It used to be, I’d wake up, check my email, respond if needed, then get on with my day. Maybe check my email again an hour or two later.

Now, it’s wake up, check my main email, check Facebook, check Twitter, check Friendfeed, chat on MSN a bit, check Tumblr, check Google Reader, chat on Google Chat a bit, check my other email address, check the news, and oh, it’s been an hour, so there might be something new at my main email. And Facebook. Can’t forget Twitter. Maybe in between, if there’s time, I think of something to blab about on the blog – hi – and then it’s time for the cycle to resume.

Then, oh, whoops, it’s bed time. I’ve been at the computer for 16 hours. And I’ve wet myself.

What I should do is unplug my router. I should turn off my computer. For seriously, what I should do is, I should cut off my electricity and chop up my desk to burn for heat. You know, really get back to the basics and focus on what’s important – family, friends, pets, a good book.

I’ll just check my email one last time.

———-

Edit: In related news, here’s an article on multitasking in Wired Science. It’s interesting, but could also win the award for most blatant contradiction between the headline and the article.

I’ve dialed a wrong number once, maybe twice in my whole life. Most people would probably claim similarly low misdial rates.

I’ve received maybe 50 wrong number calls, minimum.

How does this add up? It must mean there is a small number of people making a large number of misdirected calls. Are there people out there who, instead of dialing a number, just mash the keypad and hope for the best? This is even more baffling in the age of cell phones, where you can just speak a friend’s name and your robot phone will call them for you.

Perhaps there are some psychological factors going on. Misdialing is an embarrassing mistake, so surely my biased self-serving memory reconstructs more instances of other people making mistakes (receiving wrong numbers) than me making them (dialing them). However, I doubt that a subtle memory bias could skew the numbers by such a large order of magnitude.

Or am I just weird? Do most of you dial just as many wrong numbers as you receive? C’mon, you can admit it. Everyone (else) makes mistakes. Leave an anonymous comment and let me know. Maybe this could be the next psychology study in my series of completely unrelated research topics.

P.S. I tried Googling “wrong number” for a nice picture to go with this post, but all I got was like 500 pictures of these guys:

When he gave the go-ahead this morning, I was happy to participate.  Here’s what I tweeted to him:

“First thing that came to mind was a star shape (oops, thinking of Zener cards?). Railing. Concrete. A lamp post. Playground?”

I also acted like a real remote-viewer and scribbled a few drawings:

Then it came time to pick which location I thought he was at, out of these five:

Well look at that! My posts, railings, and concrete all over the place. But I thought the most striking resemblence was between my middle picture and his middle picture (C), so that’s the one I guessed.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t where he was. He was at D.  So if I am psychic, it’s only for my future experience, not for remote viewing a real location.

Wiseman’s experiment isn’t really unique except for the Twitter aspect. Similar studies have been done many times, and strangely, usually find above-chance results (i.e., people are able to guess where the remote person is more often than if they were guessing). It’s also full of holes and flaws in its methodology (so many that I hope the true purpose of the study is remaning hidden and this is all a cover story for a better study).  Still, it’s good to see psychic phenomena – which the majority of people in the world believe in with little question – getting some attention and new technology applied to it. I think both religious and scientific bigotry have kept good research from being done in this area, and I hope we can overcome silly taboos to engage in more of it.

Go follow Wiseman on Twitter to participate – it’s going for a few more days. Or see his blog for more details and results.

So is she any good at practicing what she preaches?

Let me get the negatives out of the way first. This is Mur’s first novel, published with the small new publisher Swarm Press, and the lack of experience shows. Nearly every chapter is full of one or more typos, grammatical errors, or otherwise awkward prose. Jarring continuity errors crop up (e.g., there is off-hand mention of demons long before they actually show up), and characters often do inexplicably random things. A lack of polish usually doesn’t get in a way of a good story, but here it is so rampant that it can obfuscate the plot and kill any sense of immersion. One careful proof reader could have fixed this. They should hire a teaching assistant, like me; I brutally criticize writing for a living, and do it for almost no money.

But pushing past technical issues, there is a creative and exciting story here. Playing For Keeps tells the story of the superpowered people between superheroes and supervillains. They’re not good nor evil, just ordinary, and while they can do extraordinary things, their abilities are so specific as to be useless outside of a single purpose (e.g., a cook who can predict anyone’s perfect meal; an old man who can take off and regrow one leg). The highlight of the novel is seeing how, when put to the test, even seemingly shitty powers can be jiggered to do incredible things. The plot moves at a Flash-like pace, with twists and turns happening at the end of nearly every short chapter, making it a quick, fun read that’s hard to put down.

