Category: interesting

Bloom recalls one famous experiment with wine drinkers done by scientists at Stanford and Cal Tech …

“Half the people are told they’re drinking cheap plunk, the other half are told they’re drinking something out of $100-$150 bottle”, Bloom said.

“It tastes better to them if they THINK they’re drinking from an expensive bottle. And it turns out that if they think they’re drinking expensive wine, parts of the brain that are associated with pleasure and reward light up like a Christmas tree.”

“So if I have people over for dinner, I should add a little ‘1’ in front of the price tag, and put it on the table?“, Spencer asked.

“That is the ultimate trick to making wine taste better”, Bloom said.

And it’s the sort of trick that works only on human beings!

Here’s another.

“Adolfo Kaminsky started forging documents after escaping deportation to a Nazi death camp. The Frenchman went on to become one of the world’s best forgers, creating documents that saved the lives of Jews, spies and freedom fighters.

“But even his daughter knew nothing about the real man behind the fake documents.”

If Barbie were life size:

well, it’s a long long inquiry, science of cancer, but get this:

“That’s not all. Scientists have also discovered that most of the protein-coding cells, the cogs of cancer, are tiny microorganisms living in the body….

“So little is known about some of these new theories, including the microbes – which contain individual sets of DNA themselves – and seem to communicate with cells throughout the body.

“It’s astonishing, really.”

From last spring’s American Association for Cancer Research, let’s review a partial list of what causes cancer: carpentry, coffee, diesel and gas and freeway exhaust, mothballs, nickel jewelry, pickled food, the color white ! and microorganisms.

As the NYTimes reports:

As they look beyond the genome, cancer researchers are also awakening to the fact that some 90 percent of the protein-encoding cells in our body are microbes.

We evolved with them in a symbiotic relationship, which raises the question of just who is occupying whom.

“We are massively outnumbered,” said Jeremy K. Nicholson, chairman of biological chemistry and head of the department of surgery and cancer at Imperial College London.

Altogether, he said, 99 percent of the functional genes in the body are microbial.

bloody stunning

ok, go ahead, explain this to your kids, what’s a weekend for?

[link]

the difficult craftsmanship seems to fail a wee bit,
nevertheless,
here’s a dinner table to drive toddlers bananas.

Los Angeles Times on Nancy Grace:

Anyone who had occasion to watch her relentless coverage of the recently completed Casey Anthony murder trial witnessed something quite new to the American news media: a mainstream news organization giving one of its commentators a nightly forum from which to campaign for the conviction of a criminal defendant.

to put it politely…

Must see these fellows using their flying suits.

There’s about 2 dozen video posted by Phoenix-Fly.

I shifted Need4Speed: The Art of Flight into full screen.

Wow.

Hunch is scouring preferences and might become a truly superior new type of analysis. Every so often they publish findings. Check out their updated infographic on pets.  I often wonder what’s unseen as they relentlessly probe our meandering clicks.

philtrum says: July 5, 2011 at 8:11 pm

Naomi Wolf always had a tendency to histrionics, but she’s gone totally off the deep end in the past 10-15 years.

I recall that in “The Porn Myth” she rhapsodized about how beautiful and empowered ultra-Orthodox Jewish wives must feel because their husbands don’t even get to see other women’s hair, or something like that. (Women living under the Taliban must have the hottest sex lives of all!)

Oddly enough, she was unsympathetic, to the point of misogyny, about the women who claimed Julian Assange had assaulted them. Like Phyllis Chesler, she’s really stopped doing anything resembling principled feminism and is now exclusively working out her own demons.

94% of all soybeans in the US are genetically engineered.

GM crops have become the ‘regular’ crop.

The majority of cotton and corn crops are now genetically modified, as USDA statistics show.

US farmers have adopted genetically engineered crops widely since their commercial introduction in 1996, notwithstanding uncertainty about consumer acceptance and economic and environmental impacts.

Scott Rosenberg at Salon:

Then Facebook started to get massive. And consultants and authors started giving us advice about how to use Facebook to brand ourselves. And marketing people began advocating that we use Facebook to sell stuff and, in fact, sell ourselves.

Dave Winer:

When IBM hit the wall, it was with a revolution they called the Micro-Channel Architecture. It was touted as a way to take back the PC industry from the cloners. But it was also a way to reign in the power of Microsoft, who was IBM’s upstart. Didn’t work, it only cemented Microsoft’s position, though it took Microsoft a few years to realize it.

With Microsoft it was the great call to arms in late 1994, when Bill Gates rallied his team and told each of them to maneuver their battleships and aircraft carriers into position. He thought he had met his own Microsoft (he had been waiting for it) and its name was Netscape. Not realizing that the problem wasn’t Netscape, it was a sea-change in the tech business analogous to the one that IBM had failed to overcome. His upstart was the web, not Netscape.

Now it’s Google’s turn.

Apple announced that it will soon be possible to wirelessly mirror your iPad to an HDTV.

This is significant for classroom design.

Enjoy Magical Nature Tour

Wired.com: But humans score high on aspects of sentience. Many animals don’t.

Jonathan Balcombe: Well, humans designed the tests.

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)