onfocus

A new study finds that fitness/obesity, sadness/happiness might be some "contagious" states that pass from person to person like a virus. The study suggests that we clue into subconscious behaviors of people around us and modify our behavior to "normal" accordingly. [via Rebecca Blood]

Oliver Sacks on Migraine Auras: "I was playing in the garden when a brilliant, shimmering light appeared to my left -- dazzlingly bright, almost as bright as the sun. It expanded, becoming an enormous shimmering semicircle stretching from the ground to the sky, with sharp zigzagging borders and brilliant blue and orange colors." I've had these and it's always amazing to read that others have experienced the same thing. [via Ironic Sans]

Helpful step-by-step guide to fixing deadlock problems in SQL Server 2005.

"More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plug-in to track users and store information about them..." [via schneier]

"Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play." [via Daddy Types]

"Superfeedr is Real-time Feed Parsing in the Cloud." Great idea that could help build specialized aggregators. Bummed it's ATOM at the end. I'd prefer RSS.

This blog connects Mad Men episodes with advertisements and details from the time. [via kottke]

"Reassuring people about privacy makes them more, not less, concerned. ...sites would much rather obfuscate the issue than compete on [privacy] as a feature."

"Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen. Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed."

"On July 14th, 1999, a programmer named Matthew Haughey made the first post on a blog he'd set up for himself and a few friends in an attempt to collect interesting links." Nice profile of MetaFilter! [via MetaTalk]

Nice collection of icons for web applications. Click Preview to see them all. [via glass]

It'd be interesting to see how much performance you'd gain moving to HTML 5. Maybe I'll try it with one of my personal sites. [via anil]

"Is there a formula--some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation--for a good life?" [via peterme]

"TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets." Interesting analysis. What I don't like is that it was built by a "Social Media Scientist" who is probably using the results to find better ways to sell things.

Michal Migurski is doing some interesting tagging with delicious to tease out his friends' top subject areas.

"In its final days before crashing into the surface of the moon on June 11, Japan’s KAGUYA explorer has been shooting high-definition footage of the lunar terrain from low altitude."

A father teaches his children the ancient art of rhetoric. "It was as if I’d given them advertising immunization shots."

Visualize the most viewed wikipedia articles, or compare the views of different articles. Here's more information about the launch from Jeff Veen: Announcing Wikirank.

"I've always thought their status updates design was brilliant. Not because it was usable or attractive, I've always thought it was terrible. But because their design didn’t make promises they couldn’t keep." Painful and true advice: make sure you can deliver what you promise through design. [via rc3]

"The pupil measurements showed that 3-year-olds neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present. Instead, they call up the past as they need it."

"As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?" [via davenetics]

Cameron expands on the Economist article: "...while the average Facebook user communicates with a small subset of their entire friend network, they maintain relationships with a group two times the size of this core."

"...people who are members of online social networks are not so much 'networking' as they are 'broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren't necessarily inside the Dunbar circle'..."

SBJ's talk at SXSW about the future of news. "...in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it's important that we try to imagine how we'd like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years."

"Las Vegas casinos increasingly pay attention to their customers - their likes, dislikes, moods and patterns - in order to create an engaging experience." This was my favorite talk at Gel 2008.

"What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09."

"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves -- the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public -- has stopped being a problem."

Paintings of alchemists in their laboratories. Posted to Flickr by the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

"People went to Google to find specific information about the President-Elect and the ceremony. People go to Twitter and Facebook to share the experience with one another. That means, Twitter and Facebook are delighting users more than Google, because they are keyed into natural human needs and emotions that trigger far greater and more addictive endorphin rushes than just finding a piece of information." [via msippey]

Tom Armitage on journalists learning to code: "Learn to think like a programmer. What's really important is to not understand how to do magical things with code, but to learn what magical things are possible, what the necessary inputs for that magic are, and who to ask to do it." [via rc3.org]

"None of which is saying you shouldn't be talking to your sources, and questioning what you're told, and trying to find other means of finding stuff out from people. But nowadays, computers are a sort of primary source too. You've got to learn to interrogate them effectively - and quote them meaningfully - too." [via migurski]