Chain Blogging

Ok, so BAW didn't really tag me, but I don't have friends either and I can't resist a game where I get to write about my favorite subject: me!  Also, I'm desperate for easy ways to promote my blog.

Here are the rules:

Link to the person who tagged you.
Post the rules on your blog.
Write 6 random things about yourself.
Tag 6-ish people at the end of your post.
Let each person know he/she has been tagged.
Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

1.  One of my biggest hopes is that before I die, I will be able to slip the surly bonds of earth, to touch the face of my own god.  I want to see the Earth from space.  Thank you, Carl Sagan, for helping me hone my reverence for the mind of man. 

2.  I can't see out of my right eye.  Actually, I can see a little bit, but that eye is legally blind.  I have a birth defect in my optic nerve and most of what I see is dark and there is a huge gap in the visual field.  With my good eye closed I can walk around without running into walls, and I can even tell you how many fingers you are holding up, but I can't read.  I couldn't even read the big E on the eye chart if I didn't know what it was.  I was curious about this because that big E is bigger than fingers held up a couple of feet away, and it only has four elements while a handful of fingers has five.  Why can't I tell that it is an E?  I decided to practice reading with my bad eye.  I used a word processing program to make a column of random letters, one letter per screen.  At first I could not identify any of them, but after a bit of practice I started getting some right.  After about a half hour I could get any letter or number, so I reduced the font size.  I spent another half hour working on it and eventually hit a wall with how small I could go.  I also was unable to identify any letters when they were in a horizontal row.  They had to have enough space around them or it just looked like random lines on the screen.  When I had had enough I opened my good eye again and I'll tell you, I had the worst headache ever.   Obviously, I was exercising my brain, not my eye.  My mind had to learn how to connect the sense data from the eye to something it could recognize as a percept.  Since I had never used my right eye to do this before, it had to be learned, just like a baby learns (automatically).  There may be some truth to the idea that humans who are deprived of sense data early in life are never able to learn to process certain data later, but I proved to myself that there are some neural pathways that can be forged as an adult.  It was a fascinating experiment but that headache was so bad I never tried it again.  I get along just fine with one eye.

3.  I'm a Valley Girl.  Like ohmigod, fer sher, I'm really from The Valley, ya' know.

4.  I dropped out of college my first time around.

5.  I named my first cat Geddy, after Geddy Lee of Rush.

6.  One of my biggest regrets is that I never made good on my dad's offer of $1,000 if I could learn how to play Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto.  I still hope to play it someday.

Woohoo!  That was fun!  I also had a lot of fun reading back through the chain.  I loved the one about the physics major who was convinced that time travel would not be invented in his lifetime because otherwise his future self would have come back to tell his present self.  Ha!

I hope these folks join in:

Rational Jenn
Diana Hsieh
LB
dooce
Kim
rootie