A killer recipe..

If you got an idee-fixe-du-jour, all you need to do is to hint your friend to come back to you and attach some official task to it for you. Preferrably with the supposed deadline, and make it all very seriozz.

The idea du jour will lose a lot of its sparkling - so you'll get your best to get rid of it as soon as you can.

This behaviour indeed not anything of an invention, but feels quite funny to experience it consciously.

I'm curious if this is the timing that matters, or really it is that the idee-du-jour would really be persistent in case it was worth it - so one can really use it as a "tester" ?

Are average faces beautiful ?

Ok, time for a relaxing post to just waste your time :-)

On one of the /. discussions I've found a nice link: you can check out the experiment that showsthe average faces of humans. The idea is simple - they have a bunch of photos, you select those that you want to "average together", and judge the result. The common theory is that the most "average" faces are considered the most beautiful. (Although I guess the technical details on how to actually "average" the pictures must be less than simple, unfortunately the page with the "computer graphics methods" seems to be not present :(

Highly entertaining, and indeed the "averaged" results seem to be more aesthetic - albeit they seem more artificial - and the perception is - younger ? A very odd effect.

It's pretty tough for me to judge the attractiveness of averaging the guys' "averaged" faces - maybe some of the female avatars reading this blog might spare their opinion ? (Of course, I assume there are still left those that did not get scared off by my recent flurry of the half-coherent geek blabber :-)

Human's brain is an amazing device

An entertaining talk on TED about viewing the brain in real time, and an extremely emotional post of Neuroanatomist sharing the experiences of the own brain stroke.

The list of human phobias

Ugh. Those humans really have a problem. as list suggests, they tend to fear everything and anything. Very entertaining. Is there a list of things they are *not* afraid of ?

The dark post of the week

Melissa posts about "griefers" causing the epileptic seisures in the users after they defaced the website, and ask "what kind of useful purpose do griefers serve" - well, i guess it's hard to give the yes/no answer... I won't comment on any specific occasions, but instead invite you onto a video journey into the darker sides of the human nature.

As a followup to my previous dive into the darker depths of the human interactions, here's another couple of interesting - albeit quite depressing - pieces. Consume with some antidepressant and fresh air :-) Don't view if you are in a stress or are upset. Some of the photos may be NSFW.

The original Milgram experiment:



And if you thought that it was in the dark old age when the humans were just much less self-aware - well, here's the newer results:



And the prof. Philip Zimbardo talking at Google - depending on your local policies, some of the photo there might be NSFW.



And the series of the videos about the original Stanford Prison experiment.