Category: fun things

The Slack group messaging system has become an integral part of work life (and even social life) for millions of people. It’s a feature of the modern business landscape (and even, increasingly, a less-creepy alternative to Facebook). But how can you make the best use of this powerful, 21st-century tool to both get your job done and have fun? In Take Control of Slack, my colleague Glenn Fleishman addresses every major type of Slack user—new, experienced, and even reluctant—with concrete advice on how Slack can make your work and personal life better. It shows you things you’ll never learn by reading the online documentation or simply poking around, based on Glenn’s years of experience in multiple Slack teams.

This book, like all Take Control titles, comes as an ebook, and you can download any combination of formats—PDF, EPUB, and/or Kindle’s Mobipocket format—so you can read it on pretty much any computer, smartphone, tablet, or ebook reader. The cover price is $14.99, but as an Interesting Thing of the Day reader, you can buy it this week for 30% off, or just $10.49.

San Francisco’s Theatre of Sound

In the years when I lived in San Francisco, one of my favorite destinations for a night out was a little-known local institution called Audium. It is the world’s only venue devoted exclusively to the performance of pure sound. Although I haven’t been there in years, Audium is still very much in business and, as far as I can tell, little changed since my last visit, delivering the same sorts of performances it has for roughly the last five decades.

Audium is a unique and highly specialized theater. The room where the performance takes place is actually a building-within-a-building, completely isolated from outside sounds. About four dozen chairs are arranged in three concentric circles, with 169 speakers of all shapes and sizes located around the room. Some speakers are suspended from the ceiling, or hidden behind the walls, under chairs, or beneath the floating floor. You’re completely surrounded by speakers, so all seats are equally good. It’s almost like being in a planetarium, except there’s nothing to see—the performances take place in complete darkness. You come to Audium to experience a total immersion in sound.

Sounding Out an Idea

The idea for Audium was conceived in the late 1950s, when electronic music was beginning to appear. A pair of classically trained, professional musicians became interested in exploring the role space played in composition and performance. Not content with two channels of sound, they wanted to know what it would be like for sound to move all the way around, above, and below the audience—using space itself as an instrument. Composer Stan Shaff and his partner, equipment designer Doug McEachern, began a long collaboration. Shaff conceptualized the sounds and effects he wanted to achieve, and McEachern figured out how technology could bring those ideas to life.

In the early 1960s the first Audium concerts were held at universities and museums in San Francisco. In 1965, the first Audium theater was created, and after a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1972, construction began on the current building. Since it opened in 1975, the current Audium at 1616 Bush St. has given weekly performances. Shaff still sits behind the console, and McEachern updated the equipment numerous times over the years.

Echo of the Past

Everything about Audium is analog—there’s not a CD player, computer, or digital effects processor in sight. Considering the vintage of the technology, the sound quality is startlingly pure. On a good night, with the controls handled expertly, there simply isn’t any hiss or buzz. Every sound is bright and vibrant. Shaff said he gave a special concert in the early 2000s for a group of engineers from Dolby, who were impressed by Audium’s use of technology. It makes Surround Sound seem downright pedestrian. Still, the engineers said, composers and soundtrack designers would have to learn entirely new skills to be able to create sounds for an audio environment as rich as Audium.

Visiting Audium is like stepping back in time. The building’s architecture, décor, and the performance itself are pure 1970s. When you arrive, you buy your ticket at the box office (cash only, of course) and proceed into the foyer. The first thing you notice, appropriately enough, is sound. There’s a faint but steady drone that sounds like a discordant organ. As you adjust to the sound, you also adjust to dim lighting and begin to study the abstract sculptures and prints lining the walls. Meanwhile, hidden speakers on every surface play seemingly random sound effects—voices, waves, ticking clocks. On one wall, a ghostly green projection of a clock face shows the current time. The total effect is one of intriguing eeriness. But it’s eerie in a very particular way: you begin to notice, almost subliminally, that the entire experience reflects the sensibilities of a bygone era. Everything around you must have seemed extremely modern when it was built, but there’s a complete absence of any artifacts, sounds, or scents of the post-computer age—right down to the powdered soap in the lavatories. But the unselfconsciously anachronistic setting is quite endearing.

Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain

Let me tell you about my most recent visit to Audium. At precisely 8:30 P.M., Stan Shaff pulled aside a black curtain and introduced himself to the 20 or so members of the evening’s audience. After a few words of explanation about the performance, he led the group through a dark, twisty hall called a sound labyrinth and into the performance space. As the lights went down, Shaff seated himself behind a customized console of knobs and levers in a small control booth. He then began what he refers to as sculpting sound. While taped recordings of all sorts of sounds played, Shaff manipulated their positions, speed, and volume in real time. So although the content was fixed, the performance itself was dynamic, changing significantly from night to night.

The sounds we heard were dreamlike, evoking unexpected memories and emotions. There might be children playing, an airplane taking off, a flushing toilet, or a marching band. Interspersed with the natural sounds were the textures of old analog synthesizers—not melodic for the most part, but aleatory—sometimes playfully so, other times harshly serious. The show was not a musical work in the conventional sense, but rather a sound performance in the best tradition of experimental twentieth-century composers such as Arnold Schönberg and John Cage.

Fermata

The show lasted about an hour and a quarter, including a brief intermission. As the sound faded away and the lights returned, the audience simply sat there, silently, for several minutes. For some, perhaps it was simply a matter of waiting for a cue that the show was really over and it was time to leave. But I think most of the audience was still savoring the experience, pondering the strange sensations and impressions of this unique performance. I left pleasantly disoriented, having to readjust to the sounds of the city with their conventional directionality.

Audium performances are held every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night promptly at 8:30. Audium does virtually no advertising, so Shaff never knows what to expect. On some nights, he said, the show sells out; on others, it’s just him and his wife. But he’s quick to point out that it’s not a commercial venture so success isn’t measured in numbers. What is important is his unique art and the impressions it leaves on the audience—including, he hopes, future generations of composers who will take up the torch of omnidimensional sound sculpture.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on April 14, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on October 10, 2004.

Taking back the dinner table

I enjoy my rare opportunities to shop at upscale supermarkets like Whole Foods Market, or here in our neighborhood of San Diego, Stehly Farms Market. In contrast to our everyday grocery stores, the produce is usually fresher and healthier-looking, more foods are available in bulk, and everything has the appearance of quality and wholesomeness. I get excited about loading up my shopping cart, preparing to stock our pantry with food we could actually feel good about eating.

Then, of course, I see how much all this is going to cost—a small fortune. For people on as tight a budget as we are, that really hurts. Leaving aside the political correctness of buying free-range, genetically unmodified, grass-fed, hormone-free, pesticide-free, organic whatever, many consumers find that the price of those attributes overshadows the quality and other virtues by a significant amount. When I see a gallon of organic milk sitting right next to a gallon of regular milk that costs half as much, I know that I’d be paying for a concept much more than what I would taste on my cereal.

I say all that to put today’s topic into context. The Slow Food movement is, as you might guess, an attempt to promote the opposite of fast food—to emphasize quality, nutrition, flavor, variety, sustainability, and many other worthwhile things. As someone who loves good food and who despairs at the depths of blandness and laziness to which our society has sunk, this is a concept I truly wish I could get behind. But let me give away the punch line: I think it’s missing a few crucial ingredients.

The Fast-Growing Slow Movement

An Italian journalist named Carlo Petrini started the Slow Food movement in 1986, when he saw the first McDonald’s being built in Rome. Petrini worried that smaller food producers would be pushed out of business by giant international corporations, that local specialty foods would be replaced by dull burgers that taste the same everywhere in the world, and that attention to flavor and quality would disappear as cultural values. At the same time, he felt that fast food threatened family and community by erasing time spent together eating, talking, and building relationships. The Slow Food movement aims to reverse all that.

Now boasting more than 100,000 members in over 150 countries, the Slow Food movement is organized into local chapters called convivia. Each convivium holds seminars, tastings, visits to local food producers, and other events. Slow Food practices include using fresh, whole ingredients rather than processed foods; purchasing ingredients from small local or regional suppliers, and where possible, directly from the source; supporting ecologically responsible, sustainable food production, and promoting gastronomic culture—including social interaction around a dinner table. “Slow” food is not necessarily food that takes a long time to prepare or eat, though using fewer processed ingredients and paying more attention to how food is cooked and eaten will typically result in longer meals. But the point of the movement is less about time than it is about quality.

