He was in a committee meeting, arguing for more funding for his department. A lifetime of work, precious research. Alan, the manager for the larger college of engineering at the university, was trying to find a way to make his dollars stretch further.. and then.. he wasn't... the lighting seemed a little bit different, and Alan was frozen in mid-gesture, mid-speak. Simon was confused, and actually felt a little drunk -- tried to remember if he had had any alcohol today. After a moment of watching the frozen features of his colleagues, he got up and walked out of the room, out of the building. He wandered out of the campus, to the street, past the coffeeshops, to the river. The people out here were moving, but things were strangely quiet, no horns on the road, people walking with a calm, measured step instead of the mix of people in a hurry and people resting. He felt a mild headache, but tried to ignore it as he sat on the bench. "Hello", he heard from his left.. a woman, whom he had not seen when sitting down... he turned to her. She was clothed in thick white robes, looking very out of place, here in Oxford. He nodded back, and turned towards the river again.. things wern't flowing the way he thought they would -- the water seemed somehow more surreal. She made a little noise to get his attention, and asked "What do you see, Dr. Clyffe?". He turned back at her, surprised, but at the same time, distracted by his headache. "Who are you?" "What do you see, Dr Clyffe?", this time, a bit more insistant. "I see the river, but things seem a bit odd. Everything's a bit odd.. the colours, the feel of the wind on my face... I feel like I've been here before.."

It was always a nostalgic feeling, saying goodbye for the last time, especially when the person you're saying goodbye to doesn't even know you yet. The last breath from a decommissioned power supply, the final askeance for a long-dormant computer.. "Remember to bring the subject back in the last memory recorded in their image, so they can hold things together long enough" .. One of the things that had been learned about sanity in the painstaking decades was that it was a lot stronger (and different) than they had thought. Sanity grabs on to the stimuli one is exposed to and violently forces it into existing paradigms, holding itself together like a pair of skis. Absent stimuli, or given nonsensical stimuli, the brain will still coerce things into something that makes sense, instilling with absolute certainty that things do make sense. "Subjects will continue to stitch things from their memory together to continue their subjective experience, with the strength of their models of reality then beginning a slow race with their ability to learn from the feedback this provides them. Eventually, the feedback destroys their coherency." And so the research teams spent years finding ways to slow the feedback, to allow such lost visits. She never thought she would use it for this purpose, to say goodbye to her husband and fellow researcher, especially before he ever met her. The brilliant research that allowed the injectee to see the subject's world, perspective, while this happened had been his, and she looked around, seeing the little aspects of his reality, his signature touch. Another way to know a person, entirely different than sharing a bed, sharing a life. Alien, and yet so suggestive of his being.. She sat with him, mourning his long-past death with a familiar stranger as the world slowly dissolved around them.

He dimly sensed that something was wrong with him.. not just alcohol, he thought.. a cancer? A stroke? He slowly began to sweat, feeling odd, and yet the woman sitting next to him seemed such good company.. almost as if she knew him. He felt his heart fill with sad hope.. Am I dying? Why is it that now, of all times, I feel like I'm finally meeting someone I could imagine being with forever?

" Up on a mountain

       Encased in solar rays
      Beyond electric dreams
   Of inarticulate passion plays
      Coming down a mountain
       Eons of a human rain
The conversation of impassive planets
    Intercepted by a human being      "

Yesterday, I had my Cognitive Neuropsychology final, and while I think it was a really good class, I think I did very poorly on the final -- I studied the wrong material, and most of it was on Neurology and Linguistics while I studied other topics. Damn! Of all the classes that were important to do well on, this was a really big one. At least I'm done with classes for this semester, and will have a bit of a break (just work, no classes) for awhile. I might use a vacation day sometime soon just to enjoy nature and wind down a bit. I have many saved up, having carried over well over half from last year. The semester, for better or worse, is over. Unrelated to scholastics/work, I've learned 2 things about 2 pieces of software recently while doing classwork. First, Microsoft Excel is pretty clever. It's notion of cut'n'paste is pretty impressive -- it really has a good notion of 'do what I mean'. I don't have much to compare it to -- I haven't tried making gnumeric or starcalc do the same thing. I don't use spreadsheets regularly, but was using it to manage data that I was going to import into SPSS to do ANOVA tests. Secondly, I learned that SPSS is a pain in the butt to use. It's pretty buggy, quirky, and many dialogues are really nonintuitive. Oh well -- I've seen much worse software for that kinda thing. Its interface reminds me a lot of excel, but more restrictive. As a side note, I'd like to learn the theory and mathematics behind Analysis of Covariance (ANOVA being analysis of variance) -- I think it'll be quite useful.