Ideas Worth Spreading

One of the best websites on the internet (yes, the entire internet) is, in my opinion, TED.com. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), for those who aren't familiar, is an annual conference where some of the world's most extraordinary people -- scientists, artists, entertainers, entrepreneurs, innovators -- convene to share their ideas in concise 20-minute talks that range from thought-provoking to inspiring to mind-blowing. To read more about TED itself, you can go here, but I want to share some of my favourite talks that I've watched recently. Talk descriptions are taken straight from the TED site, and below each video I've included some comments of my own.

Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see

Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.

I'm extremely interested in cognition and how people process information, so in addition to the treatments his groups has been doing, his research and its implications are very exciting.

Dan Ariely on our buggy moral code

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we're predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can't grasp.

I actually think the description for this one is somewhat misleading. The studies Ariely describes aren't really about why "we think it's OK", so much as under what circumstances we tend to cheat (and, based on those findings, he suggests explanations for this). However, given that the factors involved in those explanations aren't (in all likelihood) consciously considered by people who are deciding whether to cheat or not, his findings are quite interesting. If we're predictably irrational, we certainly aren't intuitively so.

[As an aside, I recently read the paper of his about what the authors term "coherent arbitrariness", how even when the value people ascribe to something is arbitrary (e.g., the amount of money they would have to be paid to be willing to endure the pain of the vice-grip on their finger, as he mentions in this TED talk), they still make adjustments in "coherent" (predictable) ways (i.e., demanding more money for longer duration of pain). He has also authored a neat paper on how buyers and sellers can value the same good quite differently. If you're interested in either paper, let me know and I can send them to you.]

Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds

Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works -- sharing her ability to "think in pictures," which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of smart geeky kids.

This talk actually made me shed tears. I cannot explain why. Maybe it has something to do with how strongly I feel about education and the role it ought to have in tapping into the specific strengths that everyone has -- getting people to realize their potential, especially in spite of what "conventional wisdom", such as academic curricula, would indicate should be expected of them.

Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.

This talk I actually watched years ago. As someone who is given to spending obscene amounts of time deliberating over important (and not-so-important) decisions, often to the point where my indecision ends up making my decision for me, I found this talk Most Excellent. Even aside from never really being able to know which choice will be "best", there's the reality that, even if we could always choose the "best" options, it wouldn't necessarily make much difference to how happy we end up being: by and large, humans make themselves (relatively) happy with the reality they are faced with.

Hm. There are several more talks that I really want to share, but I'll save those for another post.

On social media I once considered dumb

For a long time, I was one of those people who shocked others when I revealed that I didn't use Facebook. I really didn't see the point of it, and I thought it was dumb, how much time people spent on it. Eventually, years after the first of my friends to get it, I reluctantly and begrudgingly signed up. And then I proceeded to almost never, ever use it, except to view the occasional photos or event info that existed nowhere else.

More recently, however, not only do I find myself using it continually (and being one of the shocked when I now meet people who don't use it), but my hackles tend to go up when people pooh-pooh at it, and I even find myself defending it now and then.

It made me consider exactly what has changed since once upon a time when I never used it, and it seems to boil down to two main things:

First, the world has become a smaller place for me. Part of this is because of people graduating and moving away, and part of this is because I've met people abroad... but much moreso now than ever before, the people I know and really want to keep up with are all over the place; very few of my friends even live in the same city as me. We all have our own separate lives, and we're busy with hugely varied schedules, so it's nice to have quick updates on at least the major highlights (and often a lot of minor ones) even when there's nothing specific we'd be inclined to, say, email one another about.

Second is that one of the main things I do whenever I have a big enough chunk of free time is dance. This, of course, requires somewhere to go dancing and people to dance with, so being able to keep up with goings-on in the dance scenes relevant to me is huge. There are lots of different events and socials and workshops organized by different people and dance schools, and it's hugely convenient to not only know what's going on when I happen to be going to Toronto (or, perhaps more importantly, have something to plan around so I can go for the stuff I'm interested in), but also have a rough idea of who's going to be at what. Maybe this wouldn't be as big a deal if I were out dancing several times a week (as was the case during my Summer of Freedom) and could keep up by word of mouth, but alas... time is far more scarce these days... and even in this scenario, having events listed all in one place is super handy. The Events feature is also of great utility when trying to wrangle my various scattered amigos into the occasional get-together.

There are other reasons I use Facebook these days, but those are the most important ones, and the ones which perhaps most rationally justify my reliance on a form of social media that part of me still hates.

UPDATE: I like how I happened to post this just before Facebook decided to revamp the homepage layout to something that makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon.

Epic. Fail.

Helical line (TM)

Quoth the can: "The helical line formed in and extending through the length of the cylindrical cookie is a registered trademark of D.B.C. Corp. All rights reserved."

... really? :|!

