Today I learned about change blindness. I was particularly amazed by slow change blindness

In case you were wondering how google really works.

I was a subject for an EEG experiment this week, but my head produced insufficient results! One researcher claimed I have such a thick skull that I don't conduct brain potentials to the outside. However, I do seem to be a strong producer of Alpha Waves, which some associate with creativity and higher levels of consciousness. Others claim this indicates I just wasn't concentrating. While I prefer the former, I tend to believe the latter.

In other news, I'm thinking of making a trip out east sometime this fall. Anyone have any suggestions?

RoboSLAP!

Last night, I had a damn good margarita. At an otherwise quite uninspiring bar. Who would have thought that the UC Berkeley Faculty Club would have an awesome bartender?

I completed my first run. Right after work today I went out and got myself some running shoes. I bought some Adidas for about fifty bucks at footlocker.

Following the advice from the page I linked to yesterday, I took a short walk and stretch before running. I walked about .3 miles to the Ohlone Greenway [history] [pics], stretched, then ran around the greenway (totalling about a mile). At that point I was pretty tuckered out so I decided to slow down to a brisk walk. I walked another .3 miles, then resumed running around another chunk of the Ohlone Greenway (a part i'd never seen before) for 2/3 of a mile. Finished off with a walk home of about .3 miles.

For those that are wondering why i'm being so absurdly specific about the mileages, I was curious how far i'd gone, and I found a neato program called RouteRuler, an Open Source Java program that lets you load a map in one of a few image formats, define a scale, then click waypoints. It then adds up the mileage. I loaded in a Yahoo! map (as an aside, I discovered that through a mutual fund i bought, I own approximately one ten billionth of Yahoo!) and clicked up my route, and it told me how far i'd run. Pretty neat stuff.

Running?

So i'm thinking about taking up running. It seems like it would be a good and cheap way to get in shape (something i desperately need to do). Also, if I run, i'll be able to have more fun dancing, because I won't get so tired.

Some other benefits of running are that it's free, and it's something I already have basic experience with. Some drawbacks are that it's not necessarily a social activity, and it can be boring. A friend of mine belongs to a climbing gym. There is a climbing gym not too far from my home. Rock climbing is a lot of fun and is social, but in this case isn't at all free.

Of course, i'm happy to hear suggestions from my friends for other fun and inexpensive ways to get in shape. leave a comment if you have an idea!

I had a fun starwars moment today. Our lab went on a field trip to the Smith Kettlewell Research Institute to learn how to use some head modelling software. First we learned how to do a sphere. The program put a kind of weird skin on the sphere that made it dark gray and look like it had craters. "looks like the moon!" someone said. The next step was to do a more detailed model of the sphere (which was made of fairly large pixels). In the detailed model, the sphere had a rougher texture. "It looks like the Deathstar!" someone else said. The software guy then said, in a pretty good Obi-wan voice "That's no moon!"

You probably had to be there.

In other news, a pretty big security problem was found in the code used to render PNG images in Mozilla (including FireFox). I recommend upgrading to FireFox 0.9.3, if you haven't already.