I've posted links to blog essays by Jonah Lehrer before, and i maintain he is possibly the best popular science of psychology writer around today on the web.

He moved from his own blog to Wired recently, and the move doesn't seem to have slowed him down at all.  Today's essay on "The Psychology of Power" is worth reading.

Nothing revolutionary in the article, but it's worth reading.

Basically it argues that some of us have got it backwards with regards to how we get bad leaders. Jonah suggests that organizations tend to promote kind and conscientious people, and weed out the really selfish ones (contrary to the thinking of many of us that only the cut-throat Machiavellis make their way to the top).  But that it's the very act of having power and responsibility that tends to lead good people to going astray.  I guess that's the age old "power corrupts" thing.  Worth reading, especially if you are one of those good people who may find themselves in a position of some authority and think "i could never act that way."

Psychologists refer to this as the paradox of power. The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power. Instead of being polite, honest and outgoing, they become impulsive, reckless and rude... Although people almost always know the right thing to do—cheating is wrong—their sense of power makes it easier to rationalize away the ethical lapse.

http://www.wired.com...psychology-of-power/

PayPal is going to introduce a new, low-cost, micropayment service. This would allow making small payments to DonationCoder instead of using DonationCredits as it does now.

Yahoo news article: PayPal introduces micropayment service

Honestly, I don't mind using DonationCredits. I usually buy some (say $25 worth) when I want to donate for a new software program I'm using. I give $20 for the program, and I keep the other $5 for future individual donations.

I wonder if the PayPal micropayment service would be more popular than the DonationCredits that DonationCoder uses now? Not everyone uses PayPal, although many people do.

DC member avevers alerts us to a nice blog praising our Find and Run Robot application:

http://jesseliberty....tility-of-the-month/

Subsequently I’ve learned of a wonderful, stupendous substitute: FARR (Find And Run Robot). It has it all.  Set  up takes zero time.  The defaults are excellent so you can just run it.  If you want to tweak it, there are more options than on the space shuttle.  And it is wicked fast, and does a lot more than finding your applications, but it does that incredibly well. ... Okay, there’s a lot more, but I love this program already.  You do want/need a license key, which is free, but which reminds you that it would be perfectly okay to make a donation. I did, you should.

Photographs of toys as high art:

http://www.noupe.com...toy-photography.html

DC member Martin has a really nice blog about his thoughts, observations and findings from working within the software development industry.

An excerpt from his most recent post, Was Dave a Genius?:

Every company you work for always seems to have a horror story about something that happened before your arrival. Things like current production old legacy systems that used mode="SQLServer"  for session state and then stored a ton of database reads in session to cache them.

The one I remember is the story of Dave, who had recently discovered the power of document.write and took it a little too far. Why have the server do all the work when the client can do it instead? Dave decided to have the server response.write a metric ton of document.write statements which would then produce the page at runtime in the browser. It’s possible he may have been thinking too hard about what David Wheeler said about indirection.

Back when JavaScript in the browser made people as nervous as a small nun at a penguin shooting, this story was pretty funny. But with the advances of in-browser JavaScript since the days of DHTML and the widespread popularity of libraries like jQuery, perhaps (and I may be giving him too much credit here) Dave was just ahead of his time.

http://www.invalidcast.com

Interesting read:

We should have stopped believing the "don’t be evil" hype some years ago. Google has long asked to be treated as something special. But it’s special in only one way: its capacity for audacity.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38645475/