Here are a few personal interests, preferences, views, and whatnot that are not closely related to my work. (Well, I confess, some work-related items slipped in). You may not agree with everything here, so take it all with a grain of salt, as they say.

A Few Things I Don't Like to Be Without
News
Good films
Good coffee

Other Pleasures
Trees
Audio books

Interesting Organizations
You've heard about the 'Christian Right', but...
Despite the jokes on 'Prairie Home Companion' some Minnesotans aren't Lutheran
Can we have both safety and freedom?

Odds & Ends
Free brain book!
Computer Viruses, Spyware, & Adware
Audio Books of a Different Sort
Music for child that adults might like as well
Psychologists Turned Artists
Psychological Science versus Pseudoscience
It's a real kick to watch your former teacher/mentor/coauthor being awarded a Nobel Prize!

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A Few Things I Don't Like to Be Without

News
Television news is useless at best, if not downright hazardous to your health, sanity, and intelligence*. Sadly, I found that in Kutztown (but not here in Winona!) I was unable to pull in a strong enough signal from any National Public Radio station. Fortunately, there was the internet and a set of wireless computer speakers! A couple of radio stations I could listen to all day are WNYC (a New York NPR affiliate) and my sentimental favorite, KQED-FM, from San Francisco. Minnesota Public Radio has a pretty good online service as well, for when I'm not near a radio. (I also appreciate the New York Times being available online and set it as the homepage for one of my web browsers. However, the new look and paid features on the NYT site are a bit troubling).

Radio-over-internet also opens up wonderful new opportunities as well. For example, both the BBC (from the UK) and the CBC (from Canada) provide a different slant on the world than that provided by U.S. media, even NPR. Those two news sources are hardly radical America-bashers. After all, they are both government-supported sources from the world's two most U.S.-friendly countries. Nevertheless, there are interesting and important differences between the stories they choose to cover (or ignore) and those that catch (or don't catch) the attention of U.S. news sources. Despite being government-funded, they are also often tougher on their own governments than the mainstream U.S. press is on ours.

I should also mention a couple of non-news pubic radio programs of which I am a bit of a fan: This American Life and To the Best of Our Knowledge.

* Did you know that watching FOX News, as opposed to getting news from other news sources, is associated with knowing less about important public issues? What is cause and what is effect here? Does watching FOX News actually decrease viewers' factual knowledge? Or does it attract those with less knowledge of current events and/or repel those with greater knowledge? Have a look for yourself at some of the research conducted at the University of Maryland. What do you think it means? (And as long as we're on the topic of FOX News: If, as they say in their slogan, their goal is to be 'fair and balanced', why was the husband of a Bush campaign official assigned by FOX to be the reporter to cover the Bush election campaign? Good thing Woodward & Bernstein weren't married to women on the Nixon election compaign payroll!)

Good Films. I got spoiled living in Berkeley. Almost every conceivable type of movie is somewhere, from the newest predictable big budget Hollywood feature to quirky independent films to foreign to gems from the history of cinema to truly obscure (and sometimes almost unwatchable) 'works of art'. My tastes tend to favor the middle three categories, but even in a city as large as Pittsburgh, good film could be hard to find. Worried that I would either have to go without or always live in one of the largest metropolitan areas, I was very happy to discover the DVD rental web site Netflix! (Of course, that 'discovery' was quite a few years ago, and everyone knows about Netflix these days). Although they don't carry everything, the selection is extensive enough to keep me happy for years to come.

Good Coffee Starbuck's is like Wal-Mart but expensive: It pushes smaller cafes out of business, and it's coffee isn't even all that good. In graduate school, I lived a block away from what I consider one of the true holy sites for coffee-lovers: the original Peet's Coffee, on the corner of Walnut and Vine in Berkeley. The prices are generally a little lower than you-know-who's, the product is much better, and the management seems to have a social conscience (or at least has conducted a PR campaign to that effect). Although Peet's sells online, we get a better price from an acquaintance in the business who, as I understand it, learned the coffee roasting craft from Peet.

With internet services and commerce, it doesn't seem to matter much where I live these days. I can have the advantages of living in a small town and still enjoy most of what I liked best about living in a more metropolitan area.

Other Pleasures

Trees I love being around trees, and one of the things I appreciate about Winona is the attractiveness of the natural surroundings (as well as the city parks and the fabulous WSU landscaping). There are very few native trees near the coast in Southern California where I grew up, and perhaps that's why I've always loved forests. While living in Hamilton, Ontario, I thoroughly enjoyed the Royal Botanical Gardens, which range from formal gardens to wooded trails to board walks through marsh reeds. In the SF Bay Area, my favorite hikes were in Redwood Regional Park, located in the Berkeley-Oakland hills.

