Here’s an interesting passage I just read. From Julian Jaynes’ 1976 The Origin of Consciousness In the Breakdown Of the Bicameral Mind:

“It has now been clearly established that decision-making is precisely what stress is…. If two monkeys are placed in harnesses, in such a way that one of the monkeys can press a bar at least once every twenty seconds to avoid a periodic shock to both monkeys’ feet, within three or four weeks the decision-making monkey will have ulcers, while the other, equally shocked monkey will not. It is the pause of unknowingness that is important. …

A little birdie told me he saw it in a dream: Paris’ “simple” sidekick is totally going to get busted on cocaine possession.

You heard it here first, kids.

It’s such a curse to have the gift of A-list prophecy. Who would think that an MIT geek such as myself would have such awesome celebrity powers? Who?

The next Mac OS should TOTALLY be named “Liger”.

I’ve missed my calling.

Hey everybody! I’ve put some more photos up on Flickr. So…like…go look at em n stuff.

About once a month or so, I’ll randomly spot check our (wireless) router’s log files, mostly just out of curiosity to see whether we have neighbors that try use our wi-fi. I password-protected the wireless a long time ago, so I don’t ever expect to find anything interesting.

Late last week, however, I noticed a couple connection attempts from a mac named “Lisa Poole’s Computer”. I know that’s not the name of anyone in my building, so maybe it’s someone in an adjacent building. Finding this attempt in the log didn’t make me suspicious, just curious, and maybe a …

There’s a headline on Google News today, “Israelis Miss Extremist Warning Signs”. When I first saw it out of the corner of my eye I thought it was an article about the winner of Israel’s “Miss Extremist” competition. But then I couldn’t figure out why it didn’t say “Israel’s Miss Extremist’s Warning Signs” and that’s when I parsed it for real.

Still, it’s not a bad idea.

That part of the world TOTALLY goes in for extremist babes.

President Bush, leader of the free world, has now gone on record in support of teaching “intelligent design” as a complement to teaching actual science in schools. As usual, the christian nut-jobs have glommed onto this, and his advisors have tried to backpedal.

All I can think is that George W. Bush must be one of the most difficult assholes anyone’s ever had to call boss.

Warming up here, just running through some exercises, this one inspired by the recent announcement of the winners of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest:

In the long, richly awkward silence that followed on the heels of Elisa’s teary revelation that she was unable to orgasm without the aid of a photograph (or photorealistic rendering) of Matthew Broderick, famous (mostly) for his title role in John Hughes’ last big hit in a string of teen 80’s films, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, during which I thought I was bearing witness to the beginnings of one of the most savagely inept dumpings …

Just got the delightful surprise of a phone call from Christine who I haven’t seen since I left St. Louis in 1986. We were both 15 at the time and had spent the past few summers getting through the heat and boredom, mostly by virtue of board games. We loved Life and Stratego and and and … and I don’t remember what else.

It took us a while to become friends. I actually became friends with her younger brother, Tommy, who was a few years younger than me, but actually probably smarter than me. Tommy was …

According to this article from the Beeb, Internet users are now creating one blog per second, half of which will still be active in three months.

Also notable: the Technorati website claims a statistic of 14.2 million blogs currently active. And that’s just the ones they know about

And: the blogosphere is doubling in size every five months.

If this keeps up it’s just going to be too popular and I’m going to have to stop.