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In a diary I wrote 8 years ago, I described how my Siamese cat Coe (the cat who came to the hospital and took me to the world of the dead) reacted when he saw me rushing around, doing all the everyday chores of life, the kinds of things that seem so important at the moment but which turn out to be so utterly trivial later. These are the types of activities that tend to take up our time even more than usual during the holiday season.

In 2000, I wrote, "[Coe] taught me not to get too stressed- out. So many times I would be bustling about the house, doing yet another chore, and I would pass him as he lay stretched out in a sunbeam. He would look up at me disdainfully, as if to say, ‘What’s the rush?’ I still try to remember this lesson."
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How salmon find their way back to their birthplace to reproduce after migrating across thousands of miles of open ocean has mystified scientists for more than a century. But now marine biologists at think they may have discovered the secret.

The earth’s magnetic field varies across the globe, with every oceanic region having a slightly different magnetic signature. At the beginning of their lives, salmon may read the magnetic field of their home area and ?imprint? on it. By noting the unique ?magnetic address? of their birthplace and remembering it, the fish may be able to distinguish this location from all others when they are fully grown and ready to return years later to lay their eggs.
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Is there anything good that can be said about the current recession? Well, the last depression was one of the greatest creative periods of our time, so maybe this one will be too.

Researcher Miles Orvell says, “?Adversity and hardship can bring out creativity.” The Great Depression is currently all the rage, with New Yorkers hosting Depression parties, peasant skirts and newsboy caps making a return on the runways, and Netflix rentals of The Grapes of Wrath on the rise. But that 1939 Steinbeck novel is not the only Depression-era work worth taking a second (or a first) look at from our current perspective in what some are calling the New Depression.
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The Master of the Key predicted this and now it’s come true: computers of the future will mimic brains.

In BBC News, Jason Palmer quotes IBM researcher Dharmendra Modha as saying, “The mind has an amazing ability to integrate ambiguous information across the senses, and it can effortlessly create the categories of time, space, object, and interrelationship from the sensory data. There are no computers that can even remotely approach the remarkable feats the mind performs.”

Whitley held the following dialogue with the Master of the Key: Whitley?Would an intelligent machine be conscious, in the sense of having self-awareness?
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