Praise and giftedness

Arguably most interesting article I have read in some time, "the power and peril of praise". I went through more or less exactly the school experience they describe, and suffered more or less the same consequences. It's only really in the last few months that I've really made any progress on my ability to motivate myself when success is not immediate, and I still have a long way to go.

I'm intrigued though by Dr. Cloninger's observation that there is a distinct cortical region associated with persistence. That sounds like an extremely promising target for TMS. Since the latter is now achievable at home if you have a few thousand to burn, I wonder how long we have before we start seeing parents and/or teenagers trying to boost their study. Frankly I'd rather like to try it myself...

Flicker, flicker!

The dreamachine is finished - at least the cylinder is, I have yet to put the apparatus together and test it (and I will leave that until after dark, for optimal effect). I used Paul Cecil's plan as a guide, although I drew my own version in Flash for neatness (and to save printer ink - why did you colour the bits to be discarded in solid black, Paul? lol...)

The flash took maybe 15 minutes, the hole cutting a total of probably ~2.5 hours, and the reinforcement (not part of the plan) another 1.5 or so. Not too bad, although the blister on my thumb wishes to comment otherwise. I promised more photos, so here they are...

Ongoing hole cutting - it occurred to me that it would be much easier to score the holes through the guide paper then remove it and go over the scorings without the paper in the way, rather than trying to press hard enough to cut the card fully first time. G'duh.

The completed cylinder (stapled together), but as the inset shows, not very circular. I decided to build a circular base plate to regularise the shape.

This proved taxing when I realised I had no compasses - so I ended up going for a very old-school method. All in all, I was pretty pleased with the result, shown below:

I added 2cm tabs round the edge and cut the base out, then used tacks to approximately secure it to the cylinder - the erasers are seating the tacks so I can move the thing around without them popping out.

I taped the base inside and out to secure it, but the shape of the top of the cylinder was barely improved. I was rather glad at this point that I'd drawn around the base before attaching it in case I screwed it up somehow - I could use the second circle as a top plate without needing to return to bits of string. I nearly managed to do exactly that before remembering one has to hang a lightbulb through the top, so a brief quest yielded a teacup of sufficient size to draw around for a central opening.

Finally after attaching the top piece it's finished:

I was rather pleased the reinforcement circles fit so well - the top is a little cramped (odd, since it was the larger circle) but for the products of a rough pi * d in my head, they were rather good. The cylinder is now round enough to roll for a good distance in a straight line, which is good enough for me.

I'm looking forward to giving this a whirl tonight. >:D

On a side note, I've started another modafinil experiment... it seems less effective than when I tried last year, but that's n=1 at the moment obviously. We shall see.

Peripheral comment: embedding images in Blogger doable, but tedious and lengthy.

Flicker

I've been intrigued by dreamachines ever since I first heard of them, but had fairly mediocre results from the browser-based variety - probably because the light from the monitor isn't very strong. My enthusiasm to try the real thing was undampened.

However, I never managed to get my hands on a sufficiently large piece of card - that is, until last weekend, when I helped my parents clean out some of the crap a teenage me left lying around their house. (Why, teenage me, did you decide to keep the boxes - not the manuals or even the disks in most cases, just the boxes - to sixty-odd PC games? It's trying to understand old decisions of mine that most emphatically leaves me agreeing with the bundle theory of identity.)

So I am now engaged in what might be referred to as arts and crafts - cutting holes in cardboard with an exacto knife - a process which is taking hugely longer than I anticipated thanks to the surprising toughness of the aforementioned card. I'm taking a few photos as I go along, partly to play with the image uploading on this blog - here's the first one...

Life goes on

It's been a while again, hasn't it... after Laura's mum left on the 15th, I've been busy revising and also holding a belated birthday trip and meal for Laura. We went to see Return to the Forbidden Planet at the ADC theatre, which was really quite good fun, and much enjoyed I think by L who knew the music better than I did. Then yesterday I cooked up chicken enchiladas (which is L's favourite meal) to her mum's recipe (a photocopy of which she'd sneakily passed to me after she arrived) and the two of us ate far too many of them along with a Mexican side dish and watched the Season One finale of ST:Enterprise. I'm told it was a good birthday.

Revision is going tolerably well. Tomorrow I will be having lunch with Aubrey to discuss what I'll be doing after my exams and whether or not he will be paying me to do it. I'm pretty optimistic that he will, something which I find immensely reassuring and is helping me not to stress over said exams.

