Archive for the ‘Webcomics’ Category
Making up memory
I find it amazing how your own brain can fool you sometimes. I did not dig this subject very much but I have been intrigues by studies about how people can suggest things to individuals and make them believe in it like it was their own and like it has always been true.
In some circumstances, you can create and believe in your own false memory. This post is about an interesting example of how that has happened to me yesterday night.
At the beginning of the year, I have bought an Asus N10E laptop. It’s a sweet little machine, like a cross between a netbook and a laptop. There is nothing exotic in the configuration of that laptop. The N10 serie of laptops have models that include fancier options. If you look on the net, you will find reviews of the fancier models (see a revew of the N10J). Most of them include a Bluetooth module.
Yesterday, I felt like linking my laptop to my N800 using Bluetooth. I thought it would be like, and that I need needed was to learn how to activate the link and that user-friendly programs would do the rest. I was mistaken. Linux did not detect the Bluetooth device at all. Since I build my own kernel, I decided to check my kernel configuration against other known good configuration for similar models but failed to find anything I would be missing. At that point, I decided to boot back in Windows, thinking I would find more information about Bluetooth there.
At this point, I began to lose patience. Windows had no information about the Bluetooth device in the laptop. I tried reinstalling a few drivers and programs. I even checked the laptop manual, something I seldom do, to see how to activate Bluetooth. It was failure. The normal documented way to activate Bluetooth failed. The Bluetooth device drive was even missing. The BIOS did not have the option to activate or deactivate it.
I began to worry why was my Bluetooth module not working. After all, I had vivid rememberance of the shiny Bluetooth icon displayed on the OSD when I pressed the WLAN hotkey on my laptop.
I first suspected that some experiment I had done in Linux went awry and disabled the Bluetooth module for good, something that could happen by extrapolating from some forums posts on similar problems…
My Occam Razor safety device finally kicked in and I began suspecting I was the source of the problem more than the computer was. After further research, I had to come to this conclusion…
There was probably no Bluetooth module in that laptop!
I write probably for correctness, because the only way to know for sure would mean opening the laptop and search its guts for the Bluetooth chip.
The memory I had of seeing the Bluetooth icon was probably manufactured by my own certitude of that laptop having the Bluetooth option combined with the screen shots of the icon in the laptop manual. The certitude was created by myself using incorrect information since the reviews you can read of this laptop usually talk about Bluetooth, but they usually don’t use of the particular model I own. Some N10E might also have a Bluetooth module pre-installed since it’s an optional feature of the model. Add the fact that the laptop has a Bluetooth led and you have all the ingredients you need to think this laptop would have the Bluetooth module. NCIX, the place from where I ordered the laptop, make no mention of Bluetooth support.
I don’t want to sound overly clever and say I’ve learned my lesson. It’s just too easy to mix up memories with other information. This is just a simple example of what can happen. I feel good about the fact that I was able to sit back and consider that my certitudes might have been fabricated by myself.
