Well, time to hand it (and a different broken meter) off to our machine shop and their excellent electronics specialist.

More vision science questions... we just got a secondhand Minolta CS-100... and anytime we try to take a measurement, we get the E0 (luminance too high) error. Any thoughts?

Why are there so many fools in our neighbourhood who decide that their idiotic vehicles need to announce their pathetic nature to everyone in a half-kilometer radius?!?

Question for my fellow vision researchers: anyone know of work where people looked at dynamic ensemble perception for lots of boxes on Zoom? Think "what's the average emotion of these people on a group call?"

It’s ~fun~ when you’re attach-rocket-to-ass busy from 8am-3pm. Including 3 solid hours of lecture in there.

Well, it’s kind of fun that today - per B&H - is “international podcasting day” and I did a podcast on the whole speed camera story in Ontario yesterday.

Snerk. Publisher, I wasn't looking for a copy of your book, and I'm happy with the book I use. It's probably a bad sign if you're on the 9th edition and I've never heard of it for this class.

The cognitive failing of being output-focused is one I’ve run into a lot. It’s not just the product, dammit. It’s the process.

Huh, that’s new… and glorious!

Somehow, the pawspect of feline interference never occurred to me with pool. A friend’s parents had a table when I was growing up, but no pets in the house.

Cake. Because we needed breakfast.

Dammit, gotta keep this one alive.

“More ice cream?” “What did I just have you read?!? “Ah, yes.”

Also irked that what I thought was a good deal for a backup unit for my aged inkjet turned out to be a “nah, just going to ghost” marketplace post. The perils of running nearly 20 year old equipment.

Gnnn. Why does archival tape have to be so expensive… [well, archival materials generally are, so they don’t eat the art…]

24C and we cleaned up the yard? Sounds like an evening to grill.

Adulthood: bonus pay… and going “well, this’ll go towards very boring but necessary costs in the next couple months”

Probably good that they’re maple-flavored not moose-flavored

As my balding has progressed, the tweed blazers have started calling me. I might as well just give in and wind up looking like a professor from central casting.

Correct, and @tnh.nielsenhayden.com has been saying much the same for years. The Ken/beach parallel is perfect.

Paging @productivityalchemy.com

I would *love* my body to stop with the "you're awake at 0400 and not going to get back to sleep" shit.

Nice to wake up to Good Surprises, even if one’s reaction makes Howl scarper off the bed like his butt is under attack.

Ready... hit it!

Start of term - two weeks in as of today - always feels like footage of a fighter jet takeoff. Rolling along then climbing really steeply and pulling some Gs on the way up. Moreso this year for non-teaching reasons.

Timeline alignment

As is tradition, the Orchard Bag of apples. Something north of 10 kg.

Apple tart.

From the article, he’s doing this as a public safety effort - essentially saying “hey, slow down, or the camera will catch you!” I applaud his commitment to goofy road safety.

Mansplaining in Icelandic is hrútskýring. This is a play on útskýring, which means explanation, while hrútur is a ram 🐑

“This isn’t as simple as the Cat Decision Tree, but it’s pretty close”

End of the day today included "I like that we just have a cabinet of spare parts for $expensive_eyetracking_systems." Well, yes. We run one of the largest installations of them attached to a single lab (we're a two PI lab, but still, we have four of one model and one of another). Yay for ebay.

Just set up temporary lab space… it’s fun when the largest expense is “buy a couple of beefy UPSes because power loss during computer-based vision studies is Bad”

This entire thread is amazing, but when I got to this one I thought it was a good place to repost the pointer to the thread, because this song is one of the most triumphant ones I know. And the story about saving a life is true -- Bob Cusick. It's in the Wikipedia article for thems as are curious.

Surprise Cake is best cake.

This. So much this. I study the mind and brain because I fundamentally care about what it means to perceive, plan, act and think about the world. What it is to live.

Yes, I will answer your questions about vision. And driving. The latter, probably while cursing the name of fools who oversell autonomous features.

Your regular reminder that there is no reason on BSky to tolerate someone being a cavernous asshole in your mentions. Or, as @smoothdunk2.bsky.social put it... PHOOM

My office looks like a repair shop at the moment. I have two old (2011) Mac Pros open on my desk. We use them as testing machines in the lab - standardized on them a few years ago - and we needed to commission another two from storage.

We’ve been finding antiques and getting students to guess what they are. I really regret not liberating 8” floppies when I had the chance a few years ago.

Solving the Breakfast Problem

This feels like an engineering problem one could solve...

"Incoherent pierogi noises" is a thing

Well, it and its neighbour went out, and I bought enough ladder to do the neighbour. The one that’s something like 8’ up a vertical wall on the stairs (so, really, you need about 12’ of reach to get to it)… eh. It can stay dead.

Probably late to the party, but The Residence is a very enjoyable 8-episode run on Netflix. Same larger world as Knives Out, just different protagonist.

Antiques.

the strawberry-wanter has logged on