Tag Archives: coffee

Astropsychonaut. [Weekly Head Voices #63]

Posted on December 3, 2011 | 5 Comments

I recently came across this hauntingly beatiful time-lapse view of Earth made from the ISS (the International Space Station! Yes, we have one!):

Watching this, my nostalgia flared up. You see, I’ve been addicted to science fiction ever since I can remember. It started with Buck Rogers, and the original Star Trek, and only got much worse when I discovered Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and Douglas Hill. I find Kubrick’s 2001 and even the sequel movie 2010 beautiful.

For the longest time, I wanted to be an astronaut. I think I still do.

I believe I might have thought that my career plans would be seen as childish when I wrote this short piece for school detailing my life plans when I was 7 or 8 (late eighties, not saying anymore):

My life plans as a 7 or 8 year old. My brother found this somewhere and put it on facebook. I wonder what it would be like to go back in time and explain that concept to myself.

For those of you without the required Afrikaans background, here is a short translation, as true as possible to the original:

When I gow up, I’d like to work with computers, because then I’ll become really smart and I’ll know more about the outdoors and nature. As I grow older, I’ll become a professor, because perhaps I’ll find a cure for leprosy and after that I’m going to study to be a millionaire, because then I’ll go abroad or around the world.

Not a bad plan for a 7 or 8 year old, if you don’t mind me saying so myself. This note has in fact reminded me that there’s still more than enough decisions to be made and work to do, so I’ll have to postpone becoming an astronaut for a little while longer. At least by the end I’m going to end up a rich traveller, which is probably not a bad deal.

In other news this week:

  • It seems like just the other day that I made my 400th connection on LinkedIn. I’m happy to report that I broke the 500 barrier two weeks ago, and now I have that fancy looking “500+” next to my name. I finetuned my headline to celebrate the occasion, after which I promptly got approached by a head hunter.
  • Jonathan Dyer is the guru of facial hair. Check out all the beard types and accompanying facial expressions that he has mastered. Yes, that’s a hint of jealousy that you detect in my writing.
  • More reasons to love the coffee: Giving rats the equivalent of what a human gets after two cups of coffee, the caffeine caused nerve cells in a certain region of the hippocampus to show a significantly bigger burst of activity. These strengthened synapses might have a role in learning and memory. Read this summary on boingboing and the article on Nature Neuroscience.
  • In an exceptionally disappointing move, South African parliament has passed a new secrecy bill that gives members of government the power to declare information a state secret, thus deterring honest-keeping journalists and other whistle-blowers with a 25 year jail sentence. Desmond Tutu sums it up nicely when he says that this makes the State answerable only to the State.

If this new bill manages to make it through the constitutional court as well, the country is going to take a giant step backwards. At least we’ll have facedrink to cheer us up again!

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Hell Yeah! [Weekly Head Voices #59]

Posted on October 9, 2011 | 8 Comments

We kick off this week’s edition of the WHV with Ben Goldacre giving his TED talk on “Battling bad science” at 180 km/h:

He’s fabulous, isn’t he? If you haven’t done so already, you should really read his book “Bad Science” too, and don’t forget to hand a copy to anyone in your neighbourhood that might be confused about homeopathy, accupuncture, any other forms of alternative medicine, or anything by Patrick Holford, vitamin-peddler of note.

On a completely different note, I’ve fallen in love with a piece of software again. This time it’s Zotero, open source reference manager. For those of you not into writing (scientific) articles, a reference manager is an indispensable tool that keeps track of all the other articles that you’ve studied and helps you to cite them correctly whilst writing your latest attempt. I tried Zotero in 2009 but wasn’t that impressed. It seems that much has happened since, as I’ve been completely blown away this time. Killer feature #1 is the extreme ease with which I can import new references, by clicking on the little icon in my Firefox 7.0 url bar (Zotero 2.1 is a Firefox plugin). If the PDF is available, it’ll add that as well. I can also just drop a PDF directly in there and tell it to extract metadata to make a bibliographic entry. It does this surprisingly well.  Killer feature #2 is the explicit support for storing one’s reference database anywhere else, for example in one’s Dropbox, another piece of software with which I have a long-term romantic involvement and which in this case ensures that I have transparent access to my whole reference database, via Zotero, from any computer I care to use.