Let Them Eat Slowly

I believe deeply in long, leisurely meals made with fresh, local ingredients and enjoyed in the relaxing company of friends. Every time I’ve experienced such a meal, I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly. And if every single meal could be that way, I’d be thrilled. It’s just that…I don’t have an extra hour, or two, or three every day to cook and eat; my schedule is full already. And I can’t afford to buy fresh, organic, locally produced food all the time. The problem is not that I need to be convinced of how worthy this cause is; the problem is that my lifestyle and income make it impossible for me to participate fully. If I had a job that paid exceptionally well and also gave me loads of spare time, I’d be all over slow food, but however much I might desire such a thing, it’s just not that simple. And that’s speaking as someone squarely in the middle class; to low-income individuals with even less time and less money than I have, slow food would probably make about as much sense as a gold-plated toilet.

That this should be the case is a sad, sad commentary on what modern western culture considers acceptable. And OK, it’s not the fault of the Slow Food movement. Their goals are nothing if not admirable. But in this day and age, especially in North America, there are prerequisites to slow food—namely, leisure time and disposable income. The Slow Food movement can’t tell you how to achieve these things, but until you do, you’re outside their target audience.

In all fairness, Slow Food is not an all-or-nothing affair. No one is insisting that every meal and every grocery purchase has to live up to these standards, or that one must never consume fast food. Surely the mere awareness of the issues and the options facing us all as consumers can lead to small but meaningful changes. And for those who are constantly busy out of habit rather than necessity, the virtues of Slow Food may be an enticement to adopt a healthier lifestyle. All the same, I’d feel a lot more enthusiastic about joining a movement dedicated to shorter work weeks, higher pay, and less stress for everyone, even if it came with fries and a Coke.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on March 2, 2005.

Image credit: Jan-Tore Egge [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Rescuing the rescuers

Back in October 2004, I read an article with some shocking and disheartening news: the Swiss monks responsible for breeding St. Bernards since at least the 17th century were getting out of the dog business. The last 18 dogs living in the alpine hospice where the breed originated were up for sale. At that time, I didn’t know anything about St. Bernards except that they were known as rescue dogs and usually pictured wearing a little barrel or cask on their collars. It had not occurred to me that there was some particular base from which their rescue operations had traditionally begun, or an actual Saint Bernard after whom the dogs had been named. But as I read about the imminent end of the monks’ caretaking operations, I began wondering about the real story behind these dogs. Did they ever really perform rescues? How did the monks figure in? And what was the deal with those little casks? Glass of brandy in hand, I began my research.

Anyone for a Walk?

The story begins in the year 962, when Bernard of Menthon founded a monastery and hospice in the Swiss alps. To the north is the Swiss canton of Valais; to the south, the Valle d’Aosta in Italy. It was not for seclusion that Bernard chose this particular spot, at a snowy pass some 8,000 feet (2500m) high. The pass was often used by pilgrims making their way from France into Italy to visit Rome, and was known as a treacherous and forbidding spot. Bernard’s idea was that the hospice could provide shelter for the pilgrims and aid to those who became lost or injured on their journey.

By the time Bernard was canonized in 1681, the hospice he had founded centuries earlier had begun keeping dogs, which the monks found helpful in carrying out their rescue missions. Over many years, the monks bred a type of dog ideally suited to both the weather and rescue work—a huge, energetic, friendly, and faultlessly loyal breed related to the mastiff, with thick fur and keen senses of smell and hearing. And from the early 1700s, when the oldest surviving records were made, until the late 20th century, the dogs assisted in rescuing about 2,500 people. The dogs were first referred to informally as “St. Bernards” in 1833, and the name became official in 1880.

Dog Days

In the 1950s, however, helicopters appeared on the scene, and technology began increasingly to fill the dogs’ role. The last time a dog helped with a rescue was around 1975. For decades afterward, the monks—whose number eventually dwindled to four—continued to raise the dogs. But St. Bernards are costly to feed and require a great deal of time to care for; the monks felt that since the dogs were no longer assisting them, their limited time and money would be better spent serving human beings. And so, in late 2004, the monks put the dogs up for sale.

Although from the monks’ perspective this was a reasonable and utilitarian decision, it prompted a tremendous public outcry. Those most vocally opposed to the change included local merchants, dependent as they are on the business of thousands of tourists who come to the area each summer only to see the famous dogs. In less than two months, the matter was resolved. A couple of Swiss philanthropists donated the equivalent of over US$4 million to buy the dogs and set up a nonprofit organization called the Barry Foundation) to continue the breeding program and care for the dogs. The St. Bernards spend their winters in a kennel in the nearby city of Martigny but return to the hospice each summer to visit the monks. A museum honoring the dogs was built in Martigny and opened in 2006.

