Here's a good one. No really, pay attention to this: guys over at Duke University and the University of Waterloo conduct this study, right? What they find is that merely thinking about Apple makes a person more creative. Subjects who were shown the IBM logo for a fraction of a second were rendered stupid. Check it out.

Wired news says that "after researchers flashed the company's logo in front of test subjects for an imperceptible 30 milliseconds, they discovered that people actually started behaving in ways associated with Apple's brand image, thinking differently, and apparently, more creatively."

They used IBM logos for the same purpose, particularly to see how creative one can get with bricks. They concluded that subjects "exposed" to the Apple logo scored 30 percent higher than their IBMed classmates, as far as creativity went. Do they actually fund these studies...?

Well sure they're going to be more creative. The Apple logo has round edges, a bite, a leaf floating above it, it's three dimensional (there are some shadows in there too), all engraved on what looks like a rough surface, with thousands of dots. The way I see it, all these elements can lead to:

Added feeling/passion - a round-edged design is endlessly more appealing than, plain straight lines (such as the IBM logo)

Asymmetry (the bite) - encouraging one to break the rules every now and then, take chances, put on a bold attitude and so on (much like Steve Jobs really)

Endless possibilities (the floating leaf) - heck, if leaves can float, surely we can make a laptop that weighs 3.0 pounds (1.36 kg), measures 0.76 inches (1.93 cm) at its thickest point and 0.16 inches (0.4 cm) at its thinnest... out of bricks.

An image of how matter behaves around us - those dots forming the rough surface on which the Apple logo is studded can potentially give a person more sense of understanding how chaotic, yet well orchestrated everything is, at a molecular level.

I'm joking, of course. I'm not buying this one bit, although there's a certain amount of obvious truth to the results of the study - The Billings Phenomenon: The conclusions of most good operations research studies are obvious.

As for the IBM logo... why did they use the IBM logo for comparison anyway? The dam' thing looks as if it's actually "made" of bricks. Of course it's going to limit your imagination to using bricks the old fashioned way. Just look at it... Jeez!