The question is fundamentally flawed, in that "data structure" is a concept used by programmers to communicate with computers (or between programmers).

A comparable question would be wondering whether the computer you are using right now, at this point in time, is inside a for loop, or a while loop, or it's just using tail recursion.

Sure some cognitive scientist can make my point more explicit, sorry that all I can only offer is a counterexample.

Yes, isn't our conception of data structures bound up fairly tightly with the available storage media and data buses? We have thought a lot about how to organize and retrieve data on tapes, and spinning disks, and random-access memories composed of discrete little bins, each storing a bit and addressed in rows and columns.

But we don't make extensive use of (say) analog computers, or computers with data buses having several million sub-channels. Hand us a machine employing such principles and it's back to square one. (Except for the lucky pure mathematician or two who got there first but whose work remains obscure right now, the way George Boole's work used to be obscure.)

And my stupid examples are just examples - I have no idea if the brain, or any bit of it, is best conceived of as an analog computer. Nobody knows what kind of computer the brain is like, except that it is almost entirely unlike the silicon-based digital computers that we build in the von Neumann tradition. And, presumably, when it comes time to discuss brain-based data structures they will turn out almost entirely unlike the structures in our digital-computer-data-structures textbooks.

Agreed. Another example is quantum computing.

I'm actually really surprised that no one has even mentioned the idea that the brain may be a quantum computer. Check out this Google Tech Talk entitled "Does an Explanation of Higher Brain Function require references to Quantum Mechanics" by Hartmut Neven. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qAIPC7vG3Y

Agreed. Watching Carl Sagan´s Cosmos at age 9 was fascinating, even though a second viewing, years later, was much more informative.

A law could be the way to fix that if it concerns state-owned media, which in France (and Europe, in general) is mainstream.

That was somehow sorted out by the Mythbusters (Season 1, Episode 8). Or is news of Russians burying themselves a meta-urban myth?

Isn't it a "page" or "document", and not a "website"?

The first paragraph describes a common structure of the articles in The Economist, which goes a long way towards explaining why it is so satisfying to read.

The physorg article mixes up, at first, the nature/nurture question and the cross-modality of perception question (whether internal representations good for tactile perception are also good for visual perception). Those are very different fundamental questions.

http://clipperz.com rocks in terms of usability, convenience, and a sense of security (which might be false: here is a call for criticism).

It is open source, portable (runs in Javascript), works on and offline and well designed. You can log in using a master passphrase, or a one-time password.

> I don't like the idea of using a password manager, because it's difficult to move it across platforms

http://clipperz.com is a very portable password manager.

It works on your computer as well as online.

It relies on your browser being a "secure" Javascript interpreter. But then we do that every time we log into a web site.

I think that it adds value to the conversation, because one of the reasons why the link is featured here is to discuss the branding.