Ryan Mustard

Andrea Kuszewski shares some research about human intelligence and offers five techniques anyone can use to increase their IQ.

There are absolutely oodles of terrible things written and promoted on how to "train your brain" to "get smarter". When I speak of "brain training games", I'm referring to the memorization and fluency-type games, intended to increase your speed of processing, etc, such as Sudoku, that they tell you to do in your "idle time" (complete oxymoron, regarding increasing cognition). I'm going to shatter some of that stuff you've previously heard about brain training games. Here goes: They don't work. Individual brain training games don't make you smarter-they make you more proficient at the brain training games.

Now, they do serve a purpose, but it is short-lived. The key to getting something out of those types of cognitive activities sort of relates to the first principle of seeking novelty. Once you master one of those cognitive activities in the brain-training game, you need to move on to the next challenging activity. Figure out how to play Sudoku? Great! Now move along to the next type of challenging game. There is research that supports this logic.

A few years ago, scientist Richard Haier wanted to see if you could increase your cognitive ability by intensely training on novel mental activities for a period of several weeks. They used the video game Tetris as the novel activity, and used people who had never played the game before as subjects (I know-can you believe they exist?!). What they found, was that after training for several weeks on the game Tetris, the subjects experienced an increase in cortical thickness, as well as an increase in cortical activity, as evidenced by the increase in how much glucose was used in that area of the brain. Basically, the brain used more energy during those training times, and bulked up in thickness-which means more neural connections, or new learned expertise-after this intense training. And they became experts at Tetris. Cool, right?

Here's the thing: After that initial explosion of cognitive growth, they noticed a decline in both cortical thickness, as well as the amount of glucose used during that task. However, they remained just as good at Tetris; their skill did not decrease. The brain scans showed less brain activity during the game-playing, instead of more, as in the previous days. Why the drop? Their brains got more efficient. Once their brain figured out how to play Tetris, and got really good at it, it got lazy. It didn't need to work as hard in order to play the game well, so the cognitive energy and the glucose went somewhere else instead.

Tags: Andrea Kuszewski   brain

Hook 'em, Justin.

The Cronut Line

Dominique Ansel Bakery’s early-morning cronut line recalls the old world elegance of Magnolia Bakery’s time-honored, tourism-induced claustrophobia while matching the European flair and unfounded elitism of the late-night wait to get into Pommes Frites.

Free Fridays at MoMA

This beautifully executed block-spanning affair is a single-file reminder that people love Art as long as they don’t have to pay for it. A sole employee at the front of the crowded entrance ensures that event tickets are distributed to the innumerable masses in the least efficient way possible as other docents are busy informing guests that the lengthy row of bodies leading up to MoMA’s entrance is, to answer a common question, the line.

Sample Sales

Without a doubt the best-dressed lines in the city, these serpentine rows of bargain-hunting sartorialists pique expectation with bored-looking modelesque humans who apparently don’t work during 10 AM on weekdays. A gaggle of stilettos prevent these queues from breaking into unruly stampedes once the doors open, but the visceral competitive impulse between shoppers seeking to purchase draped merino dresses and pleated jogging trousers at half their net-a-porter value palpates with the early-morning aggression of a post-Thanksgiving Black Friday sale at Walmart.

Every Webster Hall Concert

Webster Hall serves lines with a populist twist: both Advance Ticket Holders and Will Call patrons are filed in the same woefully inefficient queue, and the venue keeps its doors shut well after the hour at which they are scheduled to open, ensuring with its concerts’ consistently-unpredictable start times that every one of their customers will get to experience the line that they paid good money to stand in.

The Great GoogaMooga

“Where the food is great, and so is the wait!”

Governors Ball Music Festival

Reminiscing at once of Bonnaroo’s handsy gatekeepers and Coachella’s cantankerous security crew, the welcome staff at Governors Ball established early that no credit card, tissue packet, or tube of chapstick would go uninspected through the NYC Music Festival’s prodigious security line; meanwhile, a shuttle system otherwise doomed to efficiency blossomed under the raindrops into a magnanimous, stagnating delay; and inside the festival, masses battered by torrential downpours and demoralizing winds quickly formed a third round of excruciatingly-muddy assemblages in front of bathrooms, food establishments, and anything with a roof—human agglutinations all of which rendered the lines of Governors Ball a triple-threat in the literalist sense of the phrase.

