New toy of the [time period]

[philena]

Matlab! I have no particular reason to feel that I need it, but some other people in the department do, and they started up a study group, which I decided to join. I am, after all, left to my own devices this summer, and there's no reason not to learn a new skill for free. I hear it is pretty good with "signal processing," which, if I understand correctly, might be a useful tool if I end up doing work with brain waves and electrodes and stuff. I'm not entirely sure I want to do that, though, so for now it's simply a toy, and I am treating it as such. For example, now that I have done a chapter on scripts and if/else statements, I can have the computer respond to your input with suitable responses! In one that I wrote just this morning, I created a randomly-defined variable, and if you then give the right answer to a question, the script will reward you with the first line from one of ten wikipedia articles, depending on the value of the variable. Either it is particularly fond of giving the variable a value between 90-100, or else it simply likes the sentence about pigs, because that is by far the most frequently displayed answer.

Update: In true Mike Slackenerny fashion, I have caged a very nice chocolate chip cookie from the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience's annual bash. I figure I have all the right in the world, because they're right outside my office and making a ton of noise.