Proto Indo-Europen

Excerpts from Book that I read


Cognitive study of Autumn colors

Fossil of Language

24 Jan 2013 2 142
Writing is a kind of fossil and so can tell us a little about the languages that have been recorded since it was invented. While it shares a lot with spoken language, including most of its words and much organizational structure, writing cannot be considered the bare bones of speech, for it is something else entirely. Writing is static, structured by the convent ions of punctuation and the use of space. The kinds of sentences that occur in writing bear only an indirect relationship to the more free-flowing and complex structures of speech. Writing has no additional channels for avoiding ambiguity, as speech has with intonation and gesture. And writing is only six thousand years old. ~ Page 5 [Introduction] "The First Word" ~ Christine Kenneally

LEVIATHAN

19 Feb 2013 1 7
files.libertyfund.org/files/869/0161_Bk.pdf www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm

Internet map 1024.jpg Wikipedia

09 Dec 2012 1 195
In a 2005 speech, the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, for the first time offered an estimate of the size of the Internet in total bytes of memory. He put the total at 5 million trillion bytes – or, based on the average size of the computer byte – about 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (50 sex-trillion) bites. All of this memory, representing a sizeable portion of all human knowledge and memory, was stored virtually in more than 150 million websites, and physically in an estimated 75 million services located around the world. None of these numbers were accurate, other researchers added, and some might of off in either direction by a factor of five. Of this total size of the Internet, Schmidt estimated that Google, by far the world’s leading search-engine company, had managed after seven years to index 200 trillion bytes (terabytes), or just .004 percent of the Net. Most of the rest, he admitted, was essentially terra incognita – a vast region of unexplored data that might never be fully known. At the current rate, Google would need 300 years to index the entire Internet – and that, Schmidt added, was only assuming the impossible: that the Net probably grew by several trillion bytes just during the course of Schmidt’s speech. By 2010, these unimaginable contents of the Net were accessed by just short of 1 billion personal computers, nearly 700 million smart-phones (the total for 2011), and several hundred million other devices large and small, in the hands of estimated 2 billion users worldwide. Some of these users, mostly from the developed world, arrived in cyber-pace using powerful computers and handheld devices, linked via wire-less networks or broadband cable, and stored hundreds of gigabytes of memory of their own. Others, newer to the Web and often from developing nations, had reached the Internet any way they could: dial-up modems, cell phones rented from corner stands, desktop computers stationed in classrooms and local libraries, Internet cafes of the kind long gone from the West. But they’d make it at last, and whether they were selling goods on eBay or following bloggers covering events their censored national media wouldn’t touch or taking online classes at distant universities they would never see, they were the first generation to have access to the world’s accumulated memory. And because of that, they inhabited a unique new reality that name of their ancestors had ever experienced. For the first time, these billions (and 2 billion more are expected to join this global conversation within the next decade) had access to almost everything every human has ever known. And it was at their fingertips. And it was as good as free. ~ Page 238/239

This is you talking

From King to supplicant

29 Sep 2012 106
In the parade of progress, stationary telephone systems were not left behind. During the 1990s, the cornucopia of technical advancement was spilled over all of us. A gentle voice, conducted by a technology-driven, cost-cutting management, usually starts with the heartwarming affirmation, “Your call is important to us. Please hold while we ignore it.” That is, of course, only overture. “To listen to our 112 menu items press 1. for the latest running total of the numbers of customers who say they would rather than do business with us again, press 2. for someone who is very nice person but doesn’t have a clue, and in any case is on maternity leave, press 3.” After 11 minutes and 33 second, the finale comes in a crescendo: “The person you are trying to reach is either on the other line or not in the office. Please try later.” That rips it. The companies call the customer king and treat him worse than a supplicant. I say get rid of voice answering systems immediately. They are offending customers and putting them in telephone hell. Replace those machines with friendly high-touch operators. The corporations will see where the real cost efficiencies can be made. I urge any CEO whose company has a voice answering system to call his company and see whether he can get through it himself. That eye-opening exercise would hopefully trigger great entrepreneurial opportunities to create a useful customer service system tht doesn’t turn into an infuriating maze with no exit. Again, we have to think more about the ecology of technology. ~ Page 105

