there were two guys performing nut rolls, and one was a salted.
James Kibo Parry
-> Nut rolling stunt artist in breakfast endurance test
->
-> A wacky artist will spend 12 days in a bath full of baked beans,
-> with chips shoved up his nose and 48 sausages wrapped around his head,
-> in a bizarre tribute to the full English breakfast.
->
-> Mark McGowan, 37, began his stunt today in the shop window of the
-> House Gallery near his home in Camberwell in south London.
->
-> "We don't support our culture enough, so I thought I'd celebrate a
-> part of it by turning myself into a traditional English breakfast,"
-> the artist told reporters.
Traditional English breakfasts involve things going up your nose?
Hmm, I guess that explains a lot about Prince Charles.
Is he still squirting toothpaste up his nose? And does he still use
that kind of toothpaste that has giant halftone dots going the wrong
direction?
-> His aim is to spend eight hours a day, for 12 days, in the bean bath.
Oh. In other words he's only going to spend _four_ days in the bathtub.
That's hardly newsworthy! I just spent five days in oatmeal. No, wait,
it wasn't actually oatmeal. Well, whatever it was, it's not supposed
to be here, so I should be given my own newspaper article.
-> "I suppose I am the British alternative to David Blaine but sitting
-> in a plastic box is nothing compared to what I will be doing,"
-> he said, referring to Blaine's bizarre stunt where he spent 44 days
-> of voluntary starvation locked in a perspex box next to the River Thames.
->
-> Mr McGowan first hit the headlines earlier this year when he used his
-> nose to push a nut 11km through London to 10 Downing Street to protest
-> against student debt.
...and by the time the two of them got there, Archie Plutonium had worked
out a new theory involving a giant atom in a bathtub full of baked beans.
-> His latest project was prompted by criticism of the English diet by
-> a friend who was visiting from Italy.
->
-> "I took him to a traditional English pub but he started to complain
-> when he saw the menu," he said.
->
-> "There were things like eggs, chips and beans or steak and mushroom
-> pie with chips and beans, but he didn't seem impressed by the cuisine.
-> I suppose he would have preferred mozzarella."
Here in the U.S., for breakfast we have a thing called "breakfast".
It usually involves cereal, which comes in 487 different flavors
each with a different openly gay cartoon character on the box,
such as Count Chocula, Frankenberry, BooBerry, or King Vitaman.
And in the commercials we're always told that these cereals are
"part of a complete breakfast", but they never say that about bathtubs
full of beans that have touched naked performance artists all day.
-- K.
If I really wanted to see
completely pointless performance
art, I could go down the street
to see Blue Man Group, except
that they charge money to waste
your time watching them, so
instead I'm watching TV because
at least it has hockey fights.
James Kibo Parry
in a bathtub full of baked beans also contained a link to this other
exciting article from everyone's favorite useless wire service, l'AFP:
-> Herrings converse via flatulence, researchers find
->
-> Herrings appear to be sociable fish who like to communicate among
-> themselves and use their natural flatulence to do so, a team of
-> British and Canadian researchers has reported.
Science proves it: Fish seldom employ _artificial_ flatulence.
-> A report in the British review Biology Letters described how the
-> researchers studied the sounds produced by two kinds of captive,
-> wild-caught herring.
->
-> "At night herring squeeze bubbles out of their swim bladders through
-> an anal pore, producing sounds not unlike people blowing
-> raspberries," the team of three recounted.
Science proves it: It takes three people to hear a fish fart.
-> The Pacific species (Clupea pallasii) were found to emit distinctive
-> bursts of pulses, known as fast repetitive tick (FRT) sounds, mostly
-> at night, lasting between 0.6 seconds and 7.6 seconds in the 1.7 to
-> 22 kilohertz bands.
->
-> "Digested gas and gulped air transfer to the swim bladder ... do not
-> appear to be responsible for FRT sound generation," the report said.
Science proves it: Whoever measured the amplitude of the burst of pulses
and then denied that the obvious bio-gaseous actions were the cause of it,
supplied it.
-> It was the same story with Clupea pallasii's Atlantic cousin, Clupea
-> harengus.
->
-> "Atlantic herring also produce FRT sounds and video analysis showed
-> an association with bubble expulsion from the anal duct region," the
-> researchers found.
Science proves it: Fish have anal ducts, but ducks have anal fish.
-> "The functions of these sounds are unknown but as the per capita
-> rates of sound production by fish at higher densities were greater,
-> social mediation appears likely.
Science proves it: Two-headed fish fart twice as loud.
-> "These sounds may have consequences for our understanding of herring
-> behaviour and the effects of noise pollution."
->
-> AFP
QED! AFP! FRT! QED!
-- K.
Give that wire service the
Nobel Prize For Encouraging
Scientists Who Spend All Day
Thinking Up Acronyms That Almost
Spell "Fart" So They Can Talk
About Their Fish Fart Fetish!
Talysman the Ur-Beatle
in news:kibo-15110...@10.0.1.2 but also quoted an australian
newssite which quoted a performance artist as saying in part:
> -> "I suppose I am the British alternative to David Blaine [...]"
wait, I must be confused here.
isn't David Blaine the british alternative to David Blaine? maybe the whole
london stunt lead me astray, but I always had the impression he was
british.
which country claims responsibility for David Blaine, anyways?
and what happened to the days of real musicians like Bill Bixby, or real
artists like ... ok, I can't think of any real artists, so I'll withdraw
that part of the question.
Joseph Michael Bay
WHAT IS WRONG WITH KIBO?
--
Chimes peal joy. Bah. Joseph Michael Bay
Icy colon barge Cancer Biology
Frosty divine Saturn Stanford University
www.stanford.edu/~jmbay/ fhqwhgadshgnsdhjsdbkhsdabkfabkveybvf
Joseph Michael Bay
>ki...@world.std.com (James "Kibo" Parry) wrote a whole bunch of funny stuff
>in news:kibo-15110...@10.0.1.2 but also quoted an australian
>newssite which quoted a performance artist as saying in part:
>> -> "I suppose I am the British alternative to David Blaine [...]"
>wait, I must be confused here.
>isn't David Blaine the british alternative to David Blaine? maybe the whole
>london stunt lead me astray, but I always had the impression he was
>british.
Nah, David Blaine is English.
robert lindsay
<ki...@world.std.com> wrote:
> Here in the U.S., for breakfast we have a thing called "breakfast".
> It usually involves cereal, which comes in 487 different flavors
> each with a different openly gay cartoon character on the box,
> such as Count Chocula, Frankenberry, BooBerry, or King Vitaman.
> And in the commercials we're always told that these cereals are
> "part of a complete breakfast", but they never say that about bathtubs
> full of beans that have touched naked performance artists all day.
That's so OLD EUROPE!
Also, I read that the allegations of the crunchberry beast and count
chockula are not true.
--
The time passes like a healthy stool - topato potato
James Kibo Parry
Joseph Michael Bay (jm...@Stanford.EDU) wrote:
>
> KIBO DIDN'T MENTION ANN-MARGRET!
>
> WHAT IS WRONG WITH KIBO?
Nothing. It's just that I've only watched that scene five or six times
this year so it wasn't as fresh in my memory as, say, the scene in
"Atomic War Bride" where the guy shows his wife how his radiation suit's
helmet has a Geiger counter sticking out of it. My wives never take
an interest in anything I attach to my radiation suit!
Also, parts of my brain stopped being able to think about her because
of that stupid "Flintstones" stupid live-action stupid sequel with
a British guy playing Fred Flinstone and Alan Cumming (star of
the "Spice Girls" movie and the "Josie And The Pussycats" movie)
in _two_ roles, one of which was Mick Jagger, er, I mean, Mick Jaggerock
or whatever clever name they gave him, which destroyed the continuity
of my brain because I _know_ he wasn't one of The Who.
But don't worry. Even if you folks also watch live-action flops based on
barely-animated cartoons, you'll never lose as many brain cells as I have
because unlike me, you folks are lucky enough to get to listen to me
as I tell you things that will re-activate old brain cells you forgot
you had. For instance, remember "Meego"? With the guy who used to be
the fake Latka, and that kid from the movie that gave Cuba Gooding Jr.
a catchphrase that even he got sick of after ten minutes? Well, now
you remember that you hadn't thought about "Meego" in a few years, and
therefore you now have one brain cell that won't be allowed to forget.
-- K.
Also, remember when Al Lewis
said that Butch Patrick
looked like Mitch Miller?
Joe Manfre
> For instance, remember "Meego"? With the guy who used to be the
> fake Latka, and that kid from the movie that gave Cuba Gooding Jr.
> a catchphrase that even he got sick of after ten minutes? Well, now
> you remember that you hadn't thought about "Meego" in a few years,
> and therefore you now have one brain cell that won't be allowed to
> forget.
Ha! There's a moving company here in the D.C. area called Meego
Movers, and I used to see their trucks around a lot, and they'd always
make me think of you, Kibo. I don't think I would hire them, though,
because they're clearly not as philosophical as the moving company
"Prime Movers" that advertises on the spine of the local Yellow Pages.
JM
Joseph Michael Bay
>But don't worry. Even if you folks also watch live-action flops based on
>barely-animated cartoons, you'll never lose as many brain cells as I have
>because unlike me, you folks are lucky enough to get to listen to me
>as I tell you things that will re-activate old brain cells you forgot
>you had. For instance, remember "Meego"? With the guy who used to be
>the fake Latka, and that kid from the movie that gave Cuba Gooding Jr.
>a catchphrase that even he got sick of after ten minutes? Well, now
>you remember that you hadn't thought about "Meego" in a few years, and
>therefore you now have one brain cell that won't be allowed to forget.
Actually I think "Meego" took that one brain cell and put it into
some sort of canister and flew off to Pluto with it.
James Kibo Parry
>
> James "Kibo" Parry (ki...@world.std.com) wrote:
> >
> > For instance, remember "Meego"? With the guy who used to be the
> > fake Latka, and that kid from the movie that gave Cuba Gooding Jr.
> > a catchphrase that even he got sick of after ten minutes? Well, now
> > you remember that you hadn't thought about "Meego" in a few years,
> > and therefore you now have one brain cell that won't be allowed to
> > forget.
>
> Ha! There's a moving company here in the D.C. area called Meego
> Movers, and I used to see their trucks around a lot, and they'd always
> make me think of you, Kibo.
