Many years ago, boys and girls, there were television commercials about the Keebler elves working to make their cookies inside a hollow oak tree. The commercials were probably as famous in their own way as the hucksterism of "Crazy Eddie" would become somewhat later. Here's a link: Keebler Elves in the Hollow Tree | 70s & 80s Tv Commercials | EL Fudge The elves and their tree were first cooked up, so to speak, in 1968. They got their boss and spokesperson, Ernie Fudge, two years later. That's E.L Fudge. E as in everybody -- L as in "loves" fudge. The odd pointlessness of much of memory. So: why did I illustrate this pointless memory with an image from the Sistine Chapel? I just guess that as God is said to have created His world, we within that world create our own fictional worlds. Give the copy writers some credit. That it may have been just a day's work for some of those inolved does not make it uncreative.
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35 years separate the great dust bowl storm of 1935 from the break-up of the Beatles in 1970. I remember the Beatles news and I'm sure that at the time I would have said at the time that boring depression era history was ancient and best forgotten. The same span of time, though, separates the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 from, say, the passage of the Tik-Tok ban legislation of 2024. This 35 year period FLEW by. The Berlin Wall thing was the week before yesterday. Probably has nothing to do with why Einstein thought time was relative, but strikes me as proof of the same proposition.
I once had the stereotypical sort of law office. The sort where a stranger comes through the door, speaks to a receptionist/secretary/gatekeeper, and in due course gets further, into the inner sanctum, my office proper. It has been a long time since I had or needed that sort of office, but I will relay here a random memory about cigarettes. A woman comes into my office. She had called ahead for an appointment, so I was ready for her. She comes in and asks rather diffidently whether she can smoke. I had an ashtray sitting on the client side of my desk just for such occasions, so the diffidence wasn't necessary. I said she should help herself. Thence the following dialog: "Really? Almost nobody lets me light up in the office these days." "Well, I grew up with two parents who were both chimneys. I'm quite used to second hand smoke...." "That's not the point. This is YOUR office, you should be able to say no smoking here!" "When ...
A “long short-term memory neural network” is apparently an important and recent advance in artificial intelligence research, even though it sounds a bit like "jumbo shrimp." The term refers to a neural network devised with “forget gates” attached to cells of memory, originally in order to model human short-term memory. But the “forget gate” can be set for any length of time, so the researchers can make this “short-term memory” last as long as they want it to, hence the oxymoronic name, "long short-term memory." The Vanishing Gradient Networks that have these LSTM units as their components have certain advantages over the “vanilla version” of recurrent neural networks (RNNs). In particular, they can overcome what is known as the “vanishing gradient” problem. That is, vanilla RNNs were built to learn from new data, but to give that data a weight that depended on the amount of already -stored data on the same subject a network already possess; ...
Yesterday I discussed Damasio's book Descartes' Error, and the use it made of the James-Lange theory of emotion. As I promised, I move now to Damasio's 1999 book, The Feeling of What Happens, which moves on from matters of emotion and rationality to the related but distinct issue of consciousness. Consciousness, he says, is a chain rather than a single link. It is the collective noun for a number of closely related facts, each more rare in the natural world than the one before. The following are the links in the chain: 1) non-conscious neural signalling gives rise to 2) a proto-self, which permits the development of 3) a core self, which is only here-and-now, but which when added to memory becomes 4) an autobiographical self, which finally permits something that may be distinctively human ... 5) extended consciousness, (which he also calls "consciousness post-language") and finally, 6) conscience. Damasio devotes a good deal of effort to giving separ...
I tried to describe the 'big picture' of Smolin's book in yesterday's post. Today I'll write about a detail -- a point hidden in the end note, the lengthy note 10 for the chapter 16. Smolin discusses the different "arrows of time" and the question whether they can all be reduced to one. Is time's directionality one fact, or several? He seems to think it is several distinct facts. There is a cosmological arrow, a thermodynamic arrow, a biological arrow, an experiential arrow, and an electromagnetic arrow. In principle, we could perhaps reduce the biological and experiential flow of time to thermodynamics, though Smolin sounds dubious even about this. "We remember the past and not the future because memory is a form of organization, and organization decreases in the future -- or so it is claimed." Similarly, as to biology, "we age, it is claimed, because disorder accumulates in our cells." But where he steps in with something ...
An age seems to take a particular disease as a sort of emblem. One disease serves as greatest fear and most intensely over-used metaphor. I think of consumption for much of the 19th century, polio for the early part of the 20th, AIDS for later in the 20th. Now, perhaps ... Alzheimer's. One point you may have gleaned from my short list is that the emblematic disease ceases to be emblematic when it becomes curable. It can't be a metaphysical bugaboo any longer once it begins the fade into a lesser status as a manageable health concern. Alzheimer's certainly qualifies on this account. It also qualifies by virtue of the way it attacks an individual's identity, taking it away piece by piece -- in a century that seems intent on attacking personal identity from all directions even without literal organic assistance. It attacks our identity because as humans our identity is one with certain sorts of continuity within this stream of consciousness. Knowing you...
C.D. Broad: "In a linear spatial series there is no asymmetric dyadic relation intrinsic to the series… In the temporal series of experiences, which constitutes a person's mental history there is a genuine dyadic relation which is intrinsic to the series and involves no reference to any term outside the latter. This is the relation "earlier than". It is the fundamental relation here, and temporal betweenness is definable in terms of it. In the temporal series there are two intrinsically opposite directions, earlier-to-later and later- to- earlier. In the linear spatial series there is no intrinsic direction. If direction is to be introduced, this must be done extrinsically, either by reference to motion along the line (and therefore to time)," The point, if I understand it, is that time is a very different sort of thing from space, and when physicists talk of "spacetime" as one thing they are, for their own valid purposes of course, glossing over...
If I should ever be asked whether I could name off the top of my head twenty R&H tunes, I should hope I will come up with the following, arranged below by chronological order of show debut: The songs themselves aren't listed in any particular order, by appearance in the musical or otherwise, just that in which they occur to me, which presumably would be consistent with the terms of the hypothetical dare/bet. Oklahoma! (1943) 1) the title song 2) O What a Beautiful Morning 3) Surrey with the Fringe on Top 4) The Farmer and the Cowman 5) I Cain't Say No Carousel (1945) 6) You'll Never walk Alone 7) Soliloquy (My Boy Bill) 8) This was a real nice clambake 9) If I Loved You 10) When I Marry Mr. Snow South Pacific (1949) 11) Bala Hai 12) You've Got to be Carefully Taght 13) Wash that Man Right Outa My Hair 14) Nothin' Like a Dame 15) One Enchanted Evening The King and I (1951) 16) Shall we Dance 17) Getting to Know You 18) Whistle a ...