trees and thinking less about the forest.

Like with unit testing... I see bugs as an emergent property! Very few units don't do what you think they do - in isolation - but as you connect more and more of them up, problems and misunderstandings and misassumptions occur. (The counter argument is that focusing locally better defines the units, makes misunderstandings less likely, and that without something like functional programming, you just get an untraceable mess of context sensitive side effects. But one of the points of the book is that the best answers come when the two sides are balanced.)

Although language is the only way we can scientifically bridge the chasm between mind and brain, we should always remember that we humans are creatures that can be deceived as easily by logical rigour as by blind faith ... It is possible that some of the fuzzier concepts of folk-psychology may lead us to a more fruitful understanding of the integrative functions of the brain than the rigorous, but constrained, languages of visually observable behavioural acts.

I think this is a good line for agnostic/atheist types to keep in mind as they look to the power of other ways of knowing - even if you distrust the appeal of the supernatural, sometimes these systems have a lot of built-in wisdon.

For even rationality cannot get by without imagination, but neither can imagination without rationality. The marriage of the two is, however, of such a peculiar kind, that they carry on a life and death struggle, and yet it is only together that they are able to accomplish their greatest feats, such as the higher form of conceptualising that we are accustomed to call reason.

Man, sometimes I feel bad for liking parts of Nietzsche... (and even crediting his description of Amor Fati, the love and embrace, not just getting-along-with, the world as it is to inspiring my secondary tattoo, "This Fate"... as being the thing I want to love so much I will have it inscribed on my skin.)

Reasonableness would be replaced by rationality, and perhaps the very concept of reasonableness might become unintelligible.

I find myself.... I dunno, still loyal to rationality! It seems so important to be open to ideas outside of one's lived experience, and one way you do that is through words and rational thought. But I'm willing to accept some of his ideas that it's the hemispheres in unison that work best.

The only certainty, it seems to me, is that those who believe they are certainly right are certainly wrong.

My view of epistemology in a nutshell.

The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to what lies behind the Truth. It is not possession of the Truth, but rather the pursuit of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectibility is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indolent, vain – If God held enclosed in his right hand all truth, and in his left hand the ever-living striving for truth, although with the qualification that I must for ever err, and said to me 'choose', I should humbly choose the left hand and say 'Father, give! pure truth is for thee alone.'

I'm not sure I quite buy the "striving is what makes it worthwhile" - I really would like a guaranteed view of The Truth, but still. I see a parallel to me trying to grow to like challenges more. I gravitate to ego-pleasing low hanging fruit in life, and if it's not a game I can win I don't always see the point in playing. But life is full of challenges it would be useful to be willing to take on, and I think accept challenges is a muscle that can be built up.

So yeah, I think I took a lot from this book! I think it rates with Dennett's"Consciousness Explained", Hawkins' "On Intelligence", Hofstadter's "Goedel Escher Bach" and Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" in terms of books deeply impacting what I think I know about thinking I know myself.

Mastering a skill is getting from the phase when you think you're doing great but everyone else can see your mistakes to the point where you start to see your mistakes but everyone else thinks you're doing great.

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Patience is not a feeling. It's a behavior.

I came here to do two things: define what separates us from the world & love the collection of molecules we've both decided are "you" [huskily] & I'm all out of definitions

Republicans, especially Trump, tend to like the simple state by state coloring of the last prez election map, because if it was acres who voted, it would be even further from the "other candidate had more people voting for them" result than what we got. This Wired piece about Ken Field's alternate maps. The pointilism approach makes a lot of sense...
Yesterday, for grins, I literally punched waves as they came rolling in. I think I also tried an atomic drop.

I enjoyed it and the waves certainly didn't seem to mind. In a world with too much passive aggressiveness it was nice to experiment with the opposite.

And then later I saw this...

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Odd that Dunkies in NJ have the steak and egg on a bagel that's been missing in Boston area ones. Wonder what the implications of that are, whether it's more an issue of supply or demand.

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"But maybe going through that kind of tough, lonely experience is necessary when you're young? Part of the process of growing up?"
"You think so?"
"The way surviving hard winters makes a tree grow stronger, the growth rings inside it tighter."

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Amazing demos of how different camera lenses make the subject look much, much fatter.

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I'm trying to figure out if there was any way college or something could have gotten me to my current awareness of how frickin' different people are.

I think a lot of people, as a short hand, kind of assume everyone is more or less like them. It's a bit of a working hypothesis we need for empathy?

But then... I dunno. Even apart from all the crazy amounts of partisan tribal bickering. Sometimes when I read about how badly people do on basic science questions, or fractions, say, it's just weird. Negative, sure - but just strange, too.

And I'm aware of how thinking about "basic science and math questions" as a rubric is kind of intensely OF my particular demographic.

