The Dino-Aspie Ex-Café (for Those 40+... or feeling creaky)

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((((wave)))))

Hey Lauri! Whatcha doin'?

Just sitting here wondering why the heck I can't stay away from here for any serious length of time!

I figured you were working. Or knitting. Or taking care of your family. Or out hiking. Or all the other stuff you do, and needed a break from here.

I was! And I intended to! (( humph))
And now I'm going to go make supper.

Beautiful, beautiful drawing, by the way!! !

I think I'm going to eat a little something, and head for bed. All the concentration I expended on that picture has knocked me out. Take care all!

Nitey nite! Sleep tight!

And the thread goes back to sleep, too. I DID IT!

Just got back from a bike ride, it's beautiful outside today and theres "Termination Dust" on the Chugach Mountains, which means snow for us w/ in about 2 weeks. This wil also proably be the last year my daughter fits in the bike trailer.
Chuck your artwork is extrodinary and and if you have any desire to sell your work commercially let me know. (No BS, for real)
http://www.articrosegallery.com/index.html
I'm somewhat well-acquainted w/ the owner of a local gallery and shes always looking to promote new artists. Her name is Jayna and shes very cool. (And Anchorage gets hundreds of thousands of tourists every year so you'd have great visiability) All the "Aldo Luongo's" are at my place of business. Theres a Csaba Markos(Ithink thats how you spell it) that I'd LOVE to have and if I ever have $9000.00 to blow, it'll be mine. (And yet I'm contemplating spending over 5 grand on a bicycle for my daughter and me. a little crazy of me I admit, shipping is gonna kill me through) It's either that or pay off the car. To be honest I'd really rather have the bike, not sure yet what I'm gonna do. Have to wait for our PFD's to get here first anyhow.

http://am.stores.yahoo.net/adta.html

It would be soooo worth it through, thats the bike of my dreams for us. Would eloborate on Inventors ideas eariler but my daughter wants to go outside and I can't deny her right now. Soon we'll be hibernating. In it's most succient form We really ARE creating our own reality, WE are running the "Holodeck", this reality is only here because WE believe it is." I know it sounds crazy, but thats how come quatum physics alters your perception of this reality. Blah,blah,blah, gotta go outside....Oh yeah, WISH I had Jane Fondas body.

There was an interesting show on Discovery last night (a US cable network specializing in scientific/entertainment programs, for our overseas friends), exploring the possible lives of life-forms predating the more famous dinosaurs. They posited that a proto-fish (whose name I can't recall) had developed the first brains complex enough to remember things in order to remember the way back to their spawning grounds, rather than swimming about willy-nilly looking for a good spot, in order to help them avoid encounters with Brontoscorpions (imagine a scorpion four feet long, able to breathe either water or air, with two sets of pincers on each side).

The need for memory (an underlying facet of intelligence), then, may have originated as a way for a prey species to better avoid its predators.

In the case of humanity, we developed greater intelligence than other creatures on this planet because we needed it more. In order to gain the ability to create and manufacture new tools and techniques, and in order to birth our young in an immature state (so that their brains could grow later, without interfering with the birth process itself), we needed to become neotenous - that is, to retain the features that would have marked an immature specimen of an ancestor species, especially our lack of any worthwhile natural weapons. Since we are omnivorous, and can be prey just as easily as predator, we grew these big brains in order to deal with our constantly fluctuating role in Nature. We also developed all those so-called "instinctive" social behaviors so that we could cooperate against dangers (a technique also used by dolphins, baboons, and meerkats).

Our personal variation-on-a-theme here might have been contrasurvival at one point, which explains why the autistic birthrate and survival rate was low enough in early periods that we have few records of the syndrome before about the 18th century (although there were certainly autistics and aspies even before then). In the modern era, however, the urge to socialize is less important to survival, which may explain why more of us are being born - our abiity to live alone in a crowd isn't necessarily a bad thing any more...

You phrased that so well! It is something I have long thought but never been able to put into words. And you are so right about the vision being able to survive on its own. I have found that it is almost impossible for them to be stopped once they are set in motion. Is there a way to close the top of your head once the thought has come into it's own? Can the idea be put back in there and tramped down?

