Ecological apple
This is about as creepy as you can make an apple. (via clusterflock)
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Entries for August 2009
Norway’s greatest value creator
The FT has a profile of Farouk al-Kasim, an Iraqi who immigrated to Norway as a young man and helped the country set up their sizeable oil concern. His biggest contribution was helping Norway cope with the discovery of oil.
Poor countries dream of finding oil like poor people fantasise about winning the lottery. But the dream often turns into a nightmare as new oil exporters realise that their treasure brings more trouble than help. Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, one time Venezuelan oil minister, likened oil to “the devil’s excrement”. Sheikh Ahmed Yamani, his Saudi Arabian counterpart, reportedly said: “I wish we had found water.”
Oil expertise was so scarce in the Nordic country when al-Kasim arrived that an innocent query at the Ministry of Industry turned into a job that paid him more than Norway’s prime minister. (via gulfstream)
CycloManiacs
CycloManiacs is Excitebike all grown up…it can drink alcohol and tie cherry stems in knots with its tongue. Warning: this is literally hours of fun. Hours.
How a car’s differential gear works
The video starts off with synchronized motorcycle riding but give it a minute.
The evolution of the modern blockbuster movie
Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas recently completed a five-part video series on the evolution of the summer blockbuster movie focused on the summers of 1984 and 1989.
Part 1: “The origins of MTV editing and post-Boomer cynicism. Also starring Ronald Reagan, John Hughes, semi-gratuitous T&A, synth-pop videos, The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and Prince.”
Part 2: “Steven Spielberg’s society of the spectacle, the rise of sadism and cynicism in the blockbuster movie, and the influence of the PG-13 rating. Also starring Indiana Jones, Red Dawn, and gremlins. Lots and lots of gremlins.”
Part 3: “A lickety-split recap of the second Reagan term, and begin the Bush years with the rise of hip-hop, Field of Dreams, Do the Right Thing, and the American indie film opting out and breaking out with sex, lies and videotape.”
Part 4: “We watch feel-good sequels ape the spirit of ‘84 while the heroes of Lethal Weapon II and The Abyss flip out, and the unprecedented Batman taps into the decayed American city.”
Part 5: “The New Sincerity, as rediscovered in the hallowed teen-movie triumvirate of Heathers, Dead Poets Society and Say Anything, released within three months of each other twenty years ago.”
Some of the clips are NSFW.
Things that are better than a New York City hot dog
In response to a hyperbolic statement from a friend about the goodness of New York City hot dogs, Matthew Diffee compiles an extensive list of stuff that’s better. A sampling:
Nice fluffy towels
Believing in yourself
Finding a lost twenty in your coat pocket
Prince Edward Island
Coming home after being away for a while
Submarines
Supermodels
A kiss in the rain
Edward Rondthaler
The intentional misspelling in the headline caught my eye: Edward Rondthaler, Foenetic Speler, Dies at 104. Turns out that Mr. Rondthaler was quite a fellow. He was a pioneer in the field of phototypesetting, cofounded the International Typeface Corporation & the Type Directors Club, and was a advocate of a phonetic spelling system called SoundSpel. Rondthaler’s fascination with letters began at an early age:
At 5, Edward received a toy printing press as a gift and began publishing his own newspaper. (It was a very small newspaper, about the size of a postcard, his son said.) Only a few years later, he and a friend opened a print shop in a nearby basement, doing jobs for paying customers; they ran the business through high school and for a year afterward, to earn college money.
Rest easy, Mr. Rondthaler.
Update: A few years back, Rondthaler did a charming video on the pronunciation complexities of seemingly simple words for House Industries, a type company that owns the physical assets of Rondthaler’s company, Photo-Lettering, Inc.
(thx, all)
Blogger as accidental puppeteer
Heather Armstrong purchased a new washing machine which promptly broke. After several attempts to get it fixed failed, she registered her displeasure on Twitter to her 1,000,000+ followers. The rest of the story is amusing but I enjoyed it for more inside-baseball reasons, i.e. this is how you fucking blog. Take notes.
This is where some of you are all, WTF? You spent how much on a washing machine? Don’t you know that some of us don’t even have washing machines? Don’t you know that some of us have to drag our five loads of laundry AND our three kids down to the laundromat every week? HOW DARE YOU EVEN WRITE AND/OR COMPLAIN ABOUT YOUR PRECIOUS LITTLE WASHING MACHINE.
