Thursday, April 27, 2006

A to do list for google calendar

I've been looking for a good do lo list program. I found this neet little script that works with Google Calendar. Get it.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Real Fake Grass

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Take my son to the prom...

Craig's list strikes again... This mom is willing to pay you to take her son to Prom. Requirements are that you are cute and could pass for 17-19.

Ben & Jerry's Free Cone Day!

Hey all you starving college kids, another free food opportunity awaits, Today is Ben & Jerry's Free Cone Day.

Friday, April 21, 2006

Did you ever wonder where the THX sound comes from? If you are like me, probably not, but once you find out you think it's pretty cool:

Blog from Music Thing.

Monday, April 17, 2006

Fortune

Its been a mix of being busy and not being busy. Of filling my time with things to do, but not quite going forward in the ways I need. Im very close to finishing school now, but the problem is that the things i need to do to graduate, my thesis project, is so fuzzy right now. I have taken some time to incubate ideas, doing reading, researching, but I think I get to distracted when I do these things and I go off on tangents. Interesting tangents, though, for example I spent some time tonight learning about the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method of density estimation. Lord knows how I would apply it to my thesis topic, though.

I have an interview tomorrow with for a job when I graduate. Its with a company called Vision Robotics Corp., a small startup of nine employees who work on computer vision applications. They are based in San Diego, which is rad because I'd like to live here in SD for another year or two, and the work they are doing is just about a perfect match with what I want to do with my career. Academia has been great, but I need to get my hands dirty and start building things, implementing ideas. Besides, I'm going to continue stimulating the old noggin till the day I die.I don't need to be in a classroom to continue keeping up with research.


I wish I had a little more than work to talk about, but I don't. Thats better than having some personal problem to complain about. We should all consider ourselves fortunate who have nothing new to say.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is up and running!

Sunday, April 16, 2006

Don't think too hard.

The saying "Don't think too hard" may have just found some scientific backing. The following is from the Health and Science News Round Up: (The actual study can be found here.)

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, Feb. 17 (UPI) -- Complicated decisions might be best left to the unconscious mind because thinking too hard may lead to bad choices, a Dutch study found.

Ap Dijksterhuis, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, said conscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among simple products, whereas unconscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among complex products, the Guardian reported Friday.

The problem with thinking about things consciously is that you can only focus on a few things at once, so when in the face of a complex decision this can lead to giving certain factors undue importance and thinking about something several times is also likely to produce slightly different evaluations, highlighting inconsistencies, according to the study published in Science.

Dijksterhuis said that when he has to make an important decision he gathers together the relevant facts and gives it all of his attention at first.

Then 'I sit on things and rely on my gut,' he told Science.


[[ Check out the paper discussion for more of the researcher's interpretations of their results ~d ]]


General Discussion
Unconscious thought improved the quality of decisions. When people are faced with complex decisions, a few minutes of distraction during which people could engage in unconscious thought - but not in conscious thought - led to superior decisions, compared to circumstances under which people could not engage in unconscious thought or to circumstances under which people engaged in conscious thought. Moreover, a few minutes of conscious thought generally did not lead to better decisions compared to conditions where people did not consciously think. The relative inferiority of conscious thought was expected to be the consequence of the low processing capacity of consciousness....