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My name is Jenny and I am a mommy and wife. I recently made the switch to being a stay at home mom and boy was that a change! My girls are both in school half days so I have been driving my hubby crazy with new projects and recipes that I find. I get bore for those few hours every morning that I am home alone! (Yikes! Never thought I would say I was bored with those silent moments!)
Follow me in my tales of Mommyhood, DIY awesomeness....and mistakes! You gollow my and I will follow you!
Views: 352
Hello! I'm a fan of DIY crafts and will be following your blog! Mine is at http://www.ahappymum.com! Always nice to make new friends!
hello mommies , check my blog and follow i'll follow back ..
Website : http://www.mywealthyjourney.com/
Following :)
Hi Jenny, I previously followed you on GFC, now following on Pinterest too. I love DIYs! Will be great to keep in touch!
Follow my blog Every Topic Under the Sun and leave me a link in the comments and I will follow back
hi mommies , justa got new post on my blog please visit and follow i'll do follow back
website : www.mywealthyjourney.com
thanks godbless
hi guys.. follow me on my pages.. pls leave a comment with your sites' names and i will follow u back..
I'm in! I'm a new dad of twins, boy/girl. Take a look at my blog gigglemonkees and follow back. Would love any input or guest bloggers....
just followed & loved your blog : )
Hello Mommy,
want to have exchange followers please follow my blog www.mywealthyjourney.com
I will follow back.
godbless All.
I followed you! You can follow me back! http://moresisterstuff.blogspot.com/


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EL-Jay's name stands for L.J. (Lucas Josef).. born in Velsen-Zuid on the coast near Amsterdam on March 10, 1956. EL-Jay has been DJ-ing for 41 year, not continious but he was always's fighting to get gigs.
EL-Jay's inital style of music was found in Black-Music and Drive-in-discotheek in the early eighties with Soul, Disco, Funk and Groove.. "a matter of fade in, fade out.." with voice-overs. In present time, EL-Jay still an all eater of Progressive & Trance Styles.
At the age of 12th he started orginazing with friends school-parties, back in the days of 45 inch vinyl, The Beatles, The Who, The Rollingstones and the old radio's like the Telefunke, Philips or the Blaupunkt . Luc's DJ carreer was started and has never looked back.
The smaller schoolparties grew into more substabtial local events in the late 1970's so bought a old Ford Transit (without any driving license!) and was running his drive-in-disco. Near the disco he also started a underground-music concept covering genre's like Pink Floyd, Lou Reed, Mike Oldfield, Rory Callagher, A further 10 years down the line, Luc music progressed further into Rock, Underground and Blues-Rock and is now loving EDM in the form Progressive, Trance, Hard-Trance and Techno.
EL-Jay found his heart in Progressive EDM after he met Jimmy van M on a party in Club Kremlin (Amsterdam). He loves Trance but plays Progressive. After visiting the Awakenings parties he started to love Techno. In late 2004, Luc was contracted on a German Fetish Scene and became resident on 6 club's in Germany, every 6 weeks another club.. playing Progressive with Techno themes.
Another earlier passion of EL-Jay's, was his online presence: 'Brd-Rec'. Starting from 2000 recording radio Dance live-sets at Dutch FM Radio.. as at the time slam.fm were the only people in Holland that were picking up these broadcasts, later ID&T Radio also began to pick up these type of events along with 3Fm (JayDee & Robert Albers) with Radio 538, with van Diepens Dance Department. In the East of the Netherlands he got also was able to receive the German station 'Einslife' which boasts good Dance music on saturday. Then came the time of the internet broadcasters such as Di.fm. As Brd-Rec, EL-Jay joined moderating at http://www.URTranceZone till end of 2008. Who has not a set, recorded by Brd-Rec on his computer?
In 2002, Luc starts his non-profit dance event organisation, with DJ GrandPa_JoaH, but after one year they split, Luc continuing it to a succesfull high covering 64 Dance parties untill 2006 in the East of the Netherlands. 350 upcoming and new DJ's where contracted by the TYP_DC covering Progressive, Tribal, Techno, Trance and Hardstyle.
Changing Styles:
In 2010, EL-Jay switched styles and did stop the Progressive & House Styles, to concentrating Uplifting Trance Styles in making mixes for streams with popular Trance radioshows at http://www.DI.fm, http://www.Trance.fm, http://www.DiscoverTrance.com, http://www.TRANCESONIC.FM, http://www.PureSound.fm, http://www.Party107.fm (Regarly UNLiMiTED FRiDAY Guestsets) and still loves to visit small club's to listen to the basic Blues or Rock-Blues.
3 Steps Forwards:
"In 2006 by re-start of Trance DJ-ing (Had to learn DJ-ing again after stop the vinyl mixing) made targets to work for. One of them reached in september 2010:
Own Radioshow on DI.fm Trance Channel, the "Champions Laguae" of Internet-DJ-mixing. I talked 3 years with DI.fm, patience and working forwards, be active in promoting your self and be social to others in the scene, did reached that target and DI.fm asked me to transfer the popular TranceStoned radioshow from Trance.fm to DI.fm. Well ofcaurse I was pleased with it, 3 steps forwards in your carreer, but... I made a lot of friends at Trance.fm and won't not leave them. Problems of some amateur issues at Pure.fm did decide me to stop complete with Pure.fm, and on that way my other popular Tranced Emotion.. could transfer to trance.fm as weekly show.
Work with professionals is very, very importand for your carreer to keep the steps forwards, and was pleased aswell to join after 1,5 year talking with DiscoverTrance, to go alternating with Dave Deen's show: DiscoverTrance Radioshow on primetime saturday's with a new show: TranceAction with own unique style who fit perfectly between Tranced Emotion and TranceStoned as third Uplifting Trance Radioshow."
Another issue are the live gigs. " I don't have on the moment an agency for bookings etc. There are some physical issues to go live gigs. I did stop them in 2006 after to much backache (discuss L4, L5). Its not possible to stay continious behind the CDJ players (have at home same problem). The modern Software DJ-ing, midicontroler & laptop, sitting in a good chair can resolve that issue. I'm a bit invalid, but club's who accept that, will get me, 2-3 hours are no problems.
For going Live-gigs I need a professional Agency and I need permission of my health insurence (UWV) coverment.. but I learned... some day, all comes together and I go for it! ".
Producing, Uplifting Trance:
I'm producing some progressive (secret) works for others, not under my own name.
At Spring of 2011 will do some invests to start producing in Uplifting (Tech)Trance, Psy and Hardbeats.
First for my own shows, and by succes will search some labels for releas works.
EL-Jay -"As you may think from this bio, wow he did alot, I feel there is still more to give!!!"
Most friday's, you will found EL-Jay, trucking on Dutch & Belgium roads
EL-Jay on his friday dutie
Written by:Ian (Toma) Thompson, updated by EL-Jay
Website: http://www.UrDance4u.com
email: firstname.lastname@example.com
Hyves: http://el-jay-luc.hyves.nl/
Partyflock: http://partyflock.nl/user/1151429:EL_Jay.html
EL-Jay Bio (update october 2010)
Tracklists, Downloads & News.
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text: Anritsu offers a variety of vector network analyzers (VNAs) to suit your application. Choose from an RF VNA to a Broadband VNA, from a Premium VNA with the highest performance and no compromises to a Value VNA that offers solid performance with suitable measurement speeds for an R&D environment. No matter what your application, Anritsu has your VNA needs covered. Choose with confidence from the pioneers in VNA measurements, introducing the Wiltron 310 Impedance Meter in 1965, and introducing the first broadband VNA, spanning 40 MHz to 65 GHz, in 1999.


text:
BLUE Wilderness®
Wild Cuts Trail Toppers
Chunky Salmon Bites
in Hearty Gravy
These delicious meal toppers make any meal a special treat. Made with delicious bites of real salmon steeped in irresistible gravy, BLUE Wilderness Wild Cuts Trail Toppers are made to satisfy the spirit of the wolf that lives on in your dog.
Perfect for adding to your favorite BLUE dry foods at meal time or as a savory snack, these pouches of pure canine bliss are sure to cater to their inner carnivore.
Made with only the finest natural ingredients, these meal toppers are:
- Made with real salmon
- 100% grain and gluten-free
- Free of chicken (or poultry) by-product meals
- Free of corn, wheat and soy
Guaranteed Analysis
|Crude Protein
|8.0% min
|Crude Fat
|2.5% min
|Crude Fiber
|1.5% max
|82.0% max
Nutrition Statement
Wilderness Wild Cuts Chunky Salmon Bites in Hearty Gravy is formulated to meet the nutritional levels established by the AAFCO Dog Food Nutrient Profiles for maintenance.
Feeding Guidelines
Feeding Instructions
Wilderness Wild Cuts Chunky Salmon Bites in Hearty Gravy are intended for supplemental feeding only. Wilderness Wild Cuts Chunky Salmon Bites in Hearty Gravy may be fed daily along with a complete and balanced diet. We suggest feeding up to 3 pouches a day for an average-size dog. Refrigerate unused portion.
Fresh Water
Be sure to have a clean bowl of cool, fresh water available at all times.
Note: Individual dog's requirements may vary due to age, breed, environment, and activity level. Adjust food as required to maintain optimal body condition, and ask your veterinarian if you are unsure.
Calorie Content:
840 Kcals/kg, 70Kcals/pouch.


