I feel the need to post something and the easy way out would be to just catch people up on what has been going on the past week or so.

Yesterday in iai, it was HOT!  In the low nineties and the gym we practice in has no air conditioning.  Sensei said "Excellent! This will be a great training opportunity!" and then he turned off the fans and turned ( Read more... )

The wired blog network posted an intriguing article today. "Seeing Red: Tweak your brain with colors" is a summary of a Science article by Ravi Mehta and Juliet Zhu.

According to Brandon Keim who wrote the blog entry, Mehta and Zhu have demonstrated that colors enhance cognitive processing. Red was shown to enhance "attention demanding tasks" ( Read more... )

One of my Google news feeds is HowStuffWorks. Today I saw a post I never expected to see. HowStuffWorks set out to explain the Ignobel prizes!

The Ignobel prizes are the humorous counterpart to the Nobel prizes. The prizes are awarded for real world accomplishments in health, politics, economics, technlogy, and science. It is real research and real ( Read more... )

I just wanted to take a quick minute to let you know how the conference trip to Chicago turned out.

IT WAS GREAT!!!

I enjoyed the company of my conference friends and caught up with my faculty mentor. The talk went well enough that I got quite a few compliments. The dinner at Moto Friday night was the most intense, unusual, unique, culinary ( Read more... )

Last week saw the confluence of several events that got me thinking about synchronicity and pondering the underlying (overarching?) theme tying the events together and whether it was a sign for me to take some sort of action.
The specific events were

1. Reading Malcome Gladwell's book "Blink"
2. Discussions prior to the shinsakai regarding what it means to ( Read more... )

I StumbledUpon the site OneWORDIt was fun writing about a random word for 60 seconds ( Read more... )

Just an observation: Reading articles to prepare for writing the Introduction to a research article is anxiety provoking. This isn't true as a general trend (though I had some terrifying moments preparing for my dissertation) but it is true for the podcasting article I am writing ( Read more... )

I just read an article in Wired Magazine about how man-made noise may be altering the Earth's ecology. The research of Bernie Krause suggests that every location has its own "biophony." Biophony refers to the set of natural sounds/acoustics associated with that location (check it out here - complete with Google Maps add-on). Each creature is ( Read more... )

I spent a good chunk of Sunday and pretty much all day Monday coding, entering and analyzing data.
Why the crunch? Because the deadline for submitting abstracts was Monday 6/2.
Remember when I thought I would miss the deadline last month?
Remember how I said I needed to be kicked in the ass if I let the real deadline sneak up on me?

I returned home this afternoon and was glad for it. I really enjoyed the convention and talking about creativity and psychology. I enjoy watching the students experience their first real conference. I enjoy the socializing in the evenings. I enjoy learning about the cutting edge research in our field ( Read more... )