As for the barrel on the collar, it first appeared in a painting by artist Edwin Landseer called “Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveler” in 1820; Landseer was only 17 at the time. The cask was thought to contain brandy and quickly caught on in the public imagination, though the monks and their dogs never actually used such a thing. (Alcohol, after all, could hasten dehydration—not a good treatment for a snowbound traveler.) Nowadays, that little barrel could prove more useful as a carrying case for a GPS receiver and a cell phone, giving the next generation of St. Bernards updated rescue capabilities more suitable to the modern age. And, if the helicopter is on its way anyhow, maybe a wee nip of brandy wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on February 3, 2005.

Image credit: Pixabay

Finding your stuff a new home, painlessly

As I write this, it has been over six years since my wife and I last moved, making this the longest we’ve ever lived together in the same place. I’ve enjoyed not having to deal with the hassles of moving, but painful though it may be, moving always forces me to get rid of stuff I don’t need and eliminate vast amounts of clutter. Having lived here for so long (and with two kids, no less), we haven’t had that safety valve, and our supply of unwanted stuff has grown to an unmanageable size. The usual answer to too much stuff is fill up the garage or basement or whatever, and when all your storage space is gone, you rent a storage space. Of course, you can sell or give away your unneeded stuff, but finding a good home for it, and transporting the stuff to the new home, is often more trouble than it’s worth.

The excess stuff we have is, for the most part, perfectly good—just no longer needed. Random small appliances and electronic gadgets. Lots of books we’ve read and won’t read again. Clothes the kids have outgrown. Extra dishes from when we had time to throw dinner parties. The list goes on. These kinds of things would be too much bother to sell on eBay, and they’d make little or no money at a garage sale. But we don’t want to simply throw them away, either, because they could be useful to someone. But who needs these things? Freecycling, or free recycling, has the answer.

Yours for the Asking

The idea of freecycling is simplicity itself. You sign up online to join one or more groups in your local region. When you have something to give away, you post a message to the group, which appears on the group’s webpage and may also be delivered by email, according to each member’s preferences. Anyone else in that local group who wants it sends you a reply—and arranges transportation, if necessary. There are no trades or barters, and no strings attached. Everything is completely free, period. And, of course, if you need something that hasn’t already been posted on the list, you can ask for it. Maybe you’ve moved into a new apartment that doesn’t have an ice cube bin, and someone else happens to have one, but didn’t think to list it. Or maybe it’s something larger or stranger, like a wheelbarrow, a rocking chair, or a 50-foot Ethernet cable. You never know: someone just might have what you need. As long as you can pick it up yourself, it’s yours.

Freecycling began in Tucson, Arizona in May 2003 as a way to help reduce the quantity of waste sent to landfills. Since then, it has spread to many thousands of local groups in more than 110 countries. From what I’ve read, though, it sounds like most participants aren’t doing it for the environment. They’re doing it because it’s a convenient and free way to get rid of things you don’t need or acquire things you do. If it happens to keep landfills from overflowing too, hey, that’s a lovely bonus.

Free As in Beer, Not As in Speech

But all is not peace and goodwill in the world of freecycling. For starters, there’s the term Freecycle itself, which was at the center of a trademark dispute a number of years ago, as the organizers of The Freecycle Network tried to prevent other organizations from using the term, and also fought against the use of freecycling as a verb. The organization lost that trademark battle in the United States in 2010, although the name freecycle.org is now trademarked.

Be that as it may, one result of the earlier, heavy-handed efforts to protect the trademark was the creation of several other free recycling networks that perform virtually the same function but were separate simply to avoid having to conform to rules they perceived as excessively strict and unreasonable. All of this makes the process more confusing for the people who want to use it. It’s a pity—and a great irony—that a notion built on the free exchange of stuff for the benefit of the environment was hampered by needlessly self-imposed legal restrictions.

Growing Freely

But whether under the auspices of The Freecycle Network, as part of another organization, or informally among members of a school, church, or other group, the freecycling concept is a great idea—sort of like Craigslist, but only for free stuff. In some urban areas, I’m sure you could furnish an entire apartment in a week or two by freecycling, not only saving money but doing a great favor to the people who need to get rid of their stuff.

Increasingly, too, there’s been quite a backlash against consumerism and its associated clutter, as people begin to realize that they’re actually happier with less stuff than with more. Even though I don’t buy a lot of merchandise, as I look around my home, I realize that I’ve only used, or even thought about, maybe 10% of its contents in the last year. Do I really need the other 90%? When I find possessions that no longer enrich my life in any way, at least I can let them enrich someone else’s life.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on May 7, 2007.

