Big Pickles

You've probably heard about US Men's Volleyball head coach Hugh McCutcheon, who is taking leave from coaching the Olympic team because his wife's parents were attacked in China.

During my freshman year at BYU, McCutcheon was an assistant coach for the BYU Men's volleyball team, and I took a couple of his PE classes. I just wanted to say what an awesome teacher he was. That was some of the most fun I ever had in college, not to mention the best volleyball I ever played.

During a scrimmage late in the semester, this one hot shot on the opposing team spiked the ball hard in my direction. Through a combination of involuntary reflexes and blind luck, I was able to make the dig and keep the ball in play. After the point, McCutcheon walked over to me and told me that it was a great play, but he didn't like my attitude. After a dig like that, he said, I needed to get in the face of the hitter and let him know just how much I enjoyed denying him the satisfaction of a clean kill.

That's probably what I liked best about him. He enjoyed cutting the cocky guys down to size and giving the quieter players the recognition they weren't claiming for themselves.

Labels: sports

I first came across this article a couple of years ago, but I was reminded of it again somewhat recently. I don't think I've blogged about it before, but if I have you'll forgive the repetition.

Repenting Hyperopia

This article proposes that supposedly farsighted (hyperopic) choices of virtue over vice evoke increasing regret over time. We demonstrate that greater temporal separation between a choice and its assessment enhances the regret (or anticipated regret) of virtuous decisions (e.g., choosing work over pleasure). We argue that this finding reflects the differential impact of time on the affective determinants of self-control regrets. In particular, we show that greater temporal perspective attenuates emotions of indulgence guilt but accentuates wistful feelings of missing out on the pleasures of life. We examine alternative explanations, including action versus inaction regrets and levels of construal.

(Emphasis mine.)

I think this article is interesting because it touches on something that I've felt and a lot of people I've talked to have felt, but rarely gets any press. Some of the work/life balance stuff out there gets close, I think ("Nobody on their death bed ever wished they spent more time in the office.") but those ideas are usually still expressed in a forward-looking context.

One example where I've seen this play out is by talking to former mission companions. Almost all of them have expressed regret for being so concerned about the rules and less focused on the immediate experience. If they could go back, they say, they would worry less about following the rules exactly and spend more time helping people and even having fun.

(Interestingly, I heard this advise repeatedly before my mission, from returned missionaries, but I largely ignored it. The incessant call for exact obedience from the leadership has much more sway with a new missionary who just wants to do the right thing.)

Obviously, the consequences of short-sighted decision making are real and can be dire, so I'm not advocating "eat, drink and be merry" by any means. I'm just saying that warnings against such may be over-represented, and that it might not hurt to remember that as life goes on, we value the memories of those times when we lived it up maybe a little too much over the memories of when we were careful and prudent.

...XKCD-style.

This morning when I checked the site he had just over 1400 donors. Now he has over 2300. Not bad for one day's work.

Labels: politics

Maybe you've seen this before, but it was new to me. VideoJug is chock full of instructional videos about how to do most anything. I ended up there while looking for instructions on how to operate a Trangia stove.

It appears to be British or European in origin, and professionally done. Some of them are pretty funny.

Labels: internet, video

Just like it sounds, Urban Prankster documents creative pranks carried out in an urban setting. Many of the groups submitting material are satellites of New York's Improv Everywhere, but there are submissions independent groups and individuals from all over the world as well.

Labels: internet, pranks

Baby Smash! is software that you install to protect your computer from smaller people who tend to bang on the keyboard with little rhyme or reason.

As babies smash on the keyboard, colored shapes, letters and numbers appear on the screen. Baby Smash will lock out the Windows Key, as well as Ctrl-Esc and Alt-Tab so your baby can't get out of the application. Pressing ALT-F4 will exit the application and Shift-Ctrl-Alt-O brings up the options dialog.

I like how the program assumes that random banging might possibly result in Ctrl-Esc or Alt-Tab but never Alt-F4.

Labels: babies, tech

You know the trick you used to read comic books in class, where you prop up a textbook and hide the comic behind it?

Yeah, I've never done that either. But I've seen it on TV.

Anyway, this is the work version of that.

Labels: books

This guy takes Garfield comics and photoshops Garfield out of them. The result is a very mentally disturbed Jon Arbuckle.

The New York Times has an article on the site, where they also get a response from Jim Davis. He seems to like it just fine.

At first I figured this must be a parody, but I was wrong. It's part of a real ad campaign for modesty at BYU.

Think Inside The Circle.

That might as well be BYU's motto.

The rest of the posters are here.

To be clear, I don't have a problem with the standards at BYU per se, but the heavy-handed enforcement and propaganda like the above is a different story. They know how to take all the fun out of being good, that's for sure.

