Z is for Zen

Hackaday brings us this little sand drawing machine, a little riff on the sand pendulims I posted about a little while ago.

Y is for Yahoo

Oatmeal destroying the truth right now.
The Oatmeal is the greatest or at the very least top 10 web comic that exists ever, posted the following truth and I leapt from my chair and screamed yes, yes, this is the truth. Praise be to that guy for telling it!

X is for Xanth

So yeah, reaching for it again.  Xanth is the fictional land that is the setting for Piers Anthony's eponymous pun filled fantasy series by the same name.  I read about 15 or so of these book back in Middle and High school when I had time to waste and was really into the fantasy genre. It would be easy to dismiss this series as a silly farce, but it keeps it interesting by following the bloodline of the main character of the first novel in a land of magic.

In looking up info for this post I was surprised to see that it started in 1977, and is still being written on with books due out this year and next!  I specifically can remember things from books 1 -6, but the rest seem a little vague in my mind.  The trouble is my younger brother and best friend at the time where also reading the series, so we all read quickly so the others could get to read them.  Apparently I read a few of them too quickly.

W is for Watermelon Kegs

Gizmodo shared this link from Watermelon.org on how to make a very (very, very) fancy spodie they call the watermelon keg.  In addition to a fancy cut watermelon filled with booze you need a Chrome Spigot[?] ($27 + shipping!!) to pull this off, but I feel like we can all agree that this is the coolest party drink you will ever have made so it may be worth the money.

image via Watermelon.org

Violence against women

Not sure where to start on this, but it's been kicking around in the back of my head for way to long to not put it out there.  There is a staggering amount of video depicting violence against women in the world. The trouble is I'm not sure what to do with that thought.

It is a part of our human condition, it does need to be discussed and sometimes the best way to start a discussion is to graphically portray it such as the movie The Accused, but the images I'm talking about don't examine the cultural significance of this violence but rather just display the violence for consumption. The type of thing presented in the movie Irréversible which has the most disturbing and disturbingly long rape and murder scene I'm aware of in mainstream cinema.  Really don't go watch it, it is awful.  Even worse, is they did 3 takes of the scene all as one continuous shot.  It's disturbing the frequency this type of imagery is repeated again and again in cinema and music videos.



I'm not sure if I have a point, it's more a direction at this juncture. I'm going to work on making sure that I don't give money to anything that promotes or glorifies inflicting harm on women.

As a closing thought I'll offer you this video of The Cults, the ending to me suggests that director believes we choose the suffering we endure, and have as much a hand in it as those that inflict it on us do.

Cults - Abducted from David Altobelli on Vimeo.

U is for Update

I thought long and hard about U's and came up with nothing, I couldn't come up with anything clever or new or original.  This is worse than K.  U, I bow before your mighty vowel self and just want to note that I did update the the S post with a picture of the painting I did.

In case it's too hard to click the link here it is:

T is for tired

So I lost my mind and decided to destroy my backyard planter (that I apparently never uploaded a photo of).  The thing is my "backyard" is more of a 15'x20' place where the sun don't shine.  In 3 years I managed to grow lettuce, and that is about it.  In the picture below you can see my 3 strawberry plants  (I have at least 12 now) that I have yet to grow a more than 1 berry a year on, and an onion gone to bloom.

Once I finished destroying I used the lumber to create this beauty!

In the front of my house I get amazing sun for about 8 hours a day, so I'm hoping for some better growing this season.  This whole process took about 10 hours of labor, and my body is wrecked.

S is for Starry Night

If you haven't seen the video for this app it's kind of amazing.  Not so amazing that you need to own an ipad, but I would like to have a digital art frame that played these types of animations in my house.  I painted a version of Starry Night in High school, if I'm not retarded I will get to posting a picture of it below the video.





--Update--

Here is my painting from High school

R is also for round about

ElectricMustache posted this little gem of a song.





For the internationals

Some Minor Noise - Some Minor Noise from someminornoise on Vimeo.

