Shadows and Mother Teresa

I haven't blogged in a very, very long time. But for those of you who still even check this, I found an absolutely fascinating article in TIME magazine.

Mother Teresa's crisis of faith revealed

Recent letters by Mother Teresa have been published in a book, revealing a tormented soul who almost constantly felt an absence of God in her life. She struggled often with personal faith, acheivement, and happiness.

I highly recommend reading this article.

Make your own demotivator!

The day has finally arrived -- we can now make our own demotivational posters!

I'll try to post some if I start feeling creative. :)

light to dark; dark to light

I ran across this quote, and have been thinking about it a bit. I thought that I'd share...

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

-Marianne Williamson, from her book "A Return to Love"

What do you find to be funny?

If there's one truth about grad school, it's that it definitely warps your sense of normalcy...if you had one to begin with. Here are two things that you'll find to be very funny if you've ever been in grad school:

1. A new gem of a PhD comic: humor in grad school

2. A snippet taken from the Best Visual Illusion of the Year website:

In a sense, the structure of modern science is itself a vast contest. Someday, all or most of the major scientific questions will be answered. Our job as scientists is to be the ones who discover the answers, and publish them, first.

Ah, too funny. :)

Perspectives

A visit to my college's website this evening eventually led me to visit the "best visual illusion of the year contest" website. As a quasi cognitive scientist, I have attended many lectures on the perception of our visual system, but I have to admit that I wish that more of those lectures involved visual illusions -- they're so much fun!

Here's this year's first-place visual illusion winner: The Leaning Tower Illusion.

One of the ways that we can learn about how our visual system works is by finding out what we can do to trick it. In fact, a lot of the good studies in biology and psychology involve trickery. Perhaps that's why I am so intrigued by the research in those subjects. ;)

Marriage, music, and math!

Well, I've been bad about blogging lately -- my apologies. In fact, I've blogged more for my friend Todd the Blogless than I have for myself! My lack of blogging is due to a couple of factors. First, it's been difficult to put my thoughts into words lately. And secondly, when I've actually been in a good writing mode, I've chosen to work on my thesis instead of posting to my blog. This is probably a good thing. :)

I'll post a few random thoughts for now:

-Marriage: Two of my good friends got married (to each other) this past Saturday. Congrats to the happy couple, who are now enjoying a sunny honeymoon in Disney World! I loved the wedding and I'm very happy for the couple, but it's an odd adjustment to think that they're actually married now. It reminds me that life moves along and, akin to my friend Tina's recent blog post, that we're actually growing up (or grown ups -- scary!).

- Music part 1: Bells is keeping me busy, as usual. We recently had our tour weekend, and I loved staying with host families both nights of the tour. The first host family had a cute golden retriever named Darby, and the second host family had two chihuahuas named Chico and Socks. Now we're gearing up for two concerts this coming weekend, and it feels good to be working towards a goal in a group. Honestly, I try to work towards goals (my dissertation, as a prime example) as an individual with some advice and support from others, but it's different and surprisingly pleasant to work towards goals WITH others. I love being a member of such a motivated and fun ensemble!

- Music part 2: Instead of buying new music, I've been enjoying listening to songs through YouTube/Google Video. I just search for the music video of the song I want to hear, listen to it, and don't have to spend a dime. My music choices of today have been quite eclectic: Carrie Underwood, the Casino Royale Bond theme music, music from "Night at the Roxbury", a Death Cab for Cutie song, and two of my favorite Coldplay songs: "Fix You" and "Low"

- Math (and turtles): I stumbled across this article that talks about mathematicians applying their work to turtles. I like it because it incorporates math, turtles, evolution, and sneaky/humorous mathematicians. :)

2+2 = 4 ... or does it?

I love this news article from CNN.com: 'Lie group E8 math puzzle solved'

It's just so incredibly vague that it's funny. The poor journalist covering this story was probably like "uh, I give up...I'll just write something to make this breakthrough sound impressive."

I'm always told to be prepared to talk about my research at multiple different levels of complexity. I try to have a version for family reunions, for conversations with random people in elevators, for visiting professors in my department, and for scientific conferences that I attend. Apparently this group of mathematicians doesn't have a very good sound byte for the general public. Of course, it's probably much easier to develop this skill for biology than it is for symmetry groups.

Ah well -- I'm still amused.

My find of the evening

Oooh -- I love this graphic. Bonus points to anyone who can decipher it. :)

Updates

Ah yes, my blog. It's been awhile since I last posted, but I thought I'd say hello again. And since I haven't really formulated a coherent entry on any given topic, I'll just post random thoughts for the time being. :)

- I keep two main journals; one is a personal one and the other is a work-related one. I started them around the same time (a few years ago), and I recently noticed that their page counts are nearly identical - meaning that I've written about the same amount in both. I don't know whether or not to be disturbed by that. :)

- Life is often full of challenges. I'm realizing the value of just taking things one day at a time.

- I've been working on flipping my perspective on various issues...issues like how I use my time and how I react to things. It's been helping, and I'm encouraged to see some changes in myself.

- Indian food is delicious! On a related note, I've decided that I need to find a recipe for Madras curry (a coconut-based curry sauce).

- Handbells is going well this term. We're playing a few pieces that I'll grow to love, and the group is working hard and is crazy as usual. Last night we spent a lot of rehearsal time working on just trying to hit our plucking notes. This, of course, involved a lot of laughter. :)

- Tea time really is my favorite time of day. I drink either green or white tea in the morning, and I drink herbal (or at least non-caffeinated) tea in the evenings. Since I've recently expanded my tea collection, I now have a variety of teas to choose from each day. My favorite choices for the morning are: Orange Blossom White Tea, Authentic Green Tea, and Imperial White Peach White Tea. My favorite evening choices are: Sleepytime Tea, Chamomile Tea, Madagascar Red Vanilla Tea, and (before I ran out) Candy Cane Lane Green Tea. All of these are made by Celestial Seasonings, except for the Orange Blossom one, which is made by the Republic of Tea. I have several other types of tea, but these are my favorites...for now at least. If you have any favorite teas, I'd love to have some recommendations for the next time I'm out shopping for tea.

Carpe Diem

Here's a really moving song (and accompanying moving music video). I'm a huge fan of the heavy sound of the band in this piece -- it brings out a lot of the emotion of the lyrics.

Avenged SevenFold's "Seize the Day"