Thursday, February 26, 2009 - Pancho Villa State Park, Columbus NM
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Afternoon on the rocks, City of Rocks State Park, Faywood NM, February 25, 2009
Today I moved down to Pancho Villa State Park in Columbus NM for a few days. I needed to run into Deming for supplies and perhaps more importantly I needed to find a dump station and dump my waste tanks. There is no dump station at City of Rocks. Also, the good internet access I was enjoying at City of Rocks became spotty the last few days. It was time for a change.
Night camp
Site 29 - Pancho Villa State Park, Columbus NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - good signal
- Go to the Pancho Villa State Park website
- Locate Pancho Villa State Park on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
That's the Point of Emotions: Survival
That's the point of emotions: survival. Normal emotions are essential to staying alive and well. ... To most people this doesn't make sense. We humans tend to think of emotions as dangerous forces that need to be strictly controlled by reason and logic. But that's not how the brain works. In the brain logic and reason are never separate from emotion. Nothing is neutral. That's what you have to remember. ... A lot of people's emotional life is unconscious a lot of the time, especially when you're calmly thinking something through. You feel like you're just using logic, but you're actually using logic guided by emotion. You just aren't aware of the emotion. ... I recommend Descartes' Error to anyone who's interested in emotions, intuition, and decision making. ... Nature seems to have tried to wire animals and people to have useful emotions, useful meaning emotions that keep us alive long enough to reproduce. Emotions keep us alive by letting us make good predictions about the future, and good predictions let us make good decisions about what comes next.