Have I mentioned lately how awesome the Creating Passionate Users blog is, in particular how much I agree with their teaching/learning methodologies? They rock, man.

Excerpt:

Creating Passionate Users: Foo Camp: ad-hoc learning
A lot of adult learning environments (including colleges) do have scenarios in which the students/learners are asked to help evolve the course itself… including taking turns presenting some of the material, but these kinds of activities are the exception, when they should be a key component. I’ve argued with instructors for years over this–as they claim, “Students didn’t come here to be taught by other students who don’t know anything–they came here to get the facts from ME, the expert.”

Oh really? If you drill down, you’d find that most of the students/learners are there to learn. They may have been conditioned through tradition that this means the student listens (and does the occasional “lab exercise”) while the expert dispenses facts and knowledge, but that doesn’t mean it’s truly what most learners want. They want to learn.

And surprisingly little real, deep learning comes from sitting in a chair listening. Think about it… you often learn best (or at least, most memorably) when you’re suddenly thrown in the deep end of a situation where you must figure something out in order to keep going or fix a problem. We learn from doing, and we learn from interacting and discussing with others.

But we often learn best that which we have to teach.
It’s only when you have to explain something to someone else that you really find out how little you understand. And that realization motivates you and points to the right direction for getting the rest of the story.

Via Boing Boing:

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things
Sam Cohen might have remained relatively unknown, troubled by ethical lapses in government and the military but unable to do anything about them, if he had not visited Seoul in 1951, during the Korean war. In the aftermath of bombing sorties he witnessed scenes of intolerable devastation. Civilians wandered like zombies through the ruins of a city in which all services had ceased. Children were drinking water from gutters that were being used as sewers. “I’d seen countless pictures of Hiroshima by then,” Cohen recalls, “and what I saw in Seoul was precious little different. . . . The question I asked of myself was something like: If we’re going to go on fighting these damned fool wars in the future, shelling and bombing cities to smithereens and wrecking the lives of their surviving inhabitants, might there be some kind of nuclear weapon that could avoid all this?”

Here was a singularly odd idea: To re-engineer the most inhumane and destructive weapon of all time, so that it would _reduce_ human suffering. Cohen’s unique achievement was to prove that this could in fact be done.

His first requirement was that wars should be fought as they had been historically, confining their damage to military combatants while towns and cities remained undamaged and their civilian inhabitants remained unscathed. This concept seemed quaint in a new era where everyone and everything was at risk of being vaporized in a nuclear exchange, but Cohen saw no reason why nukes had to be massively destructive. Technology existed to make them so small, they could cause less damage than even some conventional weapons.

Ideally he wanted to reduce blast damage to zero, to eliminate the wholesale demolition of civilian housing, services, and amenities that he had witnessed in Seoul. He saw a way to achieve this if a fusion reaction released almost all of its energy as radiation. Moreover, if this radiation consisted of neutrons, which carry no charge, it would not poison the environment with residual radioactivity.

The bomb would still kill people–but this was the purpose of all weapons. _If_ wars were liable to recur (which Cohen thought was probable), soldiers were going to use weapons of some kind against each other, and everyone would benefit if the weapons minimized pain and suffering while ending the conflict as rapidly as possible.

Cohen came up with a design for a warhead about one-tenth as powerful as the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. If it was detonated at 3,000 feet above ground level, its blast effects would be negligible while its neutron radiation would be powerful enough to cause death within a circle about one mile in diameter. This was the battlefield weapon that came to be known as the neutron bomb.

Via 101reviews.com…:

DigitalCamera@101reviews � New patented lens made of liquid paves way for slimmer digital cameras
Named Fluidlens, this lens is made of liquid and is no bigger than a contact lens, but can achieve an optical zoom of up to 10 times, matching the zoom capabilities of lenses found on mid-range and high-end digital cameras and superior than most cellphone cameras which use digital zoom that relies on software rather than the lens to zoom in on an object.

Via The Register:

Brits steal carloads of F**king Austrian roadsigns | The Register
An Austrian village called Fucking will not change its name despite sniggering Brits making off with its roadsigns.

Mayor Siegfried Hauppl has asked visitors to lay off the signs which began to attract outside attention after British and US soldiers passing through in 1945 illuminated the locals as to the English meaning of Fucking, Ananova reports.

