Just hug it out baby

Memorial Day 2007 and I have chalked up yet another quintessential Seinfeld moment. We're enjoying a nice cookout at our friends Monica and Hunter's place. Helen and I are sitting on their sofa chatting with another couple when the first bailers start making the rounds to say their goodbyes.

We stand as this nice couple we met earlier in the evening approach (I'll call them Tony and Laurie to protect the innocent).

"Nice to meet you."

"Good luck with house hunting."

"Maybe we'll see you again."

Just as we enter the handshake zone, Laurie makes an almost imperceptible lean towards me. A gesture that was not accompanied by extended arms, and somewhat tentative and hesitant. Uncertain. That's probably the best description.

In the milliseconds that pass between Laurie's lean and my reaction, my brain has deciphered her movement and processed the various reasons, assumptions and responses available to me. I remember my mind making lightning quick calculations and concluding that Laurie must be one of those touchy-feely people who hug on the first meeting. Maybe it was because we'd had a pretty engaging conversation earlier in the evening, or that I'd observed how affectionate she was with her son. In any case, I found myself leaning forward in a hug.

As I reached my arms toward her, Laurie's posture stiffened and her forward momentum jolted to a halt for just a nanosecond, before her torso continued on its collision path with mine. All of a sudden I found myself in a time freeze, where everything in the physical world crawled like a slow motion video. That fraction of a second between my realization that something was terribly wrong and the consummation of our awkward hug seemed like an eternity. Only the synaptic connection between thought, recognition and embarrassment moved at hypersonic speed.

"Oh crap...what did I do? She wasn't looking for a hug you idiot!"

As we engaged in the ridiculously embarrassing hug - complete with exaggerated forward lean and staccato back patting - I realized that Laurie had simply been reaching for her purse, which was sitting on the end table behind me.

If my friends were not as nice, I probably would have been the butt of laughter and ribbing. And if I had more Jim Carey in me, I probably would have gone all the way and just given her a crazy-faced two minute hug. Alas, neither happened and it will simply be filed under another cruel moment of cosmic comedy.

Sex Bomb

Normally I'm not much into figure skating unless it's accompanied by the pressure of the Olympics, but this is definitely entertaining.

What is genius?

I recently read a theory that proposes that all people have the same basic mental capacity, and that the only differences are how that capacity is divided. The theory posits that normal people have a more equal distribution of capacity - think of brain capacity as a pie, divided into relatively equal pieces. Geniuses have an overly large portion of one or more parts of the pie. However, since we all have the same basic capacity, other portions of the whole would be reduced. It is commonly believed that people who are considered genius often have odd deficiencies in some behavioral or mental areas.

The equal capacity theory goes on to define idiot savants as individuals who have an abnormal abundance in one mental area, and therefore extreme deficiencies in many other areas. Such individuals can perform seemingly impossible mental tasks such as complex mathematics, but cannot tell time or remember to feed their dog. Below is a fascinating video about Stephen Wiltshire, which seems to demonstrate this interesting theory.

Marvelous Engineering

I must have this.

Meet the World (Colbert Style)

A slightly different take on the world - also presented in the visual medium.

Meet the World

Brazilian journalist Icaro Doria's "Meet the World" project combines real data points culled from world relief organizations with national flags to create powerful visual messages about the state of the world today.