And all this is just in my country, a culture I kind of sort of more or less understand. (Actually I should probably limit my claims to intra-culture, FWIW) That there are all these other nations and cultures, each presumably with their own intra-culture diversity, is even harder to wrap my head around. TIL a New Vocabulary Word: Gamine!

"a girl with mischievous or boyish charm."

Not unrelated to Manic Pixie Dream Girl, I'd say.

Source: http://joshreads.com/?p=25478

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via

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I'll bet you somewhere near, some illustrator is sighing and putting a little tricorn-hat wearing mascot proposal away in a dank filing cabinet.
from Contra: Hard Corps via http://pixelclash.net/ ....

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"Every day is a parade if you lower your standards a little."

I think this is a good principle in life in general. I kind of have a rule that if something makes me giggle out loud, I will try and post it. I guess this was making the rounds a long time ago-- not so sure about the galaxy far, far away though.

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Thinking maybe it's time to get rid of the 4 massive binders of CDs that represented my music in the 90s and early 2000s. What should I do with them? is it moral to give them to good will, seeing as how I'm enjoying all the music on them? A Montblanc 1 second film competition:


And a "1" minute vacation in Asia:


Short video clips can be such a powerful format!
Amber found this page of Tattooed Legos -- actually a promotion for Piot Extra Fine pens:

The flavorwire page has several more, including a rather amusing trampstamp.

I admire this on multiple levels: the intricate artwork, the cleverness of the idea of giving Lego guys tattoo, how well it shows off the capability of the pen, and how by sticking in the product, they do a good job of making sure people know what the campaign is for.

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You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way navigators use stars.

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Apple's Magic Trackpad Ambitions: The Mouse Is Dead -- intriguing notion - if this is true, would it spread to PCs in general? I'm skeptical, the mouse utilizes precise muscles that the trackpad can't (I go a bit nuts if I go too long with only a trackpad.) But Apple has been a harbinger of old technologies' demise before: losing the floppy drive, and USB ports rather than specialized keyboard and mouse slots.

TIPS FOR PERFORMERS: Playing cards have the top half upside-down to help cheaters. There are a finite number of jokes in the universe. Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily. There is no music in space. People will pay to watch people make sounds. Everything on stage should be larger than in real life.

LIVING WITH OTHER PEOPLE: Violence on television only affects children whose parents act like television personallities. Table manners are for people who have nothing better to do. Civilization is a religion. Civilized people walk funny. There is always a party going on somewhere. People will remember you if you always wear the same outfit.

LIFE ON EARTH: Men like pastries, women like custards. Scientists have invented a love drug, but it only works on bugs. Animals like earthquakes, tornadoes, and volcanic activity. Nuclear weapons can wipe out life on Earth, if used properly. Cats like houses better than people. Dolphins find people amusing, but they don't want to talk to them. People look ridiculous when they're in ecstasy. Schools are for training people how to listen to other people. Body odor is the window to the soul. Sound is worth money.

IN THE HOME: There have been cases where people's shoes got stuck on their feet and could never be removed. The best way to get rid of unwanted flying insects is to have strong body odor. There hasn't been a good=looking American car in 20 years. There is always something on television. The best length for television programs is either 30 seconds or 8 hours.

THE SPACE PEOPLE: Space People read our mail. The Space People think that TV news programs are comedies, and that soap operas are news. The Space People will contact us when they can make money by doing so. The Space People think factories are musical instruments. They sing along with them. Each song lasts from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. No music on weekends.

MONEY: People will do odd things if you give them money. When everything is worth money, then money is worth nothing. If you keep your money in your shoe, then people will know which bills are yours. If you crumple your money into little bills, it will never stick together. The best way to touch money is by the edges. U.S. money is the worst looking money in the world.

WORLD TRAVEL: Passport pictures are what people really look like. Rich people will travel great distances to look at poor people. Toast is the national dish of Australia. People never travel to look at flat landscapes. People would rather watch things than eat. Looking at postcards is better than looking at the real thing. Looking up is as scary as looking down.

IN THE FUTURE: In the future, women will have breasts all over. In the future, it will be a relief to find a place without culture. In the future, plates of food will have names and titles. In the future, we will all drive standing up. In the future, love will be taught on television and by listening to pop songs.

WORK: Crime is a job. Sex is a job. Growing up is a job. School is a job. Going to parties is a job. Religion is a job. Being creative is a job.

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http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/07/exclusive-interview-with-a-pirate/ - International Talk With a Pirate Day.

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http://kirk.is/2004/07/28/ - heh, 5 years ago today I published my first Processing app... Man, 5 Years? Anyway, fun language

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So far the only good thing about Outlook Spam block is that it successfully junked "Celebrate 10 Years of Messenger" from Windows Live Team-

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"Please allow 6 to 8 weeks for delivery" - what was up with that? Every product coming in from overseas?

