{ ECE student at Georgia Tech }
// September 1st, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
NASA’s put a huge quantity of pictures online! Go check them out, there’s all kinds of cool stuff. Think of it like looking through old boxes in the coolest attic in the world.
// September 1st, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
I just got a book called “Harmonograph: A visual guide to the mathematics of music” by Anthony Ashton. It’s a neat little book that talks about the theory of music with respect to the Pythagorean ratios. It then goes on to talk about the invention of the Harmonograph and how its drawings represent musical interactions. If you’ve never heard of a harmonograph, here’s a video demonstrating one:
Back in the day (the Victorian day), rich people would bring portable versions of that to parties and sit around with the guests and watch it draw cool stuff. The drawings have much more meaning that just looking cool though, and the book goes into that. It’s really cool, and I recommend buying the book, it’s only like $10. I’d like to build a harmonograph someday (maybe a weekend project), but if you’d like to play with one right now, try this:
harmonographix- OpenProcessing.
It’s a Java app that lets you change all of the parameters and see what happens. It also incorporates sound, so you can hear the relationships between the notes and how that looks visually. The person who wrote the app wrote it after reading the same book I’ve been talking about. Give it a try!
// August 27th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
Pretty interesting talk about how physics shares some parallels with marketing. I’m not sure how far you could take these analogies, but it’s still a cool idea. I’ve always thought that business people could gain a lot from having more training in science and math. Anyway, take a look:
// August 27th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
Miss part 1? Check it out here.
Braaaains: How to Hack your sleep cycle so you don’t feel like a zombie
If you’re like me, waking up is the worst part of the day. Around here at Georgia Tech, most people get about 4-5 hours a night, often much less. In fact, the next time you see an architecture student at your school, give them a hug, because they seem to be pulling all nighters more often than anyone. Obviously sleep is important. Your brain can’t work very well without it. Researchers have, on several occasions, studied the effect of no sleep for long periods of time. The results are never pretty. As you might expect, learning and the ability to retain information goes way down, irritability goes up, and besides all of that, it’s just not healthy for your body. So how do you get enough sleep without sacrificing time to get work done? You hack your sleep cycle.
Normally, humans are on something called a circadian cycle (some people incorrectly say cicadian cycle which may be referring to the cyclical nature of the cicada insect, or may be just because they heard it wrong). Circadian is a term coined by a guy named Franz Halberg. It comes from Latin “circa” which means around and “dia” which means day. This is the cycle most people are in, and why you get tired at night and feel awake during the day (theoretically). However, it is not the most ideal way to go if you want to maximize the amount of time you stay awake during the day. To feel rested and stay healthy, your body needs a certain amount of sleep, usually about 6 hours. But more specifically, it needs a certain amount of time in something called a REM (Rapid Eye Movement – your eyes literally move around a whole lot) cycle. This is the deepest form of sleep and is when you dream.
REM is also when Leonardo DiCaprio invades your dreams.
There are probably a lot of things you have heard about sleep: that it is when your body repairs itself, that it processes things that happened during the day, or that it rehabilitates you. The fact is, not a lot is known about sleep. We can measure the brain activity during sleep with an EEG or an MRI, but other than that, we don’t know much. Research only really started in the 1930’s. One of the first things discovered was that during a typical night, the body actually goes through about five stages. One of these is REM. Ironically, this is the most active cycle out of all of them, even though it is when you are deepest asleep. During a typical night, you are only in the REM cycle for about 1-2 hours. It turns out that we only really need REM to feel awake and rested the next day. If you sleep for 8 hours and are only in REM for 2 of them, why should you have to waste time in all of those other cycles? What if there was a way to trick your body into using almost all of your time asleep for REM? Then you would only a need a few hours of sleep a day and you’d feel great and have much more time awake. This is called polyphasic sleep.
You have probably noticed that after pulling an all-nighter, you fall asleep the second your head hits the pillow. Your body has just instantly gone into REM! This happens when you are insanely tired. Well, it wouldn’t be practical to get really exhausted each night would it? Luckily, you can also trigger going into REM immediately by convincing your body that you are only getting a short amount of sleep. You can take several short 20 minute naps instead of an 8 hour continuous sleep. The sleep hacking community (yes, there is one) has come up with six different methods. Here they are in pie chart form. Each circle represents 24 hours.
Monophasic Sleep:
Polyphasic Sleep:
All of these methods are basically different ways of slicing up the amount of time you spend in REM. The “biphasic” method is one that I often employ. You get a nice chunk of sleep at night and then a short nap in the afternoon. In fact, a recent study also showed how effective this method can be. Presenting at this year’s meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS), University of California Berkeley researchers revealed the results of testing 39 healthy young adults on recalling facts they had learned that same day. From the study:
“At noon, all the participants were subjected to a rigorous learning task intended to tax the hippocampus, a region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Both groups performed at comparable levels. At 2 p.m., the nap group took a 90-minute siesta while the no-nap group stayed awake. Later that day, at 6 p.m., participants performed a new round of learning exercises. Those who remained awake throughout the day became worse at learning. In contrast, those who napped did markedly better and actually improved in their capacity to learn.”