text:
Two-Way Video Webcam, Cam2Cam
Our Cam2Cam feature allows the model to view & hear you from your personal webcam for a completely hands-free experience while in a Private Show. There are no additional fees for this service and we hope you take advantage of this free cam to cam service. Take your flirting to another level on our free cam2cam website.
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Even if you are seeing your webcam video here please make sure to install the software & drivers for your webcam before going Private to avoid potential problems.
To enjoy this site you will need the Adobe® Flash plugin, version 8 or higher
Click here to download the free Adobe® Flash plug-in
Once installed you will need to restart this browser window
Click "Allow" in the box above to test your webcam now.
Even if you are seeing your webcam video here please make sure to install the software & drivers for your webcam before going Private to avoid potential problems.
Browse Cam2Cam Performers
All of our live webcam performers are equipped to support two-way video shows. You can broadcast your video during a paid show in any show type except Voyeur and Semi-Private.
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The performer will be able to see and hear you for as long as you are in the show. You can stop your camera at any time as well.
You can verify that your camera and microphone work prior to entering a paid show with our Test Page.
Note: VIPs will only be able to access Cam2Cam in all room states if they're using the plug-in free WebRTC option available with Firefox and Chrome. VIP members still using Flash plugins will only have Cam2Cam available during private and multi-user shows.
All other members can utilize Cam2Cam during private and multi-user shows.
1) Make sure that your webcam/microphone are properly connected. Your device MUST be connected BEFORE initiating a Cam2Cam session.
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text:
The Latest on Steel Stud Walls
A version of this article appears in the September/October 2004 issue of Home Energy Magazine.
September 01, 2004
Q.We are interested in building our own home in Northern California, just east of Sacramento. It is our understanding that steelframed homes are considered more energy efficient than wood-framed homes.What do you think? A. Steel stud wall systems for residential and commercial buildings are gaining in popularity. If you want to build with steel, you need to know some of its limitations as a building material. Steel is a much better conductor of heat than wood, so steel studs can actually degrade the thermal performance of walls. But the technology is improving, and it can be a good choice for use in building your home. Several wall configurations have been developed to improve the thermal performance of steel framing. During the last decade, ORNL has tested and analyzed most of the steel framing systems available today. Our experimental and theoretical study has focused on the thermal efficiency of different traditional and unconventional methods of improving steel stud wall thermal performance. It proved that steelframed walls can be as efficient as wood stud walls (see "Steel Stud Walls: Breaking the Thermal Bridge,&...
To read complete online articles, you need to sign up for an Online Subscription.
Once an order has been placed there is an automatic $10 processing fee that will be deducted with any cancellation.
The Home Energy Online articles are for personal use only and may not be printed for distribution. For permission to reprint, please send an e-mail to firstname.lastname@example.com.


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For a binary quadratic form $ax^2+bxy+cy^2$ over a field (characteristic not 2), the discriminant $b^2-4ac$ is 0 if and only if that form is the square of a linear form. I am curious about an analogue of this fact over a ring with a valuation.
Rough version of question. Let $$f=ax^2+bxy+cy^2$$ be a binary quadratic form over a ring $Q$ with a valuation. If the valuation of the discriminant $b^2-4ac$ is large (so heuristically $b^2-4ac$ is ``almost 0''), does this imply that $f$ is "almost a square"?
More precise version of question. Here's the precise case I am interested in. Let $R$ be a valuation ring, where 2 is a unit. Let $Q$ be the standard graded ring $Q=R[s,t]$ over $R$, i.e. $\text{deg}(s)=\text{deg}(t)=1$ and $Q_0=R$. The ring $Q$ inherits a valuation from $R$. Let $f$ as above, where $a$,$b$, and $c$ are all homogeneous elements of $Q$, and where $\text{deg}(a)+\text{deg}(c)=2\cdot \text{deg}(b).$
Claim: If $b^2-4ac$ has valuation at least $\nu$, then there exist $d,e,f$, and $a',b',c'$ in $Q$, such that $$ ax^2+bxy+cy^2=d(ex+fy)^2 + (a'x^2+b'xy+c'y^2), $$ where $a',b',$ and $c'$ all have valuation at least $\nu/2$.
Update: Let me add some clarification and an example. First of all, note that $Q$ is not a valuation ring, since $Q=R[s,t]$. So an element with valuation $0$ is not necessarily a unit. For instance, $s^2$ is an element of $Q$ with valuation $0$ that is not a unit.
Also, here's an example. Let $R=\mathbb Q[[u]]$ and let $f=u^3x^2+u^3y^2$. Then $b^2-4ac=-4u^6$, which has valuation $6$. We can (trivially) write $f=(0)^2+f$ as the sum of a square and something with valuation $6/2=3$. So I think that the $\nu/2$ bound in the claim is optimal.


text:
If You Liked Stormbreaker
From Wiki
Article in Young Adult Fiction and Read-Alikes categories.
If You Liked Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz, try these books that "read like" it.
- Sequels to Stormbreaker, also by Anthony Horowitz
- The Spy High series by A.J. Butcher
- Books by Tom Clancy
- The Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer
- SilverFin: A James Bond Adventure by Charlie Higson
- Books by Norma Howe
- The Adventures of Blue Avenger
- Blue Avenger Cracks the Code
- Blue Avenger and the Theory of Everything
- The Pendragon Series by D. J. McHale>
- Acceleration by Graham McNamee
- Sparrow Hawk Red by Ben Mikaelsen
- The Gadget by Paul Zindel


text:
Featured News - Current News - Archived News - News Categories
Pictured are the Mount St. Mary's Hospital and Health Center board of associates officers for 2014. Shown from left: President Steve Broderick, Secretary Alfred Frosolone, Past President Ron Villani, Treasurer Don Thurman and Vice President Robert Fagiani.
The board of associates, a volunteer group, conducts numerous events and fundraisers, with all proceeds used to benefit the hospital. Events include the Fernandez Golf Classic, Hewitt Awards Dinner, and Guthrie Pancake Breakfast. In addition, the board sponsors the employee Christmas raffle, Easter raffle, prostate screening program, and Santa's visits to the hospital and Our Lady of Peace nursing home.


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There is so much behind a great bottle of Nickel & Nickel Single-Vineyard wine: carefully farmed vineyards, impeccable winemaking and a team of people passionate about our wines. Through our blog, we'll give you an inside look at the personalities and stories behind the scenes.
We invite you to explore our singular point of view and see what makes Nickel & Nickel and our single-vineyard wines so special. See you soon!
Sliders are favorite appetizers at any occasion and can be prepared in a multitude of ways. In the winery kitchen, we grind beef from the trim of our larger roasts and steaks. Ask your local butcher to grind you specific cuts of beef. For the buns, many grocery stores now carry slider buns, or dinner rolls work just as well.
Pair with 2009 Nickel & Nickel Kelham Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Oakville, Napa Valley–or your favorite Nickel & Nickel Cabernet.
For a printable version, click here.
1 pound ground beef filet
Salt and pepper, to taste
8 slider buns or dinner rolls
1 head Napa cabbage, chiffonade
1 carrot, julienned
½ red onion, thinly sliced
2 tablespoons parsley, chopped
2 tablespoons chives, chopped
1 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons whole grain mustard
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 tablespoon sugar
1 garlic clove, minced
1 head garlic
½ cup mayonnaise
Shape ground beef into eight, two-ounce patties. Season liberally with salt and pepper, and sauté on medium heat until the patties have reached desired doneness.
In a large bowl, combine cabbage, carrot, onion, parsley and chives. In a medium bowl, combine the mayonnaise, mustard, apple cider vinegar, sugar, garlic, salt and pepper. Mix well, then combine with the cabbage mixture. Taste and add more salt and pepper, if needed.
To create the aioli, preheat the oven to 325ºF. Take a whole head of garlic and cut off the stalk end to expose the top of the garlic cloves. Place in a baking dish, lightly coat with olive oil, salt and pepper. Cover with foil and bake in oven for 1 houruntil the garlic is very tender. Allow to cool, remove cloves from the head and place in a small bowl.
Smash the cloves with the back of a fork then mix with the mayonnaise. To assemble, slice the buns in half, place on a baking pan, and toast in a 325ºF oven for three minutes.
Spread the aioli on both sides of the bun, place cooked beef patty on bun and top with slaw. Then cap with the top bun and enjoy with a glass of Nickel & Nickel Kelham Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon.
For a printable version of this recipe, click here.


