Some of my sports fan friends are a single game fan.When the season is over, they have nothing else about which to talk until recruits are chosen for the next. Over the past week, I saw a couple countdowns for certain baseball players to report to spring training. Since October they waited for this. Football,…
In part I, I attended a Christmas party where others kept moving to different rooms of the house. They would move and only later would I notice I was alone. In part II, walking home, there were cars everywhere. Some were even parked on top of houses. There was a crowd noise up ahead. It…
Steve Jobs passed away yesterday. So naturally the fanatical fans were devastated, the normal fans were sad, and the rest of us understood. Comparisons made to Martin Luther King, Jr, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Edison, and yes even Tony Stark seemed maybe somewhat exaggerated. Though not by much. He possessed intense curiosity, powerful intuition, great vision and…
From Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don’t Know How to Use CTRL+F: This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don’t know how to use…
Watching The Brain. In talking about Tiger Woods’ putt, they guess that he really has consciously removed all anxiety by entering “The Zone”. (Must be old.) The physical manifestation of this is supposed to be his lack of blinking. Now that Tiger is not doing so well, does this mean he is blinking a lot…
Towel Day is an annual celebration on the 25th of May, as a tribute to the late author Douglas Adams (1952-2001). On that day, fans around the universe proudly carry a towel in his honour. From towelday.org. According to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar…
Interesting case where four of the numbers on Lost (4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42) came up in a big prize. What is more interesting to me is that maybe over 9,000 played them. (I say maybe because people only seem to be referencing the number of $150 winners by LOST creator’s Twitter.) Let’s…
This mention reminded me of a study where men experienced difficulties remembering the news when the speaker was a beautiful woman. Beautiful women should take up chess. Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gransmark wrote a Stockholm University working paper in which they found that male chess players pursue riskier strategies when they’re facing attractive…
Recently, Patrick asked how many geeky teeshirts do I have? I have 17 unique shirts. (Bought multiples of a few.) Bruce asked how many have a picture on Facebook? He had posted many of the pictures of me and most of those involve a geeky teeshirt. Thinkgeek Shirts got root? /Everyone stand back/ I know…