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.

Spirals show up everywhere from fractals to nautilus shells. Software developers know the spiral as iterative development–a model in stark (positive) contrast to the old linear waterfall model.

One huge problem with the waterfall model is that in its traditional form, it’s not based in reality. It assumes that it’s entirely possible for each stage to be done perfectly (and permanently) and then thrown over the fence (or cubicle wall) to the next group in the system. Nice theory, that. The guys doing the requirements finish their job and then, hey, they might as well all go on vacation. Their work is done. And so on down the line until the product is delivered to the users. The name itself (waterfall) describes the key limiting characteristic of the waterfall model–it’s one way only. Water doesn’t go back up.

User experience designers (especially with games) often use a spiral model to keep cycling the user through stages of interest/motivation, engagement, and payoff (I described the user experience spiral headrush.typepad.com…

Excerpt from:
Things to say when you are losing a tech argument
1 That won’t scale.
2 That’s been proven to be O(N^2) and we need a solution that’s O(NlogN).
3 There are, of course, various export limitations on that technology.
4 The syntax is idiosyncratic.
5 Trying to build a team behind that technology would be a staffing nightmare.
6 That can’t be generalized to a cross-platform build.
7 Unfortunately, the license would contaminate our product.
8 If we go with that idea, we’re going to have Don Marti camped out in the front lobby with 300 angry software jihad supporters.
9 Our support infrastructure simply can’t handle the volume that change would involve.
10 I had one of the interns try that approach for another project, and it scrambled the CEO’s hard drive. So I think it’s going to be a hard sell.

I’m having George Carlin flashbacks, what with ‘fuck’ or some derivative thereof being every other word. Besides that, the guy makes some good points. “Caustic” is definitely apropos.

Found this via Scoble – CausticTech has a rant that every techie should read and take to heart. Reading it is cathartic — I am sure writing it was as well. His rant is an equal opportunity attack – something for everyone – bloggers, open source zealots, Microsoft in general, evangelists, Microsoft MVPs (at least peripherally).

…excerpt from: radio.weblogs.com…

Another one bites the dust. Could we get more paranoid? Don’t answer that.

…excerpt from: blankbaby.typepad.com…

A cool story. Reminds me of my days on BITnet and xyzzy in college.

Xeni Jardin:
On John Perry Barlow’s blog today, this account of a random human connection by VoIP — testament to how technology can make this an oddly intimate planet.

I was sitting at my desk in New York on Wednesday night, writing a BarlowSpam, when Skype started to emit the old-fashioned bell tone that signals a request for a voice chat. I looked at the window associated with the request and saw a bunch of Chinese pictograms where the name should be. Some kind of Asian chatspam, I figured, and I ignored it. A few minutes later, it rang again. The name of the caller was “Kitty11_3″. There was also a text chat box on the screen, also from kitty11_3 which read, “I need a friend.” I was skeptical. I figured that whoever it was probably looking for “friends” to come see her “relax” in her web-cam equipped “bedroom.” But I took the call. A delicate Asian-sounding voice came from someplace in Cyberspace. “Will you talk to me?” she said.

“Why?”

“I want to practice my English.”

“Why me?”

“Because your name is John. I think that anybody named John speaks English.”

I remained skeptical, but further conversation convinced me that she was telling the truth. She really had no idea who or where I was and had plucked me at random from all the Skype users named John. Kitty11_3 turned out to be a 22 year old girl from Hanoi, who, like her father, works for the state-owned oil company. She had managed to get five of her neighbors in the Hanoi suburb where she lives to go in on a DSL line and WiFi which she had set up herself. Her boyfriend is off in Korea getting

…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…

This is an excellent post with a lot of informative comments as well. Personally, for years I’ve known there was a difference in thought process between typing and writing: when I want to write poetry or anything drawn from the depths of emotion, reflection, and introspection, I handwrite; when I want to write and think (logically) at the same time, I type — and then I proofread what I’ve typed several times to make sure it’s all coherent. My job as a Unix administrator benefits greatly from the typing-induced “muscle memory” learned by using the same commands thousands of times — I can have a spoken conversation and continue typing commands even while looking at the person talking, but if I’m looking at the screen while typing commands then the talking doesn’t work so well. I’ve been typing for over 20 years, touch-typing for more than 15 of them.

Excerpt from:
collision detection: Can you think better when you’re typing?
In today’s New York Times, there’s an Education article talking about the demise of proper cursive handwriting among high-schoolers. Computers have drastically reduced the amount a student writes by hand, so much that the skill, “like an unused muscle”, is pretty much dead by your senior year. But there’s an interesting question buried in this piece: What is the cognitive effect of handwriting versus typing?

Cool idea. I’m not sure how much it adds to the whole kinesthetic feedback thing but it probably can’t hurt.

Fontifier – Your own handwriting on your computer!
Fontifier lets you use your own handwriting for the text you write on your computer.
It turns a scanned sample of your handwriting into a handwriting font that you can use
in your word processor or graphics program, just like regular fonts such as Helvetica.

Kathy’s recent post, Creating Passionate Renters got me thinking about the whole 180 thing. And then today, I saw this terrific post on 43folders.com…: Patching your personal suck. I realized there a couple of different ways of looking at the whole “I don’t want to suck” thing with 180 in mind: there’s the “turn the negative into a positive” – as in Kathy’s post where the apartment complex has turned owning a dog from a renter’s negative to a renter’s positive; and then there’s the “how do I work my way out of sucking” perspective, reflected in Merlin’s post on 43folders.

Let’s start with the “how do I work my way out of sucking” thing. According to Richard Restak, you don’t have to suck. New brain research says that you can get pretty darn good at anything you really put your mind to if you 1) focus on it enough and 2) practice a lot. He talked to a lot of people who have studied “prodigies” in various areas (e.g. music, athletics, chess, and even math) and found that the really, really good people spend most of their time practicing. And not just practicing the fun things either; they practice everything, hours and hours more than people who are just good at those things.

…excerpt from: headrush.typepad.com…

Excerpt from:

Inside Firefox – The Inside Track on Firefox Development
Every few months a new worm makes the rounds, Sobig, Sober (the 77KB worm which ultimately destroyed my email account) and others. These worms usually travel using Microsoft Outlook as the hook onto people’s systems. Creating an email with an attachment that appears inocuous and beckons the user to open it but which is really a malicious piece of executable code, these emails scan addressbooks and propagate rapidly. Sophisticated worms like Sober even contain their own SMTP engine.

People get infected with these worms because they are a) do not understand internet security (probably an impossible problem to solve) and b) their email client software makes it too easy to execute such attachments.