Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Facebook 'Booktracker' application; my first review (The Edison Gene)

Booktracker rocks. Go sign up for it! You can add a book by searching for the author, title, or ISBN.

Then, you can post books that you are reading, have read, or want to read. You can pick one of these categories to display automatically in your Facebook profile. In this screenshot of my profile, I've chosen to show by default the books I'm "currently reading":




The app is also nice because it keeps a record of when I read certain books. I hope the creator of Booktracker makes an archive of book additions eventually, because I'd love to one day have a historical record of when I started and finished reading any given book, from now on, plus my own reviews of each book.

To that end, I recently posted the following short review to my Books application on Facebook (full text below image):



Thom Hartmann's The Edison Gene is an important perspective on the gift of ADHD, the state of ADHD in psychology and education, and potential options for raising ADHD children. In the book, Hartmann consistently challenges the "disorder view" that ADHD is some sort of problem to be cured. In doing so, he appeals to history, modern science, and, above all, the evolutionary psychology theory of ADHD, which explains that this genetic trait for a tendency towards agitation and creativity was chosen for the world's most agitated, creative roles: inventors, explorers, hunters. Hartmann shows sound reasoning in demonstrating why the characteristics associated with ADHD would have been useful in the environment of early humans.

---

I have a simple theory of ADHD based on evolutionary psychology.

In man's gradual conquest of the globe, it seems to me that natural selection must have always favored explorers. Explorers and expatriates are generally fueled by agitation, creativity, and nonconformism. A population that yielded a larger-than-normal number of people with these traits therefore had a larger-than-normal number of explorers. The traits, of course, occur today most frequently in people whom American society labels as "ADHD". People with these traits exported their population's genetic information across the globe, diversifying the geography of like strains, and thus avoiding forms of extinction by geographic anomaly (flood, drought, ice age, etc.).

Labels: , , , , , ,

Friday, September 14, 2007

Google's Blogger Play launches, begins to spiral out of control

Blogger Play is a great new site made by the Blogger team. It shows a pretty slideshow of images as they are uploaded by Blogger users.

This is a much more visual form of the scrolling display that can be found in most of the buildings here on Google campus. I predict that it will be equally addictive.

After hearing the product had been released, I spent about 30 seconds on Blogger Play before seeing this:


Uh oh. Does that mean that by posting to this Blogger Blog the above image, which now will appear in Blogger Play for other viewers, I am setting into motion an infinitely nested set of images?? IT WILL SPIRAL OUT OF CONTROL

Labels: , , , ,

Saturday, September 1, 2007

Flex coolness: www.officialmancave.com

I was checking on a domain I wanted to buy, eless.com, and, much to my dismay it's owned by a domain farmer. For some reason, one of the ads these squatter-spammers had on the domain piqued my interest. Taking care not to click the ad, for this would reward the evil industry of squatter-spammers, I copied the domain and pasted it into my browser bar: http://www.officialmancave.com

It seems like this is an Alltel-funded advertisement experience. I see clear examples of Flex components such as the book component in use, and they feel really nice within The Man Cave experience. All hail Flex! Check it out!

Labels: , , , ,