Open Thread: The Internet Is Hard. Earlier today, we had a runaway hit of a post that went viral within a few hours, getting unbelievable pageviews and hundreds of retweets and comments.
The trouble was, it wasn't because of the post's content. Due to some interesting SEO magic, the post was one of the first search results for the term "Facebook login. " As a result, hundreds of confused readers bombed us with angry comments about how much they hated the "new Facebook," a.k.a. our Facebook Connect comment login. We could laugh (and we did), but we could also consider that these are our customers and users - the people we make the Web for. How can we balance making the Web simple enough for all users while still creating tech cool enough to satisfy geeks like us?
Holy Surgical Side Effect. People of many religious faiths share the belief that there is a reality that transcends their personal experience.
Now, a study with brain cancer patients hints at brain regions that may regulate this aspect of spiritual thinking. The researchers found that some patients who had surgery to remove part of the parietal cortex became more prone to "self transcendence. " Scientists have grown increasingly interested in the origins and neural underpinnings of religious faith. Yet, contrary to some overenthusiastic media reports, brain scans of people of various faiths asked to ponder their relationship with God have so far failed to turn up a "God spot," suggesting instead that many regions of the brain are involved.
In the new study, psychologist Cosimo Urgesi of the University of Udine in Italy and colleagues took a different approach, asking 88 brain cancer patients to fill out a widely used personality questionnaire before and after surgery to remove their tumors.