While reading up on cytochrome c I encountered this FAQ, which looks really quite thorough and well written, and I shall be reading properly later. It never hurts to have more ammunition for the inevitable occasional conversation with a creationist. ;)

Ribosomes

I don't usually seem to manage to get to the Tuesday lunchtime seminars organised by the Biochemistry department, but I made an exception today for Venki Ramakrishnan's talk on 'Structures of Functional States of the Ribosome', not least because that's exactly the topic I've been revising for the past three days. Venki's lab produces some really amazing videos which I personally find not only scientifically interesting but also quite beautiful.

The fact that cellular processes can be so elegant and yet so reminiscent of mechanical production lines can't help but be good news for nanotechnology too. I begin to understand why some people find it necessary to dream up 'intelligent designers' to explain away the otherwise quite awe-inspiring complexity of life.

Postsoldiers

I'm not normally in favour of many things to do with the military, but they do have one very useful aspect, which is that they get away with doing all sorts of interesting things in their efforts to improve soldier performance. Those technologies are being developed for use in combat, but just like the Internet, they will have major impacts on healthcare too. I'd quite like a Glove to help me train more effectively at the gym - and Mark Roth's work on human suspension is one of very few current ideas that stand to have a dramatic impact on trauma death rates (the main cause of death apart from those addressed by SENS).

In fact, the aforementioned Wired article's table of DARPA projects reminded me strongly of Ander's page on potential human enhancements, which was among the very first transhumanism-themed documents I ever read. It's funny though that even DARPA is having to contend with the bioconservatives in this regard.

And even if you don't like the prospect of supersoldiers, at least every defence dollar spent on DARPA is one not spent murdering Iraqi civilians.

Mental flotsam

I have this quote in mind, which I thought went as follows, and I thought was attributable to Francis Crick:

"Life is basically just an affair of molecules."

However, the phrase "affair of molecules" gets 0 results from Google, and no other obvious variations seem to produce anything useful either. Can you clear up what I'm misremembering here?

Diary 09-03-07

It's been a little while since I updated, so I put 'blog' on my to-do list for today, not least since this allows me to put off other things on my to-do list while still feeling productive. Hey, it still beats playing kdice (an addiction which I seem to have cut down to a manageable level of an hour or so per day).

The term is nearly over and the lecture courses are all winding down - there's a couple more Genes sessions to go and then it's terribly quiet until the exams. Well, aside from voluntary talks of course (I'm going to a Pharmacology tea-club talk this afternoon for example...)

Today looks likely to be quite busy though - the PSU on my desktop packed in (almost certainly - the symptoms are nearly identical to the previous PSU failure) so I've had a new one shipped from Dabs (20 quid for a 480W PSU - I love DabsValue) which arrived today. First task is to get that fitted, then I can upload the Tattoo Crazy website that Laura and I have been working on. I'm fairly proud of it, it looks nice and swishy ;)

I submitted an idea ('Manifold Blistering') to the Orion's Arm mailing list and got a pleasingly positive initial response, plus the promise of a review from a physicist who contributes there, so I'm rather chuffed with that. OA appeals to me on various levels, despite the fact that I rather dislike the idea of qualitative Singularities, which smell unavoidably of techno-mysticism. Nonetheless they generally try quite hard to be plausible and do really quite a good job, at least from the perspective of someone with my complete lack of hard physics training.

I'm waiting for a grant cheque to clear into my bank account so I can finalise various plans related to L's birthday which have been in limbo since approximately December. Nonetheless I think they'll be worth the wait. She's 25 so I'm determined to make the occasion memorable (if belated, thanks to her Mum's visit - they're off in the Celtic Fringe right now).

I've been meditating rather more regularly and it seems to be having a definite positive effect on my ability to concentrate (on things other than meditating). I'm quite pleased and surprised by this.

I was reading through some of my notes from Forum 2006 in Oxford and was reminded of Nick Baylis, Cambridge's resident Happy Psychologist. I didn't realise at the time, but in hindsight his attitude and approach are nearly identical to those I've been picking up from studying Buddhism. I wonder why he never mentions the connection (he can't really fail to be aware of it).

I've nearly finished working my way through the Hitchhiker's Guide omnibus - I read the first book ages ago, but never got around to following the series through. I have to say (risking a serious chewing-out from my dad) that I'm not especially impressed with the first three books; they're funny but not extraordinarily so. So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, on the other hand, is brilliant, and oozes feel-good in a way that I find quite amenable right now.

At any rate, that's quite enough blogging - time to grab some of last night's cottage pie and bust open the computer.