Playing For Keeps is a flawed, awkward mess, but it’s very hard to not have a great time reading it. With unlimited sequel and spinoff potential, and hopefully a bit more time and experience for polishing up future endeavors, I can’t wait to see more from Mur Lafferty and the Playing For Keeps universe.

In humans, the short-term storage of symbolic information—as when you enter an acquaintance’s phone number into your iPhone’s memory—is associated with conscious processing.

A few years ago, when I was first learning about memory, the example probably would have gone more like “your short term memory holds small amounts of information, like a phone number, while you rehearse it in your head until you have it memorized.”

The main difference between the examples is that the iPhone has replaced our own biological memory storage as the final resting place of long term memories. I think this points toward a more general trend, in which technology is taking over many of the functions that our brains carried out before. Why memorize a phone number when you can, at any time, just retrieve it on a screen with a few swipes of your finger? Why commit the times table to memory when a calculator is always close at hand?

Storing memories outside of our brains is nothing new. Scrawling something on paper is much the same. However, the ease with which we can store and retrieve these external memory banks is improving at an exponential rate. Today, a lot of the human race’s collective store of knowledge can be searched in fractions of a second with a few keystrokes in a search engine. Maybe tomorrow, our fingers won’t even be an intermediary step; a direct link between our minds and databases need not be science fiction. Google may not just be the future of computers, but the future of the human race.

As we continue to improve our access to information outside of our heads, I think there will be less emphasis on teaching people raw information, and more emphasis on teaching what to do with information. [self plug] Scientific research into topics like human creativity (which computers don’t seem to have mastered yet) and cognitive psychology will become increasingly important [/self plug], as will disciplines like philosophy and math, which deal purely with how to manipulate information into something useful. We should probably also keep Keanu Reeves around to make sure we haven’t slipped into The Matrix without realizing it.

Christof Koch (2009). Exploring Consciousness Through the Study of Bees Scientific American

It’s a nice mix of recognizing an extremely important scientific accomplishment with just a pinch of end-of-the-world paranoia.

The truth is that the world has about the same chance of ending today as it did yesterday. But I think the dimwitted people protesting the large hadron collider aren’t all bad. It’s seriously nice to be reminded that the world could end at any moment. All of human history is just a brief blip in time on a cosmic scale; it could end right now and the universe would barely notice. But the thing is, in a universe with a past almost completely devoid of our existence, and a future that could very easily be the same, all we’ve got are our short little lives here in the present.

The fact that the universe is vast, cold, and uncaring does not make our lives meaningless. It’s the opposite; it shows that we are the exception rather than the rule, so we damn well better take advantage of this fleeting gift and make our lives mean something. It also makes it all the more incredible that we are on our way to understanding this vast, cold, and uncaring universe with technology like the LHC. Even if it did end human existence, at least we went out trying to understand our place in the universe. And with a good excuse to have sex.

(xkcd rules)

A peculiar fact about Facebook is that you are not supposed to write on your own wall. Because that really could have gone either way, eh? With blogs, conversations take place on a single blog, often with the blog’s owner commenting on his or her own blog. It has the advantage of the entire conversation being in one place. But a disadvantage is that anyone who comments on a blog will have to go back to that blog to see if anyone responded to it.

What I wonder is who decided that posting on your own blog is OK, but posting on your own Facebook profile is not. Was it one person who persuasively argued for a position? (e.g., I’ve seen it argued that posting on your own wall is like leaving a note on your own fridge and hoping your friends will stop by to read it) Or did it just happen naturally due to subtle properties of Facebook that make having conversations between walls easier than having them on a single wall? Or was it completely arbitrary, with one position that just happened to spread around and eventually became codified as a new taboo?

It makes you wonder if other taboos develop in similar ways. Like, who decided it was wrong to wear a hat at dinner time? I’m sure there was a good reason for it at one point, but now, I see no reason why having a piece of cloth on your head disrupts a meal.

Of course, a good source of LOLs is breaking taboos, so I’m gonna go write inane messages to friends on my own Facebook wall while I eat pizza in a cowboy hat.

