Geoff Nunberg on the denunciation of “hopefully” as an adverb:

You hear people saying that a misused “hopefully” or “literally” makes them want to put their shoe through the television screen, but nobody ever actually does that — what it really makes them want to do is tell you how they wanted to put a shoe through the television screen.

(Via Eugene Volokh.)

I really don’t care about the hypocrisy; I’m not sure I’d say that the “war on marijuana” belongs to Obama either. I just wanted to pull this tidbit of disappointing information:

Half of all U.S. drug arrests are for marijuana — more than 850,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana in 2010 alone, 88 percent for mere possession.

Natt Garun, Digital Trends:

It’s no secret that branding is powerful: Fonts, shapes, colors are all part of what we associate with certain brands. Without the words, we can tell the swoosh is part of the Nike franchise, and a yellow M is a straight sign to your local McDonald’s […] But can you recognize these brands and objects if you take the colors and logos away?

That’s the idea behind the project Brand Spirit by Andrew Miller. Every day for 100 days, Miller has taken a random object and [painted] it completely white to strip it of the branding we’ve come to know like the back of our hands. By removing the visual branding, Miller says this ”reduc[es] the object to its purest form.”

Visit Andrew Miller’s Brand Spirit Tumblr to view the rest of his collection.

(Via Shawn King.)

The editors at Scientific American wrote a great piece on why political attacks against Planned Parenthood are completely misguided.

Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona declared last year on the floor of the Senate that abortion accounts for “well over 90 percent” of what Planned Parenthood does. The actual figure is 3 percent.

Now, if only the condemnation of Planned Parenthood had anything to do with reason would exposing its irrational footing have any effect — which I suppose is why knowing is merely half the battle.

Episode #19 of The Impromptu, with Adam Hyland and Shadoe Huard.

The universe is mind-bogglingly huge. So how do astronomers know the distance to nearby stars and far off galaxies? Find out in this short, animated video from the Royal Observatory Greenwich.

The film is part of a free micro-exhibition called “Measuring the Universe: from the transit of Venus to the edge of the cosmos,” on display through September 2nd.

(Via Neatorama.)

iA has created a new website using “responsive typography” — and a custom font to boot. Oliver Reichenstein explains why a responsive typeface is necessary.

Most people can’t discern good from bad typography but everybody can feel it.

In an attempt to encourage more browsing, I have made a couple of changes to the site’s Archive — or perhaps I should say “additions.” There is now a dedicated Linked List and Article archive. The linked list is particularly useful for those who desire quick access to the pages I link to in a more pared down way, similar to Waxy’s linked list, for example.

Of course, unlike Waxy, my linked list is merely a watered down version of an actual set of posts — thus, users may always click through to my original entry. The list is, first and foremost, an archive. It is, moreover, a complement. Whatever the case, I hope that you find these new additions valuable. Thanks for reading.

-Chris

Dan Hurley, The New York Times:

Early on a drab afternoon in January, a dozen third graders from the working-class suburb of Chicago Heights, Ill., burst into the Mac Lab on the ground floor of Washington-McKinley School in a blur of blue pants, blue vests and white shirts. Minutes later, they were hunkered down in front of the Apple computers lining the room’s perimeter, hoping to do what was, until recently, considered impossible: increase their intelligence through training.

Here’s a free online version of the game they were playing.

I’ll go ahead and tag this one NSFW/NSS, just for good measure. An interesting read by Tracy Clark-Flory, nonetheless.

Early vibrators were hand-cranked, two-person jobs — and prescribed by doctors. How far we’ve come since then.

Konstantin Kakaes, Slate:

It would take a thick head indeed to believe that new technologies aren’t valuable to the economy. But determining how they are important, and how important they are, gets thorny. That’s because we don’t have access to a counterfactual world in which a given technology was never developed.

