The Asteroid Belt, First Encounter

Well, here’s the first installment of The Asteroid Belt, my weekly “link dump” post. Kudos to Jay and Cas for the idea (but Cas will let you know that she has been blogging longer! ). Thanks to Jay again for the title idea. This week’s Asteroid Belt is a bit thin, mostly because I’ve been doing non-blog stuff (it’s finals week, if that helps you figure out what I’ve been doing). Anyways, here are the links along with my accompanying babbling.

A researcher uses his understanding of the human brain to get $500,000 on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. This is a pretty interesting article. It introduced me to a few memory techniques that I wasn’t aware of, in particular “priming”. Snippet:

The priming of a memory occurs because of the peculiar “connectionist” neural dynamics of our cortex, where memories are distributed across many regions and neurons. If we can recall any fragment of a pattern, our brains tend to automatically fill in the rest. For example, hearing an old Madonna song may launch a cascade of linked memories: your high school prom where it was the theme song, your poorly tailored prom outfit, your forgotten prom date, the stinging embarrassment when you threw up in the limo.

Since the producers allow contestants unlimited time to work out answers (as long as they’re not just stalling), I knew that I could employ the most basic of priming tactics: talking about the question, posing scenarios, throwing out wild speculations, even just babbling—trying to cajole my prefrontal neurons onto any cue that could trigger the buried neocortical circuits holding the key to the answer.

The article also discusses intuition and how to deal with it. At the end of the game, on his million dollar question, the guy actually went against his intuition (and his priming technique) and chose to walk with $500,000, because he thought the answer he’d come up with was wrong, due to it being the one that intuition made him think of first. After walking, he discovered that he had had the right answer. D’oh.

Viking ship to ply North Sea; no invasion planned. Okay, let me get this straight. They have a 100-foot long replica of a Viking warship. They will have 65 crew-members. And they won’t be invading anywhere? And they won’t be going dressed up in Viking gear? To quote Gollum, “You ruinnssss it!!”

An amazingly cool animated short about the rise and fall of human civilization from the viewpoint of two sentient rock beings. I loved this little video. Like Tom, though, I’d really like to know more. A sequel is in order!

From Google Docs and Spreadsheets Unsupported Browser page:

If you are working to fix problems with a specific browser and would like to bypass this check, just add &browserok=true to the end of the Google Docs & Spreadsheets url.

Please note that it is a violation of intergalactic law to use this parameter under false pretenses, so don’t let us catch you at it.

And, it won’t work very well — really.

It’s things like this that make me like Google. Maybe it’s just part of their plan to conquer the galaxies, but I can’t help but like a gigantic company that has retained its sense of humor.

Sunken Roman ship from the 1st century thrills archaeologists. In other news, a Viking ship was found in a similar state. Apparently, archaeologists weren’t very happy with the find, because all it contained was a few barrels of rotting shark meat.