Revenge of Hump Day 2016-05-11
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The May 11th, 2016 Edition of REVENGE OF HUMP DAY! Page 1 of 48 Welcome to the May 11th, 2016 Edition of REVENGE OF HUMP DAY! I have been feeling a little better this week so I guess I am on the downside of Kruzilla. Thank God for that one. Just when I get through with this one then it’s on to something else. In this case it’s LibertyCon that is less than 2 months away. I have been having a great time lately on YouTube and have become amazed at the mass of videos on this website. Like fore instance areas covering aviation. I have been a plane nut since I was a week child and it had a lot to do with my decision to go into the Air Force for my enlistment instead of the army. I still think fondly about working on the flight line of different bases around F-4E Phantoms, F-105 Thunderchiefs, B-58 Hustlers and my beloved C-130E Hurky Birds! Good times when I was young. Anyway, I stumbled across an 89 part documentary on Discovery’s Wings and I am already up to part 15. I am definitely enjoying my refresher in the aviation history. You know, when I was a kid I loved the Public Library because I could look anything that peeked my curiosity. The internet is just a huge version of this library to me and I am still amazed on how much there is. I mean how great it is that you can go on line and get a video to tell you how to do almost anything. My only problem is that my curiosity holds very few bounds and sometimes I almost make myself dizzy going this way and that way. On an entirely different subject. I have been using Adobe Photoshop for years to reduce the size of some of the pictures I put in this missive. I try my best to keep the size of the Revenge to around 1mb. But sometimes I forget and don’t compress the pictures and then it comes in between 2 and 3mb. Well, I am still running XP at home and Photoshop just gets slower and slower. I stumbled on a new freeware program for home called FastStone Image Viewer that is incredibly smaller and faster than Adobe Photoshop and seems to meet my limited needs quite easily. It is very intuitive to use and simple. I’m not trying to sell it to you, just letting you know it seems to work for me. You might want to check it out at: http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDownload.htm I definitely have been rambling this week, but it thought that y’all would enjoy a few of my wacky thoughts to pass the day. So, on that “Introspective Note", why don't y'all sit back and relax because here's the best in gossip, jokes and science for your reading pleasure! Uncle Timmy <G>~<O>~<S>~<S>~<I>~<P>~~~<S>~<T>~<A>~<R>~<T>~<S>~~~<H>~<E>~<R>~<E>~<!> NEXT LIBERTYCON MEETING WILL BE HELD AT CASA SPRAKER ON SUNDAY, MAY 15 TH AT 2PM From: “Tim Bolgeo” [email protected] It’s that time of the year when we have to start getting down to the semifinal details to get ready for LibertyCon 29 this year. We will carefully be going over each of departments to make sure that everything is in preparation for convention. The biggest departments we are The May 11th, 2016 Edition of REVENGE OF HUMP DAY! Page 2 of 48 going over will be Vonn’s Hospitality Suite to see what goodies she will be offering this year. Rich’s Programming effort to see if we can hold him back to only 5 tracks at a time. ;^) Ann’s Art Show that should be bigger and better than last year. We have a soldout Huckster Room that you should find tons of goodies to tempt you. Then there is Gamming that consists of three different elements this year. Open gamming will be in the Norfolk room. Computer Gaming will be in the Southern Room and cards will be held in the American Car. The advantages to all of the gaming is that each element of it is only a few steps away from the Consuite! As for Registration, that is going to be interesting. We have already sold 630 memberships and you have to remember that we are limited to 750. There are only 120 memberships left this year, so it looks like there will only be preregistration at the convention. I don’t think that Matt will be too unhappy with that. One new innovation this year will be that we will have a couple of laptops at registration on Sunday this year so that you can preregister for the next year online in the Choo Choo Trade Center. It should be interesting. The meeting will be held at the home of Brandy and Derek Spraker at 802 South Valleywood Circle, Hixson, TN 37343. If you need directions to the meeting, please call 423-842-9877 or email [email protected] . I hope to see you all there. <L>~<I>~<B>~<E>~<R>~<T>~<Y>~<C>~<O>~<N> PLEASE PARTICIPATE IN AN INTERESTING SURVEY From: "Robert Hampson" [email protected] Dear Friends & Colleagues: One of our laboratory projects is looking at brain signals that support memory. We use a delayed memory task as our test, and in the task the subjects are asked to look at many different "clip-art" and photographic images, and then indicate which pictures they have previously seen in the course of testing. To better understand how the brain "encodes" such information, we categorize each picture according to a number of different features and characteristics - is it a cartoon? Photograph? Silhouette or drawing? Is it in color or black & white - if color, which colors? Are there certain recognizable features or items visible in the picture? However, we are certain that different people will categorize the pictures in different ways. Thus, before we can use these categories or classifications in a study, we need to conduct a survey of as many people as possible to find the most likely common classifications. Thanks to the Hampson Laboratory Webpage ( http://hampsonlab.org ), we have created a survey of 500 pictures that we use in our study. We are asking volunteers to go to that page and take a survey in which we ask for classification of 25 images. There are instructions and hints on the first page ( http://hampsonlab.org/default.html ); clicking on "Take the Survey" will bring up random set of 25 pictures. You enter your responses by licking next to the appropriate features that you see in the image. We know that the preselected research categories are not necessarily a perfect match to the contents of all pictures, but The May 11th, 2016 Edition of REVENGE OF HUMP DAY! Page 3 of 48 choose the closest match from the list of options. At the end of the page, "Submit" the Survey, and your responses will be written to our server. You can also click on "Take Another Survey" (and we hope you will!) and the webpage will return to the beginning where you can click on "Take the Survey" to see a new page of 25 pictures. The survey is completely anonymous - only the picture identification and 1's or 0's representing your choices are recorded (you can briefly see the data in the box on the Submit page). Unlike an earlier version of the survey, there is no need for email or cutting and pasting the results; everything is automatic. All of the pictures in the survey are purchased or used under fair use, non-commercial research purposes only. Your data contains no personal information. We conduct no diagnosis or analysis of the people taking the survey, and the data is used solely to develop anonymous population classifications that will be used for another study. We're hoping you take the survey more than once (i.e. more than one page of 25 pictures); we have 500 different pictures, and 20 different surveys. You can choose your survey page by bypassing the default screen and editing the URL to read: http://hampsonlab.org/v2Survey1.html , ...v2Survey2.html, ...v2Survey3.html, etc. through ...v2Survey20.html. Again, all results are logged on our server automatically. Thank you for participating in the survey. I appreciate your help. -Tedd Roberts / Dr. Rob Hampson <L>~<I>~<B>~<E>~<R>~<T>~<Y>~<C>~<O>~<N> THE LASTING LEGACY OF TIMOTHY ZAHN’S STAR WARS THRAWN TRILOGY, 25 YEARS LATER From: “Tim Bolgeo” [email protected] Lisa Granshaw, Blastr.com, Wed, May 04, 2016 12:48pm http://www.blastr.com/2016-5-4/lasting-legacy-timothy-zahn%E2%80%99s-star-wars-thrawn-trilogy- 25-years-later A long time ago, almost a decade after Return of the Jedi, there weren’t many ways for Star Wars fans to get more of the universe created by George Lucas. It’s hard to comprehend that fact these days, when the franchise has seeped into almost every form of media imaginable. Luckily, I never knew a time when there weren’t numerous Star Wars books available at the bookstore and steadily filling up my shelves. It’s something I only discovered as I began a deep dive into the Expanded Universe -- now called Legends -- as a teenager, and not long after read the Heir to the Empire trilogy, better known as the Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn.