.the gpb kids.

Secrets of Movement

Posted by Mike - January 7, 2008 at 10:01:30 am

Jules and I thought this talk by Robert Full of UC Berkeley was pretty interesting. He’s doing research on feet.

IE8 Passes Acid 2 Test; Mike Still Sad

Posted by Mike - December 20, 2007 at 10:12:16 am

Recently the Internet Explorer development team posted that IE8 passes the Acid 2 standards test. Having spent a lot of time working around rendering issues in IE, I feel like I should be happy about this. I think I would be happy if everyone used the same browser. But unfortunately that’s not the case. I would even settle for all IE users updating to IE8 when it comes out. Hell I’d settle for an update to IE7. Alas, even though IE8 is standards compliant, I still have to work my way around IE6. And the chain of browsers is only as strong as the weakest link.

Biology: Transparent

Posted by Mike - November 7, 2007 at 08:11:05 am

So I was looking at the pretty colors in The Colors of Your Degree article over at the Colour Lovers site. They list the hood colors for graduation gowns. It’s good to see that agriculture (maize [that's a color?]), physical education (sage green), and theology (scarlet) all have colors. But, what happened to biology? Chemistry? Are all of the sciences that they don’t have listed lumped together under science (golden yellow)? Why would oratory (silver grey) and library science (lemon) have colors when the major fields of science are lumped together? How upsetting.

Robo Cars

Posted by Mike - November 5, 2007 at 09:11:58 am

Well, looks like Carnegie Mellon wins this time. Sorry Stanford.

This kind of stuff amazes me. Who wants to build a robo car with me? Here’s a PBS video from 2005 of the race.

It’s amazing how much it’s changed in the last few years. From not being able to finish a desert race, to negotiating traffic. Yay robots.

An Apple a Day

Posted by Mike - November 1, 2007 at 05:11:08 pm

Last night Jules and I went to the Apple store and picked up a few goodies. iWork for her and the newer Apple keyboard for me.

It’s pretty nice. Sounds like a laptop when you’re typing. It also feels a little more comfortable because it’s flatter so my wrists don’t tilt up as much. You get the same effect with the wrist pad, but I don’t really like those all that much. Anyway, thumbs up. Go get yourself one.

Slave Leia

Posted by Mike - October 2, 2007 at 06:10:03 pm

… looks over my desk.

Leia watches me program at work. This is probably some kind of sexual harassment case waiting to happen.

Pen Rev[i]ews

Posted by Jules - September 14, 2007 at 03:09:45 pm

I’ve been switching back and forth between two pens while writing in my notebooks at class and in lab to see which I liked better. In the end, the Itoya won out. While neither of these pictures are the exact size that I have, you get the idea:

The Itoya Finepoint 0.2mm writes crisply on notebook paper, with no bleeding. I like the textured grip around the, well, gripping area. I also liked the feel of the non glossy pen body. The labelling rubbed off within the first week of use, so that all I can make out is “STEM” and “0.2″.

I had high expectations for this Primacolor pen, but it failed miserably. Okay, perhaps not miserably- but there was noticeably more bleeding, which interfered when I tried to write numbers and letters in the mm range. How can I write in small letters when there is bleeding?? I might as well have bought a sharpie. I admit I’m a little obssessive.

Itoya:1 Prismacolor:0

The Persistence of Myths

Posted by Mike - September 6, 2007 at 08:09:30 am

Emma shares a lot of cog-sci links that I sometimes peruse. One of them was Infowar: strike early, strike often on Mind Hack which talked about Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach on the Washington Post website which I quoted below.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either “true” or “false.” Among those identified as false were statements such as “The side effects are worse than the flu” and “Only older people need flu vaccine.”

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.

So what does this mean to me? Trust no one.

The Graduate

Posted by Mike - September 4, 2007 at 01:09:37 pm

Jules told me last night that she was assigned a paper to read by one of our old graduate student instructors, Keith Slotkin. Apparently he published a paper in the June 2005 issue of Nature Genetics under the title Heritable transposon silencing initiated by a naturally occurring transposon inverted duplication. And according to Google scholar, it has been cited 12 times since then.

Maybe one day I’ll come up with some kind of crazy HTML, CSS or JavaScript method which people will use. They’ll call it the Horn Method… actually that sounds silly. I’ll have to think of something better.

2:30am

Posted by Mike - August 30, 2007 at 08:08:25 am

That’s roughly when I went to sleep last night after assembling my new computer and playing Bioshock on it. The assembly took roughly three hours and the OS and game installation took another two hours or so.

This was probably the smoothest hardware assembly I’ve ever done. Only had one hardware problem; I forgot to change the DVD-ROM to be the slave drive. Installing Vista was alright except I had the problem of it not having default drivers for the ethernet ports again. So I had to download them on the Mac and transfer. But after all of that I got a good 30 min of gameplay in.

I’ve got to say that the Antec P180B case I got is infinitely better than the other case I had. I should have taken pictures while I was assembling everything, but I’ll just throw out some highlights.

1. The power supply is on the bottom. I always thought it was funny how the heaviest component in a PC was always placed at the top. This is way better.
2. There is space behind the motherboard to route all of the power cables so they’re not hanging over it and getting in the way.
3. The HDD slots have silicon pads for the drives to sit on so they’re quiet.
4. The fans on the front of the case that suck air in have filters over them that you can easily clean. Brilliant!
5. No crazy lights! I got over the whole clear case light-show pretty soon after I got my old case.

Maybe I’ll take a picture of what it looks like when I get back later tonight.

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