Strange but true: Harold loves buckwheat. My mom made a whole mess of buckwheat blueberry muffins and Harold will do anything, including, but not limited to, clawing his hefty weight up my whole body (which he's not done since he was a frisky young kitten with all his man parts intact) to snatch one of these muffins straight out of my mouth. Harold has never cared two shakes for any treat I have tried to give him, including, but not limited to: tuna fish, cheese, milk, cream, salmon, chicken. He's all, I could take it or leave it. But the damned buckwheat. Hoo boy, watch out. He is passionate about his buckwheat.

Today I am a putter monster. I meant to go in to work to make up some of the time I took off this week, but I didn't. Instead I'm watching movies, I'm making cookies (which is an odd thing to find myself doing, but every once in a while, on a dark and rainy day, it's just the thing), I'm doing some arts and crafts projects. I read Harper's earlier and found one thing I liked in it, which, knowing how I feel about Harper's, was pretty good. Nah, that's not even true. I usually like a lot of things in Harper's. I just don't like the conceit of the magazine, I guess. Too smarty pants for its own good. But what I liked, so far, this month: an article on the ongoing quest to fashion some artificial intelligence. Bathsheba and I had a bit of an obsession with this a few years back. We talked and taught our science fiction class about AI and the Turing Test and that wacky cybernetics guy (the self-fashioned cyborg) over in England--Warwick or something? Anyway, this article by Ellen Ullman, said something that I think is interesting:

Here is what I think: Sentience is the crest of the body, not its crown. It is integral to the substrate from which it arose, not something that can be taken off and placed elsewhere. We drag along inside us the brains of reptiles, the tails of tadpoles, the DNA of fungi and mice; our cells are permuted paramecia; our salty blood is what's left of our birth in the sea. Genetically, we are barely more than roundworms. Evolution, that sloppy programmer, has seen fit to create us as a wild amalgam of everything that came before us: the whole history of life on Earth lives on, written in our bodies. And who is to say which piece of this history can be excised, separated, deemed "useless" as an essential part of our nature and being?

She goes on to talk about sentience being a peculiarly and particularly mammalian (rather than human) trait--the ability to recognize other selves in the world--not simply or (maybe) not even one's self. Basho sure doesn't know he's looking at Basho in the mirror. But he does know when he sees another dog and he does know who I am and that I am not a dog. That's the other thing she says is a mammalian quality--the ability to form inter-species relationships.

I'm glad to know that the cyberneticists aren't as close as they think they are to creating their artificial intelligence. Or maybe Ms. Ullman is doing some whistling in the dark of her own? I think AI is not a nice idea at all and I, for one, am always looking for stumbling blocks so that it won't happen.

Ok. I'm going to go finish watching The Matrix now. Oh heh. I didn't even mean that to be funny. I mean, not that it is. Funny, I mean.

The end.