Best of the Web: November 26, 2010

Best of the Web: November 26, 2010

47 Mind-Blowing Psychology-Proven Facts You Should Know About Yourself; The Office Gift Guide; Saving the euro.

November 26, 2010 1:36 by Rasha Reslan

47 Mind-Blowing Psychology-Proven Facts You Should Know About Yourself

The mind is a crazy thing, and there is plenty we don’t know about it. Take for instance the pure subjectivity of one’s attention span. Remember the opening lines of that Madonna single Frozen, “You only see what your eyes want to see”? Well, it is a proven fact in psychology. Want proof? Check out the first video on this article. We guarantee you will be amazed by (and Kipp never uses the word ‘amazed’ lightly) just how selective your mind really is.

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The Office Gift Guide

With Christmas round the corner, the promise of holidays, parties and new clothes might just be enough to get you through the mind numbing boredom of this 9-5 grind. But, wait: with Christmas parties come Christmas office parties, and then the obligation of Christmas gifts. Figuring out what to give your cold, unreadable boss may be a major challenge for some, but this article gives you a good number of suggestions for getting gifts for your office mates, whether it is your assistant, your boss, your cube-mate or your clients. The ideas are versatile, so if your firm doesn’t do the whole Christmas thing (and obviously there are plenty here in the sand pit that don’t), you can always use these ideas for leaving parties or birthdays.

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Saving the euro

As another European country enters the limelight for its financial woes, it casts the future of the entire continent’s economical well being in a gloomy light. But The Economist doesn’t think everything is as bad as it seems. In this article it says of “all the talk of the euro failing to survive this sovereign-debt crisis, it should struggle through. Despite the troubles on its periphery, the public debt of the euro zone as a whole is not notably high by rich-country standards.” Reassuring. Sort of.

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A Website for the World’s Materialists

You know we have reached the age of elitist internet snobbery when you read of an invitation-only blog for “5,000 tastemakers and celebrities [to] upload and tag images of their possessions.” That is what The Fancy is, anyway. As far innovation in the world of cyber space go, The Fancy is pretty much ahead of the game. It’s a product of recently started Thingd (pronounced Thing D), and it seems pretty vacuous to Kipp. But it turns out that Thingd is on the brink of something other companies want in on. Roger Ehrenberg, a New York City-based venture capitalist says “The field of entity tagging is exploding (…) Other startups are also working to categorize real-world objects.” See what you think.

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The Benefits of Weight Training for Children

One for the wall of weird. Though the headline sounds like something out of Soviet Russia, apparently researchers have found that weight training is beneficial for children; both physiologically and philosophically. According to Dr. Faigenbaum, when children weight train they do not pack on bulk in the way men and some women generally do but develop neurologically; “Their nervous systems and muscles start interacting more efficiently. A few small studies have shown that children develop a significant increase in motor-unit activation within their muscles after weight training. (…) So, in essence, strength training in children seems to liberate the innate strength of the muscle, to activate the power that has been in abeyance, unused.” That’s all we need, super strong rugrats running around…