Richard’s Blogosphere
Introducing Slack-Twitter
Do you like Slack? Do you like Twitter? Would you like to use Twitter in your Slack? Read more about Introducing Slack-Twitter
There’s More to the Remembering Than Just What You Paid Attention To
Scientific American reported in December 2011 of research on the doorway effect, which is forgetting what you were going to do as soon as you entered a different room in your abode. Gabriel A. Radvanskya, Sabine A. Krawietza & Andrea K. Tamplina published a paper showing in experiments that people recalled less walking through a doorway than walking the same distance without a doorway.
From the Scientific American report:
Is it walking through the doorway that causes the forgetting, or is it that remembering is easier in the room in which you originally took in the information? Psychologists have known for a while that memory works best when the context during testing matches the context during learning; this is an example of what is called the encoding specificity principle.
Except that walking back to the room in which you thought of what you wanted to do doesn’t improve the chances of remembering what you wanted to do.
The doorway effect suggests that there’s more to the remembering than just what you paid attention to, when it happened, and how hard you tried. Instead, some forms of memory seem to be optimized to keep information ready-to-hand until its shelf life expires, and then purge that information in favor of new stuff.
No real solutions to the problem are offered in the article. Write down a list of what you need to do in the next room? The Scientific American reporters offer a theory that other events trigger purging of short-term memory, and these events probably won’t give you enough time to jot down the thing you needed to do just now.
My 2014 in Books
I only got to 17 books read in 2014, falling short of the 25 I set out to read. Read more about My 2014 in Books
Just a Gwai Lo Now Powered by Drupal 7
This blog is now powered by Drupal 7. I’m redirecting some content that Drupal 7 wouldn’t handle to my archive site thanks to the Rabbit Hole module. (Assuming DNS has propagated to you, my SkyTrain Explorer journal should be a live and well, along with some link-blog posts and other whatnots.) This is also going to be a test of the Vinculum module's support of Webmention, since my site powered by Known supports it out of the box. Some related links can be found on the post in question. Read more about Just a Gwai Lo Now Powered by Drupal 7
2014 Eastside Culture Crawl
My photos and memories of walking around East Vancouver taking in the yearly arts and crafts festival. Read more about 2014 Eastside Culture Crawl
Hot Talks at Hot Art Wet City: Eastside Culture Crawl Artists Speak
Tonight, at Hot Art Wet City, a wee little studio on Main & 6th Ave., I heard from several artists talk about their work and how they do it. Read more about Hot Talks at Hot Art Wet City: Eastside Culture Crawl Artists Speak
We Can Explore an Endlessly Generated World Freely
John Crowley: “To live at once in a time recoverable by a particular sacred calendar and also by a time without qualities, counted as it passes, involves a sort of mental doubling that is perhaps comparable, in the richness it grants to thought and feeling, to growing up bilingual: two systems, each complete, funny when they collide, each supplying something the other lacks, bearing no command to choose between them. Read more about We Can Explore an Endlessly Generated World Freely
Vancouver Design Week Bike Tour
As part of Vancouver Design Week 2014, a senior urban designer from the City of Vancouver took us on a 3 hour bike tour of Vancouver's architecture. We started in Olympic Village, made our way north on the seawall to Chinatown, then rode through Gastown to the convention centre, after which we biked to Stanley Park and then to Third Beach, ending at Mole Hill. Read more about Vancouver Design Week Bike Tour
Alternatives to the Best Way to Discover a Strange City
Google Maps turn-by-turn cycling directions, headphones, and city bikeshares are by far the best way I've found to discover a strange city.
Two Weeks of Ingress
While leaving a BBQ celebrating a friend's 50th birthday party, Richard Smith's tweet pointing out the Ingress app had been released for iOS flowed through my stream. For the last two years, owners of Android-based Internet communicators have been playing the GPS-enabled, location-based massively mouthful role-playing game. Read more about Two Weeks of Ingress
Monday Morning Meeting: Issue #6
Links randomly selected from the stuff I saw the previous week. Social issues and technology; a procedurally generated video game makes a big splash at E3; a surprisingly insightful review of a web series; and an autobiographical critique of Modernism. Some links are from longer than a week ago.
Almost Successful Bluetooth Dongle
This came in for me last week, so I hope to be able to use create a Node.js-based iBeacon in my house using Bleacon and some instructions using Estimote. So far I’m unable to install Bleacon because, I believe, I insist on using the latest available binary for Node.js for Raspberry Pi.
At least the hardware works. It’s just the Node module failing to install. Getting software to work has always been easier than getting hardware to work, so I will persist.
Shared Folder
Reading the chapter on sharing folders from other computers from Raspberry Pi Networking Cookbook this morning, I decided to do the opposite: share my Raspberry Pi over my local network with my Mac. Henrik Jachobsen has some easy-to-follow instructions, and there it is, my Raspberry Pi! (I named it Ix as an homage to Ford Prefect of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.) I followed the instructions exactly, except that I used Emacs, of course, and added Samba to the list of software I’ve installed on my Raspberry Pi. Did I mention that I have a list of software I’ve installed on my Raspberry Pi?
Almost Successful Bluetooth Dongle
This came in for me last week, so I hope to be able to use create a Node.js-based iBeacon in my house using Bleacon and some instructions using Estimote. So far I’m unable to install Bleacon because, I believe, I insist on using the latest available binary for Node.js for Raspberry Pi.
At least the hardware works. It’s just the Node module failing to install. Getting software to work has always been easier than getting hardware to work, so I will persist.
Shared Folder
Reading the chapter on sharing folders from other computers from Raspberry Pi Networking Cookbook this morning, I decided to do the opposite: share my Raspberry Pi over my local network with my Mac. Henrik Jachobsen has some easy-to-follow instructions, and there it is, my Raspberry Pi! (I named it Ix as an homage to Ford Prefect of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.) I followed the instructions exactly, except that I used Emacs, of course, and added Samba to the list of software I’ve installed on my Raspberry Pi. Did I mention that I have a list of software I’ve installed on my Raspberry Pi?
Shared folder
Reading the chapter on sharing folders from other computers from Raspberry Pi Networking Cookbook this morning, I decided to do the opposite: share my Raspberry Pi over my local network with my Mac. Henrik Jachobsen has some easy-to-follow instructions, and there it is, my Raspberry Pi! (I named it Ix as an homage to Ford Prefect of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.) I followed the instructions exactly, except that I used Emacs, of course, and added Samba to the list of software I’ve installed on my Raspberry Pi. Did I mention that I have a list of software I’ve installed on my Raspberry Pi?
Almost Successful Bluetooth Dongle
This came in for me last week, so I hope to be able to use create a Node.js-based iBeacon in my house using Bleacon and some instructions using Estimote. So far I’m unable to install Bleacon because, I believe, I insist on using the latest available binary for Node.js for Raspberry Pi.
At least the hardware works. It’s just the Node module failing to install. Getting software to work has always been easier than getting hardware to work, so I will persist.