If there’s a single moment that symbolises the beginning of conscious computing, it probably happened in 2007, when Linda Stone, a Silicon Valley executive with 16 years’ experience at Microsoft and Apple, followed her doctor’s advice to take a course in Buteyko breathing, a Russian technique used to treat asthma and stress. The day afterwards, sitting down at her computer to check her email, she noticed – now that the topic of breathing was on her mind – that she was holding her breath.
Over the following days, she realised it was a habit; later, after conducting a research project involving more than 200 people, she estimated that around 80% of us unconsciously do the same. (She labelled the condition “email apnea”, though it’s no less common during other forms of web use.) Breath-holding, not surprisingly, deprives the body of oxygen, seems to exacerbate the “fight-or-flight” response and contributes, as Stone puts it, to “a sense of being in high alert at all times”.
via Conscious Computing: how to take control of your life online
Strange Islands.
“There’s freedom in knowing that you don’t have to know it all,” I said, ” but there can be supreme danger in playing dumb to it too!”
Tenor trombone (buccin)
Origin: probably France
Date: ca. 1830
Location: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
There are several types of attention that people use during everyday activities, such as when driving or cooking or in a classroom setting. Selective attention is one of the types of attention that requires a person to focus on one activity in the midst of many activities. Sustained attention is used when a person needs to focus on one event for a longer period of time. The other types of attention, divided attention and alternating attention, are needed when a person has to focus on many things at once.
Attention: Our use of the term far exceeds our understanding of the concept, still most people – and even most researchers – use it in very versatile ways, not warranted by anything but our intuitive notions of attention itself.
It’s a cycle as old as time. (Or, at least, as old as the game.) Content comes out. It’s difficult at first. Then it gets manageable. And then it’s … not so bad. Then it’s easy. Then it becomes so mindnumbingly repetitive and boring that it feels like dental surgery.
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I find it helps to have backup entertainment in these situations. These days, I pay attention to the baby asleep on my chest. I used to chat with friends in Skype. I’ve even been known to write the occasional blog post in between pulls. I was constantly finding something (anything) I could do to keep me plugging away in the instant for just a little bit longer.
Come Out is a 1966 piece by American composer Steve Reich. He was asked to write this piece to be performed at a benefit for the retrial of the Harlem Six, six black youths arrested for committing a murder during the Harlem Riot of 1964 for which only one of the six was responsible. Truman Nelson, a civil rights activist and the person who had asked Reich to compose the piece, gave him a collection of tapes with recorded voices to use as source material. Nelson, who chose Reich on the basis of his earlier work It’s Gonna Rain, agreed to give him creative freedom for the project.
Reich eventually used the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of the boys involved in the riots but not responsible for the murder; he was nineteen at the time of the recording. At the beginning of the piece, he says, “I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them” (alluding to how Hamm had punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police that he had been beaten).via @Mafujalate329
1970, Psychiatria et Neurologia Japonica
![continuo-docs:
Hans Henny Jahnn - diagram of a church organ’s harmonics.
German writer Hans Henny Jahnn was an organ builder – his restoration of the Schnitger organ in Hamburg’s St. Jacobi church between 1919 and 1923 is a cornerstone of the German Organ Reform Movement.
[via]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mecee8NXpS1r5yt7ko1_500.jpg)
Hans Henny Jahnn - diagram of a church organ’s harmonics.
German writer Hans Henny Jahnn was an organ builder – his restoration of the Schnitger organ in Hamburg’s St. Jacobi church between 1919 and 1923 is a cornerstone of the German Organ Reform Movement.
[via]
Pasquale Taraffo and his Harp Guitar.
Pasquale Taraffo, came to the United States three times—once for a concert tour of New York City and California in 1928–29, once as a crew member of a ship that docked in New York in 1933, and once for a concert stop in New York in 1935.
Born in Genoa, Italy, in 1887, the musician began giving guitar concerts at age nine. He eventually switched from the traditional guitar to the harp guitar, a 14-string instrument mounted on a pedestal. Taraffo started touring abroad in 1910, performing on his own and with other musicians. Known as “the Paganini of the guitar”—a reference to the legendary Italian violinist—he was wildly popular around the world and especially in South America.
In this video, you can hear the virtuoso play one of his most popular pieces, “Stefania,” named after his daughter and recorded in the 1930s.
What’s invisible? More than you think.
- John Lloyd
Gravity. The stars in day. Thoughts. The human genome. Time. Atoms. So much of what really matters in the world is impossible to see. A stunning animation of John Lloyd’s classic TEDTalk from 2009, which will make you question what you actually know.
Lesson by John Lloyd, animation by Cognitive Media. via Ted-Ed
HT @ Kost Moskalets and Wildcat2030
MOSS ON A CONE - Bernhard Edmaier
Over the centuries, the extinct volcanic cone of Mælifell, near the glacier Myrdalsjökull, south Iceland, has been released from the grip of the ice. Approximately 100 metres high, its slopes now proliferate with green spring moss, and glacial water flows around its base.
Poster by Andrzej Bertrandt for Polish cinema release of Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972).
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Handel - Largo from “Xerxes”
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“
Take one step out the front door, and an individual brain cell fires. Pass by your rose bush on the way to the car, another specific neuron fires. And so it goes....
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