So there you have it. Not only can it give you more time awake, it can actually help you retain more information and improve you capacity to learn. Not bad. This can be difficult to do, especially if you are cramming for an exam, but even though it seems counterproductive, it can really help. Note that this study gave the participants a 90 minute nap rather than a 20 minute nap. The theory is that by only taking 20 minutes, you force your body to immediately drop into REM. By taking this 20 nap, you can stay awake for another hour and 40 minutes longer than if you didn’t.
These methods keep shortening the core time and spreading out the naps. Eventually, if you use the Uberman method, you end up actually feel well rested on only two total hours to sleep per day. Think of the things you could do if you could stay awake every day for 22 hours! However, there is a catch to all of this. As the total amount of sleep you get decreases, the need to stay strictly on schedule becomes more important. If you miss a nap in the Uberman method by more than 30 minutes, it will throw off your entire cycle and you’ll feel really tired for days. That’s why most people don’t do it. Their schedule during the day isn’t compatible and it isn’t predicable enough to ensure that they will always get those naps in. But, in the Everyman methods, you can miss a nap by an hour or two and still be ok. For all of these methods, the most important thing is to sleep really deeply during the nap. If you can’t get to sleep immediately and deeply then you get off and feel tired.
Some of these methods are pretty intense, and as a college student it’s unlikely that you could employ them. However, try the biphasic (aka ‘siesta’) method some time. It lets you get only 4.5 hours of sleep at night (go to bed at 4am, get up at 8:30am for instance) and a nap in the afternoon. Try to keep the nap to either 20 minutes or 90 minutes. Don’t go for anything less than 20 or anything more than 90. Also, don’t try to alternate between those lengths. Pick one and stick with it. The trick is to get your brain to think that you’ll only get a tiny amount of sleep so it’ll go into REM.
Here are some links you should take a look at before you try any of these:
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Everyman%20Sleep%20Schedule
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep
sources: http://lifehacker.com/5478053/naps-can-seriously-improve-all+day-learning-abilities
// August 26th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
As an engineer, I had always wondered about the technical details of the cameras they used in Avatar. There’s still some more things I’d be interested in finding out, like more about the beam splitter (is it a half mirror?). Still, this is a really cool look at the camera. And James Cameron seems like a pretty cool guy.
// August 24th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized
I’ve put together a couple shirts that I thought up for fun. Check them out below.
My most popular product so far is the “Physics Gang Sign” shirt. If I ever decide to start selling electronics kits or something, then I’ll finish setting up my full store hosted on here on hscott.net and the shirts will move there.
// August 20th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // Uncategorized
This is the first in a series of 3 articles I’ve written about how to improve your ability to do well in college. The tips and techniques can really be applied in almost any situation, but these are specifically aimed at college students. I’ve been doing little experiments and trying new methods to feel more rested, get better grades, and be more productive. Each article concentrates on one of those areas. The information comes from things I’ve read as well as personal experience.
Part 1: A Square Peg in a Square Hole: Learning the way your brain is designed to
The method that most people use to learn is memorization. If your professor says you have a test tomorrow in History, you read the book and go over notes and study guides and memorize. You use repetition to try to cram all of that information in your brain. This way of learning is not very effective at all. Why? Because it’s not the way your brain normally works. Your brain is a highly complex, dense organ that is essentially a huge network of neurons, or brain cells. To remember or learn something, you first receive it via a sense (usually sight in the case of studying). You must attend to and actively engage that sense in order to transfer it to short term memory.
Ever read a page of a reading assignment and get to the end and realize you have no idea what you just read? That’s because even though your brain was receiving information, you weren’t engaging it, so the information didn’t go anywhere. If you pay attention to it, you move the information to short term memory. Short term memory can only hold about seven things. When someone reads you a phone number, you can remember it with ease. But if someone were to read you a list of about 11 numbers, you would have a pretty hard time remembering it. The trick is getting it into long term memory. Repetition will work, but it’s not the best way. You have to process the information in short term memory. You do this by making connections. You elaborate, store it in a meaningful way, and represent the information rather than just cram it in. Once it’s in long term memory, it can last a lifetime. Don’t worry about running out either, since long term memory is theoretically limitless. But how do you get it in there? You may be familiar with mnemonic devices. This is when you remember something using words or symbols to represent the parts. Why does this work? Because you are creating relationships between thoughts and ideas. This is really how the mind and brain work: each “thing” in memory is a node in a network which is interconnected. Ever notice how you can start thinking about stuff while trying to go to sleep and your mind wanders all over the place? The next time you find yourself doing that, try to follow the train of thought that led you to that point. Each thought is a node. Here’s a good picture diagramming the networking nature of the mind and brain:
This makes remembering things much easier, since once you remember a single node, you know the things that you associate with it and can recall them, which leads to even more things. Here’s what researcher Marvin Minsky had to say about it:
“If you understand something in only one way, then you don’t really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that’s what we mean by thinking!”
