James MacAulay Has An Internet!

This is a few years old now, but excellent listening nonetheless. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran gave a series of lectures in 2003 all about the exceedingly interesting research going on in cognitive neuroscience. It’s aimed at a layperson audience, so you don’t need to know anything about the brain or cognitive science in order to be awestruck by it all. He talks about art and our sense of aesthetics, synesthesia and its implications on how all of us experience and understand our world, and a myriad of other curiosities produced by all these neurons that are somehow thinking and feeling.

You can find streaming audio and transcripts of the lectures at the official site, and some thoughtful folks have also made it available via BitTorrent in mp3 format so you can listen to it on the go. I heartily recommend listening to this stuff, and it’s the perfect thing to put on your iPod for the trek to work in the morning.

I haven’t had a proper site up and running in months, partially due to difficulties I had managing Typo migrations and rollbacks. This iteration is running on Mephisto, which looks very promising so far. I’m running off of the bleeding edge versions of both Mephisto and Rails, so here’s hoping nothing blows up too much.

As much as I love Simpla (the default theme bundled with Mephisto these days), I’m eager to make this place a little more personalized. Once I figure out precisely the best way of doing it, I’ll get a theme of my own together.

Expect the early days of this blog to be populated mostly just by links to interesting things produced by other people. I’ve got a top-secret project in the works, though, so this will definitely be the place to find out about that.