Musician Chris Blake googled the words “biggest regret” and pasted the funny, charming, and interesting results into a new music video.
Yay, it’s my new video for “Someone Else!”
The funny thing is we were actually in the middle of pulling together a video for “Phantom Love” when I started fiddling around with this one. Since I didn’t need to shoot any new footage, it only took a few hours. Total cost: $28!
My biggest regrets revolve around procrastinating, including, not explaining further what I mean specifically right now because I’ll get to it later. Seriously, I’m hopeless.
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Another acquaintance of mine, Jim Steacy, qualified for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The CBC wrote this article about Jim and his amazing hammer throwing skills.
I remember a couple of years ago, the night after the University’s Blue and Gold banquet (he won athlete of the year that night), most of the athletes were pretty tired after staying out late partying and I just happened to be driving by the track field early the next morning. Guess who was up bright and early and out practising by himself—Jim Steacy.
After upgrading to the newest version of Wordpress, I seem to have lost the ability to open single page posts—so if you’ve noticed commenting is down… I’ve noticed it and will get to it when I get back on Monday.
Update: It’s a known bug in Wordpress 2.6. They are going to fix it in the next release, but in the meantime, I found a fix here.
Tom Stafford, a member of the Adaptive Behaviour Research Group in the Department of Psychology at University of Sheffield, recently presented the keynote speech at the annual conference of the Association for the Teaching of Psychology at Lincoln in the UK. He talked a little bit about the priming that can occur when you load up my backmasking site. He was kind to present the topic using this slide.
Thanks Tom… you made my day.
Research Digest wrote up an interesting summary of Tom’s keynote talk.
Do you STILL love the Beatles? Then you will love this interview with John Lennon (that you haven’t heard before).
In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message.
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It’d be hard to vote no to this little girl.
My favourite 8 and a half minutes on YouTube.
I tried out Google’s new Second-Life clone, Lively. Never having played Second-Life, I’m not so sure what all the fuss is about, but just for kicks, embedded below is my Lively virtual room.
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This wasn’t coming up with results—I was thinking that posting it here would change that… but no such luck.
I love the beautiful (and very large) images found at Boston.com’s The Big Picture. Especially fun to see is the series from the recent US Olympic Trials where superman Michael Phelps broke another world record.
The Big Picture: Records Fall at U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials.
I just got back from my trip to Calgary and the Kid’s Hope Ethiopia Triathlon.
I didn’t swim nearly as fast as I had hoped but I’ll choose to blame it on the fact that I couldn’t get very good rotation on my arms while wearing my wet-suit. Every stroke meant pulling against the elastic fabric of the neoprene and I’m sure the lack of training never had anything to do with my inability to keep my time under 10 minutes.
JULY 5, 2008 — OKOTOKS, ALBERTA, CANADA — Triathlon competitor Bryce Meldrum, of Calgary, Alberta, makes a crowd pleasing mad dash sprint to the end of the Foothills Charity Triathlon for Kid’s Hope Ethiopia. — PHOTO BY JEFF MILNER.
Nevertheless our team did very well—especially against the other teams… not so much against the individual tri-athletes many who amazingly swam, biked, and ran faster than the three of us acting as a team.
The race was put on by Kids’ Hope Ethiopia, the same charity organization that Bryce happens to work as a Project Coordinator.
So against other teams, we came in 8th out of 21 and my individual swim ranked me 4th. I think the highlight for me was seeing my teammate Bryce making his crazy sprint to the finish line and then paying the price after the race. It’s not hard to love a competitive teammate.
I can almost see myself getting into doing the whole thing myself, but then again, it’s a lot easier said than done, especially from the comfort of my office chair.
I’m away today taking part swimming in a team triathlon held in Okotoks (is it safe to call Okotoks a suburb of Calgary yet?) for the annual Foothills Charity Triathlon for Kid’s Hope Ethiopia.
I’m happy enough to just have one section of the triathlon, because I want to go all out, but I have to keep in mind that I’ve spent exactly no time at all training for this event.
I’m just shooting to break 7 and a half minutes which looks to be a fairly competitive time (and a winning time depending on which year’s results you are looking at). Watch this space to see how it went.
Stanley Milgram’s famously unethical but ever so interesting experiment on obedience via Archive.org:
The Milgram experiment was a seminal series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.
The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiments to answer this question: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”
I didn’t have time to watch the whole thing, but apparently magician / hypnotist Derren Brown reproduced Milgram’s obedience experiment (watch on YouTube). I’m confused as to how he got around the ethical violations intrinsic to proceeding with such an experiment in this day and age—am I kidding myself or are they all just actors?
After running Lundbreck Falls in my kayak last month, the sport of running big waterfalls has been on my mind. I’m not too interested in doing anything bigger or scarier just yet, but the photos in this news story are even more awesome after having experienced my own little 30 foot drop over some falls.
Just to be clear, that’s not me in the photo, nor anyone I know. See more here.