I got a moderate surprise last night as I googled sources to fill out my bibliography. The page at the very top of Google was my own page -- three separate times.

I suppose that speaks to the question of just how obscure my sources are, but I thought I'd mention it just in case anybody thinks we're not live or that Google's crawlers knock before coming on campus.

Night Owl's recent piece on Hayles and pattern raises some interesting points. Hayles' dichotomy between pattern and noise seems fundamental to our neurology. I recall reading in some piece of pop science about an experiment with rabbits.

(Maybe someone with some neurological or cogsci background could extend this or improve it)

The experimenter would draw a carrot before the bunny's nose. When the bunny didn't inhale, the pattern in said bunny's olfactory lobe was stochaic. (For stochaic, think something like snow on a TV set or "white noise" on the radio; it's not technically random, but that's the way we generally take it). When the bunny inhaled, the increased input stimulated a set of waves that crossed back and forth through the olfactory lobe. A different stimulus produced a different pattern.

I found The Onyx Project fascinating. A few ideas --

I doubt it's vaguely like a matter of replacing film. As story, they don't function anything alike. A normal (itchy word, but I'll leave it) film is based on external story and operates mostly temporally, Memento and some others notably aside. Even the nontemporal stories progress in a very linear manner -- we see scene after scene. Even the time we spend on any given scene is dicatated, as it is not in a book. We've seen something of how tremendously difficult plot has been to accomplish in linked text. I can't imagine that a medium that relies on inevitably temporal sound and action footage would be easier. Imagine what they had to do -- and what they had to NOT do! -- to get the music to work.

Classes started today - I'm taking Spanish here at Interidiomas

I need a plan: I'm two weeks plus travel and hotels into my money, and I haven't gotten a damned thing written.

Apparently, the systema mexicana goes Ask and thou shalt receive. Electricity was on and off at the hotel today, so I went out to the Jardin with a yellow pad and the wad of documents to write.

As I was writing, an ancient woman came and offered to wash my clothes.

I have to settle matters of living before I set to work. A couple drops of iodine

Today the screen doesn't bake

Water is a problem I will have to solve.

Arrived this afternoon via Autobuses del Norte. I write as sunset slants through a guava tree