On June 4th, 1976, the Sex Pistols played their first gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall. There’s a book written about it called The Gig That Changed the World. You can read an interview with the author here.
The reenactment from 24-Hour Party People:
Day 3 of the Monkey Mind
I increased my meditation time from 5 minutes on Monday to 7 on Tuesday and 10 last night, and so far I still haven’t gotten bored.
On Tuesday I picked up a meditation candle (just a normal candle, really) and have been staring at it to help focus my meditation. Last night an interesting thing started happening after about 5 minutes or so. If I held my head still and didn’t blink, after a little bit of time the periphery of my vision would start to darken, and it was like being in a tunnel looking only at the candle. I could only hold onto it for a second or two. My guess is that this effect has more to do with suppressing my saccadic eye movement than anything mystical, but it’s fun to see how long I can hold onto it. Excepting of course that merely noticing when I go into tunnel-vision is an interruption of my clear mind and the goal here is to let go of things, not hold onto them.
Inspired by the article on distraction that I linked to yesterday, I’ve also picked up Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, which was cited in it.
Thing a Week: Meditation
This week I’m going to try meditating every day.
I read AJ Jacobs’s article about unitasking and the focus-destroying properties of multi-tasking last week. It reminded me that I have been wanting to try meditation.
Last night’s meditation: 5 minutes. Notes: That went much faster than I thought it would (meaning I didn’t get bored), but my mind still wandered like crazy after a couple minutes. Today I’ll push it a little.
I’ll include some more thoughts here as the week goes by.
The Blink Train
While I was waiting with Jesse and Laura for the train from Radburn back into the city yesterday, I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation to try to figure out how fast a train would have be traveling in order to get from out of sight over the horizon to being at the station before you could see it approaching. Here’s the rough calculation:
The distance to the horizon is about 2 miles (I’m decreasing it a little due to city smog). And we blink for about 300 milliseconds. So for a train to come out of nowhere, it’d have to travel 2 miles in 300 milliseconds. Or 1 mile per 150 milliseconds. Do the math and that’s 24,000 miles per hour. Roughly Mach 31, but only about one and a half times faster than the space shuttle orbits the earth.
Year in Cities 2009
Here are the lists for 2006, 2007, and 2008.
January
St John, USVI
Salt Lake City, UT
Logan, UT*
Washington, DC
Brooklyn, NY
February
Edinburgh, UK*
March
Edinburgh, UK*
April
New Haven, CT
May
Barcelona, Spain
Gualala, CA
Garberville, CA
Arcata, CA
Crescent City, CA
Gold Beach, OR
Coos Bay, OR
Portland, OR
Seattle, WA
June
Nashville, TN
Bovina, NY*
July
Logan, UT*
October
Berkshires, MA
November
Bovina, NY*
Atlanta, GA
Logan, UT
December
St John, USVI*
