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OK, here is the album with our visit to Gaudi's Casa Batllo in Barcelona last week.

Fun Op-Ed page from David Brooks @NYT

Full Article
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Self-control consumes glucose in the brain. For an article in the journal Aggressive Behavior, Nathan DeWall, Timothy Deckman, Matthew Gaillot and Brad Bushman found that research subjects who consumed a glucose beverage behaved less aggressively than subjects who drank a placebo beverage. They found an indirect relationship between diabetes (a disorder marked by poor glucose toleration) and low self-control. States with high diabetes rates also had high crime rates. Countries with a different condition that leads to low glucose levels had higher killing rates, both during wartime and during peacetime.

We tend to admire extroverted leaders. But Adam Grant, Francesca Gino and David Hofmann have added a wrinkle to this bias in an article in The Academy of Management Journal. They found that extraverted leaders perform best when their employees are passive, but this effect is reversed when the employees are proactive. In these cases, the extroverted leaders are less receptive to their employees’ initiatives.

Beautiful women should take up chess. Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gransmark wrote a Stockholm University working paper in which they found that male chess players pursue riskier strategies when they’re facing attractive female opponents, even though the risk-taking didn’t improve their performance.

People remember information that is hard to master. In a study for Cognition, Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel Oppenheimer and Erikka Vaughan found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than information transmitted in easier fonts.
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got home pretty late, not unusual for mondays, they tend to run long. chilly outside all day, mid 20's right now, brr.

saw Messi won the Ballon D'Or today, cool

ESPN
Until Monday morning, only 10 men had ever won a Ballon d'Or or a FIFA World Player of the Year award more than once -- Johan Cruyff, Michel Platini, Marco van Basten, Alfredo di Stefano, Franz Beckenbauer, Kevin Keegan and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge the former; Zinedine Zidane and Ronaldinho the latter; and Ronaldo both.

Now there are 11.

Lionel Messi, 23, has won the first-ever FIFA Ballon d'Or, the amalgamation of the two awards, tying him with Ronaldo for the youngest player ever to be named the world's best twice, having swept both previous awards last year.
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