Keep on biking

This is one I have been waiting for. Biking directions have been added to Google maps.

Right now they are covering 150 cities, so most likely yours is in there. To get an overview of good bike routes, put the name of your city in the top search box at http://maps.google.com/biking. Richmond, Long Beach, Minneapolis, and Rancho Cucamonga all have been mapped. You can see color-coded streets that show which ones are best for two wheel travel. When you want to plot a route, just use the Get Directions option to set the drop-down menu to bicycling. (Other options are by car, walking, or public transit.) Google has a little video to help you get started.

Calculate your life

If you want to look into the future, head over to the Life Expectancy Calculator. It is a fun way to look at your lifestyle and its implications for how long we can expect to see you around. Some things you can't change -- such as your gender, or diseases in your family -- but other things you can, such as smoking or wearing a seat belt. As you go through the exercise, each parameter updates your odds for living, so you can see immediately the consequences of what you are doing. It is not foolproof, of course, but it has some science behind it. Not only is if fun, but it might motivate you to change your evil ways. Besides, I like having you around.

This is your brain. This is your brain on NPR

There were two interesting stories on NPR this morning, one about the brain of the teenager and young adult, and the other about the brain of those of more advanced years. In other words, something for everyone.

I thought there were several interesting things to remember from the broadcasts.

1. The nerve cells in a teenager's frontal lobe are not fully developed, leading to difficulty in creating the association between actions and consequences. 
2. Young adults can learn easily and quickly, since their chemistry is tuned to be responsive to their environment because the cells are so easily excitable. This also makes them more easily susceptible to addictive drugs, which have a longer impact on them than they do on older adults. Young people perform poorly on tasks long after the actual drug experience is past.
3. You can learn while you sleep. Rather than cramming all night for a test or staying up to prepare a presentation, it is better to read the material, then get a good sleep. The brain will process the material and you will wake up knowing it better than when you went to sleep.
4. Aging causes that frontal lobe to slow down, making it harder to retrieve information and slower to respond to it.
5. However, aging also improves the analytical ability of the mind, allowing it to engage in much more complex reasoning, as well as the ability to emphasize with others.
6. Brain cells can continue to grow all through one's life. Growth is encouraged by physical exercise and by engaging the mind in challenging work, such as working on puzzles or working with a computer.

I recommend listening or reading both broadcasts from NPR. You will have to excuse me now. I'm going to go exercise my brain and play some computer games.

Egging you on

Who would have known I needed help in cracking eggs? I came across this in Cooks Illustrated. I don't know if it works yet, since I haven't had a chance to try it. Let me know if you are able to test it out. It may save me from always fishing for egg shells after I crack.

Don't crack the egg on the edge of the bowl or counter. Instead use a flat surface (such as the kitchen counter or a breadboard) and tap the egg, then pull the halves apart over the bowl. Presumably, this results in a cleaner break.

Please tell me that I'm not the only one who didn't know this.

Browse till you drop

I've been a regular reader of PC Magazine since its inception -- back before there were color displays and hard drives. When the Web finally arrived, PC Magazine started compiling what it considered the 100 best Web sites every year. It is something I often consult when I'm trying to find a good place to begin exploring a category. Warning: once you start browsing around these sites, you can spend a lot of time, especially in the "undiscovered" territory. Anyone for bad tattoo art?

After you spend a few hours browsing the best Web sites, you can go waste the rest of your day trying out what PC Magazine considers the best free software of 2009. From music to finance to graphics, most of what you need can be found on the Web for free. If you are spending money, you aren't doing it right.

Books, Books, Books!

To any librarians who read this blog, this news might be as old as the dewey decimal system. Try not to drool, while yawning over your keyboards. But for the rest of you reading folk, here's how to get free books in the mail.

Head over to Goodreads and sign up for their free service. Besides being a great place to keep a record of what you and your buddies are up to, literarily speaking, you can click on the Bookswap section to have someone send you their used books just for the price of shipping. What's more, every time you send 10 books, you get 1 book for F-R-E-E!

Book it Dano.

The cloud gets bigger

If you have a Google account, you can now store all sorts of files in its cloud, and not just word processing documents and spreadsheets, up to 250 MB in size. This is a good option if you need to use a file from different computers, or you want to keep certain files backed up for safe keeping. One of the best uses might be for file sharing. You can share a file or folder with other people, making it easy to collaborate on projects and to avoid file transfer problems with e-mail attachments. There are limits on the amount of storage you can use unless you pay for a premium account, but for day-to-day use it should be more than sufficient for most of us.