(NB: If you’re going to do this, make sure you don’t run Zotero concurrently on multiple machines. A better solution, which I’m now using, is to have only the zotero “storage” folder in your dropbox, and then symlink that into the default zotero firefox profile directory. Please let me know in the comments if you need more detail on this.)

Just in time for our regular coffee-themed blog post interlude, there’s been yet another study on coffee-related health benefits, and now it looks like coffee drinking may also protect against depression in women. As you will recall, I recently blogged about the coffee-related prostate-cancer protection. Seems coffee is perfect in one more regard: It’s an equal opportunity health benefit!

For my birthday, TNR bought me Anything You Want by Derek Sivers, and beamed it directly to my Kindle (go 21st century!). Derek Sivers is the guy who started CD Baby almost by accident, a company that became the largest seller of independent music on the interwebs. I say by accident, because his goal in the beginning was purely to sell his own CDs online (which was quite a feat in 1997, as there was no PayPal and not that much WWW yet), and then friends asked if he could sell their CDs too, and before he knew it, he had 85 employees, 150000 musicians and 100 million dollars in revenue. It’s a fabulous story, all the more because he really just wanted to keep his company as small as possible and do what he loved.

The book is chock-full of philosophical nuggets, for example the one that inspired the title of this blog. Sivers explains that when you have to decide whether to commit to a new project or not, there are only two choices: It’s either HELL YEAH! or NO. Your time is too limited to take on just yes or even maybe. Makes sense, no?

What really resonated with me however, was the following thought on how people grade themselves:

For me, it’s how many useful things I create, whether songs, companies, articles, websites or anything else. If I create something that’s not useful to others, it doesn’t count. But I’m also not interested in doing something useful unless it needs my creative input.

I think that I’ll leave it at that. Now go have an epic week kids!

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Coffee addiction potpourri. [Weekly Head Voices #57]

Posted on September 18, 2011 | 4 Comments

Yes boys and girls, I was keeping back writing that Rebecca Black post, but now it’s 4 days later and I can let ‘er rip again, like I promised. This week’s post sort of reflects my week 37: Chock-full of super-dense life nuggets. Hmmm, sounds like a brilliant new high energy meta-physical chocolate bar that would probably be immediately declared illegal by the current conservative and non-thinking (excuse the tautology) batch of spineless politicians (excuse the tautology).

Let’s get today’s life lessons started with Mitch Hedberg, Comic Genius (note the captital C, and the capital G):

Hedberg’s genius unfortunately could not save him from drug addiction and his overdose-related death in 2005.

On the topic of addiction, fpixel forwarded these new findings that coffee drinking is genetic, both in terms of capacity and perhaps also in terms of addiction. Even my atoms are addicted to coffee, so that feels about right. What’s really interesting however, is that the documented study found that the genes involved in the metabolism of coffee (CYPIA1 and NRCAM, if I understand correctly) are also related to the onset of Parkinson’s disease. You see, coffee drinkers are less prone to Parkinson’s disease (as well as a whole list of other diseases including prostate cancer, type 2 diabetes and liver cancer). However, past studies of course show correlation and not causation, i.e. coffee drinking and low risk of disease X appear together, but that does not tell us anything about what causes what. This new study has made the first steps towards understanding the mechanism that actually links Parkinson’s disease and coffee drinking.

