On Distractions
Widower Woodrow Wilson fell in love with Edith Galt in 1915. The President’s doorkeeper summarized the situation tersely:
“She’s a looker; he’s a goner.”
Widower Woodrow Wilson fell in love with Edith Galt in 1915. The President’s doorkeeper summarized the situation tersely:
“She’s a looker; he’s a goner.”
According to a Gallup Poll, 1 in 4 people who are dependent on alcohol (they scored 20 or more on the World Health Organization’s Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test — AUDIT) think their drinking is average or less average. It seems that beer goggles don’t just make OTHER people look better! (Click here to view…
In recent posts, I’ve presented several interesting pictures of how arbitrary thresholds influence behavior. I showed how airplane pilots speed up flights to make on-time arrivals, but don’t speed up late flights that won’t make it on time. I’ve shown that the price of used cars changes when the mileage on the odometer passes arbitrary round…
“An extroverted mathematician, goes an old joke, is one who looks at your feet while he’s talking.” Alex Stone recounts this joke in his book, Fooling Houdini, which I wrote about in a previous post. As a philosophy major, I love to think there might be a college major more full of nerds and introverts…
Put A Number In The Headline For example: “7 Ingredients of a Successful HuffPo Headline”
The surgeon told the Weindel family that the operation had gone well. He had taken Dale Weindel’s stomach and cut it into two, and rerouted his small intestines so that all the food Weindel ate would now pass through the smaller portion of his stomach. He had given Weindel a “gastric bypass” operation, the best…
In a tremendous article in The Smithsonian Magazine, Richard Conniff writes about the largely unexplored oodles of microorganisms that make us what we are. The article overflows with wonderful facts: for instance, that there are 150 microbial species, on average, behind your ear, and 440 on the inside of your forearm. Not to mention the…