i’m a little out of practice. but i hear it’s hot. soldering, that is. and, yes indeed, i managed to burn myself. but only slightly. on my finger. pinky, in fact. and a cardboard box. but success is upon me. i have spent awhile in the land of hot lead, long strings of plastic, and the fine scent of burned paper byproduct. and somehow i also managed to get myself completely tangled in a power cable for a *insert shock here* dell. no, it wasn’t mine. i don’t do such scandalous things as to buy computers running windows or linux. it would offend my religion. really it would. ok, not my religion. but at least my sense of thought. dell is actually code. it’s latin for “the sixth ring of hell”. and you thought that was a certain professor’s lectures. no, indeed. that’s a different ring. i shan’t say which. imagination, i tell you. well done. you guessed it.
suffice it to say that i now have, in my hand, a magical box. it has black cables therein. and takes a seemingly meaningless hole in the wall and turns it into the lifeblood of a technological abomination known as a personal computer. go me. *insert curtsy here*.
that being said, this was simply as introduction to a class in which the necessity of doing such hotness-related things was created. everyone makes mistakes. especially with computers. in school, this tends to get worse, as people use unfamiliar equipment that belongs to other people. there’s no caretaker of your computer like yourself. oh, the joys of heavy, padded bags and touchy new-laptop-owners. the cable was broken. by accident. it was a terrible design. not really anyone’s fault. and the computer was completely wonky, for lack of a better word. but we survived. plentifully. and moved on with the class. that’s where it gets fun.
someone suggested that thought reflects language and another that language reflects thought. you know that object that derives from the rather rear-most portion of the male bovine? both qualify as similar to this particular excremental entity. blatantly so, even. when i pointed this out, it was not taken as being particularly helpful, though, only as confusing an already confusing issue. my bad. i shall put it simply for you here. language is thought. it just is. we think in language. we speak thought. there’s no language without thought and no thought without language. infants don’t think. they react. animals don’t think. ask fido what he thinks of the theory of proximal development. see if miss pussy has a deep-seated interest in discrete inequalities. or the rules of cricket. or even in crickets. the chirping kind. unless fido fundamentally floors you with a well-placed word, sentence, or even symbolic utterance and kitty does a little more than eat the cricket and nuzzle the calculus text, what we have is simple reactivity. that’s it. no more discussion. but it took an hour.
then we moved on to other things. like group projects. i’m lucky. i attract smart people. it’s a gift. they like me because i don’t make them stupid. stupid is contagious, you know. and endemic. this is canada, after all. so i get a partner who actually knows how to do work, is willing to do it, and has no issue with both speaking his mind and listening to me speak mine. wonderful. then i notice how many people have issues with actually getting together and deciding something. but that’s a topic for another day.
simplicity is decision put into practice. don’t forget that one. it’s more important than language being thought and infants being thoughtless. not that those aren’t important. next week, we solve the mystery of the ages. or at least talk about cheese. any questions?
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