Shocking The Senses

Ready to not be ready

// December 5th, 2011 // No Comments » // Science, Self Defense, Thoughts, Violence

Is a state of awareness regarding how unprepared you are for a situation valid?  If I’m as ready as I can possibly be to accept and react to as many possible scenarios that may come about, is that considered prepared?

Let me clarify that rambling of mine.  If you are a possible victim, as we all are, wouldn’t it be prudent for you to plan your reactions regarding different situations and the choices they may present?  If you are aware of simple things like the following:

1. Hesitation isn’t always bad, especially in potentially controllable situations.  Don’t go into a quiet parking lot by yourself at night unless you’re staying acutely aware of what and who is around you.  Better yet, tag along with someone you know or trust (or even a security guard).  We have that little nagging voice in us for a reason.  There’s no reason to feel guilty or ashamed to ask for a walking buddy.  That voice is survival speaking up, listen to it.
2. Pay attention to people.  I know you like to be in your little bubble with your little world view, thinking that if something bad happens, it won’t happen to you.  That’s just not necessarily the case.  I’ve seen videos (during this seminar) that show victims of crimes and their behavior beforehand, in some cases, is supremely introverted.
3. Stay away from people and out of situations that breed these threats.  Teen/college age students are especially guilty of this one.  Steer clear of drugs, gangs, and even parties if they start to trigger #1.
4. Educate yourself.  In most of what I’ve outlined, I’m leaning toward conflict or violence.  However, like last year when I became a father, I didn’t know what I was getting into.  However, I educated myself and became as prepared as I could possibly become pre-fatherhood.  I know first hand that it helped a lot.
5. Know that you can’t avoid every situation.

Preparing for the opportunities where you do actually get to react will help nullify panic and adrenal dumps.  Even considering potential situations, whatever they may be, could give you the fraction of a moment that equals success.

I don’t enjoy hearing people say “but I don’t want to think of that, that’s not a happy thought”.  With understanding comes contentedness.  Rest assured:

“Consider the possibilities, because they’re always considering you.”

Space Shuttle Atlantis Launches

// July 8th, 2011 // No Comments » // Science, Technology, Thoughts

Successful launch, up and away in the final flight of the current space program.  Momentous.

Sorry, Losing Weight was Easy for Me.

// July 6th, 2011 // No Comments » // Science, Thoughts

It has been about three months now since my wife broke her toe.  Before then, we’d been on a diet/exercise program and loss well over 10% of our body weight in the matter of about 2(ish) months.

We used Live Strong.  Their dieting program, Daily Plate, is a free nutrition tracker and (like some other companies) has a gamut of foods in its database.  Their system would track calories of course, but also protein/carb/fat ratio, sodium intake vs. daily requirements. etc.  Most importantly, it’s free!

Just input your intake on a meal-time basis, and input whatever exercise you do and it will give you a calculation versus your allowed maximum caloric input per day.  It is simple, under the caloric intake meant you were burning more than you  consumed.  Over the intake meant you would be burning less than you consumed.  I must give props to them for simplicity of use.  They have an iPhone app too, both free and paid depending on your desire for ads or not.

And by the way. small meals in between large ones kept me from ever getting very hungry and I tell ya, an egg white or two, usually boiled, right before bed really did the trick for night hunger.

(They also had badges that were a fun stroke to my competitive ego.  Things like consecutive diet days, consecutive exercise days)

So, three months later now, I’ve gained most of the weight back.  I really was dieting to do it coinciding with her personal goals, so she had a buddy to go along with, but I was happy with the results too.  We’re talking about getting back into the diet again recently and I’m really struggling psychologically with it.  I know living life at a healthy weight is, well, healthy.  However, the ease at which I lost pounds by simply monitoring my caloric intake and caloric exercise burn and undercutting the total by ~400 calories a day makes me reluctant to commit to a specific time frame.  If I want to lose 8 pounds by November, I need about 4 weeks.  I’ll start in October!

So as many scoffs as I might get regarding weight management, it really is a matter of self discipline.  Pick a program and stick to it.  Don’t worry about carb only or protein only diets, or metabolic spike diets, or <insert fad> diets.  Just be vigilant.

Try it once like that and when you see that it can work (don’t cheat and try to lie to yourself too), you’ll realize that weight management is a matter of fried vs baked and pop vs. water.

Social Media: Twitter, Information Streams and Events like the Joplin Tornado.

// June 15th, 2011 // No Comments » // Science, Technology, Thoughts

It was a fairly quiet Sunday in May.  My wife and I were hanging out in the living room watching a Netflix movie.  I was tooling around in Facebook on my PC and Twitter on my iPhone when another tweet came across from one of my favorite seasonal Twitter accounts, @tornadohunt.  Most of the month they had been chasing storms, so I was used to the typical predictive nature of their tweets… locations they were headed to… where they thought a storm was turning.

This one was whimsical,

“Been driving in hail for 15 minutes now! Uncle! Golf balls hurt. Hang on Joplin.”

