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14
Dec 16

People, right?

Look, you don’t have to be nice, or even hospitable, like some people are fond of saying. But I’m not asking too much for a little situational awareness. Yes I am, situational awareness has been directly tied to common sense and you can only get that if you’re willing to pay premium prices. I get it.

But still:

The guy stood there, on his phone, for about four minutes. No one else in the restaurant was thirsty, and it wasn’t his concern anyway.

Except for me. I just stood there, watching, waiting, wondering, more and more impressed by his obliviousness. Phones are a too-powerful intoxicant for some people.

Here’s another example today:

This elevator services three floors, you’re not on it for long. How is it that you take off your headband, hang it on the handrail and forget about it by the time you’ve gotten to where you need to be? I don’t bet on anything, but it is even-money that this was another phone-related distraction.

If that thing belonged to the same guy, it would be perfect, but I don’t know that there’s serendipity enough for that sort of thing, an hour and a city block removed from one another.


13
Dec 16

Winter is here

Not to worry, we’ve stocked up on all of the important French Toast making ingredients.

We go now to our reporter in the field, Ernie Pyle, tell us how it is looking from where you are:

We got a quarter-of-an-inch of snow today. The record for the day, according to the National Weather Service, was three-quarters of an inch, in 2000. Ernie’s statue was not there on that day for a comparison photo.


8
Dec 16

Last show of the semester

The sports guys did two sports shows tonight. This is the last one, The Toss Up, a show they launched just this term:

And so this is the last production in the brand new studio, which opened just this semester, in September, actually.

We’re learning where all the lights point and how the buttons work. It’s a fine place and we’re very pleased. It’s a really nice studio, a great classroom and a terrific jewel in the Media School’s crown.

The students are pretty good too, if you like sports talk shows.

You can watch it here:

It felt like 12-degrees today. I ran to work in that. I ran to work. (I do not know what is happening.) It flurried on me.

Last Friday it felt like 31 when I rode my bike to campus. I’m no longer going outside.


6
Dec 16

Who watches the watchers watching me?

Oh, just trying out some new eye-tracking software in the incredible new ICR labs that are coming online in the new building.

The usual Tuesday night stuff.

This software is so cool. That camera above the monitor catches and follows your eyes and then gives the person doing the research, who is sitting on the other side of a full-sized partition a real-time look at everywhere your eyes are going on the computer screen. So if I wanted to put an action sequence from a movie up, or some newspaper or magazine layout or anything, on the screen, we could then see what you glanced at, when, and for how long. It does a whole lot of other things, too, but it probably would sound weird out of context.

You do that with several dozen subjects and you’ve got yourself a study sample. Very neat Tuesday night stuff.


5
Dec 16

Oh I sat down a lot, too

This was the most notable thing about my weekend:

On Saturday I ran 10 miles. This is a new personal record for run-only. (I do not know what is happening.) I’ve done a half Ironman and that involved a 12.1 mile run and somehow I did that. But this was 10 miles and it was about 38-degrees, which was only a problem at the beginning and the end. The pace was slow, but that was a deliberate choice on top of this pre-existing fact: I’m just kinda slow anyway. But the eighth mile and the 10th mile were the two fastest miles, so that’s good.

How was your weekend?