Moss's Bloglet

About

This is the personal weblog of Moss Collum, a programmer living in Healdsburg, CA. I mostly blog about tech stuff, linguistics, politics, and fun things I find on the web, but there's really no set topic.

If you've found this page through Google, I hope it helps. The search tool may help find the exact post you're looking for. If you want to see what I've posted lately, you can go to the front page of the blog.

If you're someone I know, you probably already know about this blog and come here regularly, but if not, please leave me a note: chances are I'd be delighted to hear from you.

If you want to contact me, you can email me at gmail (where my address is my first name dot my last name), or just leave a comment here.

Note that the "Bloglet" of my page title is the Perl script I use for my blogging, not the other, better known Bloglet.

Journal

Something Jason said made me think that I should try to properly inform myself before responding, and as a result I've been discovering just how truly wonderful Google Book Search and Google Scholar really are. Book Search helped me find the relevant passage in Visions, and working out from there (after some initial fumbling around with regular Google and (really very nice) tools like CiteSeer) Scholar helped me identify three of the papers that introduced this line of research, and got me PDFs of two of them. (I'm going to try to get a copy of the remaining one from the library tonight, rather than paying $30 for a PDF of it).

The papers, if you're interested, are:
Crick, F. and G. Mitchison. 1983. The function of dream sleep. Nature (Lond.) 304:111-114 [PDF]
Hopfield, J. J. 1982. Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 79:2554-2558 [PDF]
Hopfield, J. J., D. I. Feinstein & R. G. Palmer. 1983. 'Unlearning' has a stabilizing effect in collective memories. Nature (Lond.) 304:158-159 [abstract]
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