Where’s the sugar? O, jay, there’s no milk.
leisure
Look we can shop together mama, his and hers
Of the 110 sword swallowers queried, 46 responded and agreed to have their results reported. (…)
The most common medical complaint: a sore throat, or “sword throat” as it’s known in the business, which typically occurred while they were still learning, after frequent performances or from stunts involving multiple or odd-shaped swords. Some experienced lower chest pains, often lasting for days, which could be relieved by not swallowing any swords for a few days. Sixteen mentioned intestinal bleeding and one was told a sword had “brushed” his heart. (…)
The study also revealed how swallowers learned their craft. Often practicing daily for months or years, many desensitized their gag reflexes by gradually increasing the size of objects they shoved down their throats, beginning with their finger, then spoons, paint brushes and knitting needles before moving on to the commonly used bent wire coat hanger.
Performers must learn how to align a sword with their upper esophageal sphincter, a muscular ring at the upper end of the esophagus, and how to relax muscles in the pharynx and esophagus, which usually are not under voluntary control.
Tricks used to coax a blade down the throat varied: Many performers lubricated their swords first with saliva; one performer used butter and another had to retire because of a dry mouth condition. Some performed “the drop,” in which the sword falls abruptly down the throat; some invited audience members to move the sword.
Tap and pat and tapatagain
They call it “game transfer phenomenon,” or GTP. In a controversial study, they described a brief mental hiccup during which a person reacts in the real world the way they would in a game. For some people, reality itself seems to temporarily warp. Could this effect be real?
Most of us are gamers now. The stereotype of a guy living in his parents’ basement on a diet of Cheetos and soda is long gone. The average gamer is 34 years old, gainfully employed and around 40 per cent are female. They play, on average, 8 hours a week and not just on consoles; around half of the gaming activity today is on smartphones.
Still, the idea of Angry Birds spilling into reality does sound far-fetched. Indeed, if you read some of the descriptions of GTP, they can seem a little silly. After dropping his sandwich with the buttered side down, for example, one person interviewed said that he “instantly reached” for the “R2″ controller button he had been using to retrieve items within PlayStation games. “My middle finger twitched, trying to reach it,” he told the researchers. (…)
Half accused the researchers of disingenuously formalising idiosyncratic experiences reported by a small sample of 42 - that charge was countered by their subsequent study replicating the findings in 2000 gamers. The other half asked why Griffiths was rebranding a familiar finding. “They said, ‘we’ve known about this for ages’,” he recalls. “It’s called the Tetris effect.”
That term was coined in 1996 to refer to a peculiar effect caused by spending a long time moving the game’s falling blocks into place. Play long enough and you could encounter all sorts of strange hallucinatory residuals: some reported witnessing bathroom tiles trembling, for example, or a floor-to-ceiling bookcase lurching down the wall. In less extreme but far more common cases, people saw moving images at the edge of their visual field when they closed their eyes.
photo { Arthur Tress }
For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure
{ Camp Bonifas is home to the United Nations Command Security Battalion - Joint Security Area, whose primary mission is to monitor and enforce the Armistice Agreement of 1953 between North and South Korea. There is a par 3 one-hole “golf course” at the camp which includes an Astroturf green and is surrounded on three sides by minefields. | Wikipedia }
A black crack of noise in the street here, alack, bawled, back
The idea of the ‘hot hand’, where a player who makes several successful shots has a higher chance of making some more, is popular with sports fans and team coaches, but has long been considered a classic example of a cognitive fallacy – an illusion of a ‘streak’ caused by our misinterpretation of naturally varying scoring patterns.
But a new study has hard data to show the hot hand really exists and may turn one of the most widely cited ‘cognitive illusions’ on its head.
related { Why do some athletes choke under pressure? }
‘You breathe better when you’re rich.’ –Pessoa
Using within-state variation in employment and unemployment, we find that recreational exercise tends to increase as employment decreases. In addition, we also find that individuals substitute into television watching, sleeping, childcare, and housework. However, this increase in exercise as well as other activities does not compensate for the decrease in work-related exertion due to job-loss. Thus total physical exertion, which prior studies have not analyzed, declines.
The resulting ‘reality bomb’ has the potential to destroy all matter in every universe; reality itself would be destroyed.
The human cannonball is a performance in which a person (the “cannonball”) is ejected from a specially designed cannon. The impetus is provided not by gunpowder, but by either a spring or jet of compressed air. In a circus performance, gunpowder may be used to provide visual and auditory effects, but this is unrelated to the launching mechanism.
The first human cannonball, in 1877 at the Royal Aquarium in London, was a 14 year-old girl called Zazel.
Historian A.H. Coxe says of 50 human cannonballs more than 30 have been killed, mostly by falling outside the net.
{ Wikipedia | The Straight Dope }
photo { Tereza Vlčková }
‘By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.’ –Kafka
craigslist > des moines
Jogging Partner
Date: 2011-05-26, 9:09PMI am looking for a person of athletic build to help me get in shape.
I hate exercising with passion so the plan of action is this: I ingest Rohypnol [you supply the roofies as I don’t know where to purchase them] and you strap my body to yours [limbs to limbs using velcro] and take me along on a jog. Three nights a week. If you’re capable and interested, E-mail me so that we can discuss the fee.
