omnibrain | October 2, 2009Seriously... 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 Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., writes that Williams' head, which had been severed and frozen for storage, was abused at the facility. Johnson claims a technician took baseball-like swings at Williams' frozen head with a monkey wrench.
Seriously... look what they did to his head!
omnibrain | September 30, 2009Wow, 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-
omnibrain | September 24, 2009Here'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 documentary, Dr. David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine explains this condition, and four synesthetes explain how they perceive the world.
omnibrain | September 21, 2009Zombies 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! Check out this snippet from CNN.com:
Broad numbers are difficult to come by, but nearly a quarter of respondents in a survey for Fusion, the area's young professional association, said they plan on leaving Detroit within the next two years.
Among the larger population of 4.6 million people, 63,000…
omnibrain | 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 to share here and get your thoughts.
For the setup here's the (really pretty amazing!) story:
On the hike, Cole started fooling around by walking in the water. It was not incredibly steep, but the water had lots of slippery algae and rocks.
To Johnson, it looked dangerous. She pleaded with her…
omnibrain | July 1, 2009I'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:
omnibrain | June 16, 2009I'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 figure on the left an object. This is a collection of objects in 3D space - making it a scene. I'm not sure that this nullifies their model - but this is not object recognition.
People should really start using ideal observer analysis with scene perception...
omnibrain | April 30, 2009I 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 terrorist attack. Talk about a great case of the Availability Heuristic...
Here's a demo for you to try out (I use this to teach Psych 100). The correct answers are below the fold.
Which is the more common cause of death in the USA?
1.
A) Asthma
B) Meningitis
2.
A) Breast Cancer
B) Stomach Cancer
3…
omnibrain | April 1, 2009Jason, 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 the blogging thing. I've been thinking about doing it for a while but having 2 classes with 50 people in each meant a blog would be a bit unwieldy. If there are that many people in the class a discussion board is a much better choice (like on blackboard or something). If you have under 20 people…
omnibrain | April 1, 2009Ok 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 called Armed With Science.
Here's the schtick:
Research and Applications for the Modern Military, is a weekly webcast that discusses various applications of science and technology to military operations, and the cutting-edge scientific research and development sponsored by various defense offices. We…
omnibrain | March 31, 2009I'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 credit. I decided, along with my students, to let them explore the psychological literature through blogging. Each week they pick a relevant piece of literature (in this case - aggression, attractiveness, and political psychology) and write a short blog post about it.
I've found the blog to be a…
omnibrain | March 20, 2009Funny!
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 off base. It's more like Girls Gone Wild... I promise!
-via everyday scientist-
omnibrain | 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 @#$!
omnibrain | March 20, 2009I'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 night appearance on NBC's Tonight Show didn't leave everyone clutching their sides with laughter.
Obama's comments to Jay Leno about his low bowling score - in particular, an off-the-cuff remark that it was "like Special Olympics or something"
....
In a statement issued Friday, White House spokesman…
omnibrain | March 4, 2009Why 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 guess I should have stopped even at the education but I'm so used to filling that out.
Seriously WTF?!
I did write "REALLY?!!" as my response to the question though.
omnibrain | February 9, 2009I 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 evidence of their benefits except for perform the brain game itself better after a lot of practice (and maybe a couple other semi-related ones). I've been vindicated now by a meta-analysis of the relevant literature by Peter Snyder of the Brown med school.
Check this out from the press release:
Through a…
omnibrain | February 6, 2009In 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 you have won 500,000.00 euro in our online email Promo Draw in which email ID´s are picked randomly by computerized balloting, Your email address was amongst those chosen for this period.
contact: Dr. Mike Mejia, Accu Online Promotion.
!#$%!#$%@I'mnottellingyousinceIwon.com…
omnibrain | January 28, 2009I 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 have a hidden message: Islam is the light.
Imagine her surprise when a game for her 8-year-old daughter's Nintendo DS had the same message.
Rachel said she bought the Nintendo game, Baby Pals, as a gift for her 8-year-old daughter after a good report card.
She had no idea the game also contained…