"Transition"

Transition
Let us now turn to psychological facts. At night all leaping fountains speak with a louder tone; my soul, too is a leaping fountain says Zarathustra. Into the night life seems to be exiled --these are the famous words from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams--into the night life seems to be exiled what once ruled during the day. This sentence contains the entire modern psychology. Its great idea is the stratification of the psyche, the geological principle. The soul has its origin and is built in strata, and what we learned before in the organic field apropos of the construction of the big brain from the anatomic-evolutionary standpoint of banished aeons, is revealed by psychosis as a still-existing reality. We carry the ancient peoples in our souls and when the later acquired reason is relaxed, as in the dream or in drunkenness, they emerge with their rites, their prelogical mentality, and grant us an hour of mystic participation.

When the logical superstructure is loosened, when the scalp, tired of the onslaught of the prelunar states, opens the frontiers of consciousness about which there is always a struggle, then there appears the old, the unconscious, in the magical transmutation and identification of the "I" in the early experience of the everywhere and the eternal. The hereditary partimony of the middle brain lies still deeper and is eager for expression: if the covering is destroyed in the psychosis there emerges, driven upward by the primal instincts, from out the primitive-schizoid substructure, the gigantic archaic instinctive "I" unfolding itself limitlessly through the tattered psychological subject.


Quoted in "Plexus" the 2nd volume of the Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller

Henry Miller's Gourmet

At a Jewish delicatessen. Plenty of sour cream, radishes, onions, strudels, pastrami, smoked fish, all kinds of dark bread, creamy sweet butter, Russian tea, caviar, egg noodles--and Seltzer water.

In addition to fried onions and mashed potatoes we had succotash, beets and Brussels sprouts, with celery, stuffed olives and radishes on the side. We washed this down with red and white wine, the best obtainable. There were three kinds of cheese, followed by strawberries and rich cream. For a change we had some excellent coffee, which I prepared myself. Good, strong coffee with a bit of chicory in it. All that lacked was a good liqueur and Havana cigars.

Delicious breakfast, ...always fresh fruit and berries smothered in cream, muffins fresh from the oven, thick strips of bacon, marmalade, steaming coffee with whipped cream. I felt like a pasha.

A "snack" consisted of cold cuts, salami, headcheese, olives, pickles, sardines, radishes, potato salad, caviar, Swiss cheese, coffee, a German cheesecake or apple strudel, with kummel, port or Malaga to top it off.

What better than a caviar sandwich on black bread smeared with sweet butter--at 2:00 A.M.? With a glass of Chablis or Riesling to wash it down, certes. And to round it off, perhaps a dish of strawberries floating in sour cream, or if not strawberries then blackberries or huckleberries or blueberries or raspberries. I see halvah and baklava too. Goody goody!

Farm Bill Letter

Senator,

I am very concerned about the upcoming vote on the Farm Bill. I consider the existing farm bill a prime example of government "pork". The basic issue is whether we, the American consumers, should be allowed to choose which food and which farmers to support.

This is a very important issue, one that we are confronted with every week at the supermarket. Government subsidies have made it cheaper to buy Coca-cola than local apple juice. Why the government would want to promote corn syrup while we are in the midst of a diabetes crisis boggles my mind.

Please stay out of my dinner. Let the market decide which foods are produced (that's what capitalism is good at). By all means provide funding to retrain farmers who were dependent on subsidies, and put tariffs on imports from countries that lack our environmental and labor standards. But let us, the American people, choose how to spend our own money.

Thank you.

Conor Flynn

I Vote Every Week

Most Senators and Congressmen have email forms that can be used to contact them. Although they probably don't read 99.9% of the letters they receive, you might get lucky. Plus, there is usually a place to input the subject of an email, and I'm willing to bet that they do keep track of how many letters they get about bills they vote on.