My mind conjured images of a team of rag tag storm chasers, “Wow”ing at each plunk of the ice while they worked their way through waves of rainfall chasing a beastly cone of wind and torn up trees.

I asked my wife if I could switch the TV from our Xbox to the news to watch what was going on, she begrudgingly agreed.  When I turned to the news, there were reports plastered all over the bottom of the screen regarding tornado watches and warnings in our region (north-eastern Oklahoma).  Within the span of about thirty minutes, all hell broke loose in Joplin, MO.

The following tweets were received in sequence from @tornadohunt.  They were basically first responders after the disaster:

“Joplin hospital hit hard! On fire”

“Major damage in joplin!”

and even more alarmingly…

“Joplin MO. personally witnessing injuries and fatalities”

“Medical personnel needed in Joplin!!!”

Joplin, Missouri.

Then, a full five to ten minutes later, the meteorologist on the news reported the story.  I looked from my phone, to my TV, back to my phone, fairly astonished that this little device in my hand made the situation in Joplin all the more real, and brought it to our attention several minutes before the television broadcast.  Video came out afterwards too, broadcast on Youtube showing a first hand experience during the tornado.  I’ve received breaking news alerts and traffic advisories from local news stations a ways before audio or television broadcast, or even before their websites are updated, but never before something this heavy.

Not to take away from the gravity of the Joplin situation, but just another social media observation that over the past few weeks, I’ve watched new celebrity personalities filing into Twitter, like @AlecBaldwin who joined in mid May of 2011 started with a few drinking/alcohol related tweets and has already ruffled quite a few political feathers just in the past few weeks.  He tweeted that he’d been advised that he shouldn’t “drink and tweet”, commented on the nature of commentators on the political site Huffington Post and had his account apparently hacked.

Regarding the instant access to information that Twitter (and Facebook/other social media) represents, does all of this point to the increasing weight of the American instant satisfaction and gossip mentality?  I’ve heard dissertations about how destructive that frame of mind is.  However, I will always think back to the Joplin tornado and the scores of people in and near Joplin that had their jaw agape at the information they were receiving over a social network and take assertions that this particular form of instant information is bad for us with a grain of salt.

Regarding celebrities in the social spotlight. As unhealthy as a fixation on the lives of celebrities can be, those situations do reveal that when someone who doesn’t really grasp the full scope of what exposing your life to the world through a medium like this, they can damage themselves and/or their reputation.  (Anthony Weiner for instance, along with many other celebrities.  Courtney Love is another example).  It is a window into the increasing reality that these folks are still fallible.  It’s harder to hide your inadequacies when you hand your thoughts to the public.  Media sources pounce on those things faster than you can say “I don’t think that picture was me, my account was hacked!”

If you’re not on Twitter, which would surprise me, give it a try.  Follow some folks.  Keep an eye on things and compare it to what the news reports.

It really is interesting how so much information you didn’t ask for, helpful and otherwise, will spill into your brain.

NASA : Aquarius Lifts Off! (From the parking lot)

// June 10th, 2011 // No Comments » // Science, Technology, Thoughts

Picture of the Aquarius rocket lifting off from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base today (Friday).  Good shot, great action capture, big fireball.  A funny thing I noticed about it is that the picture on the main page and the three different designated wallpaper sizes show the shot from the exhaust upward.

However, the “Full Size” option shows the rest of the picture, and upon thinking about it, it makes perfect sense that you’d launch from a wide open cemented area.  It’s just a little funny that you can see the painted parking lot lines.  Looks to be about 70-90 feet away?

I wonder if the fella launching the rocket was sitting in his van with a big red remote fire button.

All silliness aside though, Congrats on the successful launch though, N.A.S.A.!

H1N1, Really…

// May 19th, 2009 // No Comments » // Science, Thoughts

I understand that the H1N1 strain of influenza is a serious matter. I’m not writing this to discount its importance or the importance of staying safe during flu seasons, just to make sure that anyone who happens upon this post is educated and understands the scope of the situation.

First and foremost, I’m not a medical professional, but I have done my homework. Here are a few pieces of information that reach beyond solely reports and numbers we see every day.

Read this from top to bottom. It outlines details about H1N1, preventative measures and the document is updated any time there’s new information.

Make sure you keep your facts straight and do not be overcome by some forms of media that put emphasis on the “scary” facts (they’ve gotten better in the past few weeks.)

As of now, there are nearly 10,000 cases reported world wide, but

But don’t be overwhelmed by reports like this.

I’m not claiming that anyone is reporting the news incorrectly, just that if you make sure to do everything you can to keep yourselves and your family safe, kudos for you. Just don’t become a recluse quite yet =p

And just so I can offer the facts directly, if you’re in the U.S., keep a keen eye on the CDC weekly report, updated religiously.
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/fluactivity.htm

And now, some humor… Have fun out there!

“Dave, my mind is going, I can feel it.”

// May 18th, 2009 // 6 Comments » // Science, Thoughts

What is the deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean?

