Open Space

I love to have extra space in my apartment, I don't want to get home and be surrounded by stuff. I LOVE the show hoarders because it makes me a little uncomfortable, but when they do finally get some of the stuff cleared out it makes me feel so much better (and it's not even my house!). So when I read this article on Apartment Therapy's blog, I loved it. To some extent, the article is actually a bad article, it's a little confusing, and doesn't seem to have a follow through at all; but I absolutely agree that empty space allows for creativity and exploration. I am always looking to re-enforce what I already believe though, so there's obviously that.

I have many friends who cannot fathom having an empty room in their apartment, I have just that. I do keep my suitcases and my bike in the closet, but the room itself has a couple empty plastic milk crates and my bf's broken bike. I love knowing that I can always go somewhere completely devoid of clutter, and I can flip my bike over and do random work on it, or do a major art project (still haven't done this at all) if I wanted to, or just go in there and meditate. The rest of my house is fairly barren as well, but I would love if it could be even more so. Space allows for a clear mind, and you know if it's dirty or not because there really isn't much to clean!

An empty room, to me, always reminds me of when you first move into a new place. There are so many opportunities, so many ideas about how the space will be used. Those opportunities are still there even when the space is full of stuff, we just have to remind ourselves that it exists every once in a while.

R

Up next: how to control your children

Ok, we still have a long way to go before we can control other people.  Aside from the fact that we don't have much control over the rat, people don't even have tails!

Yoo, S-s, Kim, H, Filandrianos, E, Taghados, SJ, and Park, S. PLOSone, 2013

 

 

A group in Harvard has made a way for humans to control rat tail movements with their minds. And all of this is noninvasive for both of the participants (the human and the rat).  Well, the rat was anesthetized, so not completely noninvasive.  

Further, being anesthetized means that the rat couldn't reject the movement, so this doesn't allow the "controller" to force motion of an otherwise functional rat.  And, the movement doesn't actually correlate to a movement that humans perform, so we can't get too excited about controlled, focused, functional motion just yet but this is a huge step toward brain-to-brain interfaces.

S