I went to buy a book. There were a chaos of options in the used list at the same price. Because these were used, there were descriptions of quality headlined with: Acceptable Good Very Good Like New All but new were represented at the cheapest price level. So naturally I looked through the very goods for the…
(This post on black-on-black crime is satire. Thought I would point that out before someone gets too upset over it.) A Georgia state lawmakers showed concern about the amount of black-on-black crime. He is obviously referencing the FBI homicide statistics for perpetrator race. Fortunately the actual number is lower than the 98% he claimed. But he’s not…
Lots of people claim the reason cats present dead animals to their humans is because they are trying to teach the human to hunt. (Mental Floss, IFLScience, LiveScience) At one point I probably agreed with this. This conclusion rests on cats treating their human as a kitten. I wonder if there is something else at…
Several people I know talk about having sleep issues. One of the highly cited things of late is that the blue light from our electronic devices messes with our brains to reset the Circadian rhythm making us fall asleep later. Even I use f.lux to change the light of my computer to a warmer tone just…
I first encountered the Fibonacci number series around 10 or 11 taking a class at the university offered to kids to make them excited about learning. In addition to math, I took rocket building, speed reading, and others. About this time I hated school, but I really enjoyed these because those teaching it always approached the…
In economics, a sunk cost is any past cost that has already been paid and cannot be recovered. For example, a business may have invested a million dollars into new hardware. This money is now gone and cannot be recovered, so it shouldn’t figure into the business’s decision making process. … from How the Sunk Cost…
The legal system heavily relies on eyewitness testimony. The erroneous thinking is that human memory works like a movie: events are committed to an infallible permanent storage system. Instead each time we recall a memory, we recall the memory of an earlier memory. If a detail was missing, then we can fill in information. The…
Choice overload first came to my attention through reading The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. (Schwartz’ strategy.) Sheena Iyengar has some newer research on choosing. The difficulty is people BELIEVE they need more choices to make a good decision. Lots of choices make us happier in part because we invest more time making one which in…
Stress is not our enemy. Kelly McGonigal says if you believe stress is bad for you, then it increases your risk of death by 43%. Those also stressed who do not believe it to be bad, do not die anymore than others with low amount of stress. (Gosh, I love the power of the mind.)…