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Web Design Castle Hill
Was $990 now $790 (starter)
Was $1700 now $1590 (business)
Modern, Mobile Responsive– The vast majority of people are now searching for new services/products such as 'Web Design Castle Hill' on Mobile Phones and Tablets. Your Website must be responsive to this (user friendly, for easy navigation and view-ability on smaller screen. Australian Web Design Company Ableweb uses a highly customisable modified WordPress Theme which has INBUILT SEO. WordPress is the best platform for SEO Website Builds and Provides Endless Stunning design features. Check out the DEMO version here and imagine your website as a modified version of what you see.
CMS, Client access– At Ableweb Web Design Castle Hill we like you to have control of your content. Through the Content Management System you can make blog entries, change fonts, pictures, text, layout etc. Or leave it to us. Training provided and 24/7 support from R.Goodwin.
Pages– A Website will usually have a least the following pages: Home, About, Services, Blog, Contact. This will depend on your particular line of business however. The design process is client inclusive. We listen to what you need. What is your website for? Are you selling a product? Do you want to provide information or direct traffic to a particular source? Your website's purpose will drive the design process and outcome.
Expert Copywriting– The 2012 update to Googles Index Bot's Algorithm means that Websites with clever, informative, lengthy copywriting are heavily favoured by the Search Engine ranking system. In other words. 'Content is King', 'Become the Wikipedia of your industry'. To have a high SERP- Search Engine Page Rank you must have EXPERT COPYWRITING. R.Goodwin at Ableweb is an Industry Leader in Clever Copywriting.
Discounted SEO Starter Kit is available with Web Design and Build. A Website should have a long and prosperous lifetime. Don't get stuck with a cheap build or a Web Design Company that doesn't understand what it takes to Design AND SEO.
Web Design Castle Hill. Professional Locals.
Call R.Goodwin 0410 368 782 for a FREE Website and SEO Audit.
Web Design Castle Hill are based Locally and offer a range of Web Design and SEO services. Ableweb Web Design Castle Hill are Professional Locals offering Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Hosting, Site Migration, Backlink building services and Google Business Local Search Optimisation. Our Services.
Top 2 Ways to get your Castle Hill Business on the First Page of Google. We can do it for you guaranteed.
- Keyword targeted, Search Engine Optimised (SEO) Website
- Google Business Optimisation (Yes there is a lot more you can do).
Ableweb Web Design Castle Hill
Keyword targeted, Search Engine Optimised (SEO) Website
At Ableweb Web Design Castle Hill we want you to realise that a nice looking website with pictures, text, sliders etc will NOT rank on Google or provide you with any new business leads unless it is correctly SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISED (SEO)'ed.
This can be done in many ways such as optimising URL's, Titles, meta-tags and Copywrite for keywords important to your industry. Each Page on your site can be optimised for a different set of keywords specifically chosen to bring you business. For a better understanding please read Beginners-guide-to-SEO.
If you wish to rank on the first page of Google for eg. Plumbing. You must include the keyword Plumbing in all the above areas + in 1-2% of your copywrite. However an SEO analysis of the competition (FREE of charge) may show 'Plumbing' may be a highly competitive keyword to rank for in all of Sydney so it would be better to target and optimise for 'Castle Hill Drainage Services or Castle Hill Plumbing'. You could then target other suburbs in your surrounding area and appear on the First page of Google results for eg. Greystanes Plumber, Granville Plumber etc.
This Page targets the Keywords 'Web Design Castle Hill'. Chances are you found the page you are reading now by entering 'Web Design Castle Hill' into Google search – proof enough that this can work for your website?
If the strength of your website needs a boost then Ableweb can help you build some Links to your site. Links are the roads that customers travel to get to your site. The more links (roads) the more customers. This is called backlink building. Often only a few of these links have the power to raise your site traffic dramatically.
Google Business Optimisation at Web Design Castle Hill (Yes there is a lot more you can do).
Most Business know the power of Google Business. It is a way of appearing on the First page of Google for your local area. If your site is strong enough, Google Business might appear above all other competitors for your industry.
Google sees your Google Business as a culmination of your presence on the web. The more times Google finds your business details (and they match) the better the strength. For example there are many free business directories where you can list your business eg. superpages, hi-pages, yellowpages, truelocal. For a list of the best directories to be in please see my post below. These directories will give your Google Business Ranking Power.
Top 20 Best Australian Local Service Directories 2016 by R.Goodwin at Web Design Castle Hill.
The 2nd way to increase your Google Business Ranking is to increase the power and authority of your website. i.e to follow the 1st option on this page. On Google everything that is yours on the web works together for a combined web strength. For more information on this topic please read Optimizing-your-Google-Business.


text:
"I drove over to Local Grocery, because my wife had been nagging me all damn day that we needed bread and celery.
"Anyway, Doc, when I got there and tried to get out of my car I found I couldn't move my left arm or leg at all. They were completely paralyzed. So by turning I was able to use my right arm to pull a shopping cart over, and then I used that to support me to get into the store.
"At first I thought I should get help or something, but when I got inside I saw they had those motorized electric shopping cart scooter deals, so I got into one and was able to work it okay with my right hand, though I knocked over a display or two. And all these damn store employees kept asking me if I was okay, like it's any of their damn business.
"Anyway, so I got the bread and celery, and got out to my car, and drove here to the ER. That was a bitch, because my cars a manual, so I had to work the clutch and brake both with my right foot, and that ain't as easy as you probably think it is.
"Then, after I got here, I called my wife and had to wait outside in your parking lot for her to come pick up her damn bread and celery. Then I came inside to the ER."


text:
Transfer news: Manchester United's Angelo Henriquez a target for Real Zaragoza
Real Zaragoza boss Paco Herrera has confirmed his club's interest in Manchester United striker Angelo Henriquez.
By Paulo Freitas
Last Updated: 27/07/13 3:54pm
Herrera has told the media in Chile that he feels Henriquez would be a good signing for Zaragoza as they bid to bounce back to La Liga after suffering relegation at the end of last season.
"We are very interested in Angelo Henriquez," Herrera is quoted as saying in El Mercurio.
"We have been following him and we hope to get a response from their club soon."
"He is a striker full of technical qualities, could be a good signing."
Teenage forward Henriquez, who has already been capped at senior international level by Chile, joined Manchester United last September.
He was unable to break into Sir Alex Ferguson's first XI but gained vital experience of the Premier League when he was sent out on loan to Wigan Athletic for the second half of the season.
Henriquez has previously admitted that he would be prepared to go out on loan again, and Zaragoza looks to be a possible destination.


text:
A GPS unit was stolen from a car Monday in the 1100 block of Atwood Street, police said
A thief stole a gray 1990 Honda Accord on Tuesday from the 800 block of Summer Hawk Drive, police said. The car belonged to a Thornton woman.
A trailer and tools that were stolen in April from the 1600 block of Iron Horse Drive were reported stolen to the police Tuesday, according to reports.
A Longmont woman was bitten by a cat while trying to get it away from her dogs, according to reports. The woman treated her own injuries, police said, and the cat is in quarantine.


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text:
'Just Friends'
Radical Dreamer
Pinkasaurus Rex
Crazy Scot.
There's something truly magical about Himawari that I didn't really realize back when I first read it but have come to appreciate about it more and more.
Himawari has an enforced reading order, something you don't see a lot in galge without a strong plot focus. However, like other visual novels such as Fate/Stay Night can use it to drive the plot and themes forward in parallel tales, so too does Himawari use it to give us ample
Well, at last, it happened. It's been a long time coming, Umineko Chiru is finally available for purchase on Steam, and alternatively MangaGamer's own website.
Umineko Chiru - Steam Store Page
This is the second half of Umineko of course, so if you haven't read the first half yet, you can get it here.
I've stated how much Umineko means to me many a time before,
As of today, Little Busters! English Edition is available for purchase on Steam!
Store Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/63...glish_Edition/
The game is 20% off during its launch week, putting it at a respectable price of around half that of CLANNAD's, even though the two are quite similar in terms of sheer content value (though Little Busters contains
Dies irae ~Amantes amentes~ is a visual novel created by Light. It was one of the most renowned JP-only VNs before finally getting a localization in June of this year.
Come, gather and bear witness to my opera, now in the making.
Its script is the height of cliché, I am forced to admit. And yet...
Its actors are of the finest fold; beyond exquisite.
Thus, I believe you will find it enthralling.
You talk too much. All you have to do is honestly say 'I'll kill you'.
For those that don't know, the climaxes of Episodes 4, 5 and 6 are my 3 favorite moments in Umineko (which also makes them my 3 favorite moments in fiction overall), all for their own individual reasons. I've been dying to talk about them for a while. I figured I'd start with the Episode 4 Tea Party, quite possibly the greatest example of Ryukishi's writing skill of them all.
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Volleyball mourns passing of coaching legend
Cuba's George Lafita was the chief architect behind the success of the national women's teams in the 80s and 90s and the turn of the century which won gold medals in consecutive Olympic Games at Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000 and bronze in Athens 2004. He also treasured consecutive wins at the FIVB Volleyball World Cup in Japan in 1989, 1991, 1995 and 1999, and silver medals at the 1977 and 1985 editions, the FIVB Volleyball World Grand Champions Cup crown in 1993 and silver in 1997 and two gold and four silver medals at the FIVB Volleyball World Grand Prix.
"Eugenio George will go down as one of the greats of not only volleyball coaching but in volleyball overall," FIVB President Dr. Ary S. Graça F° said. "He was an inspiration to many of the world's coaches and in an age when the coaching world was embracing technology, he proved that with hard work and dedication success could still be achieved. The thoughts of the entire volleyball family are with his family and the Cuban federation at this time.
"One of the best ways to remember Lafita is by one of his quotes from the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing when he said 'the key to my life is to educate. Through volleyball I did not only make training or won medals, I worked on social development, education, entertainment'."
George Lafita, who most recently was a member of the FIVB Coaches Commission and President of the NORCECA Technical and Coaches Commissions while still acting as the manager of the CUba women's team as recently as the 2013 FIVB Volleyball World Grand Prix, was presented with the NORCECA Golden Collar Order in January this year in recognition of his work in volleyball in Cuba, NORCECA and around the world.
In his extensive collection of victories in 1987, after the victory at the Pan American Games in Indianapolis, George Lafita received the medal for outstanding coach from the Cuba Commander in Chief Fidel Castro.
Eugenio George's funeral will take play on Sunday in Havana.
Eugenio George was born in Baracoa, Cuba on March 29, 1933 and began his volleyball career in 1947 at Pepe Barrientos Gymnasium in the Luyano neighborhood in Havana.
As a player he was a member of the Cuban men's national team that took part in the Pan American Games in Mexico City (1955) and Chicago, USA (1959), the Central American and Caribbean Games in Kingston, Jamaica (1962) and the FIVB Volleyball Men's World Championship in Paris, France (1956).
His coaching career began in 1963 with the Cuban men's junior team, building up the foundation of the men's senior team that won the gold medal at the Central American and Caribbean Games in San Juan, Puerto Rico (1966).
George Laffita took charge of the Women's National Team in 1968 leading the team to an impressive list of honors, which included wins in eight consecutive editions of the Central American and Caribbean Games (1970-1998) and seven Pan American Games titles (1971-1995).
He led the nicknamed " Morenas del Caribe" to three consecutive Olympic Games gold medals in Barcelona, Spain (1992), Atlanta, USA (1996) and Sydney, Australia (2000).
Under the leadership of George Laffita, the Cubans also clinched titles at the FIVB Women's World Championship in Soviet Union (1978), Brazil (1994) and Japan (1998), the FIVB World Cup in Japan (1989, 1991, 1995 and 1999) and the FIVB World Grand Prix in Quezon City, Philippines (1993) and Hong Kong, China (2000).
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UNCONVENTIONAL You're here because you want a marketing strategy and creative work that makes you stand out—ideas that say the right things about you, to the right people. And that's exactly why we're here. Expecting that is entirely reasonable, but getting it is surprisingly unusual. In that very important sense, we're unconventional.
WISDOM Beyond creative work, you come here for marketing insight. That's a skill we didn't download yesterday. We've developed it working in almost every market sector, and in every form of media—digital and traditional. We will always give you the benefit of our wisdom, even if it makes you a bit twitchy.
Experience the brands that have benefited from our wisdom


