Author Archives for ejk

The Boundary Effect: Entering a New Room Makes You Forget Things

Reblogged from NewsFeed:

“I know I came in here for something, but I can’t remember what it is …”

If you’ve ever said something like this, you’ve probably experienced an “event boundary.” Many, if not all, of us have had the experience of walking into a room and forgetting exactly what it is we came in there to do.

(PHOTOS: A Camera Helps an Amnesia Patient Access Her Memory…

Read more… 148 more words

"A few suggestions for breaking through event boundaries, on behalf of NewsFeed: mentally repeat the decision or action as you enter the room, announce what you’re about to do, or move to a one-room apartment."

MLS Leads the Way

In addition, MLS has given up on relying on the better angels of players’ nature to stop the diving and simulation American audiences so abhor. If a player tumbles to the ground without contact or feigns injury without being touched, he’ll be forced to write a check. If that action results in a goal or card that shows up in the box score, a suspension is likely as well.

Major League Soccer in the United States is taking a hard stance on diving. This is wonderful.

via MLS vs. the world: League takes unprecedented stand against diving, vicious tackles – SOCCER – Sporting News.

Maker Workshop - DTV Antenna & Steadycam on MAKE: television

Reblogged from MAKE:

Digital converter box? Check! Great reception? Not so much. John Park shows how to take a fistful of wire coat hangers and make a TV antenna that gives great digital reception. While he’s at it, he also makes a video camera stabilizer using metal piping and counterbalance weight; great for at-home moviemaking.

Check out the PDFs for the DTV Antenna…

Read more… 15 more words

Here's the Video and PDF I used to build my homemade HDTV antenna. Still works great.

Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Deputy Ray Yee

From last night’s tornado in Dexter, Michigan, this amazing tidbit buried in a AnnArbor.com story.

Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Deputy Ray Yee was the first officer on the scene in Dexter.

Yee approached one destroyed home Thursday, and saw a hand sticking out of the rubble. He pulled out an elderly man, who was shaken but walked away.

“That’s the best part,” Yee said. “Every place I went to, I would have thought I would have found somebody laying there — deceased or whatever. But, knock on wood, everybody was OK.”

Great to see the community coming together and the cleanup starting in earnest so quickly.

http://www.annarbor.com/news/dexter-tornado-damage-aftermath-schools/

It’s an Annoying Song (After All)

Not only is this a interesting look into one of Disney’s earliest rides, it taught me that the auditory cortex is the part of the brain where earworms get stuck.

There’s another venue where “It’s a Small World (After All)” is on continuous loop: the mind of anyone who hears it. The song is a common “earworm,” a piece of music that can easily get lodged in the auditory cortex, the part of the brain that retains audio information, identified by researchers at Dartmouth College in 2005.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/03/its-an-annoying-song-after-all/254429/

(via Metafilter)

Chris Shiflett ▪ Hacking Rails (and GitHub)

Chris Shiflett writes a clear recap of the GitHub ssh key exploit. A little scary that Rails doesn’t make form field checking easy.

For those of you more familiar with PHP, imagine a feature like register_globals, but instead of injecting arbitrary form data into the global namespace, it injects arbitrary form data into the database. It might as well be called opt-in SQL injection, but even that’s being too generous, because this is much easier to exploit than an SQL injection vulnerability.

Chris Shiflett ▪ Hacking Rails (and GitHub).

http://shiflett.org/blog/2012/mar/hacking-rails-and-github