Nude Beach Thoughts

First Audio Tank Experience

After work today I had my first audio tank experience.

I listened to Between The Buried and Me - The Parallax II: Future Sequence. It was intense to say the least, yet also very euphoric. When a heavy part of the song would play my mind would race and ideas and thoughts flew by. Unfortunately, only a few held fast once out of the tank but all directly sorted and complete. I could respond by having my heart beat sync with the rapid tempo, and 'feel' the vibrations from the speakers flowing into my back and out through my chest.

During the melodic parts of the album I was able to sink deep into the void. Every time the piano kicked in I immediately saw a massive expanse of white and lightly hued stars with my eyes wide open and wide awake, and as I scanned from side to side, it was a feeling similar to when you hold and scroll within Stellarium. Flashing colorful systems and shooting stars began to shift following the flow of the music and then more concrete patterns started to emerge. I couldn't help but laugh.

One particular image set that stands out was a blooming white rose edged in bright blue. It then stared to shift into an albino Ankole-Watusi bull. This then raised its head upwards and slowly dissipated as the song again shifted. This occurred during the song Bloom.

All I can say is that I now have a new found reverence for the power of the mind and deeper appreciation for the album.

Fixing my mums laptop.

We live on opposite sides of the country and I now have the joy again of managing her computers. This is why I love the internet and the ever increasing Singularity. 

Steam Causes Me Various Internals Dilemmas.

Seriously. This can't be good for anyone...

So I just posted this an hour ago on r/vancouver in hopes of getting my stolen iPhone 4 back.

http://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/comments/zn194/debt_ridden_student_had_iphone_stolen_while/

Then while commenting back and listening to new music I have become obsessed with.

I decided to check my bank accounts.


WTF is THAT!
Talk about bad luck. Thank the Great Magnet for having friends and loved ones that can do a loaner! 

Nude Beach Thoughts

Choking: A love/hate relationship for fans.

After catching the last 10 minutes of the Canuks vs, Bruins. I thought these notes from a paper on choking, the yips, and panicking might help sooth things over.


Clark, T.P., Tofler, I. R., & Lardon, M.T. (2005) The sport psychiatrist and golf. Clinics in Sports Medicine. 24(4), 959-971.

Purpose: The authors review pre-performance routine and methods for optimizing focus, and discuss the science behind being "in the zone." The authors also discuss how acute performance failure, or "choking," is best understood as being three separate disorders.
Method: Golf is like “mental chess,” and that the mental component is possibly the toughest part of playing golf. The mental chess of golf is the challenge of how well a player focuses on the shot at hand, rather than being taken off-task by thoughts, emotions, or poorly controlled physiological arousal.
1. Neuroelectric measures, such as EEG and ERP techniques, have findings that suggest that the same attentional mechanisms are affected by hypnosis and dissociation.
2. EEG showing hemispheric operational control in professional golfers.
Results: Golf is uniquely challenging for excessive down time leads to obsessive thinking and distraction, as well as amplification of pre-existing negative self perceptions, performance anxiety, panic, and affective over arousal.
3. Sport psychiatrist can help the athlete interrupt ironic processes by first recognizing when they occur, and then developing strategies to lessen cognitive and emotional overload. Prompt and effective management allows the golfer to attend to the task of preparing to hit his next shot.
4. Researchers at UCSD  and Scripps Research Institute hypothesized that the zone state may be a manifestation of an adaptive dissociation, and that similarities exist between the zone, hypnosis, and dissociation. They characterized the athletic zone as having four essential components: (1) enhanced attentional focus, (2) time slowing, (3) sense of detachment, and (4) super-normal performance.
5. Three distinct forms of performance failure:

• Panicking; when the mind goes blank, and the player relies on instinctive behaviors and loses the ability to think about what steps are needed to attain the goal/objective.
• Chocking; not about reversion to instinct but rather about the loss of instinct or the loss of previously mastered motor programs. Explicit monitoring interrupts the implicit motor execution programs.
• The "yips"; the yips is often referred to as a focal dystonia. Dystonia is characterized as a paroxysmal movement disorder in which an unwanted muscle contraction, or twitch, leads to an involuntary movement. Symptoms of the yips, such as jerks during execution of shots, often result in miss-hits.

Importance: Athletic zone states may be a subset of flow phenomena and might be understood by looking at models of dissociation and hypnosis. Authors also gave a brief summary of treatments for performance failure. 

Nude Beach Thoughts

Farm Trooper Quoteage

A lone Farm Trooper has spent his spare time, between Hoth placements and stellar runs on a clunky EX-F, scanning the verse for random signals. Here is another piece of what his eyes have read, dictated at his ranch on Corellia.

Nude Beach Thoughts

Check out the following for some details about the 1000 True Fan Theory.