At the start of every term, we try to get new students who are working at the DALI Lab onboarded. There's a lot to learn: the DALI Lab project process, design skills, development skills, team skills, and how to collaborate properly using git, slack, etc. 

Usually we have a new member orientation which consists of an overview of the lab process and a team building hacktivity (which I'll write about later). However, last term in addition to the orientation we also introduced specific workshops to help with this onboarding. 

The goal for this specific workshop was to get both designers and developers up to speed with coding collaboratively. CS classes at Dartmouth by and large don't teach any git flow or much about code version control, so I had to think about how to go through a lot of material quickly, yet enable everyone to feel comfortable with working together on some basic coding.

Coroutines are awesome.  If you aren't familiar with them (particularly in the context of Unity3d) then you should be.  In short, coroutines are methods that can suspend and resume execution.  In the context of Unity what this means is that you can have methods that appear to run concurrently.  Coroutines are **the** way to script a lot of things in Unity, however there are a few problems that you may run into if you use them heavily: exception handling, return values, and locking. Especially if you use nested coroutines!  Here are some ways to extend coroutines to fix some of these issues. 

I had a previous post about singletons in Unity3D and have since added a useful functionality to that class.  One of the useful features of a singleton is that it is self instantiating.  But what if you want to use the Unity editor to expose some public variables and have some other assets hooked into your singleton?  So since you are probably using prefabs to manage game components in your scenes anyway, seems like it might be useful to have a self-loading prefab for components such as the player or a gui controller. 

In Unity3D having a singleton class is very useful, whether for "global" state or simply for the convenience of having a static accessor so you don't have to have lots of: <code>FindObjectOfType(typeof(Builder)) as Builder;</code>

So you code up a C# singleton and then realize that you actually need it to be a MonoBehavior, not just a ScriptableObject -- say you want the singleton to run coroutines, or have a transform, or any other MonoBehavior feature.  But monobehaviors can't be initialized with a constructor. So what you want is a monobehavior pseudo singleton pattern.

Do you believe in free will or determinism?   Either way,  imagine you are creating a life form, and that you want it to have free will.  You figure out that you need to design an organ that would be responsible for this.  You decide to call it the "free willer".

What would this organ do?

Want to learn about why the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is the coolest part of the brain?  With the onset of modern neuroscience a common question often discussed is: where in the brain are self-regulation, executive control, free will, volition, selection, short-term memory, attention, planning, and overall consciousness located and by what neurological processes do they occur.

My eyes are glued to the screen. They rarely blink. They become irritated but I do not notice. I am in the zone. The force is with me. I feel it flow through me. I am coding. Even though the coding paradigm may not apply to everyone, we all know that feeling of hyper-attention. When an activity is so engrossing that the rest of the world fades away, we are left mano-a-mano, tête-à-tête, our ego and the task battling together for mutual gain.

I watch my cursed boulder tumble down my mountain. I heave a sigh of relief; my aching muscles allowed a brief respite. As I stand on its majestic craggy peak, I survey my mountain beneath me. My boulder is now far out of sight, but I can feel it down below in the darkness waiting for me.

Instead of writing seriously, I wrote an imaginary interview. BTW:Living in a van...

What is the mind when it is happy and when it is unhappy? Most likely the answer is different for each person, but to understand it for myself I first need to discern when it is that I am happy.

Is it possible for humanity to consciously direct our own evolution and if so can we evolve to be better, smarter and faster? Can we evolve ourselves to be able to sustain an utopic society?

There have been studies done of the effects of decentralized social networks in terms of geopolitics and global civil society, however not as much work has been done on the analysis of the content of the citizen media for the purposes of breaking through imagined geographies. As of 2010, BlogPulse reports that there are more than 144 million blog sites. Because the the interconnected nature of blogs (bloggers will often link to posts in other blogs) a hierarchy of blogs develops, with a trickle up effect of opinion from smaller blogs up toward bigger blogs with more readership (Drezner, D, & Farrell, H. 2004). The blog hierarchy aggregates public opinion (at least the opinion of the online public) and presents it to the rest of the world. The opinions may be biased, one-sided and ignorant, however, they are reflecting of a side of societies that before now has gone unheard or has been repressed.