View allAll Photos Tagged flowchart
I found this complex array of gas piping nicely sunlit behind a local industrial building. It looks just like the flowchart my brain uses for trying to make mundane everyday decisions! 310/365.
Interactive graphic that shows
who and what shaped 2013,
for Channel 4 News online.
www.channel4.com/news/big-fat-graphic-of-year-who-what-sh...
How technology will (perhaps) turn us into superhumans.
One of a series of online graphics and large posters for NESTA
Crysis 1
Maxed settings + SMAA
Custom POM and Anisotropic Filtering
Vanilla textures
1080p
Some tests with Blackfire's mod and custom flowcharts (merged with Reli2) and Ultra Realism Mod merged flowcharts.
Somehow FRAPS doesn't seem to be capturing the SMAA.
Shame.
A flow-chart showing how the Los Angeles Bail Bond Process works (applicable for the entire State of California). The diagram shows:
- Arrest of an individual;
- Booking of the defendant;
- Phone call to family/friend or attorney;
- Contacting the Bail Bondsman;
- Deciding to contract for the bail bondsman's service or to pay for the bail directly;
- And, release from jail on bond until the court date or until the charges are otherwise resolved;
A small graphic showing the numbers of Asbos (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) served since they were started, for Channel4 News.com
By Peter Watts. Just finished this great book. Somehow, each and every time I read sf, I realise I should have started on this genre much, much early on, instead of reading "classic literature". Sigh. This book was filled with so many mind-blowing ideas and so much new information. ["Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad". That line by Aldous Huxley is my favorite. It was also fun to read about the Deinococcus bacteria and the Chinese Room argument. ] Book is under a CC license available here: www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm.
[Edit May, 2022] just stumbled across this amazing short video, I couldn't have imagined it any better! vimeo.com/467342474
Some parts I liked n noted down:
--
"This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real."
The new Millennium changed all that. We've surpassed ourselves now, we're exploring terrain beyond the limits of merely human understanding. Sometimes its contours, even in conventional space, are just too intricate for our brains to track; other times its very axes extend into dimensions inconceivable to minds built to fuck and fight on some prehistoric grassland. So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest. Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it. After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer.
"He never uses the past tense," I murmered.
"Huh? Oh, that." Pag nodded. "They never experience the past tense. It's just another thread to them. They don't remember stuff, they relive it."
If the unknown was hostile, we were probably doomed no matter what we did. The Unknown was technologically advanced—and there were some who claimed that that made them hostile by definition. Technology Implies Belligerence, they said.
What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for.
"Thing about game theory is, it assumes rational self-interest among the players. And people just aren't rational."
"The glass ceiling is in you. The glass ceiling is conscience."
"But they don't know about us, not in advance. Dandelion seed doesn't know what it's up against before it sprouts. Maybe nothing. Maybe some spastic weed that goes over like straw in the wind. Or maybe something that kicks its ass halfway to the Magellanic Clouds. It doesn't know, and there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all survival strategy. Something that aces against one player blows goats against a different one. So the best you can do is mix up your strategies based on the odds. It's a weighted dice roll and it gives you the best mean payoff over the whole game, but you're bound to crap out and choose the wrong strategy at least some of the time. Price of doing business. And that means— that means—that weak players not only can win against stronger ones, but they're statistically bound to in some cases."
"We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we're all gonna die before it ends."
"Can you think of any reason why something with such different needs would attack us?"
"That depends," she said, "on whether the fact that we are different is reason enough."
I saw playground battlefields reflected in her topology. I remembered my own, and wondered if there were any other kind.
Then again, that only proved the point. Humans didn't really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to bloodlines and limited resources.
...she hated him because he hadn't had the good grace to grow unnecessary?
As far as Earth was concerned, everyone on Theseus was an alter.
"Believe it or not, Cyggers, people sometimes choose to ignore even good memories. Like, say, if they enjoyed something they didn't think they should. Or—" she kissed my forehead— "if they don't think they deserve to be happy."
"You're saying the brain's got some kind of existence gauge?"
"Brain's got all kinds of gauges. You can know you're blind even when you're not; you can know you can see, even when you're blind. And yeah, you can know you don't exist even when you do. It's a long list, commissar. Cotard's, Anton's, Damascus Disease. Just for starters."
