In the next three days, I'll out the work mostly of Elizabeth Loftus, who describes how and when our memories misfire—in cool and interesting ways—ways, you can use to create the realities you want in unsuspecting friends and family.

Part I:
When we store events in our memories, we tag them with keywords. Was the rollercoaster ride exciting, or scary? Was the dip in the pool cold, or invigorating? Then when we encounter a similar situation, we run a quick keyword search of our memory to help us interpret the new event. Whether you go on the rollercoaster or jump in the pool depends on how you tagged these experiences last time.
The dissertation is complete, the post-dissertation vacation is finished, and Squid-A-Day is back, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed! And oh boy, have I got news for you.

It's no accident that Squid-A-Day is emerging from its PhD chrysalis (note to self: nice analogy. come back to it later) just as we enter the month of October. As the 10th month of the year, it is a friend to the squid, with their ten appendages. But as its Latinate name contains the number 8, it goes the extra step to acknowledge that the squid's appendages are composed of only eight arms, and two specialized tentacles. Thus, October + Squid = Celebration!

Five hundred smiling people from around the world gathered today in the world's theme park capital to set the Guinness World Record for the biggest smiley face. Coinciding with and celebrating today's official World Smile Day(R), they formed the smiley face and stood shoulder to shoulder for ten minutes on the top parking deck of the new Amway Center mega arena, home to the NBA's Orlando Magic.  

I will be attending next week to a conference in Split (Croatia). The conference is titled "LHC Days", and has the purpose of bringing together experimental physicists working at the main CERN experiments with theorists and experimentalists from all over the world, to discuss the current status and the future perspectives of research in particle physics, focusing of course on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.