The New York City Vegetarian Festival

While less ambient-ly garlic-breathed than the iconic lines of Little Italy’s Festival of St. Gennaro, the four-hour wait to get into the Vegetarian Festival was similarly slow moving and replete with fannypack-wearing visitors who, if you can believe it, say they encountered traffic as they drove into the city. But for the possibility of snagging a free sample of hummus, they admit it was “worth it”. They think there will be coupons for Luna bars! And neglecting to purchase the advance tickets because day-of ticket sales saved them $25 was also totally worth it. And the four-hour wait to get these day-of tickets was totally worth it, as well. Because that’s like getting paid $25 for four hours of your time. And that’s definitely worth it, right?

The Line To Get Into MoMA’s Rain Room

MoMA’s Rain Room line was this summer’s best way to spend half a day standing on a steamy Manhattan sidewalk. NYC’s most ambitious queue of 2013 was a mammoth seven-hour wait whose unfathomable curb-wrapping largess was a highlight of the museum’s Expo 1 Exhibit. Even on a weekday and often before the doors even opened, its tremendous length overpowered the gum-speckled sidewalk and was so wonderfully prohibitive that most opted to leave the line after five hours of record-breaking fun. At the museum’s request, this line was BYOC—Bring Your Own Chair.

The Checkout Line at Trader Joe’s

A celebrated wholesale clusterfuck that creeps through two-fifths of the store’s aisles, the line at Trader Joe’s is short compared to the savings—and it’s completely fair trade! Customers leave unoccupied carts in the middle of its serpentine girth in exchange for benign resentment from other customers too polite to queue up and abandon their baskets as they continue to shop. As creative as it is rogue, this defiance of social etiquette adds a spike of lazy aggravation to fellow shoppers’ otherwise mundane experience of standing for 30 minutes in order to save $1.50/lb. on organic pre-washed arugula. This is a line that keeps on growing!

Modernist Petrol Stations.

I’m one in a million, so there are 316 of me in the U.S., all named Teddy Wayne. We take turns writing this column. (Number 114 wrote this one.)

It is said that Charlie Chaplin was the first silent film star, but what if a closer examination of his films revealed that they all were, in fact, recorded with sound, and he just constantly emitted jaunty piano music?

Another excellent link from Quora's weekly newsletter: What is the best sacrifice in the history of chess? A game played in 1934 featured the sacrifice of the queen & both rooks and was over so quickly (14 moves) that it's referred to as The Peruvian Immortal. I found it easier to follow the game by watching it:

Tags: best of   chess   games   video

Senator Al Franken (D-MN) has sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook expressing concern over the new Touch ID fingerprint sensor built into the iPhone 5s, which went on sale earlier today.

In the letter (PDF), the Senator, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, says he is an iPhone owner and is concerned about the use of fingerprints to unlock the device.

It's clear to me that Apple has worked hard to secure this technology and implement it responsibly. The iPhone 5S reportedly stores fingerprint data locally "on the chip" and in an encrypted format. It also blocks third-party apps from accessing Touch ID. Yet important questions remain about how this technology works, Apple's future plans for this technology, and the legal protections that Apple will afford it. I should add that regardless of how carefully Apple implements fingerprint technology, this decision will surely pave the way for its peers and smaller competitors to adopt biometric technology, with varying protections for privacy.

Franken goes on to ask twelve separate questions of Cook, including:

- If it's possible to convert locally-stored fingerprint data into a format that can be used by third parties.

- If it's possible to extract and obtain fingerprint data from an iPhone 5s either remotely or with physical access to the device.

- What diagnostic information the iPhone 5s sends to Apple about the Touch ID system.

