What's like to live on fruits

The best reads from around the web, including why mean people fail and what happens to the body when you live only on raw fruit and vegetables.

InternetAliens in the valleySeth Fiegerman | Mashable | 3 December 2014History of Reddit. Starts slowly but picks up speed in the second section. Reddit’s co-founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman wanted to build a website for ordering takeaway food. Paul Graham sensibly told them to think of something else. They looked at Delicious and decided they could do a better job of pooling and ranking most-shared links. The stroke of genius was to enable and rank comments.

LanguageThere is no language instinctVyvyan Evans | Aeon | 4 December 2014Nor, probably, a universal grammar anchoring all human languages, as Noam Chomsky argued. His conjectures were brilliant but wrong. Children learn language, as they do many other things, by trial and error. “Children have far more sophisticated learning capacities than Chomsky foresaw.” At the age of nine months, most children are already hard at work decoding what the adults around them are trying to say.

FoodThis means rawAlexandra Kleeman | Guardian | 3 December 2014A week among the fruitarians at the Woodstock fruit festival on a diet of 80% fruit plus occasional raw vegetables. For breakfast a pound of kiwi and a pound of orange juice; for lunch two pounds of bananas wrapped in lettuce leaves; for dinner two pounds of tangerines with celery and red peppers. You feel pretty good, at least at first, but you go to the loo a lot. “I told him I hadn’t been raw for very long.”

ComputingOn file formats, very brieflyPaul Ford | Manual | 3 December 2014File formats encode the history and the ideology of the internet. “The Photoshop format is more like a legal document. Parts are open to interpretation. The computer is the ultimate judge, but you never know how it will rule." As for Microsoft Office: “The file formats specifications are of a most disturbing, fascinating quality; one can read through them and think: Yes, I see this. I think I understand. But why?”

Climate changeChanging climates of historyJ R McNeill | Public Books | 1 December 2014The new prominence of climate change in discussions of the future is matched by the new prominence of climate change in discussions of the past. Historians are increasingly invoking environmental factors to explain wealth and poverty, stability and change – a shift away from the discipline’s traditional practice of explaining human affairs in terms of human initiatives arranged as social and political forces.

BusinessMean people failPaul Graham | 28 November 2014Successful start-up founders tend to be good people. Mean people fail, because they fight, and you don’t learn by fighting. “When you think of successful people from history who weren’t ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists. Their m.o seems to be spreading. The games played by intellectuals are leaking into the real world, reversing the historical polarity of the relationship between meanness and success."

Wearable computingLong live smart glassesRachel Metz | MIT Tech Review | 26 November 2014Google Glass was a breakthrough idea, prematurely executed. Smart glasses need the kind of rethink which turned the Newton into the iPad. “Researchers are going to keep plugging away until we get to a point where the technology blends into the glasses themselves, rather than sitting so obviously atop them.” The prism-like display was obnoxious. The next generation of smart glasses may be more like contact lenses.

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How to learn like a memory champ

(Thinkstock)

Companies are creating learning aids that tap the science of memories, says a logistic Do they work in the classroom?

