The notion of “flow”, also known colloquially as being “in the zone”, is a state where one just breezes through the task at hand and one is fully focused on the task as subjective time distorts. Part of sports psychology deals with training athletes to get into the zone. One thing that athletes are told to do is ignore the manual details of the sport and focus on their goals. For example, professional golfers perform better when they focus on putting that little white ball in the cup and ignore their swing.
Mystery at VL/HCC
First off… Nicky, how about photographing some GI Joes for your assignment? They don’t move much! Now back to our regularly scheduled blog.
Last week, at VL/HCC, there was someone that claimed to be a student that stayed in the Statesman’s Room at the Sheraton where the conference was being held. When asked by some fellow conference goers about grabbing a bite, she’d claim to be tired or in need of presentation practice. Since I figured out within a few minutes of meeting her that she wasn’t alone in Pittsburgh from her mannerisms and a few verbal clues without me having to so much as utter a word in conversation, I found it hilarious that others were surprised to learn that she had actually been spending her time with a “secret” companion. This was despite the numerous conversations others had had with her. And then there was the case of the false identities…
When life is a beach ball
Do you have a Mac that beach balls (colourful pinwheels that produce colourful language) for 30-60 seconds at a time when you’re not running a computationally intensive task? Your hard drive could be dying. I hope you’re backing up. But I’m not writing this blog post to convince you that backing up your data regularly is a good idea (but it is, though). Instead, I’m going to show you how to see if that is indeed what is causing the beach balling and, if so, how to keep on tempting fate by keeping your failing hard drive chugging along while reducing your unwanted trips to the beach ((Is it any wonder why computer scientists tend to be so pasty?))
Academic nightmare
Back when I was in high school, I had the occasional dream where I’d forgotten to hand in some homework or some deadline was looming. I thought to myself, my high school is fairly high pressure. Maybe the dreams will stop when I start undergrad. In undergrad, I continued to have these dreams every once in a while. I thought to myself, “Self, these’ll probably stop once you’re done undergrad.” I had a few more of these dreams while taking classes in grad school. Whatever — surely they’ll stop when I’m done classes.
Continue reading “Academic nightmare”
I have a confession to make…
I play with my food. Is that really so wrong?
The backwards bystander effect
Last night, there was a cat meowing extremely loudly outside an apartment along Spadina. I, along with three others, stopped to figure out why. Having concluded that the cat had fallen/jumped off a story balcony based on a) an open door and b) another cat looking down from there, and c) the cat had a collar, we stopped to figure out how to proceed.
In defence of climate change deniers
I’ve heard some people say they don’t understand how people can hold the view that climate change is not anthropogenic yet claim that climate change can be countered cheaply using geo-engineering, e.g., by injecting sulfur ((Why, IUPAC, why?)) into the atmosphere. The reason for their concern is that they think it’s logically inconsistent since the effects of geo-engineering techniques and anthropogenic climate change are predicted by the same computer models. However, (anthropogenic) climate change deniers are being perfectly reasonable as far as thinking about temperature goes. Let me explain.
Ultrabook fad
As someone that placed an order for a MacBook Air within 24 hours of its announcement, I obviously have some bias when I say that Stan Shih, founder of Acer, is misguided in saying tablets and “ultrabooks”, laptops under 0.8 inches thick with longer battery lives, are just “short-term phenomena”. Ceteris paribus, most people would probably choose a thinner, lighter laptop with longer battery life over a bulkier one with a shorter battery life. One of the selling points of laptops is their portability; ultrabooks are a natural evolution towards increasing portability.
Deputation Day and Night
I ended up going to City Hall yesterday, but decided not to make a fuss. There were 344 people signed up to do just that. Instead, I went to listen and (by being a body in a seat) show that people of Toronto do care about what happens to it. The main action began at 9:30 yesterday in Council Chamber 1 (CC1) but, owing to being at the Hot Yam! and running into/chatting with several people I hadn’t seen in ages on my walk over to City Hall (there was an accident, preventing streetcars from going along Spadina), I started observing municipal politics at about 4:20pm via projector in Council Chamber 2 (CC2), the overflow room. I kept some notes and posted them, mostly unedited, after the jump. Please bear with the lack of sleep.
Stop filibustering yourself!
This Thursday, I’ll be heading down to City Hall to make myself heard over proposed cuts to city services. If you care about this city and have some time, you might want to come, too; the mayor has invited us! The way I see it, if no one shows up, the mayor has carte blanche over cuts because he can claim whatever he wants. But if even a handful of citizens show up, not only will city council hear us, but all of Toronto. Why? Well, let’s do the math (because someone has to): If just a hundred people show up ((that’s less than the number of people that come to the Hot Yam! in a week and a small fraction of the cyclists that showed up to city hall recently)), that’s a whole working day’s worth of citizens addressing Toronto City Council. If this drags on for a few days, you can be the media will pick up on this and if our voices fall on deaf ears, well, an election can’t come soon enough.
I’ll be trying to prepare a detailed speech, to be broken down into five minute segments; I’ve already got a structure in mind. If you would like to help contribute a section or more to this speech or would like to read one of these five minute segments (maybe because you lack the time to write one in advance), drop me a line!