I have noticed that when I am reading, I cannot simultaneously understand spoken words. If someone speaks to me while I am reading, I can pay attention to their voice, or to the text, but not both. It s as if these two functions share the same cognitive facility, and this facility can only handle one task at a time. If someone is talking on the phone nearby, I find it very difficult to focus on reading (or writing). If I m having a conversation with someone about a document, I sometimes have to ask them to pause the conversation for a moment while I read.
This phenomenon isn t unique to me. In Richard Feynman s
What Do You Care what Other People Think?, there is a chapter entitled It s as Simple as One, Two, Three where he describes his experiments with keeping time in his head. He practiced counting at a steady rate while simultaneously performing various actions, such as running up and down the stairs, reading, writing, even counting objects. He discovered that he could do anything while counting to [himself] except talk out loud .
What s interesting is that the pattern varies from person to person. Feynman shared his discovery with a group of people, one of whom (John Tukey) had a curiously different experience: while counting steadily, he could easily speak aloud, but could not read. Through experimenting and comparing their experiences, it seemed to them that they were using different cognitive processes to accomplish the task of counting time. Feynman was hearing the numbers in his head, while Tukey was seeing the numbers go by.
Analogously, I ve met people who seem to be able to read and listen to speech at the same time. I attributed this to a similar cognitive effect: presumably some people speak the words to themselves, while others watch them. Feynman found that, although he could write and count at the same time, his counting would be interrupted when he had to stop and search for the right word. Perhaps he used a different mental faculty for that. Some people seem to be able to listen to more than one person talking at the same time, and I wonder if that s related.
I was reminded of this years later, when I came across this
video on speed reading. In it, the speaker explains that most people read by silently voicing words, which they can do at a rate of only 120-250 words per minute. However, people can learn to read visually instead, and thereby read much more quickly. He describes a training technique which involves reading while continuously voicing arbitrary sounds, like the vowels A-E-I-O-U.
The interesting part, for me, was the possibility of learning. I realized that different people read in different ways, but hadn t thought much about whether one could change this. Having learned a cognitive skill, like reading or counting time, apparently one can re-learn it a different way. Visual reading would seem, at first glance, to be superior: not only is it faster, but I have to use my eyes to read anyway, so why tie up my listening facility as well? Perhaps I could use it for something else at the same time.
So, I tried the simple technique in the video, and it had a definite effect. I could feel that I wasn t reading in the same way that I had been before. I didn t measure whether I was going any faster or slower, because I quickly noticed something more significant: my reading comprehension was completely shot. I couldn t remember what I had read, as the memory of it faded within seconds. Before reaching the end of a paragraph, I would forget the beginning. It was as if my ability to comprehend the meaning of the text was linked to my reading technique. I found this very unsettling, and it ruined my enjoyment of the book I was reading.
I ll probably need to separate this practice from my pleasure reading in order to stick with it. Presumably, over time, my comprehension will improve. I m curious about what net effect this will have, though. Will I still comprehend it in the same way? Will it
mean the same thing to me? Will I still
feel the same way about it? The many levels of meaning are connected to our senses as well, and the same idea, depending on whether it was read or heard, may not have the same meaning to an individual. Even our
tactile senses can influence our judgments and decisions.
I also wonder whether, if I learn to read visually, I ll lose the ability to read any other way. When I retrained myself to type using a Dvorak keyboard layout, rather than QWERTY, I lost the ability to type on QWERTY at high speed. I think this has been a good tradeoff for me, but raises interesting questions about how my mind works: Why did this happen? What else changed in the process that might have been less obvious?
Have you tried re-training yourself in this way? What kind of cognitive side effects did you notice, if any? If you lost something, do you still miss it?
(As a sidenote, I am impressed by Feynman s exuberance and persistence in his personal experiments, as described in his books for laypeople. Although I consider myself a very curious person, I rarely invest that kind of physical and intellectual energy in first-hand experiments. I m much more likely to research what other people have done, and
skim the surface of the subject.)
DebConf being in New York City this year, clearly the right way to get
there was to bike, together with Molly
and Daf. Being touring newbs, there were a few
mishaps.
We then had some problems with Molly's brakes, and it took a long time
to navigate out of the city, but eventually we found ourself on the
"Washington Secondary Trail" a wonderful bike path along an old
rail line. Every couple miles there'd be an old covered rail bridge over
the river, and it was a well-paved straight shot for about ten miles,
with no cars and no need to navigate.
