Category: Science


  • Zoran Perkov is one of the heroes portrayed in Flash Boys. Someone liked my review of the book, which made me re-read the review and setup a Google alert on him. This video was one of the first hits on a search for him. His thing is: Failure is feature of complex systems. Basically when you…

  • This talk resonated very deeply in part because so much of the media I consume. Of the Marvel and DC heroes, Batman and Ironman, two billionaires who are brilliant, resourceful, and psychologically broken are my idols. I love Sherlock Holmes and Frank Underwood for their insights into the frailty of human goodness. Maybe I should…

  • Just Do It

    The “just” part is the hard part. Ego depletion may not be real (another), but it certainly seems so for myself. Recently when stressed, I made lots and lots of bad decisions earlier in the day than normal. These tactics are essentially my own strategy for getting in gym almost every day: Chaining: Add it as…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Sunk Cost Fallacy

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    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…