weekend conferences are strange, especially if you have to get up early, hardly awake and have to listen to a politician like clos (major of barcelona) who tried to be a little bit philosophical. biology involved makes it to a dangerous morning coctail. bloody mary is nothing compared to that.

later i saw and listened the first time in real to daniel dennett, haus und hof philosoph of the ai community. cog, was one of his things. today the topic was: can unselfishness be tought or learned. his talk was - no surprise - following programming style. dawkins memes, of course, and darwin with his king charles spaniel story. listening to him you can't say that there is something as a computer evolution, because evolution, he says, doesn't have a designer. folk music and languages detto. i guess not a lot would agree with that. myself included.

he finished with his answer to a question he often gets from journalists and students alike: ¿how to be happy? more or less he said: find someone who is more important and follow him. well, defently not my concept. he concludes: 'our capacity to enslave ourself to human ideas makes us unselfish'.

when someone tells you during a discussion about the realtionship of memory and taste: "i think yours is seasalt with vanilla. it's great and a surpirse when you serve it with fish."

i will try, but just if i can convince another.

w.ross ashby centenary conference at university of illinois. wolfram is there, and some of the people i met at the von foerster conference in vienna paul pangaro, paul weston, ups, ¿kevin warwick? (living for 14 days with a chipimplant). haven't heard from him for a while. lately someone told me: no, he is not as bad as i think he is. actually, he is a nice guy. ... who has a problem to deal with media, i would add.