My experience living with roommates after moving out of my triple sophomore year at Brown have for the most part been pretty awesome. Last year and this summer so far have been especially wonderful. I think it is a combination of luck and my slow but steady growing appreciation for social interaction.
tags: pensieve, sanfrancisco
I spend at least an hour or two in the Ugli almost every day. I realized I have gotten completely used to people openly eating and talking within the library – not just in the lobby and cafe, but right next to the stacks.
I wonder if it was always like this in the the Ugli, or if it is as recent development. Although I didn’t spend very much time in them, I always got the impression that the the Rock and Gelman were super quiet food-free spaces.
Interestingly, the one thing I don’t see a lot is people napping, which I both observed and partook in both the Rock and the SciLi. I am 98% sure it is because there are few if any couches here. It’s all blocky wooden chairs and tables.
Evidence does indeed confirm that people adjust to both positive and negative changes in circumstances with surprising speed, and then promptly forget that they did so…Thus we find ourselves on a hedonic treadmill in which we strive for an imagined happiness that forever slips out of our grasp, beckoning us onward…
that doesn’t involve me refraining from licking my lips or breathing with my mouth open?
tags: pensieve
Woo, it appears I managed to avoid being hit by the recent attack on older versions of Wordpress, even though I hadn’t upgraded my installation in forever. I’ve upgraded to 2.8.4 and I am enjoying the new interface and the fact that I just found a working version of the live archives plugin.
The plugin shows total post counts for each year and month, making it very obvious how my posting frequency has dropped off in the past couple of years.
(I made that graph using Google Chart Generator, which was the nicest looking online graph tool I have found so far. Unfortunately I couldn’t figure out how to make the origin on the y axis start at 0 – maybe because this is technically a line chart and not a graph?)
If you look at the month level, the one of the big drop off points is May 2007. I can’t think of any specific event that happened then, other than perhaps the beginning of my “college is ending and the real world is fast approaching” anxiety which later peaked during my first semester senior year.
tags: pensieve
In the future we have ways of interacting with computers that are much less sedentary and more varied, so it is easier to avoid eye strain and repetitive strain injuries. There will be different modes or levels of activeness. The current keyboard layout we have will be obsolete.
Existing interfaces this could involve:
Touchscreen
Tablet where you can draw or write by hand
Speech recognition
Screen readers
3D display (assuming I am correct in thinking that that 3D illusions actually trick the eyes into behaving as if they are looking at items of different depths)
Stenograph-like input device combined with predictive text
E-reader like screens that can be read by ambient light instead of backlight
Portable projectors
Foot pedals
tags: interfaces, pensieve