Off to the Galapagos
Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends, and a great week to the rest of you. I will not be blogging for a bit, because I’ll be vacationing in the Galapagos, with my favorite evolutionary biology books no doubt at my side.
Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends, and a great week to the rest of you. I will not be blogging for a bit, because I’ll be vacationing in the Galapagos, with my favorite evolutionary biology books no doubt at my side.
The New Yorker recently published a very nice article on Pope Francis. At one point in the article, the Pope explains why he is trying to deemphasize all the controversies that have taken up so much of the Church’s attention in recent years, controversies about birth control, abortion and the like. His explanation shows a respectable…
Schmidt once said: “In the future, people will spend less time trying to get technology to work … because it will just be seamless. It will just be there. The Web will be everything, and it will also be nothing. It will be like electricity. … If we get this right, I believe we can…
My kids are interested in learning how to use Facebook. So I figured it was time for me to learn something about this tool, meaning that at the ripe young age of 47, I’ve joined the ranks of the Facebook users. Now I need help from all of you to teach me how to learn…
The key to good policymaking is to understand human nature. Want to increase how much money people save? You better know what they will do if you change the tax code. Want to reduce the threat of terrorism? All the security in the world won’t suffice if you don’t, at the same time, find ways…
As someone who has been working in the field of behavioral economics for a couple decades now, I have long been aware of what psychologists call “the availability heuristic.” This was a phenomenon described by Kahneman and Tversky in some of their seminal research from the early 1970s. I recently came across a nice example…
I thought I would share this wonderful poem with you: For eleven years I have regretted it, regretted that I did not do what I wanted to do as I sat there those four hours watching her die. I wanted to crawl in among the machinery and hold her in my arms, knowing the elementary,…