Saturday, November 17, 2007

How to make a scary political ad

Funny deconstruction of how negative election commercials are designed.

Crealev's levitating lamps

Coming out in 2008.

Easy not to be racist if you're positive about everything

About 7 percent of white people, though, actually show a distinct lack of racism on probing psychological tests... It turns out that the nonracists share a unique emotional style: They rarely form any negative associations, whether they're thinking about meaningless symbols or real human beings.

Deconstruct a language to see if it's worth the effort

From Tim Ferriss, that 4-hour workweek guy (previously posted video here):

How is it possible to become conversationally fluent in one of these languages in 2-12 months? It starts with deconstructing them, choosing wisely, and abandoning all but a few of them.

Interactive map of nuclear reactors and safety problems

Moving a cursor over and/or clicking on a reactor will bring up more in-depth information about each reactor, including owner and licensing dates; local population; past and present safety issues; UCS letters to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC); and testimony to Congress.

New neurons listen before they talk

Newly created neurons in adults rely on signals from distant brain regions to regulate their maturation and survival before they can communicate with existing neighboring cells...

Enurgi -- helping the elderly and disabled find better care

Caregivers and care recipients can establish relationships by sending each other messages through the website. Enurgi will then keep track of these relationships, help schedule sessions with its calendaring system, and manage all of the payments that clients send to their caregivers through the website (powered by PayPal). Clients can also post reviews of their caregivers that can be viewed by other potential clients.

Friday, November 16, 2007

Alive and safe, the brutal Japanese soldiers who butchered 20,000 Allied seamen in cold blood

You can't wipe out older ways of seeing just with some technology and in the snap of a finger.

Multitouch display from Perceptive Pixel

EveryScape -- like Google Streetview taken indoors

Hotel example here.

It was all my brain's fault

The idea is abroad that developments in neuroscience – in particular the observation of activity in the living brain, using techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging – have shown us that we are not as free, or as accountable for our actions, as we traditionally thought.
Yeah, but correlation is not causation. However, there is such a thing as an afflicted prefrontal cortex and its connections.

Wild foreign phrases

Like

Kanjus Makkhicus - Hindi: a person so miserly that if a fly falls into his cup of tea, he'll fish it out and suck it dry before throwing it away.

Circadian-mediated medication

A consideration of chronobiology.

Using incentives to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Skip the treaties:

In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come.

Debunked cognitive myths

Like the field of Cognitive/ Brain Fitness being too new to be credible.

World record artificial tornado

Inside the Mercedes-Benz Museum.

Scientists treat cancer as an infectious agent

“We had a hunch that rapidly growing tumors can “outgrow” their blood supply, resulting in dead tumor cells that might spill their viral antigens amongst the living cancer cells,” says Dr. Arturo Casadevall, Forchheimer Professor and Chair of Microbiology & Immunology at Einstein and co-senior author of the study. “So we hoped that by injecting antibodies hitched to isotopes into the blood that they’d be carried deep into the tumor mass and would latch onto these now-exposed antigens. Then the blast of radiation emitted by the radioisotope would destroy the live tumor cells nearby.”

Meetro -- make your own forum

The project, codenamed “Makaha”, has been in development since the beginning of this year. While many forums require users to find their own hosting and install software, Makaha will enable users to create and personalize forums through a point-and-click interface.

Tax cuts stimulate the economy and bring in even more revenue, right?

An analysis from the New Yorker about the great lie of supply-side economics.

Free video rippers, encoders and converters

From lifehacker. A couple web-based, but desktop too.

Lack of sleep a lot like mental illness

"It is thought that psychiatric conditions create sleep problems," he says. "We should entertain the possibility that it is a sleep disorder that is creating the condition."
and a bit expanded here:
It is almost as though, without sleep, the brain reverts back to a more primitive pattern of activity, becoming unable to put emotional experiences into context and produce controlled, appropriate responses.