To learn more effectively and more quickly, here are some practical things you can start doing today:
1. Metaphors and Analogy
If you listen to exceptionally good teachers who explain things well, you’ll notice that one of the things they do is use analogies. This is consistent with the way your brain works, because you are connecting a new idea with an old one. Much of math, for instance, has practical applications and by thinking about those applications and what you are doing rather than just memorizing steps to solve something, you learn it better, remember it better, and can apply it better. Ask your professor what a practical application of what you are learning is and imagine that process or idea as you do homework. You can even make some problems more memorable by changing the premise. For instance, say the problem gives you some initial values and an equation, and tells you to find the amount of salt in a tank of water after a certain time. Change it around and pretend that the salt is really a deadly poison and the tank is the circulatory system. How long do you have to save the person? Make up stories and backgrounds that are meaningful or interesting to you and you will remember how you did those problems much more easily on tests.
2. Visualization
While you are making connections in your brain between ideas, imagine that network. Visualize everything that you read. As you read history, picture the people and events in your head. Don’t stop at just pictures though. Imagine and represent things as colors, textures, feelings, sounds. I’ve found that if you really get into it, it can be like watching a movie or even actually being there. Think about equations as physically picking up parts and moving them around. Immerse yourself as deeply as possible in what you are studying.
3. Explanation
I used this technique with much success my freshman year in psychology. Get your roommate, and explain everything that is on your test to them. They don’t have to listen, they can be doing other work and completely ignore you, but explain it and teach it nonetheless. If you can teach a five year old how to do everything you need to do, you understand the material (Einstein said that). Eventually, this may be a bit implausible (like explaining electromagnetics) because of required background knowledge, but explain it back as far as you can. This helps you connect the material to previous courses and get an idea of the big picture of how things work.
4. Diagramming
As you probably know from taking math, you can read the textbook, agree and understand everything it says and all the examples, then fail the test miserably. You HAVE to practice and write it out. Just as you imagine the network that you are forming with the material, draw it out. This will solidify it and let you find any pieces that you are missing or are unclear about. Draw diagrams, graphs, and pictures that represent what you are studying.
5. Work harder, not longer
It is easy to assume that the number of hours you spend studying for a test is directly proportional to the grade you will get. “I studied for 6 hours, I’m gonna get an A!”. Not if you studied the wrong way. Rather than setting aside an amount of time to study, concentrate on understanding. Here’s what I do: I get all my books and stuff I need to study for a particular test. I take a bunch of sharp pencils and paper, my keys, and no cell phone. I go into a study room with no clock that is completely quiet. I sit down and work problems until I understand it. If I don’t get something, I make a note of what it is, put a sticky note on it, and ask the professor or a TA later. The main thing is to not keep track of time. People often say “well, I’ve studied for 3 hours, that’s probably enough”. In reality, the time you spend studying has very little correlation to how well you do because there are too many things that are variable. Also, some people say that they can study with the TV on or listening to music. While I can’t speak for every single person, I can say that several studies (including one at Georgia Tech) have conclusively shown that people who study with music or video on perform statistically worse than those who do not.
That does it for Part 1. Do you have any techniques you use to get better grades than your friends? Leave a comment and let me know!
Diagrams taken from Westen: Psychology 3/e.
// August 19th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
Excellent talk on classical music featuring a piece from one of my favorite composers: Chopin.
// August 12th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized
Here are a bunch of good videos that outline the basics of electronics. They’re made by a guy called Afrotech who’s website is pretty entertaining. Check out the link at the bottom of this post to see the full list of videos he has made.
// August 11th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
This is a great little primer on neural networks. It goes through what the heck they are, why they are useful, and how to code them. It’s got a lot of sample code which is helpful, because I’ve always found that there can be a big difference in learning a computer science concept and actually coding it. The first three or four pages are really informative for someone who’s never coded before or heard of neural networks. After that it gets kind of technical. Also, this website looks like it was made in 1995, so enjoy the Geocities-esque web design, complete with seizure inducing backgrounds and dorky clip art like this:
Still, it’s a pretty interesting read.
Copyright © 2010 Hunter Scott. All rights reserved.
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