YouTube - Images from The Fourth Part of the World

YouTube - Images from The Fourth Part of the World

Watch the first ~1:45 if nothing else! Wow. Rest fascinating/interesting too!!

Resurgence • Article - SIESTA

Resurgence • Article - SIESTA:

"Dali was a big fan....of sitting in a comfortable armchair and letting an arm fall down one side. The hand of the fallen arm must have a key in it (heavy, iron, old-fashioned kind) and under this hand must lie a china plate. When a delicious loss of consciousness occurs the hand drops the key which then hits the plate briefly, cracking the silence enough to wake the practitioner, who has been able to enjoy for a few seconds the benefit of siesta."

Book TV

One of my favorite TC channels/Shows. Give it a try.

Podcasts - Book TV:

"Book TV's After Words features the author of a recently published hardback non-fiction book interviewed by a guest host with some knowledge, background, or connection to the subject matter of the book. After Words airs on Book TV every Sunday, at 6pm ET."

Other favorite channels? Anything showing sports, History Channel, Discovery, and Bloomberg.

Muscle confusion: Hey biceps, you'll never guess what's next - The Globe and Mail

Does it work or not? Research is mixed.

Muscle confusion: Hey biceps, you'll never guess what's next - The Globe and Mail:

There's plenty of science to support muscle confusion's claims, says Matt Heath, a neuroscientist in the school of kinesiology at the University of Western Ontario.

“It's very, very well established in the cognitive sciences, this idea that practice” he says. “It's not just about muscle strength when you're lifting a weight. It's about the strategy you employ in order to recruit all the different … motor neurons that ultimately go on to fire off and tell the muscle to contract. You tell those motor neurons more efficiently how to fire and that's just communicated to the muscle, and so therefore the muscle can produce more force allowing you to lift more weight.”"

and on the other side:

"You probably have to do the same thing over and over again for probably six to eight weeks before you actually adapt really well to that fitness regimen,” says Robert Vigars, a professor of sports biomechanics at the University of Western Ontario. “If I keep mixing up my routines, so much that I'm only blitzing one particular muscle group periodically, that muscle group's not going to develop that much.”"

Can Ants Count? : NPR

Can Ants Count? : NPR:

"It turns out that all the ants had walked the same number of steps, but because their gaits had been changed (the stilty ants, like Monty Python creatures, walked with giant steps; the stumpy ants walked in baby steps) they went exactly the distances you'd predict if their brains counted the number of steps out to the food and then reversed direction and counted the same number of steps back. In other words, all the ants counted the same number of steps back!

Does that mean ants have something like pedometers that do something like counting?

Says professor James Gould of Princeton, commenting on the experiment: 'These animals are fooled exactly the way you'd expect if they were counting steps.'"

The Roving Runner: Running in the Dark - Well Blog - NYTimes.com

The Roving Runner: Running in the Dark - Well Blog - NYTimes.com:

"Of all the physical changes in New York City over recent decades, few are as dramatic as the transformation of the lower Hudson. Once lined with rotting piers and a crumbling elevated highway, the shoreline is now home to Hudson River Park, a five-mile strip of parkland from the Battery to 59th Street.

The park is only about halfway done, with each section opening as it’s completed, so this year’s construction site is next year’s oasis. (To see what the Greenwich Village section looked like in the mid-1990s, go to the two-minute point in this Alanis Morissette video. Ms. Morissette, by the way, ran two marathons this fall, the Bizz Johnson Trail Marathon in Susanville, Calif., and then New York three weeks later.)"

SSRN-Ultimate 100M World Records through Extreme-Value Theory by John H. J. Einmahl, Sander Smeets

SSRN-Ultimate 100M World Records through Extreme-Value Theory by John H. J. Einmahl, Sander Smeets:

"Using the thus obtained estimate for the extreme-value index, the right endpoint of the speed distribution is estimated. The corresponding time can be interpreted as the estimated ultimate world record: the best possible time that could be run in the near future. We find 9.51 seconds for the 100m men and 10.33 seconds for the women.

"