Firstly, everyone who knows Luis should read his latest post.
The boy's scathing wit more than makes up for his almost complete lack of punctuation. (I see his writing style as a grim premonition of the state of the English language after a few more decades of AIM.)
I'm drinking tea in the school library at the moment. I want to better explain myself about how I thought eyes worked.
I consider the eyes to be a part of the brain because of their complexity (and partly because in Robocop 2 when they removed the brain of that guy to put into the evil robot they took the eyes, too.)
What I didn't know was that seeing an object with the eyes and closing the eyes and imagining that same object is neurologically identical.
The exact same thing happens when you see something as when you imagine it.
I always thought there were seperate processes for imagining something and actually seeing. Nope. Uses the same part of the brain. Knowing this, now I don't feel so bad about hallucinating...
Oh, and Jared asked about the old template.
I was trying to get that blogger navbar to stop cutting off the top of my page. I don't know what I deleted, but it must have been important because nothing shows up anymore.
I'm a little scared of adding anything to this template for fear of causing the same thing.
So, I guess I'll have my old template back up as soon as I can wheedle and cajole David to stop working so damn much and work his magic on the thing.
Erk, I'm running out of time. I wanted to talk about the Nobel prize for chemistry. I doubt I'll even have time to make my quark joke.
I didn't explain the quark thing either. I'll try. From what I understand, the closer quarks are together the less they are attracted to one another. But the crazy thing is, the farther away they get, the greater the force of attraction becomes. This is like the opposite of gravity.
The article I read illustrated the idea with the analogy of stretching a rubber band. I was surprised by this. I would think that the obvious way to explain how to increase attraction by increasing distance would somehow involve women.
And now I'm late for class.
Women would be a good reference point for an explanation of the strong force, except that physicists know less about women than any other single topic. Rubber bands they know--they understand. Women may as well not exist.
ReplyDeleteI have been steretyped.
ReplyDeleteI thought everyone knew about the visual cortex and top-down processing! I got to poke the visual cortex of a human brain yesterday. I don't think it was imaginging much at the time, though.
ReplyDeleteDonovan
Nick,
ReplyDeleteYour super-ninja idea will have to sit on the back shelf for a while. "Large distance" for a quark is anything larger than about an angstrom or so (10^-15 meters). We have never even seen an individual quark. We can only infer their existence and properties from interactions governed by the strong force (nuclear beta-decay being one very common example). In our current universe (to the best of our knowledge) quarks exist exclusively in mesons (quark-antiquark pair) or baryons (3 quarks or three antiquarks each one of three 'colors'--i.e., protons and neutrons). I just found an article in the AIP Journal that a 5-quark state was discovered not too long ago, so there may be more varieties.
Regarding the visual imaging of the braing thing:
ReplyDeleteThe fact that seeign something and imagining it beign the same is also applicable to emotions. If you imagine something vividly enough it can effect your physical/emotional state very strongly. It's a great tool for me as an actor.
This, to me, is strong evidence to suggest that meditation and positive visualization can be a strong force in our lives if we use them. I mean, I don't go so far as to believe that we can change the outcome of events out of our control by visualizing it, but we can use it as a tool to keep ourselves focused and better work towards acheiving things we can control.