Ceaseless Student

Parking meters are terribly designed.

There is no reason for a parking meter to display how much time is left. It should display how much time is left while you’re adding in coins, but afterward it should only say whether there’s still time or not. Why you ask?

-Cops should not be able to see when they can come back to fine me. That’s BS.
-I should not be able to fill it up again. That’s illegal.
-There is no reason that I would need to know how much time I have left. I’m not allowed to fill it up again anyhow…
-Friendly citizens should also not be able to help me out by filling up low meters - also illegal.
-And the biggest point. Thieves should not see how much longer I expect to be away. That’s ridiculous. Yesterday, my car was at the Park & Ride for 10 hours. I don’t want a thief to know that he has nothing to worry about until night-time. Ridiculous.

Thoughts? I have at least one counterargument for myself…

This is a cool idea that could be a PoE project. Or it could be done in a weekend if people could clear that much time.

The idea is to use existing wiimote to computer interfaces to poll a wiimote’s accelerometers (better if you can poll the additional attachment with an accelerometer too). Then you strap the wiimote onto a catapult or trebuchet you build. Then you fire it.

Then you run the acceleration data through some software. The software has a little physics engine. It’ll decide when the wiimote would’ve left the catapult and then plot out the rest of the wiimote’s trajectory. Then you have some walls or castles or armies or something that you’re killing/destroying and you get to see the results.

Instant awesome.

It’s interesting because it would be the only engineering video game I’m aware of since your only control on the game is by how you design and build your launcher.

If you’re in PoE: please go ahead and take my idea. Email me or something. I’m old Boris - ask around.
If you’re older: please convince someone in PoE to do this.

Lifehacker pointed to a really interesting article from Newsweek [link]. Here’s the gist of it:

[W]hen volunteers read about two job candidates whose resumes were printed side-by-side, right-handers tended to choose the person described on the right, but left-handers chose the one on the left, again being unconsciously swayed by their experience of space more than the conventions of language and culture.

Apparently right-handed people prefer things on the right in general and left-handed people prefer things on the left.

This is one of those things I almost thought of before. I had noticed that in the game where you hide something in one of your hands and have another person choose which hand it’s in, you do better putting it in your right hand. I also noticed that people tended to put it in their right hand. This always confused me because I figured you’d guess whatever worked for you most of the time, but this explanation seems pretty likely given that right-handed people are more common (they face each other; the person choosing picks the hand on their right and loses because it’s the hider’s left).

I’m amused. The article is actually pretty interesting and a quick read, btw.

Just to mess with people who are easily messed with when they have too much info: scissors is the most common starting move in rock-paper-scissors; rock is the second most common opener.

Lifehacker just had a cool post about this and I kinda want to try it. Apparently, humans have more than one “clock.” The one most people relate to wake-sleep cycles is the circadian cycle. It appears that the SCN (the C means circadian) can be overridden by the DMH, which is triggered on food availability. The sleep hack is fairly simple: the idea is that you fast for a bit and then you eat after waking up at a specific time. This flags that time as breakfast and the beginning of your day. Some people say you need at least 12, but others say 16, so I’ll do the more painful one if I try it… It sounds pretty harsh not eating from 14:30 to reset to 06:30 though…

A source article
A fairly boring interview video

Click on a picture to see it larger. Use left and right arrows to move forward and back in the gallery.

I’m all graduated. Here’s proof:

Moved to a new post with better display.

Let me preface this by saying that this may well be the best idea I’ve ever had.

The idea is simple, a machine that continually outputs pizza. It starts with dough at one end in a large receptacle. The dough is extruded onto a conveyor belt. Then it is flattened out. Sauce is spread on it, toppings are added, and then the conveyor goes through the oven. On the other side, pizza is cut and continues to move slowly. From here, people can grab their pizza.

Note that the speed that the pizza comes out can be changed by modifying the temperature and the movement speed of the conveyor. A sensor that checks how much pizza is currently ready to be taken can control the cooking speed.

I’m infatuated with this idea. Thoughts?

Hi all. Haven’t posted anything for a while. Here’s a quick update on life:

Fall Semester: Went to school.

Winter Break: Didn’t.

Spring Semester: Now back at school.

I’ve been playing lots and lots of DotA these days. Rocks hard. How much you ask? This semester I’m currently at about 3 and a half hours a day. The goal is to spend more time on DotA than on all my classes combined. o.O

On an entirely unrelated note - analog filters seems like a /sweet/ class. Somewhat related to that second note - I’m in 5 classes with a sum total of 28 people. Tee-hee.

I had two really weird dreams last night.

In the first one, I stuffed someone’s shot in basketball. The weird part? I was playing a sport. Haha j/k. The weird part is that I’m almost positive that I actually swung my real-world arm and hit my bed.

This was followed by a dream where I dropped something acidic on three spots of my hand. My brain insists that it was “about as acidic as capsaicin.” I have no clue how acidic capsaicin is. Also, pure capsaicin doesn’t look like the oil in my dream. Anyhow. The weird part was that I felt it on my real-world hand for what seems like a couple of hours. I was asleep so maybe my time-perception was off, but it lasted through several unrelated dreams…

I think those are the two weirdest dreams I’ve had and remembered since the one with the cartoon fish that ate my older brother or the ridiculous one with the Scooby-Doo meets Paper Mario styled monsters that were trying to find me, my friends and my family in some weird mansiony thing. Those dreams are like 6 years old or something though… dreams are weird.

So I was looking at my schedule for this coming semester and some of the times lined up all pretty for me to schedule a nap…

So I’m doing biphasic again. I’m also going to be working out and doing something aerobic - a combination that I haven’t done for something like 4 years. The first time I did biphasic I was hitting 4.5 hours every day. And I would get tired/bored when people weren’t around (eg 04:30). So I’m going to try to avoid some of that this time around.

My schedule works somewhat better for it this year. Instead of staying awake and bored until 5, I’ll be in bed at 2 or 03:30. This should help with boredom at night and it gives me a nice chunk of time at 06:30 when the Babson gym opens.

Sadly, the schedule is a bit less straightforward. I wake up every day at 06:30, but there’s two different times I go to bed. On Wednesdays, SCOPE steals a nap. At the end of the day I’ll average just under 5 hours a day of sleep. I will, however, be adding in a bunch of physical activity so I might find myself needing more rest - we’ll see.

There’s two ways to go about a new sleep schedule. Gradual transition and habit forming or sleep deprivation. The second one is what I’ll be trying this time around. The abrupt change from summer sleep hours and the addition of running or swimming should make sure my body is begging for whatever sleep I decide it can take. That’s the quick, if plausibly painful, way to go about it. At least I’m not doing an uberman schedule where I don’t sleep at all for the first three days or anything that extreme…

Still haven’t figured out why I like toying with my sleep so much… I’m sure I’ll babble about how it goes in my blog