Read this article on NY Times. It reminded me of the book a book i read, “Why We Love” by Helen Fisher, who is a biological anthropologist that conducted extensive research and written five books on the evolution and future of human sex, love, marriage, gender differences in the brain and how your personality type shapes who you are and who you love.

The power of love, a non-tangible yet powerful force that affects us all, consciously and subconsciously.

—-

The Brain on Love
By DIANE ACKERMAN

A RELATIVELY new field, called interpersonal neurobiology, draws its vigor from one of the great discoveries of our era: that the brain is constantly rewiring itself based on daily life. In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of your life literally transforms you.

All relationships change the brain — but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.

Every great love affair begins with a scream. At birth, the brain starts blazing new neural pathways based on its odyssey in an alien world. An infant is steeped in bright, buzzing, bristling sensations, raw emotions and the curious feelings they unleash, weird objects, a flux of faces, shadowy images and dreams — but most of all a powerfully magnetic primary caregiver whose wizardry astounds.

Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can’t show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn’t matter whose body is whose. Wordlessly, relying on the heart’s semaphores, the mother says all an infant needs to hear, communicating through eyes, face and voice. Thanks to advances in neuroimaging, we now have evidence that a baby’s first attachments imprint its brain. The patterns of a lifetime’s behaviors, thoughts, self-regard and choice of sweethearts all begin in this crucible.

We used to think this was the end of the story: first heredity, then the brain’s engraving mental maps in childhood, after which you’re pretty much stuck with the final blueprint.

But as a wealth of imaging studies highlight, the neural alchemy continues throughout life as we mature and forge friendships, dabble in affairs, succumb to romantic love, choose a soul mate. The body remembers how that oneness with Mother felt, and longs for its adult equivalent.

As the most social apes, we inhabit a mirror-world in which every important relationship, whether with spouse, friend or child, shapes the brain, which in turn shapes our relationships. Daniel J. Siegel and Allan N. Schore, colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently discussed groundbreaking work in the field at a conference on the school’s campus. It’s not that caregiving changes genes; it influences how the genes express themselves as the child grows. Dr. Siegel, a neuropsychiatrist, refers to the indelible sense of “feeling felt” that we learn as infants and seek in romantic love, a reciprocity that remodels the brain’s architecture and functions.

Does it also promote physical well-being? “Scientific studies of longevity, medical and mental health, happiness and even wisdom,” Dr. Siegel says, “point to supportive relationships as the most robust predictor of these positive attributes in our lives across the life span.”

The supportive part is crucial. Loving relationships alter the brain the most significantly.

Just consider how much learning happens when you choose a mate. Along with thrilling dependency comes glimpsing the world through another’s eyes; forsaking some habits and adopting others (good or bad); tasting new ideas, rituals, foods or landscapes; a slew of added friends and family; a tapestry of physical intimacy and affection; and many other catalysts, including a tornadic blast of attraction and attachment hormones — all of which revamp the brain.

When two people become a couple, the brain extends its idea of self to include the other; instead of the slender pronoun “I,” a plural self emerges who can borrow some of the other’s assets and strengths. The brain knows who we are. The immune system knows who we’re not, and it stores pieces of invaders as memory aids. Through lovemaking, or when we pass along a flu or a cold sore, we trade bits of identity with loved ones, and in time we become a sort of chimera. We don’t just get under a mate’s skin, we absorb him or her.

Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful. As imaging studies by the U.C.L.A. neuroscientist Naomi Eisenberger show, the same areas of the brain that register physical pain are active when someone feels socially rejected. That’s why being spurned by a lover hurts all over the body, but in no place you can point to. Or rather, you’d need to point to the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in the brain, the front of a collar wrapped around the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers zinging messages between the hemispheres that register both rejection and physical assault.

Whether they speak Armenian or Mandarin, people around the world use the same images of physical pain to describe a broken heart, which they perceive as crushing and crippling. It’s not just a metaphor for an emotional punch. Social pain can trigger the same sort of distress as a stomachache or a broken bone.

But a loving touch is enough to change everything. James Coan, a neuroscientist at the University of Virginia, conducted experiments in 2006 in which he gave an electric shock to the ankles of women in happy, committed relationships. Tests registered their anxiety before, and pain level during, the shocks.

Then they were shocked again, this time holding their loving partner’s hand. The same level of electricity produced a significantly lower neural response throughout the brain. In troubled relationships, this protective effect didn’t occur. If you’re in a healthy relationship, holding your partner’s hand is enough to subdue your blood pressure, ease your response to stress, improve your health and soften physical pain. We alter one another’s physiology and neural functions.

