Do yourself a favor, and watch this:
(Remember to run it full screen, in HD, for best effect.)
Jim Downey
OK, so I’m back from my Great New Zealand Adventure with the choir and assorted groupies. Watch this space in coming days for images and blog eruptions about it all (it was fun! Exciting! Beautiful! And I didn’t even strangle anyone!)
But speaking of space, thought I’d share this item I came across while trying to recover from jet-lag yesterday:
That’s a shot of a room at the New York Hall of Science in Queens. If you look closely, you’ll note the size of the door – the ceilings are 100 feet tall, to give you some idea of the scale of what you’re seeing. It’s a huge room, designed to simulate the experience of being in space.
Check it in full at this most excellent blog post: The Most Amazing Room In Queens.
More when I have recovered sufficiently to actually write…
Jim Downey
I’ve always loved Tery Fugate-Wilcox’s phrase “Without art, we are but monkeys with car keys.”
And it looks like you can push that differentiation back a lot further than we previously thought:
Ancient ‘paint factory’ unearthed
The kits used by humans 100,000 years ago to make paint have been found at the famous archaeological site of Blombos Cave in South Africa.
The hoard includes red and yellow pigments, shell containers, and the grinding cobbles and bone spatulas to work up a paste – everything an ancient artist might need in their workshop.
This extraordinary discovery is reported in the journal Science.
It is proof, say researchers, of our early ancestors’ complexity of thought.
“This is significant because it is pushing back the boundaries of our understanding of when Homo sapiens – people like us – first became modern,” said Prof Christopher Henshilwood from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
There has been other evidence of early human art, shell jewelry and carvings which date back almost as far. But this latest discovery shows a level of planning and preparation which clearly indicate complex thought – it is the difference between a toddler picking up a rock and marking a wall and someone finding just the right rock, crushing it, adding in several other quite different but necessary ingredients in the proper proportions, mixing them all together in order to make a paint with which to mark the same wall.
Fascinating.
Jim Downey
this will play with your head:
That’s counter intuitive, at least for me. I would have expected the force of gravity to be applicable and manifest along the entire length of it. Huh.
Via Penn Jillette on Twitter, this fascinating clip:
Have fun!
Jim Downey
There was an item making the rounds last week that I found pretty interesting. It was about the phenomenon of ‘decision fatigue’ where the process of exercising willpower to make decisions wears you out, and after a certain point you start making bad decisions until you take a break and give your brain a chance to recharge with rest, food, and a change of pace. You can find the full article here, and here is a good passage which sums up the research:
Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain.
I think we’ve all probably experienced some form of this, and the long article goes into plenty of examples such as shopping, making the ‘decision’ to resist temptation (whether food or leisure or sex), having to go through and make judgments about difficult matters of fact, and so forth. I know that it is one of the reasons why I found editing Her Final Year so damned exhausting – fine distinctions between word choices and phrasing combined with the emotional content of the material meant that I could only effectively work on the book for 45 minutes or an hour a day.
And I think that there’s a connection to Alzheimer’s that this research clearly explains: the phenomenon of “sundowning“. Here’s a passage from Her Final Year, from an entry of mine titled “When does this plane land?” originally written 9/3/07:
There’s a phenomenon familiar to those who deal with Alzheimer’s. It’s called “sundowning”. There are a lot of theories about why it happens, my own pet one is that someone with this disease works damned hard all day long to try and make sense of the world around them (which is scrambled to their perceptions and understanding), and by late in the afternoon or early evening, they’re just worn out. You know how you feel at the end of a long day at work? Same thing.
And interestingly, that passage comes from the chapter October: Hospice or placement? which deals with the incredibly difficult decision of what to do with a loved one when you’ve reached a crisis point. A decision that any care-provider has to make in the face of years of exhaustion. A decision which they will probably second-guess for the rest of their lives.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted from the Her Final Year blog.)
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Connections, Guns, Hospice, Politics, Promotion, Publishing, RKBA, Science, Society
Interesting observation: last week I set up two Twitter accounts, one for “HFYJim” to support the care-giving book, the other for “BBTIJim” for my gun-nut stuff. Since then I’ve been learning the ropes about the Twitter culture, getting established, figuring out who to ‘follow’ and gaining a few followers myself. As of this morning, both accounts had about the same number of followers (about a score).
Now, in any sort of social media like this, you’re going to get some amount of SPAM. It’s always interesting to see where, and how it manifests. Just recently, the new Her Final Year blog has started to get some comments which seem OK though generic on the surface but which are actually links to this or that scam website. That tells me that the blog has now started to show up in search engines enough to be something of a target. No big deal, it goes with the territory.
But in the world of Twitter, spam seems to manifest as bogus followers. Not sure why this would be beneficial, but that could just be because I have my computer set up to filter out all the advertising, flash, and pop-up crap from websites. Anyway, of the two accounts I set up at the same time on Twitter, guess which one had attracted a handful of bogus followers who were ostensibly attractive young women with links to ‘pictures’ in their profiles?
It wasn’t the gun-nut one.
Nope. It was the care-giving one. The one tied to AARP, a variety of different Alzheimer’s and hospice organizations, and which I selected to use to follow different news outlets and science bloggers, many of which have significant left-wing political overtones. Not the one tied to a number of firearms-related sites and bloggers, some of which also have a decidedly right-wing political stance.
Curious, that. Now, this is just a snapshot, and it may be that I’ll see the same thing happen with my BBTIJim profile as time goes on. But I thought it was interesting.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Bad Astronomy, Ballistics, Feedback, Hospice, Phil Plait, Promotion, Publishing, Science, YouTube
First, sharing this from Phil Plait:
I’d been familiar with the illusion, but this is a really good demonstration of it. Nice.
A follow-up to this post of last week: ‘Her Majesty’ is still hanging in there, though very weak. She spent a couple of hours sleeping on my chest this morning, purring quietly. Makes it hard for me to get any work done, but I don’t regret the time. At all.
We continue to get excellent reviews and comments about Her Final Year, which makes the lack of sales of the book even more frustrating. Ah well. I won’t be posting a lot here about that book, but you can follow developments on the dedicated blog. We do have a number of big things lined up which may be of interest – reviews in papers and magazines. As those come to fruition I’ll probably mention the most important items.
Oh, if you want, you can now find me on Twitter. I’m still getting the hang of it, but can see why it appeals to some folks a lot.
And another follow-up, this time to a post from several years ago: on Monday we ‘closed’ on the real estate transaction which was the resolution of that whole debacle. The property in question is now ours. There are still some lingering details which need to be dealt with over the next year, but once again that is really someone else’s concern. And now if I never have to deal with the people involved ever again, it’ll be just fine by me, as I am perfectly happy to let this little piece of small-town history finally be buried.
Lastly, yes, we *are* making some headway on the big BBTI revamp and expanded data sets. Remember, the data we collected during the tests in May was almost as much data as we had collected in all the previous tests. Then adding in the .22 tests from June, and I think that did surpass the previous amount.
It’s been a busy and productive year. And it isn’t yet 2/3 done.
Jim Downey
NASA Spacecraft Data Suggest Water Flowing on Mars
PASADENA, Calif. — Observations from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed possible flowing water during the warmest months on Mars.
“NASA’s Mars Exploration Program keeps bringing us closer to determining whether the Red Planet could harbor life in some form,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said, “and it reaffirms Mars as an important future destination for human exploration.”
Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring. Repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in the middle latitudes of Mars’ southern hemisphere.
One thing we know from extremophiles on Earth: if there’s water, life will somehow manage to survive there, no matter how hostile the conditions are.
Will that apply to Mars as well?
We’ll see.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 