“God must be greater than the greatest of human weaknesses and, indeed, the greatest of human skill. God must even transcend our most remarkable – to emulate nature in its absolute splendor. How can any man or woman sin against such greatness of mind? How can one little carbon unit on Earth – in the backwaters of the Milky Way, the boondocks – betray God almighty? That is impossible. The height of arrogance is the height of control of those who create God in their own image.”
— Ramtha, in “What the (#$%&) Bleep Do We Know”
Into the Void
Back off, man, I'm co-creating my reality.
Thought for the Day (TFTD)
Search Terms du Jour
Ah, yes, server logs. These are my favorite searches today. I hope they found what they were looking for.
ice pick lobotomy
where can i find the plan of a pendulum
Am I predator or prey?
Someone asked me, in response to a previous message, whether I am predator or prey. My reply:
Yes, you are *exactly* right. Humans are capable of being either. This means that we can switch from one set of neurotransmitters to the other set in an instant. Deer can’t do that. Lions can’t do that. They mostly use one pathway or another.
You see the implications of this with regards to bipolar disorder?
The problem isn’t the switch for us, it’s that we switch for no reason and the chemicals take a lot longer to dissipate than non-bipolars’ do. Our non-bipolar friends seem to have a lesser response to a sudden fright too. That’s my opinion.
Predatory behavior is useful in the business world – but *modulated* to help you achieve career goals. You can’t litter your cubicle with the gnawed bones of the competition. But you don’t get to be a corporate CEO by cowering at staff meetings either. Stress is the result of long-term exposure to the prey neurotransmitter, adrenaline. You’ve heard them talk about “fight or flight” and that’s what they mean.
If you don’t like being a predator, it’s because you haven’t learned how to use it constructively.
In answer to your question, I can be either.
Natural Terror
Natural Terror | The Zucchini Patch
Update 9/22/2007: Jessica retooled her blog over the summer. Do be sure to check it out. Here’s the new link to the post above.
Natural Terror | The Zucchini Patch
A quick search for the toothmark photo below turned up a couple of interesting blog entries using the same photo. I include them here to bore the disinterested:
- Who, or What, Killed the Australopithicine? – which added the phrase “Osteodontokeratic industry” to my already useless vocabulary.
- IIDB > IIDB Philosophical Forums > Evolution/Creation > The wiring of the eye: Is it poor design? to which I answer, no, not a poor design but the prototype for the real thing – if we can evolve it before the Creationists destroy the world – to prevent it from happening, I suppose?
- IIDB > IIDB Philosophical Forums > Evolution/Creation > Early Humans on the Menu
One of Jessica’s recent posts reminded me of Paul Shepard’s eye-opening book, “The Others: How Animals Made Us Human.” Dr. Shepard was a Professor of Natural Philosophy and Human Ecology and wrote a number of books on our complex relationships with the earth and her other inhabitants.
Dr. Shepard was a Professor of Natural Philosophy and Human Ecology and wrote a number of books on our complex relationships with the earth and her other inhabitants.In “The Others,” Dr. Shepard’s focus is on the topic of domesticating animals. Originally our relationship with other species was simple. Either we ate that species, or we were eaten by it. Simplistic as it sounds, that has a profound impact on our central nervous systems, specifically the limbic system.
As an aside, domestication changed some species into status symbols, and it is possible to determine the social status of extended family members by whether they slept nearer or farther than the livestock.
In “Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence,” Dr. Shepard briefly discusses the neurotransmitters. Prey animals are hypervigilant, always watching and waiting for some unknown something to startle them into flight. Predators’ neurochemistry, however, mandates focus: moving slowly, with patience and determination, toward the object of their attention. What kind of animal can display both kinds of attention? It must require a wild mood swing to instantly change a creeping hunter into someone who is running at top speed from a predator. It is a huge shift from one neurochemical pathway to a completely different pathway, releasing a neurotransmitter and simultaneously inhibiting another. I believe that the ability to switch contexts was an important factor in our evolution.
No matter how much we have evolved both psychologically and culturally, the old systems are still wired in and still affect us. We are not a separate act of creation.