Location: Des Moines, IA
photo { Jacques-Henri Lartigue }
Breathe the air and feel the air
Despite persistent urban myths to the contrary, chewing gum is, technically speaking, edible. However, doctors do agree that it is not usually wise to swallow it, due to the risk of “gum-based gastrointestinal blockages.” Given that in 2005, Americans chewed, on average, 160-180 pieces or about 1.8 lbs of gum per person, per year, with relatively few swallowing incidents, the resulting post-masticatory waste probably adds up to more than 250,000 tons annually.
Inevitably, disposing of this sticky mass poses some challenges. (…) Discarded chewing gum debris forms the dominant decoration of the urban floor.
The state of Maryland has no natural lakes
{ Ogilvy Malaysia hired some local Lego artists to create the posters that play off of the surrounding environment. | copyranter | more }
Upon the sand, upon the bay, there is a quick and easy way you say
Sleeping Beauty goes into an isolated room on Sunday and falls asleep. Monday she awakes, and then sleeps again Monday night. A fair coin is tossed, and if it comes up heads then Monday night Beauty is drugged so that she doesn’t wake again until Wednesday. If the coin comes up tails, then Monday night she is drugged so that she forgets everything that happened Monday – she wakes Tuesday and then sleeps again Tuesday night. When Beauty awakes in the room, she only knows it is either heads and Monday, tails and Monday, or tails and Tuesday. Heads and Tuesday is excluded by assumption. The key question: what probability should Beauty assign to heads when she awakes?
photo { Man Ray, Solarization, 1929 }
He covets. That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice?
Despite the first ‘Cars’ movie’s somewhat unimpressive reviews and ticket sales, Pixar is rolling out a sequel. Why? Because the animated film sparked a long-lived licensing bonanza.
In the five years since its 2006 release, “Cars” has generated global retail sales approaching $10 billion, according to Disney. That ranks the Pixar film alongside such cinematic merchandising standouts as “Star Wars,” “Spider-Man” and “Harry Potter.”
No fewer than 300 toys — and countless other items, including bedding, backpacks and SpaghettiOs — are rolling out in stores, in anticipation of the “Cars 2″ opening.
“We anticipate the consumer products program to be the largest in industry history, eclipsing the high water mark set by ‘Toy Story 3,’” Disney Consumer Products Chairman Andy Mooney said in a webcast last week before the annual toy licensing show in Las Vegas. Last year, the third installment of “Toy Story” generated $2.8 billion in merchandise sales.
photo { Alex Tehrani }
You can’t touch me, but I can touch you
Is Pole Dancing Art? Court Rules No.
Nite Moves, a Latham, New York-based adult dancing club that features pole- and couch-dancing, had been seeking to argue that erotic dances counted as “dramatic or musical arts performances,” thereby qualifying for a tax exemption. A Tribunal had rejected that claim.
This means that Nite Moves must pay up on a $125,000 tax bill dating back to 2005 — though the club is appealing the ruling. (…)
To distinguish erotic dancing from, say, ballet, the court finds that real art requires you to go to school. In other words, stripping — or at least, the stripping that goes down at Nite Moves — doesn’t count as art because anyone can do it.
photo { Shomei Tomatsu }
There are many different methods for solving the Rubik’s cube. The method I currently use is: cross, F2L, 3-look LL.
{ WSJ | full story }
I am the rocker, I am the roller, I am the out-of-controller
{ The newest Las Vegas Strip attraction isn’t another mega-resort or Cirque du Soleil show. Rather, it is a heavy equipment playground that lets visitors operate life-size Tonka toys. “Dig This” is a construction theme park developed by New Zealand-born Ed Mumm, who stumbled upon the idea while using a rented excavator to build his home in Steamboat Springs, Colo. After a couple of days of digging, he realized that operating machinery was a blast. | Engeenering News-Record | full story }
‘I suppose every child has a world of his own — and every man, too, for the matter of that. I wonder if that’s the cause for all the misunderstanding there is in life?’ –Lewis Carroll
Mr. Kim belongs to an elite cadre of “puzzle masters” who spend their days building logical mazes and brain teasers. In more than 20 years as a professional puzzle designer, Mr. Kim has worked on everything from word, number and logic puzzles to toys. (…)
Mr. Kim defines puzzles as “problems that are fun to solve and have a right answer,” as opposed to everyday problems like traffic, which, he noted, “are not very well-designed puzzles.”
(…)He likes changing locations frequently throughout the day, moving from his office to the kitchen table, then to the library or a coffee shop. Each time he changes surroundings, he tackles the problem anew. “I often find that the amount of progress I make is proportional to the number of times I start,” he said. He’s constantly doodling and carries a 3-by-5-inch notebook to record ideas, notes and images.
He borrows ideas for puzzles from architecture, music, science and art (favorite designers include Milton Glaser and Charles and Ray Eames). Occasionally, he gets ideas from dreams. After he dreamed he was surfing on waves of color, Mr. Kim had an idea for a computer game whose goal is to stay on the red wave. (…)
He defines a good puzzle as one that gets people to look at the problem in a new or counterintuitive way.
