1999-12-28 :: 01:08:05

biological binary systems

Soundtrack: DJ Shadow, "Endtroducing..."

It is sad that yesterday's entry came just before someone nuked nobody. So now very little of it will make sense when it comes to that stuff, but... c'est la vie. After I had finished editing the entry, I thought to myself (as I went to the bathroom and enjoyed the toilet seat that I had left up all day long) that it was strange that a diary with an open password hadn't been abused or reset or whatever. Guess my cynicism was [sadly] on the money.

One quick thing about The Iron Giant, also with respect to yesterday. That's the DVD (maybe VHS too) cover, not the movie poster. The official site has pics of the poster and whatnot.

I'm maybe 30 minutes into Devil In The Flesh, and it looks like Rose is gonna be her usual badass body-flaunting self -- hot for teacher. Huzzah! It's so unpleasant to think that Marilyn Manson and she hop the love trolley. I will say that on talk shows and whatnot, Marilyn is pretty well-spoken. Gotta [grudgingly] give the man(?) that.

Here's something I wonder about a great deal, especially during a good conversation -- with all of its motioning/gesturing and visual and aural perceptions. The actual process that goes into these bits going from my fingers to a reader's eyeballs (or in a conversation, the volley of a thought between two distinct individuals). Let's see -- I think I'm going to miss a lot of details, but it should still be interesting to trace:

[my end of the picture]

my brain -> diffuse modulatory systems -> thoughts and emotions -> spinal cord signal -> stimulation of motor neurons by the signals in the cervical area -> various nerve wires traveling the length of my arms and into each individual finger (notably the index fingers) -> movement of the wrists and fingers -> keyboard keys depressing -> computer interrupts received -> keyboard buffer read -> net browser -> screen update -> light stream -> my corneas -> my optic lens -> my retinas -> photoreceptors -> optic nerve -> hypothalamus -> visual cortex -> parallel pattern matching mechanisms -> *repeat*

when the entry is completed...

nerve stimulation to move hand to mouse -> bicep and tricep contraction/relaxation as appropriate -> muscle spindle feedback -> hand on mouse -> mechanoreceptors sense left button, brain assesses success -> mouse moved to "done!" button using a mix of visual and muscle parallel processing -> pointer located over button -> mouse button depressed -> computer interrupt received -> net browser -> Submit action -> data stream over modem to Diaryland server -> some CGI shit andrew wrote -> Perl interpreter -> machine code -> hard disk written to (a lot of details I am not that familiar with skipped there)

[reader's end of the picture -- that's you!]

some sort of physical action, be it direct URL typing (as described above) or clicking on a link (similar to the button thing above)

and then...

screen update -> light stream -> your corneas -> your optic lens -> your retinas -> photoreceptors -> optic nerve -> your hypothalamus -> your visual cortex -> parallel pattern matching mechanisms -> diffuse modulatory systems -> thoughts and emotions -> possible formation of declarative memories -> spinal cord signal -> stimulation of motor neurons in the cervical area -> moving your mousewheel or hitting the down arrow or space bar as you read on *repeat* or clicking your "Back" button in disgust and completing the process somewhere else

Hmmm. It is not hard to see why so many things get lost in this rather amazing biological game of Telephone. All the while as I write this neurons in my brain are firing in parallel, smashing together chemical and electrical binary numbers, summing them and subtracting them, attempting to forge words from them, correcting and recorrecting. And then when read, your brain tries to do the same thing, in the way that a musician in the studio's sound recording gets played out of your home stereo. Only our two brains will never be making quite the same things or firing in quite the same way (just like an audiophile can never quite recreate the studio). If fingerprints are always individual, one can only imagine the differences in the brain. Still more numbing -- to me at least -- is the fact that the brain perceives differences, not absolutes. And yet, when I say "that is blue," most people would agree (unless they are colorblind, or whatever). Somehow we all see our relativity similarly enough to not have everyone in their own reality (though that does happen occasionally, of course -- with interesting *cough* results).

But isn't it amazing that it all works the way it does? With an instruction set as simple as it has? I mean, neurons are on, or neurons are off. The only way signals change is through frequency -- action potentials down axons are all the same amplitude. I didn't learn terribly much as far as memorizing distinct neural parts in Neuroscience, but I did learn a great deal of appreciation for how amazing and powerful a computer the mind is. We are capable of so much.

DJ Shadow helps me think. It just feels like it opens my head and gives me room for that sort of thing. Mellow. I admire that man a lot. He's a really pure, talented artist, and drug-free to boot. Music flows in him.

I was talking to Brent about various things in McDonald's yesterday, and he said something like "You know, it seems like we haven't grown up much." To which I replied "Well, I think we have, but parts of us haven't." We continued in that vein until he said "Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go play with the toy designed for a 3 year old." I laughed so hard everyone in the restaurant turned to look. I still think it was one of the funniest things I'd heard in a long time. Good to have the inner child come out and play.

Online diaries, to me, seem like giant halls of mirrors. That was the analogy I thought of while I was showering the sleep from my head this morning. I could see you, and you could see me, and we could have seen each other, studied one another for some time, formed opinions, whatever -- but never known that fact about the other when we meet/speak/whatever. Perhaps, if you are reading this, I have read your diary. Perhaps not, but chances are if this actually gets read by any number of Diaryland users that at least one of them will have been skimmed over by me. I certainly binged last night (that has to stop).

But you wouldn't know if I knew you (the online diary you, not the real you, of course), because I rarely write diary authors. I wrote Olivia a few times before she really became big, and I think I wrote Elly once to tell her that Henry Rollins (her hero) was on a talk show. Oh yeah, I've written Puce a few times. But she's never replied, and I don't really read her much anymore. Olivia doesn't reply too much (or with much length), so I basically stopped. She is from New Zealand.

Which brings me to...

I found it interesting that person spells with the British style and while the link I made to a post on nobody is now dead, it mentioned a bit of HTML detective work pointing towards papermilk.com as the source for person's images and Nedstat or whatever (it was a neat post, I'm sorry it's gone). So it was also interesting to note that this WHOIS information mentions a lady in NZ. I had a brainfart of sorts while reading an article on the Man On The Moon ad campaign that took place. anomalous and person seem very Andy Kaufman to me.

As for what I said about "unmasking" yesterday, it turns out it took 10 minutes max for that to occur. That was surreal.

Resonant thoughts:

Buckley talked about thinking and sleeping and nobody calling and pouring it into a computer. Dorkus discussed the fact that talking about the day's events can spoil them in a diary and make them seem duller than they were.

That is why it is best to capture the thoughts, I think. And Pinch had some particularly good ones that really spoke to me, especially about writing. Such is the self-critical nature of any form of art and the artist that makes it. Keep plugging (I think that should be said to most journalers who are really trying).

I wondered, a bit back, "why I have not made this diary public[.]" I think I have come to a conclusion: I wanted to see how it would disperse (if at all). And it dispersed pretty quickly, which is bizarre and also amusing. Furthermore, it all ties into the hall of mirrors thing. Watch me watch you, and then watch me. Somewhere there is a movie script in all of this.