For the most part, almost every trend I’ve looked at has decreased over time. Probably just an effect of people not really needing to google every possible thing. Perhaps more information has spread out into the world amongst the people and so there is less of a need to google it. Or it could mean that people are relying less on Google in general. Some things, like Facebook and Twitter, skyrocket over time. Funny that googling google has steadily increased – maybe because of the rumor that it would break the internet? Haha. But, other than just generics, here are some interesting things I found on Google Trends. Search for more!

1. Searching of neurons seems highly correlated with terms at schools and universities. This activity pattern in general seems amusing to me. “Neurons” are being activated (on google) when learning is being done. Hehe.
2. Searching of gre is cyclical throughout the years, having more interest as time approaches the graduate school application process.
3. UCSD, presumably because it is in La Jolla, generates the most google searches for cognitive science. Not sure why Koreans are so incredibly interested, but I’m sure I’ll find out in the next few years.
4. People are relying less on google to find out about the U.S. World and News Report for college rankings, although there are still spikes for when new rankings are released.
5. People in the Philippines are more concerned about graduate school than Americans, well at least on Google.
6. Lots of people in Poland want to find out about the name Karnowski (or one of their infamous politicians), so perhaps it’s true that most Karnowskis are in Poland.
7. Surfing is a hot topic in Honolulu, Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, and San Diego
8. People seem to only wonder more about Africa during its recent world cup hosting… wait, the only people really wondering about it are people already in South Africa!
9. People still remember 9-11 on 9-11 by googling it.
10. People care WAY more about Christmas than they do New Year’s, Easter, Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving.
11. People really wanted to know about robots in February and March of 2005. You know why?! A movie called Robots came out on March 11, 2005. Here, you thought people cared about real robotics. Nope.
12. Searches about Alaska are highly correlated with searches about Sarah Palin.
13. Searches about Scientology are highly correlated with searches about Tom Cruise.

People can find all types of things. Here is another blog entry to someone else’s findings:

25 Things I Learned on Google Trends

Comment on my post about other crazy things you’ve found on Google Trends!

After the windsurfing, I walked with Joel up the coast, where he was able to do some snorkeling near a shipwreck. He didn’t see too many fish, but saw a few colorful schools. We then headed back to town to shower and then into town for some shopping and to get ready for the festival.

The festival was fantastic, with an MC who knew a lot about the local goings on around Aruba and had a knack for sarcastic conversation. During the show, a few of the dancers went into the crowd to pull people up to dance. I jumped for the chance and headed up there to strut my stuff with some of the best on the island. It was a great time and we’ve both called the trip a roaring success. We board the plane tomorrow morning. Until we return the states, I leave you with my dancing - Aruban Dance

It’s been quite awhile since I’ve been abroad, so I’ve been less apt to post. My former roommate Joel and I grabbed some planes and headed down to Aruba during the low tourist season. This has given us a slightly different trip than what we expected, but I think it has turned it into what we originally both wanted – a way to get away from it all and do some awesome things.

We both arrived on different planes and managed to use the public transit well enough to get us in the vicinity of the hotel. Turns out that Fodor’s has a horrible guidebook for Aruba. It’s not completely horrible, but each one of us took an extra 30 minutes to an hour to find the hotel because of poor documentation in the guidebook. The place is fantastic, however.

Aruba is a place for honeymooners, a place for gamblers, and a place for shoppers. The reason we thought the trip would be different is the night life near the resorts. Turns out there is a reason is it the low season – there are not as many people around and many of the bars are closed and/or deserted. This has led us to other fun things.

One of the main reasons for heading to Aruba is that it is one of the best places in the world to windsurf. Even next week, a huge world tournament is being held on the island. The first day we learned to do some basic windsurfing, moving with the wind and attempting to turn back and forth. We don’t have the turning down yet and will do some more surfing tomorrow, but for the little bit we did and the little that we paid, it was quite worth it. Someday, I think kitesurfing is on my agenda, as it’s pretty sexy looking.

The windsurfing left us sunburnt and bruised, and so the next day we decided to head out on a huge bike trip of the island, getting into the mainland to see where the bulk of the people live. We rented bikes from the same place (Aruba Active Vacations) and set out. We hit up the California Lighthouse at the northwest peak of the island, headed through the mainland to some giant rock formations, headed to the large national park (and hiked up one of the few tallest points on the island to view the whole island in 360 degrees), got lost a bit, and headed up the the island on one of the main highways and past the airport. You can see the route here.

The bike ride left me more bruised but exhilarated. We woke up early this morning and biked to the capital city to watch the Dutch play in the World Cup will all of the other Dutch people on the island. We bought orange shirts and cheered along for the first half and in the second half we ate Dutch pancakes and finished out the game.

