My Name is Bish.
I am American-born, Canadian-bred, and British, Canadian, Swiss, and Australian-educated. Basically, I'm a nomad who travels the world collecting degrees. Or at least I was until I ran out of degrees to collect. Now I'm a postdoc living in Vienna, Austria.
Here I collect and expound on my doings in Europe. Where I go, what I eat, what random thoughts crossed my mind while biking to work, what I think my cat would say if she could speak human. If you would like to look at some of the pictures I've taken in the past year, go here. My original blog site, which I began years ago while only a wee undergrad, is here. For a brief explanation of why this blog is entitled Pandemonium, see below. |
Pandeumonium comes from Oliver Selfridge's Pandemonium Model, which is a framework for visual pattern recognition. The brain is said to comprise a large number of hierarchically-organised demons. At the lowest level, each demon is responsible for detecting a specific feature, such as a straight vertical line. When a feature has been detected, the demon jumps up and down in a state of high excitement and grabs the attention of the cognitive demons, who monitor the feature demons and respond when a certain group of them are excited. The cognitive demons then tell the decision demon, who determines the identity of the stimulus based on which cognitive demon is most enthusiastic. According to Selfridge, this is why an "A" looks like an "A"instead of a collection of random lines. I think Pandemonium is a good descriptor of what goes on in my brain. At multiple levels. That is my brain, at left.
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