Zap Your Brain Into the Zone. "Each person is hooked up to electrodes that tease out and display specific brain waves, along with a monitor that measures their heartbeat. By controlling their breathing and learning to deliberately manipulate the waveforms on the screen in front of them, the novices managed to produce the alpha waves characteristic of the flow state. This, in turn, helped them improve their accuracy at hitting the targets. In fact, the time it took to shoot like a pro fell by more than half."

Cool video of a gyroscopic self-leveling pool table in action on a cruise ship, keeping the balls perfectly in place as the ship rolls around. If they’d rig the beds up the same way I might actually consider stepping foot on a cruise ship.

Andy Baio ruminates on how blithely we give away the privacy farm to 3rd party apps: The Perpetual, Invisible Window Into Your Gmail Inbox. Good piece, and I didn’t know about mypermissions.org, which is very handy for reviewing what you’ve granted.

Bit of a niche post this, but if you happen to have an iPhone AND you happen to use “Camera*":http://campl.us/ AND you really like Camera* for its ability to set focus and exposure separately, BUT at the same time are frustrated because you are too clumsy to hold your phone, aim it, and slide two fingers around independently:

Set exposure separately from focus for the ultimate control of your shots… simply touch with a 2nd finger while focusing to adjust exposure until your shot is perfect.

… then THIS might be the post for you! I’m sure this is posted elsewhere and I’m probably the last to know, but quick Googling didn’t turn anything up on the first page or two, so here’s an alternate one-finger approach:

1. Fire up Camera+, frame your shot.
2. Tap the screen to set the focus. The focus box will appear. Note the little + icon at the upper-right corner of the focus box. Tap it.
3. The exposure circle will appear in the center of the focus box.
4. Drag the exposure circle wherever you want to adjust the exposure.
5. Take your shot.

So much easier, at least for my fumble fingers!

If you’re looking for an alternative to Google search, DuckDuckGo is crossing my desk more and more. They have a couple pages that are worth checking out:

• Google tracks you. We don’t. An illustrated guide.
• Escape your search engine Filter Bubble!

Giorgio loves Sonic. Fantastic, grinned ear-to-ear through the whole thing:

Color, great color-matching game. 7.7 on my first play (my mouse totally screwed me on one), and it stresses me out so I’m going to have to wait before I try again. (thx david)

Meet The Man Inside The Nicolas Cage Costume:

Star Fix has an exclusive interview with the man who has enchanted audiences for the last 30 years playing the delightfully wacky, oversized puppet of Nicolas Cage.

The Bourne Legacy trailer. Love the series, curious to see what a post-Damon installment looks like. I like the Jeremy Renner choice.

The Caging of America. "More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States."

25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore:

​18. People use whatever is close at hand for bookmarks—toothpicks, photographs, kleenex, and the very occasional fifty dollar bill, which will keep you leafing through books way beyond the point where it’s productive.

Love this photo of Obama. Something poignant about watching a guy with the weight of the world on his shoulders forgetting it all for a moment.