The Low down on MyLogBlog - 8.11.07

The Low down on MyLogBlog - Entry for 08 November 2007

After 360, the name MyLogBlog is a bit staid and unimaginative and abbreviated it's even worse. MLB has the look about it of a medical insurer, but the important question in the minds of a lot of people is, will my friends join me there?

The funny thing about this site is if you join MLB and your online friends don't, it won't necessarily stop you mixing with them.

The MLB profile I see as a kind of portal. MyLogBlog is not a blog. But it is a community of bloggers.

You go into your MLB profile and, depending on how you set it up, stored in there can be links to all of your blogs, your Youtube account, your Meem account, your Photobucket account, your Digg account, your Delicious account, and so on.

And with the vaunted changes coming up for 360 bloggers many of us joined Multiply and/or Mash in an attempt to stay together with our 360 friends. There again some of us have spread ourselves even thinner throughout the blogosphere by joining a number of other blogs for the fact of seeing what will make the best alternative when 360 disappears next year. And one thing we might be glad of is that we have been given plenty of advance warning not only that Yahoo is going to "scuttle" 360 but roughly when - it's thought some time through the first quarter of 2008.

To my point, though, given the fact that we might have a range of blogs, the rather useful feature about MLB is that - rather than loading down your browser with a heap of tabs (albeit that your browser is Flock) - or logging in and out of the different blogs - you can have all the blogs that you have authored at your fingertips, in the one place, accessible via links on your MyLogBlog profile.

So (at least in the first instance) you log onto only one membership in which you can view your other memberships.

It's in fact a simple but effective solution to the complexity of our having memberships to all manner of sites spread all over the web, and I know my situation is out of control.

Further, in normal Yahoo tradition, there are communities either set up or building which you can join to vary your blogging experience even wider than you currently do. I don't know why you would want to but you can join up to 15 communities a day - that's voluntarily joining, while if your settings permit auto-join, those you join by default of auto-join, don't count towards the limit.

In answer to your question before you ask it, when you visit a community a number of times, if your settings allow for it you become a member of that community automatically. If the idea doesn't appeal, turn off the auto-join setting.

There is no compulsory fee of $25/year (that's per blog incidentally) but you can maintain a free version of the site.

The difference? Okay so there might be more to this than I've been able to pick up in a couple of short hours looking at this but, what Yahoo themselves have to say is this:

The benefits of BlogLog Pro - "Real time stats. If you don't have a lot of traffic, the free version may be sufficient. ... Simply the pro version gives you more robust stats."

Pro also allows for a longer list of top links while with the free version, the top links showing are limited to 10.

I'm not coming down on MLB. I see it has potential to offer a unique service to me and maybe many other bloggers.

The Race that Stops a Nation - Entry for 07 November 2007

Efficient wins the Melbourne Cup

Yesterday was the Melbourne Cup horse race and we all dutifully lined up for our lukewarm chicken, salad and champagne, well I had orange juice the party pooper's alternative, and paid hard earned moneys into various sweeps.

I had a $5, 2 $2 and 1 $1 which, for the mathemeticians amongst us, totals $10 ... all down the drain I have to tell you - no I was not a winner (sob) hang on I have a smiley to do that ... next year mebbe!

Like with all gambling when you pays yer money, you reckon on losing it. But it was a nice little break ... and then back to the grindstone.

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish - Entry for Friday 2 November 2007

Anyone who has read Douglas Adams books will know immediately from the title what this blog is about.

It's about DOUGLAS ADAMS.

Who is Douglas Adams, for the unaware? Simply put, he wrote The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and various other books including So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.

" One Thursday lunchtime the Earth is unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. For Arthur Dent, who has only just had his house demolished that morning, this seems already to be more than he can cope with. Sadly, however, the weekend has only just begun, and the galaxy is a very strange and startling place."

He was a brilliant man who introduced the world to an extraordinary way of looking at life. You are never quite the same after reading his books.

I just wanted you to know, it's now 204 days and some hours minutes and seconds until Towel Day 2008

The above link will take you to the site which will tell you all about that.

Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness Edited by Marcel Kuijsten - II

At the foundation of Julian Jaynes's bicameral theory found in "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" (OC) is the idea that prehistoric people had a different kind of mentality to modern humankind; they were not conscious. And the theory does not view consciousness as an attribute of evolution since evolutionary traits take millions of years to develop. The theory views consciousness as a recent characteristic that developed in time measured in thousands of years and not millions, being revolutionary.

The word "bicameral" means two chambers and the theory postulates that in early humankind the left and right brain hemispheres were all but isolated from each other. Further, the right hemisphere constitued an executive part of the individual's mentality and played the role of God or parent or other authority figure. When the man or woman felt stressed by the need to make a decision, the executive part would come into play (in some way assess and interpret the situation) and then issue instructions in a spoken form. These instructions the individual would hear as external speech, as if someone was standing behind him or her and to the left. Differently to the way modern humans behave, the individual did not weigh these instructions in the balance and then opt to follow or not follow them. The voiced commands were the end-part of the decision-making process or, put differently, they were the conclusion of the brain's workings to devise a strategy to deal with a given situation, which the individual would then follow, automatically and without question.

Modern people, instead, consciously consider the options, using thought, which is heard as inner dialogue and, for us, the whole brain-working exercise of decision-making is patently encapsulated in our brain cases.

Of course that may not be the case for modern-day individuals who do experience auditory hallucinations.

In "Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness" (RDC) Marcel Kuijsten comments that "The issue of the complexity of Jaynes's theory and its multi-disciplinary nature is one possible reason for the absence of greater formal discussion on the topic. But perhaps the most common reason for the rejection of Jayne's theory is due to a misunderstanding (or complete lack of awareness) of Jaynes's definition of consciousness; there have have been countless times I've heard someone offer a strong opinion on Jaynes only to discover they've never read his book."

Kuijsten continues "The notion that ancient civilizations were populated by unconscious people generates a knee-jerk response that the theory is "preposterous" primarily because of the deeply ingrained but mistaken notion that consciousness is necessary for the majority of higher mental processes (and even basic sensory perception), coupled with the tremendous difficulty in comprehending a mental state without an internal dialog for anyone that has one. ... Put simply, critics reject the notion of pre-conscious civilizations prior to 1200 B.C. based on *their* ["italics"] definition of consciousness, not Jaynes's."
... to be continued

Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness Edited by Marcel Kuijsten, 1

This book revisits a book by Julian Jaynes.

I came across Jaynes’s book, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” around the middle 1970’s. It was featured in the library on a top shelf, which place (in the library scheme of things) signified that the book was a recent purchase. I retrieved “OC” from the library three times in the same year before I read it in its entirety. I remember it as a large volume which I read with the help of a dictionary because of the jargon used – and Jaynes was a psychologist – so, layperson that I was (and am), I read it in “bite sized” pieces rather than “whole hog”. And though I have yet to re-read the book it has always loomed large in my mind. Not least for its long title, which I took care to remember.

But mostly because what I read in OC, I considered a possible new truth. It didn’t sound impossible to me. True I had a mind prepared for novelty, I was someone brought up on a mixed bag of beliefs, anything from Christian dogma to spiritualist philosophy to agnosticism to atheism; and each of my critical role models, in their minds, compartmentalised the world in a different way which I, as the youngest family member, found somewhat confusing.

I, however, chose the safe route and maintained a traditional Christian belief in God up to my middle twenties when I felt a need to go deeper into myself, looking for an answer to the question, does God exist, and in OC I found an answer that seemed to satisfy.

For such a big book the basic theory is easily captured in a few paragraphs but Jaynes was in the position of presenting a novel hypothesis to the world (or is that theory?) and had to submit a lot of proofs to support it.

Jaynes put his professional reputation on the line by publishing OC, and he was apparently often damned by his peers as he strove, in this large book, to prove that human brains worked differently in prehistoric times to what they, on the whole, do now. The evidence for which is of course, nominally, non-existent, but “echoes” of a mentality change may just be detectable in what remains of ancient cultures - in artefacts - and what remains of ancient peoples in their modern-day counterparts. Us.

… to be continued