Could you handle a world that looked upside down? Marc Abrahams, editor and co-founder of The Annals of Improbable Research, shares a case study in which the subject was made to wear vision-flipping goggles. Ten days later, the man was riding a bicycle and playing catch in the park—his only impairment the strange headgear itself. Listen to this interesting conversation (short 4:38 audio)
Author: neil
Stuffed with memories [article]
This explains my constant hunger! Maybe I’ll pay more attention to my lunch (& dinner) – just after I finish reading this report!
“We’ve known for a while that people who are distracted while eating — such as by watching TV or typing — are not really thinking about what they’re eating. They’re not making memories of the food, and may be setting themselves up for later hunger.”
Dead People Like Facebook. [Article]
You use Facebook to connect with your friends. But a sharp eyed user had a disturbing occurrence – his facebook feed said one of his friends liked something. Except, that friend was dead. For a while.
The Refrigerated Workforce [Article]
This interview with Nicola Twilley about food ends with the following poignant statement about the direction that people who spend their working hours in refrigerated spaces are going in ”
When you spend a lot of time in refrigerated spaces, you slow down. In a lot of the frozen food warehouses, workers are not allowed to work alone. You don’t even realize that you are slowing down, and eventually you stop moving. We have these buildings that we maintain at extraordinary expense that we, physically, are not optimized for all. We are not optimized for spaces that slow down decay, to preserve “freshness” — whatever that means — in our fruits, vegetables and meats. On the temporal level, what refrigeration does is so weird. It is an extension that slows everything down.
Blinded by the light [Article]
Earlier this week, I linked to an article about lighting by gravity. And the critiques begin, almost immediately. A Clean Energy Breakthrough
Gee Pee Yes? [Article]
The pervasiveness of GPS has taken the fun out of navigation, says this Smithsonian article. Quite possibly true. I prefer maps personally – even though it takes a little longer to get to where we need to – maps allow you to get a sense of the environment & the geography in a way that electronic devices don’t.
Floppy Disk Desk [Article]
Nostalgic for the days of the 3.5″ floppy disk? (Now, now, don’t let your mind wander!) You can have it in your living room, in a much larger size as a desk! Check it out.
Amelia Earhart on Marriage [Letter]
Fiercely independent, the pioneering female aviator Amelia Earhart wrote this letter to her future husband, George Putnam.
Flush with [insert feeling here]
The height of American excesses, as demonstrated by this advertisement for, of all things, a commode.
Ustad Ravi Shankar [Videos]
Ravi Shankar, who passed away on Wednesday at the age of 92, recorded while teaching George Harrison.
Watch him energize a sleepy audience at the Monterey Pop in 1967, in a spellbinding minute performance along with the great master of tabla, Alla Rakha. The audience erupts at the end of this performance. (for context about this, read this blog post) And here’s a video of him collaborating with Alla Rakha’s son, another giant of Indian classical music, Zakir Hussain.