No matter that the four who'd died had been guilty of multiple counts of rape, torture, and homicide; that's just what people did in wartime. It's what they'd always done. There was nothing polite about war, no honorable code beyond the chain of command and the circling of wagons. Deal with indiscretions if you must; punish the guilty if you have to, for appearance if nothing else. But for God's sake close the doors first. Never give your enemy the satisfaction of seeing discord in the ranks, show them nothing but unity and flinty-eyed resolve. There may be murderers and rapists in our midst, but by God they're our murderers and rapists.
There was more, a whole catalog of finely-tuned dysfunctions that Rorschach had not yet inflicted on us. Somnambulism. Agnosias. Hemineglect. ConSensus served up a freak show to make any mind reel at its own fragility: a woman dying of thirst within easy reach of water, not because she couldn't see the faucet but because she couldn't recognize it. A man for whom the left side of the universe did not exist, who could neither perceive nor conceive of the left side of his body, of a room, of a line of text. A man for whom the very concept of leftness had become literally unthinkable.
Sometimes we could conceive of things and still not see them, although they stood right before us. Skyscrapers appeared out of thin air, the person talking to us changed into someone else during a momentary distraction— and we didn't notice. It wasn't magic. It was barely even misdirection. They called it inattentional blindness, and it had been well-known for a century or more: a tendency for the eye to simply not notice things that evolutionary experience classed as unlikely.
Some of the simpler tics make it through: Sascha's good-natured belligerence, Sarasti's aversion to the past tense. Cunningham lost most of his gender pronouns to an unforeseen glitch during the work on his temporal lobe. But it went beyond that. The whole lot of them threw English and Hindi and Hadzane into every second sentence; no real scientist would allow their thoughts to be hamstrung by the conceptual limitations of a single language. Other times they acted almost as synthesists in their own right, conversing in grunts and gestures that would be meaningless to any baseline. It's not so much that the bleeding edge lacks social skills; it's just that once you get past a certain point, formal speech is too damn slow.
"You don't want me happy," I said pleasantly. "You want me customized."
"Empathy's not so much about imagining how the other guy feels. It's more about imagining how you'd feel in the same place, right?"
"Both of you would've helped me out that day. And maybe he would've got there with good ol'-fashioned empathy while you had to cobble together some kind of improvised flowchart out of surplus parts, but that just makes your accomplishment all the greater..."
"Life isn't either/or. It's a matter of degree."
"What I'm asking is, are they natural? Could they be constructs?"
"Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Space ship? Of course. Were they built by naturally-evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?"
"Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him? "
Cunningham explained anyway: "A lot of biology doesn't use genes. Sunflowers look the way they do because of purely physical buckling stress. You get Fibonacci sequences and Golden ratios everywhere in nature, and there's no gene that codes for them; it's all just mechanical interactions. Take a developing embryo—the genes say start growing or stop growing, but the number of digits and vertebrae result from the mechanics of cells bumping against other cells. Those mitotic spindles I mentioned? Absolutely essential for replication in every eukaryotic cell, and they accrete like crystals without any genetic involvement. You'd be surprised how much of life is like that."
"But you still need genes," Bates protested, walking around to join us.
"Genes just establish the starting conditions to enable the process. The structure that proliferates afterwards doesn't need specific instructions. It's classic emergent complexity. We've known about it for over a century." Another drag on the stick. "Or even longer. Darwin cited honeycomb way back in the eighteen hundreds."
"You think you'd be able to fight the strings? You think you'd even feel them? I could apply a transcranial magnet to your head right now and you'd raise your middle finger or wiggle your toes or kick Siri here in the sack and then swear on your sainted mother's grave that you only did it because you wanted to. You'd dance like a puppet and all the time swear you were doing it of your own free will, and that's just me, that's just some borderline OCD with a couple of magnets and an MRI helmet." He waved at the vast unknowable void beyond the bulkhead. Shreds of mangled cigarette floated sideways in front of him. "Do you want to guess what that can do? ..."
"...Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default. Rorschach does nothing to you that you don't already do to yourselves."
Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.
Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way.
And it's fighting back.
"So sentience has gotta be good for something, then. Because it's expensive, and if it sucks up energy without doing anything useful then evolution's gonna weed it out just like that."
"Maybe it did." He paused long enough to chew food or suck smoke. "Chimpanzees are smarter than Orangutans, did you know that? Higher encephalisation quotient. Yet they can't always recognize themselves in a mirror. Orangs can."
"...wait, you're saying the world's corporate elite are nonsentient?"
Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Nirretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldn't even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself.
"We could engineer ourselves back into nonsentience, perhaps. Might improve our odds in the long run." She looked at me, a rueful sort of half-smile at the corner of her mouth. "But I guess that wouldn't be much of a win, would it? What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?"
