Thoughts of a Psych/Code Monkey/Guitarist

This is probably my final one of these for a while due to leaving Zurich  and no longer being employed, but after 2.5 years of living only a few hours away, I finally made it to Paris! It's one of the most popular tourist cities in the world, as quickly made clear by the lines of non-french folks everywhere. Having only been once before, when I was about the age of two, it was definitely high on my list of places to visit - and so as I was leaving, I felt now was my last opportunity. First up - Paris is huge, over 12 million in the Paris metropolitan area , and it certainly feels like it. I came in by train, so managed to avoid the much maligned CdG airport, but still, getting from Gare du Nord station to my hotel (about 10 mins walk) in the dark and rain was a serious introduction to Paris traffic. For most of the trip I'd resigned myself to doing completely touristy stuff rather than trying to get a better feel for the city - partially for language constraints, but m...

Some of you may have heard it already, but I haven't really broadcast it yet: 31st March was my last day working at Google, and probably my last day as a professional software engineer! I wanted to hold off announcing it until after April 1st, to avoid any suspicion of an elaborate hoax, but now it's the 4th, I think it's safe: officially, I'm now unemployed. Some more details to answer what people have been asking me most often: Why?  I like to think that it was inspired by this wonderful SMBC comic . While not following exactly, I had been doing coding for around 10 years (4 at university, 6 at Google), so it was time for a change. Additionally, it's a good time to change - I was finishing a project at work, I had to move out of my apartment anyway, I have no dependents (partner/kids) and working at Google has made me financially stable, at least for the next SMBC 'lifetime',  There were a few other (relatively minor) things at work which made the d...

For Christmas this year I decided to continue my tradition of heading towards the German  Weihnachtsmärkte , or Christmas markets. Two years ago it was Stuttgart , last year Berlin (sorry, I forgot a RtW post for it!) and this year I decided to make a bit more of a trip out of it: first a train to Stuttgart again for two days to catch up with a friend, then train to Munich for a few, then finally continuing the rail journey to end at my main destination of Vienna for five days, including the 25th. Also: one warning, being from Australia, I apologise if at any point in this post I write that instead of Austria - it's hard to retrain my fingers, but I mean .at, not .au. Vienna had been high on my to-visit list for a long time, mostly because (a) it's an old European city with a rich (and musical!) history, and (b) it consistently ranks as one of the top cities to live in, so I had high hopes. Note that 'liveable' doesn't necessarily mean good to visit - Zu...

Travelling over the winter mostly slowed down due to skiing instead, so this is the first round-the-world cities post in a while. Other travels in that time included a trip home to Australia (Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide - maybe I should add them to the series?) and London (already written up), but otherwise, just sticking within Switzerland. Anyway, to Rome (via Florence). Florence had been recommended by family as a good place to visit, and as it lies between Rome and Switzerland, it seemed a worthwhile place to add a stopover on our trip. Arriving pretty late on a Thursday night, we only got sneak peaks of all the fancy buildings on the way to the hotel ; which turned out to be interesting, it appeared to have only just opened (i.e. still under construction, although not near the rooms) and the walk up the stairs to our room past a giant old fresco was a good reminder we were in Italy. After a good half-hour introduction from the extremely friendly Cesare, and a quick peek o...

Hey all - in case you're curious at what's been occupying my time recently: www.coursera.org In particular, while in Zurich I've been filling a bunch of my spare evenings and weekends with some online courses. While I spend most of my day doing computer-science-y stuff (or, I guess 'software engineering' to be more exact), I feel the amount of new stuff that I'm learning now is pretty limited and there's only so much coding I can do before wanting to learn something else... so while my first was a programming course (Scala), the remainder have been a mixture of economics (Economics for Scientists, Competitive Strategy, Advanced Game Theory), med (Computational Neuroscience, Diabetes: Diagnosis, Treatment and Opportunities) and psychology (Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behaviour, Social Psychology, Moralities of Everyday Life). In particular though, three of those courses mentioned above (Comp Neuro, Game Theory, Moralities) were all offered at the s...

