(This post has a point. A very important point if I might say so myself and I’m even skipping the Weekly Head Voices because of it. Please read it, in sessions if you have to, from start to finish. It has a WHV Nerd Index of 0/5 and a Backyard Philosophy Index of 5/5. You can get back at me in the comments.)

It turns out that when any normal human being is faced with observations or evidence that oppose their already formed opinions, they tend to ignore or downplay the value of those observations. Conversely, any scrap of evidence that seems to confirm the opinion in question is considered to be good and trustworthy evidence. This is called confirmation bias: You and I both suffer from it, and it can be a dangerous phenomenon. Ideally, we would be able to judge the evidence and come to a reasonable decision, but this turns out to be exceptionally hard.

(This post introduces the new Weekly Head Voices Nerd Index, or WHV-NI, a metric by which you can see if you should read a post or not. See this page for an explanation of the WHV-NI. The NI of the first part of this post is 0/5, whilst the NI of the part starting with the accepted paper is 3/5, also due to the extensive Head Voices Review at the end.)

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I use many abbreviations in the Weekly Head Voices, mostly to indicate people.  This page contains a handy summary.

• ERCI – extremely resourceful  / capable individual
• GOU – Genetic Offspring Unit. Blessed with daughters #1, #2 and #3.
• FNSF – French Neuro-Scientist Friend
• HVR – Head Voices Review
• SO – Significant Other
• TNR – The New Roomie
• TPN – Tall Philosophical Neighbour
• WHV-NI – Weekly Head Voices Nerd Index

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The WHV-NI is used to classify posts, and help you to decide if you want to read or not. The NI is a figure out of 5, grading the nerdiness of the post and the minimum nerdiness of the reader.  Below is a handy table:

• 0/5 – Completely un-nerdy. Never programmed your VCR or PVR before? Not sure what a PVR is? You’re at the right place.
• 1/5 – Ever so slightly nerdy. You’ve received and successfully opened “e-mail” before.
• 2/5 – You’re normal, with slight nerdy tendencies that you possibly try to suppress or just to hide. You surf the web often. You use a smartphone, such as a Blackberry or, common sense forbid, an iPhone, that you use regularly.
• 3/5 – When you see a pocket-protector, or spectacles that have been mended with a plaster, you feel a strange excited stirring that you’re not able to put a finger on. You get all enthusiastic when some new gadget is released, or when a colleague shows you their new Android telephone syncing their stuff with Google and showing all their NI >3 friends moving in real-time on a neat map of the city.
• 4/5 – You program stuff. When you’re in the neighbourhood, technical sh*t just starts to work. You read blogs. You know and possibly regularly operate an RSS aggregator. You’ve comfortable in at least two different operating systems. You have your own blog.
• 5/5 – You speak a few words of Klingon.  Linux has no mysteries, you’ve even contributed little bits of the current kernel code. When someone mentions Seven-of-Nine, you get ALL WORKED UP.

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(This post is a slightly longer than average report detailing our trip to the EG VCBM 2010 conference. It’s of course super-entertaining, but if you still do wish to skim through it, I’ve bolded the per-paragraph themes. If you’re not sure what these danged conferences are about, see my recent EuroVis 2010 post for a general introduction.)

Last week, I accompanied Peter Schaafsma (he of the orbital fat mobility paper), Bastijn Vissers and André van Dixhoorn (they of the resting state fMRI brain connectivity paper) to Leipzig, where they had been selected to present their work at the second Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine (VCBM).

Kids!  It’s now truly summer over here, which means as much as possible time outside, which means less time available for writing blog posts. However, weeks 24 and 25 of 2010 contained such newsworthy items, that I’m simply forced to trade some sun-light for a bit of TFT exposure. In this post, we talk flowers, PhD defences, scientific talks, funny Js and finally stick figures, so please stick around!

Welcome all to the latest edition of the Weekly Head Voices!  In a bid to get more numbers into my titles (oh who am I kidding, I’m clearly trying to slightly injure or preferably frighten two birds with a single stone, splitting infinitives as I go along), this WHV is dedicated to the EuroVis 2010 conference, which on its part is the reason I spent most of last week in Bordeaux.

For various reasons, I need to do multiple marker tracking in processing with NyARToolkit.  However, with the default NyAR4psg layer between these two, multiple marker tracking is downright hard, and when you get it working, it’s not quite what you expect. After a few days of Java hacking, during which I was very pleasantly surprised with eclipse, I am now pleased to present to you my modifications to the NyAR4psg that makes multiple marker tracking easy! See here:

Hey man, I’m really busy at the moment, but it took me unnecessarily long to get those really hip facebook like, facebook share and retweet buttons everywhere on my blog, so I thought I’d try and save you some time by dropping a quick note on how I did it.

Adding the Facebook Like button functionality wasted the most time, because there are far too many plugins and howtos that claim to work and don’t quite. I ended up using the Like plugin (official wordpress page and plugin website), because it has the best documentation that includes details on all the ways in which things can go wrong, and there are many.  I’m using the IFRAME option, also because that seems to work most of the time.  I had a hard time finding this plugin in the built-in directory, so I downloaded and installed it manually.

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(This edition is about babies, textbook Ph.D. defences and mind-viruses in Snow Crash, all of which can mostly be filed under backyard-philosophy(ish).)

On the theme of striving for The Next Level, my not-quite-1-month-old bundle of joy laughed out loud today for the first time! I’m sure that it was not a false alarm, as I was being my usual comedic genius self (I target the 1 to 3 month-old crowd), and the pattern of stimulus and reaction was just too well-coordinated and sustained to be coincidental.

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