"As we prepare for takeoff, please make sure your tray tables and seat backs are fully upright in their most uncomfortable position."

"There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are only 4 ways out of this airplane..."

"Your seat cushions can be used for floatation, and in the event of an emergency water landing, please take them with our compliments."

"We do feature a smoking section on this flight; if you must smoke, contact a member of the flight crew and we will escort you to the wing of the airplane."

"Smoking in the lavatories is prohibited. Any person caught smoking in the lavatories will be asked to leave the plane immediately."

"Good morning. As we leave Dallas, it's warm, the sun is shining, and the birds are singing. We are going to Charlotte, where it's dark, windy and raining. Why in the world y'all wanna go there I really don't know."

Pilot - "Folks, we have reached our cruising altitude now, so I am going to switch the seat belt sign off. Feel free to move about as you wish, but please stay inside the plane till we land... it's a bit cold outside, and if you walk on the wings it affects the flight pattern."

Pilot - "Folks, if you were with us last week, we never got around to mentioning that it was National Procrastination day. If you get a chance this week, please try to celebrate it. If you can't get to it, then maybe try to do it at the weekend, but no big rush. Have a nice day."

And, after landing: "Thank you for flying Delta Business Express. We hope you enjoyed giving us the business as much as we enjoyed taking you for a ride."

As we waited just off the runway for another airliner to cross in front of us, some of the passengers were beginning to retrieve luggage from the overhead bins. The head steward announced on the intercom, "This aircraft is equipped with a video surveillance system that monitors the cabin during taxiing. Any passengers not remaining in their seats until the aircraft comes to a full and complete stop at the gate will be strip-searched asthey leave the aircraft.

As the plane landed and was coming to a stop at Washington National, a lone voice comes over the loudspeaker: "Whoa, big fella...WHOA..!"

"Should the cabin lose pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the overhead area. Please place the bag over your own mouth and nose before assisting children or adults acting like children."

"As you exit the plane, please make sure to gather all of your belongings. Anything left behind will be distributed evenly among the flight attendants. Please do not leave children or spouses."

And from the pilot during his welcome message: "We are pleased to have some of the best flight attendants in the industry... Unfortunately none of them are on this flight!"

Morning dear friends,

It's a sunny day here in Norfolk, and very mild again...

...my paralysis is still dreadful, with neck, arm and leg movements now extremely limited, but I seek a glimmer of hope in every movement possible.

...as I'm dealing with M.E. I found this article quite interesting, as the mind has always fascinated me, with it's oddities and profundities.

Finding a friend in a crowd, searching for a nickel in a pile of coins, and locating a jar of mustard in the refrigerator are examples of visual search tasks. Two University of Iowa, Iowa City, researchers have made an important step forward in understanding how these tasks are performed by the human visual system.

Geoffrey F. Woodman, a graduate student, and Steven J. Luck, associate professor of psychology, found that, when humans look at collections of objects, attention is focused on a single object at a time and moves from one to the next in about a tenth of a second. Research has shown that the more complex a visual image is, the longer it takes for the human brain to process the entire scene. Scientists have long debated the reason for this, with some arguing that the longer processing time indicates serial processing and others believing that it indicates parallel processing.

As an analogy, Luck notes that serial processing is like a construction company with 100 employees who work together to build one house at a time, whereas parallel processing is like a company that erects 10 houses simultaneously with 10 employees working on each house. Similarly, the human brain might devote all of its capacity to one object at a time and shift rapidly from one to the next, or it might process all of the objects in a visual scene nearly simultaneously, with just a fraction of the brain's capacity devoted to each.

Woodman and Luck are the first to show definitively that the human brain processes complex images serially--attending to one thing at a time, but shifting rapidly from object to object. "This may seem counterintuitive because it doesn't feel like we perceive only one object at a time," Luck indicates. Although it may seem that when you look at a scene you are seeing the whole picture, each object in the scene commands your attention in rapid succession.

The researchers demonstrated serial processing by having subjects search for a specific object in a display containing many other objects. They were shown a group of squares and told to search for the one with a gap in the left side. Most of the squares were black, but the picture also included one red and one green square on opposite sides of the image. The subjects were told that the target square probably would be red, but might be green. This was done to bias the subjects to search in a specific order.

Woodman and Luck used EEG recordings, which monitor brain waves in the same way as an EKG monitors heart activity. To track attention with the EEG, they measured a brain wave that indicates where attention is focused. They found that attention, as indicated by this brain wave, shifted rapidly from the red square on one side of the image to the green square on the other, which demonstrates serial processing.

Woodman compares this type of visual activity to searching for a piece of a jigsaw puzzle among a pile of pieces that will make up the completed picture. You can ignore pieces that are the wrong color, just as the subjects in his experiment ignored the black squares. Once you find several pieces that are the right color, though, you must focus your attention on them individually to see if they also have the correct shape.

Luck says this research will contribute to the long-standing quest to understand exactly how human vision works, which some day may lead to computerized visual systems. He cautions, however, that there is still a long way to go before robots or other forms of artificial intelligence that can match human vision can be created. "A huge proportion of the brain is devoted to vision. We have so much brain power devoted to vision that perceiving scenes seems easy, but it is really an incredibly complex process."

from, Society for the Advancement of Education.