R is for Rejection

In the continuing a-z theme and the vast levels of introspection started earlier in the week, we come to rejection.  This lifehacker article outlines the importance of staying true to yourself in the face of rejection.  What we don't know if the motivation of others, and this imperfect information will inevitably lead us to draw the wrong conclusions about why we where rejected.

The girl you asked out that said no, may have said no because someone dear to her passed away last night and she is in no mood.  The trouble is you will may never know that, with that in mind I offer this also relevant bit of research that indicates that rejection particularly intense and personal rejection stimulates similar areas of the brain to when we are feeling physical pain.

Q is for Quixotic

I've be on a vain quest to do all of the things lately and it's slowly killing me.  I want to play with my son and play video games, goodbye sleep.  I want to grow my own food but have no space to do it, goodbye dreams.  I want to finish projects and hang out with friends, goodbye money.

I'm starting to realize I have to say no to somethings, or maybe to a lot of things.  I'm not sure on my limits yet, but something has got to give.  My reading list is growing longer than I have life left, and my project book keeps getting thrown away because I'll never get it done.

P is for Photography

Some interesting photography videos for education, and just because it is an interesting hobby.

Fstop and how it relates to aperture



Depth of Field


ISO for digital photography

O is On the importance Of the adolescent mode of Operation

Okay so this is going to be another really long post, feel free to click past if you aren't up for some existentialism, musings on time and the value of childhood.

For quite some time I have been making the argument for the relative velocity of time, wherein we percieve time to pass more quickly as we age because of the incrementally smaller percentage of our life each unit of time represents to our continuum of experience.  More simply as we age every second is a smaller fraction of our total existence and therefore less notable and perceived as less valuable, we notice it less and less because it is a smaller fraction of our total life span.  To me this explained why time used to drag on forever as a child, at age 6 each second was 1/189,216,000th of my life, but age 30 it is 1/946080000th of my life from roughly 1/190 million-th to nearly 1/ trillion-th.  That is a huge shift in percentage and it is always becoming fractionally less and less.  I've been trying to explain this to people since High school, and still get eye rolls from most people that I try to tell about it.  There is a dearth of critical thinking minds in the world, and those that do think critically seem to discount the value of upstart minds.  Consider that the bulk of great science attributed to Einstein was done at the age of 24.

This time as perception idea that I've been dragging around with me has framed how I see the world for some time, but a few things of late have shifted my mind to believing that this velocity of time is just one filter on the lens of life, and there are other things that might temper how we perceive the passage of time in given moment.  Most people are aware of the concept of a body clock and how it affects us through out the day and the general statement that the exposure to pervasive digital/artificial lighting is shifting our natural phases and affecting our general wake sleep cycle.   These wakeful periods are affected by how rested we are.  This affect I'm sure has been experienced by most everybody at some point (seriously when you are tired the day can drag on forever).

Another potential way to affect it is engagement.  The saying "Time flys when you are having fun" is grounded in perceived reality, but I think it is more likely that time flys when you are mentally engaged.  Your mind is distracted from the perception of time because such a high percentage of your metal capacity is being focused on what you are doing.  Many of us have experienced this at work, where the day goes by quickly when you are busy but slowly when nothing is going on.  It also passes when you are having fun, but again I think fun always implies engagement.  I believe that this can be explained because time only exists as a metal construct, in that we perceive it, we measure it and ascribe it meaning it is a cerebral notion that we are moving through time.  By engaging fully in what you are doing, that part of the brain that would otherwise be acknowledged the passage of time in occupied.  Related would be the actual functions of hydration and nutrition.  If your body is not nourished the ability of the mind to perceive time time could be altered, thus affecting our perception (hows that for quantum state)

