Tom’s Wordpress Blog

Here’s a philosophy that I can get behind from the Cool Tools listing for the book Lifting Heavy Things.

As stated in the stagehand’s axiom: “Never lift what you can drag, never drag what you can roll, never roll what you can leave.” Creativity germinates in indolence, and the cleverest people are often the laziest: they are always looking for an easier way. The easiest way is often the simplest, most direct, and the best way.

Need I say more?

I went looking for an office chair recently. Off I went to a store with a large selection, and sit-tested several of them. Some were bad, some OK, but none “just right.” I was about to settle for one of the OK ones when I spotted a very odd-looking chair off to the side. As I took a seat in it, it kind of whispered to me “just right.” And it was.

The odd-looking chair turned out to have an odd-sounding name, too - HAG Capisco Saddle Chair. I had not experienced the combination of support and comfort the excentric appearing chair offered. Mostly, if chairs were comfortable, they didn’t offer much support. Or if the offered support, they could be more comfortable.

The main thing I’ve found so agreeable about this chair is the way it gets me over my sit bones, making my whole skeleton available to support me in sitting and in movement. Always good to let your bones earn their keep, according to chair expert Galen Cranz in a 2004 interview:

You never want flesh to carry the load, bones should. Deep padding doesn’t allow your fluids to enter and exit your cells properly and you have a build-up of waste material, which is fatiguing. Moreover, I believe one of the reasons we have so much cellulite in this country is because our flesh takes on this load-bearing function that it’s not designed for.

This is great for doing office work, but really helps when using it in my Feldenkrais practice.There, it’s vitally important to offer support to a client, and that’s not easy if the practitioner isn’t supported in the first place. The Capisco helps. (And I understand HAG also offers the saddle treatment in a stool, but I’ve not experienced it.) Along those lines, I find the Capisco greatly aiding the transition from sitting to standing, so important for lessening strain on the frame as you repeat this motion so many times. This is especially good for tall people, who often find themselves feeling like they are sitting in kindergarden chairs. (Try it sometime.) Cranz again:

But, posturally speaking, we need environments that support change and movement. A good chair allows you to sit in the perch position, which is a stance halfway between sitting and standing — a “sit-stand” where the pelvis rolls forward, the lumbar curve is preserved and the legs are in an oblique angle in relation to the spine. This position promotes circulation.

The Capisco is not pretty, and it’s not cheap. But according to Cranz, it’s not the only better-sitting alternative:

There are several ways to do it [see illustrations]. People can use their kitchen counter or island so they can be in the sit-stand position to eat, do bills or work. For something inexpensive, you can buy a plain wooden stool that puts you in the perch position. One chair called the “Capisco” has a saddle seat with a space cut out for the thighs so that they can drop away. Rockers and lounge chairs, like the one you’re on, are also good. When you sit in a regular chair, you round your back into this big, C-shaped hump. Lose your lumbar curve [the arch between the tailbone and middle-back] and you get slipped disks.

I’m glad that I decided to try the ugly duckling of the chair store’s showroom. It’s turned out to be a real swan.

Technorati Profile

The Mind and the Brain had a big impact on me. In that book, Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley made a convincing case that experience itself can change patterns in the brain, and that in turn can help change even troublesome behaviors. Moshe Feldenkrais had theorized the same thing much earlier in developing his method of somatic education. Practitioners of the Feldenkrais Method see how quickly change can come in themselves and in their clients.

A recent research project reported on in A new discovery shows that the brain rewires itself following an experience also caught my attention.

In their samples, the rewiring process was occurring continuously at a slow pace. By exciting the sample with glutamate, they found that the rate increased markedly. This suggests that with a strong new experience, the brain accelerates its reconfiguration process, allowing new connections to be made, tested, and strengthened, and weaker ones removed so that the brain is quickly better adapted to the new situation

The idea that experience changes the brain seems more like commonsense these days than science. That wasn’t always the case, so these sorts of research projects have their importance in the science world, and hopefully can pave the way towards changing to better brain function for those who’ve gotten damaged or diseased.

So experience can change a brain. But what about the brain it’s changing? Does that brain need to have any disposition toward a particular type of experience? In other words, does talent matter? Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin weighs in in a Wired magazine interview:

There’s no evidence that (talented people) have a different brain structure or different wiring than the rest of us initially, although we do know that becoming an expert in anything — like chess or race-car driving or journalism — does change the brain and creates circuitry that’s more efficient at doing what you’re an expert at.

