onfocus

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.

"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]

"Wolfram|Alpha can pop out an answer to pretty much any kind of factual question that you might pose to a scientist, economist, banker, or other kind of expert." A quick description of the new "search engine" by Stephen Wolfram.

Funny image demonstrating the difference in Google's suggested queries for various phrases. "how 2..." yields different suggestions from "how might one...".

This reminds me of a great line by Borges where he said monkeys could talk if they wanted to, but if they did humans would put them to work.

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."

If one were to construct an amendment to the Constitution based on a literal reading of the Bible it might well contain the following stipulations. [via lancearthur]

Audio recordings of animals and environments throughout the western United States.

"The culture of individualism is so strong that we sometimes forget how powerfully and silently social networks and those around us influence our health..." [via cshirky]

"Researchers are increasingly coming to understand that people are also 'programmed' to care about others." [via cshirky]

"Four years ago Time photographer Callie Shell met Barack Obama backstage when she was covering presidential candidate John Kerry. She sent her editor more photographs of Obama than Kerry. When asked why, she said, 'I do not know. I just have a feeling about him. I think he will be important down the road.' Her first photo essay on Obama was two and half years ago. She has stuck with him ever since." [via kottke]

"The newest and cutest exotic animals babies from zoos around the world." CUTE!

A round-up of articles about the honey bee problem that could hurt crops like apples and almonds this year. [via krazydad]

Video and audio from the "Physics for Future Presidents" class at Berkeley.

Why people hate domain registrars: "Domain name servers were not responsible for lost domain names if holders did not re-register in time, Xinhua quoted a center insider as saying, since the loss was an 'act of God.'"

Fantastic article about aggregating current emotion research. "Most neuroscientists now recognise six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise." (subscription req'd unfortunately)

turns out New Zealand wasn't strictly for the birds. [via slashdot]