Dr Dean Edell
I just got off the phone with Dr Dean Edell. Last night I watched the most recent episode of Big Love. One of the main characters owns a hardware in Utah and is obsessed with being outed as a polygamist. The non-polygamists are portrayed, unilaterally as being opposed to the beliefs of these fundamentalist Mormons. I couldn't help wondering, as I watched the show, if his lifestyle would be as much of a concern if he lived in San Francisco or California for that matter. Edell brought up the issue of Polygamy on his noon talk show on KGO 810 and so I thought I'd call him up and get his opinion on the matter. I told him that I was calling from San Francisco and that, out here, we have a pretty strong sex positive culture. We have authors like Dossie Easton who wrote The Ethical Slut, a book on polyamory. I personally know people who are in polyamorous relationships and their relationships seem to be working successfully. I don't know anyone who's a polygamist though so I asked him if he thought polygamy would be as much of an issue with someone who lived in San Francisco?
He explained that California was founded by people during the gold rush and that this contributed to our acceptant attitude. Furthermore, our acceptance of people, as with people who are homosexual for example, is influenced by whether we know someone with that lifestyle. We are more likely to accept a lifestyle if we know someone who practices it. He said it was more likely for polygamists to be accepted in blue states than in red states.
My dome at Burning Man
This is my dome at Burning Man 2006. My car is also visible, it's the straight up from the dome. You can find the spot on the regular Google Maps site too at [40.763282, -119.226706].
You can add one of these widgets to your site.
- View the HTML source of this page.
- Copy and paste the portion of code labeled with START/STOP COPY comments.
- Find your location on the regular Google Maps site and double click where you would like the marker to go.
- Click "Link to this page".
- Find the line in the code you copied from this page with the words "var me". The the line is followed values for the title of the info window, the latitude and the longitude. Notice that the URL contains a portion that reads ll=XXX,YYY where XXX and YYY are numbers. The first is your latitude. The second is your longitude.
- Replace the title in the "me" line with your own title.
- Replace the latitude in the "me" line with the latitude from the "Link to this page" URL.
- Replace the longitude in the "me" line with longitude from the "Link to this page" URL.
If you want to nudge the marker a bit you can play with the latitude/longitude numbers. Increasing the latitude makes the marker go up. Increasing the longitude makes it go left. The distance to the back of my car is +0.0001 latitude.
If you end up using this thing for anything, post to this article; I'd be interested in hearing about it.
Psychological illusionist
Derren Brown is an
English psychological illusionist. In the clip below, he convinces two advertising professionals to come up with a concept for a product that Brown has already slipped into their mind using subliminal advertising.