Delivering sarcasm with a well engineered mix of pith, pity and put-down Dilbert has long been a favorite of many office workers and introverts like me who spend too much time in their heads. Still, every once in a while the strip will miss the punch line.
If all that time spent in quietude has sharpened your observational powers, now you write a better one.
Whenever I was asked, in the weeks leading up to the Idea Festival's Lights Out Dinner at Louisville's Asiatique, I said the purpose for a dinner with blindfolded participants was to heighten their powers to taste, smell and feel, and to learn, collectively, how we would respond to those newly sharpened powers in the presence of really good food. It was an experiment with voluntary blindness as much as it was an invitation to let the other senses take center stage for a while.
Sounds more than a little esoteric, in hindsight. Or at least shortsighted.
Would we know life if we encountered it?
"Life" is hard to define according to NewScientist's space blog, which points out that there are more than 280 definitions on record. The subject was at the center of a lively discussion at a just-concluded SETI Institute astrobiology conference.
Sure there seems to be a fuzzy correlation between gratitude and a generally happy outlook on life. Many of you may know someone like that. Or conversely, perhaps you're acquainted with a hard-headed "realist" who has no time for such huff-puffery.
Still, can the practice of gratitude actually lead to happiness? Dave Munger reports.
I don't know very many people who sit around reading poetry. In fact, the only ones I've ever known to sit around and read poetry are love-sick teenage girls who discovered the writings of Jewell when she was at her peak in the music industry years ago. No, it just isn't fashionable to read poetry. I admit that I too, do not sit around and contemplate the writings of Browning, Donne or Frost. In fact the only time I really ever do read poetry (did read poetry) was during my work as an English teacher in which I had to include the study of poetry in English language arts.
It is a shame though. There are a great many poems out there worth the time and so for this entry I shall attempt to get the masses (all 5 of you) who read this post to become familiar with some very famous, very good poems.
A little boy on a run with his dad leads during an early summer run by an asparagus field. Sometimes life really is simple.
Writing about the death of MIT computer science professor, Joseph Weizenbaum, Harvard crank Nicholas Carr and Discover columnist Jaron Lanier use Eliza's tale to assay against errors of the computational kind.
Perhaps we are beginning to understand that the abstract systems — the games computer people can generate in their infinite freedom from the constraints that delimit the dreams of workers in the real world — may fail catastrophically when their rules are applied in earnest. We must also learn that the same danger is inherent in other magical systems that are equally detached from authentic human experience, and particularly in those sciences that insist they can capture the whole man in their abstract skeletal frameworks [emphasis supplied].
It's easy now to poke fun at the subjects who came to believe that Eliza was human. But the larger lesson that I take - and the one suggested by Carr - is that reason and logic are only part of the human experience.
That is particularly true when it comes to thinking because it is belief - and theatrically, the suspension of disbelief - that makes us human. Belief combined with experience holds out possible worlds for our examination; it is on the superstructure of belief that we can absorb wisdom, practice empathy, strive for justice and extend mercy where none may be merited.
As cheaply amusing as it might be in hindsight, what Eliza demonstrated was not that we can foolishly ascribe feelings to objects, but that it is the suspension of the facts that makes foolishness - as well as soul-stirring grace - possible. The rules be damned.
An interactive Web-based version of Eliza is here.
Homaro Cantu, Chicago-based chef, inventor, entrepreneur and leader in "molecular gastronomy" certainly brings a non-conventional perspective to food. Where else might a menu tasting consist of actually tasting the menu?
As always, these brief conversations may be found on IFTV at YouTube.
