Transatlantic

I have been waiting all day for Colin to cover the distance between here and there. He has been at a sort of philosopher/ neuroscientist cross-over conference where he and one of his classmates (I will call him G) gave a paper on the "upside down" goggles, the ones that reverse your vision upside down (or left and right). Actually, I remember studying this in high school psychology class. The story you hear there (and I have always taken it as unproblematically true) is that after some time wearing the reversing goggles, your vision flips so things look right side up. Then when you take the goggles off, everything looks upside down for a while. Apparently it's a lot more complicated than that, and the experiment wasn't even designed to test this kind of hypothesis, and the truth is more like you become disoriented and then you learn to adapt, and after a while maybe some things look right side up but other things don't, and then when you take the goggles off you feel disoriented again. Anyway, it seemed like an interesting paper, though unusually I didn't actually get to hear a practice run. Colin said it went fairly well, it "didn't convince anyone to abandon their views...but did convince everyone that they need to think more about Kohler" [the guy who did the experiments].

Meanwhile, Colin has also been having a very good time at Oxford. I include a picture I particularly like of Colin the Natural Philosopher. It is remarkably color-coordinated, I think. Even the blue stress-fracture boot blends in admirably. I am absolutely certain that this was completely by accident.

Speaking of accidents, Colin has granted me permission to post the following incident regarding distance and dislocation (and most especially Newton's third law):

A quick funny story as I'm back to change my pants. Why, you ask? Because I just went for a delightful afternoon 'punting' on the Chatworth river with G and DD, famous philosopher. As we were getting off the punt--slightly woozy from afternoon sun and mid-punt beer--DD offered me a hand up...

It was only a quick application of my shoulder mid-fall that prevented DD from going into the river with me---I managed to sort of tackle him into a nearby docked boat. I was of course not so lucky. Thankfully, I had forgotten my camera, and my passport turns out to be reasonably waterproof. And my foot was more or less ok, and DD was pretty forgiving---amused, even.

[This happened a few days ago. Now Colin adds:]
I've been going around with neither shoe nor crutch, and my foot has been largely fine. However, my calf has been *killing* me. At first I assumed that it must have been some sort of sprain or atrophy from over-use after a long time. Then I started worrying about all sorts of terrible things, like what happened to my dad when he flew back home recently, etc. [some kind of weird blood clot/blood thinning problem where his leg swelled up terribly]. Then this morning I actually looked at it, and I have a very large bruise shaped roughly like the edge of a punt. So that explains that!

My clumsy fellow. We are well-matched in that, though I have never yet pulled a famous philosopher into the water.

And just one more story from across the Atlantic, which I cite without permission:

Best quote from a talk so far: "Now, we had to keep our equipment free of water, but the Dolphins make big bow wakes as they splash around. So it turns out that the best way to do that is with lots of condoms. And let me tell you, as embarrassing as it is to buy condoms a hundred at a time, it's even worse when you say, 'oh, it's for an experiment with a Dolphin'."

Brilliant.