Most of my philosophy posts reside on my other blog. But I am very excited to announce – to anyone who might stop by this more-tech-oriented blog – that I have completed my master’s thesis and DEGREE in philosophy from Georgia State University. Yea!

I can now definitely say that I know pain. I’ve studied it, and I understand a bit more about the brain states involved with pain. Reallly, I swear! I know pain. You don’t believe me, do you? Well, if you are thinking that I am simply Mary the scientist, who has studied pain her entire life, but never experienced real pain, then you need to read my thesis.

Here’s the abstract…

One common element of Kripke’s and Chalmers’ reactions to physicalist theories of mind is their reliance upon the intuition that the concept of conscious experience is essentially identified by the “immediate phenomenal quality” of conscious experience or how an experience feels. I examine how Kripke’s and Chalmers’ critiques require that the concept of conscious experience be identified by how it feels and then move on to provide some ways in which this intuition about the concept of conscious experience could be wrong. Specifically, the intuition is not consistent with our intuitions about unusual cases in pain science and does not take such cases to be genuine cases of pain. These inconsistencies weaken the intuition, making it difficult for any critique of identity theory or physicalism to rely heavily upon it.

Its title is Kripke, Chalmers and the Immediate Phenomenal Quality of Pain.

Have I mentioned I love Google Sets? Something about ostensive defintions just makes me all warm and fuzzy inside! Here are some practical uses of Google Sets (and similar apps) that I have gathered from around the net:

I found these in this O’Reily article:

Enter the name of the company you work for. Enter the name of one of its main competitors. Click “small set.” Voila! There’s how the web classifies your company.

You’re packing for a weekend trip and you want to check if you’ve forgotten something? type in five items you remembered to pack (toothbrush, towel, etc.) and then generate a list..

You’ve just moved to a new house and you want to be sure you’ve notified everyone who cares about your new address – type in a few things such as electricity, comcast, post office etc. and then generate a list—you’ll be surprised at the number for things you forgot.

There’s this tip from Google Groups

Music related searches – I like Band X…. find me similar

And here’s an inspired few from me:

• Tired of the same old breakfast food, commute activities? Get suggestions on what to eat for breakfast or what to do during your commute.
• Writers can search for synonyms or topic ideas
• Can’t remember the seven deadly sins?
• Use the app as a part of a parlor game. One group has to create a list of four related items. The second team gets points for guessing what Google Sets will produce… kind of like 10,000 Dollar Pyramid.

There is also Query by Example. Look at the Popular searches on this site. There are lists of planets, constants, business schools, alternate spellings, colors, rock bands, oceans, prime numbers, political parties, and tons more. Great for writers, anyone looking to make some creative connections or simply as a reference. Very useful!

I just finished my first Squidoo Lens; it is on Blythe Dolls. Ta Da!

”...I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. “

- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

There are some annoying things about Typo that are relatively easy to fix. Here are two changes that I have made. Pointers to other posts or sites documenting Typo fixes would be appreciated.

Change pagination on Articles page

Find the contents_controller.rb file in typo/app/controller/admin. Change :per_page => 15 to :per_page => 35 or how ever many posts you want to see at a time.

Save As Draft

In order the save posts as drafts in Typo, you can change the published date to some date in the future. Instead of doing this manually everytime you want to create a draft, you can create a link that will automatically save whatever post you are working on with a publish date far in the future. The following Typo changes add a link that allows you to create a draft post. The draft post will be save with a publish date approximately one year from the current date.

• Make a copy of new.rhtml, name it draft.rhtml and change the action in the form tag from “new” to “draft”.

• Add the following code to typo/app/helpers/admin/base_helper.rb

  
def task_draft(title)
    task(title, 'draft')
 end

• Add the following code to typo/app/views/admin/content/list.rhtml:

  <div id="draft" style="display:none;position:absolute;">
    <%= render :partial => "admin/content/draft" %>
  </div>

• Also on the list.rhtml page, make sure you add the link from the list page to the draft page, like this:

<%= task_draft('Draft') %>

• Replace the get_or_build_article method in typo/app/controllers/admin/content_controller.rb with the following code:

def get_or_build_article
    @article = case params[:action]
               when 'new'
                 art = this_blog.articles.build
                 art.allow_comments =  this_blog.default_allow_comments
                 art.allow_pings    = this_blog.default_allow_pings
                 art.published      = true
                 art
               when 'edit'
                 this_blog.articles.find(params[:id])
               when 'draft'
         art = this_blog.articles.build
                 art.allow_comments = this_blog.default_allow_comments
                 art.allow_pings    = this_blog.default_allow_pings
                 art.published      = true
         t = Time.now + (365 * 24 * 60 * 60)
         art.published_at = t
                 art
           else
                 raise "Don't know how to get article for action: #{params[:action]}" 
               end
  end

More to come; any requests?

