Today the United States Government went into a partial shutdown. Also, I happened to have lunch with employees of the Georgia State Archives. (The past couple weeks I have worked on helping with working out the kinks of their move to the Board of Regents information technology infrastructure.) The restaurant where we ate appeared to…
Better Answers & How I Learned to Defrag My Brain first posts this video on Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Then it moves on to talking about Johnson’s blog post The Spark File. (Doesn’t Getting Things Done have something similar?) We have outgrown our ability to remember everything that…
I was driving to dinner earlier today when I saw this event. Mr. Squirrel leaped ran to the side of the road and paused. At first I thought, “Hey a smart squirrel. He’s realized the car in front of me would hit him if he tries to make it.” No such luck. A truck approached…
An The Atlantic article, Dating on the Autism Spectrum, I read last weekend sent me reading more about the Autism Spectrum again. This would be the fourth or fifth time. In my cache of saved articles, I found a link to a NYT piece called Navigating Love and Autism, which suggests not that long ago…
(This post is part of a series. Intro > 1. Illusions > 2. Labeling > 3. Math > 4. Multitasking) This one combines the worst of Illusions and Math. We trust our senses and inadequately assess risk. We have limited capacities for attending to what happens around us. Two or more objects are not being held at the same time in memory. We switch between…
(This post is part of a series. Intro > 1. Illusions > 2. Labeling > 3. Math > 4. Multitasking) Behavioral economics fascinates me. Humans have amazing abilities to miscalculate risk with extreme confidence they accurately assessed it. These appear to be rules of thumb which work in certain situations, but really are not applicable to others yet most people do. Part of the…
(This post is part of a series. Intro > 1. Illusions > 2. Labeling > 3. Math > 4. Multitasking) Homo Sapiens Sapiens cheated evolution in one critical way by creating language. Rather than rely totally on instincts passed along by genes, we pass along an enormous amount of information to our proteges through memes. These may not even be the descendants of our…
(This post is part of a series. Intro > 1. Illusions > 2. Labeling > 3. Math > 4. Multitasking) We like to think only those things we experience exist. Or even can experience. What about those things we can experience that do not or never did exist? That is what illusions are. They are cases where we trick…
We humans laud our superiority over the rest of the world. We even claim to be better than other humans. The chief attribute we compare is intelligence. An interest of mine regarding Psychology in college was failures of the mind. Phineas Gage suffered a brain injury that drastically changed his behavior. That was really cool! Yet, that…