The Implicit Unconscious

So this is going to be a pretty random post, because all my other posts are completely logical and organized, but anyway I have about three (at the moment) thoughts. First about my trip, I'm so dang excited to go on this trip I can hardly wait until Tuesday!! So here's my itinerary and I'm sure understand why I am so excited. So Tuesday we leave. Whoa wait I should probably explain that I'm going on this trip with my best friend Cory and maybe our mothers. Ya that sounds lame but they're completely awesome and they'll only be with us half the time anyway so after they leave we'll be able to do what we always do: go out drinking and pick up strange men. HA just kidding. Anyway back to our itinerary... Tuesday we leave here (New Mex) and drive to Anaheim, oh ya 11 hours in the car just talking and snacking and driving, it'll be awesome. So then we'll spend Tuesday night through Thursday at the Disneyland Resort. I've never been to Disneyland so I'm way excited about this. So we'll be at Disneyland all day Wednesday and Thursday. Then Friday we're going to drive to Tahoe to Cory's grandparent's cabin, I've never been to Tahoe... Then for almost a week we get to chill on the beach doing absolutely nothing but reading and watching DVD's, again I submit AWESOME. Our stay in Tahoe will end on the following Tuesday when we drive whatever mothers are with us to the Reno airport, then we drive to Concord to stay with Cory's grandparents. They will tour us around San Francisco which I've also never been to. Hopefully we'll be able to get a show and wander around the crazy streets and everything. Then we'll drive back to New Mex 16 hours on Sunday where we will then proceed to take Monday off and sit in our house and do laundry! I get to do so many new things which I love to do and I think it will be so much fun! And I plan on taking MASS amounts of pictures because I love pictures!

Okay so enough of my rambling about things probably only I care about. Second thought, and the reason it has taken me half an hour to even get this far, I'm watching the UEFA Cup Final in Moscow between Manchester United and Chelsea. So this is soccer (although you should know this! ;) and I'm not actually in Moscow but the final is. These two teams are so evenly matched that in the Premeirship they were seperated by 6 points, Man U. first then Chelsea! And all the analysts before the game couldn't really pick a clear favorite because their strengths balance so well. But look at the greats involved in this game: for Chelsea - Ashley Cole, Lampard, Didier Drogba, Terry, Ballack, for Man. U. - Rooney, Ferdinand, Christiano Ronaldo oh my gosh I could gush for much longer than this! The point is that this game is so amazing, they make the game look so pretty and it makes me wonder why I watch MLS when it's like me playing against professionals. So ya this game is amazingly pretty and SO much fun to watch, plus the fouls are so much better it makes me laugh. And English announcers are just so much dang fun to listen to. They just get so into the game you can tell they care, and they're not morons like Marcelo Balboa or the other announcers we have. They don't get as into it as Mexican announcers but still fun. Right now there is 20 minutes left in the game and it's tied, I know it's going to over time but I don't know who wins because I was denied the information.... I don't much care though because I'm basically rooting for both teams because they both are amazing and have people I love to watch.

Okay now the actual reason for my post. I've been reading this book called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell that is one of the most interesting books I've ever read. It's all about what happens in our minds when we stop thinking in the analyzing sense, and start thinking using our unconscious. The kind of thinking that occurs when we're reading people's facial expressions to see if they're sincere, or when we have to make a decision so fast that we can't look at facts and think logically but instead go with our 'gut'. Anyway the book is flippin amazing psychology that fascinates the crap out of me, but just one part that I got out of it is a study that Harvard does to try and get you to tell them what your values are in your subconscious instead of what you think you are. It's at http://www.implicit.harvard.edu/ and you go through a series of tasks where you have to pick one decision or the other (for example good or bad) as fast as you can. Some of the things they test is whether you discriminate old people versus young, black versus white, democrat versus republican... What's insane about these tests is they ask you at the beginning if you think that say white people are better than black people, let's say you tell the survey you see no difference between the two races. Then you take the test, when you associate good words with white your reaction time is about 300 milliseconds. Then it switches and you are associating good words with black people, now your reaction time is 700 milliseconds. That's slow for your mind and it's on-the-go reactions. This type of reaction would show you have a preference for white people over black people. See how it works? It's so amazing because your subconscious mind is maybe telling you something you don't know about yourself. It's not saying that you are racist, just that if forced to make this kind of decision you may choose white over black.... They are also careful to say this is not definitive, it's just one type of test. And don't be like my gay psychology class and ask for my evidence and data, it's NOT DEFINITIVE, just interesting. The most interesting one for me was the political one, I guess I think the most negative about Obama and then Hillary and McCain are the same.... So ya, the book is amazing and if you have some time go to the site and see what your subconscious says about you, you may find out something you didn't know!