You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species die—and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is."
...one of Blindsight's take-home messages is that life is a matter of degree—the distinction between living and non-living systems has always been an iffy one.
While a number of people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn't more trouble than it's worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they're probably right. I hope they are. Blindsight is a thought experiment, a game of Just suppose and What if. Nothing more.
On the other hand, the dodos and the Steller sea cows could have used exactly the same argument to prove their own superiority, a thousand years ago: if we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct? Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time aren't necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isn't over. The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost.
--
The full end notes here: www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Blindsight_Endnote...
--
Got done with Echopraxia too last month, and some interesting bits here:
--
It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.
-Anatole France
Ultimately, all science is mere correlation. For that matter, in the time before science people turned to religion to understand the physical universe; and while the thought of deities hurling lightning bolts may seem fanciful to modern minds, it was then (as science claims to be now) the best explanation available to limited human understanding.
The fundamental difference between Science and Scripture is not, therefore, that scientific insights are necessarily more realistic than those based upon Faith. The difference is no more and no less than predictive power. Scientific insights have proven to be better predictors than Spiritual ones, at least in worldly matters; they prevail not because they are true, but simply because they work.
“ALL ANIMALS ARE UNDER STRINGENT SELECTION PRESSURE TO BE AS STUPID AS THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH.
-PETE RICHERSON AND ROBERT BOYD
Brüks was an old man, a field man from a day when people could tell what they were looking at by--well, by looking at it. Check the chin shields. Count the fin rays, the hooks on the scolex. Use your eyes, dammit. At least if you screw up you've only got yourself to blame, not some dumb-ass machine that can't tell the difference between cytochrome oxidase and a Shakespearean sonnet.
At least these deaths served a purpose, some constructive end transcending the disease or predation that nature would have inflicted. Life was a struggle to exist at the expense of other life. Biology was a struggle to understand life. And this particular bit of biology, this study of which he was author, principal, and sole investigator--this was a struggle to use biology to help the very populations he was sampling. These deaths were the closest that Darwin's universe would ever come to altruism.
Nature, though. Nature always welcomed him. She passed no judgments, didn't care about right or wrong, guilt or innocence. She only cared about what worked and what didn't. She welcomed everyone with the same egalitarian indifference. You just had to play by her rules, and expect no mercy if things didn't go your way.
"Transcendence is out of reach. For our brains, anyway."
Lianna shrugged. "Change your brain."
"Then it's not your brain anymore. It's something else. You're something else."
"That's kinda the point. Transcendence is transformation."
He shook his head, unconvinced. "Sounds more like suicide to me."
Even in sleep, Dan Brüks didn’t take anything on faith.
"I COULD BE BOUNDED IN A NUTSHELL, AND COUNT MYSELF A KING OF INFINITE SPACE—WERE IT NOT THAT I HAVE BAD DREAMS." -W.S
A trip to the sun. A chance to glimpse the traces of an alien intelligence—whatever alien meant in a world where members of his own species stitched themselves together into colony minds, or summoned their own worst nightmares back from the Pleistocene to run the stock market. The face of the unknown. What scientist would choose to sleep through that?
A tapeworm may not be as smart as its host but that doesn’t stop it from scamming shelter and nourishment and a place to breed. Good parasites are invisible; the best are indispensable. Gut bacteria, chloroplasts, mitochondria: all parasites, once. All invisible in the shadow of vaster beings. Now their hosts can’t live without them.
All those gut feelings, right or wrong, that had kept the breed alive on the Pleistocene savannah—and they were wrong, so much of the time. False negatives, false positives, the moral algebra of fat men pushed in front of onrushing trolleys. The strident emotional belief that children made you happy, even when all the data pointed to misery. The high-amplitude fear of sharks and dark-skinned snipers who would never kill you; indifference to all the toxins and pesticides that could. The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision—and should some brain-lesioned mother abandon her baby in a burning house in order to save two strangers from the same fire, the rest of the world would be more likely to call her a monster than laud the rationality of her lifeboat ethics. Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will. Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.
“Dan, you gotta let go of this whole self thing. Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You’re already a different person than you were ten minutes ago.”
THE INTUITIVE MIND IS A SACRED GIFT AND THE RATIONAL MIND IS A FAITHFUL SERVANT. WE HAVE CREATED A SOCIETY THAT HONORS THE SERVANT AND HAS FORGOTTEN THE GIFT.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger, and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, he thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations—and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty-first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now, we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.