Ψ Just this week, I finished my fifth Coursera MOOC - Social Pyschology , from Wesleyan University . Somewhat interesting, I didn't really learn as much as the behavioural psych and it was a lot of watching videos from experiments, although that still had some hilights like original shots from the Milgram Obedience and Stanford Prison Experiments. Plus, going back to writing assignments took a bit of adjusting to :) One thing is for sure though, I think Social Psych (or at least, the people running this course and discussing the most on the forums) seemed too closed-mindedly left-wing for my liking. While that might not be a bad thing on average, it's a bit unfortunate in a hopefully scientific, educational environment if logical reasoning is dropped and people just follow oversimplified arguments. Anyway, the course is over, enough of the mini-rant. The actual interesting thing that seemed worth posting about is something I noticed when doing part of the required re...

Image from the Australian ABC After my North Korea trip, it was pretty easy to realise that there are some problems with the current form of capitalism, and it's worth trying to identify and borrow good parts of non-capitalist systems; unfortunately, I'm not really experienced in that area (by that I mean, I know effectively nothing), so trying to improve that by reading a few recommendations on the Marxist/Leninist side of things - Das Kapital and The State and Revolution  (I know, Amazon links, oh the irony). In any case, I'm only part way through the first and making slow progress, but all the talk of commodities and the gold standard made me think about how we define currencies today. You see, way back when, coins were used to represent actual metal value - i.e. the british pound used to be the Anglo Saxon pound which was one pound weight of silver in value. This was nice in that it fixes the price of silver (i.e. a pound buys you a pound) but means that the ...

A small post this time for a big city: Beijing, which I was lucky to get the chance to visit on the trip back from Pyongyang, although only for a few days hence the brevity of this summary. I almost didn't post it, except it'd be worth it just to say: If you ever visit, don't get scammed! Whether it be Karaoke, or Tea/Art rooms, or Taxis, or...unless you look like a local, you'll be treated as a tourist, and a target for one of the many scams that are waiting for you. Even after making the mistake of not researching travel costs and falling for an un-metered taxi scam when first arriving, the second time we went from the airport to the city we asked the uniformed airport official at the front of the queue for an unmetered taxi, yet he still led us to a driver with the special 'laminated price', at which point we bailed, took our luggage back out from the boot and tried again. Sorry, rant over. Just after a week in Pyongyang, entering a country where you...

While searching my blog for something, I ran across this previous post: http://padsterprogramming.blogspot.ch/2008/08/times-curious-thing.html In particular, the first part - August-2008-me talking about 2013-me looking back at August-2008-me. So to reflect on August-2008: I don't think I was too much of a fool. Maybe a bit. Not a huge amount though, thankfully, except for thinking that 2013-me would be odd - 'weird' is a much better word. I was a bit more...emo/whiney I guess - posts like this and this remind me that, after all, I had only just graduated back then. Still, that balances out with posts on credit or inverse darwinism  that seem fine, and I'm still thankful that past-me took a photo of the rubbish bin (or not) at uni. The treachery of rubbish bins To August-2008-me, I say: I wrote more posts than you thought I would. I think back then I already had a job offer at Google, and thought I'd be a researcher in New York by now, so working in Zur...

After a comparatively long time between holidays, summer has arrived to Zurich, complete with 30 degree weather (86F for those weird people) and this means it's time to travel! First city to add to the Round-the-World list is Venice, which can be reached from Zurich in about seven hours of train journey; and quite an impressive train ride it is, scenery-wise! (e.g. greenery and Alps like this ). But really, this trip was all about the island city itself - or, in reality, about 100 really small islands. My first impression, which stayed for the entire trip, was that this was the most touristy place I can ever remember visiting, and that beats  Cape Town during the world cup and Athens just after the 2004 Olympics. Pretty much everything is set up for tourists - the main walkways are lined with stores selling Venice-themed everything, there are loads of handbag / novelty toy sellers who  try to sell to random passers by the whole time, there are cafes, restaurants, pizz...

