Julian Jaynes and Our Bicameral Past

Traipsing along the fringe between science and pseudoscience...

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes is an interesting if dated perspective on the emergence of human consciousness. Fascinating idea, but not one I find compelling at first read.  Was Jaynes an intellect ages ahead of his time or a nutty professor with a quirky theory?  There's something to his idea, but I can't quite make sense of it.  Another book on my reading list, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist, may help me flesh this out.

Twelve Hours To Go

Until the US premiere of the film event of the summer, if not the year...

Ridley Scott's Prometheus is opening Friday morning at 12:01 AM, and we'll be there!  The prequel to Alien (apparently, sort of, mostly) features Noomi Rapace (the original Lisbeth Salander from the superior Swedish film production of the Millenium "Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" Trilogy, rowrrr!) and will give us some back story on The Space Jockey.   Yee Haa, Waa Hoo!

UPDATE: Prometheus is sumptuous to the eye, but key details don't line up with those experienced in Alien.  Of course no one told us they would (actually , we were told they probably wouldn't), but the discontinuities are unnecessary and create more questions than the movie purports to answer.  The screenplay was penned by the co-creators of Lost, which is not automatically a good thing.  The story features many traditional Science Fiction and Horror tropes and a ship load of "redshirts," about half of whom meet their end in single inexplicable scene.  Still, Michael Fassbender's David is awesome, and Noomi Rapace is captivating of course.  There are times when Ridley Scott's vision shines through and others when he manages to channel the best of Stanley Kubrick in his 2001: A Space Odyssey phase.  I'll be going back. 

REUPDATE: Saw it again and liked it better the second time. And it was great fun watching the audience squirming like worms during "that scene."

LinkedIn Hacked?

So says the LA Times...

LinkedIn and Goodreads are my favorite social media hangouts.  I have no time for Facebook, having been Zucked one too many times, and Google's offerings are many and confusing.  I should play with Twitter, but I haven't gotten around to it.  Anyway, a member of my team sent me the breaking news that a Russian hacking site has allegedly posted 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords.  Apparently they're hashed, but that is not the same thing as unbreakable.  I'm not usually an alarmist about such things, but inasmuch I'm unfamiliar with LinkedIn's ability to restore my account if someone should mess it up, I took 30 seconds to change my password, which I was behind on anyway.

Stuff Your Eyes With Wonder

"Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."

Ray Bradbury, the author of one of my favorite books of all time, Fahrenheit 451, passed away today at the ripe, old age of 91.  He's being remembered eloquently in thousands of papers, zines, websites, and blogs today, but I would be remiss not to comment on his passing.  Reading Fahrenheit 451 was a formative experience for me.  Francois Truffaut's grim movie adaptation was uncanny and wondrous as well.  Yes, Bradbury wrote many other novels and hundreds of short stories, but his apt realization of a dystopian future which resembles our current reality all too well was his greatest gift to me.  Thank you, sir, well done!

A Twice In A Lifetime Opportunity

But this is your second of the two chances...

Transits of Venus occur when Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun.  Because the Earth and Venus travel around the sun at different rates and orbit in slightly different planes they are not that common, on a human scale.  Transits of Venus are observed in pairs on a repeating pattern; 121 years, eight years between pairs, then 105 years until the next pair.  The most recent transit occurred in 2004.  Before that the last transit was in 1882.  The next will be in 2117, almost certainly too late for anyone reading this in 2012.

All my favorite blogs are chatting it up and showing you how to make your own viewer, or where to watch it on-line. 

I have a pinhole viewer set up.  It's a little more sophisticated than the two sheets of cardboard we used for the partial solar eclipse of the sun a couple weeks ago.  Don't know if I have sufficient resolution to make out the small black disk of Venus moving across the face of the Sun, but we'll give her a go.

WARNING: Do not look at the sun directly, let alone through a binocular or telescope, without appropriate filters!

Update: No joy.  We could not make out the disk against the sun, despite playing with the length of our viewer.  Caught the live feeds a couple times throughout the evening.  Oh well, maybe next time...