And you can give me a goddamn break. It’s not like we said, you know what? Let’s just go spend fourteen hundred dollars today! It’ll be fun! Where can we go? An appliance store! Hurry, let me change into my diamond-studded panties and climb into our golden chariot! Have the local police shut down traffic so that we don’t have to maneuver around the little people! Also, where is Clive Owen and that blow job I paid for?
Updates on previous entries for Aug 28, 2009*
Would-be collective nouns orig. from Aug 21, 2009
Widescreen vs pan and scan orig. from Aug 28, 2009
Helen Keller video orig. from Aug 26, 2009
1965 Ikea catalog orig. from Aug 26, 2009
The case of the missing Wired writer orig. from Aug 27, 2009
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
Exploded Store
Much thanks to this week’s RSS sponsor, Exploded Store. ES offers t-shirts and posters featuring gadgets old (Atari 2600, keytar) and new (Xbox 360, iPhone) in “exploded” views that reveal their inner workings.
From the FAQ, here’s how the shirts are made:
These are internals of actual equipment. We buy items, usually via eBay or Craigslist, and we take them apart. Sometimes this requires special tools. Then we photograph the pieces and meticulously render them in Adobe Illustrator. Troy Paiva and Garry Booth are two of the skilled artists who have ‘exploded’ designs for us.
Museum of Animal Perspectives
A bunch of videos that show the world from the perspective of several animals, including an armadillo, a wolf, a scorpion and a house fly. Here’s a bison’s view of moving with a herd:
(via @dunstan)
NYC parkour
Rocketboom recently profiled some parkour practitioners in NYC. Is 35 too late to take up a new sport?
Man in a van interview
Jimmy Tarangelo lives in Manhattan in a van down by the river.
He doesn’t like paying rent, but he does like living in Manhattan. So what does he do? He lives in a van down by the river, literally. I spent a few hours with Jimmy and let him speak his mind.
On donkeys, the “little pistons” of Morocco
Susan Orlean travels to Morocco to find out about donkeys for Smithsonian magazine.
The medina in Fez may well be the largest urbanized area in the world impassable to cars and trucks, where anything that a human being can’t carry or push in a handcart is conveyed by a donkey, a horse or a mule. If you need lumber and rebar to add a new room to your house in the medina, a donkey will carry it in for you. If you have a heart attack while building the new room on your house, a donkey might well serve as your ambulance and carry you out. If you realize your new room didn’t solve the overcrowding in your house and you decide to move to a bigger house, donkeys will carry your belongings and furniture from your old house to your new one. Your garbage is picked up by donkeys; your food supplies are delivered to the medina’s stores and restaurants by mule; when you decide to decamp from the tangle of the medina, donkeys might carry your luggage out or carry it back in when you decide to return. In Fez, it has always been thus, and so it will always be. No car is small enough or nimble enough to squeeze through the medina’s byways; most motorbikes cannot make it up the steep, slippery alleys. The medina is now a World Heritage site. Its roads can never be widened, and they will never be changed; the donkeys might carry in computers and flat-screen televisions and satellite dishes and video equipment, but they will never be replaced.
This is probably the most interesting thing you’ll ever read about donkeys.
Wrist-mounted flamethrowers
A man demonstrates a pair of wrist-mounted flame throwers in his garage.
This somehow does not end in tragedy, but I see a very painful sneeze in this fellow’s future. (via minizud)
Farewell, Reading Rainbow
Reading Rainbow is going off the air today after 26 years, making it the third longest running show on PBS (after Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood). Nothing about this on Levar Burton’s blog or Twitter acct. as of yet.
Celebrity GPS voices
I had no idea you could get celebrity voices for your GPS navigation device. There’s Mr. T (“what does he say if you need to go to the airport?”), Yoda, KITT from Knight Rider, Michael Caine, Kim Cattrall, the Star Trek computer voice, Homer Simpson, Gary Busey, and Dennis Hopper.
And then of course you’ve got the mashups like Mr. T navigates Mr. Bean, Mr. T navigates Frogger, and Mr. T navigating in Mario Kart Wii.
You may even be able to get a Bob Dylan voice soon.
Widescreen vs pan and scan
This video features a number of directors talking about the difference between viewing films in widescreen vs. pan and scan. Martin Scorsese:
[Converting to pan & scan] is, technically, re-directing the movie.
