Miscellaneous News

Stony Brook is finally starting to show some signs of life after what has seemed like weeks of hibernation. The undergrads are slowly returning, I can't park on campus anymore, and the internet in my apartment has slowed to its normal glacial pace.

We are all gearing up for the start of classes next week. Personally, it'll be nice to have a structure to my week again. As much as I like making my own hours, it does not result in me being terribly productive. Its likely that this semester is going to be busier than the last as I'm adding some research projects onto my normal insane course load.

In terms of what I've been doing recently, I finally got the hang of SPM2... only for it to completely change when we updated to SPM5. As much as the program does the same things and behaves in the same way, the interface is completely different. Its not unmanageable, but its going to take some getting used to. I've also been processing some image using Photoshop and this nifty little program called ImageJ. It turns out that standardizing brightness and contrast levels for hundreds of images is not as easy as it sounds.

These images are the stimuli for a behavioral experiment that I will be running this semester, depending on its outcome, follow-up experiments will be done with fMRI. Basically, this is the irst part in a larger research programme that will hopefully include my first year project, master's work, and possibly even my dissertation.

Quake Live

When this comes out its going to destroy any semblance of productivity anywhere with a decent internet connection. Well, until every school/university/company/clandestine government agency blocks the site from their machines.

Inauguration thoughts

Maybe its just because many of us were children then, but I remember once having very positive feelings about this country and great optimism about its future. Since then, I have become so accustomed to being disappointed, so conditioned to the fear-mongering, and so used to the necessity of cynicism that it's quite an adjustment to believe that things could potentially get better. Repairing the damage of the last few years is going to be a long and arduous process, but our most egregious mistakes are already being corrected and it seems that we can finally be positive and optimistic again.


Regular posting about ridiculous nonsense will continue later this week.

"The superman exists... and he's American."

I don't think I've been especially subtle with my criticism of the Watchmen movie. But with that said, I have to admit that the viral marketing campaign for the film has produced some neat stuff so far.

Nice Job America

Via The New York Times

Lets try not to screw this up. Please.