This month's American Scientist has a neat, short article about the Archer Fish, a species of fish that gets its food (flying or crawling bugs) by spitting watter at them and knocking them down. This appears to be done by visually tracking their prey, even across the refractive air-water boundary.

i just stumbled across an article titled emacs keybindings make you stupid. I am officially way way stupid. when i accidentally put too much of some ingredient in a sauce i'm cooking, i feel my fingers twitch for C-_ (or C-a C-k if i want to start over). I just pressed M-b to go back a word to edit this entry and brought down the bookmark menu of my web browser instead. i must do that a dozen times a day.

and sadly, my impulse is to want to "fix" the parts of the world that don't use emacs keybindings instead of retraining myself. i'm excited by the possibilities presented by MozEx, a mozilla extension that lets you edit a textarea in an arbitrary external text editor, for example.

This is so weird. Some Japanese researchers came up with a way to remotely control human movement. Oh it's so weird. Anyone who still thinks that their mind is tucked securely away in their skull should wake up and smell the coffee, or WE'LL MAKE YOU DO IT FROM AFAR!!!!!!!

Daniel and I got into a very fascinating conversation today about big numbers. I don't mean big numbers, I mean BIG NUMBERS!. Not infinities, mind you, but big finite numbers. We found a link to a really interesting article enticingly titled Who Can Name the Bigger Number? (written by this apparently very bright guy Scott Aaronson, who studies some pretty cool stuff and has written other interesting articles). The answer, it turns out, is not you. Unless you maybe know something about the Ackermann function or, better yet, the busy beaver.

Yesterday's nytimes ran a provocative article about the brain, perception, and social conformity. It raises questions about group pressure, individual choice and conscience, and the processes by which a "reality" can be made or altered. I am intrigued, also, by the way they design these experiments and interpret the data--certainly open to debate. Recent advances in our ability to see the brain functioning are impressive and exciting, and the information we gather may be correlated to the experience of these functions, to the feeling of conscious thought and being--but that's the hard part.

The NYT (registration required, or use bugmenot) has an article about the emergence of the asexual community. The article notes:

[the Asexual Visibility Network] defines an asexual as someone who "does not experience sexual attraction." This definition is, of course, distinct from the much older concept of asexual reproduction, practiced by amoebas, jellyfish and whiptail lizards, for example, as well as by many species of plants.

So joelee, his mom, and i watched Sound and Fury, a really interesting documentary about the debate over cochlear implants. We've discussed this before, but seeing the documentary was really worth it. i recommend it.

There's more info about the film on-line here, and in particular, i recommend the deaf voices section. Very challenging, provoking stuff.

Discussion also turned to Laurent, South Dakota, which was featured in a recent NYT article (i think -- don't have the link handy): it's a town designed around ASL being the primary language.