Mark Turner dot Net

Like many people, I spend much of my life on autopilot. Every day is a routine; get up, walk the dog, shower, eat, head to work. At work, grab coffee, catch up on emails, get to work, eat lunch, work again, go home. Repeat every day. If anything upset that carefully-crafted apple cart it would throw my whole day off balance. I’d have to engage my thinking brain, damn it. And thinking can be hard. It’s much easier to coast through life.
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Reggie Gemeille, then and now

I scanned the news stories at lunch the other day when I found one about a beating death of Pier Munoz-Chinos. Police arrested a kid named Wedjunald “Reggie” Gemeille who is 18 years old. He looks pretty “hard” in his booking photo, doesn’t he?

Occasionally I like to see what I can find out about suspects, so I did a quick Internet search on Reggie. As he has a pretty uncommon name it turns out it wasn’t difficult to track him down. Soon I found his MySpace page and his Facebook page, including photos and his self-provided bio.

The photos on these pages show a very different Reggie Gemeille than the one depicted in his booking photo. Here I see a kid trying to figure out who he is. In some, he’s dressing up and posing for the camera. In others, he’s clowning around with his younger cousins. He doesn’t look like a bad kid at all. He looks like any other kid with big dreams.
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Speaking of brain activity and addictions, my morning walks with my dog never cease to fascinate me. My Labrador, Rocket, goes berserk when he catches a whiff of something on the ground along the way. These smells are like crack to my dog. He is totally focused on inhaling these smells, and if you know Labradors you know that focusing is typically not their strong suit!

I would love to know what goes on in his doggy brain while he’s lost in this scent-induced rapture. What are those scents telling him? What parts of his brain are active? How do dogs really use these scents, and is there much more to this than simply marking territory?

All I can find online about doggy brain activity is an episode of NOVA that looks good, an interesting post about how dog’s dream, and a hilarious YouTube video of Bizkit, the sleepwalking dog, running into a wall. I would hope there would be more research on this. Anyone have anything else?

I cringe every time I hear someone say “consumer” when one could say “citizen” or “customer” instead. It irks me when the FCC issues a press release about how something they did was good for “consumers.” I hate being treated like I’m simply one side of a business transaction, especially when a government agency thinks I am. How about “the public?” I’d even settle for “the taxpayers,” though I am quite considerably more than simply someone who forks over my money to the government, too.

My online buddy Doc Searls takes on the label of consumer, and also touches on “content” and “delivering information” themes, too. Reading it, I realized that information never really gets delivered, it gets shared. When you share something, both of you are better for it or are changed by it. That’s quite different from delivering information, which is more of a one-way transaction.

When you meet your neighbor for an impromptu chat, you may mention something you heard or learned. Your neighbor will likely comment on it, and instantly your neighbor’s thoughts will change the information you provided into something slightly (or radically) different.

information isn’t delivered, in the sense that it made the journey from A to B completely intact. Information is always affected by those who perceive it. It can only be shared, not delivered.