Sorry for the downtime- the location where this site is hosted experienced a flood earlier this week and turned the whole place into a murky swamp. The server was sitting in an inch of water on the floor when I found it that morning, its UPS charred black. Yes, I kept the server on the floor. I don’t need a lecture.
After a couple days of air drying and lovingly caressing the chassis, I hooked everything back up, crossed my fingers and hit the power button. Magically, the server returned to life and is now humming along happily atop a desk.
We may now resume sporadic postings of little value.
The major 3.0 software update for the iPhone is set to launch today. Beta testers have said good things so far and the release seems stable, but I’ll wait a day or two until the download servers cool and more opinions come rolling in.
Related: Since foreign news outlets are barred from covering the protests, Twitter has become the platform for Iranian citizens to share updates with the outside world. Check out hashtags like http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23IranElection and #gr88.
I’m late in posting this, but for those interested in photography–photojournalism to be exact–the New York Times has launched Lens, a blog showcasing the spectrum of multimedia reporting.
The pictures aren’t as large and eye-popping as the Big Picture, but the back stories provided make up for what it lacks.
Studying the purchasing habits of their customers, credit card issuers can predict if a person will be late on payments, default or pay their bills on time, every time.
The exploration into cardholders’ minds hit a breakthrough in 2002, when J. P. Martin, a math-loving executive at Canadian Tire, decided to analyze almost every piece of information his company had collected from credit-card transactions the previous year. Canadian Tire’s stores sold electronics, sporting equipment, kitchen supplies and automotive goods and issued a credit card that could be used almost anywhere. Martin could often see precisely what cardholders were purchasing, and he discovered that the brands we buy are the windows into our souls — or at least into our willingness to make good on our debts. His data indicated, for instance, that people who bought cheap, generic automotive oil were much more likely to miss a credit-card payment than someone who got the expensive, name-brand stuff. People who bought carbon-monoxide monitors for their homes or those little felt pads that stop chair legs from scratching the floor almost never missed payments. Anyone who purchased a chrome-skull car accessory or a “Mega Thruster Exhaust System” was pretty likely to miss paying his bill eventually.
The Apple WWDC 2009 Keynote starts in less than half an hour as of this posting. Rumors point to a strong likelihood of a new iPhone to be announced, plus refreshed Mac hardware and maybe a closer look at Snow Leopard.
The gadget sites are warming up their live blogs of the event, so pick your favorite and see what happens:
Face transplants are in the news quite often these days, most prominently Connie Culp and James Maki. The majority of us can dole out a lot of empathy for the unfortunate situations these people were put in, but at the same time, you just want to sit and stare. There’s a twisted fascination with their physical appearances, and although you might feel a twinge of guilt for doing so, you can blame part of your reaction on millions of years of human evolution.
To ensure the long-term survival of our species, we’re genetically predisposed to be attracted to symmetrical faces. The idea is that normal, healthy development free of disfiguring diseases or genetic mutations produces a symmetrical face. We unconsciously see symmetry as a marker of genetic quality. Our reaction to a face that is disfigured, however, also has links with short-term survival.
To do so safely, scientists believe we have evolved a rough screening process. When someone unfamiliar approaches you in the aisle of a grocery store, a glance at his face and its expression helps your brain to sort that person into one of two broad categories: safe or potentially unsafe. The amygdala (the brain area associated with judgment) depends upon the emotion conveyed by the person’s facial features to make that crucial call. Is he happy? Angry? Irritated?
To decide, your eyes sweep over the person’s face, retrieving only parts, mainly just his nose and eyes. Your brain will then try to assemble those pieces into a configuration that you know something about.
When the pieces you supply match nothing in the gallery of known facial expressions, when you encounter a person whose nose, mouth or eyes are distorted in a way you have never encountered before, you instinctively lock on. Your gaze remains riveted, and your brain stays tuned for further information.
“When a face is distorted, we have no pattern to match that,” Rosenberg said. “All primates show this [staring] at something very different, something they have not evolved to see. They need to investigate further. ‘Are they one of us or not?’ In other species, when an animal looks very different, they get rejected.”
And so, we stare. (An averted gaze is triggered in some people. This too can be overridden only with great difficulty.)
The WikiMedia Commons’ contest for 2008’s Photo of the Year has officially ended with the submissions ready for viewing online. The Commons’ photo contest is different from most others as all of its entries are free to use (at least in a non-commercial setting, I believe).
Some good shots in here, although the drawing of the half naked preteen anime girl puts a dent in the contest’s credibility.
According to the complaint, Sugawara and other consumers were misled not only by the use of the word “berries” in the name, but also by the front of the box, which features the product’s namesake, Cap’n Crunch, aggressively “thrusting a spoonful of ‘Crunchberries’ at the prospective buyer.” Plaintiff claimed that this message was reinforced by other marketing representing the product as a “combination of Crunch biscuits and colorful red, purple, teal and green berries.” Yet in actuality, the product contained “no berries of any kind.”
Surprisingly the judge dismissed her case, allowing the Cap’n to continue his fraudulent scheme of duping consumers into buying his non-fruit-containing cereals.