Really? You should be thinking of seizing the opportunity to hire
people to move Meego! He's really tired of living in your basement
and Mork and Uncle Martin and Spock wouldn't mind seeing him go.
They say he's too silly. Except for Spock, who just wants some
privacy for his romantic relationship with the other two.
> I don't think I would hire them, though, because they're clearly not
> as philosophical as the moving company "Prime Movers" that advertises
> on the spine of the local Yellow Pages.
"Thanks to us, the even numbers are unevenly-distributed, because we put
2 where 19 used to be. Take that, Sieve of Eratosthenes!"
-- K.
And take that, Pascal's
Triangle! Take that,
Zeno's Paradox! Take
that Mork's Shazbot!
James Kibo Parry
>
> > "Meego"
> > [...] Well, now you remember that you hadn't thought about "Meego"
> > in a few years, and therefore you now have one brain cell that won't
> > be allowed to forget.
>
> Actually I think "Meego" took that one brain cell and put it into
> some sort of canister and flew off to Pluto with it.
COME BACK, TINY LITTLE BRAIN CELL!
BRAIN CELL, COME BACK! HEYYY BRAAAAIN CELLLL! Joe needs you to think about TV!
Of course, I can never get rid of particular cell in my brain -- curse my
position as the one who must periodically remind others that "Meego" used
to exist! I'd love to kill off that one cell because then maybe it's the
one that keeps me from being able to recognize faces that aren't typefaces.
I got me a brain lobe full of prosopagnosia because I'm all blocked up with
a tiny memory of "Meego"!
(I'd been wrongly calling the condition "aphasia" -- which I obviously don't
have or I'd think you people were just typing nonsense all the time instead
of most of the time -- because I had "aphasia" mixed up with "agnosia".
I've got a touch of prosopagnosia -- difficulty recongnizing human
faces -- which doesn't affect my daily life very much, since I can
still watch TV. And now that I've decided to blame this mild neurological
oddity I've had my entire life on some stupid toddler sitcom that got
cancelled a few years ago, I feel much better about it. CURSE YOU, "MEEGO"!)
-- K.
And amazingly, concussing myself
on Jacob Haller's car door didn't
kill that one evil brain cell.
As to why I still can't remember
Brian Posehn's name even after
we gave each other the finger,
I don't know. I'm getting better
at remembering his name because
lately I've been spending a few
hours a day practicing.
Talysman the Ur-Beatle
news:kibo-23110...@10.0.1.2:
> Of course, I can never get rid of particular cell in my brain -- curse
> my position as the one who must periodically remind others that
> "Meego" used to exist! I'd love to kill off that one cell because
> then maybe it's the one that keeps me from being able to recognize
> faces that aren't typefaces. I got me a brain lobe full of
> prosopagnosia because I'm all blocked up with a tiny memory of
> "Meego"!
ok, Kibo has mentioned having prosopagnosia, and I've mentioned having a
mild version of it in passing to a couple people, mainly on the moo
(don't worry, you can't catch it. YET.) so now I'm wondering: how many
other ARK peoples have trouble recognizing faces? is it like mine, where
I sometimes can't describe what people look like after they've left the
room?
let's hope this survey isn't as scary as when we all took the asperger's
syndrome test, or when we all discovered we're INTP or INTJ.
(side note: for some reason, I couldn't think of the name for "asperger's
syndrome" for a moment, probably because Kibo jinxed me with his
discussion of thinking that prosopagnosia was called "aphasia". I first
wanted to say we all took an atheism test... then I wanted to say we all
took an alzheimer's test, but I don't remember taking one of those.)
my prosopagnosia -- ok, let's call it "faceblindness", it's easier --
doesn't hurt my social life much because it seems everyone I know has a
tattoo, dyed or otherwise unusual hair, a beard, or a piercing. which is
perhaps weird, seeing as I have none of those things myself.
oh, and veering the subject back towards meego, you will be happy to know
that I don't remember meego and I'm not sure I ever saw this meego, but
it made me think of how this one toy company ripped off my idea for STAR
TREK DOLLS. this made me so furious that I (age 9) wrote to the patent
office with my hand-drawn plans for my SPACE ROCEKT IDEA, which was to
arrange electron guns from a teevee set in a circle and fire them at
uranium.
(NOT FOR STEALING!)
... and then the patent office sent back my three-hole=punched notebook
paper and included a book describing what a patent is and how to apply
for one, which made for a really cool show-and-tell, let me tell you.
Sean Case
"Talysman the Ur-Beatle" <taly...@globalsurrealism.com> wrote:
> my prosopagnosia -- ok, let's call it "faceblindness", it's easier --
> doesn't hurt my social life much because it seems everyone I know has a
^^^^^
> tattoo, dyed or otherwise unusual hair, a beard, or a piercing.
So everyone you can _remember_ has some distinctive facial feature?
Sean Case
--
Sean Case g...@zip.com.au
Code is an illusion. Only assertions are real.
Talysman the Ur-Beatle
@nasal.pacific.net.au:
> In article <Xns943C30C8CBEtal...@64.164.98.51>,
> "Talysman the Ur-Beatle" <taly...@globalsurrealism.com> wrote:
>
>> my prosopagnosia -- ok, let's call it "faceblindness", it's easier --
>> doesn't hurt my social life much because it seems everyone I know has a
> ^^^^^
>> tattoo, dyed or otherwise unusual hair, a beard, or a piercing.
>
> So everyone you can _remember_ has some distinctive facial feature?
well, yeah, that was the point.
if you read some comments by people with faceblindness, you'll find that a
lot of them gravitate towards people they can identify easily despite their
faceblindness.
Paula
<taly...@globalsurrealism.com> wrote:
>Sean Case <g...@zip.com.au> wrote in news:gsc-8598E6.21051623112003
>@nasal.pacific.net.au:
>
>> In article <Xns943C30C8CBEtal...@64.164.98.51>,
>> "Talysman the Ur-Beatle" <taly...@globalsurrealism.com> wrote:
>>
>>> my prosopagnosia -- ok, let's call it "faceblindness", it's easier --
>>> doesn't hurt my social life much because it seems everyone I know has a
>> ^^^^^
>>> tattoo, dyed or otherwise unusual hair, a beard, or a piercing.
>>
>> So everyone you can _remember_ has some distinctive facial feature?
>
>well, yeah, that was the point.
I'm not gonna ask.
Paula
No tattoos or piercings
Talysman the Ur-Beatle
news:i7s1svo6ke817uukh...@4ax.com:
don't worry paula! I don't remember what you look like!
Matt McIrvin
"Talysman the Ur-Beatle" <taly...@globalsurrealism.com> wrote:
> ok, Kibo has mentioned having prosopagnosia, and I've mentioned having a
> mild version of it in passing to a couple people, mainly on the moo
> (don't worry, you can't catch it. YET.) so now I'm wondering: how many
> other ARK peoples have trouble recognizing faces? is it like mine, where
> I sometimes can't describe what people look like after they've left the
> room?
Well, I don't have any trouble with this. I have trouble remembering
the attachment of names to faces, but it's just because I don't pay
enough attention while in awkward social situations like being
introduced to a stranger.
I think that Kibo is clearly far short of full-blown prosopagnosia, but
I've watched enough TV with him that I think his perception of faces is
a little bit odd. He has trouble distinguishing actors who have some
very general facial characteristics in common, the classic example being
Lance Henriksen and Earl Boen; and when an actor he's familiar with is
credited with a small role in a movie, he'll often at first identify
somebody else with similar hair color as being that actor, and I don't
know whether to correct him or not because sometimes he's joking (and
sometimes he expresses so much certainty about it that I have doubts).
And he says he does better with faces on TV than in real life.
--
Matt McIrvin http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/
Paula
I think those who scored high on the Asperger's test would be likely
to exhibit a lot of these types of problems as well. I can't remember
where anybody scored and am too lazy to google it, so you are safe
from any personal analysis. The part of the brain that recognizes
facial features may well be wonky in those with Asperger's since one
of the characteristics of Asperger's is a tendency to have trouble
reading facial cues to assist in determining meaning and mood. The
Asperger's kids I work with are not trying to be difficult. They
genuinely don't catch those little expressions that warn other people
of what is under the surface of the direct words or flagrant actions.
I have to start with exaggerated facial expressions and work up
(down?) to subtleties in teaching them how to figure out what others
take for granted.
Paula
Tim Serpas
>>> So everyone you can _remember_ has some distinctive facial feature?
>>
>>well, yeah, that was the point.
>
>I'm not gonna ask.
Orbiting kidz.
W
The Avocado Avenger
> so now I'm wondering: how many
> other ARK peoples have trouble recognizing faces? is it like mine, where
> I sometimes can't describe what people look like after they've left the
> room?
I just place no importance on human beings at all, and therefore
forget everyone I ever knew.
Example: some guy I'm supposed to know because I supposedly went to
high school with him is extremely ill. So I went to my Sophomore
yearbook and didn't recognize more than a handful of people. And CS Ed
wasn't one of them.
Also, I don't think I went to high school with this guy who is now
ill.
> let's hope this survey isn't as scary as when we all took the asperger's
> syndrome test, or when we all discovered we're INTP or INTJ.
Hey, I remember this. Weren't we all borderline paranoid
schizophrenics? A brief check at an online Meyers-Briggs shows that,
yes, I am INTJ like the rest of you, which should scare the fuck out of
most of you people.
> this one toy company ripped off my idea for STAR
> TREK DOLLS. this made me so furious that I (age 9) wrote to the patent
> office with my hand-drawn plans for my SPACE ROCEKT IDEA, which was to
> arrange electron guns from a teevee set in a circle and fire them at
> uranium.
That's totally cool. How did the toy company get hold of your plans?
And did your parents fail to believe you until you went on a wacky
adventure that was filmed for a 90-minute Disney movie?
> ... and then the patent office sent back my three-hole=punched notebook
> paper and included a book describing what a patent is and how to apply
> for one, which made for a really cool show-and-tell, let me tell you.
You are cool.
Stacia
James Kibo Parry
>
> ok, Kibo has mentioned having prosopagnosia, and I've mentioned having a
> mild version of it in passing to a couple people, mainly on the moo
> (don't worry, you can't catch it. YET.) so now I'm wondering: how many
> other ARK peoples have trouble recognizing faces? is it like mine, where
> I sometimes can't describe what people look like after they've left the
> room?
