Why Oh Why???

These are the everyday questions that pop up for me in my ordinary little life, and I now insist (yes via the internet) that God answer them. It's a mixture of little pet peeves, big pet peeves and other odd peeves in no particular order...

-Why oh why... do we serve food and beverages so piping hot that our tongues get burned at the first bite or sip? Meaning that the first step in consuming hot things is to wait for them to cool down? Why?

-Why oh why...do people seem to relate so deeply to the sentiments of Christmas (Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward Men, etc...) but then seem so disinterested in reaching out, understanding and connecting in any number of ways throughout the rest of the year?

-Why oh why... when I'm at a place like a public park and I walk past a pretty women in the arms of her boyfriend does she often flash a beaming, heartfelt smile at me in some overt effort to 'connect'? But when I walk past these same women when they are alone they stare ahead disinterested? Why not stare ahead disinterested in both cases for the sake of, I don't know, consistency? It's a little like saying:'Now that we've established that there is absolutely no potential between us, I want you to know how warmly I feel toward you.' Gee thanks.

-Why oh why... do people think that anything that you tell them that involves them is a statement about them? That they are the topic of discussion?

Example:
Person A: 'I'm going to straighten up the house a little more.'
Person B: 'Great- so my housecleaning isn't good enough for you!'

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-Why oh why... are so many people unable to understand that if they are 'angry' about something it means that, by definition, they are trying to tell you about a more fundamental pain that they are experiencing? And that that pain is what's really going for them.

Person A: 'I told Joe what an asshole he was for not helping with the garden today'

Person B: 'Sounds like you're disappointed and frustrated that you didn't get all the weeding done and that you're bewildered that the plans you had for the garden weren't realized. Did you tell Joe that?'

Person A: 'No, because I'm not disappointed, frustrated or bewildered- I'm just angry at Joe!'

Person B: 'I'm just asking if Joe's absence resulted in any pain for you. And suggesting that maybe you could tell him about that pain so he understands what it was like for you.'

Person A: 'I'm not in any pain- I'm just angry. All I know is that Joe is an asshole and I told him that.'

Jeez, after 20,40,60 years or whatever of living you'd think people would develop a slightly more sophisticated view of what's going on between themselves and others when there's a conflict accompanied by difficult emotions...

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-Why oh why... do so many drivers think that if you ask them to drive more safely it's equivalent to criticizing their moves on the dance floor or dissing their taste in art? Hey, if your face goes through the windshield in an accident then mine probably will too buddy, so your driving is not just your little independent trip...

Less dramatically...

Why oh why... don't many drivers realize that the chief reason I don't want to be a passenger in a car that's tailgating is that it's IRRITATING. Yes, it's also somewhat dangerous, but mostly it's IRRITATING. It's a little like having a drink with someone who repeatedly sets their glass down teetering on the edge of the table on the verge of spilling. A potential accident just waiting to happen which becomes a bothersome distraction tugging on your consciousness. That's what driving with a tailgater is like for me. I guess I don't like tailgating for the same reason that I don't like having razor blades laying around on my couch or that I don't leave my wallet on the seat of my unlocked car. It needlessly invites the imagination to ponder the unpleasant potential. Is this a hard concept to grasp??

-Lastly, Why oh why... am I the only person I know who raises questions like this? It angers me but, more importantly, well... feel my pain.
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A Sure Bet....

I've been having some fun this fall plunking down modest wagers on NFL games. Indulging my inner 'Jimmy-The-Greek' and testing whether I have that rare and elusive gift of sports prognostication.

The truth is, all bets that are available have been analyzed 6 ways to Sunday (literally) and offer a careful balance of risk vs reward through either an elevated payout or via a point spread (adding points to the score of the underdog.). So a big case can be made for making your selections by simply throwing darts at your computer screen instead of spending hours carefully weighing all the factors affecting the outcome of a game. And, sadly, my own empirical research supports this supposition. The only reason I don't employ the darts method is to avoid scratches on my screen.

The screwy reality of it all is that if it was HARD to win money betting on football then, well, it would be EASY to win money betting on football. Why? Because all you'd have to do to win is place the exact OPPOSITE bets of the poor guy a few cubicles down from you who loses his shirt every Sunday. (If he could endure the obvious swipe at his level of intelligence and competency, you could put him on a small 'retainer' to advise you of his various wagers each week.)

The exception to all this is if you just so you happen to have some kind of 'inside information' on a game. Like if you know for a fact that the quarterback for one of the teams drove his Escalade over a fire hydrant and into a tree at 3AM on the night before the game and his wife had to throw a football through the back window to extricate him from the car- that might give you an edge over the other bettors. These opportunities are rare though...

That being said, the gerbil wheel of sports betting is kept aspin by this foundational notion that there is low hanging fruit to be picked from the schedule each week. 'Sure things'. 'Can't Lose Propositions'. 'No Brainers', 'Cold, Hard Locks'. Games that grandma could pick blindfolded. And it is the quest to put a finger on these easy opportunities that consumes you. Endlessly. It's related to that sense of assuredness you get each time you buy a MegaBucks Lotto ticket.