And I just rambled so dang much I'm surprised, sorry if it's random and repetitive haha just my mood today I guess.

China, and The Universe

So a couple random thoughts that I've had in the past couple days. First there was a massive earthquake in China. You can look on wikipedia at a map that has how much of China was effected. You can look at that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2008_Sichuan_earthquake_extent.svg. The epicenter was almost in the exact middle of China too. If you consult the CIA world factbook you also discover that China is just slightly smaller than the United States. The united states is also roughly the same shape as China, although China is a little more circular. See where I'm headed with this yet? So let's transpose the red rippling earthquake onto the center of the US, say around St. Louis or so. 3000 people died in one building collapsing! Now granted China has way more populated areas then the middle of the United States does, but the effect would still be devastating don't you think? That would be so insane to have an earthquake effect Cali and Boston at the same time. And that earthquake was only a 7.9, the Richter scale goes up to 10, and with each decimal point the intensity goes up by 10! The United States if 4 times as big as the European Union, what if an earthquake like this hits them. It's just so crazy the possibilities and the consequences of the Earth shifting underneath us. It must have shifted a ton on Monday morning. I have more in my head on this thought but I won't go on....because really I could rambling for more pages.

Second thought, again while viewing wikipedia, I got a tip from Cory that I should check out my horoscope status. So I go and check out Aries but it was being gay so I was first reading about astrology and how it works. Turns out it's intensely more complicated then I thought, you should check it out if you're at work and have nothing to do for 9 hours. But to simplify things in terms of my random thought, basically they measure things off the stars, the immovable stars. Every single one of their measurements is based on the facts that the stars they're looking at don't move. So here's my problem. How can they not move? Doesn't everything have to rotate around something? How can stars just sit there? I mean I don't know but it just seems against the laws of nature for things to just sit there. But I spose if things have to rotate around something there is something bigger for them to rotate around....this is circular logic or there is something HUGE out there that really is just sitting there. Or maybe there isn't something bigger but everything is still moving. Maybe this could happen because things don't always need something bigger because we all exert some gravitational force on the things around us, we just don't know it because we're small and the Earth is so huge. But stars are massive by themselves so maybe they're all just effecting eachother.... Hmm maybe I just talked it out. I don't know, the whole "bigger universe" thing intrigued me today.

So those are my two random thoughts for the day... Last I miss Kristina, I miss Sarah, I miss Abbey a lot right now, I also miss all my guys from school. I'm so happy to be back in New Mex with my parents and my other friends but I miss them... Just wanted to get that out.

Finished

First: I love my homeplum!

I, Heidi, have now completed my junior year of college. Many thought I wouldn't make it this far, many thought I couldn't hack engineering, and many still wonder if I'll finish one more tiny year. And even if she does finish, will she really go on to grad school and get a PhD? Ya she has all these plans right now but when do plans ever work out? That's what I hear them saying constantly.