How many calories in a mcdonalds big mac?

Or check this one out… What is the melting point of diamond?

My dear reader, you look at these questions and if you’re a Trivial Pursuit whiz, you may already know the answer. If not, I know exactly what pops to mind… Copy, paste, google.com.

“But J, there would still be several websites to peruse through, and many of them may be ballparking, lacking accuracy.” Go ahead, click the links above – They take you to a new project that has gone live test as of Friday, May 18th 2009 called Wolfram|Alpha. It’s not just a search engine or a complex scripting tool, it a “Computational Knowledge Engine” which doesn’t spider the web for answers, but computes based on what it already knows about, well, lots.

Sometimes the wording of the question will throw off the computer, but odds are that if you rephrase, you will glean some result. I’ve tossed a few goodies at it like the ones above and have had fun with its algebra functions, graphing sin curves and the such.

So, this leads me to a question I’d like to pose. How do services like this affect cognitive function? In my life, I find that if I’m watching a movie and can’t remember an Actor’s name, instead of sitting and trying to dig through the cobwebs in my head, I use IMDB. If there’s a fact I need to know, instead of going to the library and learning various other pieces of information while tracking down my answer, I ask my good friend, until recently 100% reliable Google… Instant gratification! (most of the time). Have a paper to write on some historical event? Wikipedia! My college professors indicated that they would burn any paper I turned in with them as a citation because of the unreliable nature of the information and its validity, but I knew some teachers that allowed it. I can honestly say that I don’t feel the need to memorize like I used to have to back in school. Maybe this is just because I’m not in an educational program at the moment, but part of me genuinely feels that these tools which are meant to provide information at the click of a button are affecting our ability (or perhaps, desire) to retain information. This is not based on scientific research, just my own observations and analysis.

Perhaps these services will allow people to take the information that IS available and use it in new and innovative ways? If the data is readily accessible, you don’t have to spend as much time finding out what someone else already has. This is how scientific research progresses, so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time a new issue is tackled. However, historical research is still important, so we understand where we “come from” socially and interpersonally.

At this time, I don’t consider these tools a problem as they stand. When machines start *thinking* for us, now there’s a potential problem. Oh wait… Right, now I don’t need to DO the math, I just use Wolfram Alpha.

I for one welcome the all knowing automotons with open arms. As long as I can still pull a trigger, I feel like I’ll be okay. These tools are going to continue being effective and useful. Hopefully the Internet never crashes. How will I find out who that chick on Lost from season 3 is? For now, here’s a little fun~

Who am I?

What is the meaning of life?

Astro Mike

// May 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Science

If you’re not already, make sure to follow Astro_Mike on Twitter.  He’s providing (fairly) real-time updates to ground control from orbit and they’re in turn shootout out updates to… US!

Great job Mike.  They’re working on the Hubble Space Telescope, upgrading and making repairs.

Here is the link to the mission page on NASA’s website.

This will be the final Hubble repair mission.  I’m looking forward to seeing some of the images it captures in the years to come.  I’m also excited that organizations are using popular communication tools like Twitter to help draw interest to these programs.

Noodle ‘nado

// May 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Science

Yike…

Thoughts on… Tornado Hunting!

// May 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Oklahoma, Science, Thoughts

Go Vortex 2 Team!

It’s a bit daunting sitting smack dab in the center of tornado alley (I’m in Oklahoma, go Oilers! Give us a pro team!) conceptually, that is. One of the first questions I hear from visitors or friends living on the east and west coast is “Have you ever seen a tornado?” The answer, after almost 14 years here is still “no.” To be honest, I don’t even think about it in my day to day life. If I sat around worrying about being tossed a few hundred feet by a big ol’ gust of wind, I’d never leave the cellar.

So when sirens go off during a torrential down pour and the television displays a meteorologist saying “Don’t go near windows, go to a safe room in the interior of your dwelling.” I naturally kick on the storm switch in my head and promptly go… stick my head out the front door.

More often than not, my neighbors are out there too watching the Bradford Pear bent over by straight line winds, trying to touch its toes. Human nature? Heh, human ignorance more like. It makes me wonder how many personal injuries sustained during these storms are a result of not following directions. Check this dude out.

Even after thinking about it, do I care? If a tornado were sitting right across the street, I would still be trying to peek out the window. Yep, I’m the little kid who sticks his hand on the hot stove even though Mom warns me of the impending ouchies.

So, in regard to the professionals… Gallivanting across the country in search of “the origins, structure and evolution of tornadoes.” I’m happy to know that we have people willing to stride forward into the field and attempt such things. The Weather Channel has several employees that are thrill seekers by desire, or by trade, I mean, Nicole Mitchell is a Hurricane Hunter as part of her Military career. I envy them to a degree, I’d love to be in their shoes at least once.

So I’m following Mike Bettes and his team as they circle me looking for super cell storms sporting rotation. Maybe if he’s in Tulsa some time we can have a drink together.

Maybe the sirens will go off.

I guarantee he’ll stick his head out the door.