Sexy Veggie Magimix | Luxury Vans for Francophiles | Optimistic Brains

Design

Eat Your Veggies

Talk about powerful ads that grab our attention. Young & Rubicam Tel Aviv creates ‘Only the Exceptional Last’, making art of fruits and vegetables for blender brand Magimix. Wouldn’t you expect high quality performance from a blender with this kind of smile factor ad campaign? via TL

Humble Opulence

Hermes Meets Vans KNSTRCT

If Sarah Palin knew about these Hermes Meets Vans sneakers, she would surely wear them on her American History | One Nation bus tour which is headed our way any minute. At 1pm, there’s still no word on when Sarah Palin is cruisin’ for a bruisin’ at the Liberty Bell.

Plenty of folks in Philly will be out to picket Palin, if only the One Nation schedule was public knowledge. Even FOX News Philly swears they don’t knos a top secret detail.

We assumed that Palin would need permits and all that bureaucratic regulation stuff that she detests, if she intends to co-opt the city on Memorial Day.

Back to Vans and the realization that Palin wouldn’t be caught dead in printed shoes from the French Hermes collection, even if the colors are right for Memorial Day. Too French even if they are for revolutionaries.

Brainiac

The Learning Brain

The Optimism Bias TIME

Buried deep in TIME global cover story is this nugget of brain research.  Using fMRI scans, students revealed that their brains responded differently to mistakes, depending on whether they were primed with words like ‘smart, intelligent, clever’ versus ‘stupid, ignorant’ in advance of the exercise. Note, the precise use of the words isn’t explained.

When the mistake followed positive words, there was enhanced activity in the anterior medial part of the prefrontal cortex (a region that is involved in self-reflection and recollection).

However, when the participants were primed with the word stupid, there was no heightened activity after a wrong answer. It appears that after being primed with the word stupid, the brain expected to do poorly and did not show signs of surprise or conflict when it made an error.

Blog Love

A French Brocante in California - Welcome to the Irresistable Paris Party fete et fleur

In the coming weeks, we will be restoring our blog links for each channel at AOC.  On the fly, we just stumbled into ‘fete et fleur’, a lovely Francophile blog written by a woman who makes shoes with artistry.

‘Fete et Fleur’ photographs Chateau Sonoma Antiques, owned by Sarah Anderson and home to an authentic French flea market for the last nine years.