However, it’s not all sub rosa. One can decide to be a more attentive and compassionate partner, mindful of the other’s motives, hurts and longings. Breaking old habits isn’t easy, since habits are deeply ingrained neural shortcuts, a way of slurring over details without having to dwell on them. Couples often choose to rewire their brains on purpose, sometimes with a therapist’s help, to ease conflicts and strengthen their at-one-ness.

While they were both in the psychology department of Stony Brook University, Bianca Acevedo and Arthur Aron scanned the brains of long-married couples who described themselves as still “madly in love.” Staring at a picture of a spouse lit up their reward centers as expected; the same happened with those newly in love (and also with cocaine users). But, in contrast to new sweethearts and cocaine addicts, long-married couples displayed calm in sites associated with fear and anxiety. Also, in the opiate-rich sites linked to pleasure and pain relief, and those affiliated with maternal love, the home fires glowed brightly.

A happy marriage relieves stress and makes one feel as safe as an adored baby. Small wonder “Baby” is a favorite adult endearment. Not that romantic love is an exact copy of the infant bond. One needn’t consciously regard a lover as momlike to profit from the parallels. The body remembers, the brain recycles and restages.

So how does this play out beyond the lab? I saw the healing process up close after my 74-year-old husband, who is also a writer, suffered a left-hemisphere stroke that wiped out a lifetime of language. All he could utter was “mem.” Mourning the loss of our duet of decades, I began exploring new ways to communicate, through caring gestures, pantomime, facial expressions, humor, play, empathy and tons of affection — the brain’s epitome of a safe attachment. That, plus the admittedly eccentric home schooling I provided, and his diligent practice, helped rewire his brain to a startling degree, and in time we were able to talk again, he returned to writing books, and even his vision improved. The brain changes with experience throughout our lives; it’s in loving relationships of all sorts — partners, children, close friends — that brain and body really thrive.

During idylls of safety, when your brain knows you’re with someone you can trust, it needn’t waste precious resources coping with stressors or menace. Instead it may spend its lifeblood learning new things or fine-tuning the process of healing. Its doors of perception swing wide open. The flip side is that, given how vulnerable one then is, love lessons — sweet or villainous — can make a deep impression. Wedded hearts change everything, even the brain.

Source:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/the-brain-on-love/

We are using the lowest (16GB) and the highest (64GB) capacity for the Wifi-only and the Wifi + 4G models. All pricing used are from the black models since there is no price difference for color choice on the Apple online store, and USD conversion are done using prevailing exchange rate (as of April 23rd 2012) from XE.com.

From the table above, we can establish that if you are looking for a good deal on iPad 3, Malaysia is the currently one of the cheapest (if not the cheapest) place to get your hands on a new iPad 3. The US is a close 2nd, averaging a US$10 gap. Australia just edges out Singapore to claim the 3rd spot, but not by much, with the highest end 64GB Wifi + 4G model being the only model that is more expensive than Singapore.

The hosts file is a text file that maps hostnames to IP addresses.
Upon typing a url address on the browser, the system will first check if there is a relevant entry on the hosts file and gets the corresponding IP address, else it resolves the IP via the active connection’s DNS servers.

The hosts file can be edited to block certain hostnames (like ad-serving/malicious hosts), or used for web development purposes, i.e. to redirect domains to local addresses.

Editing the hosts file

Editing the hosts file in Mac OS X, is a pretty easy task, especially if you are familiar with the terminal. (Tested on Leopard/Snow Leopard/Lion)

Step 1 – Open the Terminal.app

Either by typing “Terminal” on the Spotlight, or by going into Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.

Step 2 – Open the hosts file

Open the hosts file by typing on the Terminal that you have just opened:

$ sudo nano /private/etc/hosts

Type your user password when prompted.

Step 3 – Edit the hosts file

The hosts file contains some comments (lines starting with the # symbol), as well as some default hostname mappings (e.g. 127.0.0.1 – localhost).
Simply append your new mappings underneath the default ones. Or edit one of the default values if you know what you are doing!
You can navigate the file using the arrow keys.

Step 4 – Save the hosts file

When done editing the hosts file, press control-o to save the file.
Press enter on the filename prompt, and control-x to exit the editor.

Step 5 – Flush the DNS cache

You can issue a simple Terminal command to flush the DNS cache, and have your host file changes to take immediate effect:

$ dscacheutil -flushcache

And you’re done!

