Gaius Baltar is my president

I've almost finished a terribly unhealthy binge of Battlestar Gallactica on Netflix. Gaius is *by far* my favorite character. Looking forward to seeing if Admiral Adama is the 13th Cylon.  If you ruin it for me I will unleash the fury.  

Houseboat in Amsterdam this summer

I'm heading to Amsterdam at the end of this summer for the Neurobiology of Language Conference. Here's something awesome. It's actually cheaper to rent a houseboat than to pay for separate hotel rooms for my lab. Ergo we successfully rented a houseboat. This is a 4 bedroom boat near the Tulip Market on one of the central canals.

Here's my bedroom for the week.... How awesome is this?!

Give me the 'David Lynch'

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The last couple of years I've had long hair approaching that of David Foster Wallace style. I went insane yesterday and had it all chopped.

The radical part of this move was the selective chopping. It involved a buzz cut with a #1 guard around the sides and back allowing some serious length in the front.  

In many respects this style is a reverse mullet.  It's also a throwback to the Echo & the Bunnymen era of the late 1980s. That was quite a magical time in my life, and I'm glad to relive it with this bizarre hairstyle.  

The stylist worked from exhibit A (David Lynch circa Twin Peaks) to produce exhibit B.  She nailed it!

7 years old

Here's the Once and Future King, August, on his 7th birthday.  

This picture was from his school birthday party where they dressed him up like a little king.  

So proud of my boy!

David Kemmerer is the nicest guy in cognitive science

Thanks to David Kemmerer I am no longer languishing in obscurity for our Cognitive Neuropsychology article.  

With his 10 downloads, my 6 assumed identities, and my parents the count is up to 18.  

I'm convinced that Jonathan Peelle has found some way to script the count so that for every download the N drops by 2.  

Waxing exisential

I'm in Orlando today at the Florida Association for Speech Pathology giving a talk on Primary Progressive Aphasia. I arrive at the airport last night and pick up my rental car. The man at the counter asks me a seemingly innocuous question that sends me into a tailspin:

"Are you just yourself?"

On the face of things, I certainly understood his message. He simply wanted to know if anyone else would be driving his company's Ford Focus. Yet, his question was in fact existentially complex, and it kept me up for most of the night.

Could I possibly be more than just myself?... probably not.  Could I be less than just myself? ...probably so.   Am I just myself? -- I don't know.

I should be prepping my talk right now, but this question is haunting me. That's Jean Paul Sartre btw -- He seemed apt here.