Consciousness, overcoming depression, a good book, fasting vs starving, appropriate behavior between generations, Happy New Year!

Machines vs. human experience, Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point, do people experience consciousness differently?, the connection between the subjective self and the collective environment/others, how the environment affects people's habits, the costs and benefits to specialization, how reductionism skews perspective, Complex Systems Thinking, Henri Poincare, how imagination transforms/affects reality, how nice it is to know someone who doesn't accept your depressed states - therefore forcing you to change your emotions and find a way out of the darkness (not by suppression, but by actually acknowledging the causes and overcoming them), "A good book always does that, I think: leaves you satisfied on one hand...answers a lot of questions...but also starts you asking new ones." -- Lois Lowry, how fasting and starving are not the same thing, the differences in "appropriate" behavior depending on generation and cultural upbringing, how every person brings and adds meaning to the language they use, how amusing it is to see the sparks from the static electricity created by moving my hands across a blanket in the dark, it's New Year's Eve and.....it's SNOWING!!! :-D