For most of his 20s, Ed Cooke had been hovering around the top 10 of the World Memory Championships. His achievements included memorising 2,265 binary digits in 30 minutes and the order of 16 packs of playing cards in just an hour. But at the age of 26, he was getting restless, and wanted to help others to learn like him. "The memory techniques take a certain discipline," he says. "I wanted a tool that would just allow you to relax into learning."
The resulting brainchild was Memrise. Launched in 2010, the website and app is now helping more than 1.4 million users to learn foreign languages, history and science with the ease of Cooke's memory powers. It has been followed by similar apps that also take the pain out of learning – both for individuals, and in schools, with some teachers finding benefits that even Cooke couldn't have predicted.
“It's very powerful – it does all the spade work of learning,” says Dominic Traynor, who teaches Spanish at the St Cuthbert with St Matthias Primary School in London, UK. “I would say we've covered a year's worth of work in the first six months.”
As Cooke first set out developing his idea, he turned to his former classmate at Oxford University, Princeton neuroscientist Greg Detre, to help update his tried-and-tested techniques with the latest understanding of memory. Together, they came up with some basic principles that would guide Memrise’s progress over the following years. The first is the idea of “elaborative” learning – in which you try to give extra meaning to a fact to try to get it to stick in the mind. These “mems”, as the team call them, are particularly effective if they tickle the funny bone as well as the synapses – and so for each fact that you want to learn, you are encouraged to find an amusing image or phrase that helps plant the memory in your mind. For example, in one German language course, the word “abend” for evening, is illustrated with a picture of Abraham Lincoln listening to a ghetto blaster, with the caption “Abe ends work in the evening”. It’s silly, but that’s the point – an absurd image is memorable.
To cultivate those memories, the app then sets you a series of carefully timed tests over the days, weeks and months that follow. Numerous experiments over the past few years have shown that the best way to build new neural pathways is to try and recall it afresh, helping subjects remember more than twice as much, over the long term, than just passively reading the material; self-testing also turns out to be more effective than creative techniques like drawing diagrams and mind maps.
Although you can find other apps designed for rote learning and drilling in this way, Memrise makes use of another trick. Detre had found that the most effective time to reactivate a memory is when you feel that it is half-remembered, half-forgotten – when you feel it’s on the “tip of your tongue” but you can't quite reach it. So the Memrise team have designed an algorithm that predicts the arrival of that agonising state, and then springs a test on you. Since the app constantly tracks your progress, over time it becomes more accurate at predicting your learning curve, helping you surf the waves of your memory to more efficient learning.
Fun learning

All of which may help take the pain out of learning; however, the big challenge was to make it fun too. “We're always having to compete for your attention when you look at the screen of your phone,” says Ben Whately, Memrise's chief operating officer. “The experience has to have as much light-hearted interest as something like Pinterest.” But the team have also tried hard to create a community of learners that encourages friendly competition – so users can upload their courses to share with other people looking to learn the same subject, and they can compare their rank on a leader board. “We needed people to be comfortable to share stuff on sites like Facebook in order for it to get up and running on such a big scale,” says Whately.
Unsurprisingly, it was the friendly competition element that captured the attention of Traynor's primary school pupils learning Spanish. “As soon as they come into the classroom, they want to see where they are on the leader board,” he says. And there are other advantages. Each lesson, Traynor tends to split the class into two – while half are doing the “spade work” on vocabulary learning on the school's iPads, he can teach the others – before the two halves switch over. By working with these smaller groups, he can then give more individual attention to each child's understanding of the grammar.
Even more powerfully, Traynor recently began encouraging his class to record and upload their pronunciation of the words onto the app – which they can then share with their classmates using the course. The sound of their classmates seems to have spurred on their enthusiasm, says Traynor. “They're constantly trying to work out whose voice they're hearing,” he says. “So they're giving more attention to the different sounds. I think it's improved their speaking and listening dramatically.”
Although most courses on Memrise deal with foreign languages, teachers in other subjects are also starting to bring the technology to their classroom. Simon Birch from The Broxbourne School in Hertfordshire, for instance, uses it to teach the advanced terminology needed for food technology exams, while his school’s English department are using it to drill spelling. "The benefits for literacy can't be overstated," Birch says.
The Memrise team are now hoping to develop further features that might help teachers like Birch and Traynor – by providing them with data on students’ progress, so they can see which bits of the course are failing to stick. And following Memrise’s success, other companies seem to be seeing the potential of applying the art and science of memory to learning apps. For instance, the Cerego app, which launched in September 2013, also times your learning and testing to boost recall, and its team have so far launched courses on brain anatomy, music theory and art history. The team’s preliminary tests on school students suggests that classes perform between 20-50% better using the app, and they are actively working with teachers and educational institutions to develop courses together.
So are we coming close to the relaxed, effortless learning that Cooke first envisaged? Traynor thinks so; many of his class are so hooked that they readily practice Spanish on their iPads at home, to the point that he now has to plan four or five lessons in advance. “That's the strength of it,” he says. “The learning just doesn't stop.”

