Someone asked me to take the “nerd tests”, and these were my results… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
Archive for the 'something new every day' Category
This is the text of Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, as a word cloud… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
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This post is an acknowledgement of Sept. 9, 2009, 9:09 am (9 seconds), or 09/09/09 09:09:09.
– davinci 11775
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I recently gave away, sold, donated to a library, or threw out many of the books that I’ve accumulated throughout my life. Before I parted with each book, I took a photograph of it. (I apparently forgot to do this for a few of them, and for some others, the photographs did not turn out.)
The reason that I had (actually, still have) so many books is that I love reading, and for many years I was in a position where people would consult me on various subjects. In high school, people often asked me for my recommendations on general science books, and my teachers would also discuss them with me… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
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This is my cat Heisenberg, illustrating the “Schrödinger’s cat” thought experiment.
– davinci 11751
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I recently read that the sixth President of the United States, John Quincy Adams, is apparently tweeting from the grave. This is a nice use of technology to try to get younger people interested in history, but I’m not sure that it’ll be that effective. If people generally aren’t interested in comments about the weather, they’re probably not going to be interested in comments about the weather from two hundred years ago. But who knows?
Seeing the story reminded me of one of my favourite quotes by his father, John Adams… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
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Two random events inspired me to write this post. The first is that Toby Cubitt gave a talk at IQC recently. (I didn’t attend the talk, but I did receive the announcement.) The second is that I chanced upon the book Quirkology by psychologist Richard Wiseman. (Another influence for this post is the fact that job hunting is clearly still on my mind.)
In high school, a friend and I had noticed that several of the people we had to learn about in class had names which were oddly apropos of the accomplishments for which they were famous, and so we started to compile a list. At the head of the list was Robert Boyle, who studied the inverse relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of an ideal gas at a fixed temperature. Another name on the list was Alexander Graham Bell. (“You rang?”)… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
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Since I have dropped out of university, I am looking for work, or, to use a common expression, “hunting for a job”.
I find the expression humorous — for me, it conjures up the image of a certain bulbous cartoon huntsman on the trail of a wise-cracking, carrot-munching leporid. But I hope that the outcome is more favourable for me than is usually the case for our animated friend… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
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When I was in the gifted program in elementary school, I was taught to keep a journal, in which I should write about “something new every day”. This was a habit that I had kept up for years, with only brief interruptions until a few years ago, when I started to become depressed.
I think this habit played a significant role in my extraordinary productivity in high school. During that time, my journal entries were often just a summary of the day’s events. This meant that I had to pay attention to what was happening around me, whether in class or outside, pick out the most important facts, and retain them in memory until I could write them down and comment on them. I would also finalise and review each entry just before I went to bed, so that the highlights of the day were fresh in my mind as I fell asleep… » [Expand post] [Permalink]
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