Lone Gunman

I’ve been a long-time fan of Raul Gutier­rez’ blog, and he’s just posted another beau­ti­ful item: Lies I’ve Told My 3 Year Old Recently:

If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.

We are all held together by invis­i­ble threads.

Books get lonely too.

Sad­ness can be eaten.

The most profound?

I will always be there.

Lots of peo­ple have been say­ing how impressed they were by neu­roanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk at this year’s con­fer­ence. None, how­ever, have summed it up bet­ter than Vaughan:

It’s a bit poetic in places. You can almost hear the sound of a thou­sand cog­ni­tive sci­en­tists grit­ting their teeth as she describes the sup­posed func­tions of each cere­bral hemi­sphere and prob­a­bly the sound of some of them faint­ing when she describes the “deep inner peace cir­cuitry” of the right hemisphere.

Neu­roanatomists may notice that this is almost exactly the same sound that occurs when psy­chol­o­gists describe some­thing as a ‘frontal’ function.

The talk is grip­ping, how­ever, and the high­light is her descrip­tion of the day she had her stroke which is both insight­ful and very funny.

via Mind­Hacks

Wired Sci­ence have got a great short film that fol­lows two peo­ple who have deep brain stim­u­la­tion devices implanted in their brains to treat tremors.While most peo­ple assume brain surgery is all pre-planned before­hand, for many treat­ments for cog­ni­tive or behav­ioural func­tions, the sur­geons need to wake up the patient after they’ve open their skull to make sure they’re tar­get­ing the right place (and avoid­ing dam­ag­ing essen­tial functions).

In this case, they wake the patients up dur­ing neu­ro­surgery so they can test out their move­ments while stim­u­lat­ing dif­fer­ent areas of the brain, in a trial and error style.

Video of deep brain stim­u­la­tion neu­ro­surgery and ‘The Brain of an Alzheimer’s Patient’.

via Mind­Hacks

There are a lot of very good US-based per­sonal finance blogs around, but some­times the infor­ma­tion given is dif­fi­cult for a UK reader to under­stand as the terms used are com­pletely alien to us.

One of the newer addi­tions to my RSS reader is Plon­kee Money — a site I found when search­ing for a US-UK per­sonal finance trans­la­tor. Plonkee’s UK-US com­par­i­son post is now a year old and is still vis­ited reg­u­larly when I for­get what a term means.

Roth IRA = Stocks and Shares ISA
Roth IRAs and Stocks and Shares ISAs are sim­i­lar invest­ments but there are sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences in the rules in each scheme.

Being noto­ri­ously dif­fi­cult to under­stand, Plon­kee is now — in the build up to the new finan­cial year — pro­duc­ing a com­pre­hen­sive intro­duc­tion to Stocks and Shares ISAs — a cru­cial item in your invest­ment armoury. Whether you’re new to ISAs or fancy brush­ing up on your knowl­edge for the com­ing year, this is look­ing like an impor­tant read.

• part 1: all about you – why you want to invest, and how much money you have to play with
• part 2: all about risk – suc­cess­ful invest­ing means always being able to sleep at night
• part 3: all about invest­ments – the types of invest­ments that you can put into ISAs
• part 4: all about asset allo­ca­tion – how to decide which mix of invest­ments is right for your ISA
• part 5: all about funds – nar­row­ing down your choices
• part 6: all about providers – get­ting the best deal for the money
• con­clu­sions – what’s been cov­ered, and what to do next

The Tele­graph has com­piled a nice list of The 50 Best Works of Art (and how to see them)

Zen gar­den, Ryoan-ji Tem­ple
(late 15th cen­tury) Kyoto, Japan
Get­ting there: bearable

This is the most cel­e­brated exam­ple of what in Japan­ese is called a kare­san­sui, or “dry land­scape”. Since it con­sists of noth­ing but raked white sandy gravel and mossy stones, it could, in West­ern terms, be thought of as a sculp­tural instal­la­tion. Its point, achieved with incom­pa­ra­ble sim­plic­ity and ele­gance, is one of the fun­da­men­tal objec­tives of art: to focus med­i­ta­tion on the mys­tery of existence.

Obvi­ously there are going to be works you want to be on this list and those you believe don’t merit a place on it — still, it’s interesting.

via Kot­tke