links aplenty

Anger can encourage creativity, briefly.  You should probably calm down before you start ranting.  That doesn't help anyone.

...angry people produce a higher volume of ideas, as well as more creative ones than their non-angry counterparts. The study’s authors reason that anger is usually accompanied by a feeling of intense energy and a less-structured style of thinking, two factors that lead to creative forms of brainstorming.

More on the subject at Scientific American.

I've described in the past that teachers claim they like creativity but also that creative students can be annoying as heck.  Freakonomics has more in a similar vein.

The irony is that as a society, we’re constantly talking about how much we value creativity. And yet, the study implies that our minds are biased against it because of the very nature of its novelty. The authors point out that we often view novelty and practicality as inversely related. We generally value practical ideas because they’re familiar and proven, while the more novel an idea, the more uncertainty there exists about whether it’s practical, error-free, or even useful. 

Original research here.

At Boingboing, Doctorow discusses self-publishing.

Mainstream publishers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over decades learning and re-learning how to get people to care about the existence of books. They often do so very well, and sometimes they screw it up, but at least they’re methodically attempting to understand and improve the process by which large masses of people decide to read a book (even better, decide to buy and read a book).

I firmly believe that there are writers out there today who have valuable insights and native talent that would make them natural successes at marketing their own work. If you are one of those writers – if you have a firm theory that fits available evidence about how to get people to love your work – then by all means, experiment! Provided, of course, that you are pleased and challenged by doing this commercial stuff that has almost nothing in common with imagining stories and writing them down. Provided that you find it rewarding and satisfying.

scientific data collection and 14-year-olds

This active, hands-on approach to science is in keeping with Levi’s firm belief that "the most effective way to learn is through the apprenticeship model." "There’s no reason why you can’t get meaningful scientific data from 14-year-olds," he says. "Science is about hard work and endurance. It doesn’t matter what age you are."

The colors of good and evil in comics:
At colorlovers (via Boingboing) they have made an infographic that:

has a bunch of quirky facts about how certain colors can give more insight into their personalities and hero type. Another neat aspect that I think you'll like is how the infographic discusses the different color schemes for DC and Marvel and shows how they set the trend for future comics. 

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