29th August 2003 15:03 (Greenwhich and a bit)

Unapology

A colleague is leaving as of today, which has meant a leaving do (Prinsess Victoria Street again, hoorah) and a whole bunch of frantic last minuteness. As I have a CD writer, I also get the job of preparing all the CDs of data to go, amongst other things.

Normal service will resume on Monday.

2003-08-29 12:03 (UTC+1)

Things didn't know you needed until now

1. Anja. You need the thumping surf music/bhangra cross over of "Singing Sitars".

2. When penguins attack!

A few of the cute and curious oceanic birds have launched themselves over the plexiglass wall that separates their man-made habitat from the public walkway. Several have even struck unsuspecting Zoo patrons since the new Penguin & Puffin Coast opened in May.
[...]
[Curator of birds, Mike] Macek attributed the penguins' audacious behavior to the species' fearlessness and lack of intelligence. The fearlessness comes from living on isolated islands without land predators. And the low IQ means it often takes them a couple months to learn what a parrot might figure out in a day.

The Penguin Squad! Fearless But Dim!

3. A nice list of books on the whole cognitive spiciness question. The collator appears elsewhere on the site to be a raging hippie, but the only effect on the list itself is the low count of Rabid Reductionistes, and that can only be good.

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2003-08-29 11:01

WTO: The World Tact Organisation.

The many and varied ways of EU foodstuffnaminglaw are a delight to all, of course, but over at Perspektiv Europa, Bengt has found another rich vein of squabbleicious Trans-Atlantic fun:

Vi kan helt enkelt inte acceptera att EU inte kan s�lja sin �kta italienska parmaskinka i Kanada f�r att varum�rket "parmaskinka" d�r �r reserverat f�r en skinka som framst�lls i Kanada, sade han.

[We quite simply can't accept that the EU can't sell its authentic Italian Parma ham in Canada because the trademark "Parma ham" there is reserved for a ham produced in Canada, said [Commissioner Fischler].]

The 41-strong list (see Bengt's post for the full skinny) of disputed designations includes many old favourite: champagne, chianti, madeira, but I didn't know about ouzo, of which I am very fond - after decades of hearing it joked about, it turns out to be an eminently potable Greek form of pastis, yum yum.

I bet the mood is sombre at the headquarters of Klaus's Authentic Texan-Fried "Food" Parlour (The best chicken-fried bratwurst this side of Houston!) as they await the inevitable counter-claims.

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2003-08-28 14:20

A la recherche des �pices perdues

Go and mock some silly robotistes:

"Consciousness is perhaps the last remaining mystery in understanding what it is to be human," said Owen Holland, who will lead the work at Essex University. "By attempting to build physical systems which can produce a form of artificial consciousness, we hope to learn more about the nature of consciousness."

says Mr Lintott. Must. Obey. Lintott. It's bobbins and a half, to use the technical expression. A coctail of cluelessness, metaphysics, neural networks and a Large Grant.

Admire Daniel Dennet, suggests Opie. While opportunities to admire Mr Dennet's vigorous denunciations abound - abound, I tell you, let's instead admire Daniel Dennet admiring Antonio R. Damasi's Descartes' Error:

All this is "obvious" but its major implication is under-appreciated: "Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it." (p.128.) Failure to see this, Damasio says, is Descartes' error. Far from there being a separation, sharp or ragged, between mind and body, mind cannot exist or operate at all without body. The idea that the body's needs set the pace and indirectly drive the brain's decisions is not new. When Damasio says that the older, blood-based systems intertwine with the "more modern and plastic ones" in the nervous system, via a host of feedback loops, and that thereby "the goodness and badness of situations is regularly signaled" to the nervous system, this idea occupies much the same explanatory niche as Skinner's ideas about how innate mechanisms reinforced appropriate stimulus-response pairings, for instance, but Damasio makes a more interesting proposal out of it. In particular, he shows how this intimate body-involvement plays important roles in explaining some of the juicier and more mysterious facts of "phenomenology."

As organisms acquired greater complexity, 'brain-caused' actions require more intermediate processing. Other neurons were interpolated between the stimulus neuron and the response neuron, and varied parallel circuits were thus set up, but it did not follow that the organisms with that more complicated brain necessarily had a mind. Brains can have many intervening steps in the circuits mediating between stimulus and response, and still have no mind, if they do not meet an essential condition: the ability to display images internally and to order those images in a process called thought. (p89).

Who or what is the audience for this "display" of "images"? Not a Cartesian ego or self, isolated in some central module--the dread Cartesian Theater--and overburdened with powers and responsibilities, but a self distributed throughout the body, a clear descendant of the Aristotelian vegetative soul.

Before this, I had been pointedly ignoring Mr Damasio's book, because I happen to like Descartes, but this really does look intriguing.

My own attempt to reconcile ph�nom�nologie and AI-iste research, incidentally, is still in progress - it has got a little bit out of hand, h�las, but it is coming along.

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2003-08-28 12:09 (UTC+1)

No news is kunglig news

1. Think of him as a gender-challenged prinsess, if it helps

The king of Sweden, whose name I forget, is being all coyly "Vickan's boyfriend? What boyfriend?". Sigh:

Ni har v�l h�rt talas om Daniel Westling?
Nu ser kungen l�ttad ut och s�ger:
- Javisst. Sj�lvfallet. Jag har tr�ffat honom flera g�nger och det �r v�ldigt trevligt. Det �r bra att ungdomarna tar hem kamrater och s� vidare s� att man f�r l�ra k�nna dem. Det �r b�ttre att man l�r k�nna dem �n att man inte k�nner dem alls.

