Contact and Comments
You are welcome to use the comment form on this page to send me comments and suggestions. I will integrate interesting things giving full credit to the bizarre minds that cook them up, but I’ll probably only trail the really funny ones on this page.
If you prefer, there’s a mailing list conversation at the progstone group.
My email address is alangcarter (at) gmail (dot) com. Sob. Until now that address has been pretty much spam free. How many harvesters will see past that pathetic attempt at armouring?
Apologies for poor rendering of this form with Internet Explorer 6 
Welcome and congratulations on entering the sphere Alan. Your synchronicity is - as always - richly ironic, amusing, and gratifying. A few months ago I became a contributing writer at the assaultonblacksanity - please add us to your ritual habitual and contribute the richness of your hypothesis to what’s cooking. I apologize for the misunderstanding and strife I personally contributed to the list over time, but simmering beneath my interest in the hypothesis all along was the middle of the forehead conclusion that systemic racism has got to be the most obvious and stark manifestation of generalized dopamine hegemony that there is.
Long story short, interest in cognitive activism precipitated in largest measure by exposure to your thinking led me to fairly stark Black partisanship, with Blackness (a culture and social construct) understood as the most successful and long-term oppositional cultural stance to dopamine hegemony in the world. That was and remains my summary take on things. That said, the past few years of blogospheric interaction that I’ve enjoyed have not led to any epiphanic surges of activism.
For the past couple of weeks, in addition to the assault, I’ve had the pleasure of holding forth a little bit at denmarkvesey. I’ll simply let the commentary speak for itself. Very best regards. C.N. (xavier moon)
Oh, if you haven’t activated commenting to posts yet, please have a look at haloscan (www.haloscan.com) which is compatible with wordpress and provides some valuable features above and beyond what’s native to wordpress commenting, in addition to facilitating a feed at the per comment level of granularity.
http://denmarkvesey.blogspot.com/2007/09/sugar-more-addictive-than-cocaine.html
http://denmarkvesey.blogspot.com/2007/09/cnulan-most-dynamic-intellect-on.html
http://denmarkvesey.blogspot.com/2007/09/damn-i-am-more-impressed-with-this-cat.html
http://denmarkvesey.blogspot.com/2007/09/cnu-and-50-cent-dopamine-theory.html
http://denmarkvesey.blogspot.com/2007/09/blog-post_19.html
http://denmarkvesey.blogspot.com/2007/09/robert-nestor-marely-interview-new.html
http://denmarkvesey.blogspot.com/2007/09/robyn-accuses-cnu-of-talkin-white.html
http://denmarkvesey.blogspot.com/2007/09/example-of-mind-developed-slightly.html
Update: No longer blogging at the assault - now blogging exclusively at http://subrealism.blogspot.com
An excellent conference regarding these topics takes place in Austin, TX, USA. The congress is entitled, “Sustaining Performance Under Stress”. It is geared towards soldiers/marines and athletes but has a very heavy neuroscience component that is applicable for most occupational fields as well. The first congress was held last December and will take place again next November/December 2008. It is organized by the University of Texas.
Dear Mr. Carter
At the end of your post entitled “Oh My - It Really Is A Padawan’s Hat!” there are two pictures: Natalie Portman and Keira Knightley. Is it deliberate, or you just mistook Keira for Natalie ?
I read this article yesterday, was going to send it to you, decided not to and read your blog post this morning and thought I should…. its about a psychologist Ellen J. Langer with a theory of mindfulness
http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=117&art_id=nw20080127123101448C168769
“…Almost all of us is mindless, and oblivious to it…Much of what we think we believe, we learned as a child, and to lead a fuller life you should never stop questioning what you do and looking at things in a new light…. In her most recent study, she divided in two a group of 50 chambermaids - workers with a strenuous job - all of whom she says were under the misconception that they were doing no exercise… She then explained to half of them how much they were in fact doing. The other half she left alone…A month later Langer came back and found that the health of the first half had improved - and with no discernable change in lifestyle and diet - while the second group had stayed the same…”
From her web page at http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~langer/index.html
“…In business, we are conducting research into mindful leadership, mindful contagion (i.e the effect of one person’s mindfulness on another), and mindful decision-making. … the LMS is a 21-item questionnaire intended for use as a training, self-discovery, and research instrument. It assesses four domains associated with mindful thinking: novelty-seeking, engagement, novelty producing, and flexibility…”
I liked your “Four Calendar Cafe” piece — it isn’t often that I get to see someone drop an extended Cocteau Twins reference in a programming blog entry. Actually, that was probably a first.
Personally, I think you’re on the right track regarding Haskell. I’m hoping that Real World Haskell will prove to be a turning point in making Haskell accessible to a much larger audience.
For now, I’m quite enjoying working in F#, which, as a .Net programmer, I have thus far found so be something of a functional programming Rosetta Stone. It’s trivially easy to get started, since there’s almost invariably a literal translation from C#, but you can use as much FP as you know. So I’ve ended up writing lots of FP, but falling back on OO or procedural idioms whenever I don’t know an FP way to do something. This is highly impure of course, but it ensures that I never reach a complete roadblock.
Of course, I saw your view on Microsoft technologies, so I assume you won’t be following me in this direction, which is fine by me. Viva la difference, and perhaps after I have traveled far enough down the F# road in a few years, I may want to switch over to Haskell myself.
Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful post.
wanorris@yahoo.com
For code flying off to the right like …
mapM_ (\(c, bM, bSD, _, _) -> do
if (bM > 0)
then do
let division = intDiv 500 18
you should be able to move the body of the lambda to just right of the mapM like this…
mapM_ (\(c, bM, bSD, _, _) -> do
if (bM > 0)
then do
let division = intDiv 500 18