Sunday 26 May 2002

Cheap lobster at A&P (a local supermarket, don’t know their coverage; just so you know); yum. I start with the tail, broken off—lots of easy, tasty meat for energy to work on the rest. I then lever off the top of the carapace from the undercarriage, and scoop out the delicate green glands, and, with good luck, the red eggs. The legs come off next, close to the undercarriage, and joint by joint I suck the meat out. Mm. Then the best part, but the most effortful; cracking the undercarriage bit by bit, scooping out the white meat. Then the claws, joint by joint. The claws themselves are last. The small “thumbs” usually aren’t tasty and not worth the effort, but I hate waste so I eat these and the tips of the “fingers” before the meatier “palms.” 11:53:10 PM    comment []

categories: Commonplaces

Amy Tan. "Memory feeds imagination." [Motivational Quotes of the Day] 1:18:51 PM    comment []

categories: Computationally Minded

Sometimes you use a utility so long that it seems you know it intimately, and then someone goes on and shows you something really cool with it that you imagined you had to hack it out yourself. People like Dru Lavigne make it look understandable that you’d be so enticed by other features that you’d miss some really nifty things about that workhorse. In the tar article, she often uses blatantly pedagogical errors to prove points (and perhaps bulk the article up) but it’s charmingly reminiscent of how any person comes to learn Unix command line—trial and error, usually sitting beside some wizard who knows how it’s done and why things happen. My introducers were several engineering students at USC roundabout 1990 and 1991 or so, when I was bumming around in the engineering labs instead of studying the history of American experience. Eugene, Brian, Mike, Ron (the Ecuadorian), and Dave (the Los Angelista?). I haven’t spoken to any of them since I left USC, but whenever I use the command line to simplify my life, I often think of their patient if mocking guidance through the Solaris command line on SparcStations. 1:10:48 AM    comment []

Arrgh. Along with the Visor, I lost Aparna’s and Monica’s numbers as well. Nrgh. I have to get in touch with Monica soon. 12:40:34 AM    comment []

Anybody Really Know What Time Is?[by way of Wired.com] Saniga’s method (ahem) does not seem an odd way to explore the nature of the psychological experience of time. The most profoundly rewarding breakthroughs in neuroscience and psychology comes from studying the effects of brain damage to specific sites. As for the crossing-over effect, Carolyn Dewald, my teacher at USC, once told my class about an experience of watching her body react to various driving obstacles when presented with an immediate and life-threatening road incident as if from a distance. Husserl (was it?) also considered these individual moments in trying to create a pure phenomenology of experience, “bracketing” particular instants in time, removing them from their context. While this more famously led to the philosophies of existentialism (as Sartre was an enthusiastic student of this tradition) one sees that this had an appeal for the scientific community as well. The first psychological laboratories were set up in Germany to create psychophysical experiences designed to bracket sensory observations in time. As more of these original experiments come to light through recent translations, we find that they were not so subjective as American tradition would have them: Alan’s experiments seem to come from this line of research. My understanding is that various mistranslations early in the history of American psychology were made in order to strengthen or denigrate lines of research around the time of the structuralists, much as mistranslations of the Russian acting teacher Stanislavski were made to legitimate its bastard child, the Method school of acting. Where was I? Oh, right: Bierman’s experiments would seem to point to George A Kelly’s framework for mental models anticipating events, except that a different response obtained for mundane baseline imagery as opposed to erotic or disturbing imagery. The use of disturbing imagery would make me think that this experiment needs heavy supervision. As I have said before, I always wanted to use those scalp skin conductance thingamabobbies but Maggie always said they were too expensive. This guy however repeated his electrical skullcap experiments with MRIs! Some guys get all the funding. Sigh. 12:32:35 AM    comment []