Jason's posterous

People whose surnames begin with the first few letters of the alphabet (A-I) seem to react differently to certain situations than those whose surnames begin with the letters at the end of the alphabet (R-Z). Slate reports.

E-mails were sent out to adults offering them $500 to participate in a survey. Average response time was between six and seven hours. The same negative correlation between response time and alphabetic rank was observed, but only when the researchers looked at the names the respondents were born with. When Carlson and Conard looked at married names or names changed for some other reason, the correlation dwindled to insignificance. This, they conclude, demonstrates that the "last name effect" derives from "a childhood response tendency." Only people who grew up with a name at the back of the alphabet demonstrated truly Pavlovian responses to the $500 offer.

See also the birth-month soccer anomaly.

By Jason Kottke  •  Feb 2, 2011 at 10:11 am  •  alphabet

this is amazing

Sublet Animated gifs. This is one of my favorite scenes in RT.

Chrome Extension: Save and syc your tabs on multiple computers.

Nice round up of popular web font rendering solutions. We have integrated Typekit at InstantAction and have found it relatively painless there selection of fonts is quite impressive and have manage to land some Adobe fonts recently. Personally I have used Google Fonts, which has a very small catalogue but is Free. Did I mention it was free? Google also has numerous ways to integrate their service they also allow you to download the font if you need to mock it up beforehand.

This is a really great idea, this app adds 'Gamefication' to app discovery. You play the role of an Angel investor betting on which real apps will be popular. Plus its a great way to discover more apps that do not make it to the Top 10.

Amazing video showing real time image displacement. There goes my Rubber stamping skills.

A long time ago, when I worked at a job where I had to stand for a long time. I would bring a little sketch pad with me and make drawings that were similar to these videos. The principle is simple if you focus on two similar objects and start to cross your eyes eventually those objects will appear as one. Once in this "mode" you can start to see the environment in 3D. Its cool to see that this has now progressed into video.

This is pretty amazing, Cassandra Jones finds these images online and stitches them together. In another unrelated Muybridge post from Kottke, It seems as if Muybridge may not have taken all the photos that are attributed to him.

http://kottke.org/10/06/muybridge-but-not-by-muybridge