The Culture Chart: “‘Max was this nobody performance nerd and three weeks before we were supposed to ship, he walked into the CEO’s office with a single piece of paper with a single graph. He dropped the graph on the table, sat down, and said, ‘No way we ship in three weeks. Six months. Maybe.’ The CEO ignored the paper, ‘We lose three million dollars if we don’t.’ Max stood up, pointed at the chart, and said, ‘We lose ten if we do. We must not ship crap.’”

(Via Rands In Repose.)

Glowing Cities Under a Nighttime Sky: “

Via Kottke: A beautiful and creative use of video

On my night time flight back to SF from Amsterdam, I noticed that the lights from cities were making the clouds glow. Really spectacular and ethereal – it was really seeing the impact of urban environments from a different perspective. Each glow or squiggle represents one town or city!

Luckily the flight was half empty, so I was able to set up an improvised stabilizer mound made up of my bags, pillows, and blankets for my camera to sit on.

We were around the midwest at the beginning of the clip, and there were fewer cities once we hit the rockies. the bridge at the end is the san mateo bridge.

Technique: 1600iso; beginning – 1 (30sec) exposure / 45secs, end – 1 (4sec) exposure / 10 secs; total elapsed time: around 3 hours?

Equipment used: Nikon D300 (interval shooting mode), Tokina 12-24mm.

(Via Kottke.)

From BoingBoing:

Your brain on fiction: we simulate action we read in narrative: “A forthcoming journal article in Psychological Science reports on the research of scientists from the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis into what brain activity takes place while we read narrative stories. The study concludes that our brains simulate the action in the story, echoing it as we read.

I’ve always assumed that this was the case — especially when it comes to character motivations. When I hear the voice of a loved one in my head, cheering me on or disapproving, I know that this is my mental simulation of that person. When a character does something in a story and I feel for him, it’s the same kind of simulation. And when I try to write a character doing something ‘wrong,’ I know that this, too, is part of the simulation, and the resistance I feel there is the same as the resistance I’d feel if I tried to imagine my mother committing an ax-murder.

Nicole Speer, lead author of this study, says findings demonstrate that reading is by no means a passive exercise. Rather, readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences. These data are then run through mental simulations using brain regions that closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.

‘These results suggest that readers use perceptual and motor representations in the process of comprehending narrated activity, and these representations are dynamically updated at points where relevant aspects of the situation are changing,’ says Speer, now a research associate with The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) Mental Health Program in Boulder, Colo. ‘Readers understand a story by simulating the events in the story world and updating their simulation when features of that world change.’

Readers build vivid mental simulations of narrative situations, brain scans suggest

(via Futurismic)

(Via Boing Boing.)