Update: Thoughts from David Lynch about pan and scan taken from a 1997 interview:
I would like to see everything done letterboxed and with great sound. I’m not too interested in doing the commentary, you know, like a lot of people do. But in some strange way I kind of like pan-and-scan. Because you see things. It is a compromise, and in a couple of things you really say, “Why am I doing it?” But it’s just an interesting thing that happens- another composition. It’s not so bad, but I wish really that people could see the thing in a theater and that laserdiscs and videos didn’t exist. Because on the big screen with the sound, you become inside the film, and that’s the beauty of cinema. And it never happens on video, and it doesn’t happen on laserdisc, either.
(thx, bill)
Life advice from old people
Seth Menachem takes his video camera out on the streets and collects Life Advice From Old People. Menachem is in the movie biz so he even got advice from Jon Voight and Errol Morris.
ISS construction timeline
Nice animated timeline of the construction of the International Space Station. (thx, struan)
Atul Gawande profile
Harvard Magazine has a nice profile of surgeon and writer Atul Gawande that talks about, among other things, his constant state of flow.
Gawande had seen that part of the man’s colon was ischemic — dead and gangrenous — and had ceased to move waste out of the body. He wasn’t sure about the cause, but suspected a blood clot. One thing was clear: without immediate surgery, the colon would rupture.
After examining the patient, Gawande conferred with the resident in the corridor outside the man’s room. He went through a familiar and well-practiced set of actions that he seemed to do without thinking: slipping his ring finger into his mouth to moisten it, working his wedding band off, unbuckling his watchband, threading it through the ring, and refastening it, all the while carrying on a conversation about stopping the patient’s anti-clotting medication and getting a vascular surgeon to assist.
The case of the missing Wired writer
Wired writer Evan Ratliff is on the lam and Wired is holding a contest to find him. The prize is $5000 and your photo in the magazine.
Starting August 15, I will try to stay hidden for 30 days. Not even my closest friends or my editors will know where I am. I’ll remain in the US and will be online regularly. I will continue to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and I’ll make cell phone calls. I’ll generally stay in the kind of social environment I like to live in (no hiding in a cabin in Montana), and I’ll keep track of my pursuers, searching constantly for news about myself.
Wired is keeping a blog detailing Ratliff’s breadcrumb trails (emails, IP addresses, CC purchases). Ratliff himself wrote an article for the most recent issue of Wired called Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear? which is well worth the read.
Update: Robert Sharp tracked a friend through London using only Twitter updates and caught up with him at the bar of his hotel.
Update: Evan Ratliff has been found, felled in part by his love of pizza with gluten-free crust.
Update: Now that he’s been caught, the story of what Ratliff was up to all that time is worth reading…
the costume changes are hilarious.
MRI sex tape
This, I guess, is NSFW but really, if I didn’t tell you that it’s an MRI video of two people having sex, you probably wouldn’t even know it.
Updates on previous entries for Aug 26, 2009*
Bad company alert: Fiji Water orig. from Aug 18, 2009
Fiddling while our kids don’t learn orig. from Aug 26, 2009
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
20 cool ancient maps
Among this list of 20 fascinating ancient maps, you’ll find the island of California, a would-be beautification of Paris circa-1789, and the Modern and Completely Correct Map of the Entire World, which turned out to be nothing of the sort. (thx, john)
The solution to the soprano problem
The soprano problem is the mispronunciation of lyrics by sopranos at the high end of their range. In order to make themselves heard in opera houses, sopranos need their voices to resonate, which they only do when making certain sounds.
Jane Eaglen, a critically acclaimed soprano who has performed Wagner’s works in opera houses worldwide, explains that sopranos must try to find a balance between power and clarity. “It’s really about how you modify the vowels at the top of the voice so that the words are still understandable but so that you are also making the best sound that you can make,” she says.
A pair of scientists have found that the meticulous Richard Wagner may have been aware of this problem and wrote the soprano parts in his operas to minimize the mispronunciations.
1965 Ikea catalog
From the looks of the 1965 Ikea catalog, the company could make a killing selling that same furniture today. Maybe they should do that rather than switching to Verdana. (thx, paolo)
Update: From a museum display, a photograph of a bunch of old Ikea catalog covers.
The best of Wikipedia
The Best of Wikipedia blog collects interesting entries from Wikipedia. Some recent entries include Lawsuits Against God, Missing White Woman Syndrome, and Dead Cat Bounce.
