Archive for August, 2009
You’re a wolf
Sam Easterson used to work at the Walker. Here’s what he’s doing now:
The Museum of Animal Perspectives (MAP) collects and displays wildlife
imagery that has been captured using remote sensing cameras. Through the presentation and interpretation of this imagery, the MAP endeavors to expand the public’s capacity to empathize with animals and plants.
Now, imagine you’re a wolf:
turned onto this by kottke.org
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MIT Media Lab: Personas
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. Here’s one of mine but you can click on it to make it bigger and easier to read: 
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Salt
From Wikipedia: Chloride and sodium ions, the two major components of salt, are necessary for the survival of all known living creatures, including humans. Salt is involved in regulating the water content (fluid balance) of the body.
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Morris on Lying
Errol Morris is arguably one of the great filmmakers of all time. I especially hold Vernon, Florida as one of the pinnacles of documentary filmmaking. I watch it at least once a year, twice this year.
Morris holds a discussion about lying on his hosted NYT blog, specifically on Genesis 37:29-34 regarding the story of Joseph.
Now, some pals of mine wondered why he chose to use the story of Joseph. It’s difficult to say. There are surely many stories that would have been fit for his purpose, detached from any sort of potentially touchy, dogmatic ties.
Personally, I think it’s interesting he chose the story he did. Having grown up in a fundamentalist environment, these stories are quite familiar to me and I see what value he was trying to bring though using it as his example.
However, I wouldn’t have chosen it. Instead, I would have chosen from a massive assortment of films and novels, stories that aren’t so charged with a belief system, opening the value of his thoughts up to more people without alienating them.
This point, alone, makes for an interesting debate.
Thus, it is only for our speculation.
Regardless, it’s an interesting meditation on lying and worth the time I spent reading it.
Tangent: In this age of seemingly infinite access to information, it goes without saying that it is easier than ever to be manipulated. Especially while we don’t exercise our *discerning* muscles. Teaching a child to be discerning may be the single greatest challenge of them all in this context.
For example, if collectively we only just agreed that the world is round, there would still be sites up all over the Web saying it’s flat.
Just sayin’.
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Flow = Attention deconcentration?
It comes up around nearly every turn. It’s one of the wobbles of life that leads us into such ideas repeatedly: Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály CsÃkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.
Jason Kottke posted an excellent article today that is relevant and timely:
It’s a bummer that Alec Wilkinson’s article on free diving isn’t available online (except for NYer subscribers)…it’s fascinating and right up the alley of the relaxed concentration/deliberate practice enthusiast. One of the two divers profiled uses a technique called attention deconcentration to govern her body and mind as she dives.
To still the unbidden apprehensions that might interfere with her dive — what she describes as “the subjective feeling of empty lungs at the deep” — Molchanova uses a technique that she refers to as “attention deconcentration.” (“They get it from the military,” Ericson said.) Molchanova told me, “It means distribution of the whole field of attention — you try to feel everything simultaneously. This condition creates an empty consciousness, so the bad thoughts don’t exist.”
“Is it difficult to learn?”
“Yes, it’s difficult. I teach it in my university. It’s a technique from ancient warriors — it was used by samurai — but it was developed by a Russian scientist, Oleg Bakhtiyarov, as a psychological-state-management technique for people sho do very monotonous jobs.”
I asked if it was like meditation.
“To some degree, except meditation means you’re completely free, but if you’re in the sea at depth you will have to be focused, or it will get bad. What you do to start learning is you focus on the edges, not the center of things, as if you were looking at a screen. Basically, all the time I am diving, I have an empty consciousness. I have a kind of melody going through my mind that keeps me going, but otherwise I am completely not in my mind.”
I found only one other reference online to attention deconcentration, an article on free diving written by Natalia Molchanova herself. In it, she talks about the three types of attention deconcentration: visual, aural, and tactile.
Rising from the depth, it is important to constantly scan your condition to prevent shallow water black-out, which can occur without any discomfort sensations. Somatic attention deconcentration appears to be extremely useful in this situation. Somatic AD implies attention distribution on the whole volume of the body and allows noticing tiny changes of organism state.
There is one more kind of AD — aural attention deconcentration. It is not so effective in the water, but it helps preparing to the dive and not to be distracted by judge’s countdown.
It’s interesting that both the attention deconcentration and flow techniques are designed to get the practitioner to basically the same place (i.e. ready to perform difficult tasks) from opposite directions.
Cheers, Jason – thanks for this one.
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Malecha
This is our pal, Pat.
After having lived in Little Port Walter (known by those in the know as Club Fed) for a few years, our pals Pat and Jen have moved back to Juneau with their little boy, Bruno.
Now, we don’t get to see them as often as we’d like but seeing as you’re visiting us @ Lofto this week, we’ve dedicated today’s post to you : )
We’ve missed you!
Some cool facts about Pat:
Subsequent to being a Rasmuson Fellow, Pat initially worked as a research analyst at the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission where he reported on aspects of diverse Alaska fisheries including Pacific cod, weathervane scallops, Pacific herring, and horsehair crab. Since 2001, Pat has worked as a research fishery biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service at the Auke Bay Laboratory in Juneau. In his primary role, he studies the effects of commercial fishing on benthic habitats. These studies, utilizing both submersibles and scuba, have varied objectives from simple habitat typing to manipulative studies identifying effects of trawling at varied intensities.
