Archive for February, 2007
February 9, 2007 at 5:19 pm · Filed under Minds, Brains, & inbetween
You’d think that understanding the Philosophy of Mind would take tons of laborious reading. Of course, there’s always just wikipedia, but some people don’t learn well through printed text alone, and then there are those who just have an aversion to reading in general. If you fit into that last category, you’ve probably already scampered off to the wilds of YouTube.
For those fateful few readers with attention spans longer than a hyperactive three year old, I present a fine assortment of online videos and audio related to philosophy of mind. Wait don’t run away! It’s actually interesting I promise and actually funny too!
The Promised Video Links
As an introduction to the topic on the mind-body problem watch the fabulous short film “They’re Made Out of Meat” (via YouTube)
Starting with the most assessable, the intelligent and hilarious video blogger Ze Frank, “thinking so you don’t have to”:
For those with a slightly longer attention span who just want audio, I highly suggest the Australian radio show All In The Mind:
And I’ll leave those boring old text-only links for another post.
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February 8, 2007 at 7:48 pm · Filed under Online Health Care
I’m still slaving away here at work trying to make a process graph look interesting. PowerPoint is a much more effective medium with some adobe illustrator skills and some knowledge of Edward Tufte.
The graph is for a presentation I’m giving entitled “Servicing Patients Online: Educational Multimedia and Online Patient Evaluations” at the upcoming Creating Connections: NACHRI & N.A.C.H. Spring Conference. NACHRI stands for National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions, and N.A.C.H. stands for National Association of Children’s Hospitals the public policy affiliate —I guess all the good acronyms were already taken.
The core of my presentation is going to be about how what it takes to create a web presence as a health care provider: what one needs to know to get the ball rolling, how to avoid the stumbling blocks, and what one needs to do before even hiring a web agency. Too many people in this industry get the “need a new website!” bug, and then they run out and hire someone without any real goals or direction. I’m hoping my presentation will give them the knowledge they need to start the project right and hopefully begin to think about developing an ongoing online strategy.
Secondarily, I will be talking about what it means to treat patients online and the issues regarding treating patients online. We have just recently launched the Fetal Treatment Center ~ Inside, online patient program. The long winding path of this endeavor has taught us a lot about the legal, security, and technical hurdles of dealing directly with patients, and their data, online. Online health care is an industry still in it’s infancy, everyone wants to be doing it, and almost nobody knows what they are doing.
My co-presenter and I have already put a decent amount of work into this and it’s shaping up to be an interesting presentation. If you happen to be going to the conference we’re giving our talk on Friday March 16th from 2:45p-3:45p.
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February 8, 2007 at 4:24 pm · Filed under Design & Web Geekery
I still wasn’t quite happy with the design, so I changed it again. This time I’m using the 3 column version of the Fjords 01 by Peterandrej as my template. To personalize it, I added my favorite pic of me at Burning Man 2006 above the about column. It’s an infrared film shot of me taken by a fabulous photographer friend of mine Jacob Appelbaum.
With that photo as my guide, I used pic2color to get it’s color palette. These colors served as a basis for the new gradated quasi duotone of “Cows in the Mist.” Then I added the start of a bit of design flair with the transparent white polygon lines. The background pattern is courtesy of Squidfingers.
It’s bound to change some more. I’ll probably wake up tomorrow and hate something else about it.
p.s. I’m posting this with the awesome Performancing Firefox extension which I highly recommend.
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February 6, 2007 at 1:24 pm · Filed under Design & Web Geekery
I couldn’t take it any longer. I had to add my Cat Cubed logo and to do that I needed to change the background pic in the header and make a few color changes. If you’re wondering the photo is a lime greenized version of a picture I took in India of “Cows in the Mist.”
Yeah it’s arbitrary.
It’s nowhere close to what I want this site to look like—actually I’m not exactly sure what I want it looking like. It’ll do for now though.
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February 6, 2007 at 1:35 am · Filed under uncategorized
So I’m moving over from my livejournal to a full fledged WP blog finally. CatCubed.com used to house my basic freelance site with portfolio, which can still be seen here. I’m not actively seeking freelance at the moment, so I’m turning this domain into a blog.
Eventually, I’ll probably add back in my portfolio and other functionaly, but for now it’s just this borrowed theme and a basic WP install. As a result, visitors to this blog are bound to see a fair amount of flux as I experiment with the look and feel and functionality. However, don’t expect any drastic changes for a bit since most my limited freetime is going to massively overhauling the NifNaks.com site. I’m adding store functionality and completely redesigning the look and feel. I’m hoping to have it done in the next week or two.
This is the actual first post; however, I may end up back populating this blog with some of my fav lj posts. Oh yeah, if anyone actually reads this and has a clue about enabling some sort way of crossposting with lj let me know.
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February 2, 2007 at 2:47 pm · Filed under Art Freak Culture + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood
I always loved this film and kinda idolized Buckaroo Banzai himself: rock star, neurosurgeon, particle physicist, rocket car driver, comic book hero, and savior of the world against an menacing horde of alien criminals locked away in the 8th dimension—you can’t get a much better CV then that. He was more then a little geeky, but he still had the charisma enough to capture the heart of cute dykie-haired Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin)—yes I was attracted to short hair even way back in my teens.
I’m not much of a celebrity hound and I don’t watch TV, so I didn’t really know what Peter Weller was up to these days until my parents sent me a link to a wired article. Interestingly, Weller has become a modern polymath renaissance man himself. He’s starring in the show 24, hosting the History Channel’s Engineering an Empire series, playing Frank Lloyd Wright in an off-broadway play, and working towards a PhD in Italian Renaissance art history at UCLA where he also teaches courses, writes papers, and is busy climbing the academic ladder.
“I’ve always followed my passions,” Weller says, “even when it didn’t seem to make much sense.”
I can really relate to this statement as someone else who is juggling several seemingly desperate interests from a successful career in health industry web design/development to artistic tomfoolery to pursuing a degree in neuropsychology—not to mention all my other side projects like helping with NifNaks (currently undergoing a massive redesign) and my Dad’s growing web business.
Sometimes, it gets a bit overwhelming. I glance around at all the younger students in my classes, see others my age with a single career and free relaxed weekends, and then wonder what the hell I’m doing. Then there’s people like Peter Weller who is 60 and yet continues to zigzag through multiple careers, is pursuing a PhD, and is still wearing rockstar shades.
Still after all these years, Buckaroo Banzai is my role model.
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