The Botetourt data center is bad news, and some people are quite appropriately upset. Let’s not, however, allow our anger to preclude a little education. Here we have an excellent case study of how government in these United States works. When I learned that a decision of the Botetourt board of supervisors bid fair to drain dry Roanoke’s water supply, I wondered how one county could unilaterally make a decision for a public utility servicing multiple counties. Well, it can’t, but then it turns out that the Western Virginia Water… Read more The Botetourt Data Center, The Water Authority, and an Invitation to Corruption →
It’s odd returning to old writing, I wrote what follows more than a decade ago, and I hardly recognize myself. Still, I think it holds up pretty well. It was intended to be chapter 2 or 3 of a book of Virginia lawyer stories. Here it is: In law school I met one of my good friends, Dave. While I am a Southerner of mostly Irish descent, and have consequently never enjoyed a tranquil day in my life, Dave is half Scottish and half British, and is generally composed and… Read more Wythe County →
Since writing about memory reconsolidation here, I’ve learned to explain it more simply, as follows. Your brain is a prediction machine. If one of its predictions fails, a four to five hour window opens, in which you may install a new one. To do so, repeat the prediction error, in this time frame, at least three times. You can try this at home. This exercise is for those of us gummed up with nastiness from childhood. Sit or lie down in a comfortable place, close your eyes, and listen to… Read more Memory Reconsolidation: An Exercise →
The brain is a prediction machine, and its predictions powerfully govern our very perceptions. Mark Solms writes in The Hidden Spring: Most people don’t realize that our here-and-now perceptions are constantly guided by predictions, generated mainly from long-term memory. But they are. That is why far fewer neurons propagate signals from the external sense organs to the internal memory systems than the other way round. For example, the ratio of incoming connections to outgoing ones in the lateral geniculate body (which relays information from the eyes to the visual cortex… Read more Predictions, ADHD, Electricity →
Scott Adams’ Reframe Your Brain is, by all accounts, a useful book. In the spirit of “the purpose of science is to confirm the commonplace,” let’s shallowly dip our toes… Read more Reframing Reframe Your Brain: Memory Reconsolidation →
The “perpetually incomplete and insecure,” find in fundamentalist doctrine protection from a complex and ambiguous world. They will sacrifice reality for this security, and will just as readily sacrifice the… Read more Religion, Fundamentalism, Gnosticism, Part XIII: The Scapegoat →
Why is trauma, as we know it, a distinctively modern disease? Why do we observe PTSD in domesticated, but not wild, animals? Trauma is physiological—it’s not just in your head. While it need not involve violence, death, or rape—in fact, it is reliably amplified by boring things like office buildings and public schools—its mechanism includes more than mean people and scary opinions. Let’s start with an example from 9/11: “Sharon,” at work in the World Trade Center, felt a shock and an explosion, and tried to run, but found the… Read more Industrial Trauma Robots: Two Commonplaces →
The “fat sex therapist” is a familiar lunatic. Her neatly dualistic scheme recalls Chesterton’s description of a madman: “He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he… Read more Religion, Fundamentalism, Gnosticism: Part XII →