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Just watched the Red Sox retire Jim Rice's number- Heh, wonder if they rearranged the #s so it wasn't him + Jackie Robinson apart from the white guys--

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Kirk's Law of Code Comments: Developers who think a bug tracking # is sufficient for a code comment or check-in message are probably not very good developers. Big weekend of helping people move in, including a side trip all the way out to Westfield.

acrobat

beast of a catapult

Had some time on my own, and finally managed to beat all 20 levels of Fantastic Contraption. Of all the ones I did and saved, acrobat is probably the niftiest... my solution for the final one is a serious beast. The site has a whole forum with people talking about it, and also people are posting original level designs and even a way of viewing other folk's solutions to those custom designs. While I'm proud of myself for having gotten through the original 20 levels, I think now I'm content to admire the cleverness of completed solutions rather than struggle on on my own...

The community is great, and paging through other people's solutions, sometimes I found myself giggling out loud.

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Passage of the Moment

I have noticed that, as I get older, I have trouble remembering new things. For example, my children remember the details of most of the theatrical plays they have seen in the past year. I can't. Perhaps this is because I have seen so many plays in my life that rarely do I see anything truly new. New plays fit into memories of past plays, and the information just doesn't make it to my hippocampus. For my children, each play is more novel and does reach the hippocampus. If this is true, we could say the more you know, the less you remember.

I ended up like linking this book very much, despite how he favors Searle over Turing, and a few times when I think he underestimates the summarization ability of various functions of the brain. His core idea is that the real key to the mind and consciousness is neocortex... even going so far as to say that "consciousness is what it feels like to have a cortex". He sees the neocortex as a hierarchical memory/prediction/pattern recognition system with the hippocampus at the very top...lower levels recognize patterns and send summary patterns on up, higher levels send predictions of what they'd expect to see next in the pattern on down. When something pattern is novel, it goes up all the way to the top to the hippocampus, where it has a shot at becoming a memory. (And people with a damaged hippocampus often can't form memories.)

I find this viewpoint very compatible with my introspection, and helps explains a lot of mental phenomena, from the power of visualization to our love of pattern in music and art, to why we can rely on mental autopilot sometimes.

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w00t, just beat all 20 levels of "fantastic contraption" - now I feel stupidly smart, some of those other builders are so clever...

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I don't have much against the guy, but so weird that we have a general whose last name is phonetically "betray us" - self-writing snark!

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Dumb enough to drop your iced latte at the soup-r-salad. Gilding the lily for it to be some kind of bring your daughter to work day. Video of the Moment
I've posted this kind of thing before, but this is simply the most charming and clever set of Rube Goldberg setups I've ever seen. I literally laughed with delight at some of these, used as bumpers in the Japanese kid's show PythagoraSwitch ("Pitagora Suitchi", which is the refrain that repeats at the end of each.) Well worth the 9 minutes...

Pythagora Switch from cereal griego on Vimeo.

(Via bb)

If you took someone from a few decades ago, I'm not sure how many, and put them in a modern office workplace, besides all the technical achievements, wouldn't they be surprised by the "first name culture" that so permeates the place? The other day at work I was composing an e-mail to our contact at one of our clients, she's a project lead there, we've never ment, but I get to call her by her first name. I'm not very mystical about the power of names, but still, there's a certan enforced casualness that has kind of taken over the business world.

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Video of the Moment
Oh, the things we can find Google Video... crave muscular thighs? Maybe you won't after seeing this video of an obscenely muscled bodybuilder. (Warning, also contains a fair amount of bathing-suited crotch.)

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Mascot of the Moment
Popsicles are my favorite diet indulgence, and my diet is lenient enough that I can have one daily, sometimes even two, if I choose a nice low-calorie brand. "No Pudge" has a pretty good line of stuff, at least I like the Strawberry Shortcake. (Funny how they all their products start with the word "Giant"... guess that's something their market research tapped into.)

Anyway, the only real downside is enduring the humilation of their mascot, this damn pig with a tape measure around its waist. The popsicle wrapper is covered with copies of it, and it's on every single side of the box in the freezer.

90 Calories, 1 Gram of Fat, Zero Dignity!

Random Snippet of the Moment

The formula for heat index is based on work completed in the late 1970s. R. G. Steadman wrote a paper called "The assessment of sultriness," in which he used a list of 20 factors to compute how hot you might feel on a given day.

I just love the idea that there's a scientific paper called "The assessment of sultriness". Though, much like "wind chill", "heat indexes" always seem a little indulgent; a way of letting us feel extra macho about whatever weather we happen to be stuck in. Did some nautilus etc. with a personal trainer at the gym this morning. It's kind of intimidating, I find it kind of difficult to remember all the details of the exercises and form and stretches and what not.

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Toy of the Moment
click to play

Source code // Built with Processing
--Made this last night, click and hold to make a circle, let it go and all circles start gliding to the common centerpoint, marked by a pixel. Learning Processing has been on my "To Do" list for a long time; it has a lot of nifty 3D features I haven't even begun to touch.

Geek note, I realized my usual trick of breaking down motion into seperate X and Y components won't quite work to get a nice orbiting effect, because of Pythagorean theorem and all that. Maybe later I'll try to make a Processing "sketch" that handles that better.

Peterman mentions it's a bit of a memory hog. Also, if you click to quickly it gets stuck, classic threading issue I have to work on.

Cuss-filled update follows...highlight with mouse or hit Ctrl-A to see, if you want....UPDATE: SHIIIIIIIIIIT. I made up a new version that avoids the freezing issue...works great in the toolkit but I cannot get it to run on my PC or laptop's browser for love nor money. DAMN IT I hate when technology fucks with me like this. Pardon my anglo-saxon, but it's better to rage here then hurl my laptop across the damn room which is what I'm so god damn tempted to do. METAUPDATE: got it working, doing after-hours work on my job's laptop. Weird.

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Cookie of the Moment
Arguably (it's amazing what you can get away with if you start out by saying "arguably") the world's best cookies are sold just a block or two from my workplace...Bert's Horrible Cookies are astounding. Considering how good they are, and how they are only available in the "Witch City" of Salem, I think witchcraft or some other black magic may be afoot. Essentially it's a chocolate chip cookie with a fudge brownie baked inside it. No kidding. Stunningly delicious. FoSO was very happy with her reward. (Turns out she didn't actually know the game "Cosmic Ark"...she checked the image filename and Google'd to confirm.)

Just thought you'd all like to know about the world's arguably best cookies.

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Playground Equipment of the Moment

--This brilliance via BongBoing: the Infinity Climber, a Möbius strip for kids to climb on! UPDATE: In the comments section Harry points out it has one too many twists to be a Möbius. Doggone it.

Interview of the Moment
Cigar Aficionado interviews basketball great Darryl "Chocolate Thunder" Dawkins. I heard this guy on the radio, then found this. No talk of cigars in it, however.

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Ramble of the Moment
You know, "PDA", Personal Digital Assistant, is such a goofy name. "Ooh, it's not just an electronic organizer, it's an assistant". Look, not that I don't heavily rely on my gadget, but until the damn thing can bring me drinks and follow me around, like Twiki on Buck Rogers, call it what it is, a damn handheld computer / electronic organizer. (Besides, "PDA" was already taken by "Public Display of Affection"...combined with the name "Palm" there's room for a lot of really stupid sexual jokes.)

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Movie Quote of the Moment

Be careful of women who love you just the way you are. It means they are willing to settle too easily.

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Music of the Moment
Ranjit mentioned that his favorite music to work to is "energetic music in a language he doesn't understand". Deciding to see if the same trick would work for me, I've spent the last half hour or so listening to the non-stop mix "All the Best from The German Beer Garden".

Thanks, Ranjit.

I'm not sure why I own this album. I think someone may have given it to me as a joke...maybe even Veronika. Wow, they got all nine miners out! I have to say I wasn't optimistic about it. The article mentions how last night around quarter past ten they lowered a phone to them...wish I could see a transcript of that call. Pretty sure it wasn't "Can you hear me now? ... Good." (Followup: I think the actual quote from the trapped minors was "There's nine men ready to get the hell out of here. We need some chew.")

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Links of the Moment
The other day slashdot had an article about a man who built his kids a BattleMech Treehouse. There was also a less successful attempt to build a fullsize Millennium Falcon as well as an Ebay Auction for a Rebel Blockade Runner (the ship Princess Leia and the droids are on at the start of the original Star Wars movie.) The cool thing about that last construction is that it's "to scale" for the action figures...and it's huge, as you can see below. A reminder of how gigantic the Star Destroyer that engulfs it at the beginning of the first movie is meant to be. (I mentioned it a few months ago, but that Star Wars Databank is awfully cool, especially the "Expanded Universe" and "Behind the Scenes" sections.)

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Quote of the Moment

Dating is dumb. Basically you're making false judgements based on false exteriors. Oh, sure, my superficial self likes your superficial self, but the real me likes your roommate.

Quote of the Moment

I have bought this wonderful machine--a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine--it seems to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.

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Photo of the Moment

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Political Link of the Moment
Salon article reinforces an opinion I've been forming... with all the treaty rejecting we've been doing: Kyoto, ABM, Nuclear Test Ban, Small Arms, Land Mine, Biological Weapon Enforcement, from other countries' point of view, we've become the kind of "rogue nation" Bush is trying to use as a bogeyman...the irony is, well, if not "overwhelming", at least kind of funny.