- Whether Apple considers fingerprint data to be the "subscriber information" or "electronic communication transactional records", the "contents" of communications, customer or subscriber records, or a "subscriber number or identity" as defined in the Stored Communications Act, or a "tangible thing" as defined in the USA PATRIOT Act.

The last group of questions relates to when and if Apple could be required to disclose fingerprint information to U.S. Government law enforcement agencies.


Apple, for its part, has posted an extensive knowledge base article about the security benefits of the Touch ID system, though it only discloses broad details about how the iPhone 5s stores fingerprint data, but nevertheless, it may answer some of the questions that Senator Franken asked:

Touch ID does not store any images of your fingerprint. It stores only a mathematical representation of your fingerprint. It isn't possible for your actual fingerprint image to be reverse-engineered from this mathematical representation. iPhone 5s also includes a new advanced security architecture called the Secure Enclave within the A7 chip, which was developed to protect passcode and fingerprint data. Fingerprint data is encrypted and protected with a key available only to the Secure Enclave. Fingerprint data is used only by the Secure Enclave to verify that your fingerprint matches the enrolled fingerprint data. The Secure Enclave is walled off from the rest of A7 and as well as the rest of iOS. Therefore, your fingerprint data is never accessed by iOS or other apps, never stored on Apple servers, and never backed up to iCloud or anywhere else. Only Touch ID uses it and it can't be used to match against other fingerprint databases.

Senator Franken gave Tim Cook and Apple thirty days to answer the questions and, though it is not a subpoena and Apple is not required to respond, the company is likely to cooperate.

This is not the first time that Senator Franken has interacted with Apple -- in 2011, he asked both Apple and Google to require clear privacy policies for apps sold on their app stores. He also introduced a bill to help protect customer location data.

Richard Swarbrick makes these great impressionist animations of sports events, mostly soccer but also cricket and basketball. Here's one to get you started...the 5-0 drubbing FC Barcelona handed to Real Madrid during a 2010 Clasico:

It's amazing how much Swarbrick's illustrations communicate with so few strokes...Mourinho's face is my favorite. Here's the actual match for comparison purposes. And here's Maradona's sublime goal against England in the 1986 World Cup (original video):

You can find many other examples of Swarbrick's work on his web site and on his YouTube channel. (via @dunstan)

Tags: Diego Maradona   illustration   Richard Swarbrick   soccer   sports   video

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The life of Alexander Hamilton is an example to us all, most notably in its one overriding lesson: If, out of all your many interests and hobbies, you are going to suck at one, try not to have it be dueling.

Mowgli Rudkus left the forests of Lithuania to venture off to the Jungle, in search of the Jungle Dream. He followed in the footsteps of his countryman Baloo Bear, who had crossed the ocean many years before. Instead of fortune, what Mowgli found was a wilderness of dirty two-story tenements, smoke-spewing chimneys and the distant lowing of ten-thousand cattle.

Mowgli was able to make a down payment on a hut Back of the Yards, but was tricked into signing an unfair contract by Tabaqui the Jackal; ownership of the hut came with all sorts of hidden costs. Mowgli’s job only paid five cents per hour (no different from the average earnings of the 1.5 million boys and girls laboring in the Jungle at this very moment), and one missed payment on the hut would mean being thrown out on the forest bed, and in the dead of winter, too!

When Mowgli realized that he did not earn enough money to cover his expenses, he was not discouraged.

“Why, I’ll just have to be the hardest working boy in the Jungle!” he thought.

Mowgli’s work in the killing beds was hard. The Jungle plant’s foreman, Shere Khan the Tiger, ground his workers down by speeding them up, and when workers came down with the consumption, Shere Khan simply threw them to the wolves. Bagheera McFinnigan, the Irish Panther, pressured Mowgli to join the union, an idea that sounded better each day.

For his part, Baloo Bear tried to convince Mowgli to simply walk away from the job and the hut in favor of hoboing around the country in an existence free from the exploitative ecosystem. For though Mowgli’s body was strong now, Baloo Bear insisted one day it would break, and then Mowgli would be discarded.

