Autoboreogrammatics
So, I'm not in Miami yet, and have been in a holding pattern for the last week or so here at our parent's house in scenic Pennsylvania. In fact, Mike is within, oh, a-meter-and-a-half of me at this very moment. I have very little to do, aside from dodging a few more logistical things involved in my return to the wonderful world of graduate schooling. I did manage, yesterday, to notice something interesting:
I was sitting on the back porch here, in our delightfully wooded back yard, trying to read a book that Father asked me to read on his behalf, called The Mind Parasites. It wasn't going very well - I made the mistake of reading both the introduction by one of the book's enthusiasts, who apparently played bass in the band Blondie, back in the day, and also the preface by the author himself, which turned out to be generally pompous. Maybe the dude's smart though, apparently he taught at Brown at some point, I dunno.
The day was thoroughly overcast (it being summer in Pittsburgh), but the sky was quite bright. I found myself often looking away from the novel-itself's thoroughly boring expository first pages, and staring into the sky-through-branches-and-leaves. Now, in addition, I've currently, while riding an exercycle most mornings here, been reading Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works (a terrible title, and a book that isn't nearly as interesting as The Language Instinct). I'm currently slogging through the section of the book (which was written in the late '90s) dedicated to the then-quite-popular autostereograms (Magic Eye), and their implications for how the primate visual system is a crucial precursor for how our brains operate (and thusly, how the mind works).
Reading about autostereograms, and then reading a boring-ass fiction book about stupidly named parasites that have invaded people's consciousnesses is a perfect recipe for extraordinarily vacant back-porch staring. Also, both of my eyes are slightly misshaped (mild astigmatism), causing my vision to go a bit blurry in certain lighting conditions (I have to wear glasses to drive at night, 'cause of the oncoming headlights, things like that). Now, as I wasn't wearing my glasses yesterday afternoon, my eyes were prone to going strange in the right kind of lighting.
At any rate, I was staring into the heavens, or trying to, or staring at the branches and leaves above me, and realized that I could much more easily see the shimmering little points of sky through the leaves than I could see the leaves themselves. The diffuse-but-intense back-lighting of the leaf-ed branches made it quite hard to distinguish anything but a general green-ness. So, in something like a pretend autostereogram, the little shimmering sky-grid thing popped forward, and existed in front of the leaves.
It's probably mostly just a symptom of my brain being more than willing, at the time, to indulge my mind's phenomenological interests, but it looked really cool, and I'd never seen anything like it before. Way more interesting than The Mind Parasites, anyway.
I was sitting on the back porch here, in our delightfully wooded back yard, trying to read a book that Father asked me to read on his behalf, called The Mind Parasites. It wasn't going very well - I made the mistake of reading both the introduction by one of the book's enthusiasts, who apparently played bass in the band Blondie, back in the day, and also the preface by the author himself, which turned out to be generally pompous. Maybe the dude's smart though, apparently he taught at Brown at some point, I dunno.
The day was thoroughly overcast (it being summer in Pittsburgh), but the sky was quite bright. I found myself often looking away from the novel-itself's thoroughly boring expository first pages, and staring into the sky-through-branches-and-leaves. Now, in addition, I've currently, while riding an exercycle most mornings here, been reading Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works (a terrible title, and a book that isn't nearly as interesting as The Language Instinct). I'm currently slogging through the section of the book (which was written in the late '90s) dedicated to the then-quite-popular autostereograms (Magic Eye), and their implications for how the primate visual system is a crucial precursor for how our brains operate (and thusly, how the mind works).
Reading about autostereograms, and then reading a boring-ass fiction book about stupidly named parasites that have invaded people's consciousnesses is a perfect recipe for extraordinarily vacant back-porch staring. Also, both of my eyes are slightly misshaped (mild astigmatism), causing my vision to go a bit blurry in certain lighting conditions (I have to wear glasses to drive at night, 'cause of the oncoming headlights, things like that). Now, as I wasn't wearing my glasses yesterday afternoon, my eyes were prone to going strange in the right kind of lighting.
At any rate, I was staring into the heavens, or trying to, or staring at the branches and leaves above me, and realized that I could much more easily see the shimmering little points of sky through the leaves than I could see the leaves themselves. The diffuse-but-intense back-lighting of the leaf-ed branches made it quite hard to distinguish anything but a general green-ness. So, in something like a pretend autostereogram, the little shimmering sky-grid thing popped forward, and existed in front of the leaves.
It's probably mostly just a symptom of my brain being more than willing, at the time, to indulge my mind's phenomenological interests, but it looked really cool, and I'd never seen anything like it before. Way more interesting than The Mind Parasites, anyway.
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