Thought of the Day from Albert Einstein
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
Behavioral economists have written a lot about sunk costs. The idea is pretty simple: once people have invested in an effort – in time or money – they stick with that effort longer than is otherwise justified. They don’t want to feel like they’ve wasted their investment, so they continue to invest even when pulling…
I will not be posting any new material to my website until I finish enjoying the holiday season, a season that will culminate with a trip to Minnesota to visit my family. That means leaving the warm comfort of my North Carolina home, for what I expect to be some seriously cold weather. But what…
“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…
I could go on quoting Abraham Lincoln all day long, for he was one of the finest writers of his or any time. Here’s one very special quote, where Lincoln uses the metaphor of a snake to make distinctions between slavery itself being bad, versus policies to limit slavery to the south, versus policies to…
From time to time in this blog, I take a moment to celebrate fine writing. Here is an example I came across in an article in Smithsonian magazine from May 2014. The author, Corey Powell , was trying to explain how astronomers use gravitational “tug” to indirectly reveal the existence of planets. In other words, they can’t…
I don’t read much war history. I’m fascinated by what causes humans to end up in a state of war, but not so interested in the bloody details of how they fight their battles. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed The Day of Battle, a book by Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson. The book covers the war…