How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy

The subjects who tested positive for the parasite had significantly delayed reaction times. Flegr was especially surprised to learn, though, that the protozoan appeared to cause many sex-specific changes in personality. Compared with uninfected men, males who had the parasite were more introverted, suspicious, oblivious to other people’s opinions of them, and inclined to disregard rules. Infected women, on the other hand, presented in exactly the opposite way: they were more outgoing, trusting, image-conscious, and rule-abiding than uninfected women.

via How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy – Magazine – The Atlantic.

Long, but fascinating, article on cats and a little parasite called Toxoplasma gondii.

I Don’t Know How Mail Works

You go through life, thinking, ‘I am so smart, I am razor sharp prodigy genius man,’ and then you continuously do things that can only mean one thing: you’re not smart. You’re not even average. You’re dumb, you’ve always been dumb, you always will be dumb, and there’s nothing you can do to change it. Your parents were wrong when they told you otherwise. Set those books on fire because you won’t need them. Stop trying so hard to string words together because you’re just straining yourself, and no one’s listening anyway. You need to be taken to a facility where trained professionals can care for you, where they have enough coloring books to keep you occupied for years and years until you die trying to stab a mosquito on your throat with a fork.

via I Don’t Know How Mail Works « Thought Catalog.

Portrait of the Google as a great artist

Apple created and introduced what we now understand to be — and experience as — the modern smartphone.

It threw out inessential crap like hard buttons and extraneous sliders. It revolutionized battery life in high-power devices. It incorporated technology that understands how you’re holding a device so you don’t have to worry about, for example, switching from portrait to landscape displays. It designed an original yet intuitive interface that even the least tech-savvy person can understand immediately…

via Kind of a Hater • Portrait of the Google as a great artist.

Photographs Not Taken: what makes a photographer freeze?

This story, it seems to me, gets to the heart of the matter. Many photographers share Arbus’s view that you take the picture whatever the cost – to yourself as well as the subject. I have always been uncomfortable with that notion. It says that nothing is too intimate, too private. It insists, too, on the primacy of the photograph over the experience.

via Photographs Not Taken: what makes a photographer freeze? | Art and design | guardian.co.uk.

TVs are all awful

tl;dr – Your 1920×1080 TV takes a 1920×1080 signal, chops the edges off it and then stretches the rest to fit the screen because of decisions made in the 1930s.

via mjg59 | TVs are all awful.

Isn’t technology fantastic?

A Long-Time Apple Nerd’s Review of the Galaxy Nexus and First Experience With Android

To those who want to use Android, I say go for it. I don’t think that choice is wrong — there are many fine things about the Android OS and many things it does differently and better than iOS. I can understand how tech-savvy power-users who know what they are getting into would like Android. For them, the trade-offs in certain areas are a welcome sacrifice in exchange for the customizability, the different look, and the plethora of hardware devices to choose from.

via A Long-Time Apple Nerd’s Review of the Galaxy Nexus and First Experience With Android — Shawn Blanc.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Android summed up. It’s not that I wouldn’t recommend an Android phone to your mum or dad, it’s just that I wouldn’t recommend an Android phone to your mum or dad.

For those that actually like the appeal of Android, by all means, you’re more than welcome to. Hell, even I like certain aspects about Android, but that doesn’t make it the comparative “best”.

Qualifiers such as “are they buying based solely on price?” aren’t even all that relevant to buying an Android phone, as a second-hand 3GS or similar might be more suitable instead. I’d think long and hard before recommending an Android phone to anyone.

One other thing: I’m super glad I don’t work in a telco store that sells Android alongside the iPhone, because I doubt I’d be able to “sell” Android phones based on one feature alone. I mean, Google integration, absolutely. But iOS has that in iCloud. IOS is comparatively easier to sell; do your friends have iPhones? Boom, free messages between you and them. That feature alone could sell a customer, never mind an app for anything you could poke a stick at.