Some of you might be wondering why I've been around only sporadically for the past couple of months.  Observant readers have undoubtedly noticed that no small number of my posts lately have had identical timestamps - sometimes five or six posts all in one day that went live days or weeks apart.  You may also have noticed that some of my posts are "gimme" posts, which is to say that they're just photograph dumps from months in the past, with few captions and little (usually no) attempts made to clean them up.  Friends near and far have noticed that I've been …

It is well known that the human brain is a marvelously complex and flexible mechanism, capable of aggregating and processing information from our senses as well as ruminating and calculating based upon the results of other internal processes. It is so complex, in fact, that at this time we can't be sure of what its limits are or what's actually going on in there. People have built entire careers around studying emergent phenomena within the operation of the brain. The day to day operation of the human brain is so complex that it takes very little to tweak its functionality …