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Yep! Hard to believe, but this forum has been online, now, for ten years.
On June 14, 2002, at 8:21 AM this account was created as this forum went online. Less than 20 minutes later it was set up and we were welcoming our first members (and introducing ourselves around the Three Kingdoms community). Shortly afterward, fine fellows (and other folks like the forever-secretive 'Mindless Minion') joined up with us.
Our humble little forum grew into a small community before long and ever since I've had the first online forum where I actually felt like I enjoyed conversing with the members and welcome. Our hope was to create a forum where nearly everyone could feel that way. One memory that stands out was a discussion of how long internet forums tend to last. The consensus was that if Scholars of Shen Zhou could stick around for two years it could be considered a great success. At the time there were already two successful Romance of the Three Kingdoms forums with a dedicated membership.
And now the forum's been around long enough to document a bite of many of our adult lives.
Perhaps sometimes embarrassingly so?
In any case, thank you, everyone, for your membership, and for being the heart of what has made this community worth returning to, and keeping online, for all this time.


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One morning in January, a tall, gray-haired man whom I will call Arthur Jamieson arrived at the Mandler Hall psychology building, at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla. Jamieson is seventy years old and lives in the Midwest. He is a physician and an amateur cellist, and has been married for forty-seven years. He also suffers from a rare and bewildering condition called apotemnophilia, the compulsion to have a perfectly healthy limb amputated—in his case, the right leg, at mid-thigh. He had come to La Jolla not to be cured of his desire (like most people with the syndrome, he believed that relief would come only with the removal of the limb) but to gain insight into its cause. To that end, he had scheduled a meeting with Dr. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, an Indian-born behavioral neurologist who is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at U.C.S.D., and has a reputation among his peers for being able to solve some of the most mystifying riddles of neuroscience.
Ramachandran, who is fifty-seven, has held prestigious fellowships at All Souls College, in Oxford, and at the Royal Institution, in London. His 1998 book, "Phantoms in the Brain," about rare neurological disorders, was adapted as a miniseries on BBC television, and the Indian government recently accorded him the title Padma Bhushan, the country's third-highest civilian honor. But it is the awe that he inspires in his scientific colleagues that best illuminates his position in neuroscience, where the originality of his thinking and the simple elegance of his experiments give him a unique status. "Ramachandran is a latter-day Marco Polo, journeying the silk road of science to strange and exotic Cathays of the mind," Richard Dawkins once wrote. Eric Kandel, the Columbia University neuroscientist whose work on the physiological basis of learning and memory earned him a Nobel Prize in 2000, invoked two pioneering brain scientists to describe Ramachandran's contribution to the field: "He is a continuation of a tradition in neurology that goes back to the nineteenth century, to giants like Broca and Wernicke, who gave us, from studying clinical material, enormous insights into the functioning of the human mind."
Ramachandran, who has dark skin, curly black hair, and a mustache, cultivates a slightly rebellious image, often wearing dark polo shirts and a black leather jacket. However, when he meets with patients he tends to dress more conservatively. The day that he met with Jamieson, he was wearing a wool blazer and a tie. He greeted Jamieson in his office, whose décor reflects Ramachandran's many interests outside neurology: Darwinian evolution, plate tectonics, Indian art, Victorian medicine, paleontology, optical illusions. A four-foot stone sculpture of the god Shiva stood behind his desk. On one wall, there was a three-hundred-million-year-old fossil of a mesosaur, a freshwater reptile found only in South America and Africa (and which, as Ramachandran likes to explain, is a central piece of evidence in the theory of continental drift). On a side table was an array of antique scientific items: a brass Gilbert telescope, a hand-cranked electrical machine for curing "nervous diseases," a box of glass tubes containing Victorian homeopathic medicines. Another table held what appeared to be a smoothly sanded wooden sculpture of a woman's pelvis. Ramachandran often tells visitors that the object is a Henry Moore, before revealing, with a booming laugh, that it is actually a specimen of the world's largest seed, from the coco-de-mer palm.
Ramachandran listened closely as Jamieson talked about his condition. In a specialty that today relies chiefly on the power of multimillion-dollar imaging machines to peer deep inside the brain, Ramachandran is known for his low-tech method, which often involves little more than interviews with patients and a few hands-on tests—an approach that he traces to his medical education in India, in the nineteen-seventies, when expensive diagnostic machines were scarce. "The lack of technology actually forces you to be ingenious," he told me. "You have to rely on your clinical acumen. You have to use your Sherlock Holmes-like deductive abilities to figure things out."
Ramachandran suspected that apotemnophilia was a neurological disorder and not, as Freudians have theorized, a psychological syndrome associated with repressed sexual desires. After interviewing several apotemnophiliacs—Jamieson is the fifth person with the disorder whom he has studied—Ramachandran was struck by the fact that all of them said they became aware of the compulsion in early childhood, that it centered on a particular limb (or limbs), that they could draw a line at the exact spot where they wanted the amputation to occur, and that they attached little or no erotic significance to the condition. Furthermore, none rejected the limb as "not belonging" to them, as some stroke victims do in the case of a paralyzed arm or leg, and as Ramachandran had predicted they might. Instead, they said that the limb over-belonged to them: it felt intrusive. "If you talk to independent apotemnophiliacs, they say the same bloody things," Ramachandran told me. " 'The line for cutting is here.' 'It started in early childhood.' 'It's over-present.' They're not crazy."
Jamieson, who was born and raised in New York City, first remembers having an unusual relationship with his right leg when, at around the age of seven, he was waiting for a bus. He found himself thinking that if he stuck out his leg it would be crushed and severed by the bus. "What came to me was not 'No, I don't want to do that' but 'How would I ever explain this?' " he told Ramachandran. In recounting his childhood memories, he said, "One of the things that's astonishing to me is how clear these recollections are."
"These things are very salient," Ramachandran said in a resonant baritone, which carries a British-inflected Indian accent. "It's interesting to contrast these very clear-cut descriptions with these vague, Freudian notions about this whole phenomenon—that it's primarily connected with sexual stuff."
"Yeah," Jamieson said with disgust. "I've got no desire to cozy up to anyone with a stump. It's psychobabble."
Asked where he would make the cut line for the amputation, Jamieson unhesitatingly drew an index finger across the middle of his right thigh. As to whether he felt that his leg didn't "belong" to him, Jamieson was emphatic. "Somehow, for me, that just doesn't compute, that kind of language," he said. "I have always been fascinated by amputation and wished that I had one. Why? Who the hell knows?"
Ramachandran is one of a dozen or so scientists and doctors who, in the past thirty years, have revolutionized the field of neurology by overturning a paradigm that dates back more than a hundred years: that of the brain as an organ with discrete modules (for vision, touch, pain, language, memory, etc.) that are fixed early in life and immutable. Neurological syndromes, such as paralysis from stroke, forms of mental illness, and the perception of pain in an amputated limb (a phenomenon known as phantom-limb pain), were considered largely untreatable. But Ramachandran and other researchers have shown that the brain is what scientists call "plastic"—it can reorganize itself. Not only are different regions of the brain engaged in ongoing communication with one another, with the body, and with the surrounding world; these relationships can be manipulated in ways that can reverse damage or dysfunction previously believed to be permanent. Ramachandran's work with patients at U.C.S.D. has led to one of the most effective treatments for chronic phantom-limb pain and to a new therapy for paralysis resulting from a stroke. (In both instances, his treatment involves only a five-dollar household mirror.) It has also provided suggestive insights into the physiological cause of such mystifying syndromes as autism.
Until the mid-nineteen-nineties, Ramachandran's specialty was visual perception, but he had been interested in brain science since his days as a medical student in India. He made the switch to neurology in mid-career. "A scientist with that kind of creativity—it's rare," says Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, whose experiments with monkeys in the nineteen-eighties provided much of the groundwork for understanding brain plasticity. "It's usually not allowed, in some sense. You're not supposed to be a butterfly like that."
Little about Ramachandran's scientific career has been conventional. He was born in Tamil Nadu, in southern India, to a Hindu family of the Brahman caste. His grandfather, Alladi Krishnaswamy Iyer, was the attorney-general of Madras and a framer of India's constitution. Ramachandran's father was a diplomat in the United Nations. However, science ran in the family. His mother had a master's degree in mathematics; one uncle was a professor of optics at the University of Sydney; another was an expert in theoretical physics and relativity.
At around the age of nine, Ramachandran began collecting fossils and seashells and became fascinated by taxonomy and evolution. He wrote to a conchologist at the American Museum of Natural History. "Here's this little kid from India sending him sketches of shells and asking, 'Are these new species?' " Ramachandran said. "And he is writing back saying, 'A, B, C, and D are well-known species; E is very rare and has not been reported from your locality and is very interesting.' So for a while I was the only conchologist in India!" Ramachandran continues to collect fossils and has gone on digs in South Dakota, where he has found specimens of trilobites and a thirty-million-year-old oreodon, a sheeplike creature. His most notable find, however, was not in the field but at the annual Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, in 2004, when he noticed on a table, amid heaps of bones and rocks, a skull that he thought could be a new species of ankylosaur, an herbivorous dinosaur from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Ramachandran's friend Cliff Miles, a paleontologist, was with him and suggested that Ramachandran buy the fossil so that it could be studied and described. In January of this year, Miles and his brother Clark, also a paleontologist, announced the discovery of a new species of ankylosaur from the Upper Cretaceous period: Minotaurasaurus ramachandrani.
In his early teens, Ramachandran began conducting experiments in chemistry and biology in a makeshift laboratory under the staircase in the family's house in Bangkok, where his father was stationed. He also read books on the history of science and was struck by the role of intuition and play in many important discoveries: Galileo adapting a child's spyglass and discovering the moons of Jupiter, which led him to challenge the geocentric model of the universe; Faraday tinkering with a magnet and coil and discovering electromagnetism. Ramachandran often recounts these anecdotes to his students. "These stories are inspirational and fun," he told me. "But they're also telling you about how to do science."
Ramachandran's father discouraged him from pursuing a career as a researcher. "My father was intensely pragmatic," Ramachandran said. "He told me, 'Forget about chemistry and biology and all that. I know it's fun, but you're not going to make a living out of this.' " He urged his son to become a doctor, and Ramachandran duly enrolled at Stanley Medical College, in Madras. But he continued to read British and American science journals, and, in his second year, he devised an experiment that was inspired in part by conversations he had had as a child with his uncle the optics professor. The experiment addressed a question debated by experts since the time of Hermann von Helmholtz, in the late nineteenth century, about how the brain harmonizes the two slightly different images seen by each eye. For years, scientists believed that when the eyes are given conflicting information—for instance, a green image in front of one eye and a red one in front of the other—the brain accepts input from one retina at a time. Ramachandran, using an old-fashioned stereoscope and volunteers from his medical-school class, found that, when presented with a pattern that was colored differently for each eye, his test subjects continued to see in three dimensions. He concluded that a neural channel was still active in the "shut down" eye—even though his subjects were consciously seeing only one eye's color at a time. "This suggests that concepts of retinal rivalry need drastic revision," Ramachandran wrote in a report of the experiment.
