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Café Discovery

Sometimes I wonder if it would have been better to have done worse in school.  If I had had some of my work rejected, maybe it wouldn’t have affected me the way it has as an adult.

But it never was rejected, all the way through college.  Whenever I tried, I did well.  Flunking out of Penn wasn’t the result of not doing good work.  It was the result of not working because I had already given up…on life.

So anyway, as I mentioned in Friday’s MitM, my birthday was followed the next day by a rejection form letter from Calyx press.  That was a downer.  They didn’t apparently think any of my six poems were suitable for their Journal.  They assured me it wasn’t just one person who thought so, but at least two readers thought they were not worthy.

That made me feel better, do you think?

Friday Philosophy: Freedom of Choice

A question was asked this morning.  “What am I reading?”  Because of my poor eyesight, the current answer is all too often, “Not much.”

But I’ve had a burr under my saddle for about 10 days and I decided to remedy that.

It all started with NLinStPaul‘s essay, Right Brain Consciousness about Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor.   Well, I’m as much a brain geek as the next layperson, so I was interested.  I made the following comment last week:

What of someone who habitually combines what are traditionally thought of left-brain and right-brain activity?  And what of the place of cross-fertilization?

From wikipedia:

The corpus callosum is a structure of the mammalian brain in the longitudinal fissure that connects the left and right cerebral hemispheres. It is the largest white matter structure in the brain, consisting of 200-250 million contralateral axonal projections. It is a wide, flat bundle of axons beneath the cortex. Much of the inter-hemispheric communication in the brain is conducted across the corpus callosum.



Of much more substantial popular impact was a 1982 Science article claiming to be the first report of a reliable sex difference in human brain morphology, and arguing for relevance to cognitive gender differences.

Oh, really?  My interest is piqued.

Friday Philosophy: A fair game on a level field

A question was asked this morning.  “What am I reading?”  Because of my poor eyesight, the current answer is all too often, “Not much.”

But I’ve had a burr under my saddle for about 10 days and I decided to remedy that.

It all started with NLinStPaul‘s essay, Right Brain Consciousness about Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor.   Well, I’m as much a brain geek as the next layperson, so I was interested.  I made the following comment last week:

What of someone who habitually combines what are traditionally thought of left-brain and right-brain activity?  And what of the place of cross-fertilization?

From wikipedia:

The corpus callosum is a structure of the mammalian brain in the longitudinal fissure that connects the left and right cerebral hemispheres. It is the largest white matter structure in the brain, consisting of 200-250 million contralateral axonal projections. It is a wide, flat bundle of axons beneath the cortex. Much of the inter-hemispheric communication in the brain is conducted across the corpus callosum.



Of much more substantial popular impact was a 1982 Science article claiming to be the first report of a reliable sex difference in human brain morphology, and arguing for relevance to cognitive gender differences.

Oh, really?  My interest is piqued.

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Muse in the Morning


Groove Thing

Are we there yet?

We can spend our time

counting the days

living metronomes

beating out the hours

minutes or seconds

but in the end

the important question

is whether or not

tomorrow will be

a better day

than today

and perhaps

we could wonder

for whom

that may be

and for whom

it will not

–Robyn Elaine Serven

–April 2, 2008

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Café Discovery

The time has almost come.  By next week it will have passed.

While I should be performing other tasks and thinking about other things, my mind keeps wandering back to the fact that I was born 60 years ago on Thursday.  The number addict in me observes that 60 = 22 * 3 * 5 is a special number.  But we all knew that, didn’t we?

Sixty minutes in an hour, so a minute is minute (small).  And a second is called a second because it is 1/602 part of an hour…second power.  Magic number…as is 360 (=  23 * 32 * 5) …perhaps because it can be divided so well into equal pieces in so many ways.  Anyway, the Sumerians thought a sexagesimal system was cool…and that gave us our timekeeping strategy and the way we measure angles.  Who knew…until much later, that 60 was also the number of elements in the smallest non-abelian simple group?

One could go back further than the Sumerians and discover that the Chinese use a calendar with a cycle of sixty years…the Jia-Zi system.  

each year within the 60-year cycle being named with two symbols, the first being base-10 (called Tian-Gan, ??  or heavenly stems) and the second symbol being base 12 (called Di-Zhi, ??  or earthly branches).

60 is the least common multiple of 12 and 10, of course.

Magic numbers are scarce, until you actively look for them.  Then you discover that all integers are magic.  

    Proof: Let x be the smallest non-magic positive number. If x exists, x would be special…and so x would be magic from some perspective or other. If no such x exists, then all postive integers are magic by induction.

Sort of.  Not a real proof, of course.  The term “magic number” has not been defined here…as I purposely intended.

But I digress…

Friday Philosophy: Thought Salad

I’m not in my happy place today.  At least so far.  I’m letting myself be drawn into discussions I’m better off avoiding, if only for my own sanity.  Lately I’ve been seeing signs of the same sort of thing that drove me from the other place…and I don’t see signs of anyone creating another place to escape to in the near future.

I don’t like putting up walls, really.  But when it becomes obvious that there is a central issue that I and someone else are never, ever going to agree on, I find I am much better off to not discuss anything like that issue with that person.  And sometimes it gets to the point that I am better off leaving.  I have a history of leaving, some might call it running away, just like I have a history of being told to get lost.

The former is always painful, but I have found that I can eventually get over it.  The latter is a thousand times more painful and one doesn’t get over it.  Ever.  At least this one doesn’t know how to do so.

But sometimes the former is necessary to do because one foresees the possibility of the latter.

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Muse in the Morning


Seeking to Connect

Be the Change

If we strive to live

as if the world

was as we wish it

to be

perhaps it will become

like that

“But that’s the way things are,”

says the crowd

That thinking is

what keeps our lives

this world

our relationship to this world

rigidly unchanging

So we resist

try to eradicate

that mode of thought

try to keep flicking

some switches

hoping that more

lights will illuminate

searching for a trigger

to ignite

the cascade effect

that will bring

the change we desire

It starts inside

each of us

with those things

we can really control

–Robyn Elaine Serven

–March 26, 2008

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

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