damn o’reilly, news summarization, consciousness, new design
robin posted this yesterday. I’m reposting it, because it deserves to be memetically reproduced.
see also
man, for a jew, there sure is a lot of jesus on my site right now.
I also found this cool site that offers website summariation services, Fyuze. It’s similar to something like Columbia NLP’s machine generated news summary service, Newsblaster, but this one offers customizable output.
Speaking of sites that attempt to summarize some of the media out there on the web, I often peruse Arts & Letters Daily, a huge, regularly updated respository of links to news, articles, opinions, books, etc. Today I found this gem by Gerald Edelman, Nobel prize winner for physiology and medicine in 1972. The articles about consicousness, how it arose as an outcome of some specific ways that the has brain evolved to work (in theory of course). Apparently he is a major expert on consciousness & neurophysiology, so it should have come as no surprise to me that in the advanced philosophy seminar I took in college on consciousness, his name never came up (nor did Penrose’s for that matter). It was taught by super-suave philosopher Colin McGinn, also a renowned expert on the topic. The class was wicked cool, but, as I’m obsessed with the kinds of patterns and structures our brain seems so intrinsically set up to recognize and process, I think I like Edelman’s perspective more than anything the philosophers have come up with, although it’s all worth reading. As David Chalmers makes pretty clear (possibly inadvertently), the philosophy and science of consciousness are still pretty distinct.
Lastly, I replaced the temporary header banner with this new graphic I made. I think it looks pretty dope-ass illmatic, and fully realizes the awesome magnitude of what it means to have been born in the year 1980. I didn’t really come of age in the 80s, but I should have. I mean the 90s were cool and all but not that cool… Cross Colors, MC Hammer, the Roger Rabbit dance, Boys 2 Men motownphilly, BBD’s Poison, ABC’s Ayeesha, etc. etc. All frickin awesome, but nothing compared to the dawn of hip hop and the awesomeness of the graphic design and color schemes I am paying homage to with the new visual motif of this site. Also — note the interplay of the two sides of the beatbox, another homage, this time to the great Jedi Knights who fought so that we could enjoy freedom in this great nation.. Dark and Light, like yin and yang, also present a manifestation of the constant search for happiness through a balanced life.