Here are my Senators and Representatives
Senator Jon Kyl
Senator John McCain
Representative Gabrielle Giffords (85719-2857 )
Representative Raúl M. Grijalva (85735-8803)

On the Current State of What Paleontology Knows -- Not Much.

They don't even know what the land looked like. They know next to nothing about the major rituals or holidays, let alone what beliefs may have motivated them. They don't even know what their society did. We do know they built roads. But was the land farmed? Did they plant trees? They don't know when they lived in particular places, how much rain they had to work with, what the landscape was like. How the land changed as they abandonded it (or did it change first and they had to abandon it afterward). Cause and effect?

Seminar:
Alluvial geoarchaeology of fire history and culturally modified environments along the Eastern Mogollon Rim, Arizona. Chris Roos
Affiliation: Anthropology, University of Arizona

Choose Life

"Two paths lie before us. One leads to death, the other to life.

If we choose the first path—then we in effect become the allies of death, and in everything we do our attachment to life will weaken: our vision, blinded to the abyss that has opened at our feet, will dim and grow confused; our will, discouraged by the thought of trying to build on such a precarious foundation, will slacken; and we will sink into stupefaction, as though we were gradually weaning ourselves from life in preparation for the end.

On the other hand, if we reject our doom, and bend our efforts toward survival-then the anesthetic fog will lift: our vision, no longer straining not to see the obvious, will sharpen; our will, finding secure ground to build on, will be restored; and we will take full and clear possession of life again. "


Schell, Jonathan. Fate of the Earth.

A gigantic experiment with all living things...

I have become increasingly skeptical of the safety of common chemicals. It is not that they are untested, but that they may be fundamentally untestable. Results showing changes in the grandchildren of exposed rats and hormone mimics having effects at doses almost too low to measure persuade me that the Precautionary Principle should be applied. At present, "we are running a gigantic experiment with humans and all other living things as the subject."

I talked to a Nalgene sales representative who swore there was no danger from Bisphenol A. Turns out there's quite a body of literature to the contrary, Canada's environmental agency is reviewing its grandfathered status and San Francisco has already banned it. Here's the letter I wrote after doing my research:

Mr. _____,
We spoke at the University of Arizona vendor fair on Tuesday the 24th of April briefly about BPA in Nalgene products. As I indicated, our lab is very concerned about any and all hormone mimics. We recently had an incident, unrelated to BPA, involving possibly paper products or wheat that may have been contaminated with some sort of juvenile growth hormone, leading to the virtual eradication of our colony animals (Manduca sexta) and a slow down over several months in our ability to conduct research.

As you can see, we are very concerned about possible extraneous factors affecting our research. Despite your assurances to the contrary, I do not find the peer-reviewed research on BPA to show it to be conclusively safe for use in our lab. (CF. Murray TJ (2007). "Induction of mammary gland ductal hyperplasias and carcinoma in situ following fetal bisphenol A exposure." and Frederick S. vom Saal (2006). "Large effects from small exposures. II. The importance of positive controls in low-dose research on bisphenol A.") Therefore, we will continue to seek out alternatives to Nalgene plastic containers in our purchasing.

If you are aware of any new research showing the safety of Nalgene products I would be happy to hear about it. In the meantime, this letter is simply to express my concerns and my conclusions based on the information you gave me and the information I have available to me.

Thank you.


Related Articles:
Man-made Chemicals Detected In Newborns

England Tourism

Good old food in London

Sculpture Park on the Isle of Portland

50 and 100 miles from home

This is an old AAA map of Arizona, with modifications. Since my van can be towed 100 miles for free, it seemed prudent to determine the extent of my get-home-free zone. This is where I feel comfortable; anything beyond that starts to stretch my luck and my umbilical. This zone, my home, includes most of Arizona's sky island mountain ranges.

Opportunities

www.caretaker.org
www.coolworks.com
www.housesitter.com
www.organicvolunteers.com

Learning the Shape of Clouds

"learning the shape
of clouds" not
that every moment
has to be extra
ordinary. Kick
some leaves.
The underside
of some rocks
pinecones and
pale
leaflitter on
the dark earth
but some days
there is just a single
dark cricket under
the rock and the
leaves make an empty
rustling.