Okay that was all a lie. No one I know has ever said I wouldn't be able to do this, well except one but they're an outlier and are never counted. Truthfully those are the doubts I hear in my head. I'm still a little afraid that I am just not good at engineering and my A's mean absolutely nothing because this is just school. Or that I won't get a PhD just because I'll never be able to decide where to go to school!! 3 years of my life flew by and now I'm a senior in college (technically I was last semester but anyway...) and I have to decide what to do with the rest of my life. This summer I get to take the Graduate Records Exam, how much of a joy does that sound like? And I also get to find schools to apply to so someone will pay for me to get a Masters/PhD. My freshmen year of college I said, no I DECLARED, that I was going to grad school and I WAS NOT going to New Mex or Arizona. I was going far away to the East Coast and Boston or just anywhere else. HA. I want to do that so bad, but now I start analyzing (yup there I go again) and thinking I have no family there, no friends, no nothing, how can I do that?!?! Unfortunately I still haven't figured that part out yet.....But I'm working on it. Maybe I'll go to California which isn't too far away, or Utah (ha I gag), or even (I go against every cell in my body) I could go to the med school at UNM....I don't know! But this is what I get to decide over the summer. So while I'm SO happy this semester is finally over because for some reason I have never been so stressed in my life....my future is staring me in the face and I need to decide what I'm going to do wtih it.

Speaking of stressing, interesting side note. Mother's intuition. Some say crap that mothers can know everything their children are doing and things of this sort. BUT every time this semester that I have been sitting alone crying because I'm so stressed out I can't function, my mother texts me. She always stays up late I know but has never texted me before. Well this semester she'll text me at like 2 my time just to see how I'm doing. The first time this happened it was to tell me that Pres. Hinkley had died and it was maybe 1 week into the semester. I should not have been stressed out then...but I was, and she texts and drags out of me that I'm not okay. So she helped me fix it, not literally but just talking to her about it and having her tell me everything was fine was awesome. So ya, once, I was thinking that's cool. Well she's now done that a total of 4 times. Every time on a night when I am about to fall apart. The woman lives in New Mex and even if I was there she probably couldn't tell that I was stressed, I just don't show stuff like that often, especially to her. But no, she just 'randomly' picked those times to text me in the middle of the night to ask me about my quilt or something completely off topic of my stress and then it's all better. It's been quite amazing, so mothers....think about your kids and text them whenev you want because you randomly talking to them might keep them from falling apart completely.

I'm what they call a guitar hero

Have you ever encountered a trend that you just thought was completely retarded....and then you try it....and now you're addicted. That's sort of how it hapened with guitar hero. I didn't want to try it because I was convinced I would look like a total dork, then my brother in law got the game and I'm the kind of person who just has to try everything. So I tried it, failed the first time, my bro and sis laughed at me and I vowed to not do it again because hey I suck. But ya I did do it again and actually thought it was ridiculously fun. Now I play on hard and it calms me down when I'm really stressed out. Rockband is another fun one especially withall my friends when we blast it so ridiculously loud the cops come to the door. There's something really freeing about acting like a dork with all your friends and family. Maybe that means it's not dorky anymore..... Maybe something is only dorky as long as you believe it is. Once you let go and just have fun it really no longer matters if it was dorky or others think it's dorky or anything like that, all that matters is you're having fun. So this is my challenge to you; enjoy life and embrace whatever dork you feel is inside of you...

Onto my second thought of the week. My dad recently sent me a powerpoint presentation made by some student interns working for NASA. The kids are part of Generation Y, those of us who were born in the time between 1971 and 2000. I am solidly in the middle of Gen Y but that's beside the point. The point of their presentation was that NASA has not embraced Gen Y. There is so much misconception by my generation about their mission and their entire purpose. 49% of my generation thinks that NASA is useless and their mission is counterproductive! While I think this is outrageous, I know it's just because I am a star nerd and not because I truly understand what NASA is doing. I actually completely agree that no business or government really understands how to address our generation. We grew up with instant gratification and as a result we are fickle and bored. I get bored so easily its almost disgusting. Older generations don't know how to deal with this. You can tell because no presidential candidate knows how to address us. Our age group has the LOWEST voting percentage. Only 20% of people my age actually vote in the presidential elections. I also think this is another reason why the education of technical people, like engineers or other things like it, are dropping. No one knows how to entice these kids to go into these fields because they don't take the time to understand what we like or even how to communicate with us. I mean look at me now, if I'm not writing this blog I'm talking to my friends on facebook. And while I read the paper and the news I am in a minority. I don't have a solution to this by any means I guess I'm just really interested to see how this will all pan out because, whether it scares you or not, we are the future and we need to solve this problem or we won't have anyone qualified to do anything of substance.