On the topic of coffee and addiction, TNR and I spent the Monday morning working (like animals) on our new parallel startup (there, I said it) at the Coffee Company in Delft. Two things:

  1. The Coffee Company makes a killer cappuccino. The milk is steamed to perfection, but it’s got the perfect espresso bomb exploding through all that milky goodness at just the right moment. BAM! HELLO THERE! Highly recommended. With every purchase, you get WiFi access for one hour, so no surprises or misunderstandings.
  2. It’s amazing what such a change of working environment does for one’s creativity.

On the topic of startups, Dr Jorik Blaas, ex PhDer, full-time genius and friend, is now the director of research and development at Synerscope (probably no relation with sinister, but my subconscious is just not behaving today), a high-potential startup that makes visualisation-based tools for fraud detection in big data (big money, IOW). Synerscope has brought together some of the top visualisation brains in the country. Personally, I can’t help but imagine it like this:

Are you in there somewhere?

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we made a quick train trip (*cough* 9 hours there due to delay thank you NS, 7+ hours back) to Magdeburg for the bi-annual German MedVis meeting. You’ll recall that I spent my first micro-sabbatical there. The city almost feels like home, and it was really great seeing many of the Magdeburg peeps again. The meeting itself was of high quality, with a number of VisWeek contributions being presented. Thomas Kroes (should I start using fictitious names and acronyms again?) presented his interactive photo-realistic volume renderer too! By the way, download it, use it (it makes fantastically beautiful renderings), spread it, and do cite the soon-to-appear article.

On Saturday, it rained (again, or still, I forget), so I decided to flip Mother Nature the bird by BBQing four juicy rib-eye steaks outside. Take that Mother Nature! The steaks were delicious, thank you. Mother Nature is not all bad though… Check this out: The Southern Lights. FROM SPACE!

Aurora Australis (thanks Bart!) FROM SPACE, taken by Ron Garan. Click on the photo to go to the original.

I’m going to wind down this post with two backyard philosophy-themed bits. The first is a quote by mathematician Alfred North Whitehead from this article on “The Skill that Matters Most” (found via Joe Botha, serial entrepreneur, currently changing the world with Trust Fabric):

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

I haven’t thought about it that way before, but it does make complete sense. The more things we humans do well in a routine fashion, the better.  Otherwise, our inconsistency is prone to lead to problems. By the way, the mentioned skill is self-control.

Finally, AJ forwarded this video called Disconnect to Connect. I’ll just let you watch and think about it for a while:

I’ll be off now. Please do have an epic week, and think of me when your level of enjoyment is at a local maximum. At these points, you might also consider jumping around randomly.

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The Monthly [Weekly Head Voices #50]

Posted on July 2, 2011 | 7 Comments

HEY!

I’m still here, and it seems I really have to catch up on my backlog of WHVs, all the more as I was starting to notice the beginnings of BPP (Backlogged Posting Paralysis, of course). So I’ve spent a few minutes gathering a selection of life snippets of the past six weeks (week 21 through week 26) and will now proceed blasting them out this old Web 1.0 exhaust. I wasn’t completely idle blog-wise, however. I did write a post about my EuroVis 2011 and my Schloss Dagstuhl SciVis seminar adventures.

Before the blasting commences, I would like to present some relaxing visual input brought to you via my cell phone camera, which at the time of capturing found itself in my hand, itself being inside the chapel in Herberg op Hodenpijl, a short westward cycle from my house:

Herberg op Hodenpijl chapel roof detail.

The picturesque surroundings are home to the chapel, which hosted an art exhibition at that point, and an organic restaurant and grocer. Most (all?) of the produce comes from a small farm across the road that you can also visit. The goats are really friendly. You could do worse than popping by on a sunny day.

Herberg op Hodenbijl chapel roof detail.

The rest of this post has been categorised, with nice headings, so that you can skim through it even faster.

