I love chocolate. A lot.
I've been lucky to enjoy a few interactive experiences where I got to enjoy chocolate on a whole 'nother level. Here they are below; let me know what you recommend I do next!
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A few days ago, I was trying to remember a line in a song I had heard about 9 months ago. I heard the song at a karaoke event, and the singer had a funny accent and demeanor. I vaguely remembered the line contained an alliteration, and with that clue, combined with the funny accent, I was able to remember the moment after about 30 seconds of thought.
It was those 30 seconds that then caused me to wonder how my brain did that. First of all, I was quite surprised I even could conjure up the memory, which was quite unimportant. Thus, the fact that I could do it in 30 seconds was surprising; however, why did it have to take 30 seconds? What was going on inside my skull? Was some huge table being scanned? Some map-reduce operation being done? Were old neural connections being dusted off and re-energized with electrical current for my old memory to be resuscitated? What's neat is that our brain consolidates memories and continues to work on solving problems and answering search queries while we sleep. What's crazy to wonder about is what part of "us" controls it while we sleep.... As far as I know, the brain doesn't operate at a typical "clock speed" like computers do (where the clock speed dictates how often a CPU goes from instruction to instruction). But what does control how quickly our brain works? Clearly it changes in speed and function over time as we age, and its speed can deteriorate with various diseases. So there must be something biological/physical that somewhat resembles clock speed. IQ? From a quick search, this article tries to tackle this question, but at a very high level (and the article's somewhat old). That got me thinking about another clock in our body, something a lot more like the clock on our wall and in a computer: our body's internal clock (circadian rhythm). I bet there are lessons both biologists and computer scientists can learn from each other in examining the parallels between our body's clock, our brain's "clock," and our computer's clock. And finally, how does parallel processing work? In a computer, it's like having separate little brains that can do very basic tasks like read and store numbers and arithmetic; but in our brain, is it that multiple neural connections are being formed continuously and it's just a matter of which ones happen to grasp our attention at any one time? As far as I know, people aren't really able to take a large problem, split it up into many parallel parts, and assign those different sub-problems to separate mini-brains. Or are we? Is that what intuition does? Or does intuition just leap ahead magically to some final answer and not worry about sub-problems at all? All of these questions fascinate me and make constantly wonder how our brains function deep inside. I recently was lucky enough to attend a sold-out, uber-geek event featuring the creator of PHP, the programming language powering a couple small websites out there, including some you may have heard of, like Yahoo and Facebook.
The talk was put on by LAPHP, and the speaker was Rasmus Lerdorf. The topic was "PHP in 2011," and it discussed how PHP fits into the current technology stack, followed by an overview of what you should and shouldn't be doing, along with a summary of new and upcoming features in PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4. Rasmus Lerdorf is known for having gotten the PHP project off the ground in 1995 and has contributed to a number of other open source projects over the years. He spent 7 years at Yahoo and has since worked for and consulted with various startups. He was born in Greenland, grew up in Denmark and Canada, and has a Systems Design engineering degree from the University of Waterloo. The full "slides" for Rasmus's talk are here. From the moment I found out that PHP is a recursive acronym (standing for "PHP: Hypertext Processor"), I found the language cute. While I personally feel the syntax leaves much to be desired in terms of prettiness, the language clearly gets the job done. Below are my main observations and notes on the talk. Rasmus Background
PHP Background
On his mind for 2011
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