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What on earth was Google thinking when it added the fade effect?
I am totally confused on this one: Google, so often a shining beacon of good interface design and elegant functionality, has for some unknown reason added an apparently unneccessary fade effect to its homepage. It starts off sparse, then the rest of the content appears once you move your mouse in the window.
Check out my tasty simulation after the jump.
Never give up
This made my day.
Russel McPhee, a stroke victim paralysed for 20 years, has been able to walk again after injections of Botox. Apparently, Botox is comonly used to treat the muscle stiffness experienced after a stroke, but usually shortly after the episode, not two decades later. The difficulty is that Botox relaxes the stiffness, but also the muscle tone, which makes controlling the newly relaxed muscles very difficult.
But here’s the bit that really grabbed me:
Crucially, Mr McPhee had repeatedly, over the years, attempted to get out of his wheelchair and stand on his own.
He was not successful, managing at most a few seconds on his feet before he collapsed.
“Often I would lie on the floor for hours, just hoping that someone might drop by so they could pick me up again,” he said.
Those repeated, heart-breaking attempts to stand built up a core muscle strength on which his doctors and physiotherapists were able to work.
This is a guy who simply refused to give up. Even though bitter experience, built up over 20 years, must have told him that attempting to stand unaided would lead to failure, that walking was impossible, he never stopped trying. This immense willpower, sheer bloody-mindedness really, meant that when modern medicine came up with the tools to unlock his body, he had the core strength to make the most of it, and finally walk again.
What makes you happy?
This article, and the underlying study, is so good that I almost don’t dare talk too much about it here. You really should just read it.
In a nutshell: for the past 72 years, a sample of 268 men have been followed and their entire history - medical, familial, physical, emotional, mental - recorded in great depth. The study is coming to end, mainly because only half of the original group are still alive, and they are in their late eighties. It has a huge amount to teach us about how our lives shape our personalities, and vice versa.
Mixed Day for April Fools
The Guardian absolutely nails it with news that they are soon to be the first newspaper to publish exclusively via Twitter, a story that balances absurdity with just enough plausibility to cause a double-take. Their famous stories rewritten as twitter posts (tweets) are very well done, and they even manage to squeeze in a proper snark:
At a time of unprecedented challenge for all print media, many publications have rushed to embrace social networking technologies. Most now offer Twitter feeds of major breaking news headlines, while the Daily Mail recently pioneered an iPhone application providing users with a one-click facility for reporting suspicious behaviour by migrants or gays.
Sadly, it’s all downhill from there; The Telegraph have a story about migrating salmon being used to generate electrivity, while The Times can only manage this tame effort. They are joking, right?
UPDATE: The Guardian’s efforts just keep getting better and better…
How much does a website cost?
Ed posts a typically thoughtful and balanced meditation on this key question. Turns out our prices are reasonable, by Ed’s reckoning, which is always good to know.
How to print one A4 page as two A5 pages in Microsoft Word
It’s a common problem: you have written your article, poster, flyer or handout on an A4 page in MS Word, and you suddenly think to yourself, “I could do with printing two of these per page at A5 size”.
Figure 1: Initial A4 Page
The science of the afterlife
If you have a spare 20 minutes during the Christmas break (you are having a Christmas break, aren’t you?) I thoroughly recommend reading the full version of this Times Online article by Bryan Appleyard. I just found it a) was quite insightful about the ways that scientific positions require faith and b) made me feel strangely hopeful.
The world, on the face of it, is made of two ingredients: thoughts and things. A brick, for example, is, on the one hand, a fact in the world and, on the other, a combination of all my feelings about bricks in general and this brick in particular. This is generally regarded as a very odd state of affairs. My thoughts and feelings are as real to me as the brick, but they don’t seem to be made of the same stuff. Indeed, they don’t seem to be made of any stuff. The belief that they aren’t, that the world is made of two different substances — bricks and thoughts of bricks — is called dualism. Dualism is the default human conviction, embraced by religions, philosophies and, in fact, by everybody in their lives — if we didn’t embrace some degree of it, we’d be constantly worried about crashing our cars into other people’s thoughts. Dualism means that the mind and the brain are not made of the same things and therefore in theory, they can be separated, as in NDEs.
How to find things that you have lost
Professor Solomon has the answers. Simple wisdom, clearly stated. Wouldn’t it be nice if everything on the web was this useful?
So why start blogging now?
I’ve had a nagging feeling for some time that I really should have a blog – after all, all the cool kids have been doing it for years*. Trouble is, the fact that everyone else is doing it is pretty much the best guarantee that I won’t do something.
Honestly, I’m terrible; if I’m ordering a meal and more than one person orders the thing I was planning to have, I generally won’t order it, even if I really like it. It’s not single-mindedness; it’s embarrassment.
The obligatory first post
A moment of history. I’ll get better with practice.