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Conceptual Skeleton is my new favorite thing, because it forces a match between two of my pre-existing favorite things, concepts and skeletons . This week's GEB book club reading - we're working through Chapter XIX - was really all about me and my methods in writing, especially poetry. I figured it out thanks to Sherlock . I see a pattern between disparate words or processes and I squeeze until I can draw a metaphor over them, forcing a match. The metaphor drawn and applied is a conceptual skeleton . Skeletons work nicely because the variety of bones and joints makes the concept flexible enough to drape over something unlikely, and then it can be pushed around until it seems to fit. I am not ashamed to admit I don't know how many times I've watched all episodes of Sherlock. While I was reading GEB, Season 3 Episode 1 was playing on the TV and something gelled. If this is about to be a spoiler, shame on you. You should have already seen this show. I think it...

at Mason and Rook Hotel, DC My book club has invested more than a year trying to define intelligence, consciousness, meaning, emergence.  Dr. Douglas R. Hofstadter, in his book Godel, Escher, Bach - an Eternal Golden Braid , said: "In the early days it was assumed that knowledge came in sentence-like packets, and that the best way to implant knowledge into a program was to develop a simple way of translating facts into small passive packets of data. Then every fact would simply be a piece of data, accessible to the programs using it. This is exemplified by chess programs, where board Positions are coded into matrices or lists of some sort and stored efficiently in memory where they can be retrieved and acted upon by subroutines. The fact that human beings store facts in a more complicated way was known to psychologists for quite a while and has only recently been rediscovered by AI workers, who are now confronting the problems of "chunked" knowle...

June 17 is the birthday of Maurits Cornelius Escher. You know his work; if you didn't know his name before, now you do. You're welcome. I've told you before about my awesome book club - we're reading Gödel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter for over a year now. It's a pretty dense book. The scheduled meeting was June 16, the day before Escher's birthday, so I thought we needed a birthday cake. Möbius Cupcakes?  Möbius Chicken Strips! And then I remembered reading how a bagel can be cut so that the two halves are linked. ( You, too, can make a Mathematically Correct Breakfast. ) I hied me to the dollar store, looking for plastic ants who could march along my cake like the famous Escher etching of ants on a möbius band. No ants, but I did find alligators, which relate to a different Escher work. I bought a bundt-style cake at the grocery and attempted to cut it möbius-style like the bagels. My plan was to cut, and then f...

I've been exposing my authentic self by working on art in public. Recently I took a booth at a restaurant so I could eat and keep working. People stopped intermittently to compliment my work, and I said, "Thank you!"  And I meant it, and I didn't get all awkward, even when someone wanted to discuss further. I Advanced the Discussion. Gimme a patch for that. Sunday morning I checked into Beanetics  for a French Press, a pastry, and a table to work. This is where the magic happened. The little Barista-chick who likes my illustrations is leaving; next Saturday is her last day making our coffee. We - she, I, and the other regulars - joked about getting matching coffee bean tattoos on our wrists. The Scottish guy doing genealogy work at the next table was polite or uninterested, but a dancer named Heidi leaned in close to check the detail of my work. Her mom appeared later and asked whether Heidi had seen my work; yes, she had. Heidi's mom is named Margi, h...

I don't feel like going outside, but I have this thing to do I really want to do.  You know what an introver...maybe you don't, exactly. You might think an introvert is a standoffish person who likes doing things alone, but that's only part of the story.  The part you need to know is this:  Let the introvert do her thing, but keep communication open - even if there isn't any sound.  The introvert doesn't want to be alone; she just can't control the energy draining from her. Interaction is an app that saps the battery. When I first moved to Annandale, VA, I realised I could easily fall into a pattern of going from home to work to home.  I researched to find people I could deal with doing things I actually like.  It is useless to force yourself to do things you dislike just to connect with humans - no, it really is. See above comment on sapped battery. So I found this book club , and we're reading one book for over a year now: Gödel, ...