Author: Jeff Milner

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Kid’s Hope Ethiopia Triathlon

I just got back from my trip to Calgary and the Kid’s Hope Ethiopia Triathlon.

I didn’t swim nearly as fast as I had hoped but I’ll choose to blame it on the fact that I couldn’t get very good rotation on my arms while wearing my wet-suit. Every stroke meant pulling against the elastic fabric of the neoprene and I’m sure the lack of training never had anything to do with my inability to keep my time under 10 minutes.

Bryce Meldrum running in the Kid's Hope Ethiopia Triathlon

JULY 5, 2008 — OKOTOKS, ALBERTA, CANADA — Triathlon competitor Bryce Meldrum, of Calgary, Alberta, makes a crowd pleasing mad dash sprint to the end of the Foothills Charity Triathlon for Kid’s Hope Ethiopia. — PHOTO BY JEFF MILNER.

Nevertheless our team did very well—especially against the other teams—not so much against the individual tri-athletes many who amazingly swam, biked, and ran faster than the three of us working together.

The race was put on by Kids’ Hope Ethiopia, the same charity organization that Bryce happens to work as a Project Coordinator.

So against other teams, we came in 8th out of 21 and my individual swim ranked me 4th. I think the highlight for me was seeing my team-mate Bryce making his crazy sprint to the finish line and then paying the price after the race. It’s not hard to love a competitive team-mate.

I can almost see myself getting into doing the whole thing myself, but then again, it’s a lot easier said than done, especially from the comfort of my office chair.

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Kid’s Hope Ethiopia

I’m away today taking part swimming in a team triathlon held in Okotoks (is it safe to call Okotoks a suburb of Calgary yet?) for the annual Foothills Charity Triathlon for Kid’s Hope Ethiopia.

I’m happy enough to just have one section of the triathlon, because I want to go all out, but I have to keep in mind that I’ve spent exactly no time at all training for this event.

I’m just shooting to break seven and a half minutes which looks to be a fairly competitive time (and a winning time depending on which year’s results you are looking at).

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Milgram’s Experiment on Obedience

Stanley Milgram’s famously unethical but ever so interesting experiment on obedience:

The Milgram experiment was a seminal series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.

The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiments to answer this question: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”


[Milgram Study of Obedience 1/5 – YouTube]

I didn’t have time to watch the whole thing, but apparently magician/hypnotist Derren Brown reproduced Milgram’s obedience experiment (watch on YouTube). At first I felt confused as to how he got around the ethical violations intrinsic to proceeding with such an experiment in this day and age—but then I realized scientific researchers have ethics boards to get passed; TV producers don’t.

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Pirates Dilemma

Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism (Amazon) and Jesse Alexander, producer of Heroes and Lost, are producing a new TV show called Pirates Dilemma. The following is a teaser showing how the show might look:

(via)

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From Sea to Sea

I’ve been looking forward to meeting up with the U of L Cross Canada Bike Team, Vanessa Esau, Brett Holmes, and Kelly Kennedy. They began their ~60 days of cycling across Canada on June 21 and plan to finish the 7,500 kilometres on August 29.

Cross Ccanada Bike Team U of L

I know Brett from the U of L Water Polo league, and Kelly from my involvement as a director in the Alumni Association and I just happened to be in a first-aid class with them last month as they prepared for the trip. I’ll be over at the University while they are in Lethbridge for the meet and greet at noon to cheer them on (and serendipitously a free lunch).

The Sea 2 Sea cross-Canada biking team is making their way to Lethbridge!

All friends and family of the University of Lethbridge are invited to the Atrium on Wednesday, July 2nd at 12:00 noon for a FREE BBQ to cheer on the team as they arrive on campus and make their way down the pathway to the Atrium.

The Sea 2 Sea cycling group consists of U of L fourth-year student Vanessa Esau, employee and alumnus Brett Holmes (BMgt/BA 2008) and 2007/08 Students’ Union President Kelly Kennedy. The bikers are followed by U of L student Allan Hall in a noticeably decaled SEA 2 SEA van.

To learn more about the team, visit the notice board or to follow along on their journey and plan to meet up with them on their way see their blog University of Lethbridge Cross Canada Bike Tour (hint: check out the individual blog list in their sidebar).

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Chronotopic Anamorphosis

The following video was made in real time by dividing the screen into discrete but related horizontal lines with each line delayed by one frame more than the last.

The image is digitally manipulated by fragmenting it into horizontal lines and then combining lines from different frames in the display. The result is a distorsion of the figures caused by their motion in time, or, as Brazilian researcher Arlindo Machado calls it: chronotopic anamorphosis.

The effect was completely based on Zbigniew Rybczynski’s “The Fourth Dimension”, but transposed to Processing programming environment and performed in real-time.

The effect is mesmerizing—don’t miss the fascinating twirl as the subject slips through the door near the end.

[Chronotopic Anamorphosis from Marginalia Project – Vimeo]

(via)

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Oil Sands Tourism

Greenpeace has launched a tongue-in-cheek website touting the tourism potential of the Alberta oil sands. The Greenpeace-produced site, travellingalberta.com, has an address similar to Alberta’s official tourism page, travelalberta.com, and is the conservation group’s response to the province’s $25-million campaign to improve the environmental image of Alberta’s energy industry.


[Explore Alberta – YouTube]

Minister of Tourism, Parks and Recreation Cindy Ady was not impressed with the website.

“I’m a bit disappointed mostly on behalf of those who work so hard in this industry, but I also would say it’s not an accurate representation of this province.”

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Milner Family Reunion

Every five years my dad’s side of the family holds a “Milner” family reunion. I’ll be up in the mountains this week to celebrate. Here are some historic Milner photos that were recently scanned by my uncle that I posted for this weekend.

These are interesting as just a collection of old photographs, aside from the obvious groove that I get from the fact that I’m related to these folks.

Milner Family Collage