What has been consuming my life? Tagg, you’re it.

When you think about the months in a year, what image pops into your head? Whenever I am trying to manipulate dates that span more than a month, I always picture something like this:

I suspect that layout of months got stuck in my mind because my elementary school calendar had a similar structure.

How do other people visualize the months of a year?

Update: Other people have posted examples in the comments. No overlap yet.

Another milestone has been passed in Keacherland: I have become one of “those guys” when I find myself in a Starbucks. Short dry cap, “for here.”

It really is decent. Still overpriced, but decent.

Airports are a necessary evil. I try to spend as little time in them as possible when flying, and I try to waste as little time as possible near them when picking up or dropping off somebody. It’s a pain. That’s why I was thrilled to read about some sanity at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. From the article:

By Thanksgiving, drivers can park on a lot on airport grounds, free of charge, until they get a call from their visitor, on the ground and waiting for pickup.

Brilliant! The existing design forced cars into an automotive holding pattern, circling a mile-long loop until the arriving party was ready to be picked up. There was nowhere to park, and idling at the baggage-claim doors for more than a few seconds produced quick rebukes from the airport police. The loop was a huge waste of fuel, and the extra traffic of people circling about made for irksome congestion.

The new system sounds wonderful. No more mindless looping. No more fumbling with cell phones while driving. No more well-intentioned-but-very-annoying reminders that “the white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only.”

I applaud the airport commission for a move that makes tremendous sense.

This afternoon I helped advance the collective knowledge of the world.  I participated in a psychology study.

Stanford has a storied history of psychology studies, such as the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment.  Fortunately, the study I took part in was quite benign.

The two-part, web-based test took place in a small room in the psychology building.  The first part resembled the Age Project: I was shown photos of faces and was asked to judge their ages.  In the second part, I was shown a short video of two blue squares moving around the screen.  The one question I was asked about the video: did I think of the squares as people?  That association hadn’t crossed my mind, but I did think the video looked a bit like Pong.

Even though the proctor emphasized the second part of the study, I suspect that the first part was the focus of the research.  The follow-up questions were primarily about the faces.  Also, the face photos seemed odd in some hard-to articulate way.  I know that at least one of the face photos was shown twice, and some of the photos seemed to have strange proportions or non-matching features.  Maybe it was my imagination running wild in a desperate effort to discover the true thrust of the study.  Maybe what I perceived was real.

With studies, the true goal is often veiled to prevent bias, so I might never know the actual goal.  With luck, I will run across it in print someday.