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August 25th, 2006

david | society and culture | 825 comments

Oreo Cookies and Milk Pressure

August 24th, 2006

Just putting this out there in case any water pressure/buoyancy experts ever are super bored and stumble upon my corner of the Internet. I, like many others out there I’m sure, love Oreo cookies with milk. If you hold the cookie down in the milk (so that the cookie is vertical) for a few seconds, when you bite on it it’s potting-soil like consistency of pure chocolate and creme is pure bliss. While this tiny amount of work for such a large payoff might seem trivial at first, multiply by a few thousand cookies and you’ve got some serious cookie-to-milk (W=FD for all you physics nerds) type work accumulating.

In an effort to minimize energy waste, I often just throw 3 or 4 cookies in the milk at the same time. As we all know, the black and white cookie doesn’t let milk hold it down.. it aggressively tries to elevate itself above the water line. You can let these suckers wade in that milk all you want… when you pull them out expecting even greater sogginess than before, you are often shocked/amazed/petrified/flabbergasted that - against all odds - the cookie has remained rather crunchy.

My only theory as to why this is is: somehow, when you actively hold down the cookie in a vertical state, the pressure at 1.2 inches below surface level is great enough to penetrate the air pockets inside the cookie whereas at surface level this is a much more gradual (perhaps almost indefinite) process. However, calcuations of water pressure at that depth measured against cookie pressure resistance proved to be difficult - mostly because I have no frickin’ clue how to measure either of those values.

So, I implore all you Oreo-in-milk lovers out there to explain this phenomenon to me. Unfortunately, I have sincere doubts that anyone will a) ever find this post, b) care enough to read the entire thing and c) have the great wisdom and understanding to know the answer… I guess that’s just how the cookie crumbles.

david | society and culture, stupid | 2 comments

Programming Contest Training

August 24th, 2006

Ever since I went to TopCoder’s 2004 Open I’ve been interested in improving my programming skills (right now I would rank my skills right above “enough to pay the bills”-level but I would like to see them reach “ain’t nothing but a google-thang”-level). Besides competing in more TopCoder events and solving old problems, I’ve discovered this other cool site (the training site for the USA Programming Team.. yes, they exist) has a curriculum of sorts to walk you through learning basic concepts all the way to advanced search/sort algorithms.

david | coding, cool things on the web | No comments

Forced Speed Reading Training with Spreeder.com

August 24th, 2006

I’ve always been interested in speed-reading (though I’m now afraid that training myself for speed reading has in fact lowered my reading comprehension) and saw a link to a cool utility called Spreeder on Lifehacker today. The basic premise of this tool is that you paste in some text and it flashes word-by-word to you at a very fast pace so you don’ t have time to do things that slow down your reading.

Several factors affect our reading speed, like subvocalization (the little voice inside our heads that reads along with us and slows us down), backtracing (rereading parts over and over again), etc. The purpose behind apps like these is to train our minds to get rid of all the other crap. So, by having a steady input of text, we erase our dependency on backtracing. By increasing the reading speed, subvocalization can’t keep up and eventually goes away… we don’t need to subvocalize to process information, as much as we may think we do.

I tried it using the text from “The Power of Now” by Steve Pavlina. I like his posts but I find them a little verbose when I’m in my blog-reading attention span mode. So I put the 2000 word post into spreeder and cranked up the text to about 900 words per minute. I was surprised that I was able to actually get a lot of the meaning out of thetext (probably about 90% understanding) in about 2 minutes (whereas previously something like that might take me 6-8 minutes at about 250 wpm. I think I might try it again with some text that is totally unfamiliar with me and see what level of comprehension I can get.

Update: Article on speed-reading techniques

Update: also tried Zapreader.com and it works a little better in my opinion cause you can use word chunks instead of just thousands of single words flying at you.

david | technology, cool things on the web | 4 comments