Multitasking and me

Nicholas Carr blogged last month about multitasking -- or, rather, hypermultitasking and its implications. How we sacrifice depth of attention for breadth: "... concentration, contemplation, reflection, introspection. The less we practice these habits of mind, the more we risk losing them altogether."

One commenter notes: "Scarily, it also appears to be highly addictive - sort of like acquired attention deficit disorder, making it quite difficult to focus on one thing, even when it's necessary/there's time to do so." Another wonders about whether this may affect personal happiness.

I'd mentioned to my supervisor today that I have a lot of trouble attending to things/people/whatever for very long. Even if I've just asked someone a question and they're in the middle of answering it, I *think* I'm listening, but then half the time it turns out that, really, I zoned out 20 seconds into their response. Never mind paying attention to an entire lecture. Hell, these days, it's not uncommon for me to forget what I'm saying mid-sentence, my train of thought having spontaneously jumped tracks against my will.

This is something that I've been struggling with to an increasing extent lately, and it's something that I really want to fix. I feel like I've all but lost my ability to get -- and remain -- engaged in a single task. To sit down and read something, start to finish, without punctuating my reading with five other things. Even the very blog post that got me thinking about this in the first place: I clicked to the page, read the title and the first paragraph or so, thought something to the effect of, "Oh, this is interesting; I want to read this,"... and yet, moments later, found that I had -- for some inexplicable reason and without consciously intending to do so -- flipped back to Google Reader and was checking my other feeds. Huh?

This wasn't always the case: I definitely didn't have this problem during the first couple years of my undergrad... and I'm not sure at what point my powers of attention started to waste away into practically nothing. By default I'd blame the undergrad education system somehow... the same way I blame it for turning me into a highly time-effective assessment-acing machine whose mental-bulimia approach to studying got her through three years of school with strong grades and no learning. (Not of the course material, anyway.) And by "turning me into", I suppose I really mean "letting me get away with being" -- since, in my view, no proper education system would let such student-bots through at anywhere near the top of their class.

But yeah... I think that in this case I can't rely solely on my good ol' scapegoat, The Postsecondary Education System, and must regretfully point the finger at what in fact *made* my undergrad experience (in a good way): my involvement in iGEM. Or, more accurately, the combination of iGEM and my need to see the whole picture and have a hand in everything. Heading up my team involved dealing with not only the project design stuff, but the lab work, the marketing, the funding proposals, the dozens of miscellaneous administration issues, as well as the management and coordination of people (full-time co-ops and other members) involved in each of the above... while somehow also doing my own coursework or research, as the case may have been. And I loved it; for however stressful it could get, it was also hugely rewarding. But I got really good at having a billion unrelated things flying around in my head at any given moment, ready to deal with whatever came up from one moment to the next, and I got really used to constantly switching tasks, switching modes... going from working on a proposal to helping someone troubleshoot in the lab to rescheduling some meeting or other at the last minute... somehow managing not to suffer from severe mental whiplash, but eventually relating all too well to the left side of this comic.

At some point I got past the micromanaging tendencies I once had and *actually* wanted to give other people oversight of things... and I got into the habit of looking things over only to the extent necessary to pass them off to the right person -- that is to say, very superficially, without any serious thinking involved. And despite all of the books and papers I once used to read at great length, these days I have to actively focus on reading continuously, forcing my eyes not to flit down through the beginning and end of each paragraph on a hasty hunt for the key points. (Okay, so maybe my days as a student-bot are partially to blame after all.)

I suppose, considering that haste is what got me here in the first place, there is no quick fix for my problem. Perhaps curling up in bed with a nice, long book will be a good first step toward rehabilitation.

We have a lot of juice.

The current contents of the top right shelf of my family's fridge:

1. carton of Tropicana orange juice (No Pulp)

2. carton of Tropicana orange juice (Grovestand: Lots of Pulp)

3. bag of milk

4. carton of Minute Maid orange juice ("Low Pulp" (wtf?))

5. carton of Allen's peach cocktail (i.e., peach-flavoured sugar-water masquerading as juice)

6. carton of egg nog (why??)

7. carton of Oasis pineapple juice

8. bottle of french vanilla coffee whitener

9. carton of Rubicon guava Juice (SO GOOD :O!)

10. carton of President's Choice "pineapple, guava and passion fruit juice & purée"

We have a lot of juice.

