To continue my previous post: the real word is also virtual world - in your brain. Of course using all your senses to feel the world makes a much more coherent simulation than just using sight and sound (movies). But the idea and mechanics are the same. Your own body also maps into the same space as the real world. You know you body usually better than other objects, but you still map your immediate environment and your body into the same virtual space.

The room you are in now is your current "real world" - without looking you can estimate the shape of the room, the size of it, the furniture, some textures, lighting, etc. And in addition to your position in the room, you can also feel the position of other items; chair, table, lamps, monitor, etc.

To prove that the brain isn't very picky about using your own body as a fixed reference, I'll challenge you to try the following experiment. It's from the book "Phantoms in the Brain : Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind" by V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee. It doesn't work for everyone - about 50% can experience it.

You will need two helpers.
Sit on a chair blindfolded, and ask person 1 to sit in front of you, facing the same direction as you.
Have person 2 standing on your right side and instruct him/her:
"Take my right hand and guide my index finger to the nose of person 1. Move my hand in a rhythmic manner, so that my index finger repeatedly stokes and taps the nose of person 1 in a random sequence, like a Morse code.
At the same time, use your left hand to stroke my nose with the same rhythm and timing, perfectly syncronized."
After half a minute, if you're lucky, you feel your nose being out there, streched half a meter in front of your face.

There are other experiments too, where you believe a table is a real, feeling part of your hand. (I may write about them later, if anyone is interested :-)

It's pretty amazing how fast children learn to use tools. Joel recently learned to use a spoon for eating and is pretty good at it already.
The use of tools seems to be hard coded into the brain. The plasticity of the brain allows for very quick adjustments to the sensory and motor functions, which in turn means that we can quickly learn to use new tools. The tool really becomes a part of you. Just think about riding a bike, wearing shoes, driving a car or holding a tray - in every case you learn to do it by instinct. The bike, shoes, car and tray becomes a part of you and you can estimate its weight, momentum, size, balance, etc.
The same feature applies to computer games too (action games). After a while you can feel you game character and his environment in detail. And you don't need fancy virtual reality hardware for it. Your brain does virtual reality all by it self. Fast 3D and great graphics helps of course.
Movies also create virtual worlds in your brain. When you are really into a movie, you can feel the movie enviroment and its effect on the characters. Books work too, but you'll have to train yourself a bit longer to be able to enter a book world. (There's the extra step of translating text into mental images first.)

It's the way your sensory and motor cortex is built. Cool feature.

Just saw Monsters Inc. Lovely movie with a heart. Could have had a bit more depth, but still a great movie. Have to get the DVD.
I especially liked: The slow-motion entry of the scarers, the door repository, the CDA (Child Detection Agency), the voice of the child (sounds just like Joel).

Just testing posting from Newz Crawler, which is a pretty nice RSS aggregator. It could have a few more features, but it's still already very good.

I'll try YACCS commenting system. Not that anyone reads this blog, but at least I'll know how they work.

Karma works. From ABC.net.

It seems that karma really does exist. A new study has shown that acting selflessly has rewards, even from those you haven't helped.

The system just needs to make your previous actions public.

A List Apart has a nice article on writing a better weblog. Lets hope I'll learn from it.

J Spolsky has a pretty good checklist for better code.

Oh man. Farscape just blows my mind. I just finished watching season 3 - and it rocks! This is easily the best SciFi series out there. And it also has the best villain ever: Scorpius. (A good villain is important.) Each season has managed to top the previous one on so many levels. I can still vaguely remember seeing the first episode... "I'll have to see a few more episodes before I make up my mind about whether I like this or not.". ... Well I love it.
Some excellent resources to Farscape: Farscape World and A Snurcher's Guide.

I wonder when we can buy antimatter for our personal powercells... CERN believes they created anti-hydrogen. (From Slashdot)

Mark Pilgrim has a nice Accessibility statement of his site.

The Mouse Demo. That's 2 years before my birth.

On December 9, 1968. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.

I guess this is just one of those days. 20.02.2002. Finnish notation. Todays babys will get a social security number starting with 20022002. Cool.
And of course we can take the timestamp also: 20.02.2002 at 20:02. Cnews noticed this too.

Someone scanned the web for numbers, and made a nice applet to display them. Neat.

Ever heard the phrase: "The rich get richer while the poor get poorer"? Apparently in the last 40 years the rich got 75% richer and the poor 200% - richer. But it's still a catchy phrase I suppose.

This is written using a WiFi card with my iPaq. I have to admit that a wireless pda is really cool. Too bad it's not an option in Finland. Maybe when the CompactFlash GPRS card becomes available.

I finally moved my webfiles around. Images are now stored chronologially by year, all under the images folder. It would seem the only working method of archiving miscellaneous data, is to use chronological naming with folders and/or files. I've been naming most of my work files with a date prefix.

Joel had his first visit to the dentist. All ok. 4 teeth visible. They told me that if he manages to avoid a certain bacteria (dental caries) from entering his mouth by the age of 3, he will live the rest of his life without any dental cavities. And the most likely source of the bacteria are his parents - me. If I use xylitol gum regularily, it will improve Joel's odds of avoiding that nasty bacteria.

Whoa. Digital Data Porn. I still remember every part of my (now gone) C64. Sigh. This was cool stuff at the time.

How to RTFM.

A gallery of motherboard returns. If those customers were working on - say cars, they'd get an entry on the Darwin Awards.

Modular robotics at PARC. "Instead of designing a new and different mechanical robot for each task, you just build many copies of one simple module." Cool stuff.

Ambrosia Software has a neat licensing scheme. It's slashdotted too.

The fundamental change we made was to place the date a license code was generated into the code itself. ... Now, and this is important, the timestamp has absolutely no effect on the operation of the software after the code has been entered.

How to make a printer friendly web page using CSS. I'll have to get me one of those.

A good list of different MPEG-4 Codecs at Slashdot.

This entry was written on an iPaq, using a GPRS connection. I wish it was with Bluetooth... only infrared for now.