Motus Mentis

Well, we’re back. Our latest “Service Notice” post generated a reasonable question from reader Charles L., namely: why do I bother announcing that I won’t be posting? After all, it’s not as if the trains won’t be running, or the beer will stop flowing, and I realize it must seem a bit presumptuous to imagine that anyone would even care. But as I said to Charles, having established a pattern of daily blogging, I see missing a post as a lapse of discipline, and I suppose I feel obligated to own up to it.

Speaking of which, we note that one of the most consistent of quotidian scriveners in our little circle — Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher — has announced that he will be off the air, not for a day or a weekend, but for the entire month of June. I’m sure this seems liberating in prospect — it’s hard to write every day — but I know that the man has blogging in his blood, and I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t get a little itchy after a week or so. We should start up a little office pool.

There’s been a lot going on, and we’ll just note a few things in passing, before returning to some of the topics we’ve neglected lately:

First, the Phoenix Lander already seems well on its way to accomplishing its primary scientific objective, which is to find water on Mars: it appears that in the very act of landing, its descent rockets may have blown aside enough surface material to expose bare ice. We tend to take these space-probe stories somewhat for granted these days, but we shouldn’t; Archimedes or Galileo or Leonardo — or for that matter the Wright Brothers or Robert Goddard — would have given their eyeteeth to have seen such astounding engineering achievements. These missions represent the pinnacle of human ingenuity and ambition, and they are undertaken not for the sake of greed or power or religious hegemony, but that our infant race may begin to understand its place in the Cosmos. We should be very proud. Get the latest at the mission website, here.

From my colleague Jay Chang comes the story of Fan Meizhong, a teacher in Sichuan who fled his collapsing schoolhouse during the recent earthquake, leaving his pupils behind to fend for themselves:

When his pupils began to arrive, they asked: “Teacher, why didn’t you bring us out?”

His explanation was simple. “I have a very strong sense of self-preservation,” he said. “I have never been a brave man and I’m only really concerned about myself.”

There’s nothing so odd about running for one’s life in such a situation, but what makes Mr. Fan’s story so unusual is that he then made a point of writing about it on his blog, earning himself nationwide opprobrium. (Had he been Korean, of course, he would have been seen as quite understandably trying to prevent another tragic case of Fan death.)

Reader JK, in a comment today on an earlier post, has called our attention to a fascinating new proposal put forward by Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, about the mechanism behind optical illusions. We have known for quite some time that our conscious experience is not a localized temporal point, but is, rather, smeared and distributed in the brain both in space and time. Changizi believes that our visual apparatus, in order to compensate for the time it takes to process images, gives us not what it sees, but what it expects to see a tenth of a second from now. Our conscious experience is simply not what we think it is; this is just the latest in a revelatory body of recent scientific work in this field. Read the story here.

Finally, our friend Kevin Kim has begun his trek in earnest, and you should all visit his website to follow his progress. He has made his way from Vancouver to Bellingham, Washington, and the reality of what he has undertaken is beginning to sink in, I expect.