Best presentation I’ve seen on how brain structures and processes give rise to consciousness and the sense of self

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Exactly like being right — Insightful talk on the bubble of rightness we are each stuck in.

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I arranged to be replacing a heating element in my glass-top cook surface when my friend Jerry–troubleshooter and fixer extraordinaire–arrived to retrieve some project management books I’m loaning him. Jerry had given me a multimeter last year. I had never removed it from the package, and had little idea what to do with it. Wife, [...]

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My advisor was sufficiently satisfied with my dissertation idea paper to form my review committee. Welcome to Drs Mark Givins and Qi Wang. I look forward to pressing on to completion!

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Today I updated my database to MySQL 5, updated WordPress to 3.1, and fixed the pesky mis-rendering of emphasis tags (<em> … </em>) by the Talian theme this site uses. The fix for the style.css file is adding the following to style.css for the theme: i,em { display: inline !important; } (thanks to chaoskaiser for [...]

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I read today that the Dalai Lama’s nephew, Jigme Norbu, was struck and killed by a driver in Florida. (My sincere condolences to the family.) He was from Bloomington, IN, where his late father, the Dalai Lama’s brother, Thubten Norbuhold, had been a professor. In the early 1980s, a friend of mine had met the [...]

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This article provides examples of an engineering concept regarding what makes systems (engineered or natural) either robust or failure prone. The latter are characterized by lack of redundancy, interconnectedness, efficiency, and sensitivity to stress. Together, these characteristics amplify the effects of exponentially increasing strain prior to system collapse. Cascading effects follow from the lack of [...]

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Our view on the morning of 7 September. The Albuquerque vicinity has many great hiking, mountain biking, and horseback riding trails.

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The Economist, a respectable and generally conservative news and analysis source, provides a well-reasoned argument for legalizing drugs. Even (especially) if you fear that legalization would lead to greater use, you may find some interesting insights in this article.

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Fremont, CA, based Solyndra announces a new photovoltaic system that can be mounted less expensively, resists winds, and is efficient collecting solar radiation from 360° without sun tracking systems. The Solyndra system claims one-half the installation cost of solar panels. This is significant since half the cost of a residential solar panel system is for [...]

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