He sent the report to Nature in December, 1971, a few months after his twentieth birthday_._ "To my astonishment, it was published without revision," Ramachandran told me. Soon, he published a more ambitious paper, "The Role of Contours in Stereopsis," which explored ideas about visual processing that became influential decades later. Ramachandran also wrote to one of the foremost vision scientists at the time, Dr. William Rushton, a professor of physiology at Trinity College, Cambridge, describing several original experiments that he was eager to try. The letter was passed to Oliver Braddick, a psychology lecturer who worked on vision. "The letter was obviously the product of a very fertile young mind," Braddick, who is now a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford, told me. "Perhaps a little kind of spinning off in all directions. But he had all these great ideas."
Braddick and another researcher, Fergus Campbell, invited Ramachandran to visit Cambridge for a month, at the university's expense, to conduct experiments. The results of one experiment, on which Braddick collaborated, were published as "Orientation-Specific Learning in Stereopsis," in the journal Perception. "Maybe fifteen years later, various people started publishing in this area of how specific developments of perceptual skills could be highly related," Braddick told me.****
Ramachandran returned to Madras to complete his medical degree, and in the fall of 1974 he enrolled at Trinity College to begin a Ph.D. in visual perception. "I thought they'd all be like Faraday and the great Renaissance scientists," he said of the researchers he met in England. "Ninety per cent of them are like Indian scientists, or scientists here, for that matter, or anywhere—it's a nine-to-five job. They're not moved by the great romantic spirit of science, and they're not great Renaissance people. So I was a bit disillusioned. Then I ran into Richard Gregory soon after I arrived, and I said, 'Well, at least there's some of them here!' "
Gregory was a professor of neuropsychology at the University of Bristol, the author of several best-selling books about science, and an expert in visual perception who had a special interest in optical illusions. Typical of his approach was a demonstration involving a Charlie Chaplin mask on a rotating axle, in which he shows how the brain uses prior knowledge of shape, shading, and other light effects to make sense of visual information and assemble a coherent representation of the world. Gregory's playful style irritated some of his colleagues, but Ramachandran found it electrifying. "He came to Cambridge to give a lecture," Ramachandran recalls. "He was like a magician! He is truly one of the five most amazing men I have met in my life."
During his four years at Cambridge, Ramachandran commuted regularly to Bristol to design experiments with Gregory. They have since written a number of scientific papers together, including groundbreaking work on the blind spot, the region at the back of the eyeball where the retina's photoreceptors are interrupted by the optic nerve. This region creates a gap in our vision the size of a palm held at arm's length, but, owing to several strategies of the brain, we never perceive it. Using optical illusions to trick the eyes and the brain, Ramachandran and Gregory determined how the brain "fills in" the gap, and published influential articles on stroke victims suffering from scotoma—a particularly large blind spot sometimes caused by a focal lesion in the visual cortex.
In the mid-nineties, Gregory visited Ramachandran at U.C.S.D. to undertake further experiments on scotoma, but they were unable to find a patient with a focal lesion. Instead, they spent Gregory's weeklong visit investigating a phenomenon that had long fascinated Ramachandran: the reported ability of flounder to camouflage itself against patterned backgrounds. Leading ichthyologists disagreed about whether the fish changed its appearance or whether the camouflage effect was an illusion. Ramachandran's local pet store had no cold-water flounder, so he bought five peacock flounder, a related species that lives in tropical coral reefs. The men placed the fish on the bottom of four small tanks against various backgrounds: widely spaced polka dots, a neutral gray, and two checkerboard patterns. The fish, whose natural tendency is to lie flat on the sea bottom, precisely matched on their bodies the patterns at the bottom of the tanks—and they did so within two to eight seconds, far faster than the hours and, in some cases, days reported by researchers using cold-water flounder. Ramachandran and Gregory surmised that the rapid change was an adaptive mechanism, since the species lived among bright colors and patterns. The experiment, which they meticulously documented in photographs and on videotape, effectively ended the debate on flounder camouflage—and, incidentally, throws an instructive sidelight on visual processing in human beings. Even though the fish sees the background close up and in a distorted, slanted perspective, it re-creates the pattern on its body with perfect fidelity, as viewed from directly above. Human beings, Ramachandran points out, visually process the world in the same way. "Your eyeball distorts the image—it's curved," he says. "Your lens inverts it—it's upside down. And your two eyes double it. The brain interprets the image."
When they wrote up the results of the experiment, Ramachandran and Gregory laced their paper with puns. In a caption for a photograph showing one fish on a polka-dot background, they wrote, "Spot the flounder," and they said that they had conducted the experiments "just for the halibut."
"So we sent this off to Nature," Ramachandran told me, "and back come the referees' comments: 'Brilliant paper, publish it right away, but remove all the puns.' " He laughed. The paper, "Rapid Adaptive Camouflage in Tropical Flounders," was published in a 1996 issue of Nature. "Since then," Ramachandran said, "I get papers on octopuses and squids and fish—because they all think I'm an expert on ichthyology!"
In 1983, Ramachandran joined the psychology department at U.C.S.D., as an assistant professor working on visual perception. In 1991, he became interested in the work of Tim Pons, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, who had been investigating the ability of neurons in the sensory cortex to adapt to change.
The sensory cortex is in the deeply ridged tissue that makes up the outermost layer of the brain. Until recently, much of what was known about it was the result of the work of Wilder Penfield, a neurosurgeon in Montreal who, beginning in the nineteen-thirties, had conducted a series of extraordinary experiments while performing open-skull operations on cancer and epilepsy patients. Seeking to distinguish healthy tissue from diseased tissue, Penfield touched the surface of his patients' brains with an electric probe, and, because the brain lacks pain receptors, the patients were fully conscious and able to talk to him about what they felt. As he stimulated different areas of the brain, his patients reported feeling touch sensations in specific parts of their bodies. In this way, over several decades and hundreds of operations, Penfield mapped areas of the brain according to their corresponding body parts. The "Penfield homunculus," as it came to be called, is oriented upside down: the areas corresponding to the feet and the legs are at the top of the brain, the arms and the hands are in the middle, and the face is near the bottom. Body parts with the greatest sensitivity—lips, fingertips—take up a far larger area of the cortical surface than less sensitive areas.
The regions representing separate body parts on the Penfield homunculus, like the brain centers, were believed to be unchangeable. This view came under challenge as the technology for mapping the brain improved. Whereas Penfield had used a large electrode that affected thousands of neurons at a time, brain researchers in the fifties began to use tiny microelectrodes, which could be inserted into the brains of animals to record the firing of single neurons and, thus, communication among them. In the seventies, Michael Merzenich became expert at using microelectrodes to map the sensory cortex of monkeys. In one experiment, he mapped a monkey's hand area in the brain, then amputated its middle finger. Some months later, he remapped the monkey's hand and discovered that the brain map for the missing finger had vanished and been replaced by maps for the two adjacent fingers, which had spread to fill the gap. The results, published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology in 1984, were decisive proof that the brain can reorganize itself—at least across very short distances of one to two millimetres.
Pons, at N.I.M.H., was curious to know whether the brain could accomplish more dramatic reorganizations, across greater distances. He wondered what happened in the brains of monkeys that had lost brain input from an entire hand and arm, and he thought that he could procure some animals to test. In 1981, a member of PETA had infiltrated a Maryland lab where a researcher studying stroke paralysis had severed the sensory nerves in a group of macaque monkeys which connected the animals' arms to their spinal cords—a procedure known as deafferentation. PETA released photographs of the monkeys, and the animals were seized and placed in the custody of the National Institutes of Health. By 1990, the monkeys had grown old and were about to be euthanized. Pons successfully appealed to the N.I.H. to allow him to conduct a final experiment on four of them.
Pons anesthetized the first animal, opened its skull, and inserted electrodes into the brain-map area for the deafferented arm. He stroked the corresponding limb. As expected, the brain electrodes recorded no activity, since no messages were being sent to the brain from the arm. But when Pons stroked the monkey's face the neurons in the map of the deafferented arm began to fire. The experiment showed that the neurons in the face map had invaded the area of the hand-and-arm map, which had been inactive for twelve years. Fourteen millimetres of the monkey's arm map had been reorganized to process sensory input from the face. Pons repeated the experiment on three more monkeys, and published the results in Science, in 1991, as a paper titled "Massive Cortical Reorganization After Sensory Deafferentation in Adult Macaques."
Ramachandran read Pons's paper, and wondered whether it could help solve the long-standing medical puzzle of phantom limbs. Many amputees continue to experience sensations—often painful—from a missing limb, and the phenomenon has baffled scientists since it was first reported, in the sixteenth century, by the French surgeon Ambroise Paré. Ramachandran says that his interest in phantom limbs was a natural extension of his work in visual processing. "I was interested in the 'filling in' of the blind spot and other holes in the visual field; how the brain deals with undersampled regions—gaps," he said. "This resulted in my asking, 'How do you "fill in" a missing limb?' " Pons's monkeys seemed to offer a clue.
"Often, the best experiments begin as jokes," Ramachandran told me. "I joked with my students. I said, 'Hey, this means that if I touch the monkey's face the monkey should feel it in the hand.' And they all laughed, and I said, 'Hey, why not?' Then they said, 'Well, how do you train a monkey to tell you what it's feeling?' And I said, 'Why do you need a monkey? Let's try it on a person.' "
Ramachandran arranged to examine a seventeen-year-old boy whom he calls Tom, who had recently lost his left arm, just above the elbow, in a car crash. In a basement lab at Mandler Hall, Ramachandran lightly stroked Tom's cheek with a Q-tip. Tom said that he felt the touch in his cheek, but also in his phantom thumb. A touch on the lip he felt on his phantom index finger, a touch on the lower jaw in his phantom pinkie. Ramachandran realized that every time Tom moved his face and his lips—smiling, talking, frowning—the nerve impulses from his face activated the "hand" area in his cortex. "Stimulated by all these spurious signals," he later wrote, "Tom's brain literally hallucinates his arm."
Ramachandran immediately telephoned his wife, Diane Rogers-Ramachandran, and told her, "Come in right now. You've got to see this guy."
Rogers-Ramachandran is also a scientist, specializing in vision and experimental psychology. She and Ramachandran met in the late nineteen-seventies, at a vision conference in Florida. She was then a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. They married in 1987. (They have two boys: Chandramani, who is nineteen, and Jaya, fourteen.) Rogers-Ramachandran rushed from their home in nearby Del Mar to watch the experiment. In the course of a few hours, she and her husband mapped Tom's phantom hand on his face. In a later experiment, they applied warm water to Tom's cheek. He felt heat in his phantom hand. When the water trickled down his cheek, he felt it running down his phantom arm. Ramachandran and his wife published their findings in 1992, in Science.
Rogers-Ramachandran, a vivacious woman with bright-blue eyes, continues to collaborate with her husband on papers, and they write a regular science column for Scientific American Mind. She says that it has sometimes been a challenge to be married to a man of Ramachandran's mental energy and intellectual curiosity. "Like, when we got married," she said one evening, over dinner at a restaurant with her husband and Jaya, "we went to England for our honeymoon, and spent the whole time going to bookstores and collecting prints, books, scientific instruments. Never went to a play! None of those things! The collecting! He went from scientific instruments to fossils, to learning about his Indian heritage, to art. You say, 'Well, can't we just go walk on the beach?' "
She mentioned Ramachandran's abstracted air—it's as if he were constantly mulling over an abstruse neurological conundrum. I knew something about this. On the first day of my visit to U.C.S.D., Ramachandran was unable to remember where in the parking lot he had left his car and finally had to activate the alarm on the remote control to locate it. His embarrassment suggested that this was the first time such a thing had happened. Yet, during the six days that I spent with him, it happened every time. When I told this story to Diane at dinner, she snorted.
"When we leave a place, he'll go into the parking lot, and a lot of time he'll just start walking," she said. "He has no idea where he's going. He just walks. One time, I picked him up from a trip—"