Then again, maybe the genes (if that's the "cause" of us) survived because we avoided other people, and were less likely to be impacted by the contagion (plague, etc.) that ran riot in towns and more close knit communities? We were running about painted blue (etc.) as loners up in the hills while the townies died en masse? It wasn't documented because it was so prevalent as to not be considered unusual?

(blessedmom sips her chamomile tea while reading over poems, etc. that she has collected.
This one reminds her of someone who posts on this thread. )

If A Dog Was The Teacher
By Author Unknown

If a dog was the teacher, you would learn stuff like:

- When loved ones come home, always run to greet them.

- Never pass up the opportunity to go for a joyride.

- Allow the experience of fresh air and the wind in your face to be pure ecstasy.

- When it's in your best interest, practice obedience.

- Let others know when they've invaded your territory.

- Take naps. Stretch before rising.

- Run, romp, and play daily.

- Thrive on attention and let people touch you. (Okay, maybe not applicable to Aspies )

- Avoid biting when a simple growl will do.

- On warm days, stop to lie on your back on the grass.

- On hot days, drink lots of water and lie under a shady tree.

- When you're happy, dance around and wag your entire body.

- No matter how often you're scolded, don't buy into the guilt thing and pout! Run right back and make friends.

- Delight in the simple joy of a long walk.

- Eat with gusto and enthusiasm. Stop when you have had enough.

- Be loyal. Never pretend to be something you're not.

- If what you want lies buried, dig until you find it.

- When someone is having a bad day, be silent, sit close by and nuzzle them gently.

Possible. Some birds apparently can plan ahead to the next morning. You can find some information on the Clayton lab web site. Perhaps The Mentality of Crows is the best introduction. You can find a good article on Alex here.




If I remember correctly that theory has been pretty much discredited by the finding that changes in tool use don't go together with increases in human brain size. I think there are some tools already associated with Australopithecus, who had the same brain size as chimps (and a chimp has been taught to make stone tools). I am sure there are stone tools found with Homo habilis fossils, which still had very small brains. Then the tools develop a bit, but you get big brain size increases in Homo sapiens (including Neanderthals) with tools still looking the same as before, then when brain size is stable you suddenly find more diverse tools.

Alternative theories include complex foraging, complex social systems and sexual selection. Scientists haven't yet settled on one theory. Give it another 20 years or so. This is not one of the easy problems.

You can get tool use with relatively small brains. If you go through the tool use part of Kacelnik's site, you'll find some videos of crows making tools.



According to one theory that might be necessary, but would not be enough.

All interesting thoughts! I am enjoying seeing everyone's different points. I would read more books and articles if I could read faster and didn't work so much. I always need time for contemplation afterwards as well. In the meantime, your-alls thoughts are keeping my imagination afire! You guys are "out there" smart - way past me on these issues, so I appreciate these discussions. More! More! (Wish I could stop time like in the movie "Groundhog Day" and spend time with each one of you forever and again). I've got Lamborgini brain aspirations, but have to make do with my squeaky wind-up toy brain. Still, I sure admire the brains I see whizzing around me in here.

Richie. You seem to be rather telepathic, but not telepathic enough.

In the twelve hours since you posted the above, you have missed me sleeping for six hours after the six hours on Skype with postpaleo, initiating him to the joys of Ubuntu.

It went like this...

PP had downloaded Ubuntu and burned it to a CD (a not inconsiderable task, seeing as XP would like to prevent you from burning ISO images). That had taken a couple of days, with a few false starts, and so on.

He had cleaned up his old machine a bit, so there was some space on it. Actually, he had cleared the whole of one of his two drives. I persuaded him that he hadn't needed to do that, and Ubuntu would happily work on the same drive as XP (which, at this point, occupied the whole of his main drive - no matter).

So. At around midnight, my time, last night, we started. Handy to be able to have Skype going on his other machine, so we didn't have any phone bill, plus could text some stuff back and forth at times.