A new twist on speed-dating — L.A. singles hook up by smelling slept-in T-shirts. They’re called “pheromone parties,” and Salon’s Lauren Eggert-Crowe has all the details:

Here’s how it works: Participants imprint their odor on cotton T-shirts and then bring them to the party. Upon registering and shelling out $30, they place their shirts in plastic bags with numbered Post-its – pink for women, blue for men. The bags are placed on a table in the party area in the courtyard out back, where guests can leisurely (or voraciously, as was sometimes the case) sniff shirts in between trips to the bar for an absinthe cocktail. When you find a shirt you like, you stand in line to get your picture taken with the prized numbered shirt. The photographs are projected on a slideshow throughout the night at the bar and on the big screen inside the movie theater.

When you spot the man or woman of your dreams holding up your  T-shirt and smiling for the camera, you can find them in the crowd and strike up a conversation.

Perhaps the most enthralling video you’ll see all week.

(Via Kottke.)

Episode #18 of The Impromptu is another great one. Heck, I got to talk about Lord of the Rings and StarCraft.

This week we wonder whether it is fair to whine about Diablo downtime and explore how J.R.R. Tolkien may be responsible for the death of responsible fiction. Also, Facebook is in the news again leaving us ample fodder for discussion on advertising, growth and analytics. We finish up with comments on the 4″ iPhone and while on the subject of dimensions, the 7.85″ iPad.

A super-snorkel concept called the Powerbreather allows swimmers to keep their faces submerged in water while breathing fresh air. Of course, the device also works great for snorkeling.

With the Powerbreather, air is inhaled through the upper section behind the head which is equipped with a check valve and is fully exhaled through a check valve located in the mouthpiece.

This valve technology makes it possible for the first time to have no stale air left in the snorkel tube after you exhale, unlike all previous snorkels. Only fresh air is ever inhaled. Fatigue effects from snorkel use are thus avoided. Because of the two interacting valves no water gets into the snorkel when descending. Its design and the elastic material ensure that it fits tightly around the head.

(Via Discovery.)

A 71-year old man who was paralyzed in a car crash four years ago has regained some of the use of his hands after doctors rewired the nerves in his arms. Ian Sample reports for The Guardian:

In the operation surgeons used healthy nerves to bypass the damaged area and connect working nerves above the spinal breakage to those in the anterior interosseous nerve in the forearm that ultimately controls hand movement.

The man received extensive therapy after the operation and began to move the thumb and fingers of his left hand eight months after surgery. He could move the fingers of his right hand 10 months afterwards.

The patient can now feed himself and write to some extent. Though slight, his improvement is nonetheless remarkable, given the severity of the injury and the 22 months that passed before surgery.

Like plants, some species of photosynthetic bacteria and organelles such as chloroplasts move toward or away from light to maximize their food intake. Now, plant scientists are using this phototropism to create “living photography” — art, meet science.

The 2004 UT Austin iGEM team moved light-sensitive genes from a photosynthetic organism and connected them with E. coli genes that create pigments. These engineered bacteria form light responsive “pixels”, and a petri dish coated with the cells is 100 megapixel per square inch film that turns black depending on where light is shined on the dish. Whether the pixels are engineered E. coli, cyanobacteria, chloroplasts, starch granules, or blades of grass, living photography illuminates what’s happening inside living cells.

(Bacterial Photography — UT Austin iGEM 2004.)

Orion Jones, Big Think:

Although we are not consciously aware of the calculations our brain is making, our behavior seems largely determined by sets of chemical reactions. So when it comes to high levels of performance in any field, which requires thousands of hours of practice whether you are playing the piano or programming software, some people are more willing to endure the tedium that accompanies mastering a particular discipline. “These diligent souls seem to get a bit more pleasure from the possibility of reward, but they also seem less sensitive to their inner complainer.” This is the neuroscience of effort. 

Here’s the paper, just in case you subscribe to the Journal of Neuroscience. See also The Neuroscience of Effort.

Bill Hammack explains how a digital camera captures color images using a CCD (charge coupled device) and color filter array.

This video is based on a book by Bill Hammack, Patrick Ryan, and Nick Ziech called Eight Amazing Engineering Stories.