Tweaks Elsewhere

• Subdirectories for Typo’s image folder: Now you have no excuse for having a messy image folder!
• Speed Up Typo on Dreamhost

For the past three years, I have done almost all of my Christmas shopping on Amazon.com. The main reason I try to do all of my Holiday shopping there is to narrow the places I have to look for gifts. If the mall or Froogle or my favorite online boutiques enter into the mix, shopping begins to become stressful and time consuming. Nothing in this post should be earth shattering; instead, this post is a collection of tips for shopping at Amazon.com during the Holiday season.

Here’s what I have learned:

• Find out what people want early. Pay attention to what they are into. This is easier said than done. Try to recall the last few conversations you had with the gift recipient. What were they into or excited about?

• Draft an initial gift list. I have a simple spreadsheet that I use every year to write down Christmas gift ideas, which is very useful for next year’s gift giving. The spreadsheet has three columns: person, item and item price. Once you have an initial gift list, it is easier to search for deals.

• I can’t stress this enough… the earlier, the better! Shoot for ordering everything before Thanksgiving. My theory is that the parcel carriers . They get slamed at Christmas.

• My overall attitude toward Amazon.com Holiday Shopping is a little bit at a time. One night I might work on finding a gift for my mother-in-law. The next day I might find a DVD my sister wants. Marathon shopping, whether online or at the mall, is typically exhausting! Avoid it! Find gifts for two people for the next 10 days (starting November 13, 2006) and you have finished Christmas shopping for 20 people before Thanksgiving.

• Send presents to a “gift” location. If the Grandparents are hosting Christmas morning, send “Santa Claus” to them. Or one year I knew that a gift wasn’t going to come in before I left town, so I had it shipped to my parents, where I was spending Christmas, so that I would be sure to have the gifts on Christmas.

• I used to shop a lot on Amazon.com: Christmas shopping plus school books twice a year. So, I have an Amazon.com credit card. After Christmas I always get a gift certificate back from Amazon.com. If you are an Amazon.com regular, you might want to consider signing up. If you have a problem with credit card use, do yourself a favor and don’t sign up.

• In the Pre-gift Lists Amazon.com era, I created a special x-mas wishlist, which I saved gift ideas to. I used the comments field to indicate who the item is for. In the Gift List Amazon.com era that we live in, I try to save the item under the person’s name, but if I am unsure of who will get the list, I will save the item in the special x-mas wishlist.

• Magazine subscriptions are very easy to order as gifts on Amazon.com. They are my number one gift recommendation.

• On a budget? Try Bargain books or Today’s Deals or Free Gifts and Special Offers.

• Need more gift ideas? Looking for a cool gift for your neighbor’s two year old daughter? Find Listmanias of other two year old girls, like this one.

FREE Super Saver Shipping (SSS)

• In general, if you are trying to buy things that have free shipping, look for new books, movies and music.

• So that all of your potentially SSS items qualify for SSS, make sure to wait until you have decided what you are going to get for everyone before completing your order. Last year I went ahead and ordered most of my presents before Thanksgiving and waited to order the rest until I decided on the last few gifts. I ended up paying shipping on an item that would have qualified for SSS, if the item were ordered with my previous order.

• For the kids in my family (nieces and nephews), I try to buy gifts according to a theme every year. Like last year, all of the kids got “chapter books” because they were all doing pre-reading stuff. This year they are getting “role model DVDs” (kid movies I’ve seen where the main character kicks ass – Kiki’s Delivery Service, The Worst Witch (The Movie), which is on YouTube in its entirety). This makes it easy to ensure that those items will qualify for SSS.