No meetings at Craigslist
From a long piece by Gary Wolf in Wired about Craigslist and Craig Newmark, a glimpse of the tiny firm’s internal working structure:
The long-running tech-industry war between engineers and marketers has been ended at craigslist by the simple expedient of having no marketers. Only programmers, customer service reps, and accounting staff work at craigslist. There is no business development, no human resources, no sales. As a result, there are no meetings. The staff communicates by email and IM. This is a nice environment for employees of a certain temperament. “Not that we’re a Shangri-La or anything,” Buckmaster says, “but no technical people have ever left the company of their own accord.”
I also enjoyed this line: “the public is a motherfucker”.
Helen Keller video
This 1930 newsreel footage shows Helen Keller and her companion Anne Sullivan demonstrating how Keller learned to speak.
Much is made of Keller’s method of sign language, but I had no idea she could talk. (via gulfstream)
Update: Here’s an audio clip of Keller giving a speech.
Fiddling while our kids don’t learn
A truly maddening article about the NYC school system and its interactions with government and the teacher’s union.
These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.
The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day — which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school — typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved — the process is often endless — they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.
Nobody comes out of this looking good.
Update: This American Life did a segment on Rubber Rooms earlier this year in cooperation with a group of filmmakers making a movie about them. (thx, @hautenegro & heather)
Updates on previous entries for Aug 25, 2009*
Would-be collective nouns orig. from Aug 21, 2009
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
Power reading with Google Reader
Google recently asked a bunch of folks, including me, what their favorite online reads are. The result is Power Readers (more info). You can find my picks on the tech/web page and subscribe to the whole mess of ‘em in Google Reader.
A pizza oven grows in Brooklyn
Adam Kuban interviewed my friend Mark about the pizza oven he built in his Brooklyn backyard.
It is actually pretty amazing how well the oven works. The first thing we made after pizza was a roasted chicken. I just can’t describe how amazing it was. Not to mention the pizzas. They cook in about 90 seconds, and when I pulled the first one out of the oven, and the backyard smelled like a pizzeria, we knew all the work was worth it.
Mark and I work in the same office and it’s nice to hear that his daily phone conversations about stucco, stucco suppliers, stucco styles, and stucco application techniques have resulted in success.
Ikea as tourist attraction
For many Chinese, the Ikea in Beijing is not just a store, it’s a lifestyle amusement park with free admission.
Bai mapped out a five-hour outing. First, they had hot dogs and soft ice cream cones at noon. Then they enjoyed a long rest lounging on the beds. Bai kicked off her sandals and sprawled out on a Tromso bunk bed. The 36-year-old homemaker made herself comfortable and even answered passing shoppers’ questions about the quality of the mattress. “It’s soft and a great buy at this price,” she told a young woman, pointing to a dangling price tag. After that, Bai and her family took group pictures. By 5 p.m., it was time for another meal, so they headed to the cafeteria and ate braised mushrooms with rice.
Some are for you, some are for me, but more are for me
The @shitmydadsays Twitter account is written by someone who lives with his 73-year-old dad and “writes down shit that he says”. A sampling of recent posts:
Your brother brought his baby over this morning. He told me it could stand. It couldn’t stand for shit. Just sat there. Big let down.
Love this Mrs. Dash. The bitch can make spices… Jesus, Joni (my mom) it’s a joke. I was making a joke! Mrs. Dash isn’t even real dammit!
The dog is not bored, it’s a fucking dog. It’s not like he’s waiting for me to give him a fucking rubix cube. He’s a god damned dog.
I didn’t live to be 73 years old so I could eat kale. Don’t fix me your breakfast and pretend you’re fixing mine.
Update: There were some doubts about if this were for real or not but it appears to be. A book deal is in the works. Of course.
A history of modern art in three paragraphs
Impressionism - painting outside of a studio with quick, loose brushstrokes to capture an evocative impression of their subject. Van Gogh was an Impressionist but wanted to express how he felt about what he saw so he distorted the subject. This helped to lead to Expressionism practised by artists from Edvard Munch through to Francis Bacon. The Fauves (wild beasts) expressed themselves by painting with bright colours. Jackson Pollock did it by throwing or dripping paint on a canvas. His paintings were abstract — Abstract Expressionism.
