How I hitchhiked from Austria to Sweden

Updated on Monday, August 16, 2010 at 3:32PM by Erik Frisk

Updated on Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 3:28PM by Erik Frisk

Updated on Sunday, October 3, 2010 at 11:16PM by Erik Frisk

Updated on Monday, October 11, 2010 at 6:21PM by Erik Frisk

Updated on Wednesday, January 5, 2011 at 12:54PM by Erik Frisk

Updated on Monday, January 24, 2011 at 12:45PM by Erik Frisk

Updated on Monday, April 25, 2011 at 5:41PM by Erik Frisk

Updated on Tuesday, April 26, 2011 at 11:16PM by Erik Frisk

In the end it went much more smoothly than I anticipated. I took off from Feldkirch, Austria on Saturday morning. My gear consisted of a backpack, a sports bag full of clothes and a cardboard sign with "Kiel" and a large smiley face on it. This is how it went down:

Day 1: After packing up the last of my stuff I got out of the house at 9 AM Saturday morning. The first thing I did was have breakfast in the center of Feldkirch while laying out my strategy. I would take the bus out to the edge of town to get closer to the highway access ramp, and use a cardboard sign with "Kiel" on one side and "Frankfurt" on the other. This would allow me to experiment with the efficacy of going for a far off location vs. a closer one.

I got off the bus at a stop I knew was close to the right highway. After walking for a couple of minutes I found what I thought was a good place to hitchhike. With my heart pounding I turned to face traffic, held up my sign and stuck out my thumb. Trying to maintain a natural smile and trying make eye contact with the drivers racing past, I stayed at this first location for about half an hour without so much as a single car slowing down. Mildly disheartened I decided to get closer to the highway access ramp.

After walking for another few minutes I was basically standing on the access ramp. Here I again turned to face traffic, and this time it only took 5 minutes before it happened. A car stopped.

Click to read more ...

Cognitive Biases - How Your Mind Distorts Reality

I just found this great slideshow through lifehacker.com. It gives a nice visual summary of the main "psychological tendencies that cause the brain to draw incorrect conclusions", split up into...

• the 19 social biases.
• the 8 memory biases.
• the 42 decision-making biases.
• the 36 probability / belief biases.

I especially like the memory bias Cryptomnesia, "a form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination, or the confusion of true memories with false memories". Scary stuff.

Want to get meta? Consider the Bias Blind Spot, or "the tendency not to compensate for one's own cognitive biases". 

So do you really make your own decisions? Really?

Cognitive Biases - A Visual Study Guide by the Royal Society of Account Planning

An egomaniacal social experiment

The results are in. A few weeks ago, while working on a Master’s program application, I had a revelation. After having just finished answering an essay question pertaining to my perceived best and worst qualities, I realized that the material I had produced was severely lacking. How could I be satisfied with my own highly biased and subjective view of my own best and worst qualities? I needed objective data!

So I made a list of the 30 people I believe to know me best in a professional context. I then proceeded to create an anonymous survey using Google Docs, prompting these 30 individuals to list my three best and two worst qualities as they saw them. In exchange I promised to not only reveal and submit the results of the survey in the aforementioned application, but also to publicly post the unfiltered results right here on my blog. 

So here they are... the unfiltered results. 16 people were graceful enough to respond. The ones who didn’t respond have likely changed their minds as to my sanity. Please feel free to view the Google Spreadsheet.

I also took the liberty to somewhat subjectively group the answers into “categories” for the purposes of plotting them. Here are some pretty charts (click images to enlarge):

My Best Qualities

My Worst Qualities

I was vas very happy and surprised to see that the results strongly coincided with the qualities I had listed about myself before I initialized this egomaniacal experiment. 

Thank you to all who indulged me by participating. 

UPDATE: I want to emphasize that the questions were completely open-ended. Check out the spreadsheet to see exactly what participants wrote.

The duality of digital media addiction

I’m not going to have internet access in my room for the next five months. At first this irritated me, as it limited my internet browsing to perhaps one hour per day. I didn’t understand why I had to access the internet so badly though, and soon enough I started seeing this initial problem as healthy. I found it easier to get to sleep on time, I felt more relaxed (or perhaps more complacent), and I felt more connected to my surroundings. I no longer had hundreds of interesting pieces of information constantly buzzing around in my head, and I was no longer fanatically pondering the latest ideas and ventures popping up in various technology industries. 

And that’s when I changed my mind once more. I don’t like the fact that my mind isn’t endlessly processing new innovations and opportunities. Being plugged in, and spending hours browsing the web or listening to the latest tech news podcasts, is what fueled my creativity and gave me my edge. I now understand that I am willing to accept the added stress of consuming copious amounts of digital media for the benefit of keeping my mind sharp and updated. 

Is there a way of having the best of both worlds? You tell me. 

A self-indulgent post on being grounded in snowstorms

I'm stranded at the airport, and it looks like I'm going to be here for a long time. I arrived at half past five in the afternoon after fighting my way through a train network completely brought to its knees by what seems to be a Europe-wide snowstorm (it's the beginning of the end people). As I type out this impromptu blog post the clock on my laptop reads 00:52, and in four hours I'll be at the  ticket counter praying, figuratively speaking, to have my previously cancelled flight re-booked for that same day. 

Whereas you might think I'd be frustrated over this, I have been quite content the entire time. Joyful at times, believe it or not. Even as my mind and my patience slowly but surely evaporate, I can't help but feel that this simple yet somehow meaningful life experience is worth the trouble. Wouldn't life be horribly boring if things always turned out the way they were supposed to, or "if your flight always arrived on time" so to speak? Is it not equally important and fulfilling to have unpleasant experiences as it is to have pleasant ones? By thinking this way you will rarely loose your cool, but is it a sign of resilience or a sign of complacency? Is it truly a useful cognitive construct? And am I only being philosophical because my brain is in desperate need of REM sleep?

Time to get another Starbucks coffee.