In 1848, an explosion shot a meter-long iron rod straight through the skull of Phineas Gage. Amazingly, Gage survived the accident, but underwent drastic personality changes. Now — more than 150 years later — neuroscientists from the University of California, Los Angeles have produced Gage’s connectome, “a detailed wiring diagram of his brain, showing how its long-range connections were altered by the injury.” Mo Costandi reports:

Finally, Van Horn and his colleagues crunched their data to visualize the connectivity in a healthy brain and in Gage’s brain as ‘connectograms,’ circular diagrams depicting the brain’s major white matter tracts. In these diagrams, the major brain regions – the frontal lobe, insula, limbic system, temporal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, brain stem and cerebellum – are colour-coded and arranged on the outer ring of the diagram, according to their position from the front.

The inner rings represent various other measures, such as the average volume, thickness and surface area of each area. The left half of the diagram represents the left hemisphere, the right half represents the right hemisphere, while the brain stem is shown at the bottom. The inner-most ring shows the degree of connectivity within and between the two hemispheres, as measured by DTI.

Here’s the connectogram of a healthy human brain.

And here’s Gage’s.

Images via Van Horn, J.D., et al. (Via Neatorama.)

From Wired Science, Jonah Lehrer explains how thinking in a foreign language can reduce decision biases:

The experiments themselves relied on classic paradigms borrowed from prospect theory, in which people are asked to make decisions under varying conditions of uncertainty and risk. For instance, native English speakers in Chicago who had learned Spanish in the classroom were given a $15 stake. Then, they were asked to make various bets based on a coin toss: if they correctly picked heads or tails, they would win $1.50, while an incorrect guess would cost them $1. From a rational perspective, these bets are a smart wager – a subject who chooses to bet on all fifteen trials would most likely come out far ahead.

But people aren’t rational creatures. When thinking in English, students only chose to bet 54 percent of their time; their fear of losses kept them from properly assessing the situation. However, when the same options were described in Spanish, subjects made significantly better decisions, choosing to place bets 71 percent of the time […]

[P]sychologists found that the reduced emotional valence of a second language – the words aren’t so weighted with feeling – made it easier to resist the tug of loss aversion.

Discover Google’s data centers through video and photos by following an email along its path on this interactive journey.

Chris Dixon:

Google makes the vast majority of their revenues when people search for something to buy or hire. They don’t have to stoke demand – they simply harvest it. When people use Facebook, they are generally socializing with friends. You can put billboards all over a park, and maybe sometimes you’ll happen to convert people from non-purchasing to purchasing intents. But you end up with a cluttered park, and not very effective advertising.

This is currently Facebook’s biggest challenge, and it will be interesting to see how Zuckerberg responds. Off-site advertising, most likely.

(Via Ben Brooks.)

A guest post by Bruce Schneier at SamHarris.org on airport security:

[T]o assume that only Arab-appearing people are terrorists is dangerously naive. Muslims are black, white, Asian, and everything else—most Muslims are not Arab. Recent terrorists have been European, Asian, African, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern; male and female; young and old. Underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab was Nigerian. Shoe bomber Richard Reid was British with a Jamaican father. One of the London subway bombers, Germaine Lindsay, was Afro-Caribbean. Dirty bomb suspect Jose Padilla was Hispanic-American. The 2002 Bali terrorists were Indonesian. Both Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber were white Americans. The Chechen terrorists who blew up two Russian planes in 2004 were female. Focusing on a profile increases the risk that TSA agents will miss those who don’t match it.

See also Bruce Schneier on “security theater”:

Security theater refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security. An example: the photo ID checks that have sprung up in office buildings. No-one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards. Airport-security examples include the National Guard troops stationed at US airports in the months after 9/11 — their guns had no bullets. The US colour-coded system of threat levels, the pervasive harassment of photographers, and the metal detectors that are increasingly common in hotels and office buildings since the Mumbai terrorist attacks, are additional examples.

And just for good measure — Schneier on the effectiveness of the TSA:

Let us start with the obvious: in the entire decade or so of airport security since the attacks on America on September 11th 2001, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has not foiled a single terrorist plot or caught a single terrorist.

A POV graffiti process video I really enjoyed watching, by someone called I Love Graffiti.

(Via Aaron Cohen.)