Shad BrainLab Workshop

Hey, are you a high school student who's about to head off to a Shad Valley summer program in a few days (after the July 1st long weekend in 2011)? Are you going to the University of Waterloo perchance?

If you answered yes to both these questions then I have a very important message for you: at some point in the next month you will be given an opportunity to participate in a neuroscience workshop (four two-hour long sessions spread out over a week for a total of 8 hours of brainy goodness). You might, at that time, be given other choices of workshops and some of those other choices may or may not involve robots, cars, the environment, the prefix 'nano' or other things like that. You will then ignore these other choices and choose the Path of Neuroscience -- unless, that is, you're really not interested in how your mind works, in which case you should go with the environmental one.

Oh, also, have fun! Shad's pretty great. Sleep now while you still can.

Quality Wasted Time

When I first started this blog, its mandate was to talk about engineering-lifestyle things, like freaking out about midterms and being jealous of MIT. I've strayed a bit from that ideal over the years, but I'd like to get back to it now with a discussion about the quintessential student pastime of wasting time on the internet.

Now, since you're reading my blog, I'm going to take it for granted that you already appreciate the benefits of spending time on online activities that are not, strictly speaking, useful. With that in mind, we can skip the moral questioning and get straight to the fun stuff: did you know you can download parts of Wikipedia as books?

It's true. I'm not referring to WikiBooks either, which are notoriously incomplete and haphazardly edited, but actual PDFs/ODT files/ZIM files/physical books made from the content of Wikipedia itself.

This might not sound like that much of a time waster, because navigating Wikipedia the conventional way is probably even more of a time waster due to all the link-hopping. Reading a book of encyclopedia articles could also be considered a constructive use of time. To both of these objections I present: this six hundred page book of chess variants. Clearly this is a waste of time and something I would never have wasted time on before it became possible to load onto an e-reader.

So you now have a couple thousand new books to read (starting, perhaps, with Philosophy of Science, Neuroscience, LGBT themes in science fiction, fantasy and horror, Consciousness, Complex Dynamics, or University Genetics). Interestingly, Creationism and Intelligent Design is one of the larger books, probably because the arguments, lawsuits, and politics involved are distressingly entertaining.

Moving along, I've also taken to wasting a fair amount of time on the Khan Academy site. Again, studying mathematics through a tutoring site (an incredibly good tutoring site with video tutorials from one instructor spanning topics from basic addition to vector calculus) might seem like a benign time waster, but I assure you it is quite possible to spend far too long there.

For one thing, the Khan Academy has discovered that the future is games and uses a gaming-inspired reward system to motivate students to study more. This only affects people who log into the site (with a Google or Facebook account) but should you be so unwise as to do so, you'll suddenly have the option to gain lots of points by watching video lectures and answering simple interactive math tests. Since the tests are aimed more at the elementary level than the university level, it is quite possible to gain ludicrous amounts of utterly meaningless points in the span of a few hours if you're willing to answer lots of arithmetic questions. I don't personally recommend doing this but, having done it, I have a renewed appreciation for not having to manually multiply dozens of three-digit number pairs together for homework anymore.

Seriously though, Khan Academy has a lot of good stuff for anyone who wants to learn stuff (mostly math, but there's a couple biology, chemistry, and history videos available for good measure). It's a similar type of time waster as watching lots of TED talks and you can even combine the two by watching a TED talk about Khan Academy.

In other news, I have a free unlimited internet connection and am really good at arithmetic again for no apparent reason.

In actual other news: brains, concepts, plasticity, self-organizing, going to CogSci 2011 woohoo, Shad BrainLab, iGEM, software, interfaces, coding Saturday, going to be awesome, can't say much about any of these things, but they're all awesome.

Back in Business

My laptop is back from repairs with a new hard drive, a new motherboard, and a new lease on life. I have apparently forgotten how to draw in that time, but no matter, it'll be just like the good ol' days when I was first writing this blog.

So what's been happening while I haven't been writing? Quite a lot and not much. There's a lot of stuff that's been on the brink of happening for a while: I've started working on a neural model of concept formation (which I'll try to explain one of these days), there's an iGEM hackathon coming up this weekend (the largest current piece of documentation about this project is available here as a PDF; again, I need to work on a better explanation of this), and the Canucks just got destroyed in the playoffs (or so I gather from the final score).

I find it a little concerning that I'm getting increasingly lazy about trying to communicate the stuff I'm working on (y'know... brains mumble models, biology mumble design software). It seems that I've finally gotten too busy making stuff to be as enthusiastic about talking about making stuff. This is a bit of a problem since I think the types of projects I'm working on are things that need to be talked about, both because "the world has to know!" but mainly because it's easy to forget how little I understand about my work until I start trying to write about it. I keep wanting to put together a super awesome multimedia webcomic rollercoaster seminar presentation ninja film extravaganza showcasing these things, but I just can't seem to find the time. Fortunately, with the return of my laptop, my ability to make ninja film webcomic seminar things has just gone up twentyfold, so you never know.

Thanks for reading about me being too busy working to write about work. Come back next time when I may talk about what work I'm working on. Work.

Parties: I am the most fun at them.