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Just go check out these optical illusions created by Japanese professor Kokichi Sugihara. I never get tired of this sort of thing.

Here’s another article that gets at what I found interesting about the Steve Jobs piece I linked to yesterday. In this one, David Brooks (not that David Brooks) writes in the New Yorker about What the science of human nature can teach us. The piece is the biography of one hypothetical person as seen through the eyes of neuroscience. In it, a hypothetical neuroscientist tells the hypothetical subject of the article how he finds meaning in life through his scientific view of the world: ...

Since Valentine’s Day is approaching, I thought I’d remind people of my 2007 post, Romantic gift giving for pragmatic people.

Andy Crouch, A World Without Jobs: As remarkable as Steve Jobs is in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (ruthless and demanding) leader—his most singular quality has been his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple’s early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and made it a sign of promise and progress. ...

Dana Goldstein writes about school segregation in the modern era, on the occasion of Martin Luther King Day: American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. What really drew me to her story is her simple explanation of how the soon to be dismantled school assignment program here in Wake County, North Carolina works. I’ve been following the story around this for years and never understood the nature of the program until I read this blog post: ...

Horace Dediu has another theory on why Google is dropping support for the H.264 video codec: I rather think that Google’s decision is a misguided emphasis on technical details in lieu of engaging in a deep strategic re-evaluation. Don’t miss the interesting comparison to Apple’s decision to go with the PowerPC over Intel processors back in the day. I’m sort of obsessed with this decision by Google not because of its effect on me personally, but because I’m curious as to how companies come to these kinds of decisions. It’s complex and fascinating. ...

I sat down to write a post about the Tucson shooting last weekend and the toxic rhetoric that may or may not have contributed to it, but then I found that Fred Clark of the Slacktivist made the very point I was hoping to make, so go read him instead: Violent language and violent rhetoric can be a problem, but I do not think it is the main problem afflicting our diseased political discourse. ...

Matt Drance offers one hypothesis for why Google is dropping H.264 support: If H.264 becomes and remains the dominant codec, then Google needs to convince all of its partners to bundle H.264 decoder hardware in order to preserve a competitive video experience on Android. It cannot, however, guarantee them favorable licensing terms, because it is not a licensor in the H.264 patent pool. Android and Google could end up with a problem on their hands if OEMs hesitate or get hit with lawsuits. ...

Google’s decision to drop native support for the H.264 video codec in Chrome has generated a number of arguments on the Web. Google’s defenders argue that H.264 is not royalty-free and is thus inappropriate for use with HTML5, since the W3C refuses to mandate the use of royalty-encumbered technologies in its specifications. Google’s critics argue that this doing so is a cynical move aimed at bolstering its own codec, WebM, and undermining vendors like Apple and Microsoft who support H.264 and who don’t support WebM or Theora. It seems inarguable that this decision by Google insures that Flash players will continue to be the primary means of showing video on the Web. ...

One of the most encouraging things about the original iPhone was that it was an Apple product, not an AT&T product. Apple maintained control over just about every aspect of the user experience, and customers relied on AT&T only for connectivity. This was great news for end users, because mobile carriers tend to do an awful job in terms of user experience. One of the reasons the iPhone was so starkly different from everything else on the market at the time was that it was so obviously free of the horrible sorts of interfaces that carriers always foist upon their customers. ...