One of the great things about being a writer at the close of a decade is that for two weeks you don’t have to think up a creative article idea. Instead, you can do what everyone else is doing: write a Best/Worst of the Decade, or alternatively, The Decade in Review, broken down by the genre of your choice.

Phillip Niemeyer has gone one step further and delivered something original, bucking the trend and ruining it for the rest of us. His excellent charts breaks down the last years into bite-sized icons for the attention-impaired.

Chart is Here

A lot of people invest much value in dreams. Many claims that dreaming is some kind of mystical doorway from which we view our inner-most feelings and memories. Some claim dreams predict the future or are Nature’s way of forcing us to explore what we would prefer to remain hidden. Others, like Dr. J. Allan Hobson, pours cold water on those theories and makes the bold claim that dreams are nothing more than a nightly tune-up session for the day ahead.

From the NY Times:

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.

“It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”

Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking. The idea is a prominent example of how neuroscience is altering assumptions about everyday (or every-night) brain functions.

“Most people who have studied dreams start out with some predetermined psychological ideas and try to make dreaming fit those,” said Dr. Mark Mahowald, a neurologist who is director of the sleep disorders program at Hennepin County Medical Center, in Minneapolis. “What I like about this new paper is that he doesn’t make any assumptions about what dreaming is doing.”

With the nation’s newspapers facing a collective collapse, everyone is scrambling for a savior. Unfortunately, most papers consider a savior as nothing more than bailout money, which would allow newspapers to continue limping along, staving off the inevitable for only so long. On the upside, the NY Times appears serious about adapting to a new world, evidence by a consistent roll-out of new technology and applications that make its online presence more pertinent. Case in point is today’s debut of Skimmer, a simple yet effect landing page that presents the contents of the NY Times in a slick, fast format. It sure beats the original homepage!

Try out Skimmer!

TheNew York Times has posted an interesting essay by Rachel Donadio that explores how your taste in books may influence potential relationships, especially as it relates to profiles on MySpace and Facebook.

Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.” Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”

I only have a few deal-breakers that find me running for the hills. If you have an abundance of self-help books, especially written by vile people like Dr. Laura and Dr. Phil, I lose all interest in your mental faculties.
What books would totally turn you off someone?