As far as getting anything done today I really didn't do well. But as far as catching up with some old friends in Cyberspace, I did pretty well. I managed to hook up with some people with whom I hadn't talked in a long time. I think I'm also going to wind up addicted to Leo Laporte's weekend radio show on KFI AM 640. I miss the old The Screen Savers show, even though I did attend a taping of the impostor Leo-less show at Comcast's West LA facilities in October with Chad and Donald and Pam.

We did go out this evening for food, getting the Sunday papers and a few things from the drugstore. I found a couple of nice things for Cosplay...a pair of Tatami Zories and a pair of red brocade slippers. Either one will go nicely with my Kimono when it's made. I've got to go to Little Tokyo to get some Tabi socks so that I can be close to authentic with the Kimono. I also want to go back to Marukai's answer to the 99 Cent Store and get some kitchen and Bento stuff.

I also want to go used book store diving. I have some, but not all of the books I need to write my paper for Psych 1. There is one thing about this paper that I can't do much about...there is a fair amount of research about Dyslexia and reading disorders and other conditions that interfere with Language Arts development, but really not much out there on Arithmetical and Mathematical learning disorders. It's sort of like the place we are at understanding Arithmetical and Mathematical development versus Spoken and Written Language Development. There is metric tons of research about how people acquire their first language, what Linguists call the L1, and how people either acquire or learn second languages. But the research is pretty thin regarding Math and "Number Sense." Someone in one of the papers I read over the Web about the subject estimates that research into how people learn Math is 30 years behind linguistic research.

It is thought that Neanderthals had spoken language, and there is evidence that perhaps hominids had language earlier than that. That covers about 70,000 years of existence. Yet, what we know now as modern Mathematics was developed in Ancient Greece and in the Early Caliphate period of the Islamic Empire...quite recent by comparison. When Anthropologists come in contact with indigenous tribal people, often they find that their "Number Sense" is quite stilted. Some will count "One, two, many." Others will count "One, two, three, four, many." Still others might be able to count to ten before they stop counting and just say "there's lots of them." It's a relatively new facility to be able to do higher Mathematics or even simple Arithmetic, in Evolutionary terms.

All I know is that it fascinates me. I want to learn more about this. As the cliche goes, "this time, it's personal."