What Tarot Card Are You?

You are The Tower

Ambition, fighting, war, courage. Destruction, danger, fall, ruin.

The Tower represents war, destruction, but also spiritual renewal. Plans are disrupted. Your views and ideas will change as a result.

The Tower is a card about war, a war between the structures of lies and the lightning flash of truth. The Tower stands for "false concepts and institutions that we take for real." You have been shaken up; blinded by a shocking revelation. It sometimes takes that to see a truth that one refuses to see. Or to bring down beliefs that are so well constructed. What’s most important to remember is that the tearing down of this structure, however painful, makes room for something new to be built.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

SWF files can now be found by search engines

According to a news report from TechCrunch, Flash files can now be found and indexed by Google and Yahoo. Adobe has released new technology that will allow search engines to read links and text embedded in an SWF file. As reported in the article:

Adobe has created a special Flash player for the search engines that acts like a virtual user going through each application. It actually goes through the runtime of each Flash application and translates it into something the search engines can understand. So all of those fancy interactive Flash Websites and other rich Internet applications that have been invisible to search engines, can now be seen by them.

However, this technology is still young. It does allow your Flash files to be found and indexed by search engines, but it will not promise that the same pages with embedded Flash will rank high in the search rankings.

I’m a winner times four!!!

Remember my blog post on Carl Ocab’s birthday contest? Well, whaddyaknow….. I WON!

I was just over at Carl’s blog and found my blog link posted four times on the page. This means I won 4 of the 57 items listed as prizes. I won the following:

• 1 copy of Photoshop CS3 For Dummies worth $17
• 1 copy of Direct Linking X worth $47
• 1 membership to Profit Generator System worth $50
• 1 copy of My First Online Product ebook and videos worth $17

All in all I won $121 worth of prizes. Not bad.

I just sent an email to Carl for further information. Awaiting his reply with delicious anticipation…

Sex on the Brain

Key topics and findings from the April issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior (Vol 36, No 2)

• Mental abilities decline with age more in men than in women. All mental abilities decline with age, but the decline is steeper in men than in women. Furthermore, this effect is independent of sexual orientation.
• Sex differences and cultural variations in mate preferences. Across all participants, the traits ranked most important in a relationship partner are intelligence, humor, honesty, kindness, overall good looks, face attractiveness, values, communication skills and dependability. However, on average, men rank good looks and facial attractiveness more important than women do, whereas women rank honesty, humor, kindness, and dependability more important than men do.
• Associations among birth order, handedness and sexual orientation. The strongest handedness (left- or right-handedness) finding for both sexes is a marked tendency for participants who describe themselves as bisexual also to describe themselves as ambidextrous.
• Sex differences and sexual orientation differences in mental abilities. Across nations, men score higher than women on tests of mental rotation and the ability to judge line angles, whereas women score higher than men on tests of object location memory and word fluency. On average, gay men’s visual-spatial abilities differ from those of heterosexual men—shifted in the direction of women’s abilities. Similarly, lesbian women’s visual-spatial abilities differ from those of heterosexual women—shifted in the direction of men’s abilities.
• The link between sex drive and attractions to men and women. For women, high sex drive is associated with increased sexual attraction to both women and men. For men, however, high sex drive is associated with increased attraction to one sex or the other, but not both, depending on their sexual orientation.

Source:
Springer (2007, May 8). Sex On The Brain. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 27, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2007/05/070507113352.htm

I’ve just been fagtagged!

It’s another round of memes, ladies and gents. This one is from Mckhoii, one of this blog’s visitors. He had me tagged via a comment in one of my blog posts, The Science of Love and Sex. So here it is! Fagtag #15:

1. The Blog Readability Test (now a tag)

***** Start Copy Here *****

1. Take the Blog Readability Test for your blog(s).
2. Paste the result on your site.
3. Copy and paste this tag on your blog (make sure to include the links).
4. Add your link to this tag.
5. Tag as many friends / readers / victims as you want!

1. Intiendes 2. MySpaceless 3. Ice9web 4. CNSQ 5. Malditang Pinay

***** End Copy here *****

It seems my blog can be read and understood even by high schoolers. No need for a degree to know what I’m talking about. Very nice.

The Science of Love and Sex

• Twenty years ago, the American psychologist Robert Sternberg, professor at Yale University, published a very interesting “theory of love”

  According to Sternberg, the truest form of love is the result of the perfect balance between three ingredients:

  Commitment, Intimacy and Passion. If one or the other of these elements is lacking in a relationship between two beings, we may still call it love, but not in the same sense, and we may certainly not call it true love.

  Intimacy can be defined as a need to come together, a “wanting” to be close and a craving to connect with another person. In the steps towards a relationship, intimacy follows passion and precedes commitment.