Long time between drinks! I've had a bunch of things keep me busy in the meantime, and a general lack of doing stuff bloggable, but figured it was worth keeping this from stagnating by posting an update to cover a few topics that had come up recently. Firstly, as hinted by the picture, I finally got around to reading Atlas Shrugged. I've been meaning to catch up on more classic, controversial stories, and after repeatedly coming up in the recent US elections, I figured it was worth a shot. The only thing I'd heard about it was the quote about it and Lord of the Rings - so I expected rampant free markets but not much else. While it certainly takes it to the extreme (Ayn Rand seems like she'd have been an interesting person to talk to, if not insufferable), I think there's a few things to take from it in a more recent climate. The characters are a bit too...rational, I guess, for it to even approximate reality - not that that's a bad thing, just that I do...

(Note: not about travel this week! I've mostly just been in Zurich...) Sepblog, flickr In the news a while ago, a number of issues had come up which led to people blaming media coverage for inciting violence / propogating stereotypes. This led me to wonder to what extent the media actually had control over this sort of stuff, and how much as a business they just reflected the views of their news-article consumers as a whole. While I haven't made it any further on this issue (the average public opinion seems to be 'blame the media!' which isn't very helpful...), I did recently read a short piece in the TED books range** called " Media Makeover " by Alisa Miller (CEO of Public Radio International) which had a few interesting takes on things which seemed worth adding for anyone interested. The most interesting part I found concerning my question above is quite a simple idea: How much is written about stuff that readers want to read? If the correlatio...

Merry Christmas (/ Fröhliche Weihnachten) and Happy New Year to you all! I thought I'd sneak one last cities blog post in to 2012, rounding out my year with a trip to Stuttgart (and neighbouring Ludwigsburg) to enjoy some authentic German Xmas markets! Since moving to Zurich, the only German city I've actually stopped in has been Dogern to go furniture shopping, so Christmas seemed a good time of year to actually make a trip out of it, Katie and I were both free for a weekend and heard good things about their markets so headed down for a long weekend - it's only a 3hr direct train ride! The Xmas market influence was clear immediately, as the walk from the main station to our hotel went along  Königstraße , the main shopping street which was lined with market stalls, reindeer and tannenbaum aplenty. We explored a bit further out around the gardens to the east, then headed back into the fray, as the crowd was getting big! After a quick dinner and a mug of warm Apfelg...

Grüezi Mitenand! (Swiss German for roughly: Hello everyone!) It has been a rather busy past month, visiting no fewer than five countries in two weeks - Switzerland (naturally), Australia to be best man (congratulations, Bodie & Courtney!), Germany (picking up furniture), and both Denmark and Sweden in a recent visit covered in today's post. First up was Lund - a town of about 100k focused around Lund Univerisity, which is where a friend from Sydney (and our host for the trip) is currently studying. The abundance of cobblestone streets and cute small alley-ways was rather nice, and the sudden transition to hearing Swedish and using Krona was someone lessened by the fact that, being a university town with lots of imports, pretty much everyone spoke English. I appreciated that they also made good coffee at cafes, something I'd been missing in Zurich. On the first night I also made it to Helsingborg (Sweden's closest place to Denmark, apparently) to watch Tommy E...

Today was my first official day of living in a city with natural snow, though that was covered in my other Zurich blog so won't be repeated here (read that one first!). Instead, I thought I might cover a few things which seem particularly Swiss - starting with Rösti. This side dish (or, if you're adventurous, main course) is pretty much just grated semi-boiled potatos, fried in a pan (I used this ) but can then have random stuff like cheese or bacon added. As not much is open on Sunday night (also a swiss tradition, albeit less tasty), I decided to practice my skills with a sausage and rösti combo, to the surprise of the bratwurst. Overall, I'd say success for a first shot, but could be (and will be!) experimented with in the future. Speaking of Swiss traditions, a few more worth random ones of interest. Firstly, the house numbering ("Hausnummernschild"), where pretty much all the signs look exactly the same - white text on square blue background. While...