Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Does it mean anything if one of your ears is warm while the other is cold? Even if you’ve been inside for hours and haven’t been wearing a hat and can’t think of anything you might have done that could have caused such a thing? Does this mean I’m going to die? Or just that my left brain is running hot for some reason? Ah well – I’m going to die eventually anyway.
William Shatner – “You’re Going to Die”
Seeing more and more of these Skuut balance bikes around – kids learn to balance with their feet from the get-go, and never have to go through the training wheel stage at all. Here’s a higher-end option. Seems like such an organic, natural process to me – wish I had known about these a few years ago. Just watching kids on them makes me jealous — wonder if they make them in grown-up sizes? Should hook up with the gang at woodenbikes, maybe they have a kit? I can just see myself hurtling down Hearst Ave., trying to stop with my feet.
Fun way to get your day started: Biking into work along the Ohlone Greenway this morning, suddenly felt a *thwap* against my teeth, followed a half second later by a stinging sensation in the lower lip. Durn fool bee (wasp? – never saw the critter) had flown straight into my mouth and wigged out when he hit my teeth, reacted by plunging its stinger into whatever it could find nearby. Toxin from the sting spread quickly into my lower gum, and the whole areas now feels like I’ve been visiting a dentist with very bad aim.
Speaking of dentists, heard a great idea for DIY fugu the other day — rather than risking your life with potentially deadly blowfish, just inject a slab of halibut with novocaine. Apparently it tastes very similar, and the anesthetic will give you that nice stinging/numbing/tingly sensation you get from the real deal.
Cool: Open Source Food, a site for eaters who want to share the love.
We’re not professional cooks, we just love food. We want to share, learn and improve ourselves with the help of like-minded food lovers. Open Source Food is a platform for that.
Looking forward to trying out this coffee-rubbed steak, and … dang, there’s a lot I want to try on the site. Curses! No search engine.
Recipes are Creative Commons licensed.
Farewell, awesome old shoes. You may well be the best friends my feet ever had, but all that hiking and scrambling and geocaching has taken it’s toll. I can’t stand to see you go, but you’re blown out, frayed, fried, bedraggled and besmirched, and pebbles are starting to get in through your sides. Guess I’ll keep you around for lawn mowing or something. You’re way too noble for the trash. Hey there, new kicks! I promise to learn to love you, despite the fact that you make my feet look like they’re bent inwards at an impossible angle, reminiscent of the stars of Steve Martin’s seminal short story The Cruel Shoes:
Carlo disappeared into the back room for a moment, then returned with an ordinary shoebox. He opened the lid and removed a hideous pair of black and white pumps. But these were not an ordinary pair of black and white pumps; both were left feet, one had a right angle turn with separate compartments that pointed the toes in impossible directions. The other shoe was six inches long and was curved inward like a rocking chair with a vise and razor blades to hold the foot in place. Carlo spoke hesitantly, “…Now you see why…they’re not fit for humans…”
Very proud of our News21 (News Initiative for the Future of Journalism) team for the work they did on the Moral Compass, which asks the question “How do different religions view certain issues on sex and morality?” Spin the wheel and get answers on a host of questions covering masturbation, homosexuality, premarital sex, etc. from representatives of faiths including Catholicism, Judaism, Muslim, Buddhism, Methodist, Baptist, and more. Video interviews with clergy and others included. Nice work on the Flash interface!
The Moral Compass is part of Berkeley’s contribution to this year’s News21 project, Faces of Faith in America.
A battle between a pride of lions, a herd of buffalo, and two crocodiles at a watering hole in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. You can smell the animal adrenaline. As Lebkowsky says, “This is the herd I want to join.”
Scanning the Groundspeak forums for threads on the weirdest things people have found in geocaches, came up with a short list culled from several threads:
So far Miles and I haven’t been treated to anything quite so outrageous, though we have found some excellent items (a French wooden submarine model kit still tops the bill), but I look forward to the day when I’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.