Today found us returning the bikes, eating cheaply from the grocery store (why didn’t we shop earlier? well, the eating out at restaurants was a great vacation thing to do as well, though costly), and lounging on the beach. Tonight – heading to a festival in town to see what’s going on.

See you back in America soon!

Well, in the mathematical spirit of the website, I experimented with their iterated method of making cookies. The concept of the cookies is based on Sierpinski’s Carpet, a well known figure found in Mathematics, which after the procedure is applied infinitely, the figure actually has an area of zero.

Since reality will not allow us to do this procedure infinitely nor would cookies with zero area be exciting (although, jokingly, you could show other people an empty pan and declare you’ve one-upped me by doing the procedure infinitely, but you would be without delicious cookies), I joined the creators of the website by only following the pattern a few times.

The recipe was based on a butter cookie recipe, found here, except that part of the dough was vanilla and part of it was chocolate (I used some giardelli for this part! oh yeah). This left the cookies tasting very similar to shortbread cookies, something I had never tried to make.

Actually, I should insert this comment here… I can not recall a time where I have actually made cookies on my own. Cutting a long piece of dough found in a pre-packaged container and then baking does not count. I’ve made a few batches of cookies with others, but I find that I was more on the sidelines. So, what better way to make cookies than by going insanely complicated?!

But beware, the cookies took about 3 hours to create and I only managed to get roughly 24 cookies out of it. This could be changed by a few things I learned while making them. First off, make a lot more dough so you can create more cookies. The creation of the dough is all in one step, so adding more ingredients here will basically be the same amount of time, but you’ll get more cookies. Second, I was unable to get the chocolate dough to bind together, so as in a comment I found on one of the sites, I used some egg in the chocolate dough part. Have the eggs ready already. Third, when combining the 9 segments together, 1 chocolate and 8 vanilla, make the chocolate part in the middle longer than the surrounding pieces. I found, either because the chocolate dough was less malleable or because of the way I was elongating the dough, the middle pieces began to disappear on the ends. This made it so I had to cut off parts of the ends to make all the shapes show. I had quite a bit of extra dough I cut off that could have been incorporated.

So, those are my lessons learned, and now for some pictures. Below is the steps involved. Ingredients to balls of dough to simple colored pieces to first and second iterations to final product. If you have any questions, just post and I’ll make sure to give you the info you need.

Other sites of fellow factal cookiemakers:

http://threesixty360.wordpress.com/2008/06/25/sierpinski-cookies/

http://buttonsformouse.blogspot.com/2009/04/cookie-sierpinski.html

http://sumidiot.blogspot.com/2009/03/semi-sierpinski-st-paddys-sugar-cookies.html

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/6901/fractal-cookies

A little bit after the holiday season, I finally decided to get an ebook reader. I had been wanting to invest in this technology ever since I read a Newsweek article about it when I was in the village. I was able to try out one while I was abroad, but it was a generic version and the technology was still new – so the book I was reading (a portion of the seventh Harry Potter book) was poorly formatted (of course, this might have been because it was a stolen version, but oh well).

When I got back to America, however, I held off on getting it and waited for the technology to improve. This holiday season, I had finally decided it was time, for two reasons:

1. There were several technologies competing against each other driving the prices down.
2. Amazon.com announced that the kindle was the most gifted item and that the sale of ebooks surpassed the sale of physical books.

At the time, there were several options, including but not limited to Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, and Barnes and Noble’s Nook. I went with Kindle, because the technology had been around longer and there were more novels available for it. Soon after I purchased the Kindle, however, there was a tech conference in Las Vegas that showcased a wide assortment of ebook readers. The revolution was on, and more competition was here!

I should say upfront that is the revolution is on, the prices are being driven down, and the technology is becoming commonplace, I would recommend getting one during the holiday season when things will be even better. I would also, in my experience right now, avoid the ebook readers that are really computer pads. I like the fact that the eInk technology makes reading easy and doesn’t hurt your eyes at all. These new computer pads, like the iSlate will be just as hard on your eyes as reading a book on the computer. (that sucked – I read part of Harry Potter 7 on computer and the ebook reader and the former hurt my eyes quite a bit whereas I didn’t feel anything with the ebook reader)

If you ignore that opinion, let’s talk about the actual device. I’ve had a good time with it thus far. I downloaded some free books and even bought a new york times bestseller (thus saving roughly 16 dollars on just one book). Within the book, I’ve found it easy to switch back and forth between sections, highlight sentences, create bookmarks, and make my way through the book.

The screen I have, in terms of the hardcover new york times bestseller I bought (Googled), is about 60% of the size (when the font size is at its smallest). For the paperback book I have (Pride and Prejudice), the size is probably closer to the actual amount of words on one page.  I say all of this, because you unfortunately are not able to see what page numbers you are on, because the font size can change and the amount of words on a digital ‘page’ can change. The books are made up of ‘locations’ and you can track the percentage of the book you have finished. I’m not completely used to it, but I think after awhile my brain would associate the percentage as the cross section of the binding of the book. We’ll see.

