Safari froze on my new iPad2. Screen grayed out, nothing worked. Turns out, this is a common problem. Glad I found this article on the Apple website! Learned how to force close and how to reboot the iPad2. So glad I don’t have to drive to the Apple store to get it fixed!

Solution: to force quit the app, press and hold the Sleep/Wake button on top of iPad for a few seconds until a red slider appears, then press and hold the Home button until the application quits. This gets you back to home screen with all the icons.

Then restart (reboot) your iPad. Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the red slider appears. Slide your finger across the slider to turn off iPad. To turn iPad back on, press and hold the Sleep/Wake until the Apple logo appears. It will take a minute or 2 to reboot.

Then clean out Safari. In the Home screen tap Settings / Safari. Clear the History, Cookies, and the Cache. Now try Safari.

Seth Godin’s new book contends that the Industrial Revolution is over and that it must be replaced with individuals standing up to do what matters.  “I will do this.  I am willing to fail.  Here is my art, take it if you like.”

Last Saturday I taught a class on how to “Advertise your business on Google” at the local community college.

Teaching a college class for the first time is scary, especially if there is no text book available. But businesses need to replace the Yellow Pages advertising they slashed at the start of the recession with Google advertising even though it is wicked hard to set up and mind-boggling to manage.  I know because sell this service, and I know that many business owners would rather manage it themselves.  So, using online material, I spent more than 30 hours creating more than 80 slides to present to the sold-out four hour community college class.  It did not go perfectly smoothly and I was exhausted afterward but they all succeeded in setting up accounts and creating campaigns.  Facing a roomful of business owners was daunting but I’m glad I helped them regain advertising momentum after this killer recession.

New research from the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University indicates that the Novelty Seeking Personality is genetic. People with the dopamine receptor gene DRD4 are more sensitive to dopamine, a neurotransmitter that regulates the experience of pleasure and pain, and regulates movement and emotional response. This gene is inherited.

This suggests that a party-girl mother is likely to have a party girl daughter. People who are more sensitive to dopamine get a greater boost from dopamine-triggers like cocaine, nicotine, alcohol, money, sex, food, gambling… you know the list. Because they are more sensitive to the highs and lows, they are more likely to get hooked. And we all know that addiction runs in families, too.

The article in Science Daily points out that people with the novelty-seeking gene variant would be more interested in learning about their friends’ points of view. As a consequence, people with this genetic predisposition who have a greater-than-average number of friends would be exposed to a wider variety of social norms and lifestyles, which might make them more liberal than average. Was it Benjamin Franklin who said, “Travel is toxic to narrow-mindedness.”

Is Conservatism Genetic?

University College London researchers say brains of the right-leaning have big amygdala, small anterior cingulate.

Specifically, the research shows that people with conservative tendencies have a larger amygdala and a smaller anterior cingulate than other people. The amygdala — typically thought of as the “primitive brain” — is responsible for reflexive impulses, like fear. The anterior cingulate is thought to be responsible for courage and optimism. This one-two punch could be responsible for many of the anecdotal claims that conservatives “think differently” from others.

Does this suggest that conservatives have more fear and less courage? How interesting that courage could be based in a larger anterior cingulate, and that fearlessness could result from a smaller amygdala. Courage and fearlessness are different, it seems.

Big Amygdala, Big Social Network

Time Magazine reported on research from Boston University School of Medicine that hat found a connection between the size of this brain region and the number of social relationships a person has. The complexity of those relationships — as measured by the number of people who occupied multiple roles in a social network such as being simultaneously a friend and a co-worker — was also linked with amygdala size.

“The amygdala is strongly connected with almost every other structure in brain. In the past, people assumed it was really important for fear. Then they discovered it was actually important for all emotions. And it’s also important for social interaction and face recognition,” says L.F. Barrett, one of the authors of the study. “The amygdala’s job in general is to signal to the rest of brain when something that you’re faced with is uncertain. For example, if you don’t know who someone is, and you are trying to identify them, whether it is a friend or a foe, the amygdala is probably playing a role in helping you to perform all of those tasks.”

No Amygdala, No Fear

A recent article in the New York Times reports that a woman without an amygdala was fearless, but not in a good way.

There has been some interesting physics in the news on this subject. Well, when I say news I mean… Stephen Colbert:

http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/

About 7 minutes in, there is an interview with Cornell Emeritus Professor Daryl Bem who found that, when students WANTED to see a particular kind of image, they could predict it with statistically significant accuracy.

In the same episode, the interview at the end (about :20 in) is with physicist Brian Greene who wrote “The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes” said “Everything around us may be a hologram. You are a bag of particles governed by the laws of physics.” Short clip of the interview only:

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/

It turns out, Stephen Colbert does a lot of physics interviews. I got a lot of results for the search “Stephen Colbert physics”

Also, I just read Stephen Hawking’s new book “The grand design” It is very well written and understandable, and the section on the Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty really underscored that if you are looking for a particular result, you are much more likely to get it. And how much the “laws of physics” that Brian Greene describes have changed over the centuries. Well, not changed… how our understanding has changed…

Yesterday I took my largest client to lunch to discuss strategy for the upcoming year. I used the iPad to show him a site I designed for him several weeks ago. The new site has a jQuery slider that looks great on the iPad. Then I used the iPad to show him his main website that we advertise on Google AdWords. His central Flash slideshow, and his right navigation (also Flash) were missing. I explained how the technology had changed in the six years since (someone else) built his main website, and that I was using the latest technology to make sure his new ventures would on smartphones, etc.

His response? “Cancel your plans for tomorrow and come to the office with your iPad to show this to the managers of our subsidiary warehouse operations. They need to know this as they plan for 2011.” Sigh.

So, this morning I will recharge and polish the iPad for another day of demo. People love this thing!

For me, the greatest advantage of an iPad is that it is NOT a laptop. I have spent so many years squandering my leisure time writing things that no one ever sees. The laptop and desktop have now become instruments of torture. My house is in a garden and all I see is a wall of dual computer screens. When I sit at my desk I am surrounded by stack of projects that need attention. Sitting in front of my computer is no longer a joy.

Sitting in my garden, however, leafing through my Facebook and my Twitter stream using FlipBoard (the award winning free iPad app), is a genuine pleasure. Because there is no keyboard, I really CANNOT get compulsive and workaholic. The iPad is an instrument of pleasure. At 800 bucks for the top-pf-the-line model I have, I would not call it a toy. Unless you would call a Maserati a toy.

Something I really like about the iPad is that I can adjust the size of the text just by sliding two fingers. Email no longer makes me feel elderly. When we watch TV after dinner, we use the iPad check Wikipedia for the name of the element PA when we see it in the opening credits of Breaking Bad. I would NEVER turn my big honkin’ desktop back on for that!

I would agree that an iPad is just a big iTouch. That’s like saying a woman is just a big girl. It’s true, but it misses the point.

We did not have wireless before the iPad arrived. I assume you already have and use wireless and you may be happy with an iTouch or a wireless-only iPad.

With iTouch, you can get the Line2 app and use wireless to make calls from your home or any wifi spot.

If you wait a couple of months you will be able to get an iPhone from Verizon. Do they provide a better signal for your area?

The next version of the iPad is rumored to come out in April with improved wifi capabilities and two cameras. One camera to take video, the other camera forward-facing so you can Skype from your iPad.

About Sprint’s AirRave — I think that is just a femto cell, and I believe Verizon offers an iPad + femto cell combo right now. Do you use wireless at your home? Elsewhere?