Just found this in my front yard, and I have no idea what it is. I've lived in the bush and a number of rural areas all my life, but I've never seen this before.
When I first found it, I thought it was perhaps some rubbish. It kind of looked like a blob of burnt plastic on the ground. Because it looked strange I poked at it with a stick, and it popped out of the ground:
The black and red part shown above was flush with the ground. Here is a side view, showing the pink part which was originally hidden:
Here is the top cut in half:
There was this base part hidden in the ground which the top was originally sitting in:
Here is the base pulled out of the ground, it appears to have some kind of root system:
If you have any idea what this is, please let me know.
Having trouble finishing off that strangle? Here is some advice to help you get the tap/put them to sleep.
First watch this video of Roger Gracie demonstrating the technique. He's one of the greatest Jiu Jitsu competitors of all time, and has won many, many fights with the cross collar choke.
At around 2:38, he explains that there is no need to flare your elbows out, just use your wrists. He mimics the action in the air, and it's absolutely correct. But I feel it's a little too subtle as a demonstration and it's something people often get wrong, so I decided to go over the mechanics in more detail here.
The Wrist Mechanics
Fig. 1 - BAD
Fig.1 - Here the palms of my hands turn outward and my wrists are bent the wrong way, following the curvature of my opponent's neck. The elbows are flared which puts a little pressure on the throat, but hardly any on the arteries/veins I want to hit. It's very hard to finish, and faggotry ensues.
Fig. 2 -BETTER
Fig. 2 - Here I've straightened my wrists and rotated them towards me. I have not moved my hands closer together, yet there is much less space for the neck to live in. With correct positioning and leverage I can put them to sleep.
Fig. 3 - MURDER
Fig. 3 - My hands are in exactly the same position as before. They have not moved closer together. Yet there is now very little space, and I don't even have my elbows flared yet. all I've done is bend my wrists towards the neck and turned my hands towards myself. That's it.
Once you get that working, you'll find the hardest part is setting it up. There are other details too, which we might look at later.
While I was working as a security guard on the sunshine coast, a young man of about 18 years who had been asked to leave was becoming a bit hysterical. He was drunk, refused to go and was threatening myself and the other guard, and dared us to hit him. The other guard touched the kid's elbow in a "come this way" gesture, and his hand was slapped away.
The situation was escalating, so I took him down. He was surprisingly strong, but I had him restrained. He was face down while I sat on his back.
The other guard tried to assist by applying a wrist lock. This was unnecessary as everything was under control and there was no need to cause the kid any pain at this stage.
In any case, the wrist lock didn't work. He simply made a fist and writhed his arm around. This chap was face down with two people controlling him, yet it wasn't possible to lock up his hand and wrist.
If it doesn't work on someone face down with their arm pulled behind their back, it's not going to work so well on someone who is standing up and and fighting you. I've heard the expression "chasing butterflies" in reference to wrist locks before, and that's exactly what it looks like when someone is trying to pluck a wrist out of the air.
This is why we don't see these techniques applied in MMA. We might see it happen one day, but wrist locking professional fighters is difficult to the point that very few fighters train them. It's incredibly low-percentage.
Having said that, on protesters who want to make a point about being non-violent, and who would like to demonstrate to the world how brutal police are, it'll work just fine. Let's say someone is sitting there, refusing to move, but they're non-combative and dragging them away might not be an option. This might be the ideal situation for a wrist lock to be applied. So in some limited situations they can be useful, and I'm not against training them at all. In fact, I think that it's good to have them in your toolbox.
This is my favourite example of a wrist lock being applied against a fully resisting, experienced opponent - performed by BJJ legend, Jacare:
You might notice that it looks nothing like the kind of wrist attacks you see demonstrated in most videos. Jacare is actually holding the elbow and locking the wrist against his own chest as his opponent does a lapel grab. It does not involve grabbing the hand or wrist at all.
I will also say this: wrist locks are usually taught to be applied to a standing opponent. But it's much easier to apply them when you have a dominant position on the ground.
The graph illustrates how exponential growth (green)
surpasses both linear (red) and cubic (blue) growth.
Exponential growth
Linear growth
Cubic growth
So what does exponential mean? It's one thing to learn what it means on a technical level, it's something else to understand its significance, and the ramifications of exponential growth - especially with regard to human activity. Watch the video below:
The entire video is fantastic and I highly recommend watching it all, but I decided to upload this bit in particular because it's one of the simplest, shortest and best explanations of exponential growth I've ever heard. I think he's right that few people really understand what it means, which is tragic.
Here's the video description:
Scaling up always creates new problems. Cities can innovate faster than the problems indefinitely, while corporations cannot. Every week a million people are being urbanised all around the world. It's the problem and also the solution. Creativity and wealth comes via cities.
These revolutionary findings come from Geoffrey West's examination of vast quantities of data on the metabolic/economic behavior of organisms and organizations. A theoretical physicist, West was president of Santa Fe Institute from 2005 to 2009 and founded the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Is there a grand unifying theory of sustainability that can be applied to our cities? Are we sustainable? Are their measurable predictive laws of life? West and his team have tried to find the science of cities. Our future may depend on it.
He's speaking to the Long Now Foundation, then is interviewed by its founder Stewart Brand.
Geoffrey West is a physicist. He was born in a rural town in western England in 1940 and moved to London when he was 13. He received a bachelor's degree in physics from Cambridge and pursued graduate studies in California at Stanford. West eventually became a Stanford faculty member before he joined the particle theory group at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory. After Los Alamos, he became president of the Santa Fe Institute, where he works on biological issues around power laws in biology, or allometric law. He has since been honored as one of Time magazine's "Time 100" most influential people.
Stewart Brand is an American writer, best known as editor of the "Whole Earth Catalogue". He founded a number of organizations including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently "Whole Earth Discipline: An Eco-Pragmatist Manifesto".
Here is the same explanation by someone else, but a bit longer and with a few more details:
