Eye tracking applications are pretty cool. They track the focus of a person’s eye on something like a web page, which can give a heat map that will show where people tend to look on a certain design. This can help to do empirical design analysis. This article talks about the use of eye tracking in design, with a bunch of interesting examples. Definitely worth reading if you do any design work.

As a bonus, it includes the line “Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed.”

That last part seemed to be the only one that people talked about on blogs, but the rest of the article is interesting too.

The Show with Ze Frank is ending its year-long run this week, so that’s rather sad. If you haven’t seen it, well, then you missed it. I guess you can go back and watch old ones, but it takes a while to catch on. It’s a great mix of comedy, politics, and ridiculous thoughts. It’ll be interesting to see what Ze does next.

I don’t think anyone who reads this will know what I’m talking about, but that’s ok.

This (really low quality) video shows a very preliminary demonstration of Deam Kamen’s robotic arm. It has incredible potential. What an amazing set of inventions he’s created. It’s good to see he’s able to support himself with his inventions, too, unlike some great inventors of the past.

In case you didn’t see it, this is pretty cool…

Using a whole lot of data, Matthew Gray (a googler who started the same day as me) generated a map of the world showing places mentioned in books:

Of course, there’s a lot of bias in the data because it only includes books we’ve scanned, but it’s a really neat visualization. It took 45 minutes to generate the map on google’s servers. It’s amazing to think that things like this just weren’t possible several years ago.

More info on the google book search blog