omnibrain
Posts by this author
October 2, 2009
Seriously... well not about the Zombie thing. Maybe if him and his family weren't such assholes people wouldn't do this kind of thing. Well, maybe people shouldn't do this to begin with. Here's the schtick from ESPN:
In "Frozen," Larry Johnson, a former executive at the Alcor Life Extension…
September 30, 2009
Wow, their brains are small. It all makes sense now - all they want to do is eat shit and kill their competitors.
Anyone want to translate the, what I'm assuming, is Japanese for me?
-Via Neatorama-
September 24, 2009
Here's an interesting video from boingboing:
Boing Boing presents a remix of "Synesthesia," a documentary directed by Jonathan Fowler about people whose senses blend, or mix. For instance: a synesthete might see colors when listening to music, or taste flavors when hearing a spoken word.
In this…
September 21, 2009
Zombies are attacking Detroit! This is why all of the brains are disappearing out of the city! Check out the picture here's the undeniable evidence:
Not only are the Zombies eating Detroit's brains it sounds like the young folk are escaping and leaving no brains left for the Zombies to eat!…
September 21, 2009
I was reading an article this morning that I found on fark (yeah yeah...) and for once I actually read the comments underneath the main article. I was pretty surprised on the consistency of the attribution errors that the religious folks were making and thought it would be something interesting…
July 1, 2009
I'm teaching about opponent processes in color vision today and thought I'd share one of my favorite examples. This is how you use the human visual system to turn a black and white photo into color. Try it out:
June 16, 2009
I'm in the middle of my qualification exams and ran across this interesting paper:
Liu, Z Kersten, D Knill, DC Dissociating stimulus information from internal representation--a case study in object recognition. Vision research. 1999; 39(3): 603-12.
However, I'm very confused about them calling the…
April 30, 2009
I think it's a bit like terrorism. It scares the shit out of you but there's next to zero chance it will actually happen to you. Seriously... you have a much much higher chance of choking on a twinky (even if you've never eaten one) than catching the swine flu and dying or being or even seeing a…
April 1, 2009
Jason, a graduate student at USC, shot me an email asking for more information about my blogging experiment and I thought I'd post some of the things I sent back to him. Totally unpolished and stream of consciousness but here it is...
Hi Jason,
This is really the first time around that I've tried…
April 1, 2009
Ok ok.. how about 'Using science to kill the fewest people while seeking world domination'... hmm... maybe not that either, how about 'Using science to protect our way of life'
There we go!
Now that you know what we're talking about you can check out a podcast that I'm particularly interested in…
March 31, 2009
I'm currently teaching Introduction to Psychology which has a number of university honors students who are required to do extra work in a certain number of their courses each semester in order to get 'honors credit.' The University leaves it up to me as to what they students should do to get this…
March 20, 2009
Funny!
From Jimmy Fallon:
Last night, Michael Showalter (from Stella, Wet Hot American Summer, The State, your dreams) made a cameo on the show. He and our head writer, A.D. Miles, played a couple of Columbia grad students on spring break. Things got pretty scandalous!
Really funny... but totally…
March 20, 2009
Straight from XKCD...
I had this exact same reaction.
Now that we're on the topic. I don't like federal money going to pay bonuses but seriously... this money was promised long ago and it's already been given out. Using the tax code to take it back? Wow this is seriously a real cluster @#$!
March 20, 2009
I'm not sure what this whole thing is about since at no point did Obama make fun of the Special Olympics as an organization - he straight up made fun of retarded people (or whatever the P.C. term is nowadays).
Here's a little snippet from People:
President Barack Obama's lighthearted Thursday…
March 4, 2009
Why in the world does my hospital/doctor need to know what my religious beliefs are?
I was running through this check-in form where they asked the usual questions like, what did your parents die of, etc. But then I got to the social section where they asked my education then my religion. WTF?! I…
February 9, 2009
I love 'I told you so' moments...Brain games don't do shit.
(this is totally going to come back and bite me in the ass though)
A number of months ago, I made a claim that paying for brain games was a waste of money. I got jumped on pretty hard for that claim - even though there isn't much…
February 6, 2009
In preparing for this issue of Encephalon I got access to the submission email account and realized that I had won 500,000.00 euro! I am in no way going to share this wealth with anyone else since it is my turn to do Encephalon. Here's the proof:
Dear Email ID Owner,
This is to notify you that…
January 28, 2009
I always get a kick when people see patterns in noise - especially when it's of the paranoid conspiracy religious type. Pareidolia is an amazing thing!
So onto this peach of a story...
KNIGHTSVILLE, Ind. (WTHI) - Months ago, Rachel Jones was shocked to discover her 4-year-old's baby doll seemed to…
January 20, 2009
From the syllabus:
Why Psychology?!
Psychology 100 is the most popular course at nearly every university and there's a reason why. The science of psychology covers an amazing range of topics. After all, the mind can do many amazing things! Oh yeah, it also fulfils a GenEd requirement ;)
Nearly…
January 20, 2009
It seems that a brilliant doctor in the UK has come up with an amazing piece of machinery and convinced a famous author to wear it in order to stave off the onset of Alzheimer's disease. Here's the machinery... looks like a mind control device or something - too bad It's not going to work.…
December 10, 2008
In the never ending quest for death gadgets Mercedes has come up with a specialized screen that will show the driver one thing and the passenger another. Just think, now in addition to a driver watching a movie while they are going 70 mph they will be leaning all the way over into the passenger…
December 9, 2008
I've always joked around about girls who would walk into a tattoo parlor and ask for a Chinese character that means something to them... like love, hope, or faith. Of course the tattoo artists don't know one damn character in Chinese so they just pick a random character from the internet and the…
December 8, 2008
Seriously... I'm totally amazed. I've seen pigeons play ping pong (well more like real life pong). But this is amazing.
Check it out:
December 7, 2008
Oh pareidolia. I mean I understand seeing something that maybe looks like something else in the clouds or one time I accidentally peeled an orange that looked like a penis. But thinking that there is something actually significant and spiritually meaningful in seeing a pattern in randomness is…
December 4, 2008
A sports magazine writer asked me about the different techniques one could use to distract an athlete... here's what I said:
About a year ago another graduate student and I were planning on doing some research in my lab to determine what the best way of distracting a free throw shooter was. We…
December 4, 2008
Arguably the most important and certainly the most famous single case study patient in Psychology and Neuroscience passed away on Tuesday December 2nd. H.M. as he was known to probably every student of Psychology can now be revealed as Henry G. Molaison, 82, from Windsor Locks, CT.
HM was a man…
October 20, 2008
A State Legislature proclaimed an amazing thing recently which has just so made my day! They took time out of their busy schedule of shutting down state parks and getting in a fiduciary pissing match to proclaim that this week is grad student week or some such garbage. Here's the official…
October 13, 2008
So I'm teaching Psychology 100 this semester for the first time and part of the whole thing is that we're supposed to do certain things to get a graduate teaching certificate (which I think is the schools attempt at giving us grad students some teaching training as opposed to the norm of none).…