"Oh, don't tell him that," Ramachandran said.
But Diane went on. "He reached in his pocket and he said, 'Oh, my God, I had a rental car in that city! I completely forgot! I have the keys and I didn't turn the car in!' Another time," she continued, "I got a call from Sears and a woman said, 'There's a man here who says he's your husband and he's trying to purchase something on this credit card.' I said, 'Ye-e-e-s.' And she said, 'We're kind of concerned if it's really your husband, because he doesn't know your birth date.' I said, 'Oh, that's my husband!' "
"Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" Ramachandran boomed. "That is a good story."
I could not resist asking whether Ramachandran had since learned Diane's birthday. They have been married for twenty-two years.
"I know she's a Leo," he said, slowly, eying her from across the table.
"I'm not a Leo," Diane said. "You're a Leo."
"No," he corrected himself. "Virgo! Virgo!"
"Yup," she said.
"August 18th," he said, with confidence.
"No," Diane said. Then she turned to me. "See, he gets the month, because it's the same as his."
"It's not the eighteenth?" Ramachandran asked.
"Twenty-second?" he offered.
At this point, Jaya asked, "Do you know my birthday?"
Ramachandran looked helplessly at his son and shrank into his seat. "It doesn't mean I don't love you," he said.
In 1994, Ramachandran published a paper in Nature that is now considered a landmark in the field of neuroplasticity. He described experiments that he had conducted with U.C.S.D.'s multimillion-dollar magnetoencephalography machine, which records the changing magnetic fields caused by brain activity. (Though he calls himself a "technophobe," Ramachandran occasionally uses high-tech gadgetry, chiefly as a means to support his hunches.) The high-resolution MEG scans clearly showed that in the brains of arm amputees the area associated with the face had invaded the area associated with the missing arm—"the first direct demonstration of massive reorganization of sensory maps in the adult human brain," Ramachandran wrote.
His most startling revelation about the brain's capacity for reorganizing itself was yet to come. It emerged from his efforts to address phantom-limb pain, which afflicts up to ninety per cent of amputees. Some report feeling that they are clenching their phantom fist so hard that their phantom fingernails are digging into their phantom palm. Phantom-limb pain can be so agonizing that some sufferers commit suicide.
For more than a century, doctors theorized that the pain was psychological or originated in the stump—in swollen nerve endings called neuromas. Some resorted to repeated amputations, making the stump shorter and shorter. When this didn't work, they tried severing the nerves at the spinal cord and even disabling parts of the thalamus, an organ at the base of the brain that processes pain. All to no avail. "They can chase the phantom farther and farther into the brain, but of course they'll never find it," Ramachandran once wrote. The phantoms, as he had shown, are produced in the sensory cortex, where neurons for the face have invaded territory once reserved for the arm.
Ramachandran posited that the phantom sensations are also created by higher brain centers, produced by a complex interplay among the sensory cortex, the motor cortex in the frontal lobes, and a "body image" map in the right superior parietal lobule, a section of the cerebral cortex just above the right ear. One of the main tasks of the right superior parietal lobule is to assemble a coherent body image from touch signals ("I feel my fingers touch the cup"), visual signals ("I see my hand reaching for the cup"), and nerve signals from the muscles, joints, and tendons ("I feel my arm extending toward the cup"). Even though amputees no longer received these signals from the nonexistent limb, Ramachandran believed that memories of these inputs remained in the nervous system and the brain.
Reviewing the histories of amputees, Ramachandran noticed that many who suffered from cramping or clenching spasms had experienced, before their amputations, a period during which the limb was immobilized, sometimes for months, in a sling or a cast. He theorized that a kind of "learned paralysis" was burned into the brain's circuitry, as repeated commands from the patients' brains to move the limb were met with touch, visual, and nerve evidence that the limb could not move. When the limb was later amputated, the patient was stuck with a revised body-image map, which included a paralyzed phantom whose neural pathways retained a memory of pain signals that could not be shut off. Ramachandran wondered what would happen if such a patient was presented with evidence that the phantom could move ("I see my hand reaching for the cup"). If the brain could be tricked into thinking that the phantom was moving, would the cramping sensations cease?
His first test subject was a young man who a decade earlier had crashed his motorcycle and torn from his spinal column the nerves supplying his left arm. After keeping the useless arm in a sling for a year, the man had the arm amputated above the elbow. Ever since, he had felt unremitting cramping in the phantom limb, as though it were immobilized in an awkward position.
In his office in Mandler Hall, Ramachandran positioned a twenty-inch-by-twenty-inch drugstore mirror upright, and perpendicular to the man's body, and told him to place his intact right arm on one side of the mirror and his stump on the other. He told the man to arrange the mirror so that the reflection created the illusion that his intact arm was the continuation of the amputated one. Then Ramachandran asked the man to move his right and left arms simultaneously, in synchronous motions—like a conductor—while keeping his eyes on the reflection of his intact arm. "Oh, my God!" the man began to shout. "Oh, my God, Doctor, this is unbelievable." For the first time in ten years, the patient could feel his phantom limb "moving," and the cramping pain was instantly relieved. After the man had used the mirror therapy ten minutes a day for a month, his phantom limb shrank—"the first example in medical history," Ramachandran later wrote, "of a successful 'amputation' of a phantom limb."
Ramachandran conducted the experiment on eight other amputees and published the results in Nature, in 1995. In all but one patient, phantom hands that had been balled into painful fists opened, and phantom arms that had stiffened into agonizing contortions straightened. "People always ask, 'How did you think of the mirror?' " Ramachandran told me. "And I say, 'I don't know!' There was a mirror in the lab, so that must have been in my mind, and I said, 'Let's try it.' It's not any more mysterious than if you say something 'popped into' your mind."
Dr. Jack Tsao, a neurologist for the U.S. Navy, was doing graduate work in physiology at Oxford University when he read Ramachandran's Nature paper on mirror therapy for phantom-limb pain. "I said, 'Why the heck should this work? It doesn't make sense,' " Tsao told me. Several years later, in 2004, Tsao began working at Walter Reed Military Hospital, where he saw hundreds of soldiers with amputations returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Ninety per cent of them had phantom-limb pain, and Tsao, noting that the painkillers routinely prescribed for the condition were ineffective, suggested mirror therapy. "We had a lot of skepticism from the people at the hospital, my colleagues as well as the amputee subjects themselves," Tsao said. But in a clinical trial of eighteen service-members with lower-limb amputations, in which six were given mirror therapy and the twelve others were evenly divided between two control therapies (a covered mirror and mental visualization), the six who used the mirror reported that their pain decreased (and, in some cases, disappeared altogether). In the two control groups, only three patients reported pain relief, and others found that their pain increased. Tsao published his results in the New England Journal of Medicine, in 2007. "The people who really got completely pain-free remain so, two years later," said Tsao, who is currently conducting a study involving mirror therapy on upper-limb amputees at Walter Reed.
Buoyed by these successes, in the mid-nineties Ramachandran abandoned his work in visual perception to devote himself to neurology. "Vision was getting overcrowded," he told me. Neurology seemed like virgin territory. Much of the specialty was concerned with describing strange syndromes, rather than with explaining their cause or alleviating symptoms. "You've got a hundred papers saying, 'My God, they can move their phantom'—but it stayed at that level, a descriptive level," Ramachandran said. "We said, 'Look, we can do experiments. What if you do this to the patient?' And I took that same style to other syndromes. Then the sky was the limit. No one was studying these things."
Gradually, Ramachandran began to specialize in rare conditions and disorders, including the Capgras delusion, in which an otherwise lucid victim of a head injury insists that close loved ones (spouses, parents, children) are impostors. Freudians had theorized that Capgras patients were suffering from unbearable Oedipal desires aroused by the blow to the head, but Ramachandran demonstrated that severed neural pathways between the facial-recognition areas of the visual cortex and the emotional centers of the brain were responsible for the disorder. He also investigated post-stroke syndromes, in which patients deny that a paralyzed limb has become immobile or, in a more severe version, insist that the paralyzed arm or leg belongs to someone else. Ramachandran traced the delusion to damage in the right superior parietal lobule, the body-map region, where the discrepancy between the absence of signals from the limb to the brain and the presence of the limb on the body results in a defensive rationalization that the arm or leg must be someone else's. A few years ago, Ramachandran began studying apotemnophilia, the compulsion to amputate a healthy limb. He is, he said, "ninety-five per cent sure" that he has figured out the cause of the disorder. His consultation with Arthur Jamieson strengthened this conviction.
After interviewing Jamieson in his office, Ramachandran led him to a lab for a Galvanic Skin Response, or GSR, test, which would reveal how Jamieson's legs reacted to a mild pain stimulus. He escorted Jamieson into a small room that held only a table, a desktop computer, and two chairs. He asked Jamieson to sit with his back to the computer. Then David Brang, one of Ramachandran's graduate students, attached a sensor to the middle two fingers of Jamieson's right hand using a Velcro strap. The sensor would measure the reaction of Jamieson's sympathetic nervous system by monitoring the sweat on his fingers. With a sterilized pin, Brang pricked Jamieson's legs at random points, waiting a few seconds between each prick. A scrolling graph on the computer screen registered Jamieson's responses.
The unaffected leg—the left one—and the right leg above where he wished to have it amputated showed a normal response: the graph at first shot upward with each prick, but with further pricks it ceased to rise, then began to flatten out, indicating that Jamieson's nervous system was getting used to the stimulus. But when Brang pricked Jamieson anywhere on the leg below the amputation line, his nervous system responded with increasing distress, the graph climbing higher and higher with each prick.
The experiment seemed to support Ramachandran's theory about the disorder. He believed that people with apotemnophilia had a deficit in the right superior parietal lobule, where the body-image map is assembled. According to this notion, Jamieson was missing the neurons in the map that corresponded to his right leg from the mid-thigh down. He had normal sensation in the unwanted part of his leg—he felt the pin prick. But when the pain signal travelled to the right superior parietal lobule there was nothing in the body-image map to receive it.
"So there's a big discrepancy—a clash—and the brain doesn't like discrepancies," Ramachandran said. "When a discrepancy comes in, it says, 'Shit! What the hell is going on here?,' and it kicks in and sends a message to the insular part of the brain, which is involved in emotional reactions—so you're getting this crazy GSR." In apotemnophilia sufferers, the discrepancy causes a feeling of distress that is no less agonizing for being below the level of conscious awareness.
In the past two years, Ramachandran has tested four other apotemnophiliacs using MEG brain scans. "You touch them anywhere in the body and the right superior parietal lobule lights up, as you would expect," Ramachandran said. "But if you touch him here"—he gestured to a point on Jamieson's leg below the amputation line—"nothing happens_."_ Ramachandran said that the experiment needed to be repeated by other researchers, but, he added, "This takes a spooky psychological phenomenon and, as Shakespeare said, gives it a 'habitation and a name.' " Furthermore, the findings suggested to Ramachandran a possible method for alleviating the oppressive sensations in the unwanted limb.
Later, he asked Jamieson to stand in a corner of his office and placed a three-foot-high mirror in front of him, in such a way that in place of his right leg Jamieson saw his left, which he held bent at the knee. Jamieson gazed into the mirror. "Astonishing," he said. For a moment, the leg looked "right."
The mirror was a less risky kind of sham amputation than the method that Jamieson had recently adopted: injecting anesthetic to block the sciatic nerve of his right leg, shutting down the touch sensation. (As a physician, Jamieson had learned how to perform the nerve block.) The anesthetic provided up to five hours of relief, Jamieson said. Apotemnophiliacs, like transsexuals, anorexics, and others with body-image disorders, often do not seek a "cure" for their condition, and Ramachandran spoke gingerly when he suggested that using both the mirror and the drug could potentially yield powerful results. "It's conceivable—nobody knows—but if you do this repeatedly, and I'm not suggesting that you try this, because I know you don't want to be 'changed,' but if you do it repeatedly, both the injections and the visual amputation, it might actually eliminate this desire," he said.