I'm moving in the
right direction. Except
the fire in my
lower stomach and
the surge at the back
of the brain
and the eyelids
when breathing.
Your own footsteps
on the way back.
Tire tracks gradually
you hear only
the swish
of pants
inside the muffle
of hat and jacket

Thank-you for Your Help

because of you I walked out one last time
into the Baja sun and bright concrete surround
I said goodbye to nobody and thanked no one for their help
silently without moving my lips
no vibration on take-off
blink and then the clouds opened over Dallas
the grid-plan
welcome to the American machine
consumed and then the west Texas farmfields,
Guadalupe mountains, White Sands Nat'l Monument,
the rocky backbone of the continental divide,
islands perched in the sky,
home: a rusted plane by the runway
two beautiful women with perfect posture
walking away from me into the setting Tucson sun

Why Did You Do That?

Why do other people act the way they do? Actions that you can't explain through values or ideology, like good environmentalists watching TV instead of the sunset. I think everyone has a list of weird inexplicable actions that other people do. For what reason? Personally, and I realize this is a personal failing and I'm working on it, I've always chalked up inexplicable actions to stupidity. The reason the ex-hippies paved over our vegetable garden was because they didn't realize how important it was or how much they'd miss it, nor how easy an alternative solution might have been. They didn't realize because they didn't really want to think about it, or they couldn't.

Since realizing my own explanation I've stopped believing it as much and have become more interested in other people's explanations. There is usually a dominant one, a recurring cognitive theme. For example, R, either through projection or the basic goodness of his nature, thinks that the reason people do bad things like cut you off in traffic is because although they know better, they just don't care. This lack of care is, for him, the ultimate indicator of all wrong actions. R has always been of the Old School of medieval honor and loyalty. For him, Good and Evil are daily battles.

I was recently rereading Catcher in the Rye, and over and over again Holden Caulfield, the dropout kid, explains people's behavior by calling them "phonies". I like that. In their hearts they know better and maybe actually are good people, but they end up doing the exact opposite because of society or because of something mysterious called "growing up". Getting used to being phony. Hunter S. Thompson famously described the Problem with Americans as "Fear and Loathing". Ever the wordsmith, he chose one of the most evocative and perspicacious phrases to describe other's failings. People live in suburbia because they're afraid of the city, afraid of others. And how much of that behavior transitions from fear to a kind of sublimating hatred; no better word exists than "loathing". In contrast, Steinbeck writes about "ignorance of the self" being the root of all evil.

I think he might be on to something with the whole Socrates "self-knowledge" angle, but why stop there? I'm an ecosystem Buddhist, a way of thinking I learned from the Zen/Beat poet Gary Snyder. According to him, we shouldn't judge others because everyone has a part to play in the drama-dream of life. We shouldn't judge warmongers for warmongering anymore than we should judge the hawk for killing rabbits. That is their (ecological) role in this life, a role we can vehemently fight, but not one that we should stoop to judging personally. I'll do my thing, tend to my business, and you do yours. Can any one explanation be more than a crutch? I and those around me deserve better.

Molecular Biology is either ahead of its time...

...or full of BS.

I just quit my graduate "genetics" course because it was just shape-filling protein models with a prof waving his hands at a Plato's Cave Powerpoint screen. He's a genetics guy but genetics isn't pretty enough for Powerpoint so he spent the whole semester talking about molecular genetics, which either a) he doesn't understand or b) nobody understands. Probably both, and they definitely don't know that they don't understand it. I have better things to do with my time than listen to Just So Stories (and then Regurgitate them on the midterms). I want to go on record pointing this out, so that when the Revolution comes I'll have bragging rights.

things i found on a summer hike at a ski resort in the lower sierras

eye drops and a single dime and...

the drone of flies

economies of organisms, leaves, sticks and color

mountains

so white?

i thought there were clouds over on the horizon

will you write after their end?

record birds, heartbeats, melting snow

icecubes on the face, keep me awake

the hours field mice spend gnawing on nuts

dreams speeded up to cartoonishness

the way a bicycle amplifies someone running

white charcoal on the black foundations

a house gutted by red fire as tall as the green pine

arrows anchor the earth where the man, his wife, and their children stood

and what is money?

and can you add inside a black hole?

and

...a keychain thermometer, a tree covered in lady bugs,...

