In addition, any dog over 5 years old, or cat over 6 months old is FREE.

You must show valid ID and fill out the application forms.

www.sddac.com

(Posted to Craigslist/San Diego)

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On supervisor told me I was much more suited to an in-house IT environment.  After watching this video, I’m inclined to agree.

The Website is Down

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“Depends where you draw the line for your self, doesn’t it?”

It does, I agree. The line I suggested was the division between instinct and character. Selfishness is a base concept, part of our instincts. It’s our survival instinct. Layered on top of that are the adopted traits and mannerisms that further define us as individuals. In those upper layers are parental love, honor, selflessness, all our more noble and prized attributes. For those we may express pride or shame, each life is different. But our selfishness is part of our core beliefs. In itself it’s neither a good attribute or a poor one. It’s how we build our lives around it that speaks to our character.

“…when I act in my total interests, it would be misleading to call it selfish.”

Misleading, yes, but not inaccurate. The problem is that we’ve allowed the word selfish to be given a negative connotation it doesn’t deserve. There are biological and evolutionary reasons we’re selfish. If you act totally out of self-interest, you’re behaving selfishly. And there’s no good reason in the world why you shouldn’t. Like I said, selfishness is instinctual. It’s how we dress it up that expresses our values and defines our character.

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Is there anything that differentiates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom? Tool use? Nope. The ability to communicate? No. Possessing a social order? Not even close.

We can dance.

So You Think You Can Dance?: PET Scans Reveal Your Brain’s Inner Choreography

So natural is our capacity for rhythm that most of us take it for granted: when we hear music, we tap our feet to the beat or rock and sway, often unaware that we are even moving. But this instinct is, for all intents and purposes, an evolutionary novelty among humans. Nothing comparable occurs in other mammals nor probably elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Our talent for unconscious entrainment lies at the core of dance, a confluence of movement, rhythm and gestural representation. By far the most synchronized group practice, dance demands a type of interpersonal coordination in space and time that is almost nonexistent in other social contexts.

Even though dance is a fundamental form of human expression, neuroscientists have given it relatively little consideration. Recently, however, researchers have conducted the first brain-imaging studies of both amateur and professional dancers. These investigations address such questions as, How do dancers navigate though space? How do they pace their steps? How do people learn complex series of patterned movements? The results offer an intriguing glimpse into the complicated mental coordination required to execute even the most basic dance steps.

Neuroscientists have long studied isolated movements such as ankle rotations or finger tapping. From this work we know the basics of how the brain orchestrates simple actions. To hop on one foot—never mind patting your head at the same time—requires calculations relating to spatial awareness, balance, intention and timing, among other things, in the brain’s sensorimotor system. In a simplified version of the story, a region called the posterior parietal cortex (toward the back of the brain) translates visual information into motor commands, sending signals forward to motion-planning areas in the premotor cortex and supplementary motor area. These instructions then project to the primary motor cortex, which generates neural impulses that travel to the spinal cord and on to the muscles to make them contract.

At the same time, sensory organs in the muscles provide feedback to the brain, giving the body’s exact orientation in space via nerves that pass through the spinal cord to the cerebral cortex. Subcortical circuits in the cerebellum at the back of the brain and in the basal ganglia at the brain’s core also help to update motor commands based on sensory feedback and to refine our actual motions. What has remained unclear is whether these same neural mechanisms scale up to enable maneuvers as graceful as, say, a pirouette.

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He was an excellent interviewer.  He knew how to listen and was intelligent, articulate, informed and reasonably unbiased in his questioning.  Still, he was an “everyman” in his exuberant love of baseball and his mid-western values.

No doubt he’ll join the pantheon of great journalists, each of whom in their own way attempted to inform the public with no regard for being entertaining.

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There’s another, practical reason to be an early adopter.  If you’ve put any effort into establishing your identity online, one sure way to “reserve” it is to register for any site that sounds even halfway interesting with your preferred username.  By joining a number of alpha sites and those new to the web, you sort of become an early adopter by default.  Of course, if you want to become an influential early adopter,  you’ll have to stick around the site after you’ve joined and provide feedback, commentary, invite others.  Those people seem to form an A-List; often it’s the same people at several sites.

I confess, I’m an early name reserver on a few sites.  In a textual environment, my name and pen name are a commodity, one that I want to be constant across the sites I enjoy visiting.

You know what it is?  It’s a flashback of my days with AOL.  One name, many sites.

Oh dear, now I feel so unclean.

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