Star Trek Business Cards on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
I bought a set of business cards for the characters of Star Trek (The Original Series) in the 1980′s at a Sci-Fi Convention. UnfortunatelyI don’t know who the original manufacturer is or how to get more. I found them today whilst digging for some old photos.

If you want to know how to make divine espresso, click the link below. Via boingboing (excerpt):

Boing Boing: Espresso crema shots
Crema is the wonderful tan colored foam that appears on the top of a well-shot espresso. High quality espresso joints have a saying: “No crema, no serva.”

I recently got a Rancilio Silvia espresso maker, generally considered the best consumer espresso model available. Trouble is, I can’t seem to get it to make a shot with crema. It’s shooting blanks, so to speak. The next issue of Make magazine is going to feature a couple of coffee hacks that should help espresso fanatics produce precious crema. I’m going to give them a try.

In the meantime, I’ll just drool over these photos over at espressoporn.com…. The photo here shows a machine using a “crotchless” portafilter. Some people might consider that a cheater’s way to get creama, but I’ll take it any way I can get it.
Link (thanks, Kate!)

Excerpt:

TheDamnBlog.com…
“The designers of some elevators include a hidden feature that is very handy if you’re in a hurry
or it’s a busy time in the building (like check-out time in a hotel). While some elevators require
a key, others can be put into “Express” mode by pressing the “Door Close” and “Floor” buttons at
the same time. This sweeps the car to the floor of your choice and avoids stops at any other floor.
This seems to work on Most elevators that I have tried! Most elevators have the option for this to work,
but on some of them the option is turned off by whoever runs them. This is a rather fun hack, so the next time you are on an elevator, give it a try, you have nothing to lose, And this concludes Hacking Elevators 101!

Mmm… looks and brains. Whatever is a (male) geek to do? ;-)

Excerpt:
collision detection: Celebrity math
One hazard of being an attractive starlet is that many people assume you’re not that smart. This, however, is no problem for Danica McKellar, a 30-year-old former star of The Wonder Years and regular on The West Wing, because she’s actually got documented proof of her brilliance: She’s the author of the mathematical proof “Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller models on Z-squared” (PDF), which she cowrote while doing a degree at the University of California.

Excerpt:
Congress to add 2 months to Daylight Savings Time
Congress to add 2 months to Daylight Savings Time

July 20, 2005

BY JOHN J. FIALKA
It looks like Daylight Saving Time is about to be extended, and that has child safety and fire prevention advocates riled.

Congressional leaders of both parties have signed off on a proposal, being considered in Washington this week, to start Daylight Saving Time on the first Sunday in March and end on the last Sunday of November. They say it would save energy.

Table of Condiments
Table of Condiments
That Periodically Go Bad

Excerpt from Creating Passionate Users:

No matter how enlightened and politically correct we’ve become, most people still tend to believe that when making decisions, men are less driven by emotions than women. Men use left-brained (metaphorically speaking) logical, rational thought. Men are persuaded to buy or act based on thinking, not feeling, while women do the opposite. You know, that whole Mars and Venus thing.

This wouldn’t be so bad if those left-brained characteristics weren’t seen as being more… virtuous.

Newsflash: emotions are sick and tired of being treated like second-class brain citizens! They’re taking back their rightful place in the world, thanks to the work of brave neuroscientists like Joseph LeDoux and Antonio Damsio (author of Descarte\’s Error). These two, and a handful of others, withstood the mocking of their peers (“Wait… let me get this straight…you’re basing your career on studying emotions [laughs hysterically, spits coffee out of nose]. That is hilarious! Oh, Antonio, you almost got me on that one… ha-ha

If you’ve ever tried to change a habit or behavior, read this article, and then read the previous blog entry’s site/article.

Excerpt:
Change or Die
What if you were given that choice? For real. What if it weren’t just the hyperbolic rhetoric that conflates corporate performance with life and death? Not the overblown exhortations of a rabid boss, or a slick motivational speaker, or a self-dramatizing CEO. We’re talking actual life or death now. Your own life or death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you didn’t, your time would end soon — a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?

Yes, you say?

Try again.

Yes?

You’re probably deluding yourself.

You wouldn’t change.