Pat is also involved with other work that is attempting to determine growth rates of two species of sponge and two species of coral. These studies will help managers understand habitat and fishery interactions and allow for sustainable fisheries.
Those interested in checking out some of Pat’s work can find a good start here.
Some cool facts about Jen:
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Paris Plages
I just cannot stop watching clips shot with the Canon 5d Mark II, simply for the obvious reason – a still camera shot this motion footage:
Paris Plages from Alta Media Productions on Vimeo.
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Linux on your celli? Yes plz
Nokia decided to put aside its favorite S60 platform and switch to Maemo, which is all another way of saying that they ditched S60 for Linux.
We like that and so should you. For one, the browser is pretty stable, and it supports flash, video and applets. No more harrumphing when the iPhone loads a Flash-based site, showing us the blue-square-question-mark thing.
Ho hum.
Plus, this phone is fully configurable in ways the iPhone may never be, at least, not without spending an inordinate amount of time hacking away.
The N900 is expected to be available later this year and the price has only been guessed at but will likely be in the $600 range.
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Everyone Forever Now
Everyone Forever Now – “Stoop Sitting” from Daniel Mercadante on Vimeo.
Watch more
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Remembering the contributions of Phil Dodds
Mark Oehlert, an acquaintance of mine via Twitter, turned me onto his friend Phil Dodds, who turns out was not only in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but contributed a great deal to our culture in his short life, including, but not limited to, SCORM:
From Wikipedia:
He was the chief architect of the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) under the guidance of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, a project of the United States Department of Defense. The ADL SCORM is widely perceived as a means to achieve interoperability, accessibility and reuse of the component pieces of web-based instruction, irrespective of Learning Management Systems. Philip’s work on SCORM will continue as hundreds of organizations around the world continue their collective efforts to resolve remaining issues associated with SCORM’s Simple Sequencing Models, such as a lack of common instructional strategies and taxonomies (common definitions) for learning objects.
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Above and Beyond Alaska hosts Andy Summers
Our pals, Sean and Becky Janes, gave Andy Summers and his son the tour of Southeast recently via their outfit Above and Beyond Alaska. That’s Sean on the right in the picture below.
Highly recommended if you’re thinking about making it out to the Last Frontier – but of course, we’re biased:
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Tapped
In late 2008, Switchblade’s Adam Condal edited “Tapped,” a 90-minute documentary that in July of 2009 premiered at the Long Island and Maine International Film Festivals. The film illustrates the impact of the global water crisis on America and what we can do as individuals to enact change sooner rather than later. “Tapped” examines the role of the bottled water industry and its effects on our health, climate change, pollution, and our reliance on oil. The following is the trailer Adam Condal cut for the film. (Please note that “Tapped” will be showing at the Arclight in Hollywood beginning August 7th, 2009).
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Using Nature as a Hitman
The World War 1 Tyrolean Avalanches
1916-1918
Avalanches were used as highly effective weapons during World War 1. This disastrous weapon started when lot’s of snow fell in the Alp’s during the December of 1916. People could tell that the avalanche risk was high. A big avalanche killed 250 soldiers while tumbling down on the barracks. Some unknown person got the idea that avalanches could make a highly effective weapon. The avalanche war had begun. Avalanches could be started and even directed by just bombing a mountain. History has not yet calculated the exact number of deaths. Deaths have been estimated as high as 40,000 on each fighting side. Humans are responsible for these death causing, disastrous avalanche killer.
A pal and I had a brief discussion about this today – how and why we choose to use nature to do our dirty work. Just like this story.
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Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
I just cannot seem to get enough of this band lately:
I’ve been sleeping for forty days and
Yeah, I know that I’m sleeping cause this dream’s too amazing
She got gold doorknobs where her eyes used to be, yeah
One turn and I learned what it really means to see, yeahIt’s the magical mystery kind
Ain’t no lie
Bye bye to the too good to be true kind of love
Oooooh I could die
Oooooh now, I could dieNow I’ve been sleeping for sixty days and
Somebody better pinch me
Bitch I swear, I’ll go crazy
She got jumper cable lips
She got sunset on her breath
I inhaled just a little bit
Now I got no fear of deathIt’s the magical mystery kind
Yeah it ain’t no lie
Bye bye to the too good to be true kind of love
Oooooh I could die
Oooooh now, I could dieIt’s the magical mystery kind
It ain’t a lie
Bye bye to the too good to be true kind of love
Oooooh I could die
Oooooh now, I could die
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DavenSarah’s pad de la rad
Welp, our dear pals DavenSarah [yes, it's usually pronounced as one word] have at last found, bid on and acquired the perfect home back in our old neighborhood of Seattle.
Congratulations!!! The place is suhweeeeet to say the very least. Once you two get your hands on it and in it, no doubt the rad-factor shall shoot up exponentially.
The hunt was long and arduous, however, quests such as those always pay off in the end.
Click the image below to check out the complete slide show of this rad pad:
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Cranies (sic)
I received one of the most beautiful SMS’s ever today. Is that how we say SMS in the plural?
Doesn’t really matter. Case in point: “I received one of the most beautiful SMS’s ever today.”
It was from my father, who’s never cared much about his spelling, only about the message:
Cheers, Pop.
Happy Birthday, by the way.
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