flanerie.org

Disrespect to police spokesperson Viktoria Galik for missing the whole point of being free...

[stuff.co.nz reports...]
BUDAPEST: Hungary's busiest highway, connecting Budapest with the Austrian capital Vienna, was closed after a truck carrying rabbits crashed, letting 5,000 of the animals loose on the road, police said.

The M1 motorway was closed around 40km west of Budapest and could remain closed for hours while police try to capture the escaped animals, highway police spokeswoman Viktoria Galik said.

"There are thousands of them on the road but they're not using their newfound freedom well; they're just sitting around, eating grass and enjoying the sun," Galik said.

I have added a new Games section to the site for those in search of additional idling resources. There are the sort of games that do not involved frenetic keyboard bashing or mouse spanking, just of bit of point and click puzzle solving.

A cerebral workout for the salary slave, plus a few walkthroughs for those who are stuck on classics like Submachine and Samorost.

It can all be found here: flanerie games

If you are trying to commit something to memory, take a nap. Even a short daytime snooze could help you learn.

A good night's sleep is known to improve people's ability to learn actions such as mirror writing. REM sleep, when most dreaming occurs, is thought to be particularly important.

The role of sleep in factual learning has been less clear. Now Matthew Tucker at The City University of New York and his colleagues have shown that even a nap with no REM sleep can help.

Volunteers were told to memorise pairs of words (a test of factual learning) and to practise tracing images in a mirror (action learning). When they were tested straight afterwards and 6 hours later, those who had been allowed a nap of up to 1 hour before the re-test scored 15 per cent better in the factual test than the non-nappers, but no better in the action test (Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, vol 86, p 241).

"Traditionally, time devoted to daytime napping has been considered counterproductive," the researchers say. It now seems sleep is "an important mechanism for memory formation".
[snaffled from The New Scientist]

Pretty much all of the national newspapers in England now carry sudoku puzzles, and some of the more upmarket ones were accused of dumbing-down when they introduced them.

Thankfully, there is no such danger at flanerie.org, where dumbing-up is the order of the day. Also I have no problem jumping on a bandwagon so late that it has just lapped me.

So I present the flanerie.org sudoku puzzle. The page needs a little work, but the java app is a beauty. Thanks to zentense for kind permission.

A major cause of modern stress is the news. TV and print news tells us what to think, what to do and tries to panic us, all for no real reason. There is more news than ever and yet it is increasingly devoid of real content.

The vast majority of the news is agenda driven, mostly by governments, politicians and advertisers. The media happily take this ersatz news and rehash it for our consumption. They do this usually because either it suits their own agendas or because they want the advertising dollars. No newspaper is ever going to compaign for an end to the excessive consumer society we live in - that would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.

And talking of Christmas, the amount of news suddenly collapses at this time of year. Surely news just happens and it isn't dependent on the calendar? I guess not.

I was listening to the radio a couple of weeks ago and the presenter said, "next the weather, and then we will look forward to tomorrow's news." Is it just me that thinks there is something wrong in that?

Of course, it is possible to navigate the mire of misinformation, but only by using a variety of sources and adding a large dose of cynicism, but the flâneur prefers to avoid the whole thing completely.

There is much peace of mind to be had when you aren't worrying about elections in countries that have nothing to do with you, hurricanes that you can do nothing about, and the minutiae of Blair's lies.

So try this dear reader - take two weeks off from mainstream news. You will feel a weight lifted from you, and your focus will return to yourself and your loved ones. This doesn't mean you should cease to care about the wider world, but you can keep tabs (and far more accurate tabs) on humanity without being spoon-fed the agendas of others.

To quote Thomas Jefferson: 'The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.'

I used to dislike gardening intensely. It was a chore, a thing that had to be done, effort, hardwork, a preventer of idling. But in recent years I have discovered, and come to love, its soothing qualities.

The most pleasurable aspect of gardening is its multiple time scales - the immediate, the medium term and the long term.

In the immediate, you can dig, plant, cut, trim, lop, harvest, tie, rake and hoe for instant, and often striking results. In 30 minutes I can mow my front and back lawns. In 45 I can also trim the edges, pull a few weeds from the borders and sweep the yard.

It seems to me that gardening has much in common with hairdressing - lots of snipping on autopilot, interspersed with brief checks and course corrections.

Unfortunately most hairdressers allow the underused brain to stay that way and instead subject the customer to banal conversations on themes of weather, holidays and last night's major drinking session. Personally I derive little comfort from knowing that the wielder of razor sharp scissors has a hangover that could fell an elephant. And I don't want to talk about the weather. In fact, shut the hell up and cut my hair.

Hairdressing should be the perfect career for philosophers and novelists - plenty of thinking time combined with the opportunity to meet a huge range of different people, potential characters all. For a couple of years of my Oxford incarnation my hair was cut by someone looking not unlike Zadie Smith. Now I am wondering if maybe it was her after all. Sure, she claims to live in cor blimey east London but that is probably just the marketing department being cheeky. In reality she plies her trade as a crimper in Oxford while she ponders her next opus.

There are other authors who fit the bill too, not least Julian Barnes, although clearly more of a barber than a 'hair designer.' The fact that the first short story of his last collection was titled "A Short History of Hairdressing" only adds weight to my flimsy argument.

But before I travel too far along the back passage of hairdressing (a passage, by all accounts, that is reguarly and vigorously travelled) I recall that I am supposed to be writing about gardening.

You might wonder how gardening is so different from housework and home improvement. They certainly have similar attributes - a quick tidy-up yields big results, they are easier if done regularly, and there are endless TV shows about them. But housework is only ever short term, and with housework you don't get any help from external forces.

Consider this: in March I planted some grass seed in a bare patch on my lawn. That same weekend I placed a tin of paint in my spare bedroom. Six months later, and with no additional work by me, the bare patch has been replaced with luxuriant grass. The bedroom meanwhile is still unpainted.

This is idler heaven - plant an acorn, get an oak tree. Ten minutes' effort by you, a bonus 50 years of effort from nature.

I have a variety of plants in my garden and I only know the names of two of them: grass and mint. The rest are a mystery to me, but with gardening that doesn't matter. No homework is required. The plants know what they are and what they need to do - they grow anyway.

If you have a specific need for a plant you can head to the garden centre, find an old-looking member of staff and say you want a shrub, so big, with blue or purple flowers that bloom all through summer. He will reel off a couple of latin words and lead you to the plant. If only all shopping was that easy.

There are those that try to make gardening a science, but it doesn't need to be. Gardening is a link to our agricultural past and needs no more science now than it did then. Plant, tend and harvest. All the real work is done by sunlight and rainwater.

And the result of this moderate effort, this gentle steering of nature - the perfect place to sit on a summers' evening, soothed by birdsong, fanned by a soft breeze and surrounded by nature's splendour.