“Do you measure Earth’s gravity every time you step outside? Do you reinvent quantum circuits from scratch whenever you boot up, just in case the other guys missed something?” She gave him a moment to answer. “Science depends on faith,” she continued, when he didn’t. “Faith that the rules haven’t changed, faith that the other guys got the measurements right. All science ever did was measure a teensy sliver of the universe and assume that everything else behaved the same way. But the whole exercise falls apart if the universe doesn’t follow consistent laws. How do you test if that’s true?”
Digital physics had reigned supreme since before he’d been born, and its dictums were as incontrovertible as they were absurd. Numbers didn’t just describe reality; numbers were reality, discrete step functions smoothing up across the Planck length into an illusion of substance. Roaches still quibbled over details, doubtless long since resolved by precocious children who never bothered to write home: was the universe a hologram or a simulation? Was its boundary a program or merely an interface—and if the latter, what sat on the other side, watching it run?
All I know is, he sounded just like every hapless Yahweh junkie who ever looked around at all the horror and injustice in the world and mumbled some shit about how It’s not the place of the clay to question the potter.
“Isn’t that the way, though? Isn’t that how it’s always been? Just obey the guys in the funny hats and if it’s a win it’s all praise be to Allah but if your ass gets kicked it’s your fault. You read scripture the wrong way. You weren’t worthy. You didn’t have enough faith.”
ANY SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM NATURE.
—STELLA ROSSITER
TO TRAVEL HOPEFULLY IS A BETTER THING THAN TO ARRIVE.
—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
The premise of Ezequiel Morsella’s PRISM model is that consciousness originally evolved for the delightfully mundane purpose of mediating conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles. (I have to point out that exactly the same sort of conflict—the impulse to withdraw one’s hand from a painful stimulus, versus the knowledge that you’ll die if you act on that impulse—was exactly how the Bene Gesserit assessed whether Paul Atriedes qualified as “Human” during their gom jabbar test in Frank Herbert’s Dune.)
Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and those who already happen to have newly- adaptive traits don’t get wiped out. A deteriorating Daniel Brüks muses on an especially neat case in point, the curious fact that the building blocks of advanced neural architecture already exist in single-celled animals lacking even the most rudimentary nervous systems.
You are a hive mind, always have been: a single coherent consciousness spread across two cerebral hemispheres, each of which—when isolated—can run its own stand-alone, conscious entity with its own thoughts, aesthetics, even religious beliefs.75 The reverse also happens. A hemisphere forced to run solo when its partner is anaesthetised (preparatory to surgery, for instance) will manifest a different personality than the brain as a whole—but when those two hemispheres reconnect, that solo identity gets swallowed up by whatever dual-core persona runs on the whole organ. [Reminded me of Neuromancer and Wintermute!]
Although free will (rather, its lack) is one of Echopraxia’s central themes (the neurological condition of echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness), I don’t have much to say about it because the arguments seem so clear-cut as to be almost uninteresting. Neurons do not fire spontaneously, only in response to external stimuli; therefore brains cannot act spontaneously, only in response to external stimuli. No need to wade through all those studies that show the brain acting before the conscious mind “decides” to. Forget the revisionist interpretations that downgrade the definition from free will to will that’s merely unpredictable enough to confuse predators. It’s simpler than that: the switch cannot flip itself. QED.
We climbed this hill. Each step up we could see farther, so of course we kept going. Now we’re at the top. Science has been at the top for a few centuries now. And we look out across the plain and we see this other tribe dancing around above the clouds, even higher than we are. Maybe it’s a mirage, maybe it’s a trick. Or maybe they just climbed a higher peak we can’t see because the clouds are blocking the view. So we head off to find out—but every step takes us downhill. No matter what direction we head, we can’t move off our peak without losing our vantage point. So we climb back up again. We’re trapped on a local maximum.
But what if there is a higher peak out there, way across the plain? The only way to get there is bite the bullet, come down off our foothill and trudge along the riverbed until we finally start going uphill again. And it’s only then you realize: Hey, this mountain reaches way higher than that foothill we were on before, and we can see so much better from up here.
But you can’t get there unless you leave behind all the tools that made you so successful in the first place. You have to take that first step downhill.
—Dr. Lianna Lutterodt, “Faith and the Fitness Landscape” In Conversation, 2091
--
I currently have this on my laptop at work. It actually is a good way to see what needs to be done.
Found via Lifehacker:
** GTDer Stefanos Karagos has designed Getting Things Done computer wallpaper that will keep the infamous processing flow in your range of vision all day long.