It was an informal test with a writer and a few friends. Without statistical analysis, it’s impossible to tell if the friends were guessing at an above-chance level or not (there was one correct guess about vodka brand during the trial, but who knows if it was based on taste or just a lucky guess). Still, the theory behind it makes sense; vodka is basically alcohol and water, without any oak barrels or extra ingredients being added, so differences would have to be subtle if they exist. And if people who claim to be able to distinguish one brand from another obviously can’t do so at all even in an informal test, differences can’t be as major as we’ve been lead to believe.

The implication here is that all vodkas are the same. Is that really true, though? I don’t think so. I’d argue that the appeal of a drink is about more than just the electrical signals going from our tongues and noses to our brains. It’s also about atmosphere, expectations about taste, preparation rituals, discussion of the drink with other people, etc. These factors are eliminated from a blind taste test, but present in real life. A blind test may reveal that vodkas are the same in the absence of knowledge about what brand is being drunk (drinken? drunken?), which is interesting information, but doesn’t exactly map onto real-life drinking situations.

In real life, the subjective experience of a drink is different depending on the brand. For some people, buying a $100 bottle of vodka, putting it in the freezer, garnishing it and mixing it with just the right amount of ice (or not) is more enjoyable than doing the same with a $20 bottle. Furthermore, it probably actually tastes better to them. It may be an “illusion” in the sense that the difference in taste is not purely based on receptors in the tongue and nose; but does it really matter if good taste signals are originating in the tongue or in the drinker’s own biased brain? No; a better taste is a better taste.

The problem, though, is if people knew that all vodkas were physically identical, they might have a harder time deceiving themselves into believing that “better” brands actually taste better. I guess that’s the difference between actual physical differences in taste and illusory differences; illusions can disappear as soon as one becomes aware of them. It’d be hard to enjoy a $100 bottle of vodka knowing that the stuff inside is the same as the stuff in the $20 bottle.

Luckily I’m not so into vodka after several pukey experiences with it, and I doubt the same lack of brand differences applies to more complex drinks like rum, scotch, wine, and beer. “Still”, a lot of the differences are probably all in our heads, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Here is a dog made of beer labels:

(from here.)

This is the 2nd post in an unintentional series of posts about the link between alcohol and psychology. See the 1st: Beer and Statistics.

Here is the full reference:
Sorrentino, R. M., Seligman, C., & Battista, M. E. (2007). Optimal distinctiveness, values, and uncertainty orientation: Individual differences on perceptions of self and group identity. Self and Identity, 6, 322-339.

If you’re subscribed through your university (or wherever), you can find the article here, at your local library, or through Google. That’s right, I’m Googlable.

Optimal distinctiveness refers to the fact that people don’t like to feel too different from other people, but also don’t like to feel too similar. However, this is true for some people more than others. We found that people who prefer certainty to uncertainty also tend to try thinking of themselves as similar to other people after being made to feel different. In other words, these certainty oriented people tend to want to assimilate back into a crowd when they feel like they are weirdos who don’t fit in.

We proved this with advanced science. Here is some science from the article:

Those are graphs and formulas formulae. It doesn’t get much more scientific than that.

I do find it strange that this article costs $43.75 to purchase without a subscription. That’s more than most books, just for one article that is, no offense to the authors (none taken), not all that exciting. What’s strangest, though, is that I don’t get a dime of that. Musicians complain that record companies take a large percentage of the profit from record sales. With us, publishers take 100%.

Plus, isn’t science supposed to be free, open, and collaborative?

Oh well. Luckily, with the internet, it’s nearly free to distribute a file containing a research article, and many researchers make their own work available free of charge on their personal web sites. Hey, maybe I should do that. I will soon. You just stay tuned.

Anyway, I’m done bragging / feeling sorry for my broke self.

See also: Optimal Distinctiveness Theory on Wikipedia. Oh look, there’s our article! How did that get there? *WINKY FACE*

Speaking of which, anybody interested in science should take note of Clarke’s laws of prediction:

• 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

• 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
• 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

There’s a lot to take out of those three little statements. But I think the main message is one of hope rather than cynicism. What seems impossible may very well be possible; what we consider magic today may be within our reach tomorrow.

Even though it’s impossible, let’s hope Clarke is now a glowing fetus looking down on us from a bubble floating in space. Float in peace, Arthur C. Clarke.

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* Actually, he died tomorrow, since he was in Sri Lanka, where it’s already Wednesday.