I went to a movie night last night, which was fun. But I had a 9am start this morning, and being stupidly tired is not at all fun...
I tried sleeping when I got home, but that just made me feel really weird - that is fairly disoriented and somewhat insane (yes, I actually felt that I was crazy - it's a weird feeling).

So I decided to just lay in bed, listen to music and read. The reading was supplementary material for the subject "Interactive System Design". The subject content itself has been slightly above mediocore (learning HTML yet again, and doing some Java GUI stuff), but the material in the readings is absolutely fascinating to me. This stuff is all about memory, perception, and vision. It's quite astounding the number of ways in which our vision is inconsistent - perceived depth affected by colour, lack of colour distingtion in our peripheral vision, lack of night-vision in our fovea - all this stuff is inexplicably fascinating to me.

I have known for a while about our blind spot - where our optical nerves bunch up together and escape through a hole in our eye in order to get to the brain. What I didn't know was that this is apparently due to a seemingly wrong step in evolution. Crustaceans have a similar optical system to ours, yet their optical nerves are all attached to the rear of the retina, so they can just connect straight to the brain without needing to escape the eyeball...

An unfortunate fact about vision is that as we get older, our lens often loses elasticity, making it hard to focus. This can be remedied with glasses, so I'm not too worried by it personally. But another thing that happens is your lenses turn yellowish, reducing sensitivity to blue light (as if you were wearing yellow glasses all the time). That fact personally scares me a little, because I'm a big fan of the blue. Seriously, is blue not the most awesome colour ever? I guess I'd better look at a lot of super-cool blue stuff while I can still enjoy it...

One final thought I had is in relation to music. I've been working hard to categorise my music with iRank, but that can only go so far. The music you want to hear depends heavily on the mood you're in, which is a very difficult thing to try and enumerate. I imagine that if it were possible (and more importantly feasable) to non-invasively monitor brainwaves to determine mood and subconscious reactions to the current song, then it should be possible to statistically link up songs you react well to in a particular mood, and give you an awesome listening experience. Of course a huge database would be required, which would potentially require you to listen to all of your songs at least once in each possible mood. That's a bit of a stretch, so I'm not sure how feasable it would be even if it were possible. It's also a lot of work simply to automate a personal DJ. But it's an interesting challenge nonetheless, and I guess I cant help pondering it since music has become an important part of my life in recent years (since I developed my own musical tase, I guess ;)).

It's funny how much emotion we associate with certain songs and bands, and yet we're almost totally unable and unwilling to provide the computer with any measure of personal meta-data regarding songs (how you feel about a song). Simply giving each song a rating out of 5 is a difficult task for many, especially given how wildy our appreciation of a particular song can fluctuate with both internal mood and external situation.