Peak Trash: the End of Cheap Garbage

>>>>State of the Union Speech, USA, 2025.
My fellow Americans, as we all know, during most of the Century of Oil, discovery of new deposits increased to keep pace with demand. But since oil was a finite nonrenewable resource, this could not last forever. What is now known as "Peak Oil" occurred when the available deposits began to decrease, even as demand continued to increase. During the ensuing years the end of cheap oil brought an end to everything that was made from cheap oil: plastic, fertilizer (agriculture), transportation, energy, and, basically, the entire pre-Peak Oil economy.

However, that crisis was not as bad as some alarmists had predicted. Americans are a hardy, industrious folk, and a Solution was found to the problems of post-Peak Oil times. Due to the astounding foresight of our ancestors, it appears that huge deposits of useful plastic were safely stored away in "Landfills" in case of just such an eventuality as Peak Oil.

Our economy now relies almost exclusively on trash harvesting and services related to the scrounging of this precious resource. Thanks to the generosity of our forefathers, their used styrofoam cups and plastic milk jugs saved our country from Peak Oil and helped make America one of the richest countries in the post-Peak Oil world. Yet, a new crisis awaits us. Today, I bring you news from our leading scientists that we may be headed toward an end to our supply of cheap garbage. Unfortunately, it appears that garbage, like oil, is a finite non-renewable resource. Even as our demand for trash continues to grow, there are fewer and fewer Landfills to supply that demand.

We believe that this is the beginning of a new era, an era that will challenge each and every one of us; the era of Peak Trash. Without major new deposits of plastic plates, spoons, forks, and knives, some Americans may be forced to do without when they eat their dinners of fermented compost. What will the children of tomorrow use to carry water from the sewer ditch when all the milk jugs and styrofoam cups are gone? When all the rusted car frames are occupied, where will we find shelter? Without plastic bags, what will we wear to church on Sundays? We can only hope that, just as we were saved from Peak Oil by the miraculous foresight of our ancestors, we will likewise be saved from the ravages of Peak Trash by some other miraculous intervention. Thank you. [applause]
>>>>>>>>

Cognitive dissonance...in a fly?

[diagram from Kravitz lab "boxing flies" work]

A couple hours phenology
on top of the mountain
cumquat in a plastic bag
white butterfly
after half an hour
some bees two? three?
above the valley
two eagles circled and cried
spit out cumquat seed
phenology? or phenomenology
threw the banana peel and i could almost see it
the I almost disappears --> goal

then a pair of big flies, then a pair of small flies
17 chia seeds drying on a pair of trousers
the gel does its job; hardens stuck to the cloth
cotton cloth is also gel
tug-of-war between them (like heat, electricity)
the actual neural decision-making logic of a fly -- scratch scratch it goes
strobe light-like
to investigate the cumquat seed
then shies away behind the bush

nothing here is human-sized
I won't be Ostrich-sized.
A spent caccoon hangs from a dead branch on a live bush
inches above the rocks
ALL life uses DNA. ALL countries trade with dollars.

should i follow the white butterfly? write her down?
if cities are a good thing than free trade is a good thing.
as i leave in the mid afternoon
two butterflies fight or dance
above

Teaching lesson plans

teaching lesson plans
1) find the center of the triangle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incircle



2) alphabet on beyond zebra cyrillic arabic etc

Apes

"The family Hominidae consisting of gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and humans collectively known as the "great apes".