----------<aside>---------
I have always wanted to participate in a wake sleep study where they measure your average or natural day.  The problem with this is original studies where criticized for access to artificial light saying that skewed the results longer.  My counter argument is that, if it where dark and I literally where unable to do anything else I would sleep too, but the access to a way to change my environment so that I could continue to do things enables me to shift my natural day.  If I could choose so, my natural day would be closer to 30 total hours 22 waking and 8 sleeping.  The conclusion that our "natural day" is approximately 24hrs is basically concession to natural constraints and doesn't factor that we are no longer bound by those constraints.  The day doesn't have to be 24 hours, it can be as long or short as we will it to be!
-------------</aside>-----------------------------

So where is this going?  The title was about the adolescent state of mind, and I thought that the framework of time and how it is perceived was important groundwork for how children experience the world.  What I am proposing is that access to the childish mode of operating is the gateway to youth and vitality.  This difference is not just innocence but in frame of reference, and the willingness to explore.  Often as adults we come to the conclusion that I have matured enough now I don't need to explore new avenues, or gain new experience.  I know what I like, or can apply what I have already learned to the challenges that come up;  rather the frame with which I view the world is now set, I can get on living.  Lifehacker had a post about new experiences, and how they affect our perception of time.  The short version is that new experiences require more time to process than familiar one's there by elongating time.  I'm suggesting that those that seem young around you are the ones that see the world with fresh eyes, that seek the new and different for the sake of it.

One of the hallmarks of youth is risk taking, not just the end your life kind either.  The attempting things that you may not succeed at, trying new approaches to things (different ingredients or styles of doing something). This sense of adventure and discovery are essential elements of that which we identify as youth, and the value to your mind and personhood might extend.  In that sense it could be youthful frame of mind could be considered the open mode of operating.  As John Cleese was pointing out in my recent transcription post, the childlike state is open to combining ideas and searching for meaning.  To this end, the adolescent mind open to combining ideas, playing with them with no fear of right or wrong ideas only interesting and fun.  This is where adults can look for rebirth.

The value of childlike thinking hasn't always been recognized, traditionally they only one that was allowed to be creative where the oldest and most important people, while the younger people where supposed to pay attention and learn from their elders.  While I won't discount the value of experience in most fields, it is interesting how much new ground is uncovered by looking at the world with fresh eyes, and a young mind.


I'll leave you with an interesting video on the value of being young and how the baby boomers paved the way for the current generation to capitalize on the realization of the value of thinking young.



We All Want to Be Young from box1824 on Vimeo.

N is also for religious Nerds

Thanks to Geeks are Sexy for this little bit of ribbing for the Religious out there.

N is for Wireless N adapter

Not strictly speaking the most useful thing in the world for everyone, but sometimes you got a wired connection and wish that shit was wireless.  Here is your solution Via IOGear.

If it doesn't mean anything to you move along, just flushing out weird old drafts and working this damn A-Z posting.

M is for Meritocracy

The Rise of the Meritocracy is a sociological satire written in post WWII England it pokes holes in the notion that IQ+Effort=Merit and was supposed to be a general take down of the notion that aptitude could be tested for.  This work forms the basis of the following Article on Measurement Myths from the New Inquiry.  I would really encourage you to read the article it is one of the best reasoned examinations of the current drill, kill, test regime we have adopted in the US in the wake of the well intentioned No Child Left Behind act signed into law by our good friend and former President Dubya Bush.

I'll try to summarize some of the main take aways from the article, but the article is quite long and it's case built well; I fear thumbnail sketches don't really do justice to the original content.  The first criticism of the current power structure is it fundamentally overlooks the cumulative bonuses of already being elite, the children of the elite are no more meritous than those of those currently on the bottom of the power structure.  They are however afforded more stable home lives that give them the opportunities to excel, but more over they have hands guiding them to success with positive reinforcement and active support.  This makes the children of the less powerful effectively running a race against teams rather than other individuals.  Without this support network (and the cumulative bonuses associated with it) the elites children would likely perform similarly to other unsupported children.

