ctrl.altered.mind

At the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival, New York Times columnist David Brooks discussed what scientists are learning about the human mind - and what that means for both our lives and our public policy.

Brooks is featured regularly on NPR’s All Things Considered, on topics encircling politics and culture. In this 2010 talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he departs into the realm of science of the mind, and presents several illustrative examples of the immense influence subconscious behavioral targeting can have on the human mind.

I listened to part of his talk on my drive home from work today. I was moved by his eloquent construction of the resilient life story of a Mexican-Chinese girl (a fictional account, I believe), who overcomes the adversity of growing up in a troubled household to create opportunities for herself.

Link to Audio (54 mins)

Snapped a quick picture of this lonely fellow floating over some buildings in downtown Chicago.

If the last few blog posts have looked bizarre, it was because of a Twitter cross-posting feature that I enabled via the Twitter Tools plugin. While the tool works fine, it isn’t quite compatible with a blog post structure that includes a discrete header field — it breaks up the tweet across the header and body of the blog. Needless to say, the cross-posting has been turned off now (blog posts will still ping my twitter account, though).

A meta-chart representation to help pick the correct type of chart. Interestingly, tree maps are missing from the list.

flowchart for selecting the correct chart type

Minneapolis has topped Yahoo! Real Estate’s list of America’s Safest Cities.

Minneapolis tops our list of America’s safest cities, and not just for its crime rate. In ranking the cities on our list, we looked at workplace fatalities, traffic-related deaths and natural disaster risk; the City of Lakes ranked in the top 10 of all four categories. It’s also one of America’s best places to live cheaply and offers easy access to some of the most scenic drives in the country.

Click here for the full list.

From the Fourtitude Forums, the new Audi A5 Sportback. Audi has turned on the style way up for its 100th anniversary year.

(thanks psk)

I love native PDF support on the Mac, but it quickly gets tiresome to have Firefox download .pdf files by default, only to open them in Preview. The Firefox PDF plugin (requires Firefox 3.0+) uses the built-in PDF support in OS X to display documents in the browser tab/window instead.

Carbonated soft drinks are generally called ‘Pops’ here in the upper Midwest, but ‘Soda’ is gaining some ground too. I wasn’t aware of a strong debate underlying the name for the beverage until I came across this interactive map. You can click on the map to get the generic name for soft drinks by US county. Just in case you need to stay abreast of the local jargon while venturing to unfamiliar corners of the country.

Talk about an inverse generation gap when it comes to technology! Not only is my dad on Facebook now, probably spending way more time on a social network than I would bother to, but he’s also beaten me to creating a Facebook group. Not that I was in any such race, but it is anecdotal evidence of the amazing reach that Facebook is commanding around the globe. If you know my Dad, it wouldn’t be too hard to guess his group has something to do with Maritime Shipping.

Social networks are successfully adding (active) members from demographics that, until recently, were not even considered a target market. Facebook, of course, is quickly headed towards becoming the 800 pound gorilla in this domain with an estimated 175 million profiles (and growing). That is about 1 in 34 people on the planet, which is pretty impressive for a website that has only been around for around 5 years, even if you discount for the number of inactive and duplicate profiles.

Facebook maintains general statistics on their press page, if you would like some more numbers.

I just upgraded my blog to the new Wordpress 2.7 release. Took all of three minutes (just a single click to reconnect the database, most of the time required was for uploading the new files to the server).

The new version of Wordpress (my blogging platform of choice) has a very cool new social news aspect to it. The dashboard shows popular blog posts from around the world that are related to the content on your own weblog. This is exactly how I found this interesting photoblog post by Matt Mullenweg, who apparently just visited the Taj Mahal in Agra with Om Malik, a well-known web and technology writer (and founder of the GigaOm network of technology blogs).