Ulysses! One page a day! Through this RSS feed! It's techno-literary geek heaven!   

[via Household Opera]

Joys of late-night obsesso-blogging! 

The timestamps reveal the pathology. Haven't felt this way in a year.

You know you want it.

Cruising for John Kerry's running mate?!

I need some kind of tag.

HOGBLOG says:

If you like videos of elderly white men rapping about social-democratic politics, you should visit the website of former NDP Leader Ed Broadbent.

Oh, I do! I do!

I'm thinking this is not the sort of thing I should read about before I go to sleep. Elderly white men rapping about social-democratic politics are probably going to make an 8-hour long appearance in my dreams tonight. And I'm strangely afraid it won't be the first time this will have happened to me.

Just checking out Dave Pollard's blog and was caught by a cogent, short summary that he gives of some of the discoveries of cognitive science:

Nowhere is the intellectual and imaginative poverty of psychology so clear as in our (lack of) understanding of how the brain processes images. Years of medieval torture of small mammals to try to understand this process has produced only a sketchy, inconsistent and contradictory set of theories: The retina, they claim, sends only critical data about movement, edges, and colour to the brain, which reconstructs the rest of what it 'sees' from memory.

I'm not sure if this is useful for his larger environmental argument about our active refusal to see "unpleasant" things, like mutilated animals, but I was reminded of other aspect of how our perceptions are formed (in the mind, for lack of a better way of putting it.) An initial perception, picked up by the retina, and be instantly "forgotten" and changed if we perceive something that contradicts our hardwired expectations about how one image should succeed another.

No one knows when in time this happens. Some people have argued that we have an active sensor, like the networks that add a slight delay to live broadcast so that they can bock nipples (well, and other things.) Others argue that, like the workers in 1984 who constantly rewrite history to match the present, we just rewrite what we say.

It might seem that the second argument is the more likely, but it's by no means clear -- or at least it wasn't when I was studying these things.

(Ack, having a "post-academic" moment thinking of the accretion of years since I left academia.)

Yes, it is a cute pig.