Trick or Treat, Mayor Ford!

I wish a large number of people would dress up as Marg Delahunty ((Would that make her Marg Delahaunty?)), Princess Warrior, and go trick or treating at the Mayor’s house. Those not wanting to go the whole nine yards could grab a video camera and film the ordeal or drive a black SUV carrying the faux camera crews and Princess Warriors.

I love pranks.

Life on a shoestring: Part II — Pedal for your Power

We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles. — Thomas Edison

I recall going to a science centre as a child and seeing a stationary bike hooked up to a generator and lightbulb. Museum patrons could do a bit of cycling and watch as the light burned brightly. Nowadays, cycling powers exercise bikes’ onboard computers and “regular” bikes can be hooked up to generators at the cost of a few hundred dollars. Now, before I continue, I must stress that the thought experiment proposed should remain as such — a thought experiment — and no more. It would likely fail on both an economic and environmental basis in the context discussed.

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Life on a shoestring: Part I — "Friends"

Dunbar’s number is the name given to a theoretical limit on the number of people one can maintain long-term stable relationships. This number has previously been pegged at values around one or two hundred. In this era of social networking, given that the number of on-line “friends” we have can run into several hundred if not thousands, it’s easy to believe that technology, through external cognition, has helped us overcome cognitive limits imposed by the zombie food sloshing around our skulls. Except it probably hasn’t.

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Brain on autopilot or in "the zone"?

The notion of “flow”, also known colloquially as being “in the zone”, is a state where one just breezes through the task at hand and one is fully focused on the task as subjective time distorts. Part of  sports psychology deals with training athletes to get into the zone. One thing that athletes are told to do is ignore the manual details of the sport and focus on their goals. For example, professional golfers perform better when they focus on putting that little white ball in the cup and ignore their swing.

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