What there might be is a genetic or neural predisposition toward things like patience and eye-hand coordination. (On the other hand), you can be born with a physiology that gives you a pleasant-sounding voice, but that doesn’t guarantee you’ll have a career as a singer.

Experience changes things in all sorts of brains. But do you have to experience the experience for it to make a difference. Feldenkrais would have said yes.

I’ve been playing around with Curio for a few weeks now, and I’m deciding that I really like. More of a freeform layout/notepad/doodler thingy, it really defies description. But then again, I’m discovering that’s how I work, in an almost completely nonlinear fashion. Zengobi seems to position Curio as a kind of design notebook or project manager. But I’m finding that it works for research and writing. Sure, it could use some refinements, like not truncating really long pieces of text.

Best of all, Zengobi made an unrefusable offer a couple of weeks ago. It gave away copies of the basic edition for free. And there is also a generous 60-day trial of the other versions for no cost. I’m going to keep plugging away with it and seeing what other cool things emerge from using it.

I once went to a 3D movie. That is, when you donned a special pain of glasses included in the price of a ticket, the images on the movie screen seemed to appear with a special depth of field that gave them a 3D quality. The illusion worked because the images were photographed by two separate cameras, from minutely different angles — the same way each of a person’s two eyes might do when looking at the image sans camera. The glasses, one lens green and one red, “decoded” the illusion by blocking the image meant for the other eye. This sort of 3D imaging was fun, but the need for special photography and cumbersome glasses to decode the images have largely relegated it to a historical curiosity. But impressive moving 3D images are probably coming back soon, without those funky glasses, maybe even into your own home, eventually. Perhaps even more impressively, the 3D isn’t coming from a movie projector, but from an LCD TV screen. Even more impressive, you can view the illusion from any viewing angle, not just sitting right in front of the screen. The apparent magic comes from Philips Electronics in their WOWvx technology.

So how does 3D TV work. Well, according to a write up in Wired News, it’s done with a kind of high tech version of smoke and mirrors.

Philips’ WOWvx technology places tiny lenses over each of the millions of red, green and blue sub pixels that make up an LCD or plasma screen. The lenses cause each sub pixel to project light at one of nine angles fanning out in front of the display. A processor in the TV generates nine slightly different views corresponding to the different angles. From almost any location, a viewer catches a different image in each eye. Providing so many views is key to the dramatic results.

Though the stunning images can now be viewed with the naked eye, that still leaves the problem of where the images will come from. (The images still need to be photographed from the slightly different angles to give the full effect.) But there’s already one source of 3D images ripe for picking, modern video games. Many of those games generate 3D objects inside their programs and then have to render them into 2D for plain old monitors. Philips has stuff that can take the 3D info and pop it out on their nifty new screens.

And there’s also the possibility that original production will gear up:

The company also has plans for video. The ultimate hope is that studios will produce more 3-D content, like the recent 3-D version of Sony Pictures’ Monster House that screened in 162 U.S. theaters. But Philips is developing software to convert standard video to 3-D by analyzing movement to determine the original depth position of people and objects.

In the immediate future, though, the technology will come to us as advertising from retailers and from at least one casino. Special glasses optional.

Sometimes you gotta give away one thing to make money on another thing. Think “giving away the razors to sell the blades.” I don’t normally think of this in the high tech area; who gives away hardware just to sell software? But Google is no ordinary company, so it’s not surprising that they are messing around with the idea of giving away internet access in hopes of getting the free subscribers to view ads.

This is going on right in Google’s backyard, in Mountain View, California. According to Look Homeward Google the company is offering the biggest free wifi access going.

About 72,000 people reside in Mountain View, an 11.5-square-mile city located about 35 miles south of San Francisco. As the home to major companies like Google and VeriSign, Mountain View’s daytime population can swell above 100,000

There are, of course, other communities with free wifi, or planning it. But some of them will charge for the service. And it’s hard to imagine any other network builder with as deep pockets as Google:

Google invested about $1 million to build the Mountain View network and expects to have to spend far less than that each year to keep it running. The financial commitment represents a pittance for Google, which has nearly $10 billion in cash.

Though you can’t beat the price, the offer does have a few drawbacks. The network’s speed is about the same as DSL, but slower than cable. And users may have to buy a wifi modem for up to $170. Still, it’s a pretty interesting idea.