my mind on books

This notice just came in an email today:

The Seventh International Conference on Neuroesthetics
Many Faces of a Face
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Berkeley Art Museum
University of California, Berkeley

When Velazquez’s portrait of Juan de Pareja was first exhibited in Rome, one art critic remarked:

“This is the truth; the other exhibits are merely paintings.” To what extent, and by which neural mechanisms, can we divine the intentions of others by studying their face? What happens to our ability to perceive faces when the brain is damaged? What attributes makes us judge a face as being beautiful?

How can we simulate faces through the computer? These are some of the questions that our distinguished speakers, from Europe and the United States, will address at this year’s meeting on neuroesthetics. at the Sixth International Conference on Neuroesthetics. The conference, which is sponsored by the Berkeley-based Minerva Foundation and the Institute of Neuroesthetics in London, is free and open to the public.

Visit http://plaisir.berkeley.edu for more information and to register.

I’ll be traveling to the Washington DC-Silver Spring MD area this coming week for some meetings related to my day job, so posting here will be even more intermittent than usual.

I’m taking Proust Was a Neuroscientist along for some travel reading.

I’ve been enjoying playing the vocabulary game at FreeRice . It’s challenging and addictive, good exercise for the brain, plus, for every correct answer, ten grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program!

Thanks to LanguageHat and Metafilter.

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Does anybody miss the link previews? I recently turned off “Snap Shots” because they started having ads, but I liked the way the previews worked with Amazon to show a little summary & price information for books. I’m looking around for a way to get that functionality back….

philolsophers photostream at flickr!

[update: favorite – David Chalmers: “Doood – I has a hard problm”]