13 Feet of Snow
You can check out some more (and horribly exposed) pictures in my Flickr Gallery.
Amy and I took Sally up to Steven's Pass to play in the snow on Saturday since both she and I had never seen that much snow before. Snow in the untouched areas was piled twice my height and there were drifts in excess of 25 feet. Supposedly they got another 3 feet last night while the lowlands got over and inch and a half of rain.
I've never skied, grew up in Ohio and haven't spent any winters in Colorado so this was more snow than I'd ever seen in my life.
Sally loved it though the first time she went to climb the white hill she completely disappeared and jumped back out like she'd been electrocuted, lol.
Have Sex, Speak Well
Despite my acute shyness, I consider myself a good public and group speaker. I often get asked for tips on how to speak more effectively or how to prevent debilitating pre-speak nervousness. Well, I think I can throw all that old advice away and provide one simple tip. Forget pretending you are talking to one person or concentrating on a single point in the audience because having sex is apparently the best way to calm your nerves shortly before giving a speech or presentation to a large group according to Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of Paisley, UK.
Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of Paisley, UK, compared the impact of different sexual activities on blood pressure when a person later experiences acute stress. For a fortnight, 24 women and 22 men kept diaries of how often they engaged in penile-vaginal intercourse (PVI), masturbation or partnered sexual activity excluding intercourse. After, the volunteers underwent a stress test involving public speaking and mental arithmetic out loud.
Volunteers who'd had PVI but none of the other kinds of sex were least stressed, and their blood pressure returned to normal faster than those who'd only masturbated or had non-coital sex. Those who abstained had the highest blood-pressure response to stress.
So if you want to kick ass at your next big corporate meeting, make sure it's penetrative sex - the magic vanishes if you pursue other forms of sexual gratification.
I do have some problems with the testing methodology (more than just not participating as a test subject) but I thought it was interesting news anyway.
(via The New Scientist)
Happy Birthday Macintosh
On this date in 1984, Apple told us why their new product wouldn't be like 1984 in one of the most famous commercials of all time aired during Super Bowl XVIII.
(click image to view full 13.13 MB Quicktime commercial)
Original Macintosh Specs:
- introduced January 24, 1984 at $2,495; discontinued on October 1, 1985
- works with any system from 1.0 through 3.3 (System 3.2 and Finder 5.3)
- CPU: 8 MHz 68000
- performance: 0.8 (relative to SE); 0.7 MIPS
- ROM: 64 KB
- RAM: 128 KB
- display: 9" b&w 512 x 342 pixels
- keyboard attached via coiled telephone-like cable
- mouse attached via DB-9 connector
- serial ports: DB-9 modem and printer ports
- floppy: 400 KB single sided
- floppy connector on back of computer
- physical size (HxWxD): 13.6" x 9.6" x 10.9"
- weight: 16.5 lb.
- PRAM battery: 4.5V PX 21 (a.k.a. Eveready 523, ANSI 1306AP, IEC 5LR50), discontinued
- power supply: 60W
- model no.: M0001
- Gestalt ID: 1
- addressing: 24-bit only
Now that I've drunk the Apple Kool-Aid, a happy birthday is definitely in order.
Waking Up When Your Body Says It’s Ready
(Ok, I wouldn't wake up that much but that's not the point of this post...)
Now that I have the insomnia problem artificially and (most likely) temporarily, I've been thinking a lot about my sleep cycle and wake time. Waking up feeling refreshed is not a matter of how much you sleep, It’s about waking up in the correct stage of your sleep cycle. Here’s a good article explaining sleep cycle in detail. In short, if you want to wake up feeling refreshed, the aXbo Sleep Phase Alarm Clock claims it can help.
To use it, simply put on the wireless wristband, set the time you need to wake up no matter what, and the aXbo alarm clock will attempt to detect the right time to wake you up, within a specified time window (e.g. 30 minutes).
The obvious advantage over similar products like SleepTracker, is that the alarm won’t get muffled when you tuck your hands under the pillow. The aXbo also runs on mains and/or batteries, eliminating the problem of the alarm running out of juice in the middle of the night. And as a bonus, the aXbo also comes with 3 sleep-inducing melodies which automatically stop when aXbo notices that you’re asleep. I'd like a little more detail about how the device detects your sleep cycle accurately (it can't do that measuring pulse or blood pressure) but it sounds like a kick ass idea and something I'd be willing to try.
(via Engadget)
Rat Befriends Snake
Zookeepers at Tokyo’s Mutsugoro Okoku zoo presented the hamster — whose name [Gohan] is a tasty rice dish in Japanese — to Aochan as a snack in October, after the snake refused to eat frozen mice.
But instead of indulging, Aochan decided to make friends with the furry rodent, according to keeper Kazuya Yamamoto. The pair have shared a cage since.
A more interesting picture would be that of an engineering manager befriending a sales manager. At least the sales manager is represented here though I'm not sure which is which...
:)
(via MSNBC's Animal Tracks)