Labels: BYU

"Guitar Hero on the Nintendo DS? How would that work?"

I'm glad you asked.

Labels: games, music games, video

There are five trees in my yard, and none of them are the same. I've never really known what kind they are. What can I say, Forestry is not one of the Eagle required merit badges. So I've just lived in in ignorance.

Until today.

Thanks to the Texas Tree Planting Guide, I'm fairly confident that I've identified my trees.

Starting in the back yard, going clockwise:

Live Oak. It looks deciduous, but it's really evergreen. Those leaves stay green all winter. This sucker is huge, but we have it trimmed up pretty high. You can hear the branches scraping the second-story rain gutters from inside the house, so it's probably due for another trimming. Drops a lot of acorns, which have to fished out of kids' pockets at laundry time.

Sycamore. This one is nice-sized, too. Very pretty bark. Drops these annoying spiky balls that look like naval mines and wreak havoc on the lawnmower and bare feet, though. At least the kids don't put them in their pockets.

Cedar Elm. I might be reaching with the subspecies, but I'm pretty sure it's some kind of Elm. By far our largest tree. This one seems to rain sticks more than anything else. Until the kids are old enough to mow the lawn, they will have steady employment picking up sticks from around this tree.

Baldcypress. We're in the front yard now. This tree is the opposite of the Live Oak--it looks evergreen, but it's deciduous. Those needles turn brown and fall off in the fall and winter.

Texas Redbud. For about two weeks every spring this tree is the most beautiful thing on our street. Well, except for the other Redbuds, several people seem to have them. For the rest of the year, though, it's kind of a pain. The branches are real twisty and like to grow downward, so I have to trim it almost every year. It gets some love in October, when we hang ghosties from it.

That's it. That's all my trees.

Labels: forestry

This blog post got me thinking about Facebook and Webkinz, but mostly about the construction "____ is ____ for adults," which I seem to come across a lot. So I Googled it.


God/religion/evolution/romance is a fairy tale/stuffed animal/imaginary friend/Santa Claus for adults. (By far the most common.)

Golf is marbles for adults.

The Army is Boy Scouts for adults.

BSD is Linux for adults.

Serenity is Star Wars for adults.

Shingles is chicken pox for adults.

Gmail is Hotmail for adults.

Prison is timeout for adults.

NewsTrust is Digg for adults.

NYC/Las Vegas is Disneyland for adults.

The Unseen Guest is Cake for adults.

Ikea is Lego for adults.

Ilva is Ikea for adults.

Grey's Anatomy is Dawson's Creek for adults.

Fettuccine alfredo is macaroni and cheese for adults.

Have you heard of any others?

I wonder if Richard Feynman has this picture hanging up somewhere?

Bonus points if you can count all the theories, conjectures, constants, and cats represented here.

Labels: science

New pictures are up on Flickr. There is a link off to the left, but here it is again. For emphasis.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigpickles/

I really should change the account to Melissa's name, since she's the one who posts all the pictures and writes the captions these days.

Labels: pictures

A little advice for Pants and Shan:



More at Newborn Baby Zone.

Labels: parenting

See if you can follow along.

There is a band from England called Utah Saints. They wrote a song in 1992 called "Something Good." They remixed it in 2008 ("Something Good '08"). Kanye West posted the video to the remix on Vimeo. The premise of the video is that MC Hammer got his moves from a pub in Cardiff, Wales.

Just watch the video. It's hilarious.

[EDIT] The Vimeo link is gone, but here it is on YouTube.

Labels: music, video

Everything that we're afraid of, from childhood to parenthood.

This would have been interesting to know as a kid. You know how everyone is always telling you "They're just as afraid of you as you are of them" referring to animals, other kids, whatever? Turns out the same goes for parents--their kids scare them to death.

Labels: kids these days

Melissa asked me on my way out the door this morning if I had any good ideas for Cub Scouts tonight. I suggested "Steal the Bacon."

"I don't know that game."

"Google it."

I Googled it today, just to see what she would find if she took me up on my awesome suggestion, and I found this website with like every kids' game know to man.

Well, boy.

And girl.

Labels: games, nostalgia

You have fifteen minutes to name as many elements as you can.

You don't have to know where they go on the chart, but you do have to spell their names correctly.

Ready... GO!

(I got 40 in seven minutes before I gave up. I'm sure some of you out there can fill in the whole chart.)

P.S. What's with elements 112-118? Are they new? I don't remember ever learning them. And talk about unoriginal names.

Labels: games, science

This past weekend everything got shuffled up at church, so I put together a map to help myself visualize the changes.

The color of the marker indicates what ward that family was in before the shakeup. And I was limited to 100 data points, so I just picked a few families from each ward that appeared on the leadership rosters.

Arlington Texas Stake

Labels: church