Don’t believe it? You want odds? Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That’s nine to one against you. How do you like those odds?

This revelation unnerved many people in the audience last November at IBM’s “Global Innovation Outlook” conference. The company’s top executives had invited the most farsighted thinkers they knew from around the world to come together in New York and propose solutions to some really big problems. They started with the crisis in health care, an industry that consumes an astonishing $1.8 trillion a year in the United States alone, or 15% of gross domestic product. A dream team of experts took the stage, and you might have expected them to proclaim that breathtaking advances in science and technology — mapping the human genome and all that — held the long-awaited answers. That’s not what they said. They said that the root cause of the health crisis hasn’t changed for decades, and the medical establishment still couldn’t figure out what to do about it.

Excerpt:
Creating Passionate Users: Change or lose your mind
Why are people so resistent to change? Because of how our brains work. In a previous post I discussed how neural pathways are made stronger as you repeat a behavior: this is the secret behind your habits (good and bad) and also learning new things (practice makes perfect). What makes it so hard to change your bad habits? They are literally hardwired into your brain and you have to work really hard to change that wiring. It’s like becoming a virtuoso violin player – you can’t pick up a violin and expect to learn how to play in just one or two times… it takes years of dedication and practice to rewire your brain. It can be done, but it’s not so easy, and clearly requires a lot of motivation on your part.

So what’s the right motivation? As the article discusses, emotions play a large role in motivating you to change your behaviors. We know that emotion is important for memory and learning, so this makes sense. What I find particularly interesting is the discussion of Dean Ornish’s heart disease reversal program: he believes the key to the success of his program (determined by how many people actually stick with the changes in their lifestyle over the long term) is positive emotion. He says, “Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear.”

Fear of death and other negative-emotion producing facts, while they are powerful short term motivators, are not as powerful as positive emotions for long term changes. Just after an accident or after a health scare we may be motivated to change our behavior because we have a recent, emotional incident in our lives that provides a powerful, emotional reminder of what happens if we don’t drive slowly or take care of ourselves. But over time, that reminder diminishes (a big scare is a short term event) and we get lax.

Excerpt:
Creating Passionate Users: Self-induced passion
Is there something in your life you know you should do you, but you just can’t seem to do it on a regular basis? For lots of people, this might include things like eating right, exercising, even cleaning the house! We’ve had many good ideas here about how to create passion in our users, how about creating passion (or at least something resembling that) in ourselves? It’s easy to be passionate about things you love to do already, but for the things you want to do, but aren’t passionate about, so you tend not to do them when you know you should – that’s trickier.

I recently read a great little book called The Intrinsic Exerciser: Discovering the Joy of Exercise by Jay C. Kimiecik. This book is all about how to change your mindset so that you exercise for intrinsic reasons instead of extrinsic reasons. The idea is that if you can do this, then you will want to exercise, you might even be passionate about it. After reading it, it struck me that this should work for anything you want to do in a more passionate way, but are having a hard time figuring out how to get there.

Examples from the book of shifting from an extrinsic motivation for exercise, to an intrinsic motivation, include:

* Instead of exercising because you want to lose weight, do it because it makes you feel good

* Instead of thinking about exercise in terms of the future (e.g., I will lose this much weight, or I will look better in X months), do it in the present – “I am exercising NOW because I like the way it makes me feel NOW”.

* Instead of exercising because you will have enhanced fitness, exercise because you want to master some athletic ability

Excerpt:
Creating Passionate Users: Create an intention calendar
It’s also the case that “You are what you think.” Every single thought in our heads is created by nerve impulses that travel between neurons. These impulses travel from one neuron to the next by being transmitted across the synaptic gap between neurons. The neurotransmitters in that gap make this happen. Every time a nerve fires, and passes along a nerve impulse, you are creating a neural pathway for a thought and each time you think that thought, the neural pathway gets
stronger.

As you’re learning something new, you’re forging new neural pathways. That’s why learning something new sometimes feels hard, especially if what you’re trying to learn is something your brain thinks is not important. But, once you’ve convinced your brain it is important and, damnit, you’re going to learn it, then a neural pathway is created for that thought. If you practice that thought, it will become easier. If you practice it enough, it becomes habit.

This can work against us. It means that bad habits are hard to break. It means that thinking negative thoughts is bad for your brain.

