How exciting to have a blood moon so close to Halloween! This bodes well for the spooks and spirits this Sunday.

Whoever created this cube solver deserves some sort of trans-nerding award for combining three of the coolest geek fields ever: Lego, Rubiks Cube, and Robot Vision.

Last night I had a dream that inspired me to this Haiku. It's entitled:
"For Quelbo"

The gentle giant,
with lumbering grace and poise:
Hippopotamus.

An alternative second line, "king of subaqueous grace:", came to mind, but the word 'subaqueous' seems a little hamhanded.

The new Google Desktop Search application is now available for beta use.

I am very impressed so far. I searched for a word I knew would appear in several of my documents and in 0.01 sec it came up with 36 results. We're talking inside .txt, .doc, and .pdf files, too. That search takes the windows 2000 file searcher (yeah, that cute little puppy) at least ten minutes. To be fair, I should point out that the app hasn't yet finished indexing my hard drive (although in about 5 minutes it got through nearly 1000 files). I'm going to reserve judgement untill I've used it for a while, but so far it's looking pretty good.

So I finally got around to setting up an email address for this blog. You can mail me at benvis@gmail.com. I realize I'll get spam for posting here, but I'll deal. I'm also adding a link. Oh! And if anyone wants a gmail invite, I have a few available. If you know me it's free, but if you don't, you have to send me a story. Any story will do as long as I've never read it before.

I really kind of hope someone sends me a story!

Thanks to Allen for posting this movie of the Cal vs USC game from last season. Dr.J, you'll like the music they chose for the first half of play. Watching this thing just made my day. Anybody putting together a phatty game party for this weekend?

I'm listening to The Roots album "Phrenology". Here's a phrenological report on Charlotte Bronte!

In other news: today you could have gone to the Love Parade in SF.

Because I'm in Madison, home of Bucky Badger.

I'm considering going for a new template, but I'll have to do it when I have time to put all my links in. In other news, Cal destroys Airforce with a final score of 56 to 14. Gooooo Bears!

Oh, and I now have a Yafro page. Not much there, but I may start using it now that I have it. All you yafrodites add me as your friend. I don't know what it means to be a 'friend' in this context, but I like friends, so go for it.

Yup, that's my brain. Note the lumpy skull. I'm not sure what that weird rounded triangle-shaped thingy is, and that's a bit disconcerting. I'll have to hit the anatomy texts. I have 128 slices in each of the 3 major axes, so if there's some view of my brain you want to see, I'm taking requests!

Some of you may remember the trauma I experienced upon discovering that my brain produces insufficient brainwaves. Well, I have since learned that I give good fMRI signals. This means I have excellent blood flow in my brain. Hooray!

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.

The balloon drop that will live in infamy.

I'm a dork. I accidentally (really!) started playing this onine game. You build an army and use it to attack other people's armies. I can't really figure out if there's a reason to attack anyone except to steal their gold. Anyway, the more people that click this link, the bigger my army gets.

Here's where I explain how I accidentally started playing: When you click the link, you have to click the number button corrisponding to the number image (to help prevent bots from cheating, or something). That's all you have to do. After that, if you want to, you can create your own account and start your own army. I didn't read the page very carefully, so I just kept filling out fields and clicking 'next...' and ended up with my own army!

PS you can click one time every day, if you really want to increase my military might =)