Snoop Dogg wrote a country song:

Watch “Buy My Medicine” on You Tube

I enjoy to give them smile. Keep them out of their bad life.

Thanks, Danimator, for this picture of my Dachshund, Bando.

I’m a big fan of optical illusions. This is a new one to me. Go here, stare at the black dot for 30 seconds and then move your mouse over the image. You will see a blue sky and green grass for as long as you keep your eyes still. Does anyone out there still believe everything they see?

What is suprising to me isn’t that my eyes are fooled in the first place. It is due to a phenomenon called ‘after-image‘. What is remarkable is that the illusion remains for as long as your eyes are still - the initial mistaken perception remains until it is corrected by new information (scanning with the eyes).

Link to Optical Illusion

Related Articles
More Posts about Illusions

Why would a snake refuse to eat a hamster?

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I learned how to memorize lists yesterday. Before yesterday if you would have given me a list of 10 things and an hour, I probably would have had a hard time memorizing them. No more. I was able to remember a list of 31 things in less than 5 minutes. I was able to do it in such a way that I still haven’t forgotten the list.

HOW ? ! ?

By linking the items together in an image that I can bring to mind, I can remember everything instantly. Here’s a short list:

cat Fred chair car lagoon house cat square statue sunset laughter pot germs halo danielle hallway trashcan fork bird song garage

So the trick is to create a mental image. Make the image as crazy as possible. The crazier the scene, the easier to remember. This is the scene I came up with:

A cat is latched on to Fred Savage’s leg. Fred is balanced on a chair which is balanced on a car that is driving magically over a lagoon towards a large house with big windows. In each of the windows is a giant cat head, peering out. The cat’s bodies are square. The cat’s are spitting statues of the ‘thinking man’ out of their mouths, very rapidly. The statues break through the sky and cause sunset colors to flood in. Meanwhile, Rinpoche, larger than life, is laughing at the whole situation. In his left hand he has a pot full of germs, that he blesses. The germs turn into nectar and a big halo forms around the pot. Danielle is bowing down in front of Rinpoche. This whole scene is in a photograph at the end of a large hallway. Under the picture is a trashcan filled with forks that keep overflowing, so birds are swooping in through a window, and carrying away the forks. They sing the song of fork removal, carrying them into the garage where they stockpile them.

So that’s the scene I came up with. Maybe that took me 5 minutes. The trick is to make the visualization really, really vivid. See all the colors, smell things, feel things. The more senses you employ to make the scene, the more it will stick.

I for one am very linear thinking - and very auditory. To remember the list above I would have had to remember them by sound. I would not typically bring an image to mind. That way of trying to remember things is very difficult.

Tanya and I played a game with this last night. We took turns writing down ten things and then tested each other to see if we could memorize them. It was really fun. I’m imagining a board game or something in my mind now. One version could have a person naming off an object on her list every 5 seconds. The partner could then try to recite back the items and get scored based on that. Could be fun.

So that’s about it. The site that I learned this from has tips on remember all kinds of things: dreams, numbers, foreign languages, faces, names, etc. I really recommend giving it a read.

Link to improving your memory through visualization [buildyourmemory.com]

I love Oragami. When I was young I invented my own piece - an oragami space shuttle with a suprise. Maybe I’ll put up a how-to on that. In the meanwhile, here’s how to make a paper rose.

Link to article [wikiHow]

Did you know that the band, “The Cure” used to be called “Goat Band”?

See other early band names

“She gets to the hospital and while she’s waiting for an examination, she gets up from the chair and runs,” Mayes said. “Somebody remarked, ‘That’s where the great miracle occurred.’”

It’s a miracle! (Reuters.com)

Whatch what you say, you are making yourself:

Got this from Cliff Pickerton at Reality Carnival who got it from www.my-animations.com.

Authentic Personality has been visited over 10,000 since October according to StatCounter. Most people don’t stay long and few return, so it probably isn’t something to toot one’s (my) horn about, but it looks good.

