Yes, your cat is controlling your mind.

[	Tags	|	interesting things, sharing	]
[	Current Location	|	home	]
[	Current Mood	|	sleepy	]
[	Current Music	|	none	]

I often bookmark interesting things on my delicious.

In the course of my work today, I came across Project Implicit, which is a project devoted to uncovering and understanding implicit attitudes, biases, and stereotypes. Part of the project includes making publicly available a demonstration site for the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which is one of the research instruments used in the Project Implicit research.

DISCLAIMER: I have not yet proceeded to try any of the parts of the Implicit Association Test, so I can express no opinion yet about whether to try any of them.

WARNING: If I understand correctly, if you take one or more of the parts of the test at the website, you will be told how the prior Project Implicit research suggests that your set of answers might be interpreted. If you don't want to hear those interpretations, or if the test questions themselves might be triggery or offensive, you might not want to take some parts of the test. You might not want to take any parts of the test.

I've read newspaper reports of some of the findings of this or similar research, and I find the idea of studying implicit attitudes, biases, and stereotypes, with an eye toward bringing them to light and understanding them, fascinating. I also find it hopeful, because with self-understanding, and specifically understanding of this aspect of ourselves, we can, I hope, learn to adjust our implicit attitudes, and perhaps even to make progress toward liberating ourselves from our implicit biases and stereotypes.

[	Tags	|	art, friends, photography, squee, writing	]
[	Current Location	|	home	]
[	Current Mood	|	bouncy	]
[	Current Music	|	none	]

I just got off the phone with my friend Lisa Kristine, my favorite photographer. It occurs to me that there might be people who have never heard of her, or seen her work. So here is a post about her in my wordpress blog.

Today, as everyone with a Dreamwidth account is likely to know, is the sesquicentennial of the day of first publication of On The Origin of Species. All day, I've been thinking about just how much the world changed on that day. Of course, there are large parts of the world that have not been reached, insofar as the way people think, by the changes in intellectual culture effected by the publication of that book and the subsequent campaign of Darwin and his friends to propagate its ideas. There are fewer people now living, I think, whose lives have been unaffected by those changes.

[	Tags	|	geek	]
[	Current Mood	|	tired	]

I have just created my Google Wave account: paul.oppenheimer@googlewave.com

If you would like an invitation to Google Wave, get in touch.

Wow! It's hot here. I made the mistake of working before my walk. The high today will be 105° F. For the weekend we have a severe weather alert for temperatures in the high teens and overnight lows in the high eighties and low nineties. My friend Uri Nodelman is coming in from Baltimore this afternoon. I wanted to show him Arizona's natural beauty, but unless we drive into the mountains, I'm afraid we'll be indoors. I told him to make sure to look out the window of the airplane on the way here to see whatever of Arizona he can see. Whew! I'm panting like a dog.

This is going to be a short post, because I am going to run off and read my new discovery until I fall asleep. I've just found LOGICOMIX [shouting in the original], courtesy of Cédric Eyssette. LOGICOMIX is a comic book about the history of the foundations of mathematics and logic. Now I am going to go and revel in it.

I'm having a go at NaBloPoMo. That's National Blog Posting Month—nothing to do with (bless the mark!) postmodernism. It's a knockoff of NaNoWriMo.

The blog I've asked the NaBloPoMo folks to list on their blogroll is “A Philosopher Muses: There's More Than One Way To Think About It”; currently DW crossposting does not support WordPress, so I'll try to remember to post manually here as well. When I can crosspost to WP, then I'll just post here.

This is my first Dreamwidth post in a very long time. I am sitting in Village Coffee Roastery. It's not as good as being really alone, but it's out of the house. Yesterday, I spent pretty much the whole day with other people, some of it IRL, some of it virtually. Last night, I woke up after a few hours' sleep, and was up the rest of the night—and, for a change, it was great; it was just what I needed. I went out for a walk in the darkness and silence, something I haven't done for too long. I've been reading Twyla Tharp on creativity (The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life); she reminded me of the importance of solitude and silence for creation, a lesson I seem to keep learning over and over again.

Right now, I am playing a little bit. I am listening to some audio responses to the Radio Lab show on Stochasticity, and writing this entry.

Since writing the previous paragraph, I have done some work. I've done some copy editing and formatting on the forthcoming entry “Sentence Connectives in Formal Logic” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. HTML is definitely not a typesetting language. Trying to approximate the typesetting power of TeX in HTML is doomed to failure.

I seem to be having a Tristram Shandy problem writing this. Events are occurring more rapidly today than I can write about them. In fact, it's now Saturday morning. So, anything further will go in another entry. This journaling thing can consume much time.