My Cognitive Vices: Penicillin Thinking

Sometimes I justify my mistakes by telling myself that they might result in serendipitous discoveries. Like when Fleming accidentally contaminated a culture plate with mold, and discovered penicillin. I call that penicillin thinking.

Fake physics

Attention comes from points with nonzero curl in the noetic flux.

What's the wavelength of an attention? (uh-TEN-tee-ON)

Helping

Do you suppose that Newton had a buddy who suggested to him, over coffee, "Hey, maybe you should invent a new kind of math for that. You know, some way to talk about sums of infinitesimal things." Would we hear about that guy?

I wouldn't mind being that guy, even if we didn't.

phase-space

The phase-space of life is riddled with obstacles and currents. Our course through it is not simple. Bedeviling our navigation are the twin facts that we do not know our destination, and that our charts were drawn by madmen.