Day Zero project

I’ve been in a rut lately, and I like the idea of this project, where you try to complete 101 goals in 1001 days. Specifically, I like the timeframe — it’s long enough to allow for time-consuming projects and the establishment of habits, but still structured enough to (hopefully) make the list seem non-hypothetical.

(One of the things on there is “learn Python”, so I typed up a version with of this list with numbers hard-coded, then wrote a script to delete the numbers and replace them with <li> tags for easier resorting. Go me! I really need to change that goal to “use Python for web programming with a database back-end,” but hey, baby steps.)

Of course I couldn’t stop at 101:

i suck at substantive blogging

But I sure can regurgitate links from other blogs! You should look at these:

• Brainbows
• Evolutionary psychology bingo

hot and smoky, almost irreverent

This is a totally halfassed post, since it’s a wikipedia link and was on boingboing like a month ago, but nevertheless, it’s awesome and made me happy. The Schmidt Sting Pain Index is without a doubt my new favorite classification system.

Specialized vocabularies are interesting, especially when they accompany actual increased sensory sensitivity to certain dimensions of an experience. (Can I tie this in with neural plasticity? Or, how about with a fantasy subculture of bee sting connoisseurs who go to stinging parties reminiscent of wine tastings and wile away the hours passing around jars filled with angry exotic insects and waxing snootily rhapsodic about the sensations they inspire?)

multiplying superfluous gestures

Errol Morris has a blog! The last two entries are about re-enactment, how we construct coherent narratives of reality, and how these processes in film interrelate with visual attention and memory. They’re pretty cool, albeit general. The first one is more about issues of authenticity in documentary film-making, and the second one has an interview with the dude who did some of the classic research on change blindness (which is good reading if you haven’t read it already).

I especially like this older entry, though. It fleshes out many of the same themes by painstakingly walking us through a detective story, trying to reconstruct which of two versions of the famous war photograph “in the valley of the shadow of death” was staged and which was not. By examining different accounts, he highlights the kinds of evidence and psychological assumptions that people use to make the determination. Reading the comments section is great — he challenges the reader to generate definitive evidence for the “true” placement of the cannonballs, and hundreds of people eagerly attempt to deliver, even though I think it’s supposed to be some sort of Socratic exercise intended to make everyone realize that the endeavor is impossible. (But then again, maybe not, given that he devotes two increasingly pedantic articles to the issue!)

Random quote I am totally stealing: “Experience is not unlike history – just closer to us in time.”

However! Hopefully you all read this far down the page, because the real reason I’m bringing this up is because his blog prompted me to reread Funes, the Memorious.

Hello world!

“The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.”

–Robert Burchfield

I am going to attempt to chronicle everything I read. Actually, I’m lying: that’s an impossible idea which would produce a really boring blog. I’ll settle for trying to chronicle everything that I read which I find interesting or substantive.

This endeavor is partially based on a narcissistic desire to share my internal monologue with the world (it is a blog, after all) and partially a weapon in my Sisyphean struggle to chisel as much knowledge as possible into the shifting, fragmentary surface of my own memory. This will help me maintain the illusion that the time I spend slacking during my workday is actually part of some grand autodidactic endeavor. Yesss!