Kayaking Prince William Sound'08

Initial report from the Prince William Sound Expedition '08.
I was pleased and privileged to join in the preparation and adventuring of my good friend Corinna. I jetted to Alaska to drop in on her three month kayak tour of Prince William Sound.

Chris, another Alaskan native, quit his job to join us, and we were soon joined by a fourth, the recently matriculated Penelope.

The planning was long and intense, the maps scurrulous, the route difficult, the weather tempestuous, all under a constantly illuminated sky.

We traveled a route that many have traveled before, but for us, the first time.

Each walks their own path, even as they travel together.

See photos of the trip.

Orwellian Cognitive Science

The scariest thing about cognitive science is its discovery and quantization of human behavior -- raising the specter of controlling human behavior. Behaviorism is dormant, not dead, and at casual luncheons graduate students and their advisers wonder aloud if that wasn't the ghost of BF Skinner they saw over near the punch bowl. Advertisers already correlate our unconscious (evolutionarily-based?) color biases to make us think orange and blue detergent is cheap and powerful.

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If you're not scared by biology, the science of understanding the secret underpinnings of life, you don't understand it. And if you're not scared of neuroscience, the science of understanding the secret foundations of the human mind, you don't understand it. Our only hope is that it may prove impossible to understand.