Mind Garten

A Special School I can't take credit for this piece. I reproduced it from here My life ended three days after my fifteenth birthday. As often happens when a life or even the world ends another life or another world will take its place and existence will go on, and that's how it passes that there is still a person wearing the name and matching the physical description and carrying the memories of the life that was lost. But make no mistake, my life ended three days after my fifteenth birthday. That was the day I was awakened at four in the morning by two very large men who asked me politely to dress and then grabbed me and put me in handcuffs. While my parents watched passively I was dragged into a van and then to a chartered jet and then to the island of Jamaica, and made a member of a special tropical Hell. You might ask what drove my parents to have me committed to the School. I asked myself that a lot over the next three years, and I'm pretty sure I know...

Studying at 5am I woke up at 4:30am today for no particular reason. This is happening quite often lately. I think the combination of a hungry kitty in the morning and the fact that my mind is racing ever since I got back to school, conspire to allow me to sleep for pure physiological reasons only. Last night I prepared my presentation on Marcel Schoppers' 1987 paper on Universal Plans. I had a lot of fun researching this since I studied related papers and its criticism as well as talk to the author directly. Working at NASA JPL now, he was kind enough to answer my questions via email, and I obtained wonderful insights about research work in the trenches. Of course, he doesn't do research anymore, since he got fed up with it. This morning I'm reading about a theory of evolution of the brain by Michael Arbib, one of my professors teaching my Brain Theory & AI class. This class is quite interesting but also quite difficult. There's so much new terminol...

There and Back Again 7:00am - Woke up to the meowing and harassment from Bean. Pushed him off the bed a couple times and finally threw a blanket at him to make him shut up. 8:00am - Alarm went off. Immediately Bean began meowing insistently that I feed him. I got up and walked to the kitchen while the blood was rushing out of my head. Gave him a scoop, reset my alarm and went back to bed. 9:00am - Alarm went off. Reset it to 10 and fell asleep. 10:00am - Alarm went off. Reset it to 11. Tried to go to sleep. Bean began harassing me again, and I realized that I needed to go to the lab to work today. Got up. Ate cereal. Drank coffee. Listened to the radio and answered my email. 11:00am - Got in the car and drove off to Marina del Rey where the research laboratory was. 11:45am - Signed in at the desk, and took the elevator to the 8th floor. 11:50am - Took the elevator to the ground floor and signed out after realizing that it was Labor Day and no one was t...