Relationships are stressful.

For most people, this probably isn't something noticeable, but I'm not used to caring what other people think. I've always just done what I thought best, without worrying about others' impressions. I'd be nice and polite, but if someone was offended by, say, my going barefoot, I didn't care. Now all of a sudden there's someone whose opinion of me matters.

I've always been bad at catching subtle cues. It never seemed important before; if someone couldn't be bothered to tell me I'd done something wrong, I couldn't be bothered to care. This isn't true anymore; I'm always worried I said or did something wrong and didn't notice.

My fears are probably groundless, and I know that... but that "probably" is a killer.

If you can't trust yourself, who can you trust?

Your brain lies to you. It does it all the time. It's for your own good, really, but you have a more accurate picture of the world if you take into account the fact that you can't really trust your own eyes.

Your senses take in huge amounts of data every second, way more than you could consciously deal with, but most of it gets thrown away. If I'm looking at my computer screen, many other things are in my field of view. I can see my keyboard, the wall, my mouse, the speakers, the brand logo on the bottom of the monitor...but I don't notice any of these. The light from them hits my eyes. My brain does just enough processing to determine that they aren't moving. It decides that they are uninteresting, and throws the information away.

Your brain is doing this sort of thing all the time, and is really pretty good at it. It's pretty rare that you're looking for something and not finding it, and it turns out you were looking right at it. I mean, it happens, but it's unusual when it does. Unusual enough to be remembered.

Which brings us to another area where most of the information gets thrown away: memory. You don't remember most things at all well. If there wasn't strong emotion involved, you'll forget an event pretty quickly. If it was memorable, your brain makes a story out of your experience, and remembers the story, and maybe a few important details. When you remember it later, most of the details are reconstructed (made up) to fit the story. This results in amusing stories, but also in reliability issues in eyewitness reports.

Magicians make good use of these little shortcuts and assumptions our brain makes all the time; you do much of their work for them. The same goes for magicians' dark-side counterparts, psychics. There's a lot of money to be made by fooling people, and it's not that hard if you know how.

They way the mind works causes a number of cognitive biases that make it difficult to know whether something is real, or if you're just fooling yourself. Don't worry though, people have come up with a way to work around this problem. We've been using it (and refining it) for a few hundred years now, and it seems to work pretty well. It's called science.

Security worries

I won't be installing Service Pack 3 for Windows XP on my computer due to the EULA, which says it can periodically tell Microsoft all about my computer "to prevent piracy". Screw that. I spend enough effort keeping spyware off of my system; I'm not going to have it in my OS. I didn't allow WGA onto my system, and I'm not allowing SP3 either if it's going to do the same thing. I am kind of worried, though, that this decision may make me vulnerable to security holes. This may lead to my switching to Ubuntu.

Land of the Free*

Miscarriages of justice make me furious. I'm too mad to talk.


*Offer not valid in case of technology. Some restrictions may apply.

That tube is for tube-related science, not tube-related fun!

Cool sciency links:

• The coolest optical illusion I've ever seen, with the possible exception of random dot stereograms ("Magic Eye" pictures).
• Nobel laureate Richard Feynman explains quantum theory. No math; it's aimed at laymen.
• The husband of a fantasy author decides to find out just what it would take to make that werewolf-killing silver bullet.
• You're familiar with lolcats, right? Well, cross it with Star Trek and you get LOLTrek.
• Theodory Gray decided to collect samples of all the elements to put in his Wooden Periodic Table.
• A list of very old sites (the list is from 2002 - that's like 1950 in internet time) fitting this theme, most of which are still up. The LOX barbecue is the only cool one that's died of link rot; check the bottom of George Goble's Wiki page instead.

Not-quite-current events

• The best election headline
• I don't know if I believe this or not, but apparently Sarah Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent. I mean, Sarah Palin isn't the sharpest crayon, but I trust the McCain campaign as far as I can throw them. If McCain himself said it, I'd buy it; he's been struggling to hold on to his honor and integrity all campaign. In fact, that's part of why he did so badly. You can win with a clean campaign, and you can win with a dirty campaign, but there's not much hope for "clean — no, dirty — no, clean — no, dirty — but not that dirty!"
  
• A comic on the banking crisis

A sense of scale

If you shrunk the earth down to 1 meter in diameter, the difference between the highest mountain and the deepest sea trench would be 1.5 mm. The International Space Station is 1.2 inches up, and the Space Shuttle can't go higher than about 3 inches. Geosynchronous orbit is 9.2 feet from the surface. The distance to the moon becomes 100 feet, give or take about 5 feet depending on where it is in its orbit. Mars never gets closer than 2 2/3 miles, and the sun is 7.2-7.4 miles away (we're closest Jan. 3, and furthest Jul. 4). The nearest star, Alpha Centauri? It's more than 8 times the (actual) distance to the moon.