Mizblog

This is what we’ve been saying for years! Oh, and we’ve got our own experiments to back it up, though we haven’t taken the time to test all the alternative study strategies used in this comparison. If only it were easier to develop targeted, computer-based tests for all needs. The computer could test you until you knew the material. It could present things you need more help learning, and slowly phase out the things you already know, giving you more time to master more material.

That’s what our software does!

The lesson you never got taught in school: How to learn! | Neurobonkers | Big Think.

This just made my day exciting. It’s apparently coincidental that another huge asteroid is making a flyby tomorrow, since the approach will be from a different angle than was apparent in this encounter. The blaze lit up the sky like the sun, and the shockwave set off car alarms and shattered windows. Very exciting!

BREAKING: Huge Meteor Explodes Over Russia..

Flight From Death – The Quest For Immortality is a deep look at how apprehension about our own mortality motivates us as individuals and in our various human cultures.

I’ve been listening to this video every morning for the last month. It’s a great wake-up call, reminding me to be grateful for every day, and to do my best to improve my life with the little time I have left.

Memento Mori – “Remember you will die”

Death ALWAYS Delivers – Jed McKenna Tribute 4 of 6 – YouTube.

Michael Ham: Negative Irreproducible Tweets… for Science.

It seems like all my original ideas are now being independently reproduced by other people, so I’ll just start dumping a few others that I’ve heard recently.

• “Placebo” brand pills – scientifically proven effective on many maladies
• Idiot urine test – always comes up positive

This: Scratching an itch through the scalp to the brain : The New Yorker.

I just finished reading Albert Camus – The Stranger, and I can’t help but identify with the main character. The biggest difference between him and me is that he doesn’t seem to think of much past tomorrow, except that all week he looks forward to being with his girlfriend on Sundays. I put a whole lot more effort trying to peer into the future: planning and scheming, working toward goals. Mersault was a simpleton. An idiot.

And yet if you really dig down and think about things from a relativist viewpoint, who’s to say he’s wrong when he asserts that no life is worth living? We all die and then people forget us. What’s the point? For me it all just comes back to survival. We’re here because that’s what we do, because we’re alive. If it wasn’t what our ancestors did, we wouldn’t be here to worry about it.

I did receive one surprise insight from this book – the justice system is geared to weed out socially maladapted limbic systems. People are so interested in the emotional displays of accused criminals because the limbic system is what we’ve evolved to allow us to function in a community setting. A messed up limbic system makes one unable to function as a cog in the machine, and has to be discarded or repaired or maybe just beat back into shape.

1. Avoiding pain above all else is a dead end road that ends in failure (and, of course, pain).
2. Food won’t fix the bad feelings.
3. Change is hard, and it takes time, but it’s the only way things will get better.
4. Money should be a measure of how much you’ve contributed to everyone else’s lives, instead how much you’ve contributed to wealthy people’s lives.
5. My worth as a person is not affected by the casual behavior of strangers.
6. You can tell when a watermelon is ripe by the reduction of contrast between its stripes.
7. The only thing that matters is results.

I attended a wedding this afternoon. Dave Kitani and Ji Son got married, and it was the biggest Jesus fest I’ve ever seen. I think Dave and Ji are really nice people, and the wedding theme was a very cleverly thought out political allegory, but the cheerful little zombie cult stuff was too much.

The other thing that bugged me was that the selected scripture (Ephesians 31-35 or something like that) was written by Paul, who I consider to be something of a lunatic. He emphasized that the woman’s role in the marriage is to respect the husband, but no mention was made of a husband’s duty to respect his wife. It was the old patriarchal cultural biases being reiterated. I hope those two don’t actually try to emulate that antiquated formula.

After the wedding, KP, John, and I went over to Joel’s house in Santa Monica. From there we walked all the way to Venice beach, and out to the end of the pier at Washington Blvd., where we saw a dozen or so fireworks shows at various distances up and down the coast. The closest show was Marina Del Rey, and it was weak for most of its duration. Single bursts were fired at a fairly steady pace, sometimes with two of the same in a row, and sometimes with long silences between bursts. But the finale was really exciting.

The walk home was exciting too, because drunken crazy people were lighting fireworks off on the beach. Some of them were going horizontally into the surrounding neighborhood. It was slightly harrowing but still overall a fun experience.

After a stop at Holy Guacamole for some burritos, we went back to Joel’s place and watched Die Hard 2. This was difficult because the disk kept skipping. Finally, John fixed the disk and we watched the conclusion. We decided that the reporter on the plane wasn’t such a bad guy, but Holly (the wife) was a seriously violent bitch who deserved jail time. Also, the whole story falls apart if you think about it for 5 seconds, so don’t do that or you’ll ruin the enjoyable action. :)

KP and John are going to Hawaii on Monday. Ji has already moved out of the lab. It’s going to be much more sparsely populated in there for a while. I miss them already.