Bad, bad prefrontal lobe

A guy at National Institutes of Health has offered to map Stephen Colbert's brain. That's pretty trippy, if a little scary.

Anyhow, Alison Gopnik, WSJ, Apr 6-7, 2013, says our prefrontal area--known for control and focus--may make it harder to think creatively.

This is like the brain's CEO, she says, responsible for long-term planning, monitoring, and distraction-squelching.

See, it's that squelching that can stamp out a half-formed weird idea. They have MRI-ed this and the control part stays lit up when musicians followed a score, but tended to dial back when they improvised.

But this was not conclusive, just suggestive. So the scientists (mad and otherwise) got people to volunteer to have a current passed through their prefrontal area while they were trying to improvise a new use for Kleenex. A control group got tricked into thinking they were being zapped, but they weren't.

The zapped crowd thought up more offbeat uses and did it faster.

Don't get too excited--if you were to ever find a way to turn off the "CEO" permanently, how would you decide which ideas were worth keeping or pursuing and which should go to File 13?

This whole posting made me remember once, back in DC, when the American Psychiatric Assn wanted to build a new building on the site of a bar we all liked. The regulars, of course, rebelled and the slogan was: "I would rather have a bottle of beer in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy."

[No reason--I just love that slogan.]

Late to the party: Cheese Weasel Day

I still think that if it's weird, stupid, or funny, I learn about it--but this was new to me.

Cheese Weasel Day.

And we missed it--it was April 3rd. On that fateful day, in 1992, someone saw a weasel with a Kraft single in its jaws. The Cheese Weasel--and so April 3rd must be its day.

John Biggs, a blogger for http://techcrunch.com, says he first learned of it when he showed up for work on April 3rd and a fantastic spread of gourmet cheeses was laid out. He also learned the Cheese Weasel leaves cheese under the keyboards of good tech workers--sure enough, there it was.

Is there a song? But of course. http://cheeseweaselday.com/cwd-rap-song.

Permission to take chances

Leslie Kwoh, WSJ, Mar 20, 2013, says some companies are making a concerted effort to get employees to take more risks.

Extended Stay America issues GET OUT OF JAIL FREE cards to employees to encourage them to forget about the recent bankruptcy and fear for their jobs and lash back into customer service. The workers, in some cases, shied away from needed repairs or comping unhappy customers.

With their cards in hand, employees cold-called to get customers and even appropriated some business cards left in the lobby to check for prospects.

Companies do have to be careful not to send mixed messages--a bold employee can be called a loose cannon all too easily.

One entrepreneur told his people to "fail fast"--if something is a loser, know it and move on.

His whole life, he said, had been a set of failures.

That's the spirit!

Now this is recycling!

At Michigan Technological University, the smarties are shredding up those plastic milk jugs and feeding the scraps to the 3D printer--to emerge as a cell phone case or a safety razor.

The website Thingiverse.com has thousands of open source instructions for the neato-torpedo printers, which are coming down in price to as little as $500. You can even make parts for the printer on the printer--thus saving that cost.

The big cost is the filament--the plastic that is laid down in layers. So they made a device that turns the jugs into filament--again, check out Thingiverse.com.

Milk jug filament can be harder to work with but the price is right.

Twenty jugs makes about a kilo of filament--at $50 retail, this could be a little moneymaker for people in poor countries, too.

As we all make our own gadgets!

Two articles: March issue of Rapid Prototyping: Distributed Recycling of Waste Polymer into RepRap Feedstock by Christian Baechler and Matthew DeVuono. And Proceedings of the Materials Research Society--upcoming: Distributed Recycling of Post-Consumer Plastic Waste in Rural Areas, by Jerry Anzalone and students Megan Kreiger, Meredith Mulder, and Alexandra Glover.

Revenge of the geeks

Harmony Huskinson, Arizona Republic, Mar 23, 2013, writes about two suburbs of Phoenix that held geek appreciation days.

In Chandler, it was called The Chandler Science Spectacular and in Tempe, Geeks Night Out.

Ah, how far we have come from flushing heads down toilets and pantsing the smarties.

Don't forget--the Number One TV show is THE BIG BANG THEORY, in which the term particle physics has been mentioned.

Twenty percent of the jobs in Tempe are tech-based. These jobs typically pay well and raise the bar in an entire community.

Intel, General Motors' innovation center, countless household word companies are coming to the Valley of the Sun. Eat your heart out, California. CA has Silicon Valley and now Chandler is trying to dub itself Silicon City.

And you know what's also pretty neat to recall--all high tech is not "creative." Even if you don't know a God Particle from a dust bunny, you can be creative in other disciplines, too--all it takes is that spark to bring into being something that never existed before.

Just print up a friend

Do you think this 3D printing is as smoking as I do?

I saw a documentary about a comedian who "prints" his own ventriloquist dummies.

This involves loading in resins that are laid down in thin layers until a three-dimensional object gradually is created. I have heard this could even stymie gun control--no background check if you are building your own gun in the basement.

Check out http://inmoov.blogspot.com. French artist Gael Langevin posts printer instructions for a robot he is building. You can download these open source files and build your own.

Is this creativity? Or magic? Wow--so neat.

Youngsters send tiny experiments into space

Coty Dolores Miranda, AZ Republic, Mar 15, 2013, says kids in the Kyrene de los Cerritos elementary school in Chandler AZ (where I live), made tiny experiments that fit inside a pingpong ball and grabbed the last slots to get into space courtesy of JP Aerospace.

The vehicles will be sounding rockets or weather balloons.

A parent sawed the pingpong balls in half to keep the experiments small.

One kid sent his father's dried blood on a towel to see how that fared compared with sitting around on earth.

Another child is testing the temperature variations on milk chocolate, dark chocolate chips, and a ball of wax.

A third kid is putting up some buckyballs to see if space changes their magnetic properties.

Will space make popcorn pop? yet another child is asking.

JP Aerospace, by the way, is all-volunteer, Check it out at http://jpaerospace.com.

Pretty cool stuff, kids. Science Fair raised to ..um...a whole new level.