Excerpt:
Boing Boing: Chocolate ingredient fights cancer
Chocolate ingredient fights cancer
Georgetown University scientists report that an ingredient in chocolate seems to have anti-cancer properties. Found in cocoa, pentameric procyandin turns off proteins that likely spur the out-of-control division of cancer cells. The research is funded by Mars Inc., makers of M&Ms and Snickers. Seriously. From the press release:

“There are all kinds of chemicals in the food we eat that potentially have effects on cancer cells, and a natural compound in chocolate may be one,” said the lead author, Robert B. Dickson, Ph.D., professor of oncology. “We need to slowly develop evidence about the selectivity of these compounds to cancer, learn how they work, and sort out any issues of toxicity.”

Chocolate, like many other foods, is the source of many possible anti-cancer compounds, but Dickson stresses that this research, which is part of a series of studies conducted at Georgetown on the chocolate-cancer connection, does not mean that people who eat chocolate will either reduce their cancer risks or treat a current case.

Excerpt:
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Underwater bike ride to launch students’ eight-week crime spree
As US coast-to-coast crimewaves go, it is not in the league of Bonnie and Clyde. It lacks both violence and avarice and is further hindered by an overabundance of pre-publicity.

Undeterred, a couple of students from Cornwall are intent on making American criminal history by spending their summer breaking as many US laws as possible.

Starting in the liberal state of California, they hope to evade the attention of local police officers when they ride a bike in a swimming pool and curse on a crazy-golf course.

In the far more conservative – and landlocked – state of Utah, they will risk the penitentiary when they hire a boat and attempt to go whale-hunting.

If they manage to outwit state troopers in Utah, and perhaps federal agents on their trail, they will be able to take a deserved, but nevertheless illegal, rest when they have a nap in a cheese factory in South Dakota.

Longmire does Romance Novels

The Mapping of a Cat’s Brain

Starbucks Gossip: Here’s a cake recipe for the Chantico fans out there
This recipe was posted in one of the STARBUCKS GOSSIP forums by “Chris.” Anyone care to guess the calories in one slice of this cake?

Chantico Chocolate Cake
Ingredients:
* 1 box “Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe Devil’s Food Cake” (you can use
other brands, as long as it’s Devil’s Food and says “moist” on the
box)
* 1 small box chocolate pudding
* 4 eggs
* 3/4 cup vegetable oil
* 1 cup sour cream (I use light)
* 6 oz of Chantico Drinking Chocolate from Starbucks
* butter or oil for greasing pan

Preheat oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit. Mix all ingredients well in a large bowl. Pour into a greased, cake pans (same variety and baking options as you seen on the mix box) and bake until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean or with crumbs clinging to it, about 30-45 minutes depending upon size of your pan. Cool in pan or Remove from Pan and sprinkle with powdered sugar or frost as follows:

Chantico Chocolate Cake Frosting
* 1 stick of butter
* 2/3 cup Hershey%u2019s cocoa
* 3 � cups powdered sugar
* 3-4 oz Chantico Drinking Chocolate from Starbucks
* A bit of milk as needed to soften texture of frosting
* 1 tsp real vanilla extract
Melt Butter add to mixer bowl. Stir in cocoa. Alternately add powdered sugar and Chantico beating on medium speed to spreading consistency. Add milk if needed. Stir in Vanilla. Frost the cake with this once it is cooled. Try not to eat all the frosting before you use it.

Excerpt from:
mimi smartypants
I have a bottle of cheap hand lotion in my bedroom, and it is not a gentleman. I know this because no matter how often I politely explain, “Listen, hand lotion? I don’t play that way,” the hand lotion insists on ejaculating all over me. I do not mind, and in fact I want and expect, a little spurt into the hand, but this hand lotion gets coverage and distance. I routinely end up with hand lotion on my clothing, on the other dresser-top items, and once even on the OPPOSITE WALL. My bottle of Suave Advanced Therapy is clearly a very advanced “heavy finisher,” and should consider being in porn films. And I would encourage such a career, I would even drive the bottle of hand lotion to auditions, because the hand lotion sucks as a bottle of hand lotion. One wants soft moisturized hands and fingers from a bottle of hand lotion, not big irregular splotches of creamy white goop all over shirts and pants and furniture.