A Cognitive Schema is the organization of knowledge about a particular concept or subject. When I speak of Your Cognitive Schema, not to be confused with a Self-Schema, I am talking about the incredibly complex Web of ideas inside of your mind you use to make sense of the world. It is an evolving system, growing and maturing with your experiences.

When we work out our bodies, whether aerobic or pumping iron, we stress them, pushing their limits. On a microscopic level, we are tearing up our muscles, shocking our heart, and forcing our body to adapt to increased levels of physical stress. During the recovery period between workouts, our bodies rebuild those muscles in preparation for the next shock to the system.

Our minds are receiving information about the world and trying to fit it into a great big web of understanding. The facts we learn are like the vitamins and protein we feed our bodies during the rest times. When we are at rest, contemplating and introspective, we reorganize the Schema, revising it for the next stress.

But what about the exercise? This Web Site will get to that later, in The Memepool, the mental gym where we stress our ideas into solid theories.

In this section concerns what goes on inside of the brain, hypothesis formed from observations, not yet tested in the Idea Marketplace. These are, of course, merely the inner workings of my own belief net:

Observations: These are explorations of the Natural World. Understanding our common reality is the best place to start when deciding how you think about things. These are where the nutrients of a worldview are gathered.

Hypotheses: These are the assumptions derived from the observations. Seeing patterns in the morass of reality has led to these personal beliefs about things.

Resources: Don’t ever take my word for anything you read here. I’m no authority, not even an expert. You have to test, retest, and test again everything you know. The truth will endure.

Disinformation: Like a computer virus on your hard drive, false facts in your mind corrupt the information linked to it. Here I have provided some examples of when to beware, a healthy skepticism is like a strong immune system.

Local, National, and Global means of communication, our minds, our histories all form a collective Idea Schema that we are all working to change or reinforce, whether through discovery, argument, or force. This vast, complex network of ideas forms a sort of soup, similar to the Earth’s genetic soup. Ideas compete like genes in this environment, the stronger or more effective ideas survive. This is part of the fairly recent Science of Memetics: a survival of the fittest, only instead of genes we have “memes.”

All Governments are a sort of community contract, ultimately only as powerful as its citizens make it. Even a Dictatorship requires some form of popular, if not majority, support. Only Democracy seeks to foster and harvest the power of ideological consensus, providing an official communal arena for ideas to compete for public favor. Just as Capitalism is a Marketplace of Products, Democracy is a Marketplace of Ideas.

Here we take ideas inside our personal Self Schema and place them into the Idea Marketplace, allowing them to compete with, compliment, or reinforce the memes already there. Just as a Scientist must conduct experimentation to convert hypothesis to theory, so must we all conduct disputation with society in order to convert our personal ideas about the world into public policy:

Disputations: Democracies are fueled on the conflicts of ideas that occur within them, like stars burning on the energy of fusing atoms. Fair-minded, informed, and respectable debate provides the cleanest burning, most efficient fuel. Here you will find explanations of the debates our Society currently faces and fair articulations of how to find the ideal mean.

Theories: If you’ve read this through from Observations to Hypotheses to Disputations to here, you know that this site is nothing but Theory. Here I have gathered some of my own modest conclusions. I leave you to judge them. This entire site is, after all, my Self Schema communicating with yours.

Resources: The steps I think each participant in the Idea Market should take before becoming involved and sources to inspire deep thinking and debate. These are my inspirations, what are yours?

Disinformation: These are the closest approximations to the “villainy” of the system. Here are people, institutions, and rhetorical devices that bend logic, distort facts, and otherwise stoke the fires of unconstructive fury in our society. Understand these to prevent yourself from being pulled into and victimized by another person’s skewed belief system.

Welcome to the narcissistic section of my website. Blogs are motivated by the cult of personality, so here is where you can learn things about me, myself, and “i.”

Journal: Me relating little blurbs about my life. From experience we gain wisdom. From relating our experiences we pass our history into the collective body–How’s that for making this section sound profound???

Pictures: Photographs of stuff. From photographs we… uh… show people stuff… Wait! I know! “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Bam!

Random Thoughts: Here are little rants that I simply couldn’t justify putting anywhere else in this site, especially not the “theories” section, without sacrificing credibility.

Portfolio: My web-development graphic-design portfolio. For anyone interested in knowing about my career history.

“A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.“

-Chinese Proverb

Worlds constructed through words, set down at the prompting of one person’s imagination, stimulating our own mind’s eyes to share the visions. The movie that plays inside our mind is deeply personal, unique from the movie playing in the minds of others reading the same story. The characters can be people we know, the landscapes our own, the way things move, and all the other details that would take an infinite amount of elucidating to convey, we fill in and make the story our own.

Publications: I am an unpublished Science Fiction writer. So this section is set here as a placeholder, a tiny monument to my optimism.

Great Books: Sometimes I will recommend a single book, or a graphic novel, or a comic books series. Other times I will recommend an author’s entire body of work. Other times I will recommend musicians for their lyrics. So the term “books” is being applied very loosely here.

Resources: Links and recommendations for aspiring writers. Online resources for readers.

Trash Bin: Short stories, juvenilia, and novels that I have given up on getting published will be banished to this dark corner of the site. This might cross the good taste line and take you into the realm of gratuitous, but if you’re really really bored…

Welcome to my creative wastebasket. There are very good reasons things end up here. I’ve posted their histories so you may see how long I was willing to continue putting them out into the world before finally giving up. Take that as a measure of my faith in these works.

Read at your own risk. You’ve been warned.

1. Hashanna and the Talking Matter: Final Draft

• Edge – Rejected!!!

Hashanna creates the universe in a colossal scientific accident. As she’s mopping up the mess with gravity, she finds a strange phenomenon, matter with intelligence.

2. Doppleganger’s Game: Final Draft

• Asimov – Rejected!!!
• Fantasy and Science Fiction – Rejected!!!

Everything was going great until that second Earth appeared in orbit around the sun.

3. Infestation: Final Draft

• Fantasy and Science Fiction – Rejected!!!

The committee for population growth control holds what will be a final meeting.

“There is no thief like a bad movie.“

- Sam Ewing

24 images a second, a moving photograph. Simultaneously a painting, a performance, an orchestra, and none of these. Film is a medium like any other, with fantastic potential and limitless boundaries. The new is the focus of my interests here, new ways of looking at things.

Productions: I occasionally like to write screenplays. They are quick and to the point, more open than a novel. I write “arthouse” films, and when one gets produced, you’ll find something here to look at.

Great Films: Here I will recommend films that the average person is not familiar with. These are films that do new things, things you won’t find in a summer blockbuster. These will bend your perceptions, make you think, make you walk away with a new outlook on the world.

Ratings: A simple application I wrote to keep track of the films I see based on a five-star rating system. If you find yourself liking what I like, come here for further suggestions.

Essays: Critical essays on issues in filmaking. My sometimes unique and often meta perspective on various themes.

Until one of my screenplays actually gets produced, I’ll use this page as project status report to track my progress:

Screenplays:

1. Schrodinger’s Cat – 4^th Draft

Synopsis: A man trapped in a room and a mental trip through reality.

2. Smalltime – 2^nd Draft

Synopsis: Semi-Autobiographical account of my time as a marijuana dealer in college.

3. Detail of a Life – 3^rd Draft

Synopsis: A journey through a single lifetime through four artists, four seasons, and four worlds.

4. Shy – 1^st Draft

Synopsis: A character study of Dexter, a computer programmer plagued by socialphobia.

5. The Competition – 1^st Draft

Synopsis: My answer to My Dinner With Andre, a chess game between two old friends.