Audio Books There's nothing like a good bedtime story to cure insomnia! And I've found audio books to do the trick. We download from Audible and burn the files to CD. Young adult fantasy/fiction has proved to be a particularly good category for anti-insomnia bedtime listening. Recent favorites have included Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy and The Abhorsen Trilogy by Garth Nix. They are not as groundbreaking as Tolkien's work or as uplifting as Madeline L'Engle's works, but they are good fairytales and not badly written. Along a different line, my new favorite non-psychology, popular-press, non-fiction science book is Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is a nice general science introduction emphasizing the history and personal stories behind the discoveries.

Interesting Organizations

The Evangelical Left?
You've heard about the 'Christian Right', but did you know that there is also a long tradition of theologically conservative Protestants (i.e., evangelicals) championing progressive social and political causes? For some reason, this is not discussed much these days, but here is just one contemporary example of an organization on the Evangelical Left. Why do you think we hear about the Evangelical Right and the Nnon-Evangelical Left, but not people like this?

Humanists of Minnesota.
Despite the impression of Minnesota that A Prairie Home Companion gives, not all Minnesotans are Lutheran. Here's an example.

Safety and Freedom

It has been asserted repeatedly that 'terrorists hate our freedoms'. Of course, the truth about attacks against the U.S. is more complicated (as the truth usually is) and probably has more to do with such things as U.S. foreign policy, America's image abroad, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and local dissatisfaction with many Arab governments than it does with foreign hatred of the U.S. Bill of Rights. That does not mean, however, that remaining safe from such violence should not be a public concern. Nevertheless, when it comes to threats to our freedoms, as opposed to our safety, I think this site spells things out fairly well.

Odds & Ends

Free Brain Book! The Society for Neuroscience has been giving away a very nice, short, colorful, well-constructed, hard cover book called Brain Facts. I highly recommend it to students (and others) with any interest in -- or need to learn about -- any aspect of the brain or biological psychology. The book can be obtained immediately by downloading a pdf file or ordering the hard copy. Have a look.

Computer Viruses, Spyware, & Adware. Are you tired of the unintended consequences of internet use? Wish there were a simple way to stop worrying about computer viruses? Have you encountered Spyware or Adware yet? There's an easy and nearly 100% effective way to use the internet without fear.

Audio Books of a Different Sort. Most people are probably not aware that long before audio books became popular among commuters, audio recordings of textbooks were available from Recording for the Blind. As a visually-impaired undergraduate, I relied to some extent on these tapes to keep up with my reading load. Due to the type of materials I needed to read in graduate school (primarily journal articles), I had to get by without this service. Now that I am teaching and once again reading undergraduate textbooks, this service (now called Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic) may again prove to be of some use.

Children's Music That's Not Just for Kids. There is a lot of music made for children, but much of it is notorious for annoying adults. I recently went looking for music to which both infants and adults would respond well. I had a number of ideas in mind, but was very pleasantly surprised to stumble across Dan Zanes (formerly of the 1980s band The Del Fuegos), who now puts out CDs in a genre he calls 'family music'.

Psychologists Turned Artists Two members of the Berkeley Psychology Department faculty who served on my committees and for whom I was a research assistant have taken up photography as a serious hobby, or perhaps even more than just a hobby. Very nice samples of Steve Palmer's and Art Shimamura's works can be viewed online.

Psychological Science versus Pseudoscience. Here's a site that I've browsed a bit, and rather liked, that addresses some of the quackery that masquerades as psychology. For a more general site on pseudoscience, have a look at the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims Of the Paranormal (CSICOP), affiliated with the Skeptical Inquirer magazine. Whether CSICOP remains true to its original goal of conducting actual investigations of paranormal claims, or has become pre-occupied with garnering media attention (as asserted by some among the paranormalists), I'll leave to you to judge. Also, a couple of books you might find worthwhile are How We Know What Isn't So by the research psychologist Thomas Gilovich and How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age by Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn.

Daniel Kahneman's Nobel Prize Lecture. You can watch the lecture Danny Kahneman gave when he was awarded his Nobel Prize in 2002. (Of course, it would have been nice if he had mentioned all four authors of our cold-pressor pain study rather than just the first two. Oh, well. I'll just have to find some other means of earning my 15 minutes of fame!)

(July 2009: This page is definitely looking a bit dated! We no longer hear daily reminders that 'terrorists hate our freedoms'. Both This American Life and Dan Zanes are on TV. Peet's Coffee is a national chain. The safety of the MacOS for internet use is now one of regular themes of a TV ad campaign. And I haven't had the time to watch a Netflix DVD in years!)