A dog owner in the US state of Maryland says her golden retriever Toby saved her from choking to death by performing the Heimlich manoeuvre.

Debbie Parkhurst, 45, said she was eating an apple at home last Friday when a piece became lodged in her throat and she began to choke.

Ms Parkhurst said she pounded on her own chest but could not move the piece.

Toby joined in, jumping on her chest and dislodging the apple, then licking her face so she would not pass out.

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One of the nice things about the San Francisco Bay Area is its vast array of gorgeous open space. Yesterday, a few friends and I literally stopped to smell the flowers out at Mount Diablo State Park.

The amount of colorful life in this area is really something. In addition to wildflowers in the east bay, there are mushrooms down low in the north bay, eagles up high in the south bay.

But what of the city itself?

(cc) patrick boury

Today I explored a whole different side to open space in the bay area: public urban green-space. Spots such as the Yerba Buena Gardens and Golden Gate Park are well known, but there are many hidden green gems in even the densest urban areas of San Francisco. By city ordinance, newly built or renovated buildings must dedicate a portion of their square footage to open space that is publicly accessible. Rick Evans of SFCityGuides.com writes that while developers will fulfill their legal responsibility in creating these spaces, they often keep these small gardens and parks unadvertised. Evans maintains that in order to find these quiet gems, you have to poke around, ask questions and overcome the “I don’t belong here” feeling.

Knowing (the location of the park) is often half the battle. And there are a variety of ways to find them, from browsing online satellite images to observing the high perimeters from the sidewalks. But sometimes you have to push open an unmarked door, wander to the end of a hallway or go to an odd floor in a tall building to find these secret patches of green.

A sample:
The sun terrace at the famous Crown Zellerbach building features a peaceful tree-lined seating area, a stunning view of the cityscape (including a full-length look at the iconic Transamerica tower), a small monument to our first president — all on the 15th floor.

Also, there’s a small rooftop cafe at a SF art school that features a Diego Rivera fresco and cheap bites to eat.

But I’m not going to be that guy that spills the beans. The value of these places is in the secrecy.

Many of you will be pleased just to know that these emerald patches exist. For those that must explore, I’ve compiled a map (using this handy mapping tool) of some of the hidden urban parks and rooftop gardens. If you’d like to browse the compilation, or add your own secret spots, please leave a comment here, or drop us a line: localoaf at free-google-email-domain dot com.

The immensely talented design collective Worther’s Original have created an installation called Shadow Monsters. It’s a processing app that augments your shadow puppetry with reactive audio and animation…live, on the fly.

Shadow Monsters evoked the same astonishment I felt the first time I saw my fingers’ shadows rearrange themselves into an uncannily lifelike nether-bunny hopping across my bedroom wall. Only now the bunny has fangs and throbbing tendrils.

If my fellow oafs will forgive the self-endorsement, I’d like to present a musical offering. My band, Secret Name Name, has a myspace page and I’ve just uploaded some new songs. Enjoy!

Secret Name Name - “Firewalk”

Just walking down a city street we enter and exit dozens of wi-fi networks. Ill-equipped to detect them ourselves, the Trace project uses wireless enabled PDAs to map them out. Beautiful (yet rather useless) visualizations of various journeys. Made by the folks at Stamen Design. (Ooh! They’re hiring!)

Stamen Design is also behind Splatter, which should waste about . . . 10 seconds of your time. Far less time than I’ve spent staring at Sexy Mario.

Thanks to the inimitable Things Magazine.

D’you ever get disoriented (or excited) when the same word or phrase is typeset exactly on top of itself in two successive lines of text? I found this paragraph this evening, with five informations in a row! Oddly enough, it was the result of a search for “information overload.” Remarkable? maybe. Loafable? absolutely.

Thanks, Google Scholar and Health Libraries Group.

In my user interface class this morning, our professor mentioned research showing that Asians tend to focus more on background elements in images than on foreground objects. The research was done in 2005 by psychologists at the University of Michigan. Here’s the article in PNAS, for those with journal access. Essentially, they tracked eye movement of American graduate students and Chinese grad students (all at U. of M.) while showing them images of animals with and without backgrounds. They also showed pictures of animals participants had already seen and asked them to register recognition. They found that Americans tend to focus on the foreground object sooner (we’re talking milliseconds here) and fixate on it longer, while the Chinese students glanced toward the background much more often. The graph above compares the number of times participants from the two groups participants looked at the foreground object at time intervals over 3 seconds from initial exposure. More recent fMRI work has shown that the two groups also activate different regions of the brain when performing similar tasks.

Continue reading ‘Focus on the Foreground?’

NOSO is a real-world platform for temporary disengagement from social networking environments. The NOSO experience offers a unique opportunity to create NO Connections by scheduling NO Events with other NO Friends.

These “NO” events, called NOSOs, take place in designated cafés, parks, libraries, bookstores, and other public spaces. Participants – whose identities remain unknown to one another – agree to arrive at an assigned time and remain alone, quiet and un-connected, while at the same time knowing that another “Friend” is present in the space.

NOSOs are scheduled by users through the NOSO website. They last for a duration of 1 - 30 minutes, after which participants disperse and return to their regular activities.

Via Andrea’s del.icio.us page

While discussing geography, one of my classmates pitched an idea she’d like to try: follow a homeless person around for a day with a GPS, mapping their use of space (with consent, of course). Where do they really go? Where would they want you to think they go? I often think of the homeless as landscape fixtures, which is dehumanizing, but as much a product of their geographic consistency as of my lack of empathy.

So I figured this kind of thing must have been done, and a quick search turned up the animated heat map of the homeless in LA above. As with any heat map it’s mostly interpolation, but the movement over the course of several months is interesting. One of the cartographers that worked on it has some interesting comments on the process, too. SFGate has a less interesting and less detailed map of the homeless in SF. I think the much smaller scale of my classmate’s idea would be somewhat more personal and interesting, but I couldn’t find something like it in my hardly exhaustive 3 mins of search.

On a related note, the City of Berkeley is mounting an unfunded effort to crack down on public madness and panhandling. The curious can find the proposal and (5 hours!) of video from the March 13th City Council meeting on the City website.

Thanks, Lynette and Brian!

I must admit, I love HBO’s The Sopranos.

The season finale and last nine episodes begins in April. I’ve grown to love this show and agree with an article in this month’s Vanity Fair (“The Family that Preys Together”) that maintains it’s the best dramatic television show of all time and certainly what has transitioned HBO from a feature-and-fight network to probably one of the best producers of original adult content on television. I’ve even grown to think a bit like Tony Soprano.

One thing is for sure: the amount of Italian food in this show is immense and mouth watering. From Sfogliatelle to Chicken Marsala to Baked Ziti. So, as an ode to The Sopranos here’s an easy recipe for a popular dish on the show, Baked Ziti. It’s not necessarily cheap but it is quick, yummy and will feed an army of mob soldiers for days.

Continue reading ‘Baked Ziti: Ode to the Sopranos’