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. 

While in Miami this past weekend, I stumbled on an incredibly poignant memorial.  Along Ocean Drive in South Beach, thousands of paper tombstones commemorated those who have fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan (4,985 to date). 

Each tombstone had the handwritten name and age of a fallen veteran.  

Each tombstone was written by a different person.

The simple symbolism, especially with the juxtaposition of South Beach during “Urban Week”, was powerful – it was heartbreaking.

The memorial was set up by Veterans for Peace.

 tombstones

tombstones

the juxtaposition

the memorial

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

It depicts the inter-connectedness of credit default swaps. 

Kinda reminds you of a really complicated “who hooked up with who” diagram… 

• Silverlight 3 Developer Runtime (windows, mac)
• Silverlight 3 Beta Tools for Visual Studio
• Microsoft Expression Blend 3 Preview
• Silverlight Toolkit
• .NET RIA Services

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

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…

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!

(Look Mom, I can speak British!)

me, in front of parliament

 the ferris wheel

thames river

eye from above

parliament

liane and me