And such was my mentality when I tuned into Sportstalk radio on Friday and heard a Las Vegas Oddsmaker arrogantly prognosticating about how the Raiders would be absolutely demolished by the Steelers on Sunday and how a wager on Pittsburgh to win by 14 1/2 points was the juicy, low hanging fruit of the week just waiting to be picked. If only people like me weren't too stupid to see the light and put our money down

Well, it's Monday morning and things did not go as envisioned and I'm out 20 bucks. What bugs me isn't that the guy made a prediction- it's that he made an arrogant, cocky, pompous prediction designed to draw suckers like me in. So I thought I'd make this funny video playing the radio clip and adding some graphics for entertainment. Hope you enjoy:

CLICK HERE

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Don't believe what you believe you believe

Every once in a while I run into something that is so hard to believe that the impression it makes extends well beyond my expectations. Such is the case with the below optical illusion. Believe it or not, Square 'A' and Square 'B' are the exact same color. What's so delicious about this is how hopelessly lost our brain gets in navigating the sea of relativism that's created by a shadow on a checkerboard.



More intriguing is to force the brain to release the illusion and prove the sameness of color by connecting the 2 squares to reveal a continuous shade. Like this:



If you want the leave-no-doubt-about-it version then here's a video which crunches the 2 squares together:

http://tinyurl.com/ylknlgm


It makes you wonder: If this utterly convincing distortion of perception can happen visually, then there must be equally powerful distortions in other areas of our experience that we are also unaware of. And once we acknowledge that these illusions are part of our 'input' then we must be willing to take into account at least the possibility of such occurrences in any and all situations. It's a kind of back door into the realm of humility, I guess. A realization about how utterly wrong we can be about being... right. Something to think about.
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Spacing Out

Imagine the sense of validation I felt when I read the below article today:

Stop feeling guilty about daydreaming! According to a new study that scanned daydreaming brains, our minds appear to be most active when wandering. This accounts for moments of insight - those instances of coming up with solutions when we're not necessarily looking for them, which differs from analytical problem solving.

When we allow our brains to set their own courses, they activate several areas of problem solving at once - areas which don't usually work in unison and which alight on insightful solutions long before they become conscious.

"People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty," says cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who reported the findings last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But, in looking at EEG recordings, "mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem."

So go ahead. Space out.

An Old UFO Sighting- Validated!

Just for the record... I have only seen one UFO in my life- at my Mom's house in Weston, Ct just a few days before I left on my cross country trip in 1988 to settle in California. I'd say it was about July 10th.

What I saw was a large, amorphous glob of moving lights moving in relation to each other against a darkened background in a way that could not be explained by conventional possibilities. It would have had to have been something like multiple undercover blimps being encircled by people flying jet packs with rotating flood lights attached to them. (Ok, perhaps a simpler explanation would have been someone putting acid in my diet coke or the like...)

So it was with a sense of validation and intrigue that I found the below entry in a national UFO database the other day, describing a similar object reported just 5 days after my sighting about 20 miles away in Danbury, CT. My sighting (which other family members saw too) was from a much greater distance than theirs so it was not as dramatic. But hey- I'll take a visit from another world in any way I can get it...


Here is the link to that report:

http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/016/S16594.html


And here is a link to every logged UFO sighting going back to the 1950s, listed by US State. Kind of fun to see if anyone logged a sighting for a UFO that you remember seeing:

Http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxloc.html

Devil Sticks Fun

Had some trippy fun with my Devil Sticks recently and made this video. Turn your sound on:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHSB8JFJSqY
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The Fallacy of the Shortcut

I stumbled upon the concept of 'The fallacy of the shortcut' in my wanderings today- a valuable illusion to be aware of. It's one of many examples of how our conceptualizations and models about the world can lose validity when applied to, well, the real world. How we can get caught up in a concept and ignore the limits of its application, or perhaps more accurately, the limits of the world that we're trying to apply it to.

An example of this fallacy is shown in the diagram below which shows a map of standard, rectangular city streets. The fallacy of the shortcut can arise when we consider what route to take when traveling from one corner of the grid to another. It's natural to want to take the diagonal route (shown in green) because that's the shortest distance between the 2 points. But since we're limited to traveling only on the grid of the actual streets it turns out that the only 'diagonal' available to us (shown in blue) is no shorter than other possible routes (shown in red and yellow). As a matter of fact, all routes taken from one black dot to the other that do not overtly reverse in direction will cover the exact same distance.

The blue route is only 'conceptually diagonal', because at no point does it actually proceed in a diagonal direction. So, it's a fallacy that it is the shorter route. The fallacy comes about because the mind tries to apply a valid concept in an invalid way. It makes you ponder how much of our challenge in life is about bridging and reconciling this gap between pure theory vs real world application. How easy it is to focus on the pedantic vs the applied.

Many ancient traditions recognized this problem and included the concept of 'Earth Energy' vs 'Sky Energy' in our world, and how they must be balanced if we want to live wisely. The 'Sky' represents potential- that which is theoretically possible. The 'Earth' represents the specifics of what we have to work with. The local conditions. As intriguing and mystical as it is to talk about these concepts in the same breath as tarot cards, incense, crystals and such, they are more directly illustrated by pondering this trip across the grid of city streets, with the 'Sky' representing our ideal diagonal route across town and the 'Earth' representing the limitations of the actual right angled grid of the roads.

Yes, the ideal route would proceed diagonally- but not until they bulldoze half the city and lay a new road. And I haven't even discussed traffic lights or taxi fares...