Even in the best financial times, knowing your credit score and what’s in your credit report is sound practice. Unfortunately, the three credit reporting bureaus make it just about impossible to attain your credit information, especially if you’re a young, mobile individual: the type of person who most needs to know their credit history.
I think Steven Leavitt (of Freakonomics) best distills this idea to its very core.
“So if you take the drug and pee on a special piece of paper, a secret message appears. If you don’t take the drug, you can pee on it all you want, but it will not reveal the secret message.”
I can definitely see this extending to doping at the Tour Du France, only the message would be “Allez directement en prison, vous porcine américaine.”
The graph above appears in a post over at Cognitive Daily. Basically, the colored columns for each age group correspond to three different “finding” tasks associated with objects underneath cups. In all three, a reward is hidden under one of two cups, and then the cups are hidden from view while the table rotates 180 degrees (to swap the location of the cups) or 360 degrees (to keep the cups in the same locations). The tasks vary as follows:
Colored cups: The cups are the visual indicator that a change has or has not occurred.
Left/Right: The cups are the same color, but the table is the visual indicator: half-black and half-white. The cups occupy exactly one color.
Top/Bottom: The cups are the same color, and the table is the visual indicator: half-black and half-white. The cups straddle the color division line. If the table is black on top, rotating it 180 degrees means it will be black on the bottom.
To me, the interesting thing is the decrease in performance in the colored cup task: arguably the most basic. I suspect that not enough data was gathered. I’d love to read the article, but not for the $11.95 asking price.
BumpTM makes swapping contact information as simle as bumping two phones together. No typing, no searching a list for the right person, no shaking your phone, no modem noises, no mistakes.
Finally, a business-card replacement that makes sense. Bump provides seamless transfer of information using a shared, secured, authorizable medium. You can’t have my contact information unless I want you to have it. I get to pick what contact information you recieve, and there’s no chance for error at data entry.
Simply brilliant. Another reason I’m still impressed with the iPhone and the developer talent.
Saw this list of Twitter uses the other day; kudos to Olin for the top spot (though the list might be unranked) for the 3rd-Floor West Hall laundryroom Twitter agent. Anyone familiar with this know how it works? I don’t remember how the LaundryView system works, but if I recall correctly, there’s e-mail functionality. It’d be interesting to learn more. Reply in comments if you’ve got the details.
You’d think my work laptop would have all the bells and whistles ready to go. After all, I run cygwin, the Linux emulator, as well as have full (legal!) installations of Office 2003 Professional and the latest updates from Microsoft. Apparently, my installation has issues, both of which are font related.
First, with cygwin. I tried to set up LaTeX, and hit wall after wall. Getting past using TeTeX instead, I still hit issues with installing Ghostscript, both the windows executable and the binary from cygwin. Something, deep within the belly of the machine is going haywire, but it pains me how easy it is to set up LaTeX and GS in Ubuntu: GS comes pre-installed in Hardy Heron, and after 10 minutes with the CLI I had a full PDF version of Professor Allen Downey’s How To Think Like A Computer Scientist, compiled from source. As of this writing, my windows/GS problems are still unresolved, so thanks, Windows.
The other issue is with unicode boxes in Firefox. Even in FF3.0, you can run into problems with boxes instead of text like this: さんぽ (if you’re seeing boxes here, you’re seeing the problem.) Apparently, Widnows doesn’t have full-on unicode support on by default, so you’ll have to get a full sans-serif Unicode font and install it. A simpler way might be to follow these instructions for Office installations, though YMMV. Don’t forget to restart FF if you go this route.
Even with years of experience, I still slap my head when it comes to understanding the pains and hassles Windows environments face. One of these days…..
Obviously, I’m not starting out so hot. I’ve yet to post to the blog this week. But, fear not, I’m still here, and I know I’ll sometimes fall off my goal. Nothing to do but just get back up and try again.
At any rate, I know one of my problems is knowing what exactly to blog about. As you can see on the left, the scope is fairly generic. I want to move away from blogging about my life and more towards blogging towards a specific topic. I don’t watch enough TV or see enough movies (shocking!) to blog about them.
But what I do want to post about more is the interesting tidbits and knowledge that I come across in my life: sometimes this will take the form of trivia, other times it will be new vocabulary words, or a surprising statistic. Occasionally, it will be a how-to or fact related to computer engineering, which is not just a hobby, but my current job.
Since philonoist means “a lover of learning”, this fits with the theme of the blog as I originally planned it out. I might, and I mean might start up another wordpress installation with more personal stuff, but that’s very doubtful, as I don’t post that much and I’ve tried it before and it doesn’t work.
A very happy new year to any and all still RSSing this blog (all six of you). One of my goals this year is to revamp philonoist.net and update the frequency with which I write. I do not believe strongly in New Year’s resolutions – change does not abide by a calendar. But I do believe that January is a good time to take stock in my comittments and desires, and realign my life accordingly.
Having a blog has always been a priority to me, albeit not a very high one. The concept of an unedited, unpoliced space is quite appealing. But my work with Philonoist.net ebbs and flows; I took quite some time off from the blog in 2008. In reading This Year I Will…, M.J. Ryan’s fantastic compendium of tips, tricks, and advice, I rediscovered S.M.A.R.T. goals. Thus, I present one of my goals of 2009.
S – Update philonoist.net with an originial article 3 days a week. M – Absolutely. It’s trivial to check the article count for a week. A – The goal is certainly attainable. One early step is to create a list of topic ideas, since part of my problem is finding relevant topics. R – I definitely can set aside 15-20 minutes three times a week. T – The goal is valid for the whole year.
You owe it to yourself to spend the next 4 minutes or so watching this clip. Photographer Robbie Cooper has a series of video captures (beautifully lit, I might add) of kids and young teens playing video games. Titled “Immersion”, one possible way to interpret the video is a damnation of the incredible magnetism of violent, borderline pornographic realistic video-games out today, and more importantly, the impact such immersion has on today’s youth. There are some particularly chilling, almost scary, clips, but the one that drove it home for me was the wide-eyed youngster in the Nike uni… no flinching from that one.
