#uncoffeed...

These are myriad "things" that are easy for us to recognize, point to, love or hate, and, in many cases, manipulate or even create." - Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: the Evolution of Minds We build archetypes without even thinking about it:  you visualise your dreams, your goals, your friends, your self.  You make decisions based largely on the mental models  you've created with data you collected to build those archetypes. If you're emotionally invested in the advice you've lent someone, you may take their failure worse than they do. If your knowledge is currency and you need to keep ledgers on where you spend it, then do that before spending, not after. Give without strings attached, and that includes advice. If you love someone, let them fail.  If you can't afford to clean them up after the fall, tell them.  Let them know you love them but you can't afford it right now.  Answer their questions honestly. That's all y...

My friend Meg played the catalyst this time. She bought me a Zombie Magnetic Poetry Kit and informed me I was to take it to work. "You have a kitchen at your job; I don't," she said. "So this is for your work-kitchen." Roger that. I scooped up a few words, sidled into the break-room and stuck them on the refrigerator door, trying to guess how many minutes I'd be blamed. Even if someone else had done it, my reputation would precede me. By the time I got back to my desk, I was envisioning HR's gentle admonishments in my head, so I went back and pulled all the death, corpses, and creepiness. Not an hour later, I found a new message: find out how unstoppable you can be ...and then I realised someone had gone and found the word be in a different set of magnetic poetry, and in fact had severed it from a longer word, in order to complete her message. I say her, because I knew it had to be Roxanne Jackson , who happens to be a wise person and...

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...