Baloo Bear proffered a bottle of whiskey to Mowgli.

“Look for those, bare necessities, the simple bare necessities,” Baloo Bear urged Mowgli with bloodshot eyes. “Forget about your worries and your strife.”

Mowgli began to suspect that Baloo Bear had become one of the anarchists that all the creatures were buzzing about. At the very least, the bottle had taken a toll on Baloo Bear’s mind, for how could anyone forget about worries or strife, in the midst of such hunger?

This is how food was processed in the Jungle: vegetation gave life to vermin such as cockroaches and worms, which crawled all over the plant floor. Swine then fed upon the vermin, giving host to the fleas and tics, which fed the birds that flew freely around the Jungle and defecated upon all the creatures, creating an environment conducive to no-good dirty rats. Politician Snakes then ate the rats. The snakes in turn lived in the pockets of the Beef and Railroad Trusts.

At any one time, the carcasses of these beasts could be found rotting right there on the plant floor, liquefying atop the very same vegetation that fed the whole system! And what’s more, the Jungle’s inhabitants sometimes fed upon rotting and diseased meat right alongside fresh meat, being none the wiser!

Mowgli was so beaten down by the corrupt world of the Jungle that he finally turned to hard drink and crime to get through the day, even going so far as to sell himself to the other animals.

And the words of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi the Socialist Mongoose struck Mowgli like a flash of lightning, revealing the way before him. The scales fell from Mowgli’s eyes. No longer would he work as a scab and drink his days away! Comrade Mowgli took his place in the army of his brothers and sisters—the millions of Jungle boys and girls who shared the curse of the wage slave. The Sher Khans of the world would soon see defeat at the hands of the class-conscious international proletariat! Rikki-Tikki-Tavi had lifted Mowgli out of the Jungle and set him upon a mountain top from which Mowgli could survey the great wilderness he’d wandered for five years. Mowgli would no longer be a boy of circumstance; he would be a man, with a will and a purpose; he would have something to fight for, something to die for!

Comrade Tavi’s words echoed through the forest like thunder, the band started in on “The Parade Song of the Camp Animals,” and the crowd rose to its feet and began to chant:

“The Jungle will be ours! The Jungle will be ours! THE JUNGLE WILL BE OURS!”

Josh Gondelman wants to make love to you like in the movies.

Everything that happens will be sexy. There won't be any gross sounds or sights. Just like in the movies, our sex will be tasteless and odorless. I will not kiss your neck and get a mouthful of perfume and then you're like what's wrong and I'll be like nothing and you'll get all distant and I'll be like sorry it's the taste of your perfume, and you'll be sad because you only wore it because I said I liked it one time and then all of a sudden you're not in the mood and I think about sneaking off to the bathroom to furtively masturbate but I don't and I just hold you limply until you fall asleep then I check Twitter for like an hour. That doesn't happen.

Tags: Josh Gondelman   movies   sex

GOG.com, an online game store that sells vintage titles, has debuted (via TUAW) a new indie game portal to sell indie games to Mac and Windows users, much like the Mac App Store or Steam.

The new portal will not only use the GOG.com staples like DRM-free games and "one world - one price" thinking but also offer additional incentives to developers to entice them to release their games on the new publishing platform.


While developers will be able to use traditional revenue splits like the 70/30 developer/publisher that Apple offers for the Mac App Store, they will also be able to opt to receive their royalties in advance. In that situation, GOG.com offers money upfront and then initiates a 40/60 revenue split until the initial payment is returned. Once the advance has been paid off, the revenue sharing model returns to a 70/30 split.

GOG.com also promises to "never leave [developers] without feedback," stating that developers will receive detailed information on game review processes and explanations for rejected apps. The company also promises that each title published will receive a "dedicated cross-media" campaign.

Every time we release a game on GOG.com, it gets a dedicated cross-media marketing campaign. It becomes our site's main feature, with an extra-large header banner and a frontpage news article. We'll also promote the release of your game to thousands of our social media followers (on  Facebook, Twitter and Google+, etc.). We'll post your game's trailer on our YouTube channel and feature it in our weekly video editorial.

