Who?

Well, it's drawing to the end of exams: soon I'll be stuck with the crushing responsibility of actually going through with all the plans I've made. Lest I forget, I've filled out a little paper with demands I'm making of myself and keeping it with me wherevere I go. These are little reminders scrawled in my illegible handwriting on topics which would bear personal relevance to only me. They are reasonable right now, but what if I get too tired to actually go through with any of them? So, as an antidote, I propose a list of ridiculous, exhorbitant, unlikely and/or harrowing plans for the summer which will never come to fruition, either thankfully or sadly

Propaganda minister for a socialist party in a third-world country? Santation engineer? (But not the driver of the big garbage truck: the guy hanging out the back and throwing people's garbage in then throwing the plastic containers back onto the lawn.) Writer of terrible sensationalized pornography? (With all that comes with the terrain: horrible self-loathing, unaddressed feelings of hack-ness, few friends and too much money, garbage bags filled with every conceivable kind of drug.) Coat-check in a small independent theatre house? (Charged, of course, with stealing unobtrusively small amounts of money from the patrons' wallets to cover the theatre's running costs.) Anti seal-hunt militant? (Making sure the seal hunters' casualties are on par with the number of dead, slubbed baby seals.) Yogic healer? (Much like this guy, who found a way to survive off nothing but light. Light!) Soapbox nut? (Which would really be my preferred employment. I've already got a few "bits".) A butter churner in Amish counties? That guy you always see mopping the same goddamn floor? That guy who's always just "hanging out" and eating a bag of chips? (Who, if he ever got up off the goddamn couch, would leave a permanent stain from the congealed sweat.)

Next time: back to ranting. I've also got a few of those saved up. What will it be about? New Jersey? Pedophilia? Information explplosion? The disenchantment of the world? Or something which hasn't been covered by everyone in every age all the time? Sorry.

Consider: " That's it, my lovely Cog Sci & AI. No more naturalistic imperative or Lance Ripps--the pornographic psychologist--or theories of categorization and concepts, or Elenor Rosch and her prototypes, or Osherson and Smith. Farewell to Medin's theory and the gestalt problem, to conceptual coherence and Mary Douglas and her very odd cross-categorization theories. One last wave to microconcepts and to the English word "splang", to "grue" and "fridgeon" and to the different types of memory and encoding specificity. To the amygdola and the reasoning-memory-concepts triad of dependendies. Goodbye combinatorial explosion and how you make me giggle, and the problems of sizing up and functional fixedness and of course the frame problem--I'll miss you greatly. Fare thee well means-ends analysis and GOFAI; and oh, the mental representation argument, I'll never forget you Pylyshyn, and that jerk Kosslyn. Sargon of Akkad and John of Pickering, medium independence, SHRDLU, and epistomological failings of the GPS, connectionism, Marvin Minsky, backpropogation of error, not being crypto-cartesian, systemic import and Patricia Churchland--who sounds like she's having a verbal orgasm when she talks about the brain. Some of you I shall always treasure: epistemic boundedness, and the Chinese room argument, the questioning of if the intrinsic-attributed distinction itself is instrinsic or attributed, and of course linguistic nativism. And Fodor, I shall perhaps miss you most of all."