That's what you get for trusting alien justice!

Big Blue Justice = always better.

Intellectually, I think the death penalty is barbaric and wrong. Intellectually, I *want* to believe that no one is beyond rehabilitation. And the justice system is fucked in a big way. Our jails, as they exist now, are entirely non-conducive to rehabilitation. Want to make a criminal even worse? Throw him in jail.

That said, I'm also incredibly vengeful, and if anyone I loved were raped or murdered, I'd go vigilante and kill the fucker myself.

So. I'm a bundle of contradictions.

Oh, and also -- anyone who misuses quotation marks and apostrophes gets whacked, too. Because that's the only way people will learn.

According to everything I've ever read about how the human brain and memory works, eyewitness testimony's just about the least reliable form of evidence ever. People make things up all the time and they don't even know it.

I think that's so interesting and I wonder why it is. When I was attacked, the police called me when I got home from the hospital and said, "write it all down, now, while it's fresh."

And I found that things were jumbled in my head, so I called a friend who is very good at interviewing people and she asked me questions about the sequence of events. I didn't realize it at the time but they were all non-leading sorts of things. What did you see? What did he smell like? What did he say? What street were you on? Why did you take a left, there?

And we wrote it all out like an essay, and even then, months later, something would occur to me and I didn't know if it really happened or if my memory was filling in the nooks with nonsense spackle. I can remember the sequence of events very clearly, but I can't remember at all how I felt during it. It was just an overwhelming calm, no fear, no anger, just my mind checking off a list of how to get out of this. Like the world around just started moving in slow motion.

I think a lot of things would have disappeared if I hadn't written them down. Like taking notes in a class, the act of physically writing it out helps to cement things, at least in a sequence.

I wonder why the brain chooses to color outside the lines when it comes to memory. What's the benefit?

Oh, and also -- anyone who misuses quotation marks and apostrophes gets whacked, too. Because that's the only way people will learn.

By coming back as grammar-ghosts and haunting people into correct punctuation usage?

Oh, and also -- anyone who misuses quotation marks and apostrophes gets whacked, too. Because that's the only way people will learn.

By coming back as grammar-ghosts and haunting people into correct punctuation usage?

Nah -- if you know you could die for writing "I have no room for all these book's in my house!", then I think you'd learn proper punctuation real damn fast.

(This, of course, is why I'm not a teacher.)

Can i tell you how weird it feels to post in Bitches? I feel like a stranger who crashed a party. I have no idea why.

That's kind of how I feel about Natter, Allyson. I think part of it is that both threads are so fast moving that if you don't come in on a daily basis, you feel kind of lost. Like you're at a play without a program. It doesn't totally take away from the play, but you lose some of the significant bits.

No one with pretty hair is considered a crasher.

I wonder why the brain chooses to color outside the lines when it comes to memory. What's the benefit?

I fell last week in the parking lot at the mall. All the way down, scraped my knee, twisted my ankle. But by the time I hobbled to the car, I realized I couldn't remember *exactly* what position I was in when I fell. It happened too fast, and I got up so fast, there was no way I could've reeacted it, so I had to figure it out based on where I was bruised.

The kind of thing that happened to you is so much huger, so much more traumatic, I imagine the mind goes into some kind of protective mode to filter out anything too horrible, which then would make remembering it tough.

I wonder why the brain chooses to color outside the lines when it comes to memory. What's the benefit?

Mostly, it's a trade-off. The ability to remember things as well as we do also gives us the ability to misremember things, because of the way that neural pathways are created. The brain's ability to distinguish between things we actually saw and things we thought about seeing is pretty shaky, but that kind of flexibility also gives us tremendous power in other ways. (There's a really excellent book called The Seven Sins of Memory that talks about how most memory bugs are really features from a different angle.)

I wonder why the brain chooses to color outside the lines when it comes to memory. What's the benefit?

One of the things that I learned in psychology is that our mind has a template for many different things, and so even from the beginning our memories are often colored by the way we think such things are "suppose" to be.

HA! From the description:

Consider this scenario: if you were watching a circle of people passing a basketball and someone dressed in a gorilla costume walked through the circle, beat his chest, and exited, of course you would notice him immediately--wouldn't you? [Researchers] filmed such a scene and showed it to people who were asked to track the movement of the ball by counting the number of passes made by one of the teams. Approximately half of the participants failed to notice the gorilla.

Hilarious. I want to believe I have a knack for remembering because I write essays. I never bring a notebook to a set, but can do a fairly thorough report. I want to believe it, but you know, still human and not Super Memory Girl. Makes me wonder how much I've written is what I thought I saw, and not what really happened. That's troublesome.