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Stairway to Heaven Subliminal Messages

Some time ago I received an email from a professor at York University. He asked if he could use part of my Stairway to Heaven backwards site / idea for a class. Here is the conclusion of his experiment.

Jeff-

I have now given my lecture on perception, and the Stairway to Heaven was a real hit. Before I played it backwards, (and after they had listened forwards a few times), I distributed sheets of paper with the “words”. Half the class got the Satan stuff, and the other half got my own words, which have nothing to do with Satan or religion. I realized at the outset that my words did not fit quite as well as the Satan ones, but some lines fit very well. The demo went perfectly – those who had the Satan words could “hear” the backwards lines very well, and those who got my words, could hear at least some of my lines well. Interestingly, those who “heard” my words had a very difficult time hearing the Satanic words later on when I played it again.

Thanks again so much for your [help]. It has really helped me make a very important point about the nature of perception and how we actually construct our percepts.

Cheers
Jim

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My iPod Photo

For Christmas this year, Anna-Maria bought me an iPod! It’s a 40 gig iPod Photo! Which is awesome for a number of reasons but mostly because it shows that she must really think I’m pretty great to be worthy of such a cool present.

So I’ve been learning all about iPods and here are a few of the things that I’ve learned:

iPod’s notes section is considerably lacking as it only allows short notes. There is a text to iPod note converter that takes long text and breaks them into smaller ones, meanwhile linking them altogether via hyperlinks.

Part of learning about iPod is also learning about iTunes. The auto-update feature asked if I wanted to upgrade to the newest version of iTunes. Luckily I did some research before I clicked. What I found out is that iTunes 4.7.1 scans the user’s music collection and any unlocked music it identifies as being purchased from iTunes, it puts a new fairplay DRM lock back on those tracks. I haven’t purchased any music from Apple (so far I’ve just been ripping my CD collection) but I’m planning on it and when I do, I don’t want to be restricted as to what I can do with music that I’ve legally purchased. I’m thinking twice about the new version — and maybe I’ll skip buying music online at all… for now.

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Heart Aches

It hasn’t even been a week since Anna-Maria left Lethbridge to pursue her acting career in Vancouver. It feels like she’s been gone for SO long. I feel awful.

In order to cheer myself up, I decided I am going to work on a redesign of my blog. I know my idea of fun may not appeal to most but it’s what I like doing and I’m also making myself waffles. Eating waffles would put anyone in a good mood.

I’ve been meaning to do this redesign for quite awhile now. Since I’ve got pretty much the whole day to do whatever I want and nothing but the quiet sound of my crumbling heart to distract me, I’m thinking I’ll be able to get a lot done. Hopefully sometime within the next couple of weeks I’ll have a new cross-browser compatible and fully CSS compliant webpage.