The one big issue about ebook readers thus far is that you can’t buy into the book trading culture. I think if someone is going to invest a certain amount of money into an ebook reader then they probably aren’t the person who is going to be living one one to two books at a time and trading them with others. The Nook has tried to implement this feature, by allowing you to have others borrow the book, but I think each book has a certain number of times you can do this and the borrowing is only limited to 2 weeks. We’ll see how that works out in the end.

Whether you buy it now or later, I think it’s a matter of how many books you read. I assume that I’ll be picking up quite a few classics (so will be free instead of buying a book) and i’ll buy plenty of books that save quite a bit of money, and in the end, I’ll recoup the value and probably save a good deal of money on books.

If you have any more questions, post some comments and I’ll address them!

What ensued in the theater was none other than a sensory overload. Let me preface this by saying that neither had I experienced a 1) IMAX movie nor a 2) 3D movie. So, needless to say, not only would it have blown me away, but the newness of the experience heightened this fact.

To be straight up front – I loved the movie. I had worried a bit about plot and dialogue, but I think my father put it best when he described the way that you should approach the movie:

“At first I worried about some of the less than stellar writing, but when I let go and let it be mythical instead of predictable, and archetypal instead of stereotypical, I enjoyed every moment of it.”

If you do this, not only will you just let the story be, but you can engage the incredibly intense graphics. I think I literally spent 2 hours and 30 minutes with my mouth hanging open. There were moments that, while showing the world and elaborating on parts of the environment, were presented in a fashion to say to the viewer – “yeah, check this shit out!”

The movie was also enhanced by the fact that I saw it with my friend Laura. She has spent the majority of her life studying Native American affairs, and so we were able to talk back and forth about the tribal aspects of the movie. I found myself smiling widely at many of the tribal structures, because so much of them seemed familiar. My favorite of the many references was the greeting style. They would greet each other, from the casual to the intimate with the words, “I see you.” This was a very common way to greet people in Tanzania, or to give them some shit for not greeting you and trying to ‘be like an american’ and ignore the greeting culture. Phrases like “Nakuona” (I see you) would be heard, as well as the aforementioned kidding, “Uko wapi we? Umejificha?” (Where are you? Did you hide yourself?). I would joke with friends about people being afraid and trying to avoid conversation by ‘hiding in the jungle’ or ‘hiding from the police’. Being out in the open and visible in the tribe was always the norm. Communal living was the ideal.

So, let me conclude with this: Everyone should go see this movie. But more importantly, see it in IMAX 3D! And if you want to discuss it more, just write me and we can talk about it!

But you have all missed out and I’m sorry to say that’s a problem. Soon after my trips, I began working at the Department of Veterans Affairs in St. Louis. I went through a lengthy introductory period (man, government jobs and their huge intro periods…) and settled into my new job. After being there awhile, I was able to give presentations to some of the higher ups from DC and speak to them about the issues in processing. I also got to do some software testing, so that was all fine and dandy.

I mention these things, because they would have been perfect to write about! Well, not the government job stuff. Government jobs have a way of not letting you talk about what’s going on. But the travels! I got a chance to go to the DC area and to Chicago again. Even made my way on a road trip back down to New Mexico with my friend Ben to move him into his new apartment.

During all this time, I also took a week long trip to California to look at graduate schools. I made my way to San Diego, rented a car and headed up the coast line to Irvine (near LA), Santa Barbara, Davis (near Sacramento), Merced, and parts of San Francisco. On the way back from this trip, I was able to stop in and see my friend John in Boulder, CO. I hadn’t seen this guy since college, and I had been feeling pretty bad about missing his wedding. We had a great time, and went out for my birthday. I’m sad that I missed his wife, but next time. Next time.

So, where does that leave me now? Well, the fall left me scrambling all over the place to finish college applications. I’m putting my final touches on my last one right now and will have applied to 8 or so places. I’m excited to see the responses that should come in the next few months. I also spent November participating in National Novel Writing Month (lovingly termed NaNoWriMo). I took a bunch of my letters, journals, blog posts, and memories of my Peace Corps service and shoved it into a large word document. I still have some more letters to scan and some more letters to add to the massive document, but after this, I’ll be spending my time whittling down the parts that make the best story. If anyone is interested in being a part of the editing phase of this novel, just let me know, and when I have the copy I want to have others comment on, I’ll make sure a copy comes your way.

Other than that, I’m just here in the Central West End in St. Louis living life. It’s a new year and I have some new goals and I hope you’ll enjoy my ride.