I don't know -- maybe you just picked boring friends, or perhaps they're
all secretly the bastard love children of Mr. Potato Head and spend all
their free time trading noses and ears to confuse you.
I would, however, suspect there would be a relatively high incidence
of at least mild forms of prosopagnosia among graphic artists, fashion
designers, hair stylists, and people who wear scary bodypaint to
college football games -- anyone connected to either the abstract use
of color or decorating the human body. Maybe even among photographers
if I'm reasonably typical (I have a lot less trouble recognizing photos
and video images than I do with three-dimensional people. I don't know
if this is because people on TV tend to be relatively famous and are
well-lit and covered in dramatic makeup, or just because I'm really good
at looking at two-dimensional contours and so on.)
> my prosopagnosia -- ok, let's call it "faceblindness", it's easier --
> doesn't hurt my social life much because it seems everyone I know has a
> tattoo, dyed or otherwise unusual hair, a beard, or a piercing. which is
> perhaps weird, seeing as I have none of those things myself.
I've been trying to get everyone I know to wear Mexican wrestler masks
all the time. It would really help me out in at least three ways.
Either that, or people should just wear "Star Trek" uniforms with
nametags on them. The shirts could be color-coded. From now on,
everyone I've never met will wear red, while gold is reserved for
the people I've taught myself to recognize, and blue is for the
people I should recognize but don't.
Of course, people in uniforms all wind up looking alike (especially
if they all have "Star Trek" hairblobs instead of real haircuts)
so the nametags would have to be really big and easy to read. Better
yet, the nametags should also have a photo of the wearer, because
I'm good with photos. Hey, that's why "Space: 1999" was better than
"Star Trek" -- because their uniforms did have little photos of
themselves on the front, just like Space Ghost.
-- K.
And never mind the prosopagnosia.
How many of you are supertasters?
WHY CAN'T SOMEONE MARKET A LINE
OF TV DINNERS JUST FOR US?
Sean Case
"Talysman the Ur-Beatle" <taly...@globalsurrealism.com> wrote:
> Sean Case <g...@zip.com.au> wrote in news:gsc-8598E6.21051623112003
> @nasal.pacific.net.au:
>> So everyone you can _remember_ has some distinctive facial feature?
> well, yeah, that was the point.
I wasn't sure.
> if you read some comments by people with faceblindness, you'll find that a
> lot of them gravitate towards people they can identify easily despite their
> faceblindness.
Well, I'm not completely prosopagnostic (?), but I have a pretty awful
memory for names and faces, and yet I _don't_ have any distinctive-
looking friends. Of course, I don't have that many friends in the first
place, but that's another story.
James Kibo Parry
>
> "Talysman the Ur-Beatle" (taly...@globalsurrealism.com) wrote:
> >
> > ok, Kibo has mentioned having prosopagnosia, [...]
>
> Well, I don't have any trouble with this.
Gee, good for you, Matt. Is that also your reaction when someone tells
you they have cancer? YAY FOR YOU, MATT! YOU HAVE AT LEAST ONE
FEWER CONDITION THAN ONE OTHER PERSON!
Maybe if you're lucky you're not alone -- I hope you don't turn out to
be the only person on the whole Internet not to have prosopagnosia.
> [...]
>
> I think that Kibo is clearly far short of full-blown prosopagnosia, but
> I've watched enough TV with him that I think his perception of faces is
> a little bit odd. He has trouble distinguishing actors who have some
> very general facial characteristics in common, the classic example being
> Lance Henriksen and Earl Boen; [...]
> And he says he does better with faces on TV than in real life.
The more I think about what you just wrote about me, the more cross
I am with you right now.
First, you seem not to have grasped that if I say something to you when
you've invited me to watch your big-screen TV, that things said in your
living room are not part of my public life intended to be broadcast
to the entire Internet. Even in cases where I've mentioned something
relatively inconsequential and you've blabbed about it on a.r.k, I've
been somewhat upset, and in this case it's about a mild neurological
oddity I have that I've never before felt like I should talk about.
Outside my family, you were the first person I ever discussed it with
at any length, and I thought you were understanding of it, so I was barely
able to work up the courage to mention it on a.r.k the next day, and then
I see you deciding to tell everyone your diagnosis of what you think
is wrong with me.
Second, you could at least get your facts straight. If you're going to
gossip about me to practically everyone I know, you should provide
more reliable gossip. Haven't I explained to you that the running
joke about Lance Henriksen and Earl Boen being interchangeable is due
to the (probably deliberately) confusing editing in the middle of
"The Terminator"? (The two of them play rather indistinct characters --
by which I mean that neither has a personality, they serve the same
function, they are dressed alike, and they are seen mainly in the
background. As I recall, when Schwarzenegger shoots up the police station,
there are _three_ shots of one or the other of them getting killed,
further complicated by one of them entering a scene right as the other
exits; I don't know why, but the director seemed to be trying to
add some pointless confusion to that sequence, perhaps just so he could
get away with slipping in some extra gore when one or the other of them
was killed a second time.) I do have trouble with faces, but that was a
joke; The joke may have been partly inspired by my face issue causing
me to rewind that scene a couple times to try to figure out whether
it was the director's fault or my fault that the movie was confusing,
but that doesn't make it a piece of evidence for you to broadcast in
support of your diagnosis. It's not as if I said Linda Hamilton was
Linda Hunt or anything.
Third, I don't understand why you're going out of your way to try
to convince people you seem to think I'm profoundly impaired. I mentioned
that I had some difficulty recognizing faces of people I meet, and now
suddenly you're telling the entire Internet that I can hardly even watch TV.
I hope people don't take you seriously. If people start treating me
as if I'm made of glass because they think I have some sort of
major neurological impairment, I'm not going to be happy. Has it
occurred to you that practically all my friends read a.r.k and you've
just tried to make them think I'm too incompetent _to watch television_?
You are aware that one of my jobs has been to work as a _designer_,
and that people I have done business with (or hope to do business with)
are going to see your conclusions about what's wrong with me?
Next time, if you allow _me_ to talk about a medical condition of mine,
I will try to describe it, which would be preferable to you putting out
distorted gossip based on things I said in your living room.
For the record, for anyone who's interested:
I have some degree of prosopagnosia, a condition which often makes it
difficult for me to tell whether I've seen someone before when I meet
them the second time (mainly affecting real-life meetings at airports,
which is why I always tell people to find me because I may have trouble
finding them.) It is a neurological condition (not a mental disorder,
not a visual disorder, not a lack of attention) which is usually caused
by a blow to the head (in my case, I think it was just naturally-occurring)
and doesn't affect my ability to _remember_ faces (it has nothing to do
with being unable to remember what name goes with what face, something
everyone has trouble with to some degree), just my ability to _recognize_
faces. It affects only faces; I think those who know me (and have seen
me talk endlessly about details of typography, paintings, cinematography,
etc.) know I am highly visually perceptive. In fact, I suspect my
interest in the visual arts, and good "eye" for art, is something of
a reaction to the prosopagnosia -- I have always concentrated on analysis
of everything I see because the part of my visual comprehension which
works, the part that makes up the bulk of human perception, is the part
that can analyze things rationally in terms of shape, color, texture, etc.,
as prosopagnosia only affects a specialized category of visual perception.
The belief is that the human visual system has special wiring designed
for perceiving faces in addition to all the general-purpose visual-
analysis stuff, and I'm missing the magic unit that likes to take
pictures of faces. For instance, for most people, if you were asked
to describe someone you know, you'd summon up an image of that person's
face, and then you'd mentally "look" at it and pull off details like
what shape the nose is, what color eyes there are, etc., whereas I
would draw a blank unless I had studied that person well enough to
have deliberately _memorized_ details of what the nose is, what the
eyes are, etc. I have an excellent visual memory -- if you ask me
to sketch Dali's "The Persistence Of Memory" I can put the trees and
watches in the right place, if you ask me about the Times Roman "R"
I can draw it in every detail from memory -- but most people have
some extra circuitry that basically takes snapshots of faces as single
units, whereas I have to put the same effort into learning a face
that I do into remembering anything else. And recognizing faces,
even when I've memorized their details, is still a problem because
faces show up at different angles, in different lighting, at different
distances, with different hairstyles, with different expressions,
whenever you see them. (Cecilia Burman's prosopagnosia site,
http://www.prosopagnosia.com , has a really great demonstration of how
this works by showing some photos of faces and some photos of rocks,
showing that most people "just can" recognize faces under all sorts
of conditions, but you have to really work to learn the specific
shape of a rock in order to recognize it under even mildly different
conditions, because the brain doesn't have special "rock" circuits.)
This doesn't normally bother me at all, because it mainly makes little
problems when I have to meet someone at an airport, etc., or when
someone says "Hi!" on the street and I wonder if I've ever met them
before. People I know well turn out to be quite recognizable because
I work at learning how to recognize them -- most people have a distinctive
style of dress (even though they don't wear the same clothes all the time,
I've developed a fashion sense to be able to say "He likes desaturated
solid colors, and they like stripes of tertiaries...") and a recognizable
height, hair color, gait, voice, and so on.
I don't understand why I do well recognizing actors and newsmakers
and so on in photos and on TV (although I'm not quite as good as average,
I'm not terrible at it either; I actually scored above-average on
an online test at recognizing photos of famous people last night.)
I think it's because photos and movies tend to try to make people easy
to recognize (good lighting, etc.) and I can study the image without the
face moving around. (And of course it's usually a picture of someone
I've seen a zillion times!)
There's no real way of illustrating what a face looks like to someone
like me; Cecilia Burman has some pictures of Mickey Mouse with his
face blurred, and Bill Choisser's site ( http://www.choisser.com/faceblind/ )
has a pixelated photo of him, but those are more illustrations of
"This is how hard it is for some people," it's not possible to illustrate
_what_ the perceptual difficulty is. I can see the eyes, nose, mouth,
etc. quite clearly, I just don't get it as "this is a face", just as
"here's a complicated collection of body parts that have to be studied
individually, like a puzzle."
