Sometimes You Didn't Know What You Were Looking For
I'm very glad my RSS reader came pre-loaded with a feed to the Wired website. It's been very interesting and informative over the past few months.
This one, about what we're finding at the border of the solar system, is just cool.
This one is really up my Alley of Pet Subjects; it's about how new studies appear to demonstrate that succeeding or failing at activities like field goal kicking, or putting, or shooting a basketball, may directly revise your perception of the size of whatever it is that you're trying to put the relatively small object through. It's a cliche for basketball players who are shooting well (there's another line of inquiry that suggests there is no such thing as a "hot streak" in sports - I tend to come away from reading about the subject with the opinion that people are variously over-interpreting the data or the concept of a hot streak) to say that the hoop starts to look bigger; this is taken as a metaphor for confidence, but it may actually be marginally true! I'm ever fascinated by, and influenced by, information about how the brain mediates our experience of the world. I've remarked recently on several occasions, in several contexts, that I think I'm probably much more likely than the average person to distrust the evidence of my senses, and I have been ever since my 11th grade physics teacher had the class do an exercise which revealed our blind spot. After that, everything I've read or heard about how the brain is interpreting sensory data rather than just opening a window to it has stuck with me. I haven't dragged this back around to metaphysical issues (I was rather unfocused and directionless as a philosophy undergrad, and my nascent interests lay in the realm of ethical and aesthetic inquiry), but this all goes to some very basic Problems of Philosophy shit that I'd probably love to read about.
(Shooting a basketball is funny; you're far enough away that very minor divergences in technique can have disappointingly large effects on the trajectory of your shot, but any experienced player - or a novice with a cheesily inspirational coach - knows that the hoop is actually quite big, big enough to fit two basketballs simultaneously with negative space left over. This isn't as big a ratio as trying to throw a football through a tire swing, but shooting a basketball is easier than putting a spiral on a specific target, or at least that's what I think as someone who knows how to shoot a basketball but throws a wobbly pigskin.)
When the people around me at work became aware of the plight of Falcon, The Auspiciously Named Balloon Boy, I was in the middle of trying not to explode for work-related reasons. People started making funny word-noises, I turned around and saw a colleague was displaying on her computer some streaming video of a big puddle of mylar traveling to the left, and I said something like: "Whu?" I was briefed on what was then thought to be the situation (poor Falcon!) and then I made an exasperated noise and returned to my work, feeling at the moment as though the Balloon Boy was an enemy agent sent to try and provide auxiliary annoyments to hamper my productivity. I would like to think, though, that had I been in a newsroom while this story was being covered for HOURS, without the troubling distraction of new information to interrupt my mylar-obsessed musings, that I'd have started to wonder about some of this.
This one, about what we're finding at the border of the solar system, is just cool.
This one is really up my Alley of Pet Subjects; it's about how new studies appear to demonstrate that succeeding or failing at activities like field goal kicking, or putting, or shooting a basketball, may directly revise your perception of the size of whatever it is that you're trying to put the relatively small object through. It's a cliche for basketball players who are shooting well (there's another line of inquiry that suggests there is no such thing as a "hot streak" in sports - I tend to come away from reading about the subject with the opinion that people are variously over-interpreting the data or the concept of a hot streak) to say that the hoop starts to look bigger; this is taken as a metaphor for confidence, but it may actually be marginally true! I'm ever fascinated by, and influenced by, information about how the brain mediates our experience of the world. I've remarked recently on several occasions, in several contexts, that I think I'm probably much more likely than the average person to distrust the evidence of my senses, and I have been ever since my 11th grade physics teacher had the class do an exercise which revealed our blind spot. After that, everything I've read or heard about how the brain is interpreting sensory data rather than just opening a window to it has stuck with me. I haven't dragged this back around to metaphysical issues (I was rather unfocused and directionless as a philosophy undergrad, and my nascent interests lay in the realm of ethical and aesthetic inquiry), but this all goes to some very basic Problems of Philosophy shit that I'd probably love to read about.
(Shooting a basketball is funny; you're far enough away that very minor divergences in technique can have disappointingly large effects on the trajectory of your shot, but any experienced player - or a novice with a cheesily inspirational coach - knows that the hoop is actually quite big, big enough to fit two basketballs simultaneously with negative space left over. This isn't as big a ratio as trying to throw a football through a tire swing, but shooting a basketball is easier than putting a spiral on a specific target, or at least that's what I think as someone who knows how to shoot a basketball but throws a wobbly pigskin.)
When the people around me at work became aware of the plight of Falcon, The Auspiciously Named Balloon Boy, I was in the middle of trying not to explode for work-related reasons. People started making funny word-noises, I turned around and saw a colleague was displaying on her computer some streaming video of a big puddle of mylar traveling to the left, and I said something like: "Whu?" I was briefed on what was then thought to be the situation (poor Falcon!) and then I made an exasperated noise and returned to my work, feeling at the moment as though the Balloon Boy was an enemy agent sent to try and provide auxiliary annoyments to hamper my productivity. I would like to think, though, that had I been in a newsroom while this story was being covered for HOURS, without the troubling distraction of new information to interrupt my mylar-obsessed musings, that I'd have started to wonder about some of this.
Labels: Basketball, Pop Scienceish, Sports, The Very Web Itself
posted by medrawt at
22:53
