A special visitor

Ah, the wonderful smell of rain after a period of drought. Even though most of the summer has passed already, tonight was enlightened by a fresh typical summer rain. One that is not too cold and not too violent. A peaceful shower. But the shower brought out something else besides rain to my fifth floor apartment. Something rather unusual.

I found this little friend crawling on the wall outside my front door. I wonder where he came from…

And as the rain passes so do the interns. Tonight the last intern leaves the youth heim. Who would have thought that I would be the last one of the foreigners to live here..

Yugawara hiking photos

So here’s the edited pictures of last week’s hike in Yugawara. It’s getting increasingly harder for me to find nearby places that I haven’t been to before. Yugawara was in interesting choice, as it’s right at the start of the Izu peninsula. There’s not much room between ocean and mountains, which made for an interesting (and very steep) climb.

A friend introduced me to a new program to stitch panoramic photos, and this occasion was the perfect opportunity to give it a try. It’s called hugin, and so far I have to say it works way better than the crappy Canon photostitch software I was using up until now. You can see two of the panoramas I took in this post, and the remaining pictures are on Picasa, as usual.

Additional reading material

Analysis Paralysis @ wikipedia

Clay Shirky on information filtering

Random thoughts:

• Human beings like symmetry, but only in one dimension (left/right). That’s why we don’t think a car that looks the same from the front and back is beautiful.
• We have a tendency to remember ‘impressive’ (epic) events, whether they are bad or not. I think this might lead people to actually prefer an impressively disastrous event over a complete lack of events.
• The brain has a certain bias towards the beginning and end of things. For example, that’s why we tend to forget the middle of sequences of words when we are studying. Perhaps the mid-life crisis relates to this as well?
• Whenever I’m depressed, bored or empty-minded, I turn on some music and my mood will improve instantly. I wonder if other people have this as well. Similarly, work sucks without music, but even boring tasks are fun for me if I can focus on music while I’m doing them.
• I tried to listen to Shirky’s keynote while at the same time reading the wiki article on Analysis Paralysis in a window next to it. I think I did fairly well. With the proper amount of training I think I can multitask successfully between reading and listening on similar topics. I wonder if I can extend this skill to include reading and reading (switching from window to window) and to extend the range of simultaneous topic exposure. Note: this kind of multitasking is quite different from when I talk to my parents on the phone, because I only need 10% of my attention to listen to the phone. In this case, it’s about evenly divided. The phone conversation does provide the added challenge that the speech is in Dutch and the article I’m reading is usually in English..

At Goro Jinja

Don’t copy that..

Found this linked on a forum somewhere:

Strangely enough the replies on the video are of higher quality than the usual youtube dribble. I’d write more about this but I really only have one thing to say:  Propaganda piece of SHIT.

Yugawara

Went hiking today. Will post some pics later. For now, here’s the nice view we enjoyed from the top.

And here’s a rather uninteresting time-lapse video of the sushi shop in Hon Atsugi.