ctrl.altered.mind

According to results of a study led by Morten Kringelbach, our brains respond distinctly to pictures of babies and infants (as compared to those of adults), with reaction times averaging around 150ms and most significant differences in brain activity occurring in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, according to this graph in the published findings.

The Orbitofrontal Cortex (OFC) is primarily associated with decision-making and evaluating emotion and reward. It also ranks among the least-understood regions of the human brain.

According to the Cognitive Daily,

This area of the brain has been shown to be activated in a similar pattern when people see masked drawings — drawings that they don’t actually remember seeing because they are flashed so briefly. So almost immediately after seeing infant faces, adults show a dramatically different response compared to equivalently emotional and attractive adult faces; a response they may not even be aware of.

These findings might aid in fortifying speculation the researchers have, on the correlation between such medial OFC activity and postpartum depression (the prevalence rate of which ranges between 5-25%).

Morten Kringelbach is affiliated with the University of Oxford (where he is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry) and researches the functional neuroanatomy of human conscious and unconscious processing, in particular those aspects related to pleasure, desire, emotion, learning, reward and hedonic processing.

(via the Cognitive Daily weblog)

Chris Jordan is a photographer who explores the phenomenon of American consumerism. His ongoing series, Running the Numbers, takes a hard look at contemporary American culture through a statistical and pictographic snapshot. If the gory numbers alone fail to make the reader squirm, the images are sure to induce greater discomfort. Jordan hopes to achieve precisely this - by trying to convey something beyond the capacity of mere raw figures, which can sometimes have an unfortunate desensitizing effect for some. According to the photographer:

My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

Some numerical examples (specific to the United States) behind the pictures, which must be seen to try and grasp the sheer magnitudes involved:

2,000,000 the number of plastic bottles used every five minutes, as shown here:

32,000 the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly, in 2006

410,000 the number of disposable paper cups used every fifteen minutes

200,000 the number of Americans dying from cigarette smoking every six months

8,000,000 the number of trees harvested every month, to make paper for mail order catalogs

426,000 the number of cell phones retired every day

1,140,000 the number of brown paper supermarket bags used every hour

60,000 the number of plastic bags used every five seconds

106,000 the number of aluminum cans consumed every thirty seconds

15,000,000 the number of sheets of office paper used every five minutes

A fire broke into an older brick building housing the popular Maxwell’s American Cafe in Downtown Minneapolis on Wednesday, causing some serious damage with the flames causing the roof to partially collapse.

Firefighting efforts were compounded by sub-zero temperatures that day as the sprayed water instantly frosted the building and surrounding structures, casting a frosty and fascinating mantle over the landscape.

Flickr user Tony Webster has some fascinating images captured at the scene, such as this one (cannot post the image here as all rights are reserved by the photographer).

See the complete photoset here (29 pictures), or view as a slideshow.

Neat-o-Rama has a feature story on the evolution of fifteen car brands and their logos, ranging from Alfa Romeo to Volkswagen (with brief summaries of the history of each that makes for some interesting reading).

Audi seems to have barely changed their logo at all, apart from the time that the four car companies merged to form the auto union (back in 1932).

Received this in an email forward, and thought I’d share it here. All credit goes to the originator, whoever that may be.

Carrots
A sliced Carrot looks like the human eye. The pupil, iris and radiating lines look just like the human eye…and YES science now shows that carrots greatly enhance blood flow to and function of the eyes.

Read the rest of this entry »

LetterFrequency.org has a summary of the most commonly occurring letters of the English alphabet, in various writing contexts. It is interesting to note that the letter ‘h’ appears more often in every day speech and writing than it does in a list of dictionary words (aside: Lexus recently began an advertising campaign in the US highlighting the importance of the letter ‘H’, to promote their line of hybrid vehicles).

On a much more impressive note, author Ernest Vincent Wright in 1939 wrote a story of over 50,000 words without using the most common letter in the English alphabet. His book, Gadsby, is a lipogrammatic work of art and is famous for not containing the letter ‘e’ (except for the author’s introduction). The complete manuscript is available online, and is a must-read for students and enthusiasts of the English language.

The book accomplishes a literary task that to me seems daunting beyond belief. As the author himself puts it:

As the vowel E is used more than five times oftener than any other letter, this story was written, not through any attempt to attain literary merit, but due to a somewhat balky nature, caused by hearing it so constantly claimed that “it can’t be done; for you cannot say anything at all without using E, and make smooth continuity, with perfectly grammatical construction—” so ‘twas said.

Charming.

A very special event took form this past week, in celebration of Valentine’s Day. Some guy grabbed credit for making the first ever lolcats proposal (propozlol?).

Oh, and she said yes, lolcats style. =^-^=

Full coverage here.

(picture from icanhascheezburger.com)

It is quite difficult to believe today that Starbucks, the largest coffeehouse company in the world (with over 15,000 stores in 44 countries), did not start selling coffee even after they had opened their fifth store. It took several years post establishment for the company to start selling beverages - their business was selling coffee beans until then. After that symbolic change, however, it was not business as usual anymore.