APES; fellow travelers, uncles, caricatures, demons. They look out of the same eyes, see each otther as we see each other. Of all animals, the creatures we have perhaps the best chance of understanding. Closest. Kissing cousins. But Different, their faces twisted, their bodies warped, like us, but reflected imperfectly. All of these words for Different mean, somehow, Inferior. And, like the mentally retarded, it takes more cognitive machinery than most humans posses to understand them, irremediably separate, but Equal. Fellow voyagers clutching at one another's limbs on the edge of the cliff gazing out over the inexplicable universe. Can you name the four living species of ape (five, counting homo sapiens)?

Q: What is the point of Education?

Q: What is the point of Education?
A: To teach obedience and limit learning.

"The whole system was built on the premise that isolation from first-hand information and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders."
-John Taylor Gatto, describing the adoption of Prussian-style education in 19th Century America.

CF. essays by Milton Friedman, David Henderson, others

notes
http://www.gracellewellyn.com
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com

good essay
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/hp/frames.htm

http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich.html
www.infed.org


Many people complain about government waste, but I welcome it…efficiency is not a desirable thing if somebody is doing a bad thing.…Government is doing things that we don’t want it to do; so the more money it wastes, the better.

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman,
http://www.reason.com/news/show/118175.html

Guest post from Henry

Not that long ago there was a bad Evil Man, a sorcerer so powerful the seas themselves bent to his command. One day from atop his throne of bare hard rock his saw a princess collecting pebbles from the water's edge. At once enthralled by her beauty and furious that she would take his property, he cast a spell to fence her in. The sun had shown brightly at the hour of her birth, and his magic was little against her: moments after the spell was cast it broke, leaving her free to leave. So the sorcerer recast the spell, and again it broke, and again he cast it, again and over again. And so his cruelty imprisoned the both of them. It is said that they both are still there, trapped... but beware if you find that hidden beach: the Evil Man's craaazy eyes may spot you too. (holla!)

Photojournalism is "objective".

Photojournalism is "objective". Instead of telling "stories", photos are chosen for holistic interest, a slice that is judged significant through an event that may or may not be judged significant. Because visual interest is often associated with traumatic experiences, a fair number of the major events of the day are reported, but also a cross-section of interesting minor events that, taken as a more-random sample, yield a more objective overall world-wide "picture".

What would constitute a truly "random" sampling of photographs? What does God see?

And yes, I realize that I'm confusing "objective"'s two meanings, both the metaphorical and the photographic. This is intentional, as are the potential dual meanings of "picture" and other terms that seem to have parallel or harmonious meanings in both the realm of images (CF. Wittgenstein's aphorisms) and our notion of truth. Despite what they say about Photoshop, seeing is still [closer than reading to] believing.

Friday CogSci: Conditioning on perceptual cues.

Ben Backus from Penn

Dr. Backus asked the question, which pairing of perceptual stimuli can be classically conditioned? Not just learning greater acuity, but actually learning perceptual experience; "the way the world looks". Can stimuli from different modalities influence each other? See for example the illusion of simultaneiety when someone claps their hands together a fair distance away. How does perceptual learning compare with other forms (appetetive, aversive) conditioning?

Interesting that, given these illusions, Dr. Backus assumes that visual perception is "optimal" e.g. uses all sources of information. What does it mean to argue that a structured representation is "correct"?

So, is the cue arbitrary? No, some cues (unconditioned stimulus) work better than others when paired with a given conditioned stimulus. For example, sound doesn't work to flip a Necker Cube illusion, but it does work on the bouncing/ghost ball illusion. There was a lively discussion afterward and during lunch about what makes a good model species, whether evolutionary justifications can explain (not just post hoc) what cues will work and which won't.

Is learning incremental or abrupt (i.e. paradigm shift)? Incremental, although perception is abrupt ("all or nothing").

Is there a "learning to learn" effect? No.