It’s the middle of August, which means it’s time for the UW-Madison students to arrive and for thousands of downtown apartment dwellers to toss most of their possessions to the curb and be homeless for a night until they can move into their new place the next day.

Right outside the front door of my building was a box marked “FREE” of discarded electronics including what are now my new alarm clock and subwoofer-equipped computer speakers. It doesn’t get any easier or cheaper than this.

I’ve been interested in biomechanics, movement, physical therapy, etc., for a long time. After posting a few times lately about injuries and self treatment of trigger points, I decided to start a new blog dedicated to that area of interest: rehabilitating injuries and increasing my mobility, flexibility, and strength. The first thing I have to do is pay attention to how my body moves and feels, and I’ll go from there.

Here it is: Move Aware.

Anecdotes are entertaining and can be pretty convincing — I’ve been caught up in many of them myself — but they’re no substitute for scientifically-derived evidence. Michael Shermer explains why they’re so powerful:

The reason for this cognitive disconnect is that we have evolved brains that pay attention to anecdotes because false positives (believing there is a connection between A and B when there is not) are usually harmless, whereas false negatives (believing there is no connection between A and B when there is) may take you out of the gene pool. Our brains are belief engines that employ association learning to seek and find patterns. Superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old, whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old. So it is that any medical huckster promising that A will cure B has only to advertise a handful of successful anecdotes in the form of testimonials.

[Scientific American via RichardDawkins.net]

Old habits die hard. Unfortunately, humans don’t. What’s the Harm? documents cases where critical thinking — as opposed to magical thinking, superstition, or trust in authority — could have saved people’s health, money, or life.

I watched Meet Joe Black for the first time tonight. The concept of “life’s work” stuck with me… the idea that a man in his waning years can look back at something concrete that was 40+ years in the making and call it his “life’s work.” Currently I don’t imagine that I’m building toward anything like that despite being stably employed for the foreseeable future. I’m pretty young and I can afford to cut myself a little slack. For a little while. The more I think about it, the more it seems that that little while amounts to not much longer. Which is probably why I don’t think about it often.

Right there on the Twitter home page it asks me, “What are you doing?” Forget what am I doing. How about why am I doing it? For whom, for what purpose, to what end? Can I admit to myself that I’m just doing it to be doing it, just to be doing something? Something other than having some stark, honest time with myself? Must nearly every sentence in this paragraph be a question?

You hate the alarm clock but without it you’d be lost in this dream that just doing something for the sake of doing is good enough. Better to be repeatedly half-awoken to at least squint at something real than to just sleep in so long that you might as well just not show up at all. But that’s what happens anyway if you just keep hitting snooze. I’ve been snoozing a lot lately.

I just installed a widget so that my infrequently-updated Twitter messages will appear on my even-less-frequently-updated blog. I also installed the Twitter Updater plugin, which hopefully will create a “tweet” with a link right back to this blog. Ah, self-reference.

The WaterCone, a dead-simple portable water distiller, could be a way to avoid or mitigate the coming water wars.

When I saw this one come down the pipe from A Word a Day, I thought, “cool, there’s a word for that.”

resipiscent

[From Latin resipiscere (to recover one's senses), from re- (again) + sapere (to taste, to know). Ultimately from Indo-European root sep- (to taste or perceive) that is also the source of sage, savant, savvy, savor, sapid, sapient, and insipid.]
Having returned to a saner mind.

resipiscence

[L. resipiscentia, from resipiscere to recover one's senses: cf. F. résipiscence.]
Wisdom derived from severe experience; hence, repentance.

So there’s a single word to sum up the experience of hard-won wisdom, the kind that we don’t necessarily seek but that always reveals itself as a valuable blessing…those Romans thought of everything. It seems that the human condition really hasn’t changed that much despite having been given several thousand years to evolve.

This is my new favorite commercial:

This guy sells cell phones. He also happens to be a talented amateur opera singer.

That performance really impressed me. This one really blew me away. I’ve never really cared at all about opera, but I have to admit that I got a little misty watching this one. That doesn’t happen very often:

When I read Fahrenheit 451 for a junior high book report, I apparently missed the author’s intended message along with the rest of the world. I could have sworn it was about The Man denying otherwise intellectually thirsty people of the books they loved.

It turns out that the “firemen” were just cleaning up a mess of old literature that had already become irrelevant due to the rise of television and the population’s apathy toward books.

from LA Weekly:

Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.
…
Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.