I came across this very problem when i bought a few sets of the iPad 3 to resell. Buyers would ask how can they tell that this is the iPad 3, instead of an iPad 2? Finding a suitable reference table for the model number that translate to which iPad 3 is also hard to come by. Hence i decided to compile a list, based on the Singapore retail sets of iPad 3.

The model number is displayed on the back of the box, bottom right corner.

iPad 3 – Black
MC705ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi only 16GB – Black
MC706ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi only 32GB – Black
MC707ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi only 64GB – Black

MD366ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi + 4G 16GB – Black
MD367ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi + 4G 32GB – Black
MD368ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi + 4G 64GB – Black

iPad 3 – White
MD328ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi only 16GB – White
MD329ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi only 32GB – White
MD330ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi only 64GB – White

MD369ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi + 4G 16GB – White
MD370ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi + 4G 32GB – White
MD371ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi + 4G 64GB – White

Click on image below to see the full sized version.

As we all know, digital signaling uses a combination of  zeros(0) and ones (1) for transmission, so in theory the signal transmitted should either work or fail; there is no “in-between”. Analog signals uses sine-waves for transmission, so if there are external interference, it will result in image degradation (by augmenting the sine-wave in transmission).  For digital signalling, failed transmission should result in a failed pixel display (appearing like sparkles on screen). Some cables are also marketed as Ultra-High bandwidth, but in actual fact, the HDMI 1.3 (and the upcoming v1.4) specifications states that cables should only require to meet the 340MHz (10.2Gbps) bandwidth requirements. Below is a breakdown on the amount of bandwidth require that is required for uncompressed Full HD 1920×1080 video. This also takes into account for the vertical and horizontal blanking pulse to denote a new frame.

HDMI bit-rate = (horzPixels + hBlanking) x (vertPixels + vBlanking) x bitsPerPixel x frameRate x 10/8 (for TDMS encoding) x 3

Full HD 1920×1080, 60fps, 8-bit color per channel (24bit RGB) = [ (1920+280) x (1080+45) x 24-bit color x 60fps x 10/8 (extra 2-bit for TDMS enconding) x= 4.45Gbps

So in theory, any cable that meets the HDMI 1.3 specifications should be more than ample to support the bandwidth required. There is no  need for additional bandwidth at all, at least at this point.

Several tech sites had also performed testing with generic HDMI cables vs expensive Monster cables, and using specialized software to capture the transmitted output on the end display . The results are a victory for those of us who does not buy into marketing gimmicks and actually had some common sense. The output is 100 per cent identical, whether you are spending $10 or $100 on a cable.  HDMI guarantees you a pristine image – how good the image is comes down to the quality of your screen, and your perception of how it looks. People that purchase expensive cables might fall into the placebo effect, as personal perception is hardly measurable.

From my research, i would say it is safe to say that any properly manufactured cables with no loose cable or broken heads should work flawlessly for most home users that do not require HDMI cabling more than 4 meters . As cable length increases, the quality of the cabling becomes more prominent as the signal needs to travel further, and is more susceptible  to signal degradation issues. Below is a breakdown from mint.com of what i have discussed above in pictorial form.

Question is: are you going to be a douch nozzle or feed the children?

Below is a budget PC that would be relatively quick for everything that you would do, without breaking the bank.

CPU: AMD Athlon II X3 445 Triple-Core Processor 3.0GHz – $100

Mainboard: Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H – $159

Memory: Kingston PC3-10600 2GB DDR3-1333 x 2 pc – $62

GPU: Power Color Radeon HD5750 1GB DDR5 - $155

Hard drive: Hitachi SATA-II 500GB 7200RPM 16MB - $48

Casing: Cooler Master RC-360 Elite 360 - $54

PSU: Cooler Master RP-550 550W Extreme Power - $79

Optical:  Samsung SH-S223F 22X SATA DVD Burner - $27

Total: $684

I didn’t experience this problem myself — all the 5 devices in my house are on wireless, and they worked flawlessly. But something went wrong when i made a slight change to my router’s DNS proxy hostname, and poof — my DNS stopped working. DHCP would lease out all the correct settings, so it wasn’t a DHCP problem. I tested with the standard ping test and dig lookups:

Ping to SingNet DNS:

eddie-tans-macbook:~ eddie$ ping 165.21.83.88

PING 165.21.83.88 (165.21.83.88): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 165.21.83.88: icmp_seq=0 ttl=55 time=10.139 ms

64 bytes from 165.21.83.88: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=8.889 ms

That looked ok. DSL line appears to be working normally.