GOG's feedback policies appear to be aimed at developers who have complained about the lack of feedback or lack of marketing push in the Mac App Store or Steam.

GOG.com previously released vintage PC games on Windows machines, but has also begun releasing classic PC games on the Mac in recent years. Independent game developers wanting to submit their games to GOG.com can do so on the indie portal website.

Automatic today sent out an update email to customers eagerly awaiting one of its Link connected car systems, announcing that the public release date of the product has been pushed back yet again.

As we work to fulfill your pre-order, here’s an update. In short, we’re making a lot of progress towards the public launch of Automatic, but we’re pushing back that date by just a few weeks. Read on!

In the email, Automatic says that despite shipping a number of test units to customers who volunteered for a private beta, production delays have prevented them from shipping additional devices to beta customers who have yet to receive a Link.

Unfortunately, we recently experienced a production delay, which has temporarily affected our ability to ship Links to Beta customers. We’re working around the clock (literally!) to fix the issue and our hope is to ship to all remaining Beta customers by the end of the month.

Beta customers were originally supposed to receive both the Link and the accompanying app in mid-June, but the company now expects the remaining Links to ship out by late August.

The Automatic Smart Driving Assistant can currently be preordered from the Automatic website for $69.95. Automatic claims that the Link and iPhone app will begin shipping out to standard customers in September and in the meantime, MacRumors has posted a hands-on look at the device and its accompanying app.

(Thanks, John!)

Have you ever had the overwhelming desire to bring your dog along when you go to the bar? This very well could be a fantasy/lifelong dream you could finally live. [ more › ]

For the Journal of the American Revolution, Todd Andrlik compiled a list of the ages of the key participants in the Revolutionary War as of July 4, 1776. Many of them were surprisingly young:

Marquis de Lafayette, 18
James Monroe, 18
Gilbert Stuart, 20
Aaron Burr, 20
Alexander Hamilton, 21
Betsy Ross, 24
James Madison, 25

This is kind of blowing my mind...because of the compression of history, I'd always assumed all these people were around the same age. But in thinking about it, all startups need young people...Hamilton, Lafayette, and Burr were perhaps the Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg of the War. Some more ages, just for reference:

Thomas Jefferson, 33
John Adams, 40
Paul Revere, 41
George Washington, 44
Samuel Adams, 53

The oldest prominent participant in the Revolution, by a wide margin, was Benjamin Franklin, who was 70 years old on July 4, 1776. Franklin was a full two generations removed from the likes of Madison and Hamilton. But the oldest participant in the war was Samuel Whittemore, who fought in an early skirmish at the age of 80. I'll let Wikipedia take it from here:

Whittemore was in his fields when he spotted an approaching British relief brigade under Earl Percy, sent to assist the retreat. Whittemore loaded his musket and ambushed the British from behind a nearby stone wall, killing one soldier. He then drew his dueling pistols and killed a grenadier and mortally wounded a second. By the time Whittemore had fired his third shot, a British detachment reached his position; Whittemore drew his sword and attacked. He was shot in the face, bayoneted thirteen times, and left for dead in a pool of blood. He was found alive, trying to load his musket to fight again. He was taken to Dr. Cotton Tufts of Medford, who perceived no hope for his survival. However, Whittemore lived another 18 years until dying of natural causes at the age of 98.

!!!

Tags: history   lists   Revolutionary War   Samuel Whittemore   Todd Andrlik   USA   war

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GearSketch is a cool and simple gear-making game. Click on the "?" for a quick demo. If you spend fewer than 20 minutes on this, you're a better person than I. (thx, nick)

At this point we are quite confident that public The Old Reader will be available in the future, now with a proper team running it.

More details later this week.
Sorry about Monday. Again.

Six easy steps. No concept necessary!