The more important statitistic is how many “absolute returning visitors” I am getting per week. This counts anyone who comes back to AP. According to Google Analytics, at this time it looks like there are 35 returning readers per week. That’s gone up from about 21 in the last few weeks. So if we only count absolute unique visitors, AP has been visited 672 times. If I take how many returning visitors came to my site this week (35) and divide by the total number who came to the site (348), I see that I am retaining about one percent of the total traffic which comes here. Probably if I remove poeple that are friends and family that drops to maybe eight tenths of a percent.

Matt Drudge, I aint.

Tashidelek!

Update:

Okay, my first number was off - in so many ways. First my math was wrong - 35/348 is 10 percent, minus family and friends is 8 percent. Got my decimal wrong, but even more important than that - to really see what my retention rate is, I need to divide the number of regularly returning visitors with the total number of visitors who have ever come to this site. 35/10000 is .0035. Move my decimal and you see my retention rate is 0.35 percent. Let’s round that up to .4% retention rate.

Matt Druge, I aint.

I am opperating right now under the influence of panic. There are no lions after me. I am not being shot at. I just don’t want to work. When we feel a strong emotion, we feel it in our bodies. Strong emotion is associated with the heart or the gut or the head. When you are angry you blow your top. Your heart breaks when you are sad. Butterflies in your belly. So I am in a sort of panic state right now - and with that there are feelings of being found out - of being revealed. Someone might see through my suit of armor and question my substantiality. So maybe in the future you will be able to get meta data about every letter you see on a page. You could right click on a letter in one of these words and a context sensitive menu would pop up and you would be able to see how much force was used to press the key. You would see that I am pressing the keys very hard because I am in a complete panic. Well, I guess its not a complete panic because I’m pretty much just feeling it in my body. I’m not pulling at my gums and kicking the doors. I did make a little whiney noise - real quiet at one point. I have that under control now. It’s nice to be able to have it out with a keyboard. It beats stripping off my clothes and running into the street. That would be a real change of pace - from “sitting at my desk fretting that I’m just not into working today” to “scraping my naked theighs as I scale cyclone fencing trying to avoid arrest”. That’s usually why I freak out, its a change of pace. I need to get some mittens for this office I work in. A lady here has hot flashes so she turns the AC down to 68 degrees.

Driving down the road with all the road goers
Mind slows down, speeds up, checks for danger
The road goes with the traffic
stretching canvas, looks like moving cars!
Or how are we to take it today?

My father went to AA where they told him that when he was at his lowest - when things were the bleakest and most confusing, that he should, ‘do the next indicated thing’. Just plan to the next indicated thing and don’t get mired down in the big picture. Like in order to not be an alchoholic today you need to brush your teeth. Like that’s it. Then when you are done brushing, do the next indicated thing. It’s actually really helpful. If you are freaking out and kind of freezing up, just move your mind to something simple. Gosh, if it’s bad enough, if you are wild enough, the next indicated thing might be, ‘breathe in’ then, ‘breathe out’. So that is pretty good advice that i think transcends freaking out. Meditation is good training to get you back to the essentials. On one level it is just that - you are sitting there, you are breathing. It is enough. In a very real way everything beyond that is utter complication. I mean, that’s why we have an idea of grace. Because this world is akward and anyone who moves through it without bashing into something is graceful. I don’t know if I would be considered graceful or not. I don’t bump into things too much or fall down too much. But my mind crashes around a lot, ungracefully. Is gracefullness only an asthetic quality?

Back to my panic, which I just forgot about. I’ll induce it again in a moment. Next indicated thing: PANIC!

Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis. - Jack Handy

Once again, the gatekeepers of science prove easy to fool: Three MIT students were tired of receiving repeated spam requesting submissions to the 2005 World Multi-Conference of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, so they wrote a simple computer program to generate a nonsensical paper, which they submitted. It was accepted by human reviewers, according to the New Scientist

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