2002 Mac switch Ad – Ellen Feis “The PC devoured my paper. It’s kind of . . . a bummer.”
June 16, 2009
OK, this is just silly but it (below) came up on TWIT this week and I figured it was a good a spot as any to recommend the TWIT (This Week in Technology) podcast hosted by Leo LaPorte. Y’know, man, I had like totally forgotten about this little-aired TV spot, part of Apple’s Switch campaign.
TWIT comes out like clockwork every Monday and gives you an hour plus of diverting, informative and opinionated commentary on the tech news and trends that wash through our culture with each news cycle.
Leo is your affable host, regular guests include the real John C. Dvorak and Jason Calacanis (but never on the same show), Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, David Prager, Andy Ihnatko, Roger Chang, Alex Lindsay, Wil Harris, Molly Wood, Tom Merritt, and Veronica Belmont.
Famous guests on TWIT include Steve Wozniak, Kevin Mitnick, beloved American humorist John Hodgman, Lawrence Lessig, Roger McGuinn, LeVar Burton and Wil Wheaton.
If following tech is important to you, you should be listening to this podcast. Dvorak also gives tips sometimes on great wine buys at Costco as a bonus!
Mirror Neurons in your Brain and Prick-eared Dog Breeds
June 15, 2009
Speaking of Dogs
Your mirror neuron system may possibly even jump species. Think about domestic dogs. Dogs are highly social, intelligent animals. We have been able to integrate these deadly carnivores into our homes because evolution has endowed them with instincts for fitting into a socially stratified yet cohesive and cooperative pack. Now, if you look at one of those prick-eared breeds such as the German shepherd, it is amazing how much emotional expressiveness there is in those fuzz-covered triangular ears. Whether they are erect, relaxed, swiveled forward, tilted out or pulled flat against the skull, they are eloquent advertisers of the dog’s mood and inclination. A dog’s ear posture combines with its other facial and body language—mouth smiling or snarling; eye brow nubs set to convey helplessness, confidence, or innocence; neck high or low; tail wagging, up, flat or between the haunches—to express an impressive range of moods. Even a floppy-eared beagle can tell you what it’s thinking! Remarkably, we are able to read this alien body language with ease. After all, we are primates; our ears are totally immobile and purely ornamental. But thanks to our mirror neurons and homuncular flexibility, we easily become “bilingual,” if you will, in canine body language.
Now that you’ve read the above, I’ll bet you’re dying to know what mirror neurons are, aren’t you? What exactly does homuncular flexibilty have to do with your daily life? To learn the answers to those questions and learn a great deal more, you’ll simply have to buy Sandra Blakeslee & Matthew Blakeslee book, The Body Has a Mind of its Own: How body maps in your brain help you do (almost) everything better
10 Years and $2.5 Billion Dollars Later: Complimentary and Alternative Medicine’s Epic FAIL
June 10, 2009
“No statistically significant benefit.”
That’s what a decade of taxpayer-funded research into Complimentary and Alternative Medicines has produced. And all it cost you was $2.5 billion dollars to prove that echinacea won’t cure the common cold and glucosamine and chondroitin are useless to treat arthritis.
Meanwhile, real medical science has made tremendous advances over the last decade in the diagnosis and treatment of many diseases. But that’s not news. Hard core science, along with advances in sanitation, nutrition and preventive care like vaccines, is the reason the average life span in Western nations has almost doubled since the Industrial Revolution.
“It’s become politically correct to investigate nonsense,” R. Barker Bausell, author of Snake Oil Science and a research methods expert at the University of Maryland.
“This is not science, it’s ideology on the part of the advocates,” Dr. Joseph Jacobs, head of the Office of Alternative Medicine, the smaller federal agency that preceded the creation of the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine.
For the complete story by Marilynn Marchione, Associated Press Medical Writer, go here.
For another excellent investigative story by Marchione, this one on the dangers of unregulated supplements, go here.
For an explanation of why you shouldn’t take medical advice from Oprah Winfrey and the people she promotes (like Jenny McCarthy and Suzanne Sommers), read Newsweek’s recent cover story, ‘Crazy Talk: Oprah, Wacky Cures & You.’
To measure the true impact of McCarthy’s anti-vaccine campaign, go to the Jenny McCarthy Body Count site. Real science trumps McCarthy’s “mommy instinct” every time.
To understand how crazy McCarthy’s position is, read Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure by Dr. Paul A. Offit, MD.
“A definitive analysis of a dangerous and unnecessary controversy that has put the lives of children at risk.” — Peter C. Doherty, Ph.D., St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital and Nobel Laureate in Medicine for fundamental contributions in Immunology
3D Dog Photography
June 8, 2009
This is Huxley, our chocolate Labrador, 7 years old, and Luna, a Lab-mix rescue, approx. 3 years old. Click on images for larger size.
