Charlie

Charlie was convinced aliens were following him disguised as policemen. It was part of plot to take over by snatching people one at a time. He hasn’t seen his friend Michael since the night of his DUI arrest. Charlie managed to bolt out the passenger door, but it was close. Tonight he decided he’d been waiting, crouched in fear, long enough. He got in his truck and, with the stereo blasting, circled the neighborhood trying to flush ‘em out. When an officer arrived Charlie successfully outmaneuvered the unsuspecting alien with it’s own gun, then called 911 for reinforcements. But it was a trick and a whole regiment of aliens showed up instead. That’s when he knew it was Armageddon time. He took off his clothes, sat on the pavement, looked up and patiently waited for rapture to come and take him away from there.

Cosmic zone

Dawn is breaking on the continent of Capella. Overhead, the star of Davriel is still visible in a purplish blue sky. A meteorite trail flashes by. Sallareä bows her head in homage to all she does not know. She’s unaware that, momentarily, what she does not know will be paying homage back. Flickering particles of crystal enter a sector of Sallareä’s narrative-space. Passing through the prism of her senses, an apparition emerges. Sallareä sees a constellation of linked images that, to her, resembles a mandala. It has a message. Whoever this presence may be is telling her that everything is OK and would like to know if they can join her narrative-space and play.

Google

The Internet is like an anarchist state. No one is in charge and everyone can contribute. That’s how it should be. It puts everyone in charge of what comes and goes by a democratic process of selection. What is of interest to the most rises in visibility and what is of interest to the fewest decreases in visibility. It’s still available but mostly to the interested ‘niche’. What has no niche, or is offensive, fades into obscurity and may vanish altogether. That’s how it should be. Since there’s an open-door policy for entry, the ‘gateway’ needs to reside at the point-of-retrieval. This has been the protocol for nearly every database system I’ve installed ..the successful ones anyway. The gatekeeper to the Internet has been the role of portals such as AOL and Yahoo, or search-engines like Google. The most successful being the one that allows the most clear and manageable handle on chaos. That would be Google I believe. They have an equitable and consistent method for delivering Internet content. They call it ‘PageRank’ and it allows viewers to determine what comes to the foreground and what recedes to the background of our collective Internet experience. Rankings are based on factors such as the amount of attention a site receives or the aggregate number of links or ‘signposts’ directing traffic there. It is a most democratic point-of-retrieval system, provided they stay away from paid-ranking practices. Now they’re turning their attention to making Internet services available over the greatest number of devices and locations with their Android operating system. This has made the selection process even more democratic. In addition, it has put the Internet in our back pocket. Browser-based touch-screen phones have created a virtual ‘wallet’ ..containing a marketplace with virtual ‘catalogs’, ‘order-takers’, ‘currency’, ‘transaction-handlers’ and ‘record-keepers’. The number of services they can deliver to the palm of your hand is virtually endless. I don’t see the role of Google diminishing anytime soon [link].

Coastal zone

Ok, the way I look at it ..we can continue fighting the tide or we can step back and come to grips with a changing coastline. Looks like we’ve chosen to bunker down and fight. I believe this kind of old-school mentality just leads to faster erosion, more polluted water and fewer homes we can claim as beachfront property. What we end up with is a barrier that’s in constant need of repair and beaches that sicken us. That’s what happens when you build out to the edge. Ask anyone who lives on Broad Beach in Malibu or on the bluffs in Santa Barbara. The beach has receded hundreds of feet since I moved here in the 1990’s. Ask any one who still surfs the river jetty in Newport. Respiratory ailments, skin rashes and diarrhea come with the territory. You might say it’s nature’s way of restoring balance. I agree with UC Santa Cruz Oceanographer Gary Griggs and the Pacific Institute. We gotta’ retreat. Move the fucking concrete and asphalt back a couple hundred yards and replace it with cobblestones and sand. Restore a wetland that once acted as a natural filter and did a much better job at keeping the sand on the beach. Or just sit back and watch the ocean reclaim its property. What we’ll be left with are beaches of upturned asphalt, concrete pillars, rusted-out rebar and other detritus of a civilization that, for centuries, crammed its most valuable homes and businesses to the edge of the ocean.

Receptivity

Senator
Russell Pearce

I have a theory. People who rate themselves as highly ‘consistent and uncompromising’ on issues are slower to adapt to the unexpected and less likely to learn from their mistakes. To put it bluntly, “I think inflexibility leads to arrested development”. Roger Shank has a model of speech comprehension that says people only tune-in long enough to retrieve the most likely script from memory. After that, communication becomes a process of listening for information that fills-in the missing pieces. Tom Trabasso says script-based processing is a useful strategy but only when matters are highly predictable ..like listening to a kidnapping story where you can safely narrow your attention to the parts that talk about “what kind of force was used” or “what the kidnapper’s demands are.” My theory says that over-reliance on script-based processing is sort of like Procrustes bed in Greek mythology .. reception becomes limited to what conforms to a standard set of precedents in the listeners head. The rest is quickly dismissed as either immaterial, inconceivable or unacceptable (take for example John Boehner’s “Hell, no!” anti-Obama strategy, or Senator Russell Pearce’s claim that all opposing views are “treasonous”). I talked to Dr Thompson about it. Although he generally considers theories a dime a dozen, he thinks it merits attention and even suggested some ‘assessment tools’ I could use to measure ‘willingness to yield’ on issues. I didn’t think it would be hard getting people to admit to having an uncompromising nature and I have tests that measure how swiftly people handle unexpected events in a narrative. Now I’m interested in getting started and seeing what turns-up in the literature. Perhaps it’s already been done. I mean, you’d think it’d be a factor in Alzheimer’s or something. Considering the political atmosphere around here there’s bound to be some interest in the subject.

Anti anxiety

Sian Beilock

Writing has been shown to replace ruminating. Ruminating is generally thought of as the mental activity devoted to replaying past traumatic experience. It is a well-known contributor to clinical depression. That’s why writing workshops are often included in the treatment of depression. However, ruminating over future events, such as taking a high-stakes exam or something, can be equally disruptive. In this case, ruminating often leads to “choking” where students perform more poorly than expected given their skill level, especially when there are large incentives for optimal performance and negative consequences for poor performance. University of Chicago Psychologist Sian Beilock has found that the simple act of writing about anxiety can significantly reduce students’ chances of choking, especially if it’s done just prior to test-taking [link]. She says that when students are able to express their fears in writing, they’re given the satisfaction that they’ve dealt with them enough to move on and stop ruminating over them. This, in turn, releases space in working memory ..making it available to work on the task at hand.