Image credit: Pxhere

Alien spacecraft hidden in plain sight?

One summer, I was driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles along California’s Interstate 5. I’d left the Bay Area mid-morning, and after five and a half hours of driving on the long, straight highway through the great central valley, I was approaching the modest range of mountains that separates that valley from southern California. I was happy to be within an hour’s drive of my destination so early in the afternoon, and had already started to plan the hours of evening I had gained by leaving early and not stopping to eat. It wasn’t going to go the way I was planning, though.

I got stopped by a cloud.

Within an hour’s drive of the mountains, I started noticing that something was—well, it looked like something was balanced on top of the nearest mountain. As I got closer it started becoming obvious that a giant spacecraft was poised over the mountain, maybe even tethered to it like an airship to a mooring post. It was colored as you’d expect a cloud formation to be, but had sharp, clean edges, and a precise layered structure. More ominously, I could see that as time passed, and my view of the mountain stayed more or less the same, the nearby clouds were moving but the “thing” wasn’t.

They Want You to Think It’s a Cloud

Of course, I always knew it was a cloud, of some kind. But the closer I got to it, the harder it became to accept that it was a natural phenomenon. It was elegant, delicate. There was an architecture to it. And it wasn’t moving. Because of this I was compelled to buy a disposable camera and wait at the little “last chance” gas station at the foot of the mountain until sunset rolled around and started throwing wild colors of light onto the…the…

“They’re called ‘plate clouds,’” said a waitress who stepped out of the diner to smoke. She’d seen it once before, in the same spot, about the same shape, “but not as big a deal as this time.” She didn’t know how they were formed, or why they stayed frozen like that for so long, making the illusion of solidity so eerily real.

Giant Lentils in the Sky

Lenticularis (from the same root word that gives us “lentil”), or “lenticular clouds,” are a cloud species occasionally found over mountain peaks, or on the leeward side of a mountain. As wind forces air up one side of a mountain, the air cools, and the moisture within that air condenses into visible drops. As soon as the air begins to descend down the other side of the mountain the moisture in the air warms, and is no longer visible. What appears to be a stationary cloud is actually the condensation point of a constantly moving stream of air, and the layers within the apparent cloud represent “waves” within the stream. It doesn’t happen all the time, or even often.

It happens, for example, when the upper air is stable, meaning lenticular clouds are a good indication that it’s not about to rain. But the event can grow. Altocumulus lenticularis (the formation that I saw), an already unusual occurrence, can grow into the legitimately rare Stratocumulus lenticularis, whose elements are larger yet, and must either be so spectacular as to stop hearts within a hundred-mile radius, or actually be so large that they cover the sky and thus go unnoticed.

Other rare cousins in the sky lentil family are those lenticular clouds that form absent any orographic features (mountains). Large bodies of ice surrounded by warmer ground can cause the same mysterious, unmoving “stack of pancakes” formations, though they will not have the intriguing concave underside, caused by the updraft from the mountain, that made mine so artificial-looking. Lenticularis is also the species of cloud known for “irisation,” an effect of iridescence at the sharp edges of the “plates.” I don’t recall having noticed this quality in the formation I saw.

Of course, I might just be inadvertently continuing the grand cover-up, by describing these as meteorological events with plausible causes. Maybe they really are alien spacecraft. Either way, I’m keeping a camera in my car from now on.

Editor’s note: Here are some full-size photos of plate clouds provided by the author: Photo 1 | Photo 2 | Photo 3 | Photo 4.

Guest author Bill Bain is a painter and commercial illustrator who, having toured the world, has correctly chosen San Francisco as the place to live.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on March 28, 2005.

Image credit: Bill Bain

The magical music of the brain

Regular readers may recall an article here about brain machines—electronic devices that use flashing lights to promote relaxation. The idea behind these machines is that brainwaves have a tendency to fall in step with stimuli of certain frequencies—a phenomenon known as entrainment. So by flashing lights at the same frequency as one’s brainwaves would have during, say, deep meditation, a machine should be able to induce a meditative state artificially. It’s a fascinating concept, and there are numerous gadgets that use light alone, or sound and light together, to induce sleep, improve learning and creativity, and perform any number of other feats.

In the course of my research for that article, I noticed that there were also products that claimed to produce exactly the same effect using sound alone. Somewhat skeptical, I put on some headphones and listened to one of the sample recordings. The next thing I knew, I was waking up, wiping the drool from my keyboard. A half hour had gone by and I never knew what hit me. Whatever happened, the effect was as surprising as it was impressive.