Note: These are anaglyphic 3D pictures. You’ll need a pair of red-blue, or red-cyan glasses to experience the 3D. If you don’t have access to any, I’ll send you a pair free. Just shoot an email with a mailing address to cynodictis@gmail.com
NYC Zombie Crawl 3D Group Photo – Williamsburg, Brooklyn 2009
June 2, 2009
Click for full size 3D anaglyph image.
Zombie Crawl Photo Gallery
June 1, 2009
The NYC Zombie Crawl from Bedford Avenue to McCarren Park, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Sunday, May 31, 2009. Photos by Premium Blend.
Click on images for larger size.
For 3D photos, go here and here.
For more Zombie Crawl 2009 coverage, please go to nyczombiecrawl.com
Zombie Crawl 2009 3D Pictures
June 1, 2009
Note: These are anaglyphic 3D pictures. You’ll need a pair of red-blue, or red-cyan glasses to experience the 3D. If you don’t have access to any, I’ll send you a pair free. Just shoot an email with a mailing address to cynodictis@gmail.com
Click on images for larger size. If you increase the viewing distance from your monitor, you can increase the 3D effect (up to 3 feet or so).
For over 60 more pictures (2D) go here. For a 3D group shot, go here.
For more Zombie Crawl 2009 coverage, please go to nyczombiecrawl.com
A gathering of the reanimated recently deceased swarming on Bedford Ave and taking over a local park?
Zombies? On the march in Brooklyn? 3D documentary coverage? Could it all be true?
Despite a complete blackout of main stream media and cable news coverage, facts about the Incident in Williamsburg are rapidly emerging on tweets, blogs, IM and other channels of digital chatter.
The picture painted by even this fragmentary information is unsettling, to say the least. Some local residents are calling it the Massacre at McCarren Park.
If you are by nature sensitive to brutal images of undead depravity, we ask that you stop viewing this site immediately! Please select another channel on the Interwebs.
But until “they” shut us down— with their black helicopters and their radioactive posion darts — we’ll be giving you actual eyewitness 3D photography. Proof and everything! Dare to believe your own startled eyes!
Brain Science Podcast by Ginger Campbell, MD
May 30, 2009
If you have a brain, this is the podcast for you.
The Brain Science Podcast by Ginger Campbell, MD is a wonderful example of what a podcast can be. Begun in 2006 and going into its third year, this is a great introduction to neuroscience. I can’t imagine anyone not finding this material fascinating. I just discovered it, so I’m happily wading through all 57 episodes, most of them a hour long.
Dr. Campbell is an experienced emergency physician with a long-standing interest in mind-body medicine, the brain, and consciousness. In this podcast she shares recent discoveries from the world of neuroscience in a way that people of all backgrounds can enjoy. — from her web site
For example, Episode 21 which discusses Body Maps with Sandra Blakeslee, author of The Body Has a Mind of its Own: How body maps in your brain help you do (almost) everything better is an especially interesting one. It explains how the function of the parietal lobe in the brain may be responsible for people’s belief in the effectiveness of so-called ‘energy’ treatments like Reiki and Therapeutic Touch.
500+ FREE Watercolor Brushes for Photoshop from Designm.ag
May 30, 2009
The good folks at Designm.ag have collected over 500 free high resolution water color brushes for some program called Photoshop.
Have you ever heard of it? You have? Well, then this link may be of some use to you.
Seriously, there are some outstanding brushes here. Definitely worth checking out and downloading a few sets to play around with (see samples below).
One thing I know is we’ve come a long way from Mac Paint 1.0 in January, 1984. . .
50 Best Premium WordPress Themes chosen by Design Reviver
May 30, 2009
Design Reviver has a numbered list.
Everyone has a numbered list these days.
It’s the 10 Best iPhone Apps for Marine Biologists;
42 Simple Ways to Increase Productivity Using Mentholated Caffeine;
3 Lamest Video-Game-to-Movie Franchises directed by Uwe Boll*;
7 Funny Things You Didn’t Know About Open Heart Surgery (And the Madcap Surgeons Who Perform the Operations!).
We are in the List Making era of the Internet’s life. Will we ever evolve beyond this stage? I live with a List Maker and I believe soon they’ll have us all making numbered lists of things.
Lists, in their most useful form, are really just collections of resources or information. Collections of opinions or rankings of Hottest, Worst, Lamest, etc. interest me not at all.
Except for Worst Celebrity Plastic Surgery Nightmares — that stuff’s great.
Still, it is surprising how often Cracked.com gets high ranked on Digg with their 13-Stupid-Movie-Continuity-Errors type posts. (Hey fanboy, you want realism? Go watch a documentary).
Design Reviver offers a list that has value as a collection of resources; a set of 50 premium quality WordPress themes. The designs range from blog and portfolio styles, corporate and magazine and all the way to specialized themes for video and photoblogging.
If we must have a deluge of numbered lists on the Internet, they should all be as useful as this one.
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* Uwe Boll has been compared to Ed Wood as a film director — except for the fact that Boll gets multi-million dollar budgets and stars like Sir Ben Kingsley for his movies. I sort of like the idea of imagining Ed Wood, wearing an angora sweater, directing Ben Kingsley. . .