Using pen and paper to perform long multiplications is the first step of externalizing cognistive processes – but we are more and more on a route to have many external actions being part of our cognitive processes (think of Google for extending our current actual knowledge).
So far, so good, but how about mind? Can that then too be partially externalized?
An example given by the authors is the comparison of the behavior of a ‘normal’ person with a person with Alzheimers disease when trying to find a museum. One uses the information in the head, whereas the other relies completely on things in his laptop.
Next step: can  my mental states be partly constitued by the states of other thinkers?
And then how about an extended self?
And if this is extended out of my person – will interfering with my environment have a moral significance similar to interfering with the person? And are some forms of social activity more like ‘thought’ instead of communication and action?

Citing older work the distribution is most of the time a power law distribution with varying power coefficients. New work done by the author is to look at the distribution of casualties of events belonging to one war – and they also follow powerlaws (data for Iraq and Columbia are investigated) – and compared for terroristic events.

The power coefficient is in these at roughly 2.5. Making a further analysis of this coefficient as it changes during the war time (by subpartitioning the data) one sees that for the Iraq war it goes from lower to 2.5 (from large armies to insurgents), for the Columbia war from higher to 2.5 (small disorganized to better organized insurgents). Terroristic casualties are following a power law with about 2.5.

One more thing is the analysis of time sequence of events, compared to randomized set of these events: this shows a difference, meaning that the time-sequences are non-random, so have at least some systematic order in it (unfortunately no more details are given on that).

The power-law behavior might not be too surprising as it is the result of random group acts in this case, without any given ’scale’.

The article is interesting but I find it a bit introductory (it starts by explaining normal vs. power-law distributions), still the application of scientific statistical methods to this area is an important contribution.

See the paper by Mark Changizi “Latency correction and a general theory of illusions”.

Link: http://www.longnow.org/views/essays/articles/ArtEden.php

The author of this paper goes one step further and adds the human color vision system with the three different color receptors (cones) to the picture. Due to this restriction to three types, there is the possibility for metamers, i.e. different mixes of light frequencies leading to the same color as perceived by the human eye. An example is the mixing of red and green light resulting in a perceived yellow exactly like the single frequency yellow light.
Armed with that background, he tries to identify a simple frequency spectrum which will be perceived the same as the frequency spectrum resulting from the sun and Rayleigh scattering. As model he adds a very narrow frequency range to a background of white light of all frequencies. Fitting the frequency of the narrow band to result in the same perceived color, one gets a background of white light with a narrow blue frequency range – corresponding to unsaturated blue. Ergo, we see the sky as blue not violet!
Nice paper and very readable!

For me, I recognized another important thing: one usually says that all colors are in the rainbow – but this is not true! Due to the fact that there are three different types of color receptors, a small frequency range will always produce some special combination of responses from the three receptor types – but not all possible combinations. For example: with a small frequency range, one cannot excite the low and the high frequency receptors without the medium frequency receptor.
But with a suitable mixture of various light frequencies I can get any combination of responses from the three types. I.e. there are many more perceived colors than the rainbow contains!

Corollary: for color blind people with only two types of color receptors the rainbow indeed contains all possible perceived colors.

Reference:

Smith, G.S. 2005. Human color vision and the unsaturated blue color of the daytime sky. American Journal of Physics 73(July):590-597. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.1858479.