I’ve been enjoying listening to archival episodes of Sonny and Sandy’s congenial Podcacher podcast, packed with helpful geocaching tips and adventure stories. I find the geocaching community’s obsession with FTFs (first-to-finds) and high-number finders annoying, but enjoy the deep-woods or out-to-sea live recordings and occasional semi-philosophical musings. In a show from last March, Sonny talks about something near and dear to my heart – the concept of “Flow.”
OK, the topic is a little fluffy-fuzzy, but there’s something important to human happiness here. The bit focuses on the ideas of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, “who has devoted his life’s work to the study of what makes people truly happy, satisfied and fulfilled.” Csikszentmihalyi’s idea is that “flow” is achieved in the balance between challenge and skill. A pro snowboarder on the bunny slopes is bored because skill is high and challenge is low; an amateur on a black diamond run is anxious, because skill is low and challenge is high. But an amateur on a bunny hill and a pro on a black diamond both experience the same balance between challenge and skill, and thus both experience the same state of “flow,” where time and cares slip away, and the activity becomes total, consuming.
The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.
The conversation is focused on geocaching of course – a game where skill and difficulty levels vary hugely from cache to cache – but any activity, properly balanced, can lead to a sense of flow. Even walking through the city, if attention is focused, can deliver this sense of timelessness and involvement. I often have similar thoughts when biking, or navigating through crowds on foot.
This is exactly why I get so annoyed (experience anxiety) when people stand on the left side of the escalator, or try to get on the train before others have gotten off. These things feel to me like cultural apathy toward any sense of collective flow. I want to feel like we’re all psychically coordinated, a school of fish thinking as one, rather than a bunch of atoms bouncing off each other in chaotic Brownian motion.
Loose thoughts for a Saturday morning.
Had a few ideas about ways to present multiple views of GPS data in a multimedia project, part of which involved videotaping my bicycle commute along the Ohlone Greenway from handlebar-eye-view, then speeding up the 27 minutes of footage to a more watchable five minutes. Mounted a camera with a very sturdy professional cam clamp left over from a long-ago project and set off. Hit a bunch of snags, and am not sure whether they might be show stoppers for the whole project. What I had hoped would capture a lovely ride turned into a struggle with the outer limits of the most advanced codec technology, and ended up looking like total dooky.
Problem #1: Because camera is rigidly attached, it picks up every little bump in the road. This mounting method is inherently shaky.
Problem #2: Because camera is on handlebars rather than on my head, the camera view doesn’t track my line of sight, which is very disconcerting for the viewer (or maybe just for me, since it doesn’t match my experience at all).
Problem #3: Video doesn’t account for a human’s peripheral vision, which accounts for so much of the experience not shown here. Again, disconcerting (makes it seem much more dangerous than it actually feels).
Problem #4: The natural side-to-side pumping action of bicycling adds to a seasick, high-motion effect not actually experienced by the rider.
Problem #5: Once the footage was speeded up, pauses at stop signs pass by in a blink, making it look like I ride with total disregard for both death and the law. Not so! Though I do do some rolling stops, I’m actually very careful at intersections, especially because the Ohlone Greenway cuts across streets a ways away from the “real” intersections, so most drivers aren’t in the headspace to be expecting cross-traffic (despite zebra stripes and big yellow warning signs). I wear an orange safety vest and treat those intersections with kid gloves.
Problem #6: Video codecs rely on data similarities between frames, and none of them perform well under high-motion conditions. What could have more motion than shaky footage played back at 5x? Thought I could convey a beautiful morning experience, but this looks completely pixelated and smeared-out, even though I used the usually gorgeous h.264 codec. Of course, YouTube also apply their own compression, but my local version doesn’t look much better than this one. The only version that came out looking passable was the version with no compression at all — and it’s 750 MBs.
The footage is also a bit over-exposed, but that’s operator error rather than endemic. Hope to have access before long to a helmet-mountable lipstick camera, which should help a lot with problems 1, 2, 3, and 4, but will do little for problems 5 and 6. Back to the drawing board.
Music is “High Water” by Bruce Lash – Bruce gave me permission to use his stuff in projects back when I was at Adamation, and he now offers a bunch of downloadable music free for personal use.