It's a very difficult thing to explain, particularly as the effect is
so subtle (most people aren't even aware that this condition exists
because it doesn't affect people like me in any way that might be
noticed, except in terms of some social awkwardness when people say
hi on the street.) It's a lot like trying to explain color-blindness
to someone with full color vision -- they probably always ask, "If red
and green look the same to you, do they both look red, or do they both
look green?" You can't describe how what you see is different from what
other people see, you just know there's a little bit of extra information
that other people are getting. With prosopagnosia, the most common
response seems to be "I have trouble remembering what name goes with
what face too. Why don't you just pay more attention?" But you
wouldn't tell a color-blind person to try harder to see the difference
between red and green. You'd just expect them to deal with it.
Just as a color-blind person knows that the red is on the top of the
traffic light and the green is on the bottom, I know that a person
of height X with stride Y and hair Z is probably a specific friend,
and if I hadn't gone out of my way to bring up the subject as an
interesting minor difference between me and other people, you folks
would never be aware I was different in this way (unless you met
me at the airport and wondered why I told you to wave to me.)
Just as it's a little tricky to understand how prosopagnosia works,
it's also tricky to figure out where I fit in on the spectrum of people
with this disorder. I think I have a relatively mild case of it --
enough to make it hard to recognize people's faces, but not the
degree some people have where they are unable to read people's emotions
from their facial expressions, and some people aren't able to perceive
faces _at all_. (The more general form of agnosia causes some people
to have generalized perceptual problems, making them unable to
recognize things of any sort, as in Oliver Sacks's "The Man Who Mistook
His Wife For A Hat". Prosopagnosia is face-recognition-specific,
agnosia is a broad category of disorders that fall into the category
of "trouble recognizing something".)
After the terrorist attack on New York in 2001, there was a brief
fad for installing "face-recognition" cameras in buildings, stadiums,
and so on, in hopes that computers would be able to identify terrorists
by looking at them through a cheap little video camera and applying
some digital-image-processing snake-oil. I could've told them that
wouldn't work. Most humans have the wonderful gift of just automatically
being able to _know_ they've seen a face before without thinking about
it, but I deal with faces in the same way a computer does, by looking
for clues such as shapes and colors and positions of the parts, and
thus I know that no grid of pixels pointed at a three-dimensional
face with a variable hairstyle and bad lighting can put those pixels
together into the equivalent of the automatic "Aha! It's Mary!" moment
humans usually have.
The most fascinating thing about this is that it's so specific --
as someone who's done a lot of computer programming, I always tended
to assume that the brain was like a computer and followed well-defined
rules about what did what (even if we can't specify what each part
does, it still seems like it ought to work more like a computer) but
it turns out that there are things in our brains that perform tasks
well beyond the sophistication of any artificial intelligence we
could create any time soon. Think of how hard it is for a computer
to scan a printed page and determine that the "a"s are "a"s, the
"b"s are "b"s, and so on (scanned text tends to come out with a lot
of garbled words) and then imagine how complicated the task is of
answering the question of, "Who is that person down the hallway?"
We don't understand how most people can do this without furrowing
their brows and hunting for clues, but I know what it's like to
try to do it in the more computery way of having to consciously
match faces to a database I've been keeping of people's bits and parts.
I have to use the generalized "studying stuff" algorithms for everything,
while most people also have "seeing whole faces" tricks.
I don't look on it as being a problem for me -- it only causes a little
trouble in specific circumstances and as I mentioned earlier, I think
its side effect is that it caused me to get really good at the visual
analysis of visual media other than faces, such as ad layouts, clothes,
movie scenes, calligraphy, and so on. It's a flaw, but I think on the
whole it's helped me as much as it's hurt me. The only thing I've concluded
I just will never be able to do is to become a painter of fine portraits.
(I can sketch okay, except for faces! That's probably why my design
work tends to revolve around logos and lettering and layout, rather
then trying to emulate Rembrandt.)
And that's all I'm interested in saying about this quirk of my neural net.
I hope it helps everyone understand that I, like most people, am a little
different from everyone else, but I hope that bringing up the subject
doesn't lead to people thinking I'm having great difficulties or the new
Rain Man or some sort of bizarre crazed genius. (Well, actually, the
prosopagnosia isn't the reason I'm a bizarre crazed genius. But there
is insufficient space on the Internet for me to list all the ways in which
I'm weird. For purposes of this discussion, I just wanted to talk about
one perceptual difficulty caused by a bug in my wetware.)
-- K.
Now, as far as being a supertaster
goes, that's another tiny genetic
difference that makes me better
than the Muggles, even if it makes
dark chocolate taste really nasty.
Glenn Knickerbocker
> you they have cancer? YAY FOR YOU, MATT! YOU HAVE AT LEAST ONE
> FEWER CONDITION THAN ONE OTHER PERSON!
I thought he meant he didn't have any problem with YOUR condition.
DOUBLE YAY FOR MATT! HE IS UNEMCUMBERED BY SYMPATHY!
> support of your diagnosis. It's not as if I said Linda Hamilton was
> Linda Hunt or anything.
Wait, you're going to deny this AFTER I've already admitted that I
seriously wondered when Shelley Duvall became Shelley Long? There's no
shame in it, you know.
I don't have prosopagnosia either, of course, just an even worse memory
for actors' faces and names than for those of people I know. Combine
this with my forgetfulness of stories and the trancelike state the 30 Hz
flicker induces in me, and I really am incompetent to watch television.
> but those are more illustrations of
> "This is how hard it is for some people," it's not possible to illustrate
> _what_ the perceptual difficulty is.
I bet words written in an unfamiliar alphabet would be a pretty good
demonstration. Even 15 years after achieving fluency in writing it, I
still have no fluency in reading in the Georgian alphabet, because I
haven't learned enough of the language to pick out words I know from
words I don't. I know individual letters as well as if they were Roman
letters, but I still have to sound out even short, familiar words letter
by letter. (Fortunately, Georgian writing is exactly phonetic!) Of
course, such a demonstration might also be somewhat misleading regarding
the nature of the condition, since it would suggest that you could
somehow put similar effort into learning to "read" faces as you would a
language.
> thus I know that no grid of pixels pointed at a three-dimensional
> face with a variable hairstyle and bad lighting can put those pixels
> together into the equivalent of the automatic "Aha! It's Mary!" moment
ITYM "You must be Mary Catelli."(*) Also I've never understood why
people call it a "Hail Mary pass." I don't think it's usually meant as
a pick-up line.
> to scan a printed page and determine that the "a"s are "a"s,
THIS IS aYN RaND aND/OR aRISTOTLE FETISH
> And that's all I'm interested in saying about this quirk of my neural net.
I have trouble remaining interested in my own attempts to explain my
mental quirks to other people, too. Why don't you just pay more
attention?
津zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzmmfph!R
(*) I thought I had posted about this before, but I seem to be mistaken.
In a large online discussion group from work, we regularly found
that most of us formed completely incorrect mental images of each
other, with one major exception: We all instantly recognized Mary.
Glenn Knickerbocker
> I've been trying to get everyone I know to wear Mexican wrestler masks
> all the time.
Hey, I really liked that part of "Spock, Messiah" too.
¬"Put the mask on now. Put the mask on now."R
Joseph Michael Bay
>their uniforms did have little photos of
>themselves on the front, just like Space Ghost.
Space Ghost would be a really great kids Halloween costume,
because in addition to the sharp plastic "mask" that goes over
your face, and the collar picture of Space Ghost, you'd have a
plastic bib that says "Space Ghost" and has a picture of Space
Ghost, including his picture of himself.
SPACE GHOOOOOOOOST!
> -- K.
> And never mind the prosopagnosia.
> How many of you are supertasters?
> WHY CAN'T SOMEONE MARKET A LINE
> OF TV DINNERS JUST FOR US?
Some flavors must go.
--
Joe Bay Cancer Biology www.stanford.edu/~jmbay/
"We are all lying in the gutter, but some of us BLEAAAAGHH, AARGGH HRRRRRRRK"
--Oscar Wilde
Putting the "harm" in molecular pharmacology since 1998.
Matt McIrvin
ki...@world.std.com (James "Kibo" Parry) wrote:
> The more I think about what you just wrote about me, the more cross
> I am with you right now.
You're right, of course; my post was a combination of unwarranted
speculation and violated confidences; it was stuff that was not for
me to say and was probably incorrect besides.
I'm deeply sorry about this. You're a great friend and I shouldn't be
abusing that.
Kevin S. Wilson
Um, I don't want to appear as if I am making light of what are
obviously sincere expressions of hurt, anger, and regret, but I
really, really want to say "I'm abusing my great friend right now,
IYKWIM."
Sorry.
--
Kevin S. Wilson
Tech Writer at a University Somewhere in Idaho
"You can safely ignore Kevin in order to
maximise life's experience." --A. Loon, in alt.religion.kibology
Joseph Michael Bay
>In article <kibo-24110...@10.0.1.2>,
> ki...@world.std.com (James "Kibo" Parry) wrote:
>> The more I think about what you just wrote about me, the more cross
>> I am with you right now.
>You're right, of course; my post was a combination of unwarranted
>speculation and violated confidences;
or as I call them, "unwarridences".
David DeLaney
>be the only person on the whole Internet not to have prosopagnosia.
He might be. I myself can only add about one or two new names to new faces a
day. And get confused between people who bear similarities to each other even
though they don't look alike; canonical case was in high school, where I
never could remember which of Scott's two sisters, Ann or Amy, was the one
that was six inches taller than the other. (Both had long black hair. Scott
had short curly black hair. This will lead you, correctly, to conclude that
their last name was Corrigan...)
>First, you seem not to have grasped that if I say something to you when
>you've invited me to watch your big-screen TV, that things said in your
>living room are not part of my public life intended to be broadcast
>to the entire Internet. Even in cases where I've mentioned something
>relatively inconsequential and you've blabbed about it on a.r.k, I've
>been somewhat upset, and in this case it's about a mild neurological
>oddity I have that I've never before felt like I should talk about.
>Outside my family, you were the first person I ever discussed it with
>at any length, and I thought you were understanding of it, so I was barely
>able to work up the courage to mention it on a.r.k the next day, and then
>I see you deciding to tell everyone your diagnosis of what you think
>is wrong with me.
Uh-oh. Kibo's mad at Matt. I'm going to hide under the Tubby Tustard bin now...
