Wes Kelley (the online experience)

According to this snippet from Slashdot, researches have determined that the human brain starts to slow after age 39.  I have a few years good years left before the inevitable slide begins.

Scientists at the University of California Los Angeles are reporting that while some people may think “life begins at 40,” all it seems to do is slow down. According to recent research, at age 39 our brain reaches its peak speed, and it’s all downhill after that.“The loss of a fatty skin that coats the nerve cells, called neurons, during middle age causes the slowdown, experts say. The coating acts as insulation, similar to the plastic covering on an electrical cable, and allows for fast bursts of signals around the body and brain. When the sheath deteriorates, signals passing along the neurons in the brain slow down. This means reaction times in the body are slower too.”

I remember being in middle school and enjoying going home with my friends who were posh enough to have cable television.  They had access to MTV.  All the songs I heard on the radio came to life in moving pictures with ridiculous story lines and crazy imagery.  Of course, as time moved on, MTV forgot about actual music and became the go-to channel for whiney, flamboyant and tacky reality TV.   

Well, thanks to the MTV Music website, we can now become reacquainted with the lost “art” of music videos.  Better yet, by simply typing the name of a band, you can watch their videos on demand and don’t have to suffer through the VJs (back when they had VJs) selections.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Fans of the Terminator movie series will remember that we sowed the seeds to our eventual destruction when we tied our military systems into a computer network known as Skynet.  After Skynet initiated a nuclear holocaust, it used robots to round up the remaining humans for extinction.

If you even wonder where the robots came from that served Skynet’s purposes, now we know.

The good folks at Slashdot have posted a recent Pentagon request that asks contractors to “develop a software and sensor package to enable a team of robots to search for and detect human presence in an indoor environment. ”  While such technology could certainly help keep our soldiers out of harms way, it is creepy.

Speaking of retro and cool, Dust Films had made a cover version of the classic Take On Me from the Norwegian powerhouse a-ha.  In this version, the lyrics have changed to match the unfolding drama in the groundbreaking music video.  Consider it reversed closed caption.

[Via Laughing Squid]

TUAW and Cult of Mac recently wrote about Contexture Design’s one-of-a-kind iPod cases made from old cassette tapes.  Now this was a clever idea: both retro and cool.  Sadly, I believe they are all sold out. However, if you consider yourself crafty you can gather up your old Chicago, Def Leopard or Huey Lewis tapes and make your own custom case.

The Official Gmail Blog is reporting that Google Labs is working on a protection mechanism that will limit the chance you will send an ill-advised email in the middle of night. The idea is that this new feature, named Mail Goggles, will present a simple math problem that must be solved before the email is sent. Apparently you can turn this feature on or off, and it will only be active in the wee small hours of the morning. If you are coherent enough to solve a math problem, then chances are you are awake/sober enough to communicate via email. We all say weird things when we are too tired or under the influence; it is good to know that Google is there to help protect us from ourselves.

[Via First Things]

Kathleen Parker at the Washington Post found this video that demonstrates that all those years Obama spent community organizing did not go to waste. Take a grass-roots politician, mix in politically-minded middle class parents and throw in some vacation Bible school memories and this is what you get.

[Via The Misplaced Librarian]

Here is another entry in what seems to be the beginning of a series of bizarre British contributions to this blog.  Enjoy the sweet sounds the of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain playing the theme from Shaft.  Can you dig it?

[Via RealDan]

There are many charts and graphs sprouting up on the Internet depicting our dire financial condition, but this one shows a unique correlation. Is our use of foreign oil tied to the lower quality of rock and roll music? Is the use of good ole’ US oil an important catalyst for our distinctly American form of music?  Or is it the other way around?

[Via Sourjayne]

I won’t pretend to understand all the nuisances of the financial sector meltdown, but it is shocking to hear terms like “socialism” and its close cousin “nationalized” returning to polite and intelligent conversation.  Jack Shedd pointed out this post from Willem Buiter of the Financial Times where he suggests that maybe we should stop kidding ourselves and just nationalize our banks (the FDIC, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being part of the joke).  

If financial behemoths like AIG are too large and/or too interconnected to fail but not too smart to get themselves into situations where they need to be bailed out, then what is the case for letting private firms engage in such kinds of activities in the first place?

There is a long-standing argument that there is no real case for private ownership of deposit-taking banking institutions, because these cannot exist safely without a deposit guarantee and/or lender of last resort facilities, that are ultimately underwritten by the taxpayer.

Alexander Hamilton created the first Bank of the United States to encourage financial stability, shore up our currency and develop a source of credit for our cash-starved country.  Perhaps what was old will be new again.  Sadly, it is hard in this circumstance to know what is the frying pan and what is the fire.