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How do thoughts form?

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We are now beginning to crack the brain’s code, which allows us to answer such bizarre questions as “what is the speed of thought?”

Human brains grow most rapidly just after birth and reach half their adult size within three months, according to a study in JAMA Neurology.

When he was asked, as a joke, to explain how the mind works in five words, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker didn't hesitate. "Brain cells fire in patterns", he replied. It's a good effort, but all it really does is replace one enigma with another mystery.
It’s long been known that brain cells communicate by firing electrical signals to each other, and we now have myriad technologies for recording their patterns of activity – from electrodes in the brain or on the scalp, to functional magnetic resonance scanners that can detect changes in blood oxygenation. But, having gathered these data, the meaning of these patterns is still an enduring mystery. They seem to dance to a tune we can't hear, led by rules we don't know.
Neuroscientists speak of the neural code, and have made some progress in cracking that code. They are figuring out some basic rules, such as when cells in specific parts of the brain are likely to light up depending on the task at hand. Progress has been slow, but in the last decade various research teams around the world have been pursuing a far more ambitious project. We may never be able to see the complete code book, they realised, but by trying to write our own entries, we can begin to pick apart the ways that different patterns correspond to different actions.
Albert Lee and Matthew Wilson, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) first helped to set out the principles in 2002. It progresses like this. First, we record from the brain of a rat – one of our closer relatives, in the grand tree of life – as it runs a maze. Studying the whole brain would be too ambitious, so we can focus our recording on an area known as the hippocampus, known to be important for navigation and memory. If you've heard of this area before it is probably because of a famous result which showed that London taxi drivers developed larger hippocampi the longer they had spent navigating the streets of England's sprawling capital.

The longer London taxi drivers navigate the city's streets, the bigger certain parts of their brain tasked with memory and navigation grow (Thinkstock)

While the rat runs the maze we record where it is, and simultaneously how the cells in the hippocampus are firing. The cell firing patterns are thrown into a mathematical algorithm which finds the pattern that best matches each bit of the maze. The language of the cells is no less complex, but now we have a Rosetta Stone against which we can decode it. We then test the algorithm by feeding it freshly recorded patterns, to see if it correctly predicts where the rat was at the point that pattern was recorded.
It doesn’t allow us to completely crack the code, because we still don't know all the rules, and it can’t help us read the patterns which aren't from this bit of the brain or which aren't about maze running, but it is still a powerful tool.  For instance, using this technique, the team was able to show that the specific sequence of cell firing repeated in the brain of the rat when it slept after running the maze (and, as a crucial comparison, not in the sleep it had enjoyed before it had run the maze).
Fascinatingly, the sequence repeated faster during sleep – around 20 times faster. This meant that the rat could run the maze in their sleeping minds in a fraction of the time it took them in real life. This could be related to the mnemonic function of sleep; by replaying the memory, it might have helped the rat to consolidate its learning. And the fact that the replay was accelerated might give us a glimpse of the activity that lies behind sudden insights, or experiences where our life “flashes before our eyes”; when not restrained, our thoughts really can retrace familiar paths in “fast forward”. Subsequent work has shown that these maze patterns can run backwards as well as forwards  - suggesting that the rats can imagine a goal, like the end of the maze, and work their way back from that to the point where they are.

A rat can mentally replay a route around a maze 20 times faster when sleeping than it can when it’s awake (Thinkstock)

One application of techniques like these, which are equal parts highly specialised measurement systems and fiercely complicated algorithms, has been to decode the brain activity in patients who are locked in or in a vegetative state. These patients can’t move any of their muscles, and yet they may still be mentally aware and able to hear people talking to them in the same room. First, the doctors ask the patients to imagine activities which are known to active specific brain regions – such as the hippocampus. The data is then decoded so that you know which brain activity corresponds to certain ideas. During future brain scans, the patients can then re-imagine the same activities to answer basic questions. For instance, they might be told to imagine playing tennis to answer yes and walking around their house to answer no – the first form of communication since their injury.
There are other applications, both theoretical science, to probe the inner workings of our minds, and practical domains such as brain-computer interfaces. If, in the future, a paraplegic wants to control a robot arm, or even another person, via a brain interface, then it will rely on the same techniques to decode information and translate it into action. Now the principles have been shown to work, the potential is staggering.

