At 2AM this morning, I got a text from a user on Instagram. Let’s call them John Do. They aren’t really my close friend and haven’t messaged me for a while, so I was surprised that they sent me a reel. I replied with a like and asked a question back. To my reflex, the question is very NYU related as I asked them if they have ever taken x classes. There are several reasons why I ask them that question:

1. I’m in New York.
2. I suppose I’m overwhelmed with class choice and am constantly thinking about it recently.
3. John Do shares the same name as another person that goes to ITP NYU few years ago.

Instagram’s John Do replied that they don’t know what I’m talking about. And (surprisingly) it still took my brain a few more questions to realize that this John Do is not ITP John Do!

From this embarassing experience, I took note of how my brain persists on my presumed knowledge, as if it has a cached information that needs to be updated from time to time. Not everyone brain updates immediately. I have to ask 3 questions before my brain warns me that I’m asking the wrong person.

But also, it depends on the questions being asked, the first statement that I gave was a party invitation (please come to Memorabilia Mystery!!! tickets here. i'm remaking dancefloor on a digital scene, it's like a little diorama of the party, there will be Indonesian disco and Indonesian real ghosts (they're actually hiring people to do that!)) that I'm contributing visual to. They answered that they're not in New York. To be fair, this answer does not eliminate the possibility that this person goes to ITP NYU.

The second question that I asked was if they ever taken x classes. They answered that they had to search the teacher's name up. Obviously, my brain wouldn’t go straight to interpreting their answer as a context that they don’t go to ITP because not all ITP students may know a specific teacher’s name.

But the remark that got me was “I have taken zero classes”, which effectively triggers my brain to question why this person doesn’t have any idea at all.

Apart from this anecdote, I thought this mistake may have been avoided had their name/username is significantly different from the other John Do.

From the TED’s Memory Palace video, we can memorize information by encoding the raw data into representations (somewhat compressing them), which can be decoded later when we need to retrieve that memory. If I apply this to the ideas of naming people, in a way, we have been encoding every single individual’s identity into a number of characters that we can write and pronounce or NAME.

Question

Why haven’t we implemented a system where a person only has 1 unique name, so it’s not mistaken with another person?

Making

Documentation link here

Attempting to study the complicated x,y,z in THREE JS space, and not to mention the alpha, beta, gamma of gyroscope. It is not simple as translating them to x,y,z in THREE JS, because apparently they are not the same. In fact, i'm altering camera.rotation.x with beta, camera.rotation.y with gamma. I'm not altering the camera with beta because I do not need the image plane to be tilted.

alpha: tilt your device left/right

beta: look up and down with your device

gamma: rotate your device left/right

After a long struggle (that is still unsolved, because the motion of up-down will mess the camera.rotation for left-right and vice versa), I made an experimental camera that grabs the texture of the webcam (that user is currently 'seeing' by pointing their phone towards at), and position it in relative to the camera within the 3D space. The image base64, its location, and the user location (latitude & longitude) are then uploaded to Firebase. Later on, I'd like to add filter function where only image from a requested range of latitude/longitude will be rendered.

This camera is inspired by my assignment for Hedonomics VR where I use this library to do QR code detection, and upon touching the QR code, it will render a plane textured with the VR headset webcam view.

Notes

memory palace

people pacing around is that a psychologically advantageous thing to do?

object permanence at early stage of life vs adulthood

Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched. This concept develops in infants during the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development (birth to about 2 years old) and is a key milestone that allows them to form mental representations of objects and people.

animal perception of time

gene for altruism

A sea squirt "eats" its own brain by absorbing it and other nervous system parts once it settles permanently, because it no longer needs them for movement. This happens after the sea squirt's larval stage, during which it is a free-swimming creature with a brain to navigate. The absorbed nutrients are then repurposed by the body, allowing the adult sea squirt to focus on filtering food and reproducing while stationary

What happen for humans?

Does brainrot happen because we've settled in the comfort of digital media? The brain rots and our energy is reoriented to live our primordial life as it is (just to eat, live, sleep)?