Festival weekend

Roncesvalles Polish Festival, Queen West Art Crawl, and Parkdale is throwing it down too.

Evolutionary mutation?

http://io9.com/5359538/evolutionary-throwback-snake-with-foot-discovered

A woman in China discovered a snake clinging to the wall of her bedroom with one clawed foot. It turned out she'd discovered an incredibly rare mutation - it's actually more common for snakes to have two heads than feet.

Nice link Sandra!

LHC creationism

Megastructures beyond the horizon? Nah...

.. it's just multi-dimensionality!


http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327246.000-13-more-things-dark-flow.html

So a recent finding by Sasha Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, does not make sense. His team has found a group of galaxy clusters moving at an extraordinary speed towards a small patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela. Kashlinsky calls it the "dark flow", in tribute to those other cosmic mysteries dark matter and dark energy (New Scientist, 24 January, p 50).

... One of the foundation stones of cosmology is the Copernican principle, which says that there is nothing special about our region of the universe.... There are also suggestions that the pull might be from another universe altogether. That would be good news for proponents of eternal inflation theory, which suggests that the universe should actually be composed of "mini-universes" that have bubbled off from one another.

--

From the series:

13 things that do not make sense
and
13 more things that do not make sense

New Malcolm Gladwell book, sort of.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316075841/



Below; straight from Kottke.org

What the Dog Saw is a collection of his writing from The New Yorker. Here's an annotated table of contents with links to all the articles and the dates on which they originally appeared in the magazine:

The Pitchman - Ron Popeil and the conquest of the American kitchen. (Oct 30, 2000)

The Ketchup Conundrum - Mustard now comes in dozens of different varieties. Why has ketchup stayed the same? (Sept 6, 2004)

Blowing Up - How Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy. (Apr 22, 2002)

True Colors - Hair dye and the hidden history of postwar America. (Mar 22, 1999)

John Rock's Error - What the inventor of the birth control pill didn't know about women's health. (Mar 13, 2000)

What the Dog Saw - Cesar Millan and the movements of mastery. (May 22, 2006)

Open Secrets - Enron, intelligence and the perils of too much information. (Jan 8, 2007)

Million Dollar Murray - Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage. (Feb 13, 2006)

The Picture Problem - Mammography, air power, and the limits of looking. (Dec 13, 2004)

Something Borrowed - Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life? (Nov 22, 2004)

Connecting the Dots - The paradoxes of intelligence reform. (Mar 10, 2003)

The Art of Failure - Why some people choke and others panic. (August 21, 2000)

Blowup - Who can be blamed for a disaster like the Challenger explosion? No one, and we'd better get used to it. (Jan 22, 1996)

Most Likely to Succeed - How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job. (Dec 15, 2008)

Dangerous Minds - Criminal profiling made easy. (Nov 12, 2007)

The Talent Myth - Are smart people over-rated? (Jul 22, 2002)

Late Bloomers - Why do we equate genius with precocity? (Oct 20, 2008)

The New Boy Network - What do job interviews really tell us? (May 29, 2000)

Troublemakers - What pit bulls can teach us about crime. (Feb 6, 2006)

From Amazon:

"Good writing," Gladwell says in his preface, "does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head."What the Dog Saw is yet another example of the buoyant spirit and unflagging curiosity that have made Malcolm Gladwell our most brilliant investigator of the hidden extraordinary.

Uh, all are pretty much must reads.

ok, one more youtube video...

.. cuz I'm in the mood...

What not to do when a dog starts to hump your leg.

I am packing my bags!

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Hilarious hick kid. This is tv gold.

Anna's 25th birthday!

25th!

We went to La Veranda at Royal York and Bloor; food was ok.. nothing special. Lacked creativity, almost chain-ish... but, fun night (before getting pulled away for a football draft :(.

Dad excitedly tearing open a gift from Africa.


This one's for you Anna, cuz it's your birthday.


No more salt!

Labour Day, classic.

I went down to the Labour Cay Classic with a few great friends; Argos at the Ti-Cats. What a fantastic day, from start to finish.

Setting up the bbq... A few of us arrived a bit late for the start of the tailgating, but it didn't matter one bit.













Above and below; beef tongue. Yeah. Fuck yeah.



Surprisingly sweet!



Master of ceremonies at work.













Look below. Kari, arm in arm with the Pinball. The arm grab; the expression (click to enlarge!).





Happiness ensues.





Later...

Digital Synesthesia

I wrote about synesthesia here before, where some people have senses and experiences neurologically intertwined (days of the week induce a colour vision, musical chords each have a specific taste and flavour). This project, reminiscent of the Northern Exposure episode where Chris designs a machine to help him live out lucid dreams seems very ambitious, but also a very cool first step.

http://www.good.is/post/digital-synesthesia/

This is a really great article (stuff on good.is is generally pretty interest.. ). The idea that everything is programmable is certainly not new... I mean, we program our minds and thoughts based on inputs everyday. Moreover, this programming (and reprogramming) can be specifically controlled and manipulated.

"For example, there are the “Flavor Tripping” parties fueled by Synsepalum dulcificum, aka “Miracle Fuit,” the West African berry that temporarily reprograms your taste buds to make anything sour or bitter taste perfectly sweet. And there’s the story of Daniel Kish, the blind psychologist who, by clicking his tongue, uses echolocation to “see.” In the realm of digital synesthesia, numerous projects are attempting to leverage tactile feedback in the form of clothing outfitted with tiny vibrators. Instead of picking up your phone to read a text message, you might feel the words spelled on your back.

The late Paul Bach-y-Rita could be considered the father of all technology used to reprogram the human senses. In 1963, Bach-y-Rita developed a “Tactile to Visual Sensory Substitution” device. It converted images from a camera to tactile sensations that a blind person could feel on his or her back. Bach-y-Rita’s research was all based on the notion of “sensory substitution.” The brain, he argued, was not hardwired and that a working sense, say touch, could be used to replace a failing one, e.g. vision. His ideas around the plasticity of the human brain were very controversial at the time but widely accepted today. He continued his research on sensory substitution technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his company Wicab, until his death in 2007.

“I can connect anything to anything,” Bach-y-Rita said in a profile in The Telegraph shortly before his death:

We see with our brains, not with our eyes. When a blind man uses a cane he sweeps it back and forth, and has only one point, the tip, feeding him information through the skin receptors in the hand. Yet this sweeping allows him to sort out where the doorjamb is, or the chair, or distinguish a foot when he hits it, because it will give a little. Then he uses this information to guide himself to the chair to sit down. Though his hand sensors are where he gets the information and where the cane “interfaces” with him, what he perceives is not the cane’s pressure on his hand but the layout of the room: chairs, walls, feet, the three-dimensional space. The receptor surface in the hand becomes merely a relay for information, a data port.

In the latest incarnation of Bach-y-Rita’s work, the data port is the tongue...."

Drinking and biking..

I'm refraining from commenting on the Bryant-Sheppard situation, mostly cuz it doesn't seem like anyone is sure what exactly happened yet. One good article to come out of this is Adam's..

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/radwanski/drinking-and-biking/article1274956/

"The very notion that police would have sent Sheppard on his merry way in a car after he'd been drinking is unthinkable. Maybe it should be no less unthinkable that he'd have been sent off on a bike."

I agree with you, and leaving the bike at home/locked up on the street overnight is something that I'm gonna start doing. It's really about taking responsibility, and there's no point to take needless risks.



Nice new head shot Adam, and congrats again on the new job.