Amazon link I remembered China Mieville’s name from Aneel’s book page, so when I stopped by the library, I looked him up, and this was the one book by him that they had. It’s somewhat in the same vein as Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, describing a London with more dimensions than most of us ever get […]
Gah
Well, I was on an almost-daily posting schedule there for a bit. But I failed to stay ahead, used up my backlog of posts, and then the last two nights, Christy lured me over to The Nursery with twin enticements of dinner and company, Krevice last night, and Tstop tonight. Evil temptress! So no interesting […]
Prescriptive context
Picking up on the identity as context post (as an aside, I need to figure out a way to thread posts, like on a bulletin board, except with comments – I’ve got to start doing research on my blogging software options – yes, I know I’ve said that before), it’s time to think about how […]
Quick hits of February
A couple random observations, then more links. I was ego surfing today and decided to check on some of the neological phrases I’ve used in this blog. I’m now first on Google for “cognitive subroutines”, “information carnivore”, and “conservative postmodernism”. Of course, nobody but me has really referred to any of those phrases yet. But […]
Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
Amazon link I stopped by the library a few days ago and picked up a bunch of books that I was vaguely interested in, but not enough to toss into one of my Amazon orders. Mostly quick reads, so you’ll see several book reviews over the next couple weeks as I slam through them. This […]
Identity as context
Picking up on the cognitive subroutine thread, I had another thought yesterday. What is our self, our identity? To some extent, it is the holistic sum of all of our cognitive subroutines. After all, we judge somebody by how they react to different situations. At work, we like to see how people handle pressure. In […]
More thoughts on thin-slicing
I sent off a note to Malcolm Gladwell through his website with the nitpicks I mentioned in my review of Blink, in particular the height study and the Ted Williams story. Much to my surprise, Gladwell wrote me back thanking me for the observations and loving the Ted Williams story. Cool! While thinking about it […]
Firefly
[ed. note: As a complete break from the cognitive science type philosophy that has filled this space recently, we bring you a rant about television] I finally got the DVD set of Firefly last week, and have now watched the whole series. For those of you who don’t know, Firefly was a show created by […]
Cognitive subroutines and context
More thoughts on yesterday’s cognitive subroutines post after thinking about it some more, partially in response to Jofish’s comment. Jofish brings up the importance of leveraging the real world. We don’t have to store a hypothetical model for everything in the real world, because we can use the real world to store information about itself, […]
Cognitive subroutines
This is going to be a relatively long post, mostly inspired by reading Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, and Sources of Power, by Gary Klein, both books that explain how and why our unconscious decision-making capabilities are often better than our conscious ones, and also explain when such capabilities fail and need to be over-ridden. I […]
