This is the basic epistemological question.

At age fifteen I had some questions about this, based on experiences I couldn't quite account for. Where are the boundaries between me and other people?

I had a feeling from Tommy Loeser.

What does that mean? Whose feelings were they? All my life I've had this confusion from time to time ~ in the last few years I've come to think in a totally different way about some of these experiences. More about that another time. At fifteen, in the midst of a hormone storm and the challenges of adolescent, I had no tools to handle them.

Now check out this insanity:

The fact that I even did it, although she was perfectly willing to part with the money, disgusts me. That I kept it so long disgusts me.

I don't remember the details, but on the face of it I borrowed a dollar from E sometime in the summer and paid it back in September. How disgusting! Why I'm no better than a thief, really!

Do we detect a tad of over-reaction here?

11:08:00 PM    please comment []

Next time you head for the hills for a little winter hike, consider taking some of those little packets of ketchup with you...

"That tomato sauce H was excellent," helicopter pilot Lieutenant Steven Lownie said. "It was like Day-Glo."

  please comment []

Natalie Angier reports on new research on women's brains that indicate that there is a pleasure center reward associated with cooperative behavior. In other words, we get a glow on by treating each other well. At least, most of us do. It seems that there may be a certain percentage who just aren't wired up the same way.

Assuming that the urge to cooperate is to some extent innate among humans and reinforced by the brain's feel-good circuitry, the question of why it arose remains unclear. Anthropologists have speculated that it took teamwork for humanity's ancestors to hunt large game or gather difficult plant foods or rear difficult children. So the capacity to cooperate conferred a survival advantage on our forebears.

Yet as with any other trait, the willingness to abide by the golden rule and to be a good citizen and not cheat and steal from one's neighbors is not uniformly distributed.

I'd like to hear the results of a similar study of men. How about we start with those chumps at Enron or WorldCom?

4:29:37 PM    please comment []

In a brief Wired report on the 31st International Conference on High Energy Physics which opens Wednesday in Amsterdam, the reporter ~ Diana Michele Yap ~ delivers herself of the following paragraph:

Every now and then, published pure research spins off into moneymaking products for everyday life, or technology for military weapons. It would be interesting to determine what fraction of this furthering of horizons of conscious knowledge is applicable to humanity's practical needs, as defined by a given government. Not many poets get bread from the federal Department of Energy. America's national science labs do.

This strikes me as the lamest form of editorial aside. In fact, the article contains several other examples of this snide attitude. Does it add anything to the value of the piece? I certainly didn't think so. I've got nothing against a well-informed coherent critique of any field, or any program of government spending. But I don't think this qualifies.

How about you?

4:24:18 PM    please comment []

I love cosmology. In my view, only a person without imagination could fail to be inspired, filled with wonder, and tantalized by the pictures we try to build of the origins and fate of the universe.

The latest twist in the cosmology story is the putative presence of "dark energy" ~ which, although not in any way directly observed, is required to explain current observations that the universe is not only expanding, but expanding in an accelerating fashion.

If the idea of an infinitely cold and dark future for the universe is too depressing, then check out the current theory of "branes" (from membranes) which is an offshoot of string theory. Our universe may be just one brane floating in a multi-dimensional space with many others ~ and the occasional collisions or gravitational interactions could be what sparks the next Big Bang.

Gosh!

We sure don't know. But astronomy and the ever more fabulous telescopes we have here on earth and in space are essentially the poor man's particle accelerator, allowing us to look back into the past when exotic conditions prevailed, and providing us with ever more strange phenomena to try to account for.

Read more about it in this New York Times article.

4:00:36 PM    please comment []

Not even exchanging glances.

I survived my first social occasion with B- and others tonight at the showing of Strangers on a Train tonight for Screen on the Green. It was a nice group of people, and I had plenty of folks to interact with, so there wasn't any awkwardness for me.

Part of me hopes he wakes up in a cold sweat three months from now realizing he made a horrible, horrible mistake.

2:18:19 AM    please comment []

This is a remarkably mundane series of entries from the Wayback Journal in which I comment on my abilities to hex our own side in soccer, announce that my new friend H is not only French, but without obvious personal flaw, and find yet another reason not to practice the flute (and *surprise* I watch TV instead).

It's amazing to realize what a huge hyped deal the Billie Jean King v. Bobby Riggs match was. It managed to attain a level of cultural significance that was utterly out of proportion to a mediocre tennis match.

12:41:11 AM    please comment []