According to this article blogging is good for you, just like complaining! Complaining seems to have a placebo effect in humans where without solving the actual problem they use complaining to feel better about the situation. Now blogging is not all complaining (its most of it though) but it allows the same placebo effect to prevail. It may also trigger release of dopamine in our brains giving us feeling of pleasure!

Flaherty, who studies conditions such as hypergraphia (an uncontrollable urge to write) and writer’s block, also looks to disease models to explain the drive behind this mode of communication. For example, people with mania often talk too much. “We believe something in the brain’s limbic system is boosting their desire to communicate,” Flaherty explains. Located mainly in the midbrain, the limbic system controls our drives, whether they are related to food, sex, appetite, or problem solving. “You know that drives are involved [in blogging] because a lot of people do it compulsively,” Flaherty notes. Also, blogging might trigger dopamine release, similar to stimulants like music, running and looking at art.

Communication (also complaining) has always allowed us to gain better perspective on the situation thereby reducing stress and giving us a clearer head, thereby making us feel better despite all difficulty. Writing is a medium of expression which gives vent to all the feelings and relevant creative urges that you might have. This not only relieves the pressure but allows us to utilize our potential, explore our talents, achieve something along the way as well. You heard it, now start blogging and be happy.

I read this turning dancer article and according to it, it predicts which side of the brain is dominant. Your particular characteristics are attributed to which part of the brain is stronger. This strength is not literal but just point to your predisposition or tendency. This wont be the first thing that you must have read that tells you about your personality. From stars to blood groups to lines in my hand to the sum of digits in my name, everything is supposed to be revealing in this regard. This sounds more scientific. It is not completely wrong though. It is true that specific abilities are centered at specific areas in the brain, for example language is in the left brain and spatial abilities. The diagram below shows the distribution of the abilities.

These things became known when doctors started treating patients with brain damage, especially those with the corpus collosum, a bundle of nerve wires that connect the left and the right half, cut were studied. Patients with severe epilepsy were treated by cutting the communication between the two halves of the brain. The experiment were successful but it revealed strange behavior in those patients. They could see a word but couldn't read it, they could sing but not speak and they couldn't remember their dreams as one half is responsible for having the dream and another for recording it to memory.

Coming back to personality and brain inclination, this got me interested but further research revealed that this was by far not a definitive answer to the question. People use both brain halves for most processing and even in people who have one half of the brain destroyed due to some problem the other half learns to adapt to this loss and compensates for its abilities. The other half can be trained in such people to learn the other half's ability, pointing to the fact the its not just the side of the brain that matters. This sells pretty well as an idea because the sides show that the creative and analytical or the artist and the scientist have different inclinations, how obviously left/right brain isn't it? Not so obvious actually. People typically have the whole spectrum of the creative to analytical abilities. The creative people often use the analytical abilities in their thinking and the analytical also rely on their intuition as much as logic. Both during their thinking processes use both sides of brains. During individual tasks, that are focused through well designed experiments in a lab environment, we do tend to use one area more than other but in general any give task that we do, requires multiple areas of the brain to work in concert.

Still for the sake of fun we indulge in the left brain - right brain thing to explain our personalities. Having left and right hand inclination also has nothing to do with the brains inclination as creativity and analytical abilities are equally distributed among both of them. So which brain are you?

It is me or do you see this as ironical as well. Evolution the very force helping to destroy God in the 20th and 21st century, the staple argument of the atheists, is the very agent behind the whole thing.

So why do so many people believe? And why has belief proved so resilient as scientific progress unravels the mysteries of plagues, floods, earthquakes and our understanding of the universe? By injecting nuns with radioactive chemicals, by scanning the brains of people with epilepsy and studying naughty children, scientists are now working out why. When the evidence is pieced together, it seems that evolution prepared what society later moulded: a brain to believe.

Tests of faith | Science | The Guardian

Scientists are beginning to see that evolution created a "brain to believe" because it made evolutionary sense. It was beneficial for us in helping to stay focused in uncertainty and complexity. It allowed us to form groups and societies. It seems evolution itself is doing the task of recognizing God which those who ardently preach it don't acknowledge. Now isn't that interesting.

UW scientists unlock major number theory puzzle (Feb 26, 2007)

Mathematicians have finally laid to rest the legendary mystery surrounding an elusive group of numerical expressions known as the "mock theta functions." Number theorists have struggled to understand the functions ever since the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan first alluded to them in a letter written on his deathbed, in 1920.

The man:
This is more of a fiction story than real to the ears. Ramanujan was a self-taught mathematician who was born in the Tamil Nadu state of India. Born in a poor family, went through a life that was expected of such a person. At the age of 25 in 1913, he went to Cambridge to continue his work under G. H. Hardy, a preeminent mathematician of his time. Ramanujan at that time was working as a clerk in the Accountant General office. He made some effort to get attention by getting some of his papers printed, but could not get through. Then he sent letters to the prominent mathematicians of his time, with some of this work. His genius was recognized by Hardy and he brought him to England.

Over the period of six years, he did most of his work. He is said to have written around 3000 theorems in this time. Most of his work was not as elaborate as a trained mathematicians, because he wasn't. He often wrote the answer without stating much derivation. Making it difficult for others to see how it was true, but somehow they knew it was coming from such a man. In 1919, he returned to India and in the next one year, died of tuberculosis at the age of 32.

Eastman Kodak (NYSE: EK) shoved its way into the tough world of desktop printing Tuesday by tipping a sacred cow of the segment: the overpriced inkjet cartridge.

For a decade, other printer makers relied on the model pioneered by Gillette, which gave away its razors but charged customers a premium to buy replacement blades. Printer companies, including market leader Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) , sell printers for less than cost but earn huge profits by substantially marking up the price of the ink cartridges.

Kodak's only hope of competing in the space was to turn the model upside down, said Charles LeCompte, president of Lyra Research, which studies the printing segment. "We basically think this is a big deal," LeCompte told the E-Commerce Times. "We essentially agree with Kodak that this is disruptive.

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