Beat It

I decided to investigate further. There are, it turns out, quite a few different companies selling downloadable audio files, CDs, and electronic gadgets based on the basic notion of binaural beats. Although they come in many different forms and have different claims, they all exploit an interesting quality of the brain.

If you were to listen to two musical instruments playing the same note, but slightly out of tune with each other, you may perceive a sort of warbling or vibrato effect. These cyclic pulsations are called beats, and within a small range of tunings, they get faster the farther apart the two notes are. (If the instruments are perfectly in tune, the effect is absent, and if they’re really far out of tune, then you simply hear two different notes.) It turns out that you can get exactly the same effect if you play a tone in one ear and a very slightly lower- or higher-pitched tone in the other ear. Listen to either sound individually, and it sounds normal—but listen to both together and you perceive the beats. In other words, this effect is not an acoustic one, but is produced by the brain.

The human auditory apparatus can hear sounds with a pitch as low as about 20Hz (Hertz = cycles per second), give or take a few Hertz. However, the frequency of brainwaves—particularly those associated with states of relaxation and sleep—can go much lower, even below 1Hz. So a recording of a sound at, say, 4Hz would be inaudible and would have no effect. However, if you pitch two sounds exactly 4Hz apart (say, one at 100Hz and the other at 104Hz) and play one in each ear, the brain “manufactures” a 4Hz beat. And, all things being equal, the brain will then strongly tend to fall into sync with that frequency, producing the same sort of subjective sensation as sleep. Conveniently, the range of frequency differences that can produce an audible beat corresponds roughly to the range of frequencies dominant in the brain during the sorts of relaxed states most of us enjoy.

Mixed Notes

Of course, plain out-of-tune tones aren’t especially interesting to listen to, so most publishers of binaural beat recordings mix in other sounds such as rain, waterfalls, bells, gongs, and so on. In some cases, these extra sounds completely hide the beats so that the listener is unaware of them consciously, but they still register in the brain and have the same effect.

It’s not at all difficult to record these sounds in an MP3 file or on a CD—perhaps in a progression from faster to slower beats—and numerous companies do. There are also mobile and web apps that do the same thing. These recordings and apps are billed as aids for meditation, relaxation, or self-hypnosis—and even as a legal “digital drug.” The prices range from almost nothing to thousands of dollars for a multi-year program of customized recordings. Although each company puts a unique spin on its particular method or formula, it’s virtually impossible to make fair comparisons because what you have to judge is ultimately a subjective experience. That US$15 recording might produce an effect that, for you, is just as good as what you’d get by spending several hundred dollars—then again, it might not. It’s reasonable to expect better and more reliable results from larger companies that employ neuroscientists and psychologists and do actual testing of their products’ effects on human brainwave patterns.

I have invested only a little time—and no money—into a few limited experiments on myself with binaural beats. My results have been modest at best—perhaps I get what I pay for. Still, my experience suggests that this technology has a lot of potential. And it’s certainly a lot less goofy-looking than sunglasses with blinking LEDs mounted on the inside. So the next time you see someone on the train wearing headphones and apparently zoned out, remember: you might be looking at a great spiritual master in training.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on October 13, 2004.

Image credit: Skyhead E [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Wow, it seems like a mere 12 months ago that I was writing about our 15th birthday! Websites, like kids, grow up so fast!

Although this site has indeed been around since April 1, 2003 (and no, it wasn’t/isn’t an April Fools’ joke—that just happened to be a convenient date), it spent much of that time in a zombie-like state of ambiguous not-quite-deadness. Last year, I finally managed to resurrect it for real, and for each of the past 365 days we’ve had freshly updated content. Yay! So I thought I’d take a moment to bring our readers up to speed about a few things.

A Year (or So) of Progress

First, let me say thank you for reading! Some people stumble on one of our articles during a web search, while others subscribe via email or RSS, or follow us on Twitter, and a few just like coming back to the site every day. However you got here, we’re glad to have you! We hope we’re able to provide a few minutes of enjoyable infotainment every day.

This past year has turned out a bit differently than I was imagining. Careful readers will have noticed that most of the articles we’ve published have been updated versions of our “classic” articles from 2003–2007. I was expecting to dole those out more slowly, but for a variety of reasons it seemed wiser to get rid of stale content—outdated information, broken links (oh, so many broken links!), and text that offends our older-and-wiser sensibilities. We repurposed some old SenseList content, too. We also retired quite a few articles that just needed to die—either they simply weren’t interesting anymore, or they were about things that no longer exist, or they would have required a complete rewrite to be publishable.

