What does your brain see?

What does your brain see?

Something that’s bothered me for quite a while, and apparently bothers others too is the issue of color perception. One night I had a dream where everything was viewed through a photonegative. All colors were the opposite of what they were supposed to be. The sky was orange, plants were yellow, and only I seemed to notice. Is it possible that the colors we see differ from other people? Perhaps what I see as green you would see as yellow. The thing is, you were trained that the color is green and have always grown up knowing it is green. To see something through someone else’s eyes could completely throw us off, as they’re colors are all wrong in our perception.

Another thing that would be interesting would be if you could take one eyeball out of its socket, pull it around and point it into the other eye. You are effectively looking into yourself. How would the brain interpret that? Would you go nuts, your brain explode? Would you get dizzy and throw up? Well, you’d probably throw up at the prospect of pulling out your eyeball, so it’d be hard to know what really caused it.

But enough vomit talk. It's hitting too close to home right now. Stupid food poisoning.

Database interfaces

Database interfaces continue to prove an enigma to me. I’ve tried to work with Access, MySql, along with a couple others whose names I don’t remember or have since blocked out of my mind. They’re wretched to setup, harder still to change, and seem to specialize in one of two categories:

Those that are easy to put information in.

Those that are easy to get information out.

Wikipedia is a great example of a database that’s easy to get information in. Bugzilla is another one. People who need to get information into a system love these types of systems. You freehand in information and do not require any particular type of structure. They’re very approachable, and great when you wish to amass information from a variety of sources very quickly.

But have you ever tried to compare two articles?

Let’s say you want to know the name of Franklin D Roosevelt’s dog. In wikipedia, you can probably find such a thing, but you can’t search for it directly. You have to search for Roosevelt, and then cull through the various pages that reference him to see if they mention his dog. You can add a string modifier to look for dog, which will reduce the time, but you still have to scan through the article to see if the information is relevant. Inconvenient, but not a show stopper.

But what if you wanted to compare articles referencing Roosevelt’s dog? What if you wanted to find out the context of someone’s life that an author would reference a famous man’s dog? There is no culling of data to gleam some greater insight. There is only an upchuck of that information that has already been deposited.

Now, on the opposite end of the spectrum, more business oriented databases like Access exist. My former employer used Access to keep track of clients, inventory, and various product models, as well as employee records. These systems require a lot of forethought. One must first consider Exactly what types of information you’re going to need to enter. For a product that you sell, you could include information like:

Sale price, sources of goods, prices your vendors charge, prices you sell for, etc. This is all well and good. Often someone who is entering information into the database needs a certain level of training so that they don’t enter numbers into a cell that requires text. However, you can design custom search strings to compare similar pieces of information. If you want to compare the prices of your different products, or look at what goods are the most expensive and the most cheap, you can do this fairly quickly and effortlessly.

But, if a year into the business you decide it’s time to start considering multiple vendors for a particular good you need, something you hadn’t thought of originally, your database needs a reworking to support all that. Cells have to be added, new information has to be entered. New queries have to be created, and some old ones have to be changed as they may not work anymore.

With respect to flying

I've said this before and I'll state it again. When on a long flight, give the person in the middle both armrests.
The window person has the few and a wall to lean against when napping. The aisle person can both stretch out and have easy access to the bathroom without imposing on others. The ONLY thing a middle seat person can possibly get is both armrests. When you have to sit there for over 16 hours, you really need both armrests.
This will be repeated as often as necessary until it catches on. Or, at least until I don't have to sit in the middle anymore.

Philosophy on technology and robots

I first developed this stance about 3 months before I started working at my current job. At the time, I was trying to understand how a cell phone made my life better.

Ideally the purpose of technology is to simplify our lives. However, most technologies only serve to further complicate everything we try to do by adding more and more layers of steps and processes. The exception to this is robots. Robots like the Roomba serve to fully free us of daily responsibilities and allow us to pursue other goals. The key lies in the automation that incorporates the technology.

Currently we live in a world with 1st and 3rd world countries. The 1st world nations further scientific development and technological achievement, while the 3rd world nations provide us with baser needs such as food and low cost labor. Ideally, 3rd world nations need to be brought up to the level of 1st world nations. But, before that can be realized, the baser needs that 3rd world nations provide must have a suitable replacement. This can perhaps be best realized through automation.

There is much more I can post on theories regarding automation, but it's late. Goodnight non-readers.