Unlike “How to Create a Brain,” which I love but mainly appeals to computer scientists. And unlike “Connectome,” which would appeal to anyone who loves science. I think “Brain Rules” would be fun to read for just about anybody. But then my brain is wired completely differently from yours, so what do I know?

A Boy and his Atom

AppStoreRankings.net is a really cool site for SEO. It lets you compare your App with your competitors in reference to ranking for a particular keyword. It gives lots of great stats on keywords, such as how many people are searching using that keyword and how difficult it is to rank highly with that keyword. It gives you suggestions on how to improve your rankings based on keywords. It lets you see your competitors’ keywords.

And it does all this in an intuitive interface with nice charts and graphics.

For example, here is a graph of how our HotelPlanner app fares against Booking.com in the travel category:

Here is an example of how well we rank with regard to the keyword “Hotels.”

This screen compares the keywords used by Expedia with those used by HotelPlanner:

This page shows how we’ve ranked for the keyword “Booking” over time as compared with Expedia. Notice that it also shows that 952 iphone apps use the keyword “Booking.” The traffic value of 6.8 tells you a lot of people search with this term. The difficulty of 5.1 measures how hard it is to place well with this keyword on a scale from 1 to 10.

There’s a keyword optimizer, a keyword suggestor, and the paid version lets you track multiple apps and multiple competitors, among other things.

Overall, this site is very well done. I think it is going to be very useful for improving our rankings. I’m looking forward to putting it into practice.

Utlimately, Connectome is about how neurons are connected… what we know, what we conjecture, how we know what we do, what we can expect to know with future developments. He speaks of the 4 R’s: Regeneration, reconnection, reweighting, and rewiring as fundamental processes of connectomics. He conjectures about “connectopathies” of certain diseases. He describes the tools used on living and dead brains, and the resolution of the information gathered by each. He even delves into the fantastical realms of Kurzweillian brain uploading.

I cannot begin to recommend this book enough to anyone with the slightest interest in how the brain works. Get it. Read it! Thank me later.

Sencha Touch is a MVC framework that leverages HTML5 and CSS3 webkit. You can package the website as an iPhone or an Android app. So this is my plan for the next few weekends.

Oh… and I still loooovvveee my Dell hi-res monitor.

I bought a thunderbolt adaptor for it so I could get the highest resolution, and once I realized there was a menu that you activate with the side buttons to select your input, it worked right away. No issues. It comes with several cables, but not one that would give the Macbook hi-res.

Update: The next day I returned this monitor. It turns out that a 1080p monitor doesn’t give you more desktop space because it magnifies your windows much bigger than you would like them. When I use cmd-minus to make text smaller to see more of it, it is so pixelated I cannot read it at all. So today I ordered a Dell U2713HM-IPS-LED CVN85 27-Inch Screen LED-lit Monitor from Amazon. I’ll let you know how things go Tuesday when it arrives.

Ten-minute interview with Ray Kurzweil on his new position at Google

You can sign up for Ray’s newsletter at KurzweilAI.Net. It is always full of amazing state-of-the-art research.

#!/bin/sh
# -------
# Usage sh unusedImages.sh (jpg|png|gif)
# -------
# Caveat
# 1 -
# NSString *imageName = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"image_%d.png", 1];
# This script would incorrectly list these images as unreferenced. For example, you might have
# This script will incorrectly think image_1.png is unreferenced.
# 2 - If you have a method, or variable with the same name as the image it won't pick it up

PROJ=`find . -name '*.xib' -o -name '*.[mh]' -o -name '*.storyboard' -o -name '*.plist'`

for imageName in `find . -name '*.'$1`
do
   name=`basename -s .$1 $imageName`
   name=`basename -s @2x $name`
   name=`basename -s ~ipad $name`
   name=`basename -s @iPad $name`

   if ! grep -q $name $PROJ; then
        echo "$imageName"
   fi
done