Ramachandran describes his approach to science as "opportunistic": "You come across something strange—what Thomas Kuhn, the famous historian and philosopher of science, called 'anomalies.' Something seems weird, doesn't fit the big picture of science—people just ignore it, doesn't make any sense. They say, 'The patient is crazy.' A lot of what I've done is to rescue these phenomena from oblivion." Ramachandran is conscious of the fact that this focus might lead some to think that he works on the margins of his field. "Now, you could say that about Oliver," he told me, referring to his friend and colleague Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." "'Oh, he studies spooky things,'" Ramachandran went on. "That's bullshit. This man has deep insight into the human condition. He's a poet of neurology." Ramachandran says that his own interest in oddities is not for their own sake but for what they can tell us about the normal brain, including, he said, "very enigmatic aspects of the brain that few people have dared to approach, like what is a metaphor? How do you construct a body image? Things of that nature."
In 1999, Ramachandran turned his attention to synesthesia, an intermingling of the senses that causes some people to see each letter of the alphabet in a particular color. Others identify musical notes with colors; still others mix touch sensations with strong emotions, so that sandpaper might evoke disgust, velvet envy, wood grain guilt. Vladimir Nabokov described his letter-color synesthesia in "Speak, Memory": "I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl." As an artist, Nabokov was, according to Ramachandran's research, eight times more likely to have synesthesia than someone who is not an artist; the fact that Nabokov's mother also had the condition suggested a genetic component. (The phenomenon runs in families.)
The most common synesthesia is number-color. Ramachandran believed it was not coincidental that the fusiform gyrus, where number shapes are processed in the brain, lies next to the area where colors are processed. He suspected that a cross-wiring in the brain, similar to that in phantom-limb patients, was responsible. Brain scans confirmed his hunch: in synesthetes, there are excess neural connections between the two brain centers. This suggested to Ramachandran that the syndrome arises from a defect in the gene responsible for pruning away the neural fibres that connect the various centers of the brain as it develops early in life. "What do artists, poets, and novelists have in common?" Ramachandran asked me. "The propensity to link seemingly unrelated things. It's called metaphor. So what I'm arguing is, if the same gene, instead of being expressed only in the fusiform gyrus, is expressed diffusely through the brain, you've got a greater propensity to link seemingly unrelated brain areas in concepts and ideas. So it's a very phrenological view of creativity."
In the mid-nineties, Ramachandran read a paper by Italian researchers who had discovered that a set of neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys fired not only when the monkeys reached for an object but also when they observed another monkey performing the same action. Ramachandran wondered if these so-called "mirror neurons" also exist in humans—a difficult thing to test, since the Italians had inserted electrodes into the brains of living monkeys, a technique that it is impossible to use on people. But Ramachandran knew of experiments from the nineteen-fifties in which noninvasive EEG scans were used. These had shown that deliberate movements in humans suppress a kind of brain activity in the motor cortex called mu waves. Ramachandran and a postdoctoral fellow, Eric Altschuler, ran EEGs on volunteers as they observed another person performing an action such as opening and closing a hand. The tests showed that merely witnessing an action in others caused mu-wave suppression in the watcher—evidence that mirror neurons exist in humans, too. Other researchers have since confirmed that people have several systems of mirror neurons, which perform different functions.
"So let's take the broader theoretical implications of this," Ramachandran said one afternoon, while we were visiting the San Diego Rehabilitation Institute at Alvarado Hospital, where he had examined a paralyzed stroke patient suffering from limb denial. He was sitting in the hospital cafeteria with the clinic's medical director, Lance Stone. "These mirror-neuron experiments are showing that, through and through, the brain is a dynamic system not only interacting with your skin receptors, up here"—he pointed at his own head—"but with Lance!" He pointed across the cafeteria table at Dr. Stone. _"_Your brain is hooked up to Lance's brain! The only thing separating you from Lance and me is your bloody skin, right? So much for Eastern philosophy." He laughed, but he wasn't kidding. Ramachandran has dubbed mirror neurons "Gandhi neurons"—"because," he said, "they're dissolving the barrier between you and me."
Ramachandran wondered whether mirror neurons were implicated in autism, a condition whose primary characteristic is severe social impairment, including an inability to imitate and a lack of empathy. Ramachandran, Altschuler, and Jaime Pineda, a U.C.S.D. colleague, ran EEGs on autistic children. They got normal mu-wave suppression when the subjects moved their own hands. But when the children watched another person move his hand, their brains didn't respond. At a neuroscience conference in 2000, Ramachandran and his co-authors presented their findings and speculated that autism was caused by a deficit in the mirror-neuron system. The idea initially met with resistance from autism researchers, some of whom argue that the disorder is caused primarily by deficits in the cerebellum. Unlike his earlier foray into ichthyology, Ramachandran was entering a sphere of science fraught with politics. "The trouble is, it's a minefield," he told me. "The parents are involved. There's big money involved. Suppose you invested your life in saying that the cerebellum is what's going on, then someone comes along and spends one year on it and says, 'It's the mirror-neuron system'?"
In the past nine years, however, mirror neurons have become a central topic in autism research. Almost at the same time as Ramachandran, a group in Scotland had also suggested the link. Among those who have provided further evidence are researchers at the Helsinki University of Technology, who used MEG scans to show mirror-neuron deficits in autistic teen-agers and adults. Lindsay Oberman, a former graduate student of Ramachandran's, who now works as a postdoctoral fellow at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, at Harvard University, has begun using a technology called transcranial magnetic stimulation—a technique that triggers targeted areas of neurons in the brain—to influence brain plasticity in autistics. "So far, we have done some amazing things," Oberman has written. "We have found evidence that we can improve the functioning of the mirror-neuron system and some communication skills following repeated application of TMS."
On the last day of my visit with Ramachandran, I attended the lab discussion that he holds, each Monday, with his postdoctoral and graduate students at the Center for Brain and Cognition Laboratory, on the second floor of Mandler Hall. The lab, a room of modest size, was dominated by a long central table heaped with the strange tools of Ramachandran's trade: a foam-rubber hand of the type you buy at a horror shop (for a demonstration that Ramachandran likes to do to show visitors how the brain projects touch sensations onto objects that are not part of the body); a mirror ball of the type that M. C. Escher liked to draw; a boxed set of the BBC miniseries of Sherlock Holmes (for inspiration); several plastic minimizing lenses (Ramachandran has found that viewing a painful arm or leg through a lens that makes the limb look smaller dramatically reduces pain); a reflective metal tube that could be twisted into various amoebic shapes (when I asked if this puzzle had "experimental significance," Ramachandran said, "No," then quickly corrected himself: "Well, it's fun"); a series of oddly shaped metal boxes outfitted with slanting mirrors (for inducing perceptual distortions in those who peer through the eyeholes); and a plaster cast of Minotaurasaurus ramachandrani, a creature that resembles a medieval gargoyle, with three nasal openings on either side of its ridged and crenellated head. Ramachandran has asked one of his postdocs, Paul McGeoch, to perform a CAT scan of the skull in order to learn about the creature's olfactory lobes, and, in this way, to test Ramachandran's theory that his ankylosaur's heightened sense of smell might allow the beast to sniff out mates or carrion from a great distance (although it was more likely a vegetarian).
Seated around the table were members of Ramachandran's research group. Most were in their middle to late twenties, except for a man in his eighties with a British accent: John Smythies, whom Ramachandran introduced to me as the person who launched the drug revolution in the sixties. Smythies demurred, explaining that as a postdoc at Cambridge in the fifties, while performing psychopharmacology experiments involving mescaline, he had merely introduced Aldous Huxley to a colleague, who then administered to Huxley the hallucinogens that led him to write "The Doors of Perception," which later became a bible of the Woodstock generation.
Ramachandran, who was dressed in his usual black leather jacket and dark polo shirt, took a seat at the table and fielded questions from his students, helping them to refine their methodologies and using the brisk interchanges to hone ideas for research. At one point, Lisa Williams, a Ph.D. student who specializes in schizophrenia—a disorder that Ramachandran first began exploring about a decade ago—mentioned, in passing, the difficulty that schizophrenics have in differentiating between phenomena that are internally and externally generated.
"Oh!" Ramachandran cut in. "Speaking of that, I have an idea—I'm sure it's been done—but you know that when people think to themselves you get unconscious movements of the vocal cords? Now, has anybody done that with schizophrenia to see if it's enhanced?"
"I don't know," Williams said. "I'll look that up."
If such enhanced subvocalization occurs when schizophrenics think, that would support Ramachandran's view of the brain as an organ in dynamic equilibrium—and of mental illnesses as resulting from a neurological disruption that destroys that equilibrium. In the case of schizophrenia, whose sufferers often complain of "hearing voices," Ramachandran suspected damage or deficit in a sensory mechanism in the vocal cords which, when normal people think, sends a signal to the brain indicating "This is simply a thought; no one is actually saying this." If this mechanism was damaged, the subconscious movement of the vocal cords could be interpreted as an outside voice speaking in one's head.
"By the way," Ramachandran continued, "I have a theory that if you take people with carcinoma of the larynx, and you remove the vocal cords, and they think to themselves, they may actually start hallucinating. A prediction."
This remark prompted Laura Case, a first-year graduate student who has focussed on autism, to speak. "That could be interesting in autism, too," Case said. "Because if they lack the robust mirror activation for actions, which they do—"
Ramachandran interjected, "Then they confuse—so they may confuse their own vocalizations with somebody else's! And people have linked autism to schizophrenia. The old theory was that it was early-childhood schizophrenia! Was that a coincidence?"
The discussion proceeded in this freewheeling manner for more than an hour, with Ramachandran seizing on notions that seemed to offer fruitful possibilities for further investigation and tactfully deflecting those which he thought were dead ends. When the discussion ended, at 6 P.M., and Ramachandran's students had departed, I asked him if he thought that his work was aimed at constructing a "grand unified theory" of the brain. He said that neuroscience was still too young a discipline for such an ambition. Nevertheless, in recent years he has increasingly focussed on the biggest mystery of the brain: consciousness. Mirror neurons play a role, he thinks. "One of the theories we put forward," he said, as he packed up his bag, "is that the mirror-neuron system is used for modelling someone else's behavior, putting yourself in another person's shoes, looking at the world from another person's point of view. This is called an allocentric view of the world, as opposed to the egocentric view. So I made the suggestion that at some point in evolution this system turned back and allowed you to create an allocentric view of yourself. This is, I claim, the dawn of self-awareness."
Still, Ramachandran said, deciphering how consciousness works will take a supreme creative leap. "It may require a radical revision of the way in which you perceive the universe, the world, the brain," he said, as he stepped into the hallway and locked the lab door behind him. "Just like Einstein had to change your complete perspective in order to really understand time, saying it's part of the whole space-time manifold. Things don't 'pass through' time—that's a human illusion. But, if it requires that, some genius is going to have to come along and solve it." He opened the door to the stairwell and started down. "What we're hoping," he went on, "is that we can grope our way toward the answer, finding little bits and pieces, little clues, toward understanding what consciousness is. We've just scratched the surface of the problem. When I say 'we,' not just our lab but the entire world of neuroscience."
By now, we had reached the ground floor of Mandler Hall and were walking outside, past clusters of students. Ramachandran was still speaking excitedly—he had veered into a knotty digression about the brain's role in the evolution of language—when he glanced up and realized that we had reached the parking lot. He stopped talking and looked out over the sea of automobiles.
"Uh-oh," he said. ♦


