especially if their your neighbor, I assume.

Today has been random last minute invitations. One of mac's friends mother calls from downstairs seeing if mac wants to go to the park with him. Neither of us are dress. I was still in bed. Seriously?! I emailed her on Wed. afternoon about a playdate.

Then since I am now up, I checked email and a college friend is in town for the weekend and wanted to know if we could get together TODAY!. They are in town looking at neighborhoods for a possible move to NYC. I politely explained that 40 min + on subways each way with mac to "hang out" for an hour, when their son is 7 months, not 7 years was not a great plan for me. I think we will either get breakfast or lunch tomorrow since we will already be in Manhattan.

sheesh.

Sophia, report the driver.

That was a fascinating article. Which I managed to read without itching.

The first paragraph that Kat quoted ("The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception....") has been my view for a while now. It could explain all sorts of things, like, say, some UFO sightings, where what the brain "sees" is the result of it trying to make sense of some very unusual stimuli. Or if you draw a "3 dimensional" box on a two-dimensional surface, it'll look sorta' 3-D, no matter how hard you try to see it as just some lines on a flat surface. The process of interpreting reality from perception is just so complex that the brain takes shortcuts. If you're in a place where attack from lions is a possibility, better that the brain immediately interpret anything lion-shaped and colored that you see out of the corner of your eye as a possible lion so you can react quickly (at the expense of possibly being wrong) than for the brain to wait until it has enough info to reliably determine if it really is a lion before your brain gets all fight-or-flighty.

The brain's best guess is why we see ghosts and the virgin mary in grilled cheese sandwiches. Humans are especially awesome at finding patterns.

damn it is humid. My goal was to get the living room and mac's room vacuumed while he was gone. I've only managed the upper half of the living room. I sorted laundry and washed dishes instead.

My list of things to do today is epic. Coffee is on.

And, tommy, it's also the way the brain learns too. For example, fluent readers don't note each letter of each word. Rather the brain chunks bits and instantly interprets that set of letters as given word. If the word that the brain perceives isn't sense-making, then the eyes go back and recheck. Of course all of this happens near instantaneously.

So cool!

And if you get used to not understanding a damned thing on signs for a period of time, your brain begins to assume you can't understand a damned thing. So you return to the land of the familiar and can't figure out what on earth a sign for s-p-a or ma-t-t-r-e-s-s could possibly referring to. (It took about a week to unlearn that. And it was really bizarre.)

I thanked the heavens that my pitcher of ice coffee was not empty. It is dangerously low, so after the ice cream finishes, I think I will brew up another pot to get in the fridge.

I have conquered the other half of the living room with the vacuum.

I just ate curried naan. It was ...interesting.