Joke of the Day

The following sentence is from an article about Larry Squire, a neuroscientist at Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Diego.

[About Squire:]He is a leading investigator of the organization and structure of mammalian memory and pioneered the brain-based distinction between declarative and procedural memory, or as he later refined it, between declarative and nondeclarative memory systems.

What got me chuckling, and of course, a reporter wrote the article, not Professor Squire, was the word in the above quote: "refined." In the context, and to a non-scientist, the opposite of refined seems to be a better description.  Quite apart from the general giggles descriptions of academic stuff can produce.

The Backyard

One man found a treasure in his backyard. He dug up a gold lantern.
But he did not dig up any candles, so the lantern was of little use.

Binary Thought -- part 8,930,281.

"...[W]hy psi phenomena flourish best in [the] darkness [of
statistics] is ...hard to comprehend. If the mind can alter the
statistical outcome of many tosses of heavy dice, why is it powerless
to rotate a tiny arrow, magnetically suspended in a vacuum to
eliminate friction?...The failure of such direct unequivocal tests is
in my opinion one of the great scandals of parapsychology."

These are the words of Martin Gardner, who for almost three decades
wrote the column on mental puzzles for Scientific American. He has
written quite a few books pointing out charlatans and sloppy research
in the psychical research laboratory. In the quote above he is
referring to the fact that there is a statistically significant effect
pointing to some kind of psychical power of mind (so-called) when
tests are done in runs, rather than individual tests of say,
precognition. So if you guess what card will come up next, you get
significant results (better than chance) only if you average the
results from a large number of tries.

Gardner has thankfully pointed out many many cases where people
cheated on these tests. He seems annoyed that there remain these
statistical results that confirm the existence of the so-called
psychic powers, and that cannot be explained away.

It would not be so odd that an individual person cannot demonstrate
psychic powers in the lab, but that large scale test results do, if we
recall the map Jan Cox used, which spoke of a global mind. If the
individual mind is merely part of a larger phenomenon, and not itself
any kind of self actuating engine, as is so fondly believed, then
these results are what one would expect. But the intellectual cannot
relinquish his dream that his rational, binary, mind is an adequate
tool to investigate everything he might encounter. So he gets annoyed.
And yet the cosmos keeps on spinning.

The worth of a bird in the...

Road.  How often do you see birds that have been run over. Not often. They  have another direction available to them, they can and generally do, go up if there is any need.  The words of Jan Cox, and other real thinkers, are kind of like dead birds in the road.  By words I mean spoken, printed, words.  What can you tell of flight from a flattened mass of feathers? Yet the common asphault is the only means of communication to groups of people for someone such as Jan. 

 

The proportion of birds on the road compared to the sky -- how tiny the number on the road, how vast the song and feathers in the sky.  Such, it may be, is the amount a mystic like Jan Cox could say, compared to what he knows.

Numbering Energies

Of the maps Jan Cox created to help us glimpse the panorma we fall into, that of the three flows, was one of the most durable.  "C" was the creative flow of energy, D, the conserving, called sometimes destructive, and E, the irrelevant, that which man could not grasp as relevant with his binary mind.  All three being always present in an event, Jan rarely mentioned that three was an arbitrary number, though using alphabetic letters to signify them, hinted at the other flows. For the first time I am wondering about A and B flows, and remembering from another mystic, the phrase "fundament of the stars."  And how some today would consider that description old fashioned, and irrelevant, as if we already knew, now, this fundament, because we have particle physics, and string theory, as if THESE ideas addressed the question of Job: who has fathomed the fundament of the stars. As if the passage of two and a half millenia could answer such a question.  But such is the unempirical drive of the modern mentality, that binary rigidity which hides one's ignorance, in all but a few questioners.  Perhaps.

Possumility

There is a kind of knowing which notices motion in shadows.  It need not be a grand knowing, but when defined as a knowledge of the partial, it can be...

Cyberia

It is still a question to me the extent to which cyberspace can promote the growth of real understanding. Cyberspace must always be in the past, after all, ALWAYS, -- because it lives in words. And, as Jan Cox said, TKS, This Kind of Stuff, only exists in the present. Words are of and in the past, because of, for one reason, the neurological processing time they involve. By the time a word is said, comprehended, the reality of which we are a part is already different from whatever prompted that particular word. Where is there, in cyberspace, silence. It is all words, there is no silence in cyberspace, and is that silence, or approximation thereto, not a goal? These comments of course do not address the reality of tigers, --- merely the usefulness of cyberian tigers.