Mid-morning. Up at dawn, breakfast and the news-media. You remembered an article from the Times yesterday and copied it this morning for further reference. The focus is on measuring human consciousness. I have one paragraph for you to insert here.
I don’t even have it in front of me Amorella and I haven’t read it through since yesterday. Okay – let’s see what the paragraph is. I am curious. > The New York Times of the 20 September article is “Sizing Up Consciousness by its Bits,” by Carl Zimmer.
“. . . Dr. Tononi’s theory is, potentially, very different. He and his colleagues are translating the poetry of our conscious experiences into the precise language of mathematics. To do so, they are adapting information theory, a branch of science originally applied to computers and telecommunications. If Dr. Tononi is right, he and his colleagues may be able to build a “consciousness meter” that doctors can use to measure consciousness as easily as they measure blood pressure and body temperature. . . .”
This is the fifth paragraph in an article five pages long. I haven’t reread the article but it seems to me there was another paragraph far more interesting than this.
Add it then, orndorff. – Amorella.
“For the past decade, Dr. Tononi and his colleagues have been expanding traditional information theory in order to analyze integrated information. It is possible, they have shown, to calculate how much integrated information there is in a [brain] network. Dr. Tononi has dubbed this quantity phi, and he has studied it in simple networks made up of just a few interconnected parts. How the parts of a network are wired together has a big effect on phi. If a network is made up of isolated parts, phi is low, because the parts cannot share information. . . .
"Networks gain the highest phi possible if their parts are organized into separate clusters, which are then joined. “What you need are specialists who talk to each other, so they can behave as a whole,” Dr. Tononi said. He does not think it is a coincidence that the brain’s organization obeys this phi-raising principle.”
We work from different perspectives, orndorff. The substance of this article shows an example of it. Post. – Amorella.
Late afternoon. Sitting at Kroger’s on Mason-Montgomery Road after other errands. Chips and celery tonight for snacks while watching one or two of the new shows, NCIS and NCIS Los Angeles as well as Detroit ??? at ten. You both enjoy the characters and the plots of the police or detective shows.
We were both brought up reading Sherlock Holmes and listening to ‘Yours Truly Johnny Dollar’ and the like before we had televisions. Comforting entertainment for us I suppose. There used to be a lot of mysteries on the late forties and fifties radio shows. The Green Hornet was another. I cannot remember the names. One was an FBI show and maybe even Dragnet was on radio. Anyway we listened to them as well as adventure shows where the characters were in Latin America or exotic places such as India or Tibet or the Congo in Africa. Loved those shows. I remember a little bit of Indian Jones in several of them. Tarzan too was another. I ought to check them out online. Some may still be played on one of the internet old time radio stations. It’s all in what you grew up with.
I still enjoyed listening to radio shows throughout the fifties. I mostly kept it to myself and almost always listened in bed on old post WWII headphones which were bulky but cool. I had antenna wire stretched around the floor of my bedroom from 1953 until we moved from Minerva Park in 1959. Then when in college I stretched it around my room at my grandparents on the corner of Walnut and Knox in Westerville. Also, Ellery Queen, This Is Your FBI, and Suspense were three more radio shows worth listening to. CBS and ABC Radio Mystery Theatre(s) were others. I could check them all out but not worth the time now. Maybe when I am older, beyond the writing stage of my life. Nothing like a good mystery or who-done-it almost anytime, that’s what Carol and I think.
No comments:
Post a Comment