Adam Pieniazek

In a new, sporadically published, feature, I’ll share with you some interesting quotes from around the web. Let’s get to it.

For $20 a month, you can get an infinite supply of the internet. Clara Moskowitz of LiveScience thinks this infinite supply is dangerous and writes:

These over-wired people are so focused on their gadgets, they neglect relationships with other people, O’Neill said. Communication aids such as texting and e-mail may actually hamper our abilities to have more important face-to-face conversations.

True. Sometimes when I’m talking to people “face-to-face” I lose focus and start searching for the ignore, send to voice-mail button.

I like Chuck Klosterman’s writing style, but in his latest article for ESPN.com, he writes a bunch of mumble-jumble about how history will look at these New England Patriots more favorably if they lose. The premise is silly and I don’t recommend reading the article, but, there was one glorious nugget hidden within it:

Taken to its logical (and therefore most absurd) extreme, a truly perfect football team would score on every offensive play, surrender zero yards defensively, and never miss an extra point. Even on PlayStation, this is impossible.

Little does he realize, but Chuck just gave the Patriots a little more motivation for Super Bowl Sunday. You don’t tell these New England Patriots that a task is impossible. I was nervous about this Super Bowl, just like I’ve been nervous before the other 18 games this season, but I’m starting to grow more confident that this Super Bowl will be a blowout. The Patriots are the true underdogs in this game anyway. It’s New York versus New England. This rivalry has been going on for centuries and it’s time for us New Englanders to finally take the title of Beasts of the Northeast.

This site made me “LOI”.

I want a Super Bowl Ring. I want it bad.

How anyone could doubt Randy Moss would fit in here with the Patriots? Sure, on the surface I thought it was an odd fit, but looking past the superficial dissimilarities, we all should have seen this monster season coming. Why? Take a look at this Youtube video of Randy Moss’ offseason training program from the Randy Moss documentary, from which the above quote came.

In a very interesting article, Caroline Williams writes for the New Scientist about time and how our perception affects our time. Apparently, we all have a piece of our brain which:

…emits regular pulses that are temporarily stored in an accumulator. When we need an estimate of how much time has passed - how long we’ve been waiting for a bus, say, or whether that pot of tea is likely to be ready - we simply access the contents of the accumulator.

Though it makes sense that we’d all have such a device in our brains, after all we don’t need a watch to recognize that time has gone by, it’s a bit mind-blowing to know scientists are studying such a device. Warren Meck and Catalin Buhusi from Duke University [go Tarheels] compiled evidence and studied the biological basis of this device.

They suggest that the hub of the interval-timing system is a region of the brain called the striatum, part of the basal ganglia. But it is not as simple as saying that the striatum is the brain’s pacemaker. Instead, they say, it monitors activity in other areas of the brain including the frontal cortex. As neurons in these brain regions go about their business, coordinating movement, attention, memory and so on, they produce waves of electrical excitation that are detected by the striatum and integrated into an estimate of how much time has passed.

That’s so cool. We don’t all have actual clocks in our heads, but by following the transmission rate of electrical waves in our brain, our brain can determine time. In the next quote from the same article, Warren Meck notes that dopamine affects the transmission rate and thus the time estimate.

Schizophrenics have too much dopamine activity in the brain so their clock is so fast that it feels like the whole world is crazy

Interesting. So it’s not that Schizophrenics are crazy, it’s just that they think the world is crazy and thus don’t act like everyone else in order to maintain sanity. In other words, Schizophrenics go crazy trying to avoid being crazy like everyone else. OK, one more quote from this fascinating article:

At last year’s meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington DC, the Dalai Lama gave a talk to the assembled neuroscientists on how time seems to slow down during meditation, as you focus away from the internal clock. Yet when you surface from meditation, he said, you think more time has passed than actually has. This is uncannily like being in the zone.

Having played football for five years in high school and one year of club lacrosse and club football in college, I’ve experienced being in the zone a few times. It does seem like time slows down, or at least everyone around you is moving slower than usual. Watching Tom Brady, it also seems like he’s in the zone a lot (duh); meaning he sits in the pocket and analyzes defenses so well I wonder if he feels like minutes go by when he’s back there. I wonder how many professional athletes meditate before games.

Speaking of being in the zone, I’m expecting this to be the greatest Super Bowl ever played. Contrary to my earlier comment of the Patriots playing a perfect game (they won’t, though here’s hoping) I think this will be a very close game and will come down to the end. Randy Moss said it well in an interview on his site, The Real Randy Moss (click Moss’ Corner, then Interviews to read the full post):

This is the last football game of the season. We’ll have time to rest our bodies and minds and reflect back on it afterwards. At this point, it doesn’t have anything to do with statistics, MVP’s and things like that. It’s about getting the job done.

So utilitarian. He goes on to say that “To win a championship on every level would mean a lot to my resume.” Right. Winning the Super Bowl is just a bullet point for Randy on his curriculum vitae. A week after he’ll be with his trainer working to get even more jacked for next season, no matter the outcome. That’s humble pie folks.

Who will you root for? The Giants, led by Mr. “But I don’t wanna play in San Diego” or the perfect yet humble Patriots, who’ve taken on and vanquished every challenge, on and off the field, that the world has thrown at them. OK, let’s end with some political comedy.

If you’re in my facebook network, you’ve probably already seen this video and read my opinion on it but for those who aren’t or haven’t check out the latest debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, followed by me quoting me.

LOI…that’s the best debate I’ve seen those two have yet.

Though, Obama is a much better candidate than Hilary, they’re both part of the corporate-media complex that plagues our political process.

The way to solve this debate is to vote for Ron Paul. Yup, somehow an old, white, Republican man from Texas is the answer to all the shit that an old, white, Republican man from Texas caused this country.

Ron Paul, FTW.

That’s all for this interval, people. Check back next time for more web quotes and counterpoints [whenever that may be].