I was playing with a four-year-old girl recently, and she has now provided me with my favorite explanation for other children who claim they need a band-aid (this was a surprisingly frequent occurrence when I was a camp counselor). She was telling me about how she had fallen down at school, and said, "I got a booboo, but I didn't need a band-aid ( Read more... )

Yesterday I went to a talk by Madeleine Albright, which was really surprisingly funny. Here are my favorite moments, in paraphrase ( Read more... )

( In which Hanna personally experiences why her 9-month-old study participants make search errors )

Over the weekend I finished the last toiletries from the east coast - a ziplock bag of Q-tips, and my Wegman's toothpaste. This fact somehow seems noteworthy to me. Particularly for the Q-tips, because that led me to actually buy Q-tips for the first time in my life (at least, as far as I can remember). At home my parents would get them, and ( Read more... )

I had a ridiculously amusing (and productive) conversation with a likely future adviser today, which was very good. One key thing I learned from that meeting: if you are teaching young children colors, it is much more effective to say "look at the car. it's white!" rather than "look at the white car!" It is easier to have the correct item in mind ( Read more... )

Reasons my middle and high school rocked ( Read more... )

I fly out to Stanford on Monday and have been working on getting all my stuff together. I had this great moment where I thought I had successfully packed everything I wanted into the allotted two suitcases, and they were both still below the weight limit (albeit just barely). And then I realized two minutes later that I hadn't packed any of my ( Read more... )

So I'm in Denver at the moment (I've been here for a couple weeks, but I don't think I've actually posted at all about it) working with Sarah, a former grad student from my lab at Cornell. We're working to write a publishable paper about the study that I wrote my thesis on, which was done back at Cornell. So the problem here is that we're in ( Read more... )

This morning, shortly after reading some birthday cards and emails and such and feeling kinda old, I went to wash my hands, and just started laughing when I became conscious of the fact that I was singing the alphabet song. It's a long standing habit from spending time in preschools that I sing the alphabet song while I wash my hands, and the ( Read more... )

thesis is turned in to the readers! of course, the weekend will be busy preparing for the defense on Monday, and I'll have another version of the thesis to put together after feedback from my readers, but having a complete draft turned in is a huge step for me!