• If you need an extra item to get free shipping, try getting something for a White Elephant party or for stocking stuffers or both. Search Amazon.com for the following phrase: “eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping”. Or try this guide: So you’d like to… Buy one more thing to get that FREE shipping.

• If you are looking for some interesting items with free shipping, here are some ideas:
1. Pimpjuice Premium Energy Drink, Extra Strength Formula, Case of 24- 8 Ounce Cans (192 Ounces)
2. Bitter with Baggage Seeks Same: The Life and Times of Some Chickens
3. Puzzle Time Sudoku: Book Two (100 Puzzles)

Amazon.com on Your RSS Reader

If you want to watch the price of some item or group of items, try RSS Stalker. Look for Holiday shopping ideas on a blog, like this one.

Here are some Amazon.com RSS feeds that you can modify for your RSS reader:

Baseball books

Top selling DVDs

Alternate History Books

Multi-tasking has, rightfully I think, taken a lot of heat lately on the blogosphere. People still use the word “blogosphere”, right?

The idea is that trying to do several activities at once takes away from our ability to perform some function at our full capacity.

In this post Lifehacker Gina Trapani asks for multi-tasks that are effective.

The “problem” of multi-tasking is in its current formulation this:

We all waist time. We all procrastinate. I am sure that there is a pop psychologist out there researching this fact as we speak. So, the question then becomes, “How can we get the most out of activities that don’t require our best efforts?”

But of course, the best solution is not to answer this question, but to re-frame it. A better solution is most likely to take those things we tend to “veg out with” and creatively make them a part of our goals. Luis von Ahn has found a way to use humans for simple tasks that computers cannot perform. His ESP Game and Google’s Image Labeler allow us to work on two things (vegging out & tagging images) while only doing one task (playing the game). So, the new question is, “How can we engineer our lives so that if I had a bad day, I could still move toward my goals?” Oooh, tough one! I’ll have to get back to you. No, seriously! Come back; I’m working on that one.

In the meantime, here’s my suggestion for effective multi-tasking 1.0:

Mix an item from the first list with an item from the second, and BAM, you’re on your way to studying vocab in the shower! ;-)

Activities that tend to make me a Zombie

• cleaning
• folding clothes
• exercising
• riding public transit
• listening to elevator music over the phone for 5 minutes while I wait on customer support
• cooking dinner (some dinners!)
• I can imagine using a breast pump being boring, but I don’t know… I’ve never had a kid
• showering
• for my fellow grad students out there, cooking ramen!
• waiting on that one page to load
• (fill in your favorite zombie-fying activity here)

Activities that Zombies can do without sacrificing performance or quality

• read escapist literature, fashion magazines, podcasts
• print out (yes, like on paper) some code and read, mark-up
• customize settings on cell phone (for those of us who otherwise would have NO inclination to mess with our phones)
• quiz self with vocab cards (which is, for most people, different than committing vocab to memory)
• listen to German, French, Spanish, Chinese, whatever language you are trying to learn
• knit
• talk with in-laws, just kidding guys!
• listen to music, unless you think you are a music critic or something. Gaw!
• workout your forearms with one of those 1980’s hand squeeze device
• DAYDREAM, its not bad for you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have been listening to Saint Etienne’s Travel Edition this week.

The Short & Sweet Intro

A light, lingering girlie voice with techno beats that don’t overpower… this is what I think of when I think of Saint Etienne. And Travel Edition is a greatest hits album for the group. You will probably like Saint Etienne if you like Belle & Sebastian, Air or Mogwai. Let me say that I really, really don’t like dance/techno music. But I love Saint Eteinne! Unlike so many groups, their music takes you to a familiar place that you have never been before. They always set a mood.

Some Lyrics…

“He’s on the phone, doesn’t want to go home. The hotel life – forget your wife, you’re on your own. Academia girl her life’s a gas, she loves the trash inside his world. Can’t find his way there, got the cash, feeling flash in Leicester Square.”—He’s on the Phone

Is it me or does this verse from Saint Etienne remind you of Lost in Translation? ...except London instead of Tokyo?

Saint Etienne Links

Official Site

Saint Etienne Disco

Blanche looks like me reading my thesis for the ga-zillionth time, that is, like a ZOMBIE! Shhh, no mentioning zombies!