Les Bonnes Choses

I've been reading. I just finished reading Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, which was a remarkably fast and enjoyable read. I received a book called The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch, in my stocking this past Christmas. Apparently, Carnegie Mellon had a series of lectures called The Last Lecture, where speakers were invited to pass on their wisdom for the ages, as though it were their last chance to be heard. In the case of Randy Pausch, when he gave the lecture on September 18, 2007 (my birthday), he did so knowing that it was his last lecture because he had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He died July 25, 2008. I'm going to go ahead and read the book, but damn, that's just the most depressing way to start off a book. It doesn't help much that the book is peppered with photos and such of him with his three young kids. I'm not sure if it's a cause or an effect of my vocation, but I very often find myself putting myself inside someone else's head. It's very useful when trying to figure out what the hell people are doing (or are going to do) when they're taking part in psychological experiments (which often require perfectly normal people to do rather bizarre things). But sometimes empathy is a real pain in the ass.

Maybe I should just read the volumes of research put out by the people I will be visiting in San Diego on Monday. I doubt I'll feel too much one way or another while reading Neurophysiological evidence for transfer appropriate processing of memory: processing versus feature similarity.