Health and well-being

  • In a recent cooking insert on the television, two chefs prepared Loup farci en croûte, or sea bass filled with julienne vegetables in a pastry of a thousand layers. Take a look at the video clip: The chefs put an amazing amount of effort into preparing this visually beautiful and apparently delectable dish.
  • My TNR and since recently also business partner, who can often be found hurtling down mountains on various and high-speed forms of personal transportation, and when he’s not is involved in a number of other extreme sports activities, managed to break two fingers on his right hand cycling over the flat and otherwise uneventful piece of earth between the computer science and physics buildings on our campus. Go figure.
  • In a recent study with 48000 (yes, that’s fourty eight thousand) men followed over a period of 22 years, a strong correlation was found between drinking six cups of coffee per day and a lowered risk of prostate cancer. Also men (but can you still call them men?) drinking fewer than 6 cups of coffee per day had a lower risk. The study did correct for other lifestyle factors. The linked summary also mentions other studies in which coffee drinking has been associated with lower risk of Parkinson disease, type 2 diabetes and liver cancer. I guess I can worry less about this addiction than, euhm, the other ones.

Nerd News

  • Dropbox has recently activated functionality they call shareable links, meaning that you can request a unique http://db.tt/some_code link for any file or directory anywhere in your dropbox and share it with anyone else (also non-dropbox users), who is then able to download said file or directory given the link. There’s a page on the website where you can manage all of your shared links, for example deactivating ones you don’t want people to access anymore. Read the help on shareable links for more information.
  • As you might know, I keep a lab journal documenting in some detail my daily work activities. I also maintain a personal journal, mostly for dumping stuff that might be interesting for this blog. I used to do all of this in Google Docs, but for the past few weeks I’ve experimenting using TiddlyWiki (this is a single file JavaScript-heavy wiki implementation) on my Dropbox for all my journaling and personal knowledge base needs. It’s been going swimmingly for at least two reasons: 1) It’s available also when I’m offline. 2) The idea of being able to break out into a new wiki page (called a tiddler) at the drop of a hat takes some getting used to, but fits the non-linear nature of my journal and personal knowledge base entries much better than the mostly linear google docs.
  • I’ve settled on using the free tonido personal cloud software to make all the files on my home server available via the internets. This means I can get to all of my music, photos are whatever no matter where I am. Pretty neat! (I have too much to fit on my 50G dropbox account. There’s also the PogoPlug software, but the free version has its limitations.)
  • Just a few days before Google+ (Google’s new social networking religion, in case you’ve been sleeping for the past week) hit the internets, I installed the Google +1 button on this blog, see right at the bottom of every post. So now you know what to do with every post: Click my +1 button, then click my facebook like button, then leave me some snarky comment right here. Easy as 123, and I’m a happy camper.

Comedy

Whilst flipping through channels one Saturday night,  I flipped right into the stand-up comedian Demetri Martin. I made a note of it in my journal, and now here we are. Watch him present his research findings on his large pad, with his pointer:

That’s it for now dear readers. I really do hope to be back soon, and I hope to do so with a slightly more focused contribution. See you on Google+!

UPDATE 2011-07-23 note-taking strategy

To you I might appear fickle, but I guarantee that it’s just hyperactivity. I’ve since adjusted my note-taking strategy again. As you will have seen in the comments, Pieter Kitslaar subtly influenced me to go searching for a note-taking solution that syncs between phone and everywhere else. Fortunately, I ran into the SimpleNote universe and I’m now officially in note-taking heaven. I have Flick Note on my Android, the SyncPad extension on Chrome (for sometimes) and ResophNotes on Windows and on Linux with Wine. All apps work exactly as I would expect a super-fast and efficient note-taking app to work, with real-time incremental searching, hotkeys everywhere, and best of all, offline use and transparent syncing. ResophNotes is especially cool, definitely give it a shot.

So I’m using this SimpleNote setup for all my personal knowledge base and general note-taking needs. For detailed work and lab journaling, I’m now using linear OpenDocument files on my Dropbox, which solves the offline problem I had with Google Docs, which I do still adore for collaborative work.

Lemme know in the comments what you think!

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