There is also a myopia in the elite class that fails to recognize these cumulative benefits that causes them to perceive that they have earned the benefits they currently receive, and assume that if others applied themselves the benefits would be available to them as well.  By discounting the value of the assistance they have revived and the cumulative advantages afforded them the elite effectively feel justified in not advancing or assisting the disenfranchised and retreat to intellectual enclaves that assure them they are correct in their assumptions (Ayn Rand's Fountainhead is mentioned as an example and to satirize their position of authority).  My personl feeling is that examples of this abound, but the general fall of charity and near complete dissolution of service organizations is truly indicative of this myopia and a danger of the entitlement mindset.

Another and more troubling outgrowth of the test for merit is the testing inherently undervalues that which it doesn't measure.  How do you test for artistic intelligence, or the ability to render the profound into prose?  There are few tests to measure creativity (an inherently unstructured way of thinking) and the focus on testing, and the passing along the standard knowledge is a destructive force on free thinking and ultimately dangerous.  I'll leave you with my favorite line from the last paragraph of that article.

More and better testing, regardless of how it is conducted, won’t make for better people, despite what educational reformers seem to believe, because tests always impose reductive goals that invalidate some ineffable amount of real aptitude among those tested.

For a completely different take on education here's the New Turks Discussion on Education in Finland.  This is the world I want my son to have access to, learn and pursue what you want.

L is for LSD

Former Gadget/Technology blog now turned drug, and art blog Gizmodo shared an article about LSD being an aid in treating addictions (as in all of them).


money quote from the Nature article:

"Psychedelics probably work in addiction by making the brain function more chaotically for a period - a bit like shaking up a snow globe - weakening reinforced brain connections and dynamics."

Taking LSD (or other hallucinogens) is to your brain like shaking is to a snow globe.

K is for Cake (best I could do)

Saveur those bastards have been posting cake recipes left and right and its all I can do not to make them all and wallow in them like fat kid heaven.  Everyone looks amazing, and the ingredients let me know that they will be over the top.

First up:  Black Forest Cake

Image via Saveur credit Todd Coleman

Next as a special treat for my best childhood friend: Lemon Cake

Image via Saveur credit André Baranowski

And finally for me, my favorite flavor on the whole planet Coconut Cake

Image via Saveur credit Todd Coleman

I'm sorry for the drool and other bodily fluids you have on and around your keyboard now, but wait!  I give you the finale!

Carrot Cake Cookie Sandwiches, Profoundly V lead me to yourcupofcake.com, and well for the Real V in my life Carrot Cake cookie sandwiches would pretty much fit the bill.

Image via Cupofcake

J is for Just Finish It

By way of Lifehacker comes a post that is fairly pertinent to my life at large Just Finish It.

Much like the author of the post I don't struggle with ambition to start things, or lack vision to design a more grand universe.  What I do lack is the wherewithal to finish or carry out these dreams that live in my head.  My project list is ever growing in both my personal and work life; the sensation is overwhelming in someways.  A real commitment in the form of my son is robbing me of my late night productivity and lack of interest is having further negative impact on my ever increasing project list at work.

The short list includes migrate from exchange 2003 to 2010, continue Windows7 rollout, update backup exec from disk to tape to disk to disk to tape (de-duplication for the win!) and hopefully making my backup windows shorter than 22 hours, upgrade the last NT server and the software that it is running (sometimes legacy just won't die, it has in the neighborhood of 80+k reasons why it's been kicking around on the really old version of the software) Mobile device strategy (people really think tablets are going to be some form of productivity boost, I think they are smoking that funny tobacco) completing the office 2010 deployment, some server automation scripts to make the co-workers lives easier.  Then I have a backlog of documentation, and future network planning to complete (really should be certified Cisco to run the network I have, let alone the network I need).

So yeah.  Sometimes my work sits on my mind a lot, but I have almost no interest in doing about half of that shit I just wrote down.

I is for Indie

Well the day has come, and it's time to put those fake synths down for a second and listen to some organic real life music.  So you beat junkies hold off on your next mdma infused hit and hear what music is supposed to sound like.

Bass Drums of Death - I wanna be forgotten


Wye Oak - Civillian


Jack White - Love Interruption