Author: Brian

Sometimes I think the world is just starting; I was born in its primitive era; fixing superstition, and fireside pride; our problems so ordinary, our solutions ahead:

Could magnets replace aspirin as blood thinners?

Why on earth do we tolerate firms that pick our pockets?? Excite’s policy filled me with anger and resentment. You might take away other thoughts.

via chris dixon’s blog

When Google released its search engine in 1998, its search results were significantly better than its competitors’. Many people attribute Google’s success to this breakthrough technology. But there was another key reason:  a stubborn refusal to accept the orthodox view at the time that “stickiness” was crucial to a website’s success.

Here’s what happened when they tried to sell their technology to Excite (a leading portal/search engine in the late 90s):

[Google] was too good. If Excite were to host a search engine that instantly gave people information they sought, [Excite’s CEO] explained, the users would leave the site instantly. Since his ad revenue came from people staying on the site—“stickiness” was the most desired metric in websites at the time—using Google’s technology would be counterproductive. “He told us he wanted Excite’s search engine to be 80 percent as good as the other search engines,” … and we were like, “Wow, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about.” – Steven Levy, In The Plex (p. 30)

via marco.org

Some doctors use copyright contracts to censor negative reviews

The receptionist handed me a clipboard with forms to fill out. After the usual patient information form, there was a ‘mutual privacy agreement’ that asked me to transfer ownership of any public commentary I might write in the future to Dr. Cirka.

Be careful what you sign.

Roseanne Barr: Fame’s a bitch.

It’s hard to tell whether one is winning or, in fact, losing once one starts to think of oneself as a commodity, or a product, or a character, or a voice for the downtrodden. It’s called losing perspective. Fame’s a bitch.

It’s hard to handle and drives you nuts.

Yes, it’s true that your sense of entitlement grows exponentially with every perk until it becomes too stupendous a weight to walk around under, but it’s a cut-throat business, show, and without the perks, plain ol’ fame and fortune just ain’t worth the trouble.

“Winning” in Hollywood means not just power, money and complimentary smoked-salmon pizza, but also that everyone around you fails just as you are peaking. When you become No 1, you might begin to believe, as Cher once said in an interview, that you are “one of God’s favourite children”, one of the few who made it through the gauntlet and survived.

The idea that your ego is not ego at all but submission to the will of the Lord starts to dawn on you as you recognise that only by God’s grace did you make it through the raging attack of idea pirates and woman haters, to ascend to the top of Bigshit Showbiz Mountain.

All of that sounds very much like the diagnosis for bipolar disorder, which more and more stars are claiming to have these days. I have it, as well as several other mental illnesses, but then, I’ve always been a trendsetter, even though I’m seldom credited with those kinds of things.

Wes Miller, Microsoft Research VP:

In 2007, Apple shocked the world by releasing a phone. A REALLY EXPENSIVE phone. But this phone did something important. Every phone before it had been a device seemingly designed by committee, to meet the business goals of a wireless telco. This one was designed for the consumer first.

Step 1 for Apple was delivering the first iPhone. Remember, this phone had NO 3rd party apps at launch. It had the ability to pin web pages to the home screen, and these could be designed to be “application-ish”. No dev ecosystem or tools, no App Store, no sales revenue. Oh, and it also had a very premium price of $599, and was locked to AT&T’s network.

But it had a touch-driven user interface, accelerometers, a very usable web browser, powerful email client, a camera, iTunes media integration and an Apple fit and finish to the device and software that recalled what Mac fans were used to.

That’s where we were in 2007. People paid through the nose to get a phone that put some aspect of design in front of telco business requirements.

The top 5 passwords in the Sony breach were: seinfeld, password, winner, 123456, and purple.

It remains alarming.

“We know passwords are too short, too simple, too predictable and too much like the other ones the individual has created in other locations.”

Worse.

Sony did not even attempt to obfuscate passwords. They simply stored them in open files.

Yo!

Sony stored over 1,000,000 passwords of its customers in plain text.

link to here:

…discovered something interesting when he studied the tiny percentage of kids who could successfully wait for the second treat. Without exception, these “high delayers” all relied on the same mental strategy: they found a way to keep themselves from thinking about the treat, directing their gaze away from the yummy marshmallow. Some covered their eyes or played hide-and-seek underneath the desk. Others sang songs from “Sesame Street,” or repeatedly tied their shoelaces, or pretended to take a nap. Their desire wasn’t defeated — it was merely forgotten.

…Mischel refers to this skill as the “strategic allocation of attention” and he argues that it’s the skill underlying self-control.

Too often, we assume that willpower is about having strong moral fiber. But that’s wrong — willpower is really about properly directing the spotlight of attention, learning how to control that short list of thoughts in working memory.

Research paper on heroism published

Abstract:

Heroism represents the ideal of citizens transforming civic virtue into the highest form of civic action, accepting either physical peril or social sacrifice.

While implicit theories of heroism abound, surprisingly little theoretical or empirical work has been done to better understand the phenomenon. Toward this goal, we summarize our efforts to systematically develop a taxonomy of heroic subtypes as a starting point for theory building. Next we explore three apparent paradoxes that surround heroism–the dueling impulses to elevate and negate heroic actors; the contrast between the public ascription of heroic status versus the interior decision to act heroically; and apparent similarities between altruism, bystander intervention and heroism that mask important differences between these phenomena. We assert that these seeming contradictions point to an unrecognized relationship between insufficient justification and the ascription of heroic status, providing more explanatory power than risk-type alone. The results of an empirical study are briefly presented to provide preliminary support to these arguments. Finally, several areas for future research and theoretical activity are briefly considered. These include the possibility that extension neglect may play a central role in public’s view of nonprototypical heroes; a critique of the positive psychology view that heroism is always a virtuous, prosocial activity; problems associated with retrospective study of heroes; the suggestion that injury or death (particularly in social sacrifice heroes) serves to resolve dissonance in favor of the heroic actor; and a consideration of how to foster heroic imagination.

Heroism: A Conceptual Analysis and Differentiation Between Heroic Action and Altruism (PDF)

Analysis of how bubbles form in stout and other delightful drinks:

We review the differences between bubble formation in champagne and other carbonated drinks, and stout beers which contain a mixture of dissolved nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The presence of dissolved nitrogen in stout beers gives them a number of properties of interest to connoisseurs and physicists.

These remarkable properties come at a price: stout beers do not foam spontaneously and special technology, such as the widgets used in cans, is needed to promote foaming. Nevertheless the same mechanism, nucleation by gas pockets trapped in cellulose fibers, responsible for foaming in carbonated drinks is active in stout beers, but at an impractically slow rate.

This gentle rate of bubble nucleation makes stout beers an excellent model system for the scientific investigation of the nucleation of gas bubbles.

grok this tidbit on Alexander Graham Bell’s wife.

Her name was Mabel and she often helped him with his experiments – offering suggestions, working out calculations. She was just as fascinating a woman as Bell was a man.

[click pic for more]

In fact, the village of Baddeck, NS , Canada thought so highly of her, the local municipal government gave her a vote on all civic matters in 1908. Women in Canada and the U.S. were still more than a decade away from gaining that right.

She was also completely deaf from the age of 4. She helped to establish the first Home & School Association in Canada ( the PTA in the US), the first Montessori School in Canada and she created a progressive women’s club for local villagers – still in existence.