One suggested activity for the sciency-minded among us: Every week for a month, find a new and interesting question to ask on 「Ask A Biologist」. Post your question and the response(s) to your blog and talk about them.
One of my favourite answers on that site was on a question (not asked my me), "Are viruses alive?" - the answer:
Social barriers, professionalism: (view full entry for contents)
Books - I read a lot, and am sometimes bothered at how little I remember from great literature (view full entry for contents)
I remain highly impressed at how quickly I can type with the NexusOne's onscreen keyboard, turned to the side.
Recently I dug the bike out of the basement and had it repaired.(view full entry for contents)
In most respects I have a lot of respect for Richard Dawkins, but in this debate, I have some friction of perspective - I don't like how quickly or strongly he marks questions as meaningless. (view full entry for contents)
Recently been chewing on Wittgenstein's argument against private language - while I believe I agree with the premise, the argument seems fairly broken to me. Part of my discomfort is I think the terms relevant to the argument have been laid down in bad places and that on a more ideal fabric, the question would take a different shape or be impossible. That's not uncommon in philosophy though - one often has at least three possible responses to an idea - it is right, it is wrong, it is defined in terms that are either ill-formed or inappropriate. I may offer more concrete objections as I continue to chew on it - for starters, I believe the terms "language" and "understand" should be held differently (ideally in a way more messily-emergent-from-biology than formally-in-a-way-that-feels-like-they-were-plucked-from-Platonic-forms), and I object to his building off of falsifiability as foundation for meaning (structural/definitional statements have meaning too, even as a different one).
BigThink has put forth ten interesting "dangerous ideas" for discussion. Some thoughts:
This is qualified as a dissenting thought.
There are times when I hear a cover of a song and it helps me understand the original song. Not so odd. What is odd is when I don't like the original until I have the time to get the interpretation through the cover. Odd when a cover is training wheels for the actual song.
Example: I have a fondness for Jeff Buckley's version of 「Hallelujah」, and only after listening enough to it did I really begin to appreciate the Leonard Cohen (original) version.
In jogging/running, I go barefoot and apart from some very light clothing am carrying nothing but my NexusOne (still don't consider it exactly a phone, but I digress). I've been experimenting with different parameters of how I hold my body when doing so - seems to be difficult to figure out what settings are best. (view full entry for contents)
Is this thing on? *tap* *tap*
An open letter to Hysterical Sharia Conspiracy Theorists (not that many of them are likely to read my blog):
Swung by the old workplace to talk about backups and data store management - need to hang onto huge datasets from past experiments creates interesting challenges, particularly as these sets keep growing. We recently filled another 6 terabytes of RAID storage.. oy. Cognitive burden of "are we ready to archive this experimental data yet?" is housekeeping that's hard to do in a group that doesn't have a fulltime sysadmin.
On the way out, I chatted with a researcher on the state of psychology - apparently my research interests are not necessarily that far off from being approachable but they are likely to be very difficult to make concrete enough to do interesting research. It's an interesting enough problem that the field will have to do it at some point, as it's tied to the heart of neuroplausible hard AI (as well as understanding human learning). The challenge is how to turn it into simple tractable problems that don't amount to studies of separate problem domains - if I really want to understand inter-domain reasoning and domain construction, I'd need to be thinking about the kind of experiments that could regularise domain mastery among participants and measure how they bring these things to the table in new domain - either relying on concurrent verbal protocols or cognitive models with very good imaging evidence would be appropriate, and each would have challenges (I'm extending this a bit beyond my conversation with him).
Before I left, I was reminded that he's from Belgium, and we talked a bit about the future of Belgium (for those of you who don't follow world politics, look into this - it's interesting stuff) - I never thought of the status of Brussels as being what keeps that country together (my formal reading on the topic suggested it would just become a third region), but it makes sense. It was also good to get the perspective of someone who has on-the-ground knowledge - as I've often stated, it's hard to get the breadth of perspective from even the best sampling from current events journals. We also talked a bit about the future of the United States, shaky foundations of our economy and issues with our educational and political systems.
I have a letter to finish writing. The feel of pen on paper is nice.
State of head: recently altered, as if I were restored from a "last known good backup" and reintegrated. Complex, but good. Hoping things stay like this. Also hoping I can pull the bits of my life that I've terribly neglected back into working order. I think I can manage that, at least some of it.
Concern: Port Authority's planned bus service cuts come January are very very nasty. For example, the 61A is planned to be cut entirely(view full entry for contents)
The Jayme Stone/Mansa Sissoko 「From Africa to Appalachia」 CD is worth checking out - it feels like appalachian, gaelic, and traditional african music got caught in a blender.
I made my way past the theory part of 「The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure」 - the chief problem around which it's arranged is whether the Marxian analysis of class antagonisms is correct. (view full entry for contents)
It was mentioned that my last post may have not been super clear - perhaps few of my posts actually are clear. So, I will go into a bit of depth on it, both as a (public) exercise for me and as a potential source of clarity for others. I have no idea how interesting this will be. (view full entry for contents)
So maybe that clears things up? I admit it may have been hard to draw all the meaning out of that post (or really, many of my posts), particularly without having read my posts for quite some time and/or having had extensive philosophical conversations with me - I've received little feedback on my posts (e.g. "I don't understand what you're saying in this part"), maybe either because the topics are uninteresting to most people, or because the normal reaction to reading dense prose is to just stop reading. Maybe both.
I suppose dense poetry would not necessarily be better than dense prose. It might be more entertaining though? People use blogs as social media in such different ways...
