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There’s a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex – wow, a fascinating article of the neurophysiological effect of branding.

Over several months this past summer, Montague set to work looking for a scientifically convincing answer. He assembled a group of test subjects and, while monitoring their brain activity with an M.R.I. machine, recreated the Pepsi Challenge. His results confirmed those of the TV campaign: Pepsi tended to produce a stronger response than Coke in the brain’s ventral putamen, a region thought to process feelings of reward. (Monkeys, for instance, exhibit activity in the ventral putamen when they receive food for completing a task.) Indeed, in people who preferred Pepsi, the ventral putamen was five times as active when drinking Pepsi than that of Coke fans when drinking Coke.

In the real world, of course, taste is not everything. So Montague tried to gauge the appeal of Coke’s image, its ”brand influence,” by repeating the experiment with a small variation: this time, he announced which of the sample tastes were Coke. The outcome was remarkable: almost all the subjects said they preferred Coke. What’s more, the brain activity of the subjects was now different. There was also activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently, the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink — in a word, its brand — to shape their preference.

Pepsi, crucially, couldn’t achieve the same effect. When Montague reversed the situation, announcing which tastes were of Pepsi, far fewer of the subjects said they preferred Pepsi. Montague was impressed: he had demonstrated, with a fair degree of neuroscientific precision, the special power of Coke’s brand to override our taste buds.

• Human-Centered Computing: The Borg Hypothesis
• The end of the Oil Age
  

  The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.

• misbehaving.net – chicks and technology
• jill/txt – PhD on fiction and interaction, interest in networked writing, art and expression
• writeup on Matrix ARG – forget where else I saw this before…
• Some use of Blogs in Education
• Friendster Slut – trials and tribulations of a Friendster whore
• Some of Don Hertzfeldt’s animated shorts up online (including REJECTED)

• All the President’s votes?
  

  A quiet revolution is taking place in US politics. By the time it’s over, the integrity of elections will be in the unchallenged, unscrutinised control of a few large – and pro-Republican – corporations. Andrew Gumbel wonders if democracy in America can survive

• Rumsfeld’s war-on-terror memo, USAToday followup: After grim Rumsfeld memo, White House supports him
• Rumsfeld Heralds Shift to ‘War of Ideas’ on Terror
• Rumsfeld Draws Republicans’ Ire
• With a Smile and a Joke, Rumsfeld Defends Iraq Memo
• Different Strings: The Rumsfeld Memo
• Why the Rumsfeld Memo Matters
• Slate: Rumsfeld’s Pentagon Papers
• Nobody Died When Clinton Lied is documenting “freeway blogging“:

  

• Emu48 for Mac OS X – An free emulator for modern HP calculators
• x48 (archived home page)
• /. thread on encrypted home directories – hmm, one could use losetup/lomount on USB keys… but it would work on Windows…
• Carnival Strippers (photo series)
• Amazon announces full-text search of 120,000 books – wow
• SEEMEN – robotics, pyrotechnics, bio-input and other experimental art (hey, that’s Gabe in the Flaming Halo Lie-Detector there)
• Speaking of which, great photo
• Hijacked IPs – oooh, darknet, oooh (ghost story sounds)
• Life Hacks – request for comment on how to be a productive alpha geek
• C.A. Childers asks about iTunes ownership (see my Lessig debate writeup)
• nuclear fuel discussion thread (another interesting thread)
• Branding Mozilla: Towards Mozilla 2.0 (and yeah, Mozilla needs to have an epk)
• 3 great new articles and fancy schmancy stuff like XML feeds on the relaunched A List Apart

Wow, some great artwork by Jason Salavon (a lot of stuff w/ computerized averaging of images). [waxy’s links]

Nice (awesomely nerdly thread):

the logic being you would gain superhuman powers and hence cool names like dying-of-cancer-man and oh-the-burning-pain-man.

That would be sweet! As Dying-of-Cancer Man, you could fight crime using the awesome power of your inspiring tale of courage!

DoCM: “Stop, villain! *pant* Your nefarious schemes are over! *hack cough* Oh, there goes the last of my hair…”

Villain: “Your body wracked with cancer and the effects of chemotherapy, I’m surprised you can stand, much less threaten me.”

DoCM: “I just want to leave the world… a better place than I found it…”

Henchman: “You can’t hurt him, boss… He’s dying of cancer!”

Villain: “You’re right! Such courage and love of life… We surrender, Dying-of-Cancer Man!”

Big whoppers – excerpt from Michael Moore’s new book, Dude, Where’s My Country?

Sure, we’ve been lied to before. Lots of lies: big lies, little lies, lies that brought us down in the eyes of the world. “I am not a crook” was a lie, and it sent Richard Nixon packing. “Read my lips: No new taxes” wasn’t so much a lie as a broken promise, but it nonetheless cost the first Bush his presidency. “Ketchup is a vegetable” was technically not a lie, but it was a good example of the Reagan administration’s whacked view of the world.

…

But nothing can hide this indisputable fact: There is no worse lie than one told to scare mothers and fathers enough to send their children off to fight a war that did not need to be fought because there never was any real threat at all. To falsely tell a nation’s citizens that their lives are in jeopardy just so you can settle your own personal score (“He tried to kill my daddy!”) or to make your rich friends even richer, well, in a more just world, there would be a special prison cell in Joliet reserved for that type of liar.

Just got back from the Four Tet/Prefuse 73 show @ the Troubadour. OMFG Prefuse kicked ass. He’s going to be at Spaceland tomorrow. If you’re not going to the Lessig debate, you owe it to yourself to check it out. (hey, actually, you can catch both, the Lessig thing ends at 8:30, and Four Tet probably won’t go on until 9PM, and Prefuse at 10PM)