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Believe It or Not Strange Unbelievable

Believe It or Not Strange Unbelievable

• The US Secret Service,tasked with protecting the president as created by Abraham Lincoln on the day he was assassinated !

• The word Scientist was coined in 1833 ! Before this ,scientists used to call themselves as nature's philosophers!

• Until 1911, clocks at French railway stations were set 5 minutes fast so travelers would not miss their trains !920-180

• You will be amused to know that in April 1910, in France ,kissing was banned on railway platforms because it caused delays.

• Do you know the upper limit of the speed at which Heinz tomato ketchup can drip out of its bottle to 0.028mph (about 1 km/day). If it comes out any faster, it is rejected.

• The sandwich is named after John Montagu ,who was the 4th Earl of Sandwich, who started a craze for eating of slice beef between 2 slices of toast.

• Dolphins can develop diabetes !

• The human brain runs on the same amount of power as a low-powered light bulb !

• Rats laugh when tickled !

• In 1925,a monkey was tried & convicted for smoking a cigarette in the US !

• The National Anthem of Spain has no words !

• High heels were originally made for men !

• DOG TV is a new television channel created exclusively for digs to watch !

• In Thailand,it is illegal to go in public without wearing an underwear !

• There are more than 1200 species of venomous fish -more than venomous snakes and all other venomous vertebrates combined.

• Tian Hao -a hair stylist from Xian Shaanxi,China,cuts his customers hair with his eyes closed!

• New born babies can see only in Black & White!

• Footgolf is a new sport where players kick a soccer ball into holes on a golf course !

• Betty Lou,85 years old of Mich ,USA and 76 years old Delores Viola ,reunited in 2012, discovering that they were sisters saparated by adoption 76 years earlier!

• The BUSCH GARDENS,a theme park in Tampa,Fla,USA,allows its visitors to play a tug-of-war match with a tiger!

• THE SAME CAFE,in Denver ,Cola,USA ,has no fixed prices.All of its patrons are allowed to decide to pay whatever they feel appropriate & affordable for them for their cup of coffee!

• Rope Climbing was an Olympic Sport until 1932 !

• The total known population of Mountain Gorillas in the world is less than a thousand!

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• The cities of Windsor ,Ontario ,Canada and Datroit,USA celebrate each other's National Holidays

• James Simpson of Anna Maria Island,Fla,USA had his wallet returned to him in April 2011,48 years after he had lost it !

• Have you heard about the Titanic,the ship? Do you know it took USD 7 million to make the ship but to make the movie about it ,approximately USD 200 million was spent !

• On Feb 5,1958 , a nuclear bomb was dropped into the sea off the coast of Georgia,USAafter a mid year collision of air planes ,and its location is still known after so many years later!

• Dolphins can develop diabetes !

• Scientists disagree on the reasons of 'why we slip on the ice' !

World Weird Days

• World Turtle Day :it is celebrated on May 23 .In 1990 the American Tortoise Rescue decided to red letter May 23 as a day to educate people on dangers faced by these reptiles.Many people dress up like turtles on this day and march in busy places like gardens and shopping malls.

• World Sleep Day :it is celebrated on every third Friday of March .A recent study conducted in 2011,found that 93% of people surveyed felt sleep-deprived ,so wouldn't we want more such days..

• International Left handers Day :It is celebrated on August 13th of every year.Considering that there are over 700 million southpaws in the world,we should have a special day for them.

• Geek Pride Day :it is celebrated on May 25th .ASC-066 The no. of geeks are growing in the world.So why not give these smartphones obsessed geeks/nerds/dorks a day of their own!.

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