Cezanne was very important. He began as an Impressionist but then started to look at a subject from two different perspectives to represent how we see. Picasso and his friend Georges Braque were very impressed and started to paint subjects from lots of different views. This is Cubism. Marcel Duchamp was a Cubist but then changed art for ever. He said the idea is more important than the medium and refused to stick with the limited choice of canvas or stone. So he chose everyday objects and called them art because he had altered their context. This led to Conceptual Art where the idea becomes the medium.
The Dadaists were very cross. They blamed the horrors of the First World War on the Establishment’s reliance on rational and reasoned thought. They radically opposed rational thought and became nihilistic — the punk rock of modern art movements. Dada plus Sigmund Freud equals Surrealism. The Surrealists were fascinated by the unconscious mind, as that’s where they thought truth resided. Piet Mondrian thought he could paint everything he knew, felt and saw by using two lines placed at rectangles and three primary colours. This was called Neo-Plasticism and was inspired by Cubism. So was Futurism, which is Cubism with motion added. Vorticism is the same as Futurism, but British. The Minimalists might represent the real truth because they weren’t trying to represent anything. Performance Art is Dada live.
That’s from Will Gompertz in the Times. (via sippey)
The history of Levi’s jeans
A Continuous Lean has an interview with Lynn Downey, an archivist and historian for Levi Strauss.
Well, [Levi’s] started just as a regional thing, we had the lock on the West and other brands had their own consumer segments. I believe Lee had the South sort of sewn up, and there were some other brands, I think Lee included, that were known in New York. It’s funny, you could always tell where someone was from; if they said “jeans,” then they were from the west, if they were from the East they called them “dungarees,” you could immediately tell where someone was from.
Update: Here’s part two of the interview.
Damn nature, you scary!
I almost wet my pants laughing the other night watching this little bit on Family Guy:
Beach parkour in Kazakhstan
My pal Mouser is in Kazakhstan and took a bunch of photos of kids doing parkour on the beach. This shot is my favorite.
Will parkour eventually join soccer as one of the world’s most egalitarian sports? You don’t even need a homemade ball to play, just stuff to jump over, through, and off. The whole world’s a course.
Updates on previous entries for Aug 24, 2009*
Aronofsky and Portman in Black Swan orig. from Jun 16, 2009
Immaculate innings orig. from Aug 24, 2009
Usain Bolt: 9.58 orig. from Aug 16, 2009
Gambling your money away to a safe place orig. from Jul 22, 2009
The Line Diet orig. from Aug 24, 2009
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
I’ll have a rum and Coke and coke
Route 36 is a cocaine bar located in La Paz, Bolivia and is understandably popular.
The waiter arrives at the table, lowers the tray and places an empty black CD case in the middle of the table. Next to the CD case are two straws and two little black packets. He is so casual he might as well be delivering a sandwich and fries. […] Behind the bar, he goes back to casually slicing straws into neat 8cm lengths.
The Inheritance of Rome
As Tyler Cowen seemingly reads every new book published in English each year (and I’m not even sure about the “seemingly”), a rave review from him directs my finger from its holster to Amazon’s 1-Click trigger. This week Cowen is on about The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham. From the review:
What can I say? I have to count this tome as one of the best history books I have read, ever.
Having just finished, coincidentially, Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy (more on that soon), I *am* looking for another book to read.
Religion and science sitting in a tree, c-o-o-p-e-r-a-t-i-n-g
Writing in the New York Times this weekend, Robert Wright attempts to reconcile religion and science. The middle ground is the “built-in” moral sense of our universe, in that the universe builds and rewards organisms that cooperate with one another.
I bring good news! These two warring groups have more in common than they realize. And, no, it isn’t just that they’re both wrong. It’s that they’re wrong for the same reason. Oddly, an underestimation of natural selection’s creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic.
If both groups were to truly accept that power, the landscape might look different. Believers could scale back their conception of God’s role in creation, and atheists could accept that some notions of “higher purpose” are compatible with scientific materialism. And the two might learn to get along.
This is essentially the subject of the last chapter or two of Wright’s The Evolution of God, the only part of this excellent book that I didn’t quite buy into, even though I’ve been thinking about his conclusion quite a bit since finishing the book.
Must Pop Words
Boggle + Tetris/Snood = Must Pop Words. This is difficult for poor typists like me. (via vsl)
Immaculate innings
Immaculate innings are those innings in baseball games where the pitcher strikes out all three batters with nine pitches. It’s only happened 42 times in the history of the game. David Archer is tracking the frequency of such innings; they are getting more common.
