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You've arrived at the main page of Digressions, my personal blog. To leave a comment to a post (and please do!) click on the post title and you'll find a Comments box at the bottom of the post, or click on the Comments link at the bottom of posts on the main page. If you want to read about watches, clocks, and other mechanical diversions, I'm the US editor for Revolution Magazine, whose homepage is at www.revo-online.com.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Short Subjects Part VII: S=k x logW

Dramatis Personae: Myself, Oldest Heir

Scene: Walk to school one semi-brisk October morning

OH: . . .So, anyway, I think the way this could work is --theoretically, anyway --you replace each neuron in the brain one at a time with an artificial one.  That way you don't interrupt the continuity of consciousness and you eventually get consciousness in a completely artificial brain.

M: That's an interesting thought experiment.  What about the body?

OH:  Same basic strategy.

M: What about metabolism?

OH:  What about it?

M: Well, I mean --you'd need some sort of energy intake.  You know, an external source of energy.

OH:  Yeah.  I mean, look, what I'm going for here is really total self-sufficiency and physical immortality, OK?

M:  Uh, doesn't the law of entropy forbid that?

OH:  What?

M:  Entropy.  No closed system is a hundred per cent efficient, kinda thing?  So you need some external energy source.  Chemical, nuclear, whatever.

(Pause)

OH:  OK, you know what I'm hearing?  Quitter talk, that's what I'm hearing.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

An Inconvenient Truth, Part Deux

"“The luxury industry has changed the way people dress.  It has realigned our economic class system. It has changed the way we interact with others. It has become part of our social fabric. To achieve this, it has sacrificed its integrity, undermined its products, tarnished its history and hoodwinked its consumers. In order to make luxury ‘accessible,’ tycoons have stripped away all that has made it special."


"Luxury has lost its luster."


--Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster



Monday, July 2, 2012

An Inconvenient Truth

"I think most journalists are pretty lazy, number one. A little lazy and also they're spoon-fed information, such as the weapons of mass destruction back in 2003....you have these people who create a package of news, develop it as a story line, a scenario, and they find, as Mailer once said about the press, that they're like a donkey. You have to feed the donkey. The donkey every day has to eat. So [special interests] throw information at this damn animal that eats everything. Tin cans, garbage." --Gay Talese

Sunday, July 1, 2012

An Update from "The Science of Scent" --Luca Turin's TED Talk

Thanks to Jon Edwards via Twitter for pointing this out.  Luca Turin's The Science of Scent was the subject of my first post ever on this blog and he's also done a TED talk on his theory and some fascinating subsequent developments.  Love his notion that a theory "is something that lets you do less work."


He is rather entertaining, as organic chemists go.