Minted

I find news of our coin industry both fascinating and giggle worthy. Fascinating because I can understand why people prefer carrying lighter bills instead of heavier coins. Yet we not only keep producing $1 coins, but we spend gobs of money storing and promoting them in the meantime. On the flip side I can see why the treasury would rather mint than print.

Giggle worthy because otherwise I think I would cry. Seriously? You've spent HOW MUCH on promoting the use of $1 coins? That's our tax dollars at work yet again.

Continuously introducing new $1 coins gives them a feel of unofficial tender. That's kind of the way I felt (despite it being a trite feeling, I know) when the Sacajawea dollar came out. It was gold instead of silver, it wouldn't be accepted by vending machines, and it seemed more like a collector's piece. Granted, I'm glad they did the minting in general and the prestige it has given to Sacagawea, but having all these different kinds of coins running around is probably throwing our small American minds for a loop.

Maybe I'm just jaded

This is really not news, aside from the fact that they have merely provided empirical evidence (finally) of something they didn't have the technology to show previously.

"Such a highly interconnected structure has been hypothesised for some time"

Um....YES

"Such a diagram would be boundlessly complex, and the degree to which it could shed light on the more slippery questions of consciousness and cognition is still up for debate."

Um....NO

Well let me rephrase.

For those who have been hypothesizing the loop structure FOR QUITE SOME TIME, the hypothesis of consciousness and cognition being EMERGENT has also been common thinking and around for a while as well. All those others who are "debating" the issue are just closed-minded shlubs who still prescribe to the Descartes "I think, therefore I am" paradigm, which is WRONG.

You are - Therefore you think.

Also, I will continuously stand behind my assessment that cognition is nothing more than a feedback system which serves as another sensory input for the pattern recognition thingamajig we call a brain to chew on. It just happens to be quite a tasty bit of sensory data that lends quite significantly more value to the proverbial Input Soup, but it is still merely an ingredient none-the-less.