As one friend pointed out, the best explanation for the increase in recent decades appears to be the advent of the modern reliever, especially the flame-throwing, one inning closer (more immaculate innings have been thrown in the 9th inning* (eight) than in any other inning), though starters — such as Burnett — have also been throwing them with impressive frequency.
Update: See also three-pitch innings. (via noah brier)
Pitchfork’s songs of the decade
As part of their review of the music of the 2000s, Pitchfork listed the top 500 tracks of the past decade. Here are the top 10:
10. Arcade Fire, “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”
9. Animal Collective, “My Girls”
8. Radiohead, “Idioteque”
7. Missy Elliott, “Get Ur Freak On”
6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Maps”
5. Daft Punk, “One More Time”
4. Beyonce [ft. Jay-Z], “Crazy in Love”
3. M.I.A. [ft. Bun B and Rich Boy], “Paper Planes (Diplo Remix)”
2. LCD Soundsystem, “All My Friends”
1. OutKast, “B.O.B.”
Be sure to click through for the extensive explanations. It would easy to nitpick specific selections, but that’s a pretty good top 10.
Gorilla vs. Bear also shared their top songs and albums of the decade.
The Line Diet
The Line Diet (good name!) is a web-based version of the Steve Ward Diet. There is also an (unrelated) iPhone app. From the site’s creator:
About 4 weeks ago, I stumbled across a story on Kottke’s Blog about the “Steve Ward Diet”. The idea seemed ingeniously simple to me… so I started my chart the same day. I’ve lost almost 8 pounds since then.
Update: There’s an Excel spreadsheet version as well.
Attention Deconcentration
It’s a bummer that Alec Wilkinson’s article on free diving isn’t available online (except for NYer subscribers)…it’s fascinating and right up the alley of the relaxed concentration/deliberate practice enthusiast. One of the two divers profiled uses a technique called attention deconcentration to govern her body and mind as she dives.
To still the unbidden apprehensions that might interfere with her dive — what she describes as “the subjective feeling of empty lungs at the deep” — Molchanova uses a technique that she refers to as “attention deconcentration.” (“They get it from the military,” Ericson said.) Molchanova told me, “It means distribution of the whole field of attention — you try to feel everything simultaneously. This condition creates an empty consciousness, so the bad thoughts don’t exist.”
“Is it difficult to learn?”
“Yes, it’s difficult. I teach it in my university. It’s a technique from ancient warriors — it was used by samurai — but it was developed by a Russian scientist, Oleg Bakhtiyarov, as a psychological-state-management technique for people sho do very monotonous jobs.”
I asked if it was like meditation.
“To some degree, except meditation means you’re completely free, but if you’re in the sea at depth you will have to be focussed, or it will get bad. What you do to start learning is you focus on the edges, not the center of things, as if you were looking at a screen. Basically, all the time I am diving, I have an empty consciousness. I have a kind of melody going through my mind that keeps me going, but otherwise I am completely not in my mind.”
I found only one other reference online to attention deconcentration, an article on free diving written by Natalia Molchanova herself. In it, she talks about the three types of attention deconcentration: visual, aural, and tactile.
Rising from the depth, it is important to constantly scan your condition to prevent shallow water black-out, which can occur without any discomfort sensations. Somatic attention deconcentration appears to be extremely useful in this situation. Somatic AD implies attention distribution on the whole volume of the body and allows noticing tiny changes of organism state.
There is one more kind of AD — aural attention deconcentration. It is not so effective in the water, but it helps preparing to the dive and not to be distracted by judge’s countdown.
It’s interesting that both the attention deconcentration and flow techniques are designed to get the practitioner to basically the same place (i.e. ready to perform difficult tasks) from opposite directions.
Somewhat related, a reader (thx, martin) recently sent in a link to The Game, a mind game with an unusual objective:
The Game is an ongoing mind game, the objective of which is to avoid thinking about The Game itself. Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss, which, according to the rules of The Game, must then be announced. How to win The Game is not defined in the rules; players can only attempt to avoid losing for as long as possible. The Game has been described alternately as pointless and infuriating, or as a challenging game that is fun to play.
Update: Sad news. Natalia Molchanova failed to surface after a dive in the Mediterranean Sea and is presumed dead.
Update: Wilkinson wrote about Molchanova’s presumed death shortly after she disappeared.
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