The Seattle-based chain has witnessed viral growth over the past few years, and is currently expanding at a phenomenal rate. Here is my attempt at collecting some magazine-styled numbers about the chain.

1971 The original Starbucks opened in Seattle, WA

300 Million pounds of coffee purchased by Starbucks in 2006.

6 The percentage of purchased coffee certified as fair trade.

7 The average number of new stores opening each day, worldwide.

7 Rank by Fortune magazine in a list of best companies to work for, in the United States, in 2008.

29 Its rank in the same list for 2006.

Incidentally, Starbucks does have a little secret item that’s not on the menu - a ’short cappuccino’ (the smallest size on their menu is called the ‘tall’), which is considered better and stronger, and available only by request.

(most figures drawn from Wikipedia)

A friend asked me for my brief opinion regarding solid-state drives, particularly in the event of actual reviews of these devices pouring in (such as this one by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal). For the uninitiated, these solid-state drives are drop-in replacements for conventional hard disc drives (or HDDs), but employ flash storage instead of storing data on rotating magnetic media.

While this technology may be an interesting alternative for some, I do not see SSDs denting the expansive HDD market at least over the next decade. There will be some low storage capacity markets that would be taken over by solid-state storage, such as handhelds and special-purpose laptops. SDDs differ from flash storage employed by portable devices such as digital cameras and music players in two aspects: the type of flash memory used, and the interface. Current generation SDDs use the SATA interface and have a HDD-like form factor; and are therefore designed as a drop-in replacement for conventional hard drives.

My comparative reasoning between SDD and HDD technologies, is as follows:

Conventional hard drives are a mature technology and are continually seeing impressive gains in storage density (due to better materials, advances in physics, and better recording techniques). It is a just a matter of time until we start seeing multiple terabyte storage in hard drives. With a tremendous shift in media consumption towards high-definition audio and video formats, the quantity of available storage will be a perennial question.

While they do involve moving parts, the energy usage to operate a hard drive is a tiny fraction of that used for other computer parts. In todays laptops, powering the screen consumes the most energy, although this is being mitigated by the use of LED backlighting in some newer devices. In fact, in a comparative test recently performed on the Apple Macbook Air by Ars Technica, it was seen that a solid state drive presented no significant benefit in terms of battery life, even in an LED-backlit laptop computer.

The data access time benefit from flash storage is usually mentioned, but there are two sides to this story. Flash beats HDDs when it comes to random access times (due to spin delays in HDDs). However, HDDs have far superior sequential access times than SDD storage, which is of great importance in video playback and retrieving of any sequentially placed data. Moreover, with a new breed of hybrid HDDs that employ larger flash memory caches for frequently accessed information, users would be able to benefit from the best of both worlds (with greatly improved random/sequential access times as well as higher storage capacity).

A prime disadvantage of SSDs is the limited number of rewrites to memory. This makes it mandatory to perform wear-leveling within the SSD to prevent repeated rewrites to the same sections. This issue is expected to make recovering lost data from SSDs far more difficult than is the case with HDDs.

So far, the biggest advantage that I see favoring SDDs in portable computers, is the resilience from shock and damage arising from dropping the device. Therefore, computers built for rugged use and/or harsh environments would strongly benefit from using SDDs, if the compromise on storage capacity is acceptable.

A dear friend just emailed me an excellent (and very creative) slideshow, which chronicles some capers his fiance and he have shared in recent years. This presentation also doubles as an invitation - they are getting married by the end of this month (congratulations!!). Sadly, I won’t be able to make it to the wedding that will be taking place halfway around the planet (I’ll get my dinner treat later for sure!). I’d have loved to post this awesome presentation here online, but I’m pretty certain it comes to me accompanied by limited copyright.

Onto the technical part of this blog post (oh yeah, there is always one, isn’t there!)- the slideshow file that I received (in the PowerPoint Show, or .pps format) is not natively playable by StarOffice. While it is one of the better open source application suites available today, StarOffice does fall short in cases such as this one. Fortunately, Microsoft has been graceful enough to offer standalone viewer programs (on Windows) that can handle Microsoft Office formats - not only for PowerPoint (2007), but also for Word (2003) and Excel (2003). There is also a compatibility pack available, which enables MSO 2003 viewer programs to handle MSO 2007 file formats.

By the way, if you have not heard of (or recently taken a look at) Sun’s StarOffice or its parent, OpenOffice, please do. They are excellent substitutes for Microsoft’s commercial Office suite, and have equivalent programs that look and feel almost the same. They can also handle about ninety percent of the functions that the average user requires from their productivity applications suite. Of course, both come at the low, low price of $0.00. StarOffice is also offered via the Google Pack, a convenient package manager tool. For the Mac platform, there is a derivative of OpenOffice available in the form of NeoOffice (with a full Aqua interface).

Now, if only Microsoft gratuitously extended this service for Microsoft Project files, I’d be a happy camper (sigh).