>As I recall, when Schwarzenegger shoots up the police station,
>there are _three_ shots of one or the other of them getting killed,
>further complicated by one of them entering a scene right as the other
>exits; I don't know why, but the director seemed to be trying to
>add some pointless confusion to that sequence, perhaps just so he could
>get away with slipping in some extra gore when one or the other of them
>was killed a second time.)
Well, it -is- a movie about time-travel...
>It's not as if I said Linda Hamilton was Linda Hunt or anything.
Why not?
>If people start treating me
>as if I'm made of glass because they think I have some sort of
>major neurological impairment, I'm not going to be happy.
Glass? No no no. Yum-my _can-dy_.
> Has it
>occurred to you that practically all my friends read a.r.k and you've
>just tried to make them think I'm too incompetent _to watch television_?
We -know- you can watch television, Kibo. In ways that most of the rest of
us never even dreamd of before we wound up here. The incompetence in the
scene of you watching television isn't generally hovering around -you-...
>It is a neurological condition (not a mental disorder,
>not a visual disorder, not a lack of attention) which is usually caused
>by a blow to the head (in my case, I think it was just naturally-occurring)
>and doesn't affect my ability to _remember_ faces (it has nothing to do
>with being unable to remember what name goes with what face, something
>everyone has trouble with to some degree), just my ability to _recognize_
>faces.
Huh. Okay, strike my remarks above. I can generally tell people apart by face,
even if I have no idea who they are after having been introduced repeatedly.
(_Remembering_ faces is different, and HARD.) So that's like the antithesis
of this? [snip discussion, longer than I've _ever_ seen Kibo go without
being even tangentially humorous, proving it seems to be] [i'm scared mommy]
>(even though they don't wear the same clothes all the time,
>I've developed a fashion sense to be able to say "He likes desaturated
>solid colors, and they like stripes of tertiaries...")
...Okay, _now_ I'm scared.
>I don't understand why I do well recognizing actors and newsmakers
>and so on in photos and on TV (although I'm not quite as good as average,
>I'm not terrible at it either; I actually scored above-average on
>an online test at recognizing photos of famous people last night.)
>I think it's because photos and movies tend to try to make people easy
>to recognize (good lighting, etc.) and I can study the image without the
>face moving around. (And of course it's usually a picture of someone
>I've seen a zillion times!)
Suggestion: you're recognizing -acting- style perhaps? Posing and voguing and
stuff?
>I can see the eyes, nose, mouth,
>etc. quite clearly, I just don't get it as "this is a face", just as
>"here's a complicated collection of body parts that have to be studied
>individually, like a puzzle."
>
>It's a very difficult thing to explain, particularly as the effect is
>so subtle (most people aren't even aware that this condition exists
>because it doesn't affect people like me in any way that might be
>noticed, except in terms of some social awkwardness when people say
>hi on the street.)
On the contrary, I'm getting a sense of what's going on here from your
explanation. (You -are- good at 'splainin' things.)
Does this have anything to do with me not being able to say, once I look
away from a person, _anything_ about what they're wearing, right down to
what color(s) it was or whether they had shoes, sneakers, sandals, or no
footwear at all? [Without actually taking the time to look at and memorize
what they've got on?] I always figured it was because I was looking at the
person, not at what they were wearing, so it mentally fuzzed away.
[No, this does NOT mean I can mentally picture people without any clothes
on at will. I could make a _lot_ more money if I could do that. Somehow. I
think...]
> It's a lot like trying to explain color-blindness
>to someone with full color vision -- they probably always ask, "If red
>and green look the same to you, do they both look red, or do they both
>look green?"
They both look the -same-, is the point.
>and if I hadn't gone out of my way to bring up the subject as an
>interesting minor difference between me and other people, you folks
>would never be aware I was different in this way (unless you met
>me at the airport and wondered why I told you to wave to me.)
But: _Now_. We. _Know_.
And prosopagnosia is the best word I've never seen before that I've seen
all week, too. (Those don't come along very often...)
Will we use this knowledge for Good? Or for E-vil?
Nah, we're too busy using it for laughter, like everything else.
>The most fascinating thing about this is that it's so specific --
>as someone who's done a lot of computer programming, I always tended
>to assume that the brain was like a computer and followed well-defined
>rules about what did what (even if we can't specify what each part
>does, it still seems like it ought to work more like a computer) but
>it turns out that there are things in our brains that perform tasks
>well beyond the sophistication of any artificial intelligence we
>could create any time soon.
Yep. And every time someone does get one of those things programmed, it
turns out that hey, that's not the basis for determining intelligence
after all, plus the computer blows up when dealing with even slightly-
odd corner cases...
>(I can sketch okay, except for faces! That's probably why my design
>work tends to revolve around logos and lettering and layout, rather
>then trying to emulate Rembrandt.)
It occurs to me to ask: how are you at backs-of-heads?
>And that's all I'm interested in saying about this quirk of my neural net.
Oh, okay. Never mind then.
>but I hope that bringing up the subject
>doesn't lead to people thinking I'm having great difficulties or the new
>Rain Man or some sort of bizarre crazed genius. (Well, actually, the
>prosopagnosia isn't the reason I'm a bizarre crazed genius. But there
>is insufficient space on the Internet for me to list all the ways in which
>I'm weird. For purposes of this discussion, I just wanted to talk about
>one perceptual difficulty caused by a bug in my wetware.)
Rest easy, Kibo, we were perfectly sure you're a bizarre crazed genius even
before we knew this.
> Now, as far as being a supertaster
> goes, that's another tiny genetic
> difference that makes me better
> than the Muggles, even if it makes
> dark chocolate taste really nasty.
Dave "and he doesn't need anything like a _whole_ phone booth to change in,
either" DeLaney
--
\/David DeLaney posting from d...@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.
The Avocado Avenger
> ki...@world.std.com (James "Kibo" Parry) wrote:
>
> > The more I think about what you just wrote about me, the more cross
> > I am with you right now.
>
> You're right, of course; my post was a combination of unwarranted
> speculation and violated confidences; it was stuff that was not for
> me to say and was probably incorrect besides.
>
> I'm deeply sorry about this. You're a great friend and I shouldn't be
> abusing that.
I for one welcome our new sympathetic, understanding overlords, and to
them I provide this list of people they *can* abuse, and should, with
great abandon:
1. Michael Jackson
2. George "Lawn Molester" Bush (no pun)
3. Fran Drescher
4. Lots42
I am off to burn my copy of "Truer than True Romance" in a 5-gallon
galvanized metal bucket, in the name of our new overlords. Hooray for a
good old fashioned book burning!
Stacia
The Avocado Avenger
> If people start treating me
> as if I'm made of glass because they think I have some sort of
> major neurological impairment, I'm not going to be happy.
No offense, but you're not happy now. I'M JUST SAYIN'. Anyhow, I
personally plan on treating you as if you were made of clay and moss and
call you Mr Chia.
> Has it occurred to you that practically all my friends read a.r.k
Does this mean we're your friends? Hooray!
> I actually scored above-average on
> an online test at recognizing photos of famous people last night.)
Geez, Matt, you made Kibo take an on-line test. I hope you're happy
now. It probably had photos of Ken Wahl, and who can recover from THAT?
> ... the reason I'm a bizarre crazed genius.
Dear Kibo:
We know why you are a bizarre crazed genius. It's the Pez.
Wuv,
Everybody In the Universe
Also P.S. and stuff: In case you haven't noticed, all the regulars on
ARK, 100% of them, everybody, no exceptions, is COMPLETELY FUCKED IN THE
HEAD. We love you no matter what, even if your Death Ray is woefully
misaligned and your obsession with serifs is obscene, to say the least.
So please stop being mad and come be as messed up as the rest of us.
Stacia
WE ACCEPT HIM
WE ACCEPT HIM
ONE OF US
ONE OF US
James Kibo Parry
> >
> > I hope you don't turn out to be the only person on the whole Internet
> > not to have prosopagnosia.
>
> He might be. I myself can only add about one or two new names to new faces a
> day. And get confused between people who bear similarities to each other even
> though they don't look alike; canonical case was in high school, where I
> never could remember which of Scott's two sisters, Ann or Amy, was the one
> that was six inches taller than the other. (Both had long black hair. Scott
> had short curly black hair. This will lead you, correctly, to conclude that
> their last name was Corrigan...)
You have a daily limit on how many faces you learn? Hmm, I'll have to use
that excuse next time I'm at a party: "I'm sorry, I can only learn one or
two new faces a day, and I already looked at that ugly couple over there..."
> > [...]
>
> Uh-oh. Kibo's mad at Matt. I'm going to hide under the Tubby Tustard
> bin now...
Oh, it's okay, he's forgiven, assuming he starts wearing the name tag
I'll be sending him. And -- hey, David, what are you eating under there?
-- K.
Also, is it true that the
second "T" in "Tubby Tustard"
really stands for "M" because
"Teletubbies" was originally a
German production with them
cavorting drunkenly about the
biergarten?
Of course, few Germans actually
stand for "M", what with him
killing that little girl
and then throwing her pretty
ball into the bushes...
Paula
>And that's all I'm interested in saying about this quirk of my neural net.
>I hope it helps everyone understand that I, like most people, am a little
>different from everyone else, but I hope that bringing up the subject
>doesn't lead to people thinking I'm having great difficulties or the new
>Rain Man or some sort of bizarre crazed genius. (Well, actually, the
>prosopagnosia isn't the reason I'm a bizarre crazed genius. But there
>is insufficient space on the Internet for me to list all the ways in which
>I'm weird. For purposes of this discussion, I just wanted to talk about
>one perceptual difficulty caused by a bug in my wetware.)
I developed some problems in this area when I was hit in the head
repeatedly in my run-in with the double dumpster. If you ever want to
talk about it with someone who remembers both ways of remembering
faces, let me know. Mine is mild, but it is very disconcerting to go
from always recognizing a face as one I know even if I can't for the
life of me remember from where or what name to attach to it, to never
knowing when I will come across someone I should know well but will
not be able to say that I've ever even seen their face before.
Paula
and that's not the only way I'm screwed up, either!
James Kibo Parry
>
> I don't have prosopagnosia either, of course, just an even worse memory
> for actors' faces and names than for those of people I know. Combine
> this with my forgetfulness of stories and the trancelike state the 30 Hz
> flicker induces in me, and I really am incompetent to watch television.