“The Hipster Logo Design Guide” by San Francisco-based designer Tim Delger is described as “a handy guide for creating an artisanal logo.” Prints are available in a variety of sizes at Society6.

via DesignTAXI

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Johnny Manziel, attending a fraternity party in the West Campus area near the University of Texas, was "quickly and harshly" kicked out of the event Friday night, according to a report.

In addition to its main office in Cupertino, Apple maintains a number of satellite offices in different cities in the United States. One such office is located in Boston, and according to industry sources that spoke to Xconomy (via 9to5Mac) Apple’s Boston team specializes in speech technology and may be working on Siri improvements.

Based on their online job profiles, we can say that members of the Apple speech team here are working on Siri, the company's voice-activated virtual assistant. Details beyond that are hard to come by, however, even for others in the field.

"They won't tell us what they're doing," says Jim Glass, who heads MIT's Spoken Language Systems Group. “We can only guess.”

Apple's Boston team is said to be made up of employees that formerly worked at VoiceSignal Technologies, a speech software company that was purchased in 2007 by Apple partner Nuance.

Multiple members of the team worked at Nuance before moving onto Apple, including Gunnar Evermann, Larry Gillick, and Don McAllaster. Gillick, a former vice president of research at Nuance, lists his job as "Chief Speech Scientist, Siri at Apple," while McAllaster calls himself a "Senior Research Scientist" at the company.

While it is unclear just what the Boston Siri team is working on, Xconomy speculates that Apple could potentially be working on a Siri solution that moves away from Nuance, the technology that currently powers the personal assistant.

It would not be out of the question for Apple to aim for improved Siri software using its own in-house technology. The company has made moves to be more autonomous over the past few years, most recently switching to in-house mapping with iOS 6 rather than continuing to rely on Google Maps. Both former Apple CEO Steve Jobs and current Apple CEO Tim Cook have emphasized the importance of owning technology. "In the business we're in, own the technology," said Cook in an interview. "Steve was laser focused on that and that's ingrained in us."

Though it is possible that Apple is working on its own in-house voice recognition solution, the team could also be seeking to improve the integration of Nuance's technology into Siri. Apple could also be working on new developer APIs to better integrate Siri with existing iOS apps.

Apple has been working hard to improve Siri since the software's debut in 2011. With iOS 6, Siri gained the ability to provide sports scores, make reservations, launch apps, and locate movie listings. In iOS 7, Siri will see further improvements, including speed enhancements, better pronunciation, and new voices.

While rumors of an Apple television set have quieted down in recent months, the company's living room ambitions remain at the forefront amid new Apple TV offerings and continued reports of talks with content providers.

In a brief report today, Digitimes claims that Apple has been talking to LG about the possibility of securing display panels in the range of 55-65 inches for a future television set. The panels are said to be of Ultra HD, or 2160p, resolution.

Rumors are circulating in the market that Apple is interested in purchasing 55- and 65-inch Ultra HD TV panels from LG Display.

However, the rumors state that Apple is still testing the technology and has yet to finalize its orders with LG.

Apple is said to also be considering Sharp to provide panels for its needs.

Digitimes had reported back in March that Apple was looking to launch an Ultra HD television set late this year or early next year. That report had indicated that Apple and Foxconn were in discussions about mass production of the TVs but that Apple was sill considering where its display panels would come from given industry constraints.


Pricing remains a major issue for Ultra HD television sets, with LG's offerings currently priced at $7000 for a 55-inch model and $9000 for a 65-inch model. Still, prices are dropping fairly quickly as technology and production efficiency improves and more companies enter the market.

Excitement about an Apple television set ramped up in the wake of the publication of Steve Jobs' authorized biography in late 2011, in which he was quoted as saying he had "finally cracked it", but despite numerous rumors the product has yet to come to fruition.

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Dan Kois profiles Jack Handey for the NYT:

“Deep Thoughts” wound up being the perfect distillation of Handey’s comedic temperament. He was no longer constrained by the format of the sketch — he was free to create koans, tiny polished gems of comedy. Like: “If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is ‘God is crying.’ And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is ‘Probably because of something you did.’”

Handey’s new novel, The Stench of Honolulu, comes out tomorrow.