Preparations

I'm slowly inching my way toward starting to pack for my trip. I'm determined to pack even lighter than I did last time, my goal being a single not-entirely-full backpack. Some things that probably seem excessive but which I plan on bringing are a Portuguese dictionary and language book (not a phrasebook... I plan on doing some actual studying while I'm travelling), as well as a notebook and my sets of flash cards (of which I need to make more before I go... they take forever to cut and hole-punch :|!). I am torn about bringing my netbook. Part of the reason I bought it in the first place was for this sort of thing, but this time I am doing quite a bit more travelling *around*. Last time I stayed in one city and could therefore safely deposit my belongings at the hostel and not have to worry about them at all for the whole two+ weeks. This time, not only am I travelling through three cities, but for the first two there's going to be quite the trek from the airport to my hostel, meaning I'm reluctant to go completely broke on taxis, let alone twice. Normally I'd be fine about wandering my way through the city since I blend in well enough (pretty much all Brasilians I've met have told me I look Brasilian... whatever that means, since Brasilians can look like anything :P)... but the giant backpack is *just* a little conspicuous. (Just a tad.) I think it'll probably come down to whether it'll fit nicely in my bag along with everything else. :|

But my preparations so far haven't consisted solely of deliberation! I finally booked my hostel for São Paulo. I don't know why I put it off so long, considering it's the first place I'm going, but it turns out I was just in time: a day later and I wouldn't have been able to book online! :| I also went out today to exchange some money, and then I went to Shoppers looking for these little plastic travel tins to put cream-type stuff in. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I did find this:

Which is a bajillion times better! :D!

I can't even begin to express how much I love containers. It's probably a bit unhealthy, the extent to which I do. I can't explain it. My friend suggested that it's because they're practical, which is probably true. But even that fails to fully explain the intense satisfaction I derive from finding the Perfect Container. I mean, when I come across some sort of nice box or bag or tin, or even bottle/jar (or envelope), I always want to take it and save it for some kind of special use. And I'll try to think of things I could use it for, but if it's a *really* nice container, I don't want to hastily assign it to some purpose and then not have it for something that it's even better suited for. So it'll just end up sitting somewhere collecting dust instead of containing things! (Travesty!) BUT! On the rare occasion, I'll have some particular item(s) that I need to contain -- they could be multiple instances of a single item, or various types of items, or maybe even just one Important Item -- and I serendipitously happen across a Perfect Container! It holds all of the items and is just the right size for them: little to no extra room for them to roll or jumble around in, messing up their Perfect configuration. The Perfect Container does exactly what I wanted it to do -- nothing more, nothing less. And actually *putting* the items into the Perfect Container and then basking in their Perfect Containment: inexplicably satisfying!

So I must admit, the container (set) that I purchased above is not a Perfect Container. It has more bottles and tins-of-various-sizes than I actually need. But I do need some of them, and think of all the things I could put in the others! (Not that I'll be able to decide what to put in them...) But that's not all! It's specifically a carry-on toiletry set, so it conforms to the "three-ounce containers in a one-quart clear, sealable plastic bag" thing. The bag is exactly one quart! So awesome! And obviously it's designed for the bottles and tins it comes with, so no extra loose space for them to jumble around in! :D!

I think this is the most gleeful anything has made me in the last couple of days. Including hearing that my iGEM team is getting funding that we're going to use for DNA synthesis (which is really, really awesome). Make of this fact what you will.

Actually, on second thought, it probably ties with finally finding the elusive *good* guava Juice at Zehrs, on my way from the currency exchange place to Shoppers. :9

Avocado seeds

I really like avocado seeds for some reason. I don't know why. Maybe because they're so giant and smooth and round...

They're kind of cute. :3! It always makes me a bit sad when I accidentally score them with the knife while cutting the avocado... :|

Nutella

Today my friend lamented to me, "I have an interesting relationship with Nutella. I enjoy it, but I never know where to fit it into my meals." Laughing a bit, I realized that although I've never had a problem consuming Nutella when I feel for it, there are a lot of other things in my life that tend to remain on the sidelines along with his Nutella. Things I enjoy doing, like playing guitar, or listening to all kinds of music that I like, or studying Portuguese, or reading, or exercising. When I'm doing these things, I love it, but somehow I seem to have a lot of difficulty actually working them into my day-to-day activities. I don't know why this is, considering how much time I spend sitting around doing nothing at all.

Another of my Nutellas is really good juice. Like this amazing guava or mango nectar you can get in this big glass bottle. I only ever drink juice like this on its own. Juice like this really isn't a beverage: it's too rich, too thick, and too sweet to be refreshing or to drink with most food, and it's such a good experience on its own that it's kind of a waste to sully it with other flavours. It's like a dessert, or a snack, almost. Only not a subset of these categories. It's its own category altogether: Juice.

Sometimes I'll get a craving for Juice, so I get a cup and go to the fridge. But when I open the fridge, along with the desired Juice, I see orange juice! And seeing the orange juice makes me conscious of being thirsty, and the taste of orange juice is so salient to me that it takes over the part of my mind that imagines eating or drinking things and causes me to seek out these things. And so I have to drink the orange juice. And then by the time I've had some orange juice, I no longer feel for the originally desired Juice. And you can't squander Juice by drinking it when you aren't already salivating for it: futilely trying to create the Full Juice Experience (a.k.a. Finally Drinking the Sweet, Sweet Juice You Were Craving) by simply drinking the Juice any old time. It doesn't work, and then you have no Juice left for the next time you actually crave it and therefore have the precious opportunity to enjoy the Full Juice Experience. I've made this mistake many times before, and I rued my actions.