Oh, Joy, False Memories Are in the News

 

I cannot, in a quick Google search, find any evidence these people are directly connected to the False Memory Syndrome people. And the malleability of memory is a thing that needs to be studied, just by people who are open to all possibilities and not starting with a predetermined conclusion.

But it hasn't been nearly long enough since the Memory Wars for someone who's published over 100 articles on the subject to not have been active during the Memory Wars, and at that point if you want to be doing responsible reporting you need to specify what they were doing during that time, or it's too hard to determine if the people you're writing about are credible or not. There's not enough evidence of false memories as a widespread thing for this to be an especially exciting find, especially since they don't appear to have tried this technique on real memories, in which case they haven't proven whether this is actually reversing the false memory or just a second manipulation of memory in the reverse direction. (Have you noticed that all the "memory is malleable" people are focused on creating false memories and no one ever asks whether you can be made to be convinced real memories are false? I'm not sure how you'd design this experiment such that it gets past the IRB, since you're basically asking permission to gaslight people in the name of science, but someone needs to be devoting effort to the question if they want to study this at all seriously.)

The question is whether someone-- either the reporter or the scientists-- is trying to reignite the Memory Wars.

Adventures in Printing

Printers are actually demonic creatures.

Which is to say, the Windows work laptop is throwing "can't connect to this network" as an error, which has... some fixes but none of them are great and none of them are permanent, and I don't really want to spend a lot of time troubleshooting the laptop just so I have it functional enough to spend a lot of time troubleshooting the printer when I don't even think it will work. (This shouldn't be necessary, but HP has decided to make printers that can't function just by plugging them into the laptop like a normal machine; you *have* to have wireless connectivity. Which I specifically didn't want because all of my machines have intermittent problems with wireless connectivity.)

Besides which, the only reason I need the Windows laptop is that HP has decreed that you can initially set up the printer only on a Windows or Mac-- which, person maintaining the list of Linux-friendly printers, is not what I would consider a Linux-friendly printer; you are a liar-- and I think I may have gotten that part done enough during the last time I was doing this since I got far enough to be stymied by the disappearance of my printer paper. Now that I've got more printer paper, though, I can't install the HP file on my Linux laptop because it insists it is unable to locate this package. Which I downloaded. And is sitting in the same directory I'm in when running the apt install command.

And all of this means that I've now been actively trying to install the new printer for several days and have not yet actually printed anything.

Have I mentioned that I hate printers?

(Update: I have now succeeded in printing from a hardwired connection between the Windows laptop and the printer. This does not help with either the Windows laptop's wireless issues or getting the printer to work with the Linux laptop, but it does mean I've printed both the things I want to print right now. This is not, however, a long-term solution.)