Takin' Care of Business (Time)

Life events have kept me from blogging much lately. Starting about two weeks ago, my cell phone died. Two days later, my 4-year-old iPod died. The day after that, the PC on which I produce music shit the bed. All of this might've sent me out to a ledge if it weren't for some other, more positive happenings.

Like this: my lovely girlfriend Maria and I got engaged. No date yet, but a nice ring on her finger if I don't say so myself. Statistically, I'm on my way to living longer than my bachelor friends. Coincidentally, that buys me more time to finish my ongoing music projects like INSTILLE, FIGORA and others who have yet to be named.

Oh, yeah, and we've fallen hard for Flight Of The Conchords.

Attention, Pixar Fans!

With the scoop that (so far) has escaped the likes of Upcoming Pixar, /film has an informative look at the Pixar projects in the works: Pixar: A Look at The Future and Beyond.




What projects, you ask?
These:

• 2007: Ratatouille
• 2008: WALL-E
• 2009: Up
• 2010: Toy Story 3
• TBD: 1906*

* Pixar's first live-action film.

[Image lifted from Pixar.com]

In A Toy Box Far, Far Away...

Excuse my geek-out, but this looks awesome. One of my favorite Adult Swim shows, Robot Chicken, is about to release a special treatment of Star Wars on June 17. Watch the trailers and get other digital souvenirs here.

[Apologies for not embedding the trailers here; the embed codes supplied by Adult Swim don't work correctly.]

Forgetting To Remember

NYT's Forgetting May Be Part of the Process of Remembering cites a report in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Basically, maintaining cognitive control demands that we forget things, much in the same respect it demands that we remember certain other things. Two sides of the same coin, when you think about it. Or, as the report phrases it:

"Remembering often requires the selection of goal-relevant memories in the face of competition from irrelevant memories."

So, in order to remember to get your proverbial shit together, you may inadvertently force yourself to forget some irrelevant trivia (or perhaps things you know you can look up anyway). I know that ever since I read that Einstein never bothered to remember anything he could look up, I've tried to give myself permission to let easily retrieved information fall out of my head to make room for other ideas and processes. For example, I don't remember your phone number any more because I know my phone remembers it for me.

Does this happen to you? Are you aware of any similar process in your own memory selection?

Prozac Turns 20, Still Not Good For You

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of Prozac, the first drug I was oh-so-wrongly prescribed. I'm no doctor, but believe me when I say the long-term effects are still being determined. I have yet to meet anyone who was on the drug before I was, for what it's worth.

I was twelve or thirteen at the time, one of the first people under age 18 to be prescribed the "miracle" drug. By a lazy physician, urged by a parent who couldn't cope with the mood swings of a pubescent me. I was too young to be on an antidepressant. I didn't have a serotonin imbalance, so Prozac didn't do anything for me - unless you count about nine months of side effects with no improvement in mood. In fact, things got progressively worse.

That same physician later tried to get my mom to pay for a drug test he ran on me during one check-up when I was in a decent mood - as if he couldn't believe that such a mood was possible without chemical inducement. (There were chemicals at work, but they were hormones awakened by a make-out session with a girl the day before.) That's the last time I saw that doctor, but others followed in his unsure footsteps and continued to prescribe dangerous substances without concern for their long-term effects.

Of course, I was better off consuming the relatively useless Prozac than I was on the medication that followed, a form of Lithium that led to other, more severe mood and medical issues - including unpredictable toxicity in the bloodstream and, for me, DOZENS of kidney stones. Plus a whole lot of excruciating pain that came with those stones, complications from other medications, and so on.

Moral of my story: Prozac is neither a status symbol nor a magic bullet for "bad" thoughts. Don't give antidepressants to kids who are just going through puberty; you could seriously screw up their bodies in ways you can't imagine.

To commemorate the anniversary, I felt the need to relate my experience with the drug before I showed you to this: Guardian Unlimited's Anna Moore gives us "20 things you need to know about the most widely used antidepressant in the world.

[via BoingBoing, via MindHacks]

Bike Helmets Bad For Cyclists?

Just in time for prime bike season: news that wearing a bike helmet may actually increase your chances of an accident involving a motor vehicle. I'm not just pulling your leg, this makes a lot of sense to me. But I've done a little reading on it, so let me throw the links at you...

Neatorama reports on
a Scientific American article about
the findings of University of Bath's Dr. Ian Walker.

As a perennial pedestrian, people-watcher and rider of public transportation, I have no problem whatsoever getting behind Walker's reason for conducting this road safety study.

His road safety work is currently considering questions relating to how drivers' attentional and decision-making mechanisms affect the safety of vulnerable road user groups such as pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorcyclists. Of particular interest at the moment is the issue of how our natural tendency to "read" other people (i.e., to interpret their gaze signals and other non-verbal communications) affects the safety of vulnerable groups.
[via Ian Walker's site]

I've worn a bike helmet ever since I started biking through the city. I've never been hit, but Chicago traffic is always more dense and less predictable than, say, DeKalb traffic. I do remember first wearing kneepads and a helmet while skateboarding on a half-pipe, and feeling invincible. But I also get the feeling that certain accidents are likely to happen regardless of the cyclist's choice of headgear.

Does wearing a helmet just say to everyone "the wearing of this helmet is totally protected"? It would seem that some effect like this is indeed at play. Do you think drivers are more likely to take precaution when a cyclist is not wearing a helmet?

PULL YOUR LID BACK

Try it. I did, and it really helped.

It finally got me to the realization that this blog has had an identity crisis. Until just now, I couldn't decide if it was about business or pleasure. Ironically, the content of a presentation I've given a few times at work suggested that I not write about work on my personal blog. All this really means: you'll notice a continued shift in tone at PYLB.

Well, it also means the "persuasion industry" topics, minus snarkism, will be migrating to the blog effort underway at work.

Welcome to Pull Your Lid Back.
[Image via hackcanada]