The Set of All Possible Things

Shallow Grave comics, scientific musings, miscellany, curated by Sean Polyn

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The People’s Illustrated Mueller Report! It begins.

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This one is pretty self explanatory. I am particularly fond of the wee upside down rendering of Speck, by my wife Joanna

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Yeah I think this is from 1999 or 2000. Speck the rat terrier wasn’t quite that smart but the incident is based in reality nonetheless

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I’m more of a dwarf than an elf, memory-wise. You?

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A new comic for y’all

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oh man, this thing pays for itself

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About us, using only the ten hundred most used words

When something happens to you, you form a memory of that thing, and you store a memory of it inside your brain.  Later, you can think about this memory again, and it is almost like you are going back to the time that thing happened.  A man once wrote a long story where he ate and smelled a nice little piece of food, and it made him feel like he was going back a long, long time, to when he was a child.  I haven't finished reading the story, because I kept falling asleep while I was reading it.  But that was my fault, not the man's fault; I kept reading the story at bed time, instead of during the day.  I read the part about the nice little piece of food though.  I liked that part.

We want to know what happens in your brain when you think about memories of things that happened a long time ago, or a little while ago.  There are a lot of memories inside your brain!  Somehow your brain can find the memory you want to think about, even though there are lots of other memories that sometimes get in the way.

If you come visit us at a room in our college, we can study your memory.  We give you some money, and you play a computer game where you try to remember things.  When you have a thought, tiny things move around in your brain really quickly.  We put a thing on your head that gets pushed around when these tiny things are moving around.  You can't see it getting pushed around, but we have a computer that can see it. Then we use the computer to figure out what is happening inside your brain when you try to remember things.  Or we can take you to a room in a hospital, and you can play a computer game inside a loud box that gives a picture of your brain to another computer.  Then we try to figure out what kind of memory you are thinking about, by looking at these brain pictures.

We also use computers to make a pretend brain, and we make it so the pretend brain can remember and forget things.  Then we try to figure out how the pretend brain isn't the same as a real brain.  Does it remember too many things?  Does it remember the things in the wrong order?  We change the pretend brain a little bit at a time, to make it more and more like a real brain.  

Some people can't remember things that happened to them, because they hurt their brain.  Some people are scared that one day they won't be able to remember things.  Some people want to know how best to learn a lot of things, really quickly.  We hope one day our pretend brain can help us understand these things, and help people.

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A fragment

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Potty alert! Potty alert!  VOOT! VOOT!  Who’s a good child?  You are, you are a good child!  You used the potty!  Good child!

Pants alert! Pants alert! BREET! BREET! Shame! Shame on you!  You are a troubled child!  Feel shame, shame for not attending to your bodily needs in a timely manner!

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In every mind there exist elaborate frameworks organizing one’s knowledge; these networks allow one to make sense of the world. One draws upon this structured set of memories to infer what will come next, from what has come before.

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Before tweets, apparently, there were ticklers! Points of note: (1) tickles, ahem, sorry, ticklers, could only be sent to men, or possibly women writing pseudonymously under a male name; (2) this particular tickler was left tucked in a leather bound volume of Helmholtz's Physiological Optics, never able to fulfill its mission, to tickle the fancy of some eminent scientist, causing him to stroke his luxurious beard and make a low harrumphing sound that is his closest approximation to laughter; (3) I feel like the fewest points of note one can get away with is three; any fewer and it seems like the rhetorical device is being mistreated.

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doodles and phrases

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Just a bit of ornamental doodle, with watercolor marker…

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Vanderbilt Computational Memory Lab 

~=~ press release draft — 4 July 2014 ~=~

The Polynlab Summer of Publications (PSoP), in full swing!  

[Top Left] With each submitted manuscript, we open one of the Futurama Mystery Boxes (FMBs) that wait patiently on the lab windowsill, beckoning like a cooling pie.  

[Top Right] Thursday, July 3rd, 6pm. After submitting his manuscript "Neural activity in the medial temporal lobe reveals the fidelity of mental time travel," James E. Kragel had the honor of opening the second box of the PSoP!  Inside the hermetically sealed inner wrapper was revealed… Roberto, the insane knife-wielding robot who just so happens to be the namesake of Jim's own workstation.  The stars were truly aligned for this event!

[Bottom Left] Roberto menaces all, from his new perch atop Jim's monitor. Roberto: "I need to stab someone! Where's my stabbing knife?!" Oh, Roberto, so much anger, so much brain crazy, don't tell him he is already holding the stabbing knife.

[Bottom Right] Roberto joins Mom, of Mom's Friendly Robot Company, the dweller within the first FMB of the PSoP.  The honor of this opening belongs with Neal W Morton, for his submission "A neurocognitive theory of episodic and semantic interactions during memory search." As mom might say: "Jam a bastard in it!" 

ok, that sounds good, can you, you know, go back and edit the transcript so it makes sense, and then put my name down at the bottom, ok?

Yours in science,

Sean M. Polyn

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I got inspired after seeing a page of visual illusions… I only used one color red, but it shifts depending upon what’s around it… You can go into Photoshop and confirm that the RGB values of the red are the same, but it looks orangey or purpley (scientifically speaking) depending on its surroundings!  You can also zoom way in to get the illusion to dissipate.

Akiyoshi's Illusions

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C’mon HG Wells, don’t hold back, why don’t you tell us how you really feel?