And, Back

But first, a non-technical post! Well, sort of...

This experiment in revealing detail was recently posted by the excellent Design with Intent, which I found a long while back as a neat explanation of how architecture can be used to influence desired behavior. Since then, the author has done a simply fabulous job making his topics accessible, especially since they usually aren't.

Anyway, back to the experiment. It is still an interesting application of the web for content delivery (I really like sites/pages that show ideas that can only be shown on the internet), so I suppose it is technological...but the main concept is merely an in-depth examination of everyday life. Writing one of these pages would be a good exercise for a creative writer or poet, I would assume, although I am neither.

I like clicking on the words in different orders. It is somewhat like a limited choose your own story in that sense...

But seriously, I think this experiment emphasizes a couple of interesting things:

1) The amazing amount of decision making, judgment, and coordination involved in every day life
2) The fact that this is made almost entirely unconscious by our brain's amazing powers (which I will hopefully write about later). This makes human-level A.I. so hard to imagine at this point.
3) What level of detail is appropriate? In writing, details can be lauded as so realistic that the reader is transported into the scene...but can also be entirely boring. In memory, we subconsciously choose which details to remember (and usually, it's only a small bit of the total detail).

Actually, my Classical Music professor did a nice demonstration of typical detail memorization while trying to illustrate the limitations of oral tradition (versus writing down songs/stories). She rattled off an absurdly detailed story about nothing really important, then asked a student to recite it. He managed to remember almost the entire outline of the story, but had to make up words to fill in the details.

This was entirely expected, of course, but I still came away impressed by our ability to remember the essential details of life. If you want to try a similar exercise, just try to remember the details of the tea story from before- I bet you can't!



Well, that's it for now. My schedule for the semester is intense:
Algorithms (CS theory)
Artificial Intelligence (CS theory/application)
Analysis (Math)
Classical Music (yay!)
I will also be learning Ruby on Rails (to start...perhaps Django on Python) with my friend Seth, who worked at YouTube this summer and absolutely rocked their socks off. Check out his mugshot!

Point is, you may be seeing quite a few posts regarding the 5 topics above. I hope to finish up the posts I had in mind over the summer, as well.