Chant to yourself "Is it actionable?" with Zen-like calm as you power through your inbox, email or otherwise, every day. The wallpaper GTD flowchart comes straight from the book and is free to use. (No word on how The David's legal team feels about that.) **
A friend of mine e-mailed this too me. Couldn't help but share it!
From topcultured.com/where-should-i-eat-fast-food-edition-flow...
the macromonday theme is tool/utensil. while neither of these is strictly a tool, every well-stocked toolbox should have both of them. see the engineering flowchart in comment box#1 ~grin~
This image does not have an article on opensource.com yet. Can you write one?
Created by Colleen Simon for opensource.com
The saddest flowchart you will see today.
Imagine a future free from ChildMarriage and #ForcedMarriage. Let's make it happen! Pledge your support: www.girlsummitpledge.com
#GirlSummit
The Girl Summit will rally a global movement to end child, early and forced marriage (CEFM) and female genital mutilation (FGM) for all girls within a generation. Ending these practices will help preserve their childhood, promote their education, reduce their exposure to violence and abuse, and allow them to fulfil their potential in life.
Take a stand against FGM and child marriage today - sign our pledge now to show your support in ending these harmful practices forever: www.girlsummitpledge.com
Design: Ricci Coughlan/DFID
A funny yet informative flowchart we created at www.befoodsmart.com to highlight the importance of making informed decisions about what we consume.
If you have a problem, if no one else can help you need a flowchart!
Flowcharts are everywhere at the moment, and I admit they are awesome. I knocked this up quickly to illustrate how they can solve any problem with no fuss after seeing this rather nifty one for Watermark! designtaxi.com/news/32612/Does-Your-Brand-Need-a-New-Logo...
I found this back in Belfast (part of a WWII poster - on pink card, of course?) I did at school when I was 13. Water-based felt tip marker, which is why it looks so shite
I'm not sure I can come up with 16 things, but I'm going to try.
1. I was born in the hospital in Big Bend National Park, where my silly hippie parents were vacationing (hiking, actually). I rode home to Dallas in a beer cooler packed with blankets. It's amazing I made it through childhood without being removed by CPS.
2. I have a weird malformed nose, but it's kind of my family nose so I don't think I would ever have it fixed.
3. I was essentially raised by a single father, and am therefore a total daddy's girl.
4. I once locked myself out of my car in the middle of an intersection during a hailstorm. Oh, and the car was running.
5. I love my Grandma more than anyone else in the whole wide world. I am so lucky that she is alive and healthy and spunky. Part of the reason I am looking for a bigger house is so that she can come live with me when she gets too old to take care of herself.
6. I have cellulite on my butt, and I have since high school, even though I'm relatively trim. It's a curse.
7. I have fallen madly in love with a few people who didn't love me back. I still have crushes on them even to this day. I think one crush dates back to something like 1989, haha. Every now and then I run into these people, and it still gives me that same giddy but devastated feeling.
8. I love John because he makes spreadsheets for everything. Spreadsheets are cute.
9. I feel guilty about everything. Thank you, St. Bernard Catholic School.
10. I hate it when friends grow apart and friendships die. I will hang on to a friendship long after I should, and it usually results in the other person thinking I am a crazy bitch. I should have learned by now, but I haven't, I guess. I have learned not to get too close to most people, because it hurts too much when they let me down.
11. I have high expectations (therefore #10)
12. My memory is terrible. I honestly can't remember things that happened even a few days ago. I am a visual learner, so I remember the way things looked. I made it through medical biochemistry by turning everything into tables or flowcharts, and I would remember where the words were on the paper rather than the actual information.
13. Despite #12, I am good at global thinking and pattern recognition, so I actually DO learn things (for those who are afraid I might be a doctor who never learned anything in medical school)
14. I have never smoked a cigarette or done any drug.
15. In junior high, I wrote a romance novel about KISS. My stepmom found it and threw it away (it did contain sex scenes)
16. I save the best bite on the plate for last.
Ahaaaa - I have to add #17, because John was just making fun of me. I can only type with one hand, but I type like a zillion words a minute. I just cant make my other hand play along. I thought I had a brain abnormality, but I had a brain MRI last year for another reason, and my corpus callosum was fine and there were no infarcts or anything. I'm just a typing freak. Everyone who has watched me type just stares gape-jawed.
Patent drawing Software is a sort of PC program that enables the client to effectively make graphs, flowcharts, designing schematics, and PC helped drafts.
