![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A Few Things...
May. 8th, 2025 12:18 pmA few things that have been popping up in my head during the last week or two…
I woke up last Sunday and for some reason I was missing the sounds I used for Trillian to let me know when friends logged on our off. I miss instant messaging, and the Zuckerbook system doesn’t come anywhere close to filling the bill. Trillian’s interface and how it amalgamated the features of several messenger protocols/interfaces shows up in the first Love Meme? novel.
I’m 209 pages into the third and probable final Déjà vu novel, Presque Vu. I’ve finished part 1 of it. This is a situational project, so I don’t have much in the way of plot points. I’ve started setting up the plot for Love Meme? 3, and it’ll be way different from the first two (as it should be, because I don’t write formulaic novels). I’m up to part 13 of Z’s Story, which I’m writing at a thousand words or less a month using prompts given to us. Oh, and www.magnetsandladders.org has two of my stories in their current issue.
If any of y’all want to do a little writing on a monthly basis, let me know, because the Brainz group is looking for more members. One thousand words or less, but it can be nonfiction, fiction, poetry, or whatever else. This’ll also give you access to the monthly compilation; right now this is pretty much the only way to read my story of Z, a for the most part gender free set of stories about someone struggling with ADHD and also romantic relationships.
In the March 2025 issue of Scientific American, there’s an article about how choral, which people tend to think of as a fixed genome when the larvae become “adult”, are more adaptable than science has reported in the past. Corals in tropical waters are showing increased heat resistance as they experience dangerous warming periods. The interesting thing about this is that it’s easy to see when coral dies, because it bleaches out, but this isn’t happening as expected because the coral are adapting, up to and including releasing the algae used for coloration and bonding to other things that are more heat resistant. Cool.
In the same issue there’s an article about brain throughput, and recent studies have revealed a couple of things thought to be different – first off, cognitive throughput is at a rate of 10ms, or one hundred bits a second. This means that wiring someone’s head to a computer won’t be much faster than a telephone call. This bandwidth isn’t what we use for acquiring stimulus, so we can collect information much faster than we can act upon it and think about it. Another bummer for modern concepts of cognition, the studies have also shown that we’re not wired for multi-tasking or multithreading, it’s all single focus switching for those who can create the illusion of multi-processing. The same article discussed how much the ability to take in information is a function of sensory systems. This makes me think about the discussion I had with the professor teaching the Learning and Cognition course I took at TWU about eideticism – it’s the common belief that nobody has a tape recorder or video camera in our heads, we chunk in data, and how much data we chunk and the types of it is the “real” kernel of memory. In that discussion she floated a theory that eidetic individuals stored data better, so there was less interpolation involved when someone is accessing a long term memory, so the mind has more to use in bringing up something remembered. This seems to indicate that sensory input is also a factor; I know, for instance, that I’m not taking in much visual data these days, so it doesn’t factor in memories for me since 2003. But everything else seems to be on board and working the job.
Desire is so annoying.
I woke up last Sunday and for some reason I was missing the sounds I used for Trillian to let me know when friends logged on our off. I miss instant messaging, and the Zuckerbook system doesn’t come anywhere close to filling the bill. Trillian’s interface and how it amalgamated the features of several messenger protocols/interfaces shows up in the first Love Meme? novel.
I’m 209 pages into the third and probable final Déjà vu novel, Presque Vu. I’ve finished part 1 of it. This is a situational project, so I don’t have much in the way of plot points. I’ve started setting up the plot for Love Meme? 3, and it’ll be way different from the first two (as it should be, because I don’t write formulaic novels). I’m up to part 13 of Z’s Story, which I’m writing at a thousand words or less a month using prompts given to us. Oh, and www.magnetsandladders.org has two of my stories in their current issue.
If any of y’all want to do a little writing on a monthly basis, let me know, because the Brainz group is looking for more members. One thousand words or less, but it can be nonfiction, fiction, poetry, or whatever else. This’ll also give you access to the monthly compilation; right now this is pretty much the only way to read my story of Z, a for the most part gender free set of stories about someone struggling with ADHD and also romantic relationships.
In the March 2025 issue of Scientific American, there’s an article about how choral, which people tend to think of as a fixed genome when the larvae become “adult”, are more adaptable than science has reported in the past. Corals in tropical waters are showing increased heat resistance as they experience dangerous warming periods. The interesting thing about this is that it’s easy to see when coral dies, because it bleaches out, but this isn’t happening as expected because the coral are adapting, up to and including releasing the algae used for coloration and bonding to other things that are more heat resistant. Cool.
In the same issue there’s an article about brain throughput, and recent studies have revealed a couple of things thought to be different – first off, cognitive throughput is at a rate of 10ms, or one hundred bits a second. This means that wiring someone’s head to a computer won’t be much faster than a telephone call. This bandwidth isn’t what we use for acquiring stimulus, so we can collect information much faster than we can act upon it and think about it. Another bummer for modern concepts of cognition, the studies have also shown that we’re not wired for multi-tasking or multithreading, it’s all single focus switching for those who can create the illusion of multi-processing. The same article discussed how much the ability to take in information is a function of sensory systems. This makes me think about the discussion I had with the professor teaching the Learning and Cognition course I took at TWU about eideticism – it’s the common belief that nobody has a tape recorder or video camera in our heads, we chunk in data, and how much data we chunk and the types of it is the “real” kernel of memory. In that discussion she floated a theory that eidetic individuals stored data better, so there was less interpolation involved when someone is accessing a long term memory, so the mind has more to use in bringing up something remembered. This seems to indicate that sensory input is also a factor; I know, for instance, that I’m not taking in much visual data these days, so it doesn’t factor in memories for me since 2003. But everything else seems to be on board and working the job.
Desire is so annoying.
