22 Oct 97 
 
It's been a chock-full time lately.  Let me hit some of the highlights  
(WAP!): 
 
1) Last Friday, went to a symposium on Vision and Perception.  One talk  
was on the mental concepts of "object" (or at least small objects) that  
very young infants have.  Basically, small solid objects have the property  
of continuous paths in space & time and some other property.  Supposedly,  
really young infants (4 mos.) know this.  They also supposedly know 1+1=2  
exactly.  I could make a snide comment at this point but I'll refrain. 
 
Anyway, I was thinking about how one learns this property of objects, that  
they don't pop in & out of thin air... is it hard-wired?  Do we have a  
world view, fully formed, when born?  or is this concept learned just by  
looking around at the world?  If your father was David Copperfield (not  
the Dickens character), would you learn that _some_ objects, such as  
coins, tend not to have this spatiotemporal continuity.... 
 
Plenty of illusions of perception were shown, and one I particularly liked  
was an eye chart in which, instead of getting smaller, the letters get  
fainter....  Phantom letters.... 
 
And I learned how photoshop does edge detection.  kind of. 
 
2) Heather & Stuart came for the weekend, and we wandered everywhere.   
Pretty much.  We were all rather pooped. 
 
3) I found that I'm seated in the boat for our first race for the novices.   
Tomorrow, I'll find out which seat I'll be in. 
 
4) I ran into the filming of NYPD Blue over the last two days.  The first  
time was on E. 4th St.  Near that Merchant something Museum, and the  
Swift Lounge (I saw a sign pointing to a nearby bar/restaurant from an  
apartment that said "How Could Cooper Union do this to us? Lifestyles of  
the Rich and Shameless").  Evidently, they were using a very small space  
to shoot, though it seemed that Jimmy Smits (Switch) and the short, bald,  
moustached guy et. al. were hanging around reading scripts.  And turning  
over trashcans. 
 
Then yesterday they were shooting right in front of my apartment (oh  
sigh).  More specifically, they built a camera track in front of my  
apartment while I was eating lunch.  Again, it did not seem they were  
doing much for most of the day.  It seemed they were filming the old  
Hebrew Actors Union building. 
 
It's kind of pointless to mention any of this, for the shots they were  
taking were of the sort that few, if any, signs or markings would be  
showing.  I think they pick blocks for their generic New York look -- for  
they must hop from block to block every 24 hours.  They got everything  
done by 7pm (their lighting was only so good), and needed to find another  
parking place for the camera trucks, the caterers, the trailer.   
Considering the premium on parking, it's probably cheaper for them to get  
a permit to shoot on different blocks in NYC every day, and pretend to be  
working than to build a parking garage for everything.