text:
Two weeks before Thanksgiving, it appears as though a female turkey nicknamed Tammy is trying to get the heck out of town. An office worker driving to work on the New Jersey Turnpike called the authority trying to get it removed.
"I'd hate to see it hit by a car, and it could cause an accident," Donna Debrango told NBC New York.
It was "strutting back and forth across a ramp" at Exit 14B in Jersey City, according to spokesman Joe Orlando.
He declined to speculate if she might be trying to hitchhike a getaway before she faced the chopping block, though hitchhiking on the Turnpike is strictly illegal.
However, Orlando did note, "She hasn't gone through the toll plaza yet so she's technically not in violation (of Turnpike rules)."
Then again, seeing no evidence of an E-ZPass tag hanging around her neck, "I'm guessing she's not an E-ZPass customer," Orlando speculated.
Either way, based on her movements so far, it seems as though this bird could not maintain the minimum speed limit required on the Turnpike. In fact, motorist Debrango said she's seen it hanging around the exit all summer, adding she wants it captured and saved. "I know at Popcorn Park zoo (in South Jersey), they take in animals all the time," she said.
"A couple of minutes ago I got to watch a turkey play chicken with a tractor trailer," deadpanned Orlando.
Asked if he felt more sorry for the turkey or the tractor trailer, Orlando added, "It could go either way, just depends whether you're an animal rights person or not."