Thin-Slicing and Andre Agassi's forehand

Learned some more interesting things at school today. In architectural history, our teacher is finally drooling over the Roman civilization. He get so excited in his lectures, he occationally has difficultly talking, and he gestures with his arms all over the place. Its still preferable to my human factors teacher, who is putting everyone to sleep.

We found out we're going to have the contractor teach us wood properties and construction next semester. This class we learned how to calcuate moment of inertia for section properties of beams by breaking the section down into its componant shapes. The moment of inertia describes the strength of the section (and the beam) and along with its bendiness (modulous of elasticity) and the forces on it, can tell us how much the beam will bend. It's all formulas and equations, although individually its pretty simple. He said at the beginning of the class that all structural engineering is bookkeeping.

I've started bringing my lunch to school again. The long school days plus the work meant that I was going for twelve hours without food, and that was just not working out.

In Finding purpose we talked about stress and stress management. Fun fact for the day #1, we lose most of the water in our body in the moisture we exhale. Less water adds to stress, so we especially need to drink lots of water down here. He talked about various types of stress from survial, to enviornmental, to internal, and work related. In discussing things we're worried about or thinking about, he said our body disregards the time of the event, so that when I'm really worried about a project due in a week, my body goes into the flight or fight mode right now. This energy has to go somewhere and its usually destructive. For people like me who get stress headaches, he recommended "face yoga" where you scrunch up and relax the face to get the muscle tension out. He also highly recommended walking and meditation.

A few stresses right now: A three page single spaced book report due tuesday for a book I've only recently started. Forutnately its an interesing book. More on that later. Also for monday I need to have three sections drafted from my library model along with support matreial in the form of narrative text on what the space to feel like, and colored sketched details. I'm also out of clean clothes. At least I'll have the weekend free to get all this stuff done, as Jen's mom is coming down for the weekend.

The book I'm writing the report on is Blink! The Power of Thinking without Thinking. Check it out at Amazon.com. The main idea of the book is that our subconscious mind is really good at making lighting quick analysis and decisions. Some people call it instinct, some people call it gut reaction, this author calls it thin-slicing. It's the idea behind speed dating- the singles get a slice of a person and either get an instant connection or instant dislike. One example from the book was of a study done by an insurance company which issued malpractice insurance. They wanted to see what kind of doctors were sued and which weren't. The first surprising thing was that who was sued was almost completely irrelevant to whether or not they made medical mistakes. People tend not to sue doctors they like. The ones who were sued didn't spend enough time talking to the patients, providing opportunities for questions, or telling them what they were doing. The researchers listened to a few minutes of recorded conversation, and were able to predict with good accuracy which doctors were more likely to be sued. One researcher took out the high pitched noises which made the words garbled, but left the tone, pitch, and sense of the converstaion. The same predictions were made with just 14 seconds of tonal speech.

Well, here I am thinking I'm writing my paper. Sorry about that. Jump to the good bit.

Andre Agassi had his forehand taped and anlyzed on tape. The researchers looked at it second by second, watching how he hit the ball. Agassi talked about how he rolled his wrist over the ball when he hits it, but the researchers saw that he hit the ball with a straight wrist, and rolled right after. In fact, its impossible to see the ball in the last five feet of flight. It's moving too fast for us to process consciously. But our subcounscious mind can predict where it will be and tells the arm how to hit it -I guess you'd call it muscle memory, but its really in the subconscious mind.

Anyway, going to see Serenity tonight with Jen at the drive-in. It's actually gotten some pretty decent reviews.