Leopard canines puncture protohominid skull.
“The Others” is worth reading if only for the chapter on teddy bears as psychological bridges between the wild and the civilized. (I think housecats serve that purpose adequately.)
“Except possibly his soul, man prizes his mind above all else. His mind is a product of its ecology — the same ecology. Nothing that evolves persists unless sustained by those same creative forces. Like a ball at the top of a fountain, the human head pivots on its animal backbone, the mind a turning knot of thought and dream on the end of a liquid spear of living animals.” — Paul Shepard, “Thinking Animals”
WiFi Hotspot Locator
This Hotspot Locator is coming in very handy, given the exorbitant price of Cingular’s GPRS service. Republished with permission from JIWire.com.
New Google Feature: 403 Forbidden
Google flagged me on the 11th page of results for doing an exhaustive search. If I’m a virus, why do they want to see me again?
I hope this isn’t a ploy to force users to download their branded apps.
|
We’re sorry…
… but we can’t process your request right now. A computer virus or spyware application is sending us automated requests, and it appears that your computer or network has been infected.
We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your computer is free of viruses and other spurious software.
We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.
Et Nox Facta Est
Bipolarhead suggested some light reading for the darkness. My favorite for falling into the void is Victor Hugo’s La Fin de Satan:
ET NOX FACTA EST
I
Depuis quatre mille ans il tombait dans l’abîme
Il n’avait pas encor pu saisir une cime,
Ni lever une fois son front démesuré.
Il s’enfonçait dans l’ombre et la brume, effaré,
Seul, et derrière lui, dans les nuits éternelles,
Tombaient plus lentement les plumes de ses ailes.
Il tombait foudroyé, morne silencieux,
Powerful stuff,.
My poor translation:
Et nox facta est
For four thousand years he had fallen into the pit.
He was never again able to soar to the heights,
Nor even once to raise his foul visage.
He was surrounded by the twilight and the mist,
frightened, alone in the eternal nights,
and behind him the feathers dropped slowly from his wings.
Review of the Siemens SX66
Santa wasn’t very good to me this year. I suspect that he heard me accidentally call him Satan the week before Christmas. Or maybe he figured out that I’m a techno-Pagan.
I bought myself a toy instead. It’s better that way… I got exactly what I wanted and I didn’t have to be a good girl to get it. :-)
My latest toy is a Siemens SX66 PDA phone. I needed this phone, really I did. My old Toshiba e310 is still in great shape, but it doesn’t have enough RAM. My old cell phone was one of Cingular’s freebies.
It’s not cutting edge, but the 
SX66 is still an impressive little device. It runs the Windows Mobile 2003 OS, so I didn’t have to RTFM.
Yeah, ok, you want some more details. 400MHz X-Scale processor, 128M of RAM and 64M of flash. For reference, my spare computer is only marginally faster and originally had less RAM. 128M of RAM doesn’t hold much in the way of fun, but the SX66 has an SD slot so I can carry around videos and photos on SD or MMC cards.
I have Cingular, and they have this silly thing called MEdiaNET. It’s expensive, a penny per kbyte. Fortunately the SX66 also has WiFi, and I set it up to check for WiFi first. It also has bluetooth – and of course the first thing I did was make it talk to my husband’s Motorola Razr. Hmmm, Santa was pretty good to him this year. The second thing was to have a great bluetooth group grope at work. Engineers…
As an aside, there are variations on this PDA for other phone systems. The Audiovox XV6600 PDA Phone works with Verizon and seems to have a bonus – a camera.
The SX66 connects to my PC with ActivSync via USB, just like my old Toshiba. It shares the calendar, notes and contact list with Outlook. I don’t use Outlook for anything but to keep all that stuff backed up.
And if that’s not good enough, it also has an Irda port. I had a universal TV remote on the Toshiba, which came in handy more than once. I love a good practical joke.
And of course, I had to get some accessories:
Code Snippet
This is what I do at work.
/* For instructions on use, read article
* "Computer Program Virtually Eliminates
* Machine Errors"
* http://www.aa6e.net/msewing/orema.html
*/
void orema()
{
short invocation;
}
Author! Author!
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