I think everyone is worse at remembering people's names than all their
friends are. I have yet to meet a person who has never had trouble
remembering someone's name, somewhere. And even if you do ever meet
that person, you would automatically forget their name in order to
keep the Universe from folding up on itself because of one of those
paradoxes that isn't even a paradox!
But, as I've mentioned, I have particular trouble with _one_ name:
I can't remember that Brian Posehn is "Brian Posehn". I have to keep
calling him "that guy who looks like a child molester with an extra
side of sideburns" and that bothers me because I don't think he's
actually a child molester, even though I don't know the backstory
as to why he was given the electric chair live on stage.
I suspect this means that either (a) all other humans were born with
a Brian Posehn Cell and I'm missing it and nobody has noticed because
nobody else ever thinks about him because I know that he was personally
giving me the finger when I was in the back row of that giant theater,
or else (b) there is no such thing as a Brian Posehn Cell because
all intersections of the words "Brian" and "Brain" got blowed up
at the end of the "Space: 1999" episode "Brian The Brain", after the Daleks
laughed at how pathetic the robot looked until he jumped out the airlock.
> > [...]
> > And that's all I'm interested in saying about this quirk of my neural net.
>
> I have trouble remaining interested in my own attempts to explain my
> mental quirks to other people, too. Why don't you just pay more
> attention?
Do you mean to the TV, or what?
-- K.
I have to turn on the TV!
That guy might be on!
Sideburn guy!
Talysman the Ur-Beatle
> For the record, for anyone who's interested:
>
> I have some degree of prosopagnosia, a condition which often makes it
> difficult for me to tell whether I've seen someone before when I meet
> them the second time (mainly affecting real-life meetings at airports,
> which is why I always tell people to find me because I may have
> trouble finding them.)
which makes it somewhat ironic when Jake and I had to find you at that
one mall, because Jake was expecting me to help find Kibo and I thought
"ok, I will look for randomly skinny people and ask them if I've met them
before."
also, you tried to trick me by changing the style of your beard.
> It is a neurological condition (not a mental
> disorder, not a visual disorder, not a lack of attention) which is
> usually caused by a blow to the head (in my case, I think it was just
> naturally-occurring) and doesn't affect my ability to _remember_ faces
> (it has nothing to do with being unable to remember what name goes
> with what face, something everyone has trouble with to some degree),
> just my ability to _recognize_ faces. It affects only faces; I think
> those who know me (and have seen me talk endlessly about details of
> typography, paintings, cinematography, etc.) know I am highly visually
> perceptive. In fact, I suspect my interest in the visual arts, and
> good "eye" for art, is something of a reaction to the prosopagnosia --
> I have always concentrated on analysis of everything I see because the
> part of my visual comprehension which works, the part that makes up
> the bulk of human perception, is the part that can analyze things
> rationally in terms of shape, color, texture, etc., as prosopagnosia
> only affects a specialized category of visual perception.
in my particular case, as I mentioned, Iactually can't remember the face,
unless I've seen the face quite a bit. there are a couple old friends I
haven't seen in a while that I can still remember what their faces looked
like ... but there are a lot of people you would *think* I'd remember
what their faces looked like, but I don't.
so it seems my prosopagnosia is a little more extreme than yours, but I
still think mine is fairly mild; there are some facial features I can
occasionally recognize without the aid of tattoos or piercings. also, I
can recognize faces a little easier when they are in a "context" I'm
expecting -- I can recognize co-workers when I see them at work, for
example. remove them from the context I usually see them in, however, and
it takes me longer to recognize them. this causes problems because people
think I'm snobbish or something when they meet me by accident when I'm
out on the town.
for the *other* record, here's a rundown of my other senses.
-- VISUAL: I think I'm pretty good in some forms of art, but I'm
definitely never going to be much of a graphic artist, since I'm
colorblind. I can recognize fire-engine red and emerald green, but when
you start showing me pastels or murkier colors, I have trouble. as a
result, I never learned to identify most colors.
-- AUDITORY: I seem to have a very good memory for sounds. if I'd had
the proper training, I might have become a decent musician of some kind.
as it is, I only took a semester of college piano plus an introduction to
music class, plus taught myself to play medieval tunes on the recorder by
ear. I can also recognize various languages and accents pretty well, so
there's *another* skill I could have trained more in to develop something
in the way of a marketable skill. also, sometimes people who know me get
infuriated because I will hear something they say and recognize it as
having the exact same rhythmic pattern as part of a song, so I will sing
the song. also also, once this guy was talking and he made a sound effect
like "whewitt!" and I said "that sounded exactly like the spinning
trident blade traps in `Rise of the Triad'".
-- TACTILE: my sense of touch doesn't seem to be very acute at all, but
I'm not sure how you'd rate this or test it. I can tell the difference
between fuzzy and silky, though.
-- TASTE/SMELL: I"m no supertaster. I can taste the four basic tastes,
and I can recognize certain strong odors, but most subtle odors and
flavors are completely lost on me. this seems to be inherited; I have a
great aunt with no sense of smell at all (so don't ask "but how does she
smell?") this explains why I tend to use lots of sugar, salt, pepper, and
garlic in food I make. not all in the same food, however, although I did
develop an addiction to salted raisins. most of my food preferences are
determined by texture rather than taste -- I don't like mushy vegetables,
for example, or juice with pulp (because it's like drinking a glass of
parasites.)
there! collect and save!
Talysman the Ur-Beatle
> Talysman the Ur-Beatle wrote:
>> this one toy company ripped off my idea for STAR
>> TREK DOLLS. this made me so furious that I (age 9) wrote to the patent
>> office with my hand-drawn plans for my SPACE ROCEKT IDEA, which was to
>> arrange electron guns from a teevee set in a circle and fire them at
>> uranium.
>
> That's totally cool. How did the toy company get hold of your plans?
> And did your parents fail to believe you until you went on a wacky
> adventure that was filmed for a 90-minute Disney movie?
I think they managed to get a hold of my plans by using the tricky maneuver
of having me send them a letter that said something like "HI MECO I LIKE
YOUR PLANET OF THE APES DOLLS PLEASE MAKE STAR TREK DOLLS THANKS BYE!". of
course, six million other kids probably sent the same letter, but when
you're nine years old and you never saw any star trek dolls, so you send a
letter to a toy company thinking you are going to be as rich as in those
daydreams where you imagine the government revalues each penny as being
worth a WHOLE DOLLAR, then suddenly BAMF! there are star trek dolls and you
never even got a letter saying "THANK YOU WE ARE MAKING STAR TREK DOLLS
PLEASE BUY THEM", let alone the thousands of pennies you thought they would
send you... well, under those circumstances, you become a little
disgruntled and prone to conspiracy theories.
>> ... and then the patent office sent back my three-hole=punched notebook
>> paper and included a book describing what a patent is and how to apply
>> for one, which made for a really cool show-and-tell, let me tell you.
>
> You are cool.
indeed I am! I should tell you also about how in the fourth grade they
taught us how to make puppets using papier mache wrapped on a lightbulb and
I made a richard nixon puppet and put on a skit about "nixon and the three
senators" that was loosely based on a kid's idea of what watergate was
about.
HarCo Industries
So, I gotta ask: What's the name for it when you don't remember
peoples' faces/names because YOU JUST CAN'T BE BOTHERED WITH
TRIVIALITIES?
Because that's what I have.
Rich Holmes
> Uh-oh. Kibo's mad at Matt. I'm going to hide under the Tubby Tustard bin now...
Relax; this is a perfectly normal phenomenon -- it's called Ragnarok.
Happens all the time.
--
- Doctroid Doctroid Holmes <http://www.richholmes.net/doctroid/>
"You are standing in a large vat of wrong, which is being rapidly
filled by a tanker truck pumping out more wrong."
- Kevin S. Wilson
Rich Holmes
> So, I gotta ask: What's the name for it when you don't remember
> names of psychological disorders because YOU JUST CAN'T BE BOTHERED
> WITH TRIVIALITIES?
>
> Because that's what I have.
IFYPFY.
Kevin S. Wilson
Industries) wrote:
>So, I gotta ask: What's the name for it when you don't remember
>peoples' faces/names because YOU JUST CAN'T BE BOTHERED WITH
>TRIVIALITIES?
My wife refers to it as my "Oh, that's other people" syndrome.
Jeremy D. Impson
> Well, I'm not completely prosopagnostic (?), but I have a pretty awful
> memory for names and faces, and yet I _don't_ have any distinctive-
> looking friends. Of course, I don't have that many friends in the first
> place, but that's another story.
[Warning: abuse of "them"/"their" to mean arbitrary person of
intederminate gender abounds in the following paragraph. Plu, passive
voice.]
Recognizing a face is different than remembering the name associated with
the face. If someone whom you should know (because you've interacted with
them more than once, or within the last few minutes/hours/days) enters a
room and to you they are a complete and total stranger, then you have
recognition problems. If you recognize them (i.e. feel that you've met
them before, even if you don't know when or where or what context) but
can't remember their name, then either you're like me and don't pay enough
attention when introductions are made, or maybe you have some other sort
of memory/cognizance disorder.
--Jeremy
--
Jeremy Impson
jdimpson can be contacted at acm dot org
http://impson.tzo.com/~jdimpson
Jeremy D. Impson
> The belief is that the human visual system has special wiring designed
> for perceiving faces in addition to all the general-purpose visual-
> analysis stuff, and I'm missing the magic unit that likes to take
> pictures of faces.
I've always wondered if this also had something to do with the global
phenomenon of people from one major phenotype thinking that people of
another major phenotype all look alike, e.g. so said by
negro/caucasian/asian of one of the other three. It's as though the face
recognizer can be attuned (and re-attuned, as I know from first hand
experience) to a phenotype. I suspect few if any scientists of SCIENCE
have looked into this for fear of causing what is probably unneccessary
racial friction.
It's amazing how much of the brain works in parallel (but not the
redundant kind of parallel--more like an assembly line). There's one part
that recognizes shapes, there's the face recognizer that Kibo mentions,
there's a part that processes motion (which if damaged reportedly causes
the victim to live in perpetually strobe-lit world), there are even parts
the perceived up and down lines, left and right lines, and diagonal lines.