[Your Yourselfness has surely heard talk of Daniel Westling?
Now seems the king relieved and says:
"Certainly. Naturally. I have met him several times and it was hugely enjoyable. It's good that young persons bring friends home and so on so that one can get to know them. It is better that one gets to know them than that one doesn't know them at all."

He goes on to be mystified by talk of engagements. Gripping stuff, for sure.

2. Madde talks frankly

Except for the "frankly" of course.

Hovet har n�mligen best�mt att den yngsta prinsessan ska h�rdtr�nas i hur man m�ter pressen.
Det f�rsta tr�ningspasset �gde rum p� Slottet f�re sommaren. Men det blev varken Se & H�r eller Svensk Damtidning som fick komma p� bes�k.
I st�llet tackade prinsessan Madeleine ja till en pratstund med den lilla lokaltidningen Ljusnan i H�lsingland.

The court has in fact decided that the youngest prinsess is going to be carefully schooled in dealing with the meeja.
The first trainingsession took place at the Castle this summer. But it was neither Se & H�r or Svensk Damtidning that was invited.
Instead Madeleine consented to an interview with the little localnewspaper Ljusan in H�lsingland.

(Madde is of course the Duchess of H�lsingland.)

You will be astonished to hear that sometimes she is unhappy when people (mentioning no Tyskebladets) make up mean stories about her.

3. Mette-Marit - tax payers' money well spent, hurrah!

And finally, Mette-Marit goes shopping, and why not?

[This post was developed under license from Annalouisebladet, hoorah!]

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2003-08-28 09:25 (UTC+1)

Tact goes on holiday

I have seen the Briteesh touristes on cut-price package holidays. It is not, you will exhilirate to be told, an edifying spectacle. My experience has been that German touristes are less systematically vile, but what do I know?

British holidaymakers have come a very close second to the Germans in a survey to find the rudest nation of tourists.
[...]
The survey also carried the claim that Germans always found something to complain about no matter how high the standard of service.

Enfer, c'est les touristes.

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2003-08-27 13:40 (UTC+1)

Kronprinsess Krazy!

Finland, which for much of the 20th century was too busy being invaded, threatened with invasion, or generally oppressed, to get around to establishing a monarchy to replace the Swedish one it whose patronage it forsook in gaining independence from said land of lagom, now has to make do with the scraps from its better-endowed neighbour's table. It was, then, as much a relief mission as a state visit when

I g�r reste kungaparet och kronprinsessan Victoria till Helsingfors f�r ett statsbes�k. Men inte med flygplan.

[Yesterday the kronprinsess Vickan and her mummy and daddy (her mummy and daddy are the king and queen!) travelled to Helsingfors ["Helsingrad"] for a state visit. But not on an aeroplane ["airplane"].]

They went on a boat! The boat was called HMS Visborg! (Why "HMS"? In Engleesh that's for H(is|er) Majesty's Ship, but not in Swedish, surely?)

And Vickan wore a hat and waved at Finnish persons! And they were very happy and shouted "L�nge leve Victoria!" and that's from a Swedish-language paper in Finland so it must be true. (NB: "Victoria" is Finnish for "Vickan".)

And now the Finnish persons - enjoying unprecedented peace and prosperity since joining the EU and EMU, hint, hint - have finally realised what it is they have been missing all this time:

Starka krafter i Finland vill g�ra Victoria till kronprinsessa �ven �ver Finland.

[Strong forces in Finland want to make Vickan kronprinsess of Finland as well.]

Testify, my Finnish brethren, testify!

[Most Vickan linkage via Anna Louise, prinsessa spotter extraodinaire, hurrah!]

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2003-08-27 09:25 (UTC+1)

The Oxfam Bookshop in Clifton

is on Princess Victoria Street, and yet yesterday was the first time I had been there. I'm glad I did now, though, because they had "Svenska M�nster: Grammatik�vningar i svenska som andraspr�k" for 59 of our Engleesh pences, and now I have it instead. (I am of course 59 pence less well off, but still.)

Closer inspection shows that it had a previous life in the library (which I have never visited) of the college where I study Swedish. Closer inspection still shows that it is probably Beneath Me, but I shall endeavour to persevere - 59 pence is 59 pence, after all.

And in the other Oxfam bookshop I belatedly found Mr Sartre's Huis Clos - a charmante romantic comedy about how French persons can't shut up even when they're dead.

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2003-08-27 08:29 (UTC+1)

Europe, Moderate.

Why ze French zey are not so - 'ow you say? - lard-ass as ze Merrkins? Ees vairr simple, mah gluttonous frrriends - voila:

Now, researchers on both sides of the Atlantic believe they have cracked the riddle. The answer, they say, is simply smaller portions.

While the French eat more fat, they consume fewer calories than their American counterparts.

Mais, oui, c'est tout. Nah what you say mah, ah, chunky chums? Oh l� l�, to talk weez yourr masfull, ees not naas, n'est-ce pas?

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