(In the following, I'ii stick to saying "we", when in fact, I couldn't do anything but talk to postpaleo... his fingers did all the work.)

We closed down Windows (well, you have to do that, don't you?) and stuck in the Ubuntu disc. Restart, and after a few minutes of tension, there was PP with a Ubuntu desktop in front of him. At this point, the thing is running purely off the CD - the hard drives are not being touched, at all.

So, we fiddled around for a little while, checking that he had internet access already, and even that his sound card was working. Everything looked pretty good, and I suggested that he might like to click on the "Install" icon on the desktop.

Apparently, I was too slow. In his excitement, PP had already done that. No matter. It took him through the (nowadays pretty brief) question and answer sequence. PP was insisting that he just wanted to overwrite the old XP install. I managed to get him not to do that, without really being able to offer an argument (well, he might want to run a Windows program, sometime?).

At this point, Ubuntu said it could find itself 18Gbytes, by squashing XP down, and I know that that's about four time what is needed for a Ubuntu install. We proceed... Ubuntu installs its bits, and says it is time to reboot.


========= first reboot ================

Well, we are, at this point, switching over from running totally from the live CD to running the system of the chunk of the hard disc stolen from XP. It's not as if you can begrudge Linux this reboot.

Up comes the new system. This time, a little (!) faster, because the programs are now all installed on the disc. They are running from there, rather than being decompressed on-the-fly, as they are read from a CD.

A little icon up on the bar pops up - saying that there are 115 updates (well - the Ubuntu 7.04 CD is quite a few months old, now. Another 20 minutes to download, and a bit more to update. Meanwhile, we just toy around a little with the newly installed system. Nothing spectacular... yet.

Now, part of this update is a new kernel. The CD had a kernel from 2007-04-15, but there has been one upgrade on 2007-08-31 since then. The system politely mentions to us that we might like to reboot, to start using this upgrade. Note that. It doesn't suddenly force us to reboot - it suggests that we reboot.

========== second reboot ==========

A quick reboot, and we're back in with our nice shiny, 100% up-to-date Ubuntu. I get PP to install "Xaos" - a Mandelbrot (plus others) fractal display that you can "fly" through. He's impressed. We look at the clock. It is now one hour and twenty minutes since we started.

Shall I say that again? It is now one hour and twenty minutes since we started.

We must have wasted a bit of time on something. I makle it 20 minutes for the initial install from the CD, 20 minutes for the 115 updates to download, about 10 minutes for those to install. I wonder where on earth the other half hour went?

So... we now start fiddling with more bits. PP likes the screensavers (30 of them). Unfortunately, he thinks some of them are running "jerkily". The firework display causes Ubuntu to restart the graphic desktop (note - not a reboot of the system - just the desktop). I don't like that much, but there are other things to play with, and this seems to be a minor problem - for the time being - don't use that particular screensaver.

Actually, here it all gets rather hard, because I eventually establish that we're using the native driver for PP's GeForce7 card, but the "easiest" way to switch to the manufacturer's driver escapes me (there used to be "Automatix", but their site seems to have been down, all weekend. (It's back up now Postie!).

At one point here, I manage to get PP to wreck the whole GUI. No matter. We reset it. PP very nearly convinced me to do a reboot, but I narrowly avoided it, with a "/etc/init.d/gdm restart".

After a HUGE amount of scrabbling around (and lots of other excursions), We find that ticking the box that says "Use Nvidia's own driver" works quite well.

At this point, another couple of bits can be enabled, and PP gets his first sight of his desktop cube spinning.

As it has now progressed to 6am, my time, I flake out. So - a fully fledged, "beat Vista into a cocked hat", Ubuntu in six hours. I grabbed six hours sleep. I'm not sure what PP is doing at this instant. Possibly sleeping, now, as I just saw his Skype connection go off-line.

============ third boot ? ============

Well... we'll see. So far as I can guess, this might happen when there is an upgrade to the kernel. Predicting from the last two - this may be early in December. Reboots just aren't something Linux bothers with.