Just as we were getting into things after the bike trail ended,
something completely unexpected happened.
This is Daf's derailleur after it sheared off in the middle as we
attempted to start after a red light outside Tractor Supply Co.
Luckily, John and his son Chris lent us a hand and hauled Daf and his
bike to the nearest bicycle shop in the back of their pickup truck.
They'd just come from there, where John had bought Chris a new helmet.
Greenway Cycles, the only bike shop in a
twenty mile radius, was
three miles away.
We got there an hour before it closed and Rick replaced the derailleur
and straightened the hanger in a jiffy.
Due to all these things, we didn't get as far as we'd planned in the
first day and ended up camping in Seaport Campground in Mystic,
Connecticut, rolling in at around 22:00. We did about 65 miles, including
six due to the detour to the cycle shop. Carrying camping gear is heavy!
Several delicious peanut butter and jelly bagels and some wheatberry and
couscous salad later, we were passed out.
The second day included less bike trouble, but was no less eventful, and
we were tired from the previous day's riding. The highlights included
taking a tiny sidewalk path that I'm baffled how Google knows about up
onto a sidewalk alongside the I-95 bridge across the Thames to New
London, Connecticut.
The 13:00 ferry from New London to Orient Point, New York, where we got
some remarkably good veggie burgers (whole edamame visible!) for lunch.
And a vineyard on the north fork of Long Island, where we stopped for a
quick tasting and ended up picking up a bottle of
barrel-fermented chardonnay. The
vineyard was small 23 acres, with 11 acres of grapes and the
proprietors were friendly and extremely interested in our trip. They
gave us a dollar off on the bottle due to our method of transport.
It turns out there are only two trains a day on the Long Island rail,
and we just barely caught the 18:52 return from Riverhead. We had mere
seconds in the station and ended up without enough cash to pay for
tickets onboard, but the conductor just took what we had and gave us
tickets to Penn Station anyway.
Outside Penn, a girl with a mohawk and a messenger bag overheard us
talking about biking up Broadway and told us to bike up 8th Avenue
instead. "Always bike up 8th and down Broadway because they have bike
lanes in those directions." Thus, we didn't die dodging taxis in the
dark.
So basically, due to various people being extremely nice to us for no
good reason, we made it to Columbia University around 22:30, on the
correct day. Warm fuzzies for humanity all around. 
As 
Here on the porch at Dani's, enjoying the chill breeze as a distant
storm passes by, and the last half hour of daylight, it seems right
to have been awake to see the solstice dawn, and out in the world all
day. Though after 16 hours, the part of the day spent napping in a
hammock barely seems enough.
Such an early start to this day, first visiting a small-town garage with
Dad, where skype video calls were being made, and then racing the morning
heat north, out of South Carolina.
(I can't hear "frakking water" on the radio without snickering.
Congratulations to all the news-people who pulled that phrase off
today.)
A long drive punctuated by picking up my passenger, and my own
No sooner do I 
I'd never met Marina before last September, despite living in the same
metropolitan area! I'm glad women that I don't know about and who
work on free software exist and that I get to meet them and find out
that they live nearby.
. Patent pools are helping slowly as they grow. Companies which don t care about the freedom aspect of GPLv3 are adopting it because of the patent protection aspects. Patent system is at the head of the list of causes-of-bad-things affecting free software. SFLC is building coalitions outside the core community to protect the interests of the free software community. We are starting to be taken for granted at the high end of mgmt in companies that build on free software. We face a problem in the erosion of privacy. We need to build a stack, running on commodity hardware that runs federated services rather than folk needing centralised services.
Marina Zhurakhinskaya on GNOME Shell: Integrates old and new ideas in an overall comprehensive design. Marina ran through the various goals of the shell growing with users, being delightful, starting simply so new users are not overwhelmed. The activities screen looks pretty nice 
The workspace rearrangement UI is really good. The notifications thing is interesting; you can respond to a chat message in-line in the notification.
We had a visitor on #ironruby today asking for help getting IR running on his mac. I gave him the following directions, and they seemed to work aside from one glitch. I tested them on my wife s mac, and it worked for me, too.
Install Mono
You can grab the Mono .dmg from 