Then there are all the speach and hearing disorders, like the inability to
speak even though you know what you're trying to say (i.e. can't perform
the act of speaking correctly), compared with the inability to speak
because you really can't say anything (i.e. can't form sentences).
The most fascinating to me is the diagnosis of blindsight, where
(reportedly) someone who, upon suffering a stroke, lost vision in the
lower right part of his visual field. However, he had an apparantly
subconcious ability to perceive, almost "intuit", things that occurred in
that field (bright lights, colorful objects, etc). This was explained by
the fact that, as the optic nerves leave the eyes, they first come
together, mingle, and split up again, this time with the fibers from the
left fields of BOTH eyes going to the right brain, and the fibers from the
right fields of both eyes going to the left brain. Most of the fibers go
back to the occipital cortex, but a small amount of fibers split off and
end somewhere else (I want to say near the hypothalamus, but I'm doing all
of this from memory, so it's probably already full of factual errors).
Sort of a detour. The stroke damaged some brain cells in the left
occipital lobe, darkening part of his field of vision. However, the bit
of brain that is innervated by the detouring fibers was fine, so it was
thought that he has some form of vision still. For whatever reason, the
victim thought he was blind, but had "feelings" about certain things that
lay in the blind section. I wonder if these results were ever
duplicated...
> For instance, for most people, if you were asked
> to describe someone you know, you'd summon up an image of that person's
> face, and then you'd mentally "look" at it and pull off details like
> what shape the nose is, what color eyes there are, etc.,
Speaking only for myself (but I'd be surprised to hear that many people
are different), I know that I can't describe anyone's face, not even my
own, even though my recognizer does work. (Except to say "she had a giant
nose" or "he had a very red boil on his cheek".) But it's probably more
because I lack a vocabulary, and the training/skill to use it.
Presumably police sketch artists are trained to coach people through the
process of describing someone's appearance. And perhaps police officers
are trained in the vocabulary, as well, in order to act as expert
wisnesses.
This is what I was trying to say when I said the brain acts in parallel.
What I really mean is that perception and cognition are the sum total of
tons of separate processes, which seem to work on their own. When one is
damaged, the rest continue working (assuming pathways still exist), and
the idea of conciousness may be a lot different than what we think it is.
I used to think that the brain was the most important organ I had,
then I realized what was telling me that.
--Steve Wright (paraphrased)
I saw an incredible docoumentary about a man who, in order to treat his
debilitating epilepsy, had a procedure done to split his brain in
half--they cut the bigger of the two bundle of nerves that connect the two
halves of the brain. Under normal circumstances, there was no effect
(other than the absence of siezures). But they performed a variety of
tests where they would manage to show his left brain (right field of
vision) one image, say a bird, but show his right btain (left field of
vision) another, say the word orange. Then they told him to use his LEFT
hand to draw what he saw. The left hand ppicked up an orange crayon and
drew a round orage fruit. The left hand, driven by the right brain,
cannot (usually) speak. Most people have their speech ability on the
left braing. They asked him to confirm that he saw. He actually
stammered for a bit, his right hand picked up the crayon, and drew
tail feathers and a head on the orange (making it look somewhat like a
turkey), and said "yeah, it's a bird... an orange bird". When
interrogated some more, he came up with some excuse as to why he did that,
but stated that he never saw the word "orange"--this is because the
speaking brain really never did see the word.
So basically, 1 theory states simplistically that conciousness is a lie
created by the speaking part of our brain to explain the otherwise
baffling actions of the rest of the brain.
I think this explains why some people subconciously say or do things that
they claim they are not or would not do.
> And that's all I'm interested in saying about this quirk of my neural net.
> I hope it helps everyone understand that I, like most people, am a little
> different from everyone else, but I hope that bringing up the subject
> doesn't lead to people thinking I'm having great difficulties or the new
> Rain Man or some sort of bizarre crazed genius. (Well, actually, the
> prosopagnosia isn't the reason I'm a bizarre crazed genius. But there
> is insufficient space on the Internet for me to list all the ways in which
> I'm weird. For purposes of this discussion, I just wanted to talk about
> one perceptual difficulty caused by a bug in my wetware.)
Hmmm. Let's see. ARK is full of people who are:
Alcoholic
Depressed
Overweight
Underweight
Balding
Misogynistic
Sexually repressed
Asperger-ific
Oversexed
Undersexed
Codependent
Lonely
Angry
Joe Bay
Awkward
Divorced
NOT BITTER
Obsessed
Haughty
Naughty
Spotty
Apathetic
Manic
Astigmatic
Distant
...
I for one welcome the revelation of a neurological oddity as a refreshing
change of pace. Also, please forgive Matt. Sometimes it's difficult
maintaining friendships.
David DeLaney
>> day. And get confused between people who bear similarities to each other even
>> though they don't look alike; canonical case was in high school, where I
>> never could remember which of Scott's two sisters, Ann or Amy, was the one
>> that was six inches taller than the other. (Both had long black hair. Scott
>> had short curly black hair. This will lead you, correctly, to conclude that
>> their last name was Corrigan...)
>
>You have a daily limit on how many faces you learn? Hmm, I'll have to use
>that excuse next time I'm at a party: "I'm sorry, I can only learn one or
>two new faces a day, and I already looked at that ugly couple over there..."
It's not like I practice it or something; I just know my limits by now. "No,
ma'am, my brane's temorarily full, can I just call ya Hon?"
>> Uh-oh. Kibo's mad at Matt. I'm going to hide under the Tubby Tustard
>> bin now...
>
>Oh, it's okay, he's forgiven, assuming he starts wearing the name tag
>I'll be sending him. And -- hey, David, what are you eating under there?
Depends. How old are you?
> Also, is it true that the
> second "T" in "Tubby Tustard"
> really stands for "M" because
> "Teletubbies" was originally a
> German production with them
> cavorting drunkenly about the
> biergarten?
Dave "Now Iss THze Time On Sprvocketzs Vhen Ve ..." DeLaney
David DeLaney
>> disorder, not a visual disorder, not a lack of attention) which is
>> usually caused by a blow to the head (in my case, I think it was just
>> naturally-occurring) and doesn't affect my ability to _remember_ faces
>> (it has nothing to do with being unable to remember what name goes
>> with what face, something everyone has trouble with to some degree),
>> just my ability to _recognize_ faces.
>so it seems my prosopagnosia is a little more extreme than yours, but I
>still think mine is fairly mild; there are some facial features I can
>occasionally recognize without the aid of tattoos or piercings. also, I
>can recognize faces a little easier when they are in a "context" I'm
>expecting -- I can recognize co-workers when I see them at work, for
>example. remove them from the context I usually see them in, however, and
>it takes me longer to recognize them. this causes problems because people
>think I'm snobbish or something when they meet me by accident when I'm
>out on the town.
No no no, take it from the top please. You can't remember the faces when
you're not looking at them, and can't remember if you've seen that face
before when you are; he's not categorizing them as 'face' when he's looking
at them, he has to build them up out of 'nose' and 'direction of smile'
and 'texture of cheek on left side', but can remember which collection
goes with what out of the collections he knows. I think.
> -- TASTE/SMELL: I"m no supertaster. I can taste the four basic tastes,
>and I can recognize certain strong odors, but most subtle odors and
>flavors are completely lost on me. this seems to be inherited; I have a
>great aunt with no sense of smell at all (so don't ask "but how does she
>smell?")
Can we ask how her dog smells?
>this explains why I tend to use lots of sugar, salt, pepper, and
>garlic in food I make. not all in the same food, however,
That's good, as that mixture's at least level 45 Crafting skill.
Dave
Jeremy D. Impson
> >It's a very difficult thing to explain, particularly as the effect is
> >so subtle (most people aren't even aware that this condition exists
> >because it doesn't affect people like me in any way that might be
> >noticed, except in terms of some social awkwardness when people say
> >hi on the street.)
>
> On the contrary, I'm getting a sense of what's going on here from your
> explanation. (You -are- good at 'splainin' things.)
>
> Does this have anything to do with me not being able to say, once I look
> away from a person, _anything_ about what they're wearing, right down to
> what color(s) it was or whether they had shoes, sneakers, sandals, or no
> footwear at all? [Without actually taking the time to look at and memorize
> what they've got on?]
No. Or at least, not necessarily (for all I know there may be a pathology
that causes this). Show of hands... who can remember this sort of thing
about they people they work with/spent the day with? Most people simply
aren't trained for this sort of thing.
This is one of the many things that frightens me about the US (and
presumably most other) legal systems--the reliance on witness testimony.
> I always figured it was because I was looking at the
> person, not at what they were wearing, so it mentally fuzzed away.
Sort of. It's probably because you already recognize the people's faces,
so there's no need to remember what they wear in order to figure out who
they are.
> [No, this does NOT mean I can mentally picture people without any clothes
> on at will. I could make a _lot_ more money if I could do that. Somehow. I
> think...]
With that sort of power, I wouldn't need to go OUTSIDE! Waitaminnut, I
guess I would...
Jeremy D. Impson
> d...@gatekeeper.vic.com (David DeLaney) writes:
>
> > Uh-oh. Kibo's mad at Matt. I'm going to hide under the Tubby Tustard bin now...
>
> Relax; this is a perfectly normal phenomenon -- it's called Ragnarok.
> Happens all the time.
In fact, some people think that it's ALREADY happened all the time.
Jeremy D. Impson
Corrections...
On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, Jeremy D. Impson wrote:
> It's amazing how much of the brain works in parallel (but not the
> redundant kind of parallel--more like an assembly line).
Actually not really like an assembly line. More like an orchestra.
> Most of the fibers go back to the occipital cortex,
Occipital lobe, not cortex. I think...
> Speaking only for myself (but I'd be surprised to hear that many people
> are different), I know that I can't describe anyone's face, not even my
> own, even though my recognizer does work. (Except to say "she had a giant
> nose" or "he had a very red boil on his cheek".)
By this I mean that we only remember egregiously unusual features of the
face, similar to talysman's trick of making all of his friends get
peircings and tatoos.
> I think this explains why some people subconciously say or do things that
> they claim they are not or would not do.
But mostly I am full of shit for making hypotheses based on some
documentarian's pop-science treatment of an unusual and incompletely
understood phenomenon in a field where I don't even hold an undergrad's
degree.
Tim Serpas
>It's not like I practice it or something; I just know my limits by now. "No,
>ma'am, my brane's temorarily full, can I just call ya Hon?"
