RE: My Post Concussive Syndrome Speech Disorder: A Malfunctioning Word Queue
Topic: Science
10:46 am EST, Feb 12, 2009
Jello wrote: Last Monday I was in a car accident and suffered a severe concussion that didn't manifest symptoms for 24 hours (weird, I know). Since then I've periodically lost the ability to speak. I go from normal speech to slurring, to mute. Its being looked at, but the reason I made this thread is because... I realized that it is exactly like TCP packets overloading the sliding window, or a web server with limited resources getting too many requests: overload the throughput on the queue and everything after that is lost.
So I made a diagram tonight when I had a bad episode to prove I can still think.
When things are bad, and I fill the shrunken word queue, I can't speak until it self empties. Full empty seems to take between 30 seconds and one minute, and seems to happen at a linear rate. However, if I limit myself to the actual word queue/minute throughput, I can speak continuously for a longer period. Normal speed speech very quickly fills the queue though.
Strange, but accurate. If my mind is a Turing Machine, my word queue is malfunctioning and is too small to hold enough words to speak normally.
Sorry to hear about that, can't imagine what that feels like. Wishing you a full recovery.
Boundary Functions is realized as a set of lines projected from overhead onto the floor which divide each person in the gallery from one another. With one person in the gallery there is no response. When two are present, there is a single line drawn halfway between them segmenting the room into two regions. As each person moves, this line dynamically changes, maintaining an even distance between the two. With more than two people, the floor becomes divided into cellular regions, each with the mathematical quality that all space within the region is closer to the person inside than any other.
The title of the piece, Boundary Functions, refers to Theodore Kaczynski's 1967 Phd thesis at the University of Michigan. Better known as the Unabomber, Kaczynski is a pathological example of the conflict between the individual and society - the conflict and compromise of engaging in society versus solitude and individuality uncompromised by the thoughts or presence of others. The thesis itself is an example of the implicit antisocial quality of some scientific discourse, mired in language and symbols impenetrable to the vast majority of society. In this installation, a mathematical abstraction is made instantly knowable by dynamic visual representation.
RE: Lions: Africa's Magnificent Predators | By Nathan Myhrvold
Topic: Science
1:16 pm EDT, Aug 25, 2007
possibly noteworthy wrote:
Even a buffalo separated from the herd has reasonable chances. At one point we saw a lone bull that was trying to get back to the herd, which was about a half mile away. In between him and the herd were four lionesses, sacked out asleep. This looked like the perfect opportunity for a kill, but the buffalo surprised both us and the lions. He crept up on the sleeping lions, then when he got close he lowered his horns and charged. The lions awoke, panicked and scattered into the bushes. The buffalo then trotted victorious back to the pride. It was a perfect illustration of the adage that the best defense is a good offense.
This essay carries the following warning at Edge.org:
WARNING: some of the photos are a bit gory, and one shows explicit lion sex.
See also the latest research on fight-or-flight, using fMRI on video-game-playing humans.
This was pretty humorous, the discussion about what part of the anatomy a lion will start ripping into first:
I was describing this to a friend over lunch in Palo Alto. As I was describing this the waiter came up behind me to take our order. I was in the middle of saying "it's very hard to enter the rectum, but once you do things move much faster", only to hear the waiter gasp. Whoops. I tried to explain saying "well, this is about" but with a horrified look he said "I do NOT want to know what this is about! Some people are just not interested in natural history, I guess.
There are better ways we could spend $1.5 billion dollars than subsidizing consumer electronic devices. I would feel exactly the same if I actually watched television.
Television is not a right. I just don't understand where this attitude of entitlement and indignation comes from about TV. It's a system used to deliver advertisements, propaganda and entertainment. Why should the government subsidize that system?
There used to be an arguement about federal election debate coverage, etc. But now that the Presidential debates are shown on pay for play TV networks such as MSNBC, that arguement is gone. It's all corporate owned and controlled infotainment now.
No, I do not agree with any government subsidy for the HDTV switch.