Read more at thepatentdrawingsfirm.com/patent-drawing-software/
Today, I received a second edition of Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1, Fundamental Algorithms. Sort of an inheritance, you could say. It's kind of cool to have a copy of such a famous book, even if I'm too dumb to read it all. How many books include a full page flowchart explaining how to read the book?
Echofon Pro (£2.99)
There are lots of Twitter apps out there for the iPhone and iPad, including an official app, but Echofon is my favourite for three reasons: 1) it syncs with my iPhone and desktop Twitter apps, so I can always pick up where I left off; 2) It send notifications to my devices when I get an @reply or Direct Message, except - cleverly - when I'm using Echofon on my desktop; and 3) it sports a slick, clutter-free interface.
Guardian Eyewitness (Free)
The Guardian Eyewitness app makes the most of the iPad's gorgeous display, showcasing provocative photographs that reflect the day's events. Tap to see a 'Pro Tip' from the Guardian photography team for budding photo journalists.
Reeder (£2.99)
An RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader (and therefore my iPhone and desktop RSS apps) and really cares about its design. It looks gorgeous and takes the clutter out of reading the news in the morning. It's how I start my day and keep on top of all that business, lifestyle and technology news!
Comics (Free)
If you're a comic book fan, like I am, the Comics app is the real superhero of the App Store. Comics, which include issues from Marvel and DC, look incredible on the iPad's display and the Guided View Technology intelligently takes you through books panel by panel. And for iPhone or iPad app developers, Comics is a great example of generating income from in-app purchasing. The app itself is free but comics cost a couple of quid each.
Instapaper (£2.99)
Let's say you're at your desktop or laptop computer and you've spotted a post on Enterprise Nation that you don't quite have the time to read properly now. Click the 'Read Later' bookmarklet in your browser and Instapaper saves just the text and accompanying images (no ads!) and syncs it to your Instapaper account, ready to read later on your iPad or iPhone or via the Instapaper website. Magic!
iBooks (Free) and Kindle (Free)
iBooks from Apple is an arguably better reading experience, but the Kindle app from Amazon offers more selection at a better price. Both sync pages across devices, so you can pick up the same book on your iPhone and it'll remember where you left off.
Pages, Numbers and Keynote (£5.99 each)
Word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software from Apple is surprisingly fully featured and affordable at £5.99 each. They won't replace your desktop alternatives (probably from Microsoft), but for light work or document editing these apps are very impressive. You might want to use an Apple Keyboard Dock or sync and Apple Keyboard for heavier work.
Photogene (£2.39)
Until Adobe release Photoshop for the iPad, Photogene is the next best thing: crop, straighten, red-eye correction and much more with just a swipe here and there.
SketchBook Pro (£4.99)
The example sketches that come with SketchBook Pro will blow your mind! Really powerful stuff. My masterpieces are usually flowcharts or website plans!
Evernote (Free)
I can't say enough about Evernote. It turns your iPhone or iPad into an extension of your brain, helping you remember everything - notes, images, web pages - and syncs it across all of your devices.
Taska (£2.99)
A decent to-do app is conspicuously missing from the iPad's default set-up, but Taska steps in and does a grand job, syncing with Toodledo, so you can keep up-to-date with your tasks on the web and on your desktop.
1. Tofu king!, 2. Untitled, 3. shake, shake... shake, shake, a-shake it!, 4. breakfast love., 5. beer belly, 6. Zen Monkey Meditating Sock Hanuman, 7. Hippo attempting Locust Pose, 8. Yoga Pug, 9. 65.365 - More Porn for Women: Dinner n' Dishes, 10. change has come to america, 11. Nov 5, 2008, 12. i'd like to think, 13. Mar 25 / IMG_0715, 14. la la la la la la la, 15. Lotus, 16. PC319304_x, 17. what really goes on over here, 18. Like Lace, 19. The Crossing, 20. See you under the big top!, 21. Umbrella 21/365, 22. Robot Parade, 23. 365 22. year 2. we're not 9., 24. Enter here, 25. Flowchart, 26. sunkehst, 27. IMG_0326, 28. Jackass Penguin - 6506, 29. Kasey and Adrian - eSession, 30. .E., 31. hbbw!, 32. The sun told me to take this (Black and White Version) (Explored!), 33. 95 • 365 :: Life is like an orange..., 34. Day 272 : "No more flower pics!", 35. "i love you", 36. frosty, the plant growing out of the river
Created with fd's Flickr Toys.