Within a couple of months, all the remaining classic articles (and the SenseList stuff we want to keep) will have been either updated or sent to live on a farm in the country. Then we’ll turn our attention fully to brand new content, though as I mentioned last year, our new-from-scratch articles will mostly be much shorter, because there are only so many hours in the day.

Can You Hear Me Now? No. (Sorry.)

I’ve received a lot of email since last year asking what happened to the audio recordings we used to have. Previously, every article included a recording of yours truly reading it (and doing my best not to butcher all the words in French, German, Chinese, Norwegian, and so on). It turned out that these recordings were especially popular among English learners, because they could listen to the audio and follow along with the perfectly matched text, thus picking up clues about colloquial English writing and pronunciation at the same time. But the audio disappeared with the site redesign, and that made a lot of people unhappy.

I’m sorry about that. I wish I could have kept the recordings, but it was impossible. The whole idea (and, indeed, the thing that made them attractive to English learners) was that the audio matched the text. But now all the text either has changed or is about to change, so in order for the audio recordings to match once again, I’d have to re-record (and edit) all of them, something that is incompatible with my already much-too-full schedule. As a matter of fact, knowing that would have to happen was one of the main things that kept me from redoing the site for so long—I couldn’t figure out when I’d ever have the time to deal with all that audio, and I wasn’t willing to break the connection between the audio and the text, or leave embarrassingly outdated info in the recordings. So I got stuck. It was only by deciding to ditch the audio that I was able to bring the site back at all, and though I’m sad to have left the audio in the past, I’m glad the site is once again viable.

That said, I have been thinking about compiling chunks of articles from this site into an actual book (well, I mean, there’s enough content for several books), and if I did that, I would certainly consider offering an audiobook version as well. I’m not sure I’ll have time to do that, but having plenty of updated content certainly would make that job easier, and that’s another of the reasons I decided to focus on refreshing old content before adding new. So, we’ll see. In theory, I’d also like to do a podcast, but again, it’s a question of time.

In and Out

Last April we started listing (mostly informal) “holidays” on the site, like National Donut Day and World Sleep Day. I thought it would be fun, and it was, but very few people bothered to read about them, so I don’t feel as though that time was well spent. As of today, the faux holidays are gone, and in their place we have a new Book of the Week feature, which more often than not will be a Take Control title, in that running the company that publishes those books is my actual day job! Because I’m such a nice guy, I’m offering readers of Interesting Thing of the Day a 30% discount on all our Take Control ebooks. They’re all designed to help ordinary, nontechnical people overcome problems with technology, and I hope you find them helpful!

There are several other things on my to do list for Interesting Thing of the Day, too—including new types of content that I think will be both fun and useful, and at the risk of repeating myself, the only barrier to implementing them is the number of hours in the day. Since I don’t know for sure which of these things will happen or when, I shan’t promise anything, but the more interest people show in the site, the more likely I am to squeeze in some extra hours working on it.

One thing you have not seen here in the past year, and still don’t, is ads. Because, frankly, I just hate ads. I run ad blockers on all my devices, and if you don’t, you should! Ads are, in some respect, a necessary evil, but lately I’ve felt they’re more evil than necessary. So there aren’t any on this site, and it simply isn’t part of my plan to use ads to support our content. I mean, unless you consider articles and blurbs about other books we publish to be ads, in which case Oh Yes You Will See More of Those. But those are just us telling you about our own stuff. We don’t let third parties display any content on our site, and we don’t do any surreptitious tracking or other privacy-violating stuff, because ewwwww. So if you like reading good material with no ads and want to support us, you know, buy some books! We’d really appreciate that.

Image credit: Jim, the Photographer [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr

This week we’re instituting a new feature: our Book of the Week. Because the people behind Interesting Thing of the Day also run Take Control Books, many of the featured titles will be from our collection of tech books for nontechnical people, and of those, a fair percentage were written by our own Joe Kissell. To make the books even more attractive, we’re offering a 30% discount on all Take Control books to Interesting Thing of the Day readers (after you click one of the links in this post, the discount will be applied automatically when you check out…or you can manually enter coupon code ITOTD). From time to time we’ll also feature books by authors we know, and other titles that we just think are especially noteworthy.

