I am a “wee” bit behind on my stack of New Yorkers. However, on the plane this past weekend, I finally had a chance to read a few.
Jonah Lehrer’s article, “Don’t! The secret of self-control,” about Stanford Prof. Walter Mischel’s Marshmallow Experiment was really interesting.
In a nutshell, Mischel told a bunch of unsuspecting 4 year:
You can eat ONE marshmallow now. Or, if you sit here quietly while I leave the room for a bit, you can eat TWO when I get back.
Turns out, kids only lasted on average 3 minutes before they gave in and ate (the damn) marshmallow. Only 30% of them successfully waited the 15 minutes until the researcher’s return.
Lehrer eventually discovered a “marshmallow resistance correlation” (my term) between those who withstood the treat temptation at 4 years old… and those who had good self-control later in life.
Would your 4 year old self have resisted the initial marshmallow and waited for the larger payout?
Note: I think I probably would have held out for the second marshmallow… but not sure how my current self would do with the “wine + really good cheese” experiment. 
I was in wine country last weekend… Nothing beats wine + sun (unless it’s wine + sun + cheese).
During the campaign, Obama created his own Flickr account. The photos during election night were amazing – and very personal.
Obama now has a new Flickr account: The Official White House Photostream. The first set – Delivering on Change – was just posted. Here are a few of my favorites.
superbowl
briefing on swine flu
Michelle Obama with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, wife of french president
a day in the office
Just saw this on the NPR Planet Money blog.
It depicts the inter-connectedness of credit default swaps.
Kinda reminds you of a really complicated “who hooked up with who” diagram…
Here are all the Silverlight 3 Beta links, if you’re interested in digging in.
As a callout: This is a developer beta release only! This means there is no “go-live” licensing available and the end-user runtime of Silverlight 3 is not available.
A full list of the new features can be found here.
If you’re curious, some of the new framework features inside of the core runtime are:
- BasedOn Styles
- Merged ResourceDictionaries
- Ability to listen to handled routed events
- Data Binding to DependencyProperty sources
- Binding supports RelativeSource syntax
- Explicit update for Bindings
- Validation UI supported by VSM
- MultiSelection for ListBox
Thank you to everyone to who came to my talk at Mix09!
I’m always a bit nervous having talks on the last day of a conference. (After all, you work really hard to pull a session together – and it can kinda be a bummer talking to mostly empty chairs.) But my room was full, and the audience’s vibe felt great from stage.
If you missed the session, you can watch the video here:
Also, as promised, here are links to…
Sample source code
Deck
The final WishExplorer demo uses Wishpot’s 3rd party web service.
Wishpot is a great site for wishlisting – it’s aimed at avoiding “random” (note quotations) presents on your birthday and holidays. :) Anyways, in order to compile & run the demo locally, you’ll need to request a developer key from them here.
Also, here’s a link to two other demos, if you’d link to click around them:
A few callouts:
- Thank you to Wishpot’s CTO Tom Lianza and Senior Designer John Hildenbiddle for all their help on the backend and visuals for the demos.
- Dave – your radial panel rocked it. Thanks!
Any feedback you have on the session content or presentation is appreciated – I’m always trying to be a better speaker.
p.s. I’ve posted an update to my SnippetManager – it now automatically copies the snippets to the clipboard.
Yep. That’s a rhyming blog post title. Anyways.
Mix09 is next week. As you can tell from the title of our talks… You’ll get to see Silverlight 3 at Mix this year!
Here are some of the core Silverlight talks (including one by me).
Also note the ambiguously named talk by Mike Harsh – I can’t wait for that session!
Smashing holiday in London! More soon, long flight - quite zonked. Cheers!
(Look Mom, I can speak British!)
me, in front of parliament
The view from the London Eye at sunset was lovely….
the ferris wheel
thames river
eye from above
parliament
liane and me