Checking DNS lookups on the router address:

eddie-tans-macbook:~ eddie$ dig @192.168.1.254 www.singtel.com

; <<>> DiG 9.4.3-P3 <<>> @192.168.1.254 www.singtel.com

; (1 server found)

;; global options:  printcmd
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
Ahh.. DNS lookups were timing out.

eddie-tans-macbook:~ eddie$ dig @165.21.83.88 www.singtel.com

; <<>> DiG 9.4.3-P3 <<>> @165.21.83.88 www.singtel.com

; (1 server found)

;; global options:  printcmd

;; Got answer:

;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 29837

;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:

;www.singtel.com.		IN	A

;; ANSWER SECTION:

www.singtel.com.	318	IN	A	203.208.248.10

Dig @SingNet DNS resolves www.singtel.com correctly. So when i set my Mac Book’s DNS manually to include 165.21.83.88, my webpages resolves properly, but experiences problem with the default DNS leased by out the DHCP server (192.168.1.254).

So for some reason the DNS server on the router when there are multiple clients connected to it. After mucking around for a bit, i think i found the fix to the problem.

To work around this problem, make sure you have your LAN setup properly check under Advanced Setup -> LAN and “Enable DHCP Server” is checked. Fill in your start and end address (if unsure, just fill in 192.168.1.100 for Start IP Address, and 192.168.1.200 for End IP Address)

Next, go to Advanced Setup -> DNS -> DNS Server and see that “Obtain DNS info from a WAN interface:” is selected and make sure you choose your WAN interface from the dropdown list.

Lastly this is where i was stucked. Under Advanced Setup -> DNS Proxy, checked Enabled or disable DNS Proxy, under “Hostname” key in your router’s IP address, which should be 192.168.1.1 by default. (mine was 192.168.1.254). For the “Domain name of the LAN network“, you may key in any name that you fancy. Then click Save/Apply.

And viola! For some reason, this appears to work around the problem.

Excerpt from Microsoft KB: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/251394

/times:{times | all}
Is the logon hours. The times option is expressed as day[-day][,day[-day]],time[-time][,time [-time]], and is limited to 1-hour increments. Days can be spelled out or abbreviated. Hours can be 12-hour or 24-hour notation. For 12-hour notation, use am, pm, a.m., or p.m. The all option specifies that a user can always log on, and a blank value specifies that a user can never log on. Separate day and time entries with a comma, and separate multiple day and time entries with a semicolon.

The above sounds rather confusing at best. Here are some examples to help you understand how to use the command:

Sample Usage

• net user Aloysious /time:M-F,08:00-17:00
• net user Aloysious /time:M-F,8am-5pm
• net user Aloysious /time:M,4am-5pm;T,1pm-3pm;W-F,8:00-17:00
• net user Aloysious /time:all (this allows user to logon at any time, on any day)

How to?

1. Go to command prompt from Start > Run and type “cmd”(without quotes)
2. Type any one of the appropriate net user command to restrict the user to a certain time frame and allowed days.

Note: The time is limited to one hour increment, which means you can only restrict the user by one-one hour (like 13:00, 16:00, not 13:30 or 16:45). You can use the abbreviation for the day (that is, M,T,W,Th,F,Sa,Su)

Source: apple.com

With the annoucement of the iPhone 3GS, many of us wonder what changes the new iPhone brings us. Apple released the new iPhone mainly to address one issue: performance, hence the “S” connotation for Speed. Apple claims that the new iPhone 3GS would be up to 2X faster than the iPhone3G. Physically, you can’t tell the difference between the iPhone3G and iPhone3GS, other than the badge marked on the back of the phone. In order to supply the 2X faster performance as advertised, Apple had revised the hardware with higer performance chips.

First we look at the CPU update. The original iPhone and iPhone 3G use a system on a chip (SoC) from Samsung. The SoC is a custom part and actually has Apple’s logo on the chip. The SoC houses the CPU, GPU and memory for the iPhone.

Source: Anandtech

The CPU is based on the ARM11 core, and runs at 412MHz to save power, although the core is capable of running at 667MHz. The ARM11 CPU is a single-issue in-order microprocessor with an 8-stage integer pipeline. You can think of this core as a very high clocked, very advanced 486. And extremely low power. Under typical load, the CPU core should consume around 100mW. By comparison, the CPU in your laptop can require anywhere from 10 – 35W. Idle power is even lower.

Paired with this CPU is a PowerVR MBX-Lite GPU core. This GPU, like the CPU, is built on a 90nm process and is quite simple. The GPU does support hardware transform and lighting but it’s fully fixed function, think of it as a DirectX 6/7 class GPU (Riva TNT2/GeForce 256).

Moving on to the good stuffs..