Our first weekly book is just for Mac users, so if you don’t have a Mac, there’s nothing to see here (but stay tuned…we’ll have some good options for you in future weeks). It’s called Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, and it’s a comprehensive, up-to-date, and user-friendly guide to keeping all the data on your Mac safe from any of a thousand things that could endanger it (including theft, fires, floods, and even good old-fashioned human error). This book will teach you about various types of backup, how to choose backup media, how to pick and configure backup software, and much more…including, crucially, how to restore data if disaster strikes. You’ll learn about the pros and cons of Apple’s Time Machine app, why and how to clone your disk or SSD onto an external volume, and what you should be aware of when considering a cloud backup system. And that’s just the beginning. If you have Mac backup questions, this book almost certainly has the answers. Don’t wait until it’s too late—protect your data right now with an excellent backup plan!

This book, like all Take Control titles, comes as an ebook, and you can download any combination of formats—PDF, EPUB, and/or Kindle’s Mobipocket format—so you can read it on pretty much any computer, smartphone, tablet, or ebook reader. The cover price is $14.99, but as an Interesting Thing of the Day reader, you can buy it this week for 30% off, or just $10.49. In fact, we can do even better than that, but just through Monday, April 1, 2019. Since we’re still running our World Backup Day sale, for today only, it’s just $5. Pick up your copy before this special sale ends!

Short story as body art

Here in urban California, if you want to appear inconspicuous in public, the best way to do so is to wear leather, dye your hair in fluorescent colors, and have all your visible skin tattooed, pierced, or both. I exaggerate, of course—but I think we can all agree that in much of the western world, body art is big these days. Personally, I find the notion of permanently altering my appearance unappealing. My tastes in clothing, hair styles (and colors), and so on change over time, so I don’t want to lock myself into a look I might feel less enthusiastic about in a few years. There’s also the whole issue of pain, which, all things being equal, I prefer to avoid. If I ever were to have a tattoo, though, it would have to be both discreet and very meaningful—something more than mere decoration.

One artist is using tattoos on human skin as a medium for literature rather than images, and in an extremely unconventional manner at that. In 2003, New York author Shelley Jackson wrote a 2,095-word story titled “Skin,” which she refers to as a “mortal piece of art.” By the time the project is finished, each word of the story will have been tattooed on a different person’s body; over 500 of the tattoos (and possibly many more) have been completed, using participants from around the world.

Jackson last updated the project’s status page in April 2011, and I don’t know what progress has occurred since then. However, in March 2011, just before that last public update, Jackson had an exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum featuring a video of a subset of the Skin Project’s participants—each person saying their word (in some cases, multiple times) and showing their tattoo, with the words cut together into a different story of about 900 words.

I Give You My Word

Someone who encounters one of the “words,” as she calls the participants, will be able to read at most one word, along with any adjacent punctuation. Volunteers must sign a contract stating that they will receive a tattoo of whichever word Jackson assigns them (in black ink and in a classic book font) and that they will send her a photograph of the finished tattoo as well as a portrait of themselves that does not show the tattoo. Jackson further stipulates that if a volunteer receives a word that could be considered a body part (“back,” say), that word must be tattooed on another part of the body. Only after the tattoo is finished does the participant get a copy of the entire story, which, according to the contract, must be kept secret.

Jackson’s intention is that the complete story never be published or revealed to the general public in any fashion; only those who receive the tattoos get to read the entire piece. However, when the work is finished, Jackson hopes to arrange portraits of the participants (not showing the tattoos) in the order in which their words appear in the story, complete with paragraph breaks. When a “word” dies, according to Jackson, the story will change—and she will attempt to attend the funeral, though she expects most of the words to outlive her. When all the words have died, the work as a whole will be dead.

Going With the Flow

The idea for Jackson’s human work of literature came partly from the art of Andy Goldsworthy, the subject of the 2001 documentary Rivers and Tides. Goldsworthy uses only natural materials for his pieces, including icicles, leaves, rocks, and dirt. Many of his works melt within hours, disappear with the next tide, or float away in the river (hence the film’s title). And yet the ephemeral nature of the art is precisely what he means to explore. In Jackson’s story, meanwhile, not only is the work as a whole temporary, but all of its components are also autonomous.

Although my tastes in art tend toward the conventional—and I still do not have the slightest interest in getting a tattoo myself—I find something about these organic works of art strangely compelling. If Jackson decides to do an even more ephemeral sequel called “Nails” or “Hair,” perhaps I’ll volunteer to become a word myself.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on January 14, 2005.

Image credit: Logan Baird [CC-SA 3.0], via Wikipedia