• In a study by the Bern University in Switzerland, researchers discovered that females were attracted to men with more masculine features when they were fertile, but preferred males with more feminine features the rest of the time. The researches deduced that when females weren’t fertile, they preferred companionship, thus they tended to prefer males that resembled themselves genetically.
• According to a study conducted by the University of Mexico, pheromones and physical symmetry play a large part in the attractiveness of a person. A symmetrical face and a waist-to-hip ratio that falls within a certain range makes a person attractive because they appear healthy and consequently may also produce healthy offspring. Pheromones meanwhile, are olfactory signals that tell the other person that the genetic make up of a potential mate is viable match. Scientists believe that the laws of attraction are based mostly on these two concepts.
• According to a study led by Dr. Devendra Singh of the University of Texas, a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 is a very significant factor in female attractiveness. Females who fall in the ideal hip-ratio range, regardless of weight, are deemed to be less susceptible to disease such as cardiovascular disorders, cancer and diabetes, as studies have shown. Women in this range also have less difficulty conceiving.
• Males tend to focus more on the physical appearance of potential mates. Whilst experts opine that women, tend to look for men who can protect and sustain them, thus attributes such as wealth and personality become important factors as well.
• According to University of New Mexico’s evolutionary biologist Randy Thornhill, testosterone shapes a man’s face, making a larger lower face and jaw and a more prominent brow. In the BBC’s ‘Sex ID,’ the program took two pictures of one person, altering one to produce a more defined brow and jaw, while leaving the other one untouched. Both photographs were shown to women, who consistently chose the altered photograph as ‘more masculine.’
• Large eyes and a full mouth are considered female facial attributes (think of French actress Bridget Bardot), and science traces this “ideal” to estrogen. The hormone caps the development of a woman’s facial structure, resulting in a smaller frame and giving prominence to the eyes and the lips.
• Men are also subject to the “ideal” waist-to-hip ratio of 0.8 to 1.0, regardless of weight. In the study conducted by the University of Texas, most males who fell into the ideal ratio were also less likely develop cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and diabetes. This correlation further underlines that theory that attractiveness and health are tied up together.
• A study by the University of Western Ontario focused on the genetic make up of long-time married couples and found that similar genetics, specifically on hereditary personality traits, play a vital role in the longevity of a couple’s relationship. Researchers believe that certain genes work well in tandem, thus they advise people to look for mates whose personality traits are similar or complementing to theirs.
• A McMaster University study showed that humor plays a very important role in relationships, but there is a stark difference between the sexes in terms of what makes humor fulfilling. According to the study, men like women who laugh at their jokes, while women prefer men who make them laugh. Once again the researchers traced these preferences to similar genetics and hereditary personality traits- basically a couple has to have the right combination of similar and complementing characteristics to up their chances of staying together.
• Numerous studies have linked pheromones, which affect the olfactory system, with attraction and sex. For example, a pheromone component in male sweat increases the level of cortisol in women (cortisol is associated with stress, including arousal, in humans). Cortisol may also be the cause for the synchronization of menstrual cycles amongst groups of women in close proximity.

Top 20 Contributing Factors in Ranking High in Google

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag - Placing the targeted search term or phrase in the title tag of the web page’s HTML header.

2. Keyword Use in Body Text - Using the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page.

3. Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords - Topical relevance of text on the page compared to targeted keywords.

4. Keyword Use in H1 Tag - Creating an H1 tag with the targeted search term/phrase.

5. Keyword Use in Domain Name & Page URL - Including the targeted term/phrase in the registered domain name, i.e. keyword.com plus target terms in the webpage URL, i.e. seomoz.org/keyword-phrase.

6. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure - Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page

7. Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages - Do links on the page point to high quality, topically-related pages?

8. Age of Document - Older pages may be perceived as more authoritative while newer pages may be more temporally relevant

9. Amount of Indexable Text Content - Refers to the literal quantity of visible HTML text on a page

10. Quality of the Document Content (as measured algorithmically) - Assuming search engines can use text, visual or other analysis methods to determine the validity and value of content, this metric would provide some level of rating.

11. Global Link Popularity of Site - The overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web (both link quality and quantity)

12. Age of Site - Not the date of original registration of the domain, but rather the launch of indexable content seen by the search engines (note that this can change if a domain switches ownership)

13. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site - The subject-specific relationship between the sites/pages linking to the target page and the target keyword

14. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community - The link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world

15. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site - The frequency and timing of external sites linking in to the given domain.

16. Anchor Text of Inbound Link.

17. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site.

18. Topical Relationship of Linking Page.

19. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community - The link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world.

20. Age of Link.

These following components may negatively affect a spider’s ability to crawl a page or its rankings at Google.

* Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots.

* Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index.

* External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites.

* Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages.

* Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming).

About the Author: Jon Bergan is the owner of Bergan Blue, an Australian based creative design firm focused on bridging the gap between the online world of the Internet with the offline world of Marketing. Please visit http://www.berganblue.com.au for more information.