Sources indicates that the iPhone 3GS uses (again) a Samsung SoC but this time instead of the ARM11 + MBX-Lite combo it’s got a Cortex A8 and PowerVR SGX. If the ARM11 is like a modern day 486 with a very high clock speed, the Cortex A8 is like a modern day Pentium. The A8 lengthens the integer pipeline to 13 stages, enabling its 600MHz clock speed (what I’m hearing the 3GS runs at). The Cortex A8 also widens the processor; the chip is now a two-issue in-order core, capable of fetching, decoding and executing two RISC instructions in parallel.

Show me the graphics

Now that we’re familiar with the 3GS’ CPU, it’s time to talk about the GPU: the PowerVR SGX.

Also built on a 65nm process the PowerVR SGX is a fully programmable core, much like our desktop DX8/DX9 GPUs. While the MBX only supported OpenGL ES 1.0, you get 2.0 support from the SGX. The architecture also looks much more like a modern GPU. The SGX ranges from the PowerVR SGX 520 which only has one USSE pipe to the high end SGX 543MP16 which has 64 USSE2 pipes (4 USSE2 pipes per core x 16 cores). The iPhone 3GS, I believe, uses the 520 – the lowest end of the new product offering.

In its lowest end configuration with only one USSE pipe running at 200MHz, the SGX can push through 7M triangles per second and render 250M pixels per second. That’s 7x the geometry throughput of the iPhone 3G and 2.5x the fill rate. Even if the SGX ran at half that speed, we’d still be at 3.5x the geometry performance of the iPhone 3G and a 25% increase in fill rate. Given the 65nm manufacturing process, I’d expect higher clock speeds than what was possible on the MBX-Lite. Also note that these fill rates take into account the efficiency of the SGX’s tile based rendering engine.

Features and offerings

The iPhone 3G S is available in capacities of 16GB and 32GB – both will be available in black and white. The phone also features a new 3MP camera (now capable of recording 30 fps video) on the back of the device. The iPhone 3G S also has the ability to edit videos directly on the device.

In addition, the new iPhone 3G S promises better battery life (see image to the right) despite the increased processing power. Speaking of processing power, Apple brags about 2x to 3.6x speed performance improvements over a wide range of apps.

Another new addition to the iPhone 3G S is the increase in data transfer speeds from 3.6Mbps to 7.2Mbps

Voice dialing is also coming to the iPhone 3G S – something that most other phones have already had for years. However, the voice commands also extend to other aspects of the iPhone 3GS like “previous track”, “play album” or “play songs by The Killers” within the Music app.

Other new hardware features include a built-in digital compass, Nike+ support, and hardware encryption.

As you may have already surmised, the iPhone 3G S is sporting OS 3.0 which was announced way back in March. iPhone OS 3.0 brings a wealth of new features including long-requested support for copy and paste, MMS, turn-by-turn directions, voice memo recording, Spotlight search, landscape email/notes/messaging, 3G tethering (via Bluetooth or USB), stereo Bluetooth (A2DP), peer-to-peer Bluetooth connectivity, and more. IPhone OS 3.0 will be available to download on June 17 (free for iPhone users, US$9.95 for iPod touch users).

As expected, pricing for the new 16GB and 32GB iPhone 3G S will mirror the prices of the current 8GB and 16GB iPhone 3Gs: US$199 and US$299 respectively. To make things even more interesting, Apple is also discounting the price of the iPhone 3G (8GB model) to US$99 to further expand its user base — the new price is effective today. The iPhone 3G S will be available June 17 in the US. So far, Singtel has not announced availability of the iPhone 3G S. I’m thinking it would take at least a couple of months before it hits our shores. Look out for special promos on the current iPhone 3G. I’m thinking Singtel would want to clear their exisiting stock before the new model arrives. As for Maxis, i’ve pretty much written them off as a viable candidate for anyone to get an iPhone. Their offerings are just not compelling at all.

Putting things in perspective

Combine the power of the the new hardware with the highly optimized software stack of the iPhone and you’ve got the recipe of an extremely fast iPhone. While I’ve yet to play with one, on paper, the 3GS should be every bit as fast as the videos make it seem.

The iPhone 3GS’ performance upgrades should make the phone feel a lot faster, but the real improvement will be what it enables application and game developers to do. Apple recently hired two former AMD/ATI CTOs, presumably to work on some very graphics-centric projects. The iPhone 3GS may be a mild upgrade from a consumer perspective, but what it’s going to enable is far from it; watch out Nintendo. Remember the performance gains we saw in the early days of 3D graphics on the PC? We’re about to go through all of that once more in the mobile space. Awesome.