IWPTA "Mom".
Wretch
Theresa Willis
<jdim...@acm.spam.org> wrote:
>On 25 Nov 2003, Rich Holmes wrote:
>
>> d...@gatekeeper.vic.com (David DeLaney) writes:
>>
>> > Uh-oh. Kibo's mad at Matt. I'm going to hide under the Tubby Tustard bin now...
>>
>> Relax; this is a perfectly normal phenomenon -- it's called Ragnarok.
>> Happens all the time.
>
>In fact, some people think that it's ALREADY happened all the time.
Helpful hint: Do not read the above sentence while drinking cheap red
wine. May result in brainlash.
Ben Allard
HELPFUL HINT FOR HELPFUL ALCOHOLICS: DON'T READ DON'T PANIC! ALSO THAT ONE
SENTENCE IN THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY.
--
Ben
Besides, Finns don't have evil twins, they have happy twins. --Ben Wolfson
Who commit anti-suicide and spring themselves into cheerful, sober
existence. Seems logical enough to me. --Andrew Pearson
Paula
Industries) wrote:
Egomaniacal bitch. HTH.
Paula
David DeLaney
Ew. I wouldn't voluntarily call ANYONE 'Mom'.
Dave "it wastes my time and annoy the pig" DeLaney
Talysman the Ur-Beatle
news:slrnbs7u2...@gatekeeper.vic.com:
no, it works the same for me: in theory, I could work out a method of
memorizing what people's faces look like, sort of creating a "face
index" and looking it up mentally to see if it's a face I know. except
that that's more effort than I'm willing to make, so I mostly go by non-
facial cues.
see, the main common factor in all the cases is that faceblind people
have to consciously figure out who that person is waving at you, whereas
normal people know instantly. this can sometimes be done pretty quickly,
but it's still slower than having the right brane cells to begin with.
I have it a little easier than Kibo, maybe, in that I have that whole
sound thingie going on. I can recognize voices pretty easily. I don't
recognize most actors in movies very well, unless they are character
actors (who usually have unusual features) or certain classic actors like
Bogart... but sometimes I can identify their voices.
or could, if I knew their names, and most of the time I don't.
Mark Hill
(In Charlie Brown voice) That's it!! I've got egomanical bitch!
Sean Case
"Jeremy D. Impson" <jdim...@acm.spam.org> wrote:
> It's amazing how much of the brain works in parallel (but not the
> redundant kind of parallel--more like an assembly line). There's one part
> that recognizes shapes, there's the face recognizer that Kibo mentions,
> there's a part that processes motion (which if damaged reportedly causes
> the victim to live in perpetually strobe-lit world), there are even parts
> the perceived up and down lines, left and right lines, and diagonal lines.
I frequently find that a word or two will leap out at me from a wall of
books, and then I have to spend ages trying to find which book had that
word on its spine. So I guess I have some kind of word recognizer which
completely bypasses the rest of my visual system.
Sean Case
--
Sean Case g...@zip.com.au
Code is an illusion. Only assertions are real.
E Teflon Piano
"Jeremy D. Impson" <jdim...@acm.spam.org> wrote:
}I for one welcome the revelation of a neurological oddity as a refreshing
}change of pace. Also, please forgive Matt. Sometimes it's difficult
}maintaining friendships.
Amen. For one thing, they keep changing the rules on you: it used to be
an oil change every 4,000 miles. Now it's every 3,000 miles. What's up
with that?
--
Institute for Misapplied Psychometry fellow E Teflon Piano is founder of the
Internet 'Lectronic Legal Society. Teflon is a mark owned by duPont. E is E
poly(TFE) Piano Enterprises' [dibs] for ironic hyperbole and elitist satire.
(C)E[dibs] 1994-2003
Kevin S. Wilson
wrote:
>James "Kibo" Parry <ki...@world.std.com> wrote:
>>
>>And -- hey, David, what are you eating under there?
>
>Depends. How old are you?
>
HAW! HAW! Kibo made Dave say "adult diapers."
Steve Christensen
Since you tend to remember events/people better when your emotions are
running high, why not do what I do?
Every time I meet someone new I give them a meat cleaver and ask them
to chase me around the room. Benny Hill music not included.
-Steve
--
May be there are some girl lizards - not nice, not cute, not from the earth,
not have good legs. Do not call me. -- Kurt Stocklmeir
Mark Hill
> And never mind the prosopagnosia.
> How many of you are supertasters?
> WHY CAN'T SOMEONE MARKET A LINE
> OF TV DINNERS JUST FOR US?
If anyone could
do it, you could.
Rich Holmes
> I frequently find that a word or two will leap out at me from a wall of
> books, and then I have to spend ages trying to find which book had that
> word on its spine. So I guess I have some kind of word recognizer which
> completely bypasses the rest of my visual system.
Probably we all do. Or at least I do.
I once was flipping through (literally) the latest issue of the late,
non-lamented publication "Computers In Physics" when suddenly my brane
said to my brane, "'Holmes.' There was a mention of someone named
'Holmes' back there." And then I spent the next five minutes
examining the pages one at a time, trying to find the 'Holmes' I'd
seen for a few milliseconds.
I did find it, and that was how I discovered my cousin Lewis (who I've
probably met a maximum of two or three times in my life, if that many,
and those would've been when I was of a single digit age, though I
still have his clarinet) had become editor of the late, non-lamented
publication "Computers In Physics".
Gregory King
> On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, Jeremy D. Impson wrote:
>> Speaking only for myself (but I'd be surprised to hear that many people
>> are different),
Surprise! Almost all people are different. You might be the only one
who's the same.
>> I know that I can't describe anyone's face, not even my
>> own, even though my recognizer does work. (Except to say "she had a giant
>> nose" or "he had a very red boil on his cheek".)
>
> By this I mean that we only remember egregiously unusual features of the
> face, similar to talysman's trick of making all of his friends get
> peircings and tatoos.
Just think, if you and talysman lived in Dick Tracy's universe, you'd be
the best police witnesses ever, along with everyone else in the world.
"Looks like Cheeky Redboil is up to his old tricks again!"
And then Dick Tracy would give you shiny tin badges that say "JUNIOR
CRIMESTOPER" in big letters, so that criminals would know to shoot you
before they committed any crimes.
(BTW, if anyone's keeping score, I would describe myself as having the
"Oh, that's other people" syndrome, although more out of avoidance of
social interaction than of colossal arrogance. I also have some definite
problems with recognizing people in unfamiliar contexts. I've had the
unsettling experience of going to a dance recital and repeatedly losing
track of which of two similarly-featured dancers was my girlfriend.)
--
Gregory King :: http://flyingpawn.com/
This .sig was made with pirated software.
Jeremy D. Impson
> (BTW, if anyone's keeping score, I would describe myself as having the
> "Oh, that's other people" syndrome, although more out of avoidance of
> social interaction than of colossal arrogance. I also have some
> definite problems with recognizing people in unfamiliar contexts. I've
> had the unsettling experience of going to a dance recital and repeatedly
> losing track of which of two similarly-featured dancers was my
> girlfriend.)
Isn't the point of dance recitals that they all look the same? Except for
the prima ballerina.
Gregory King
> On Sat, 29 Nov 2003, Gregory King wrote:
>
>> (BTW, if anyone's keeping score, I would describe myself as having the
>> "Oh, that's other people" syndrome, although more out of avoidance of
>> social interaction than of colossal arrogance. I also have some
>> definite problems with recognizing people in unfamiliar contexts. I've
>> had the unsettling experience of going to a dance recital and repeatedly
>> losing track of which of two similarly-featured dancers was my
>> girlfriend.)
>
> Isn't the point of dance recitals that they all look the same? Except for
> the prima ballerina.
Well, this was modern dance, not ballet. I don't know enough to say that
particular rules apply to each, but this was not a "one or two leads plus
anonymous chorus" type dance. They were wearing identical costumes,
though, which is why I was stuck using my kludgy facial recognition
software.
Jeremy D. Impson
Perhaps you should spend more time looking at her face than her other, uh,
parts.
Glenn Knickerbocker
> On Sun, 30 Nov 2003, Gregory King wrote:
> > anonymous chorus" type dance. They were wearing identical costumes,
> > though, which is why I was stuck using my kludgy facial recognition
> > software.
> Perhaps you should spend more time looking at her face than her other, uh,
> parts.
Or vice versa.
ŹR
James Kibo Parry
>
> Since you tend to remember events/people better when your emotions are
> running high, why not do what I do?
>
> Every time I meet someone new I give them a meat cleaver and ask them
> to chase me around the room. Benny Hill music not included.
That's fine and dandy for the face problem. But what about that other
special little hole in my brain that causes me to not be able to remember
that Brian Posehn's name is Brian Posehn? I don't want him chasing me
around with a meat cleaver, because he's too scary to have doing that.
Can't we just start a petition to change his name to "That guy from
'Mr. Show'"? How many signatures does it take before a petition like
that becomes a law, 100 or 200?
-- K.
Benny Hill would never
run with a meat cleaver.
However, that would be
the ending of every
episode of "The Lizzie
Borden Show" if she
were a fat British guy.
Steve Christensen
>
> That's fine and dandy for the face problem. But what about that other
> special little hole in my brain that causes me to not be able to remember
> that Brian Posehn's name is Brian Posehn? I don't want him chasing me
> around with a meat cleaver, because he's too scary to have doing that.
> Can't we just start a petition to change his name to "That guy from
> 'Mr. Show'"? How many signatures does it take before a petition like
> that becomes a law, 100 or 200?
I think your nemesis will be able to get more signatures to change his
name to "That mail-room guy from 'Just Shoot Me'". Perhaps it is better
to let sleeping dogs lie.
Or maybe the petition should just be for forcing him to wear a name tag.
Glenn Knickerbocker
> special little hole in my brain that causes me to not be able to remember
> that Brian Posehn's name is Brian Posehn? I don't want him chasing me
> around with a meat cleaver, because he's too scary to have doing that.
So call him Brian Benben to make him less scary, and THEN hand him a
meat cleaver and tell him to chase you around with it.
I had no clue who Brian Posehn was until I googled up a photo of him
just now and said, "Oh, THAT guy." I bet if you just called him that
he'd know who you were talking to.
ŹR