The Crisis of Print

12 Jun 2013 1 109
In the parade of progress, stationary telephone systems were not left behind. During the 1990s, the cornucopia of technical advancement was spilled over all of us. A gentle voice, conducted by a technology-driven, cost-cutting management, usually starts with the heartwarming affirmation, “Your call is important to us. Please hold while we ignore it.” That is, of course, only overture. “To listen to our 112 menu items press 1. for the latest running total of the numbers of customers who say they would rather than do business with us again, press 2. for someone who is very nice person but doesn’t have a clue, and in any case is on maternity leave, press 3.” After 11 minutes and 33 second, the finale comes in a crescendo: “The person you are trying to reach is either on the other line or not in the office. Please try later.” That rips it. The companies call the customer king and treat him worse than a supplicant. I say get rid of voice answering systems immediately. They are offending customers and putting them in telephone hell. Replace those machines with friendly high-touch operators. The corporations will see where the real cost efficiencies can be made. I urge any CEO whose company has a voice answering system to call his company and see whether he can get through it himself. That eye-opening exercise would hopefully trigger great entrepreneurial opportunities to create a useful customer service system tht doesn’t turn into an infuriating maze with no exit. Again, we have to think more about the ecology of technology. ~ Page 105

A computer simulation of a network of cosmic strin…

Knock knock

12 Jun 2013 1 139
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5aB2RkPkro Excerpt from "Hidden Brain" by Shankar Vedantam
12 Jun 2013 1 127
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP_X7cb-gwU&list=PLFE79F8DF49...

Song Bird

29 May 2012 135
At the same time as Sperry (Roger) was fine-tuning his theory of never development in the early 1960s, a young British biologist, Peter Marler became fascinated with song birds . these birds learned their songs from their fathers. He had noticed, while doing botanical fieldwork, that songbirds of the same species had somewhat different songs (which he called dialects) in different locales. Looking at white-crowned sparrows, he found that young sparrows were eager and able to learn a range of sounds during a brief sensitive period from about 30 to 100 days old. He wondered if he could control what song they learned by what shat song they were exposed to. He isolated young birds during this sensitive period and exposed them to the songs of either their home dialect or an alien dialect. They learned the dialect that they were exposed to. So the dialect they learned was dependent upon their experience. Then he wondered if they could learn the slightly different song of a different species of sparrow if they were exposed to one. He tried alternating the training song with the song of a different sparrow species that were common in their native habitat, but they learned only the song of their own species. So while the song dialect that they learned depended on the song that they exposed to, the variations of the song that they were able to learn were very limited. They were preexisting neural constraints in what they were able to learn. These built-in constraints presented a problem of the blank-slaters ….. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa ~ Page 17
25 May 2012 113
Silver Blaze hadn’t been missing for long when Inspector Gregory and Colonel Ross identified the stranger who had sneaked into the stable and stolen the prize racehorse. But as usual, Sherlock Holmes was one step ahead of the police. The colonel turned to the great detective: “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time” “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes. It seems that a dog lived in the stable, that both the stable hands had slept through the theft, and that these two facts had allowed Holmes to make one of his indubitably shrewd deductions. As he later explained; “I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog ….. A dog was kept in the stables, and yet, though some one had been in and had fetched out a horse, he had not barked enough to arouse the two lads in the loft. Obviously, the mid-night visitor was some one whom the dog knew well.” Although the inspector and the colonel were aware of what had happened, only Holmes was aware of what hadn’t happened: The dog hadn’t barked, which meant that the thief was not the stranger whom the police had identified. By paying careful attention to the absence of an event, Sherlock Holmes further distinguished himself from the rest of humankind. As we are about to see, when the rest of humankind imagines the future, it rarely notices what imagination has missed – and the missing pieces are much more important than we realize. ~ Page 96/97

Abandoning the Concept of Free Will

22 Oct 2012 3 107
THE HUMAN INTERPRETER HAS SET UP FOR A FALL. It has created the illusion of self, and with it, the sense we humans have agency and “freely” make decisions about our actions. In many ways it is a terrific and positive capacity for humans to possess. With increasing intelligence and with a capacity to see relationships beyond what is immediately and perceptually apparent, how long would it be before our species began to wonder what it all meant – what was the meaning of life? The interpreter provides the storyline and narrative, and we all believe we are agents acting of our own free will, making important choices. The illusion is so powerful that there is no amount of analysis that will change our sensation that we are all acting willfully and with purpose. The simple truth is that even the most strident determinists and fatalists at the personal psychological level do not actually believe they are pawns in the brain’s chess game.

When is piece of matter said to be alive?

Squeegee Men


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