National Geographic has just published a terrific article summarizing the many ways in which animals think. Here’s the article. You can watch a short accompanying video on this topic of animal cognition here. I like the approach to both the article and the video. They are both centered around large beautiful portraits of many…
I am a wealthy person, but not in the way most people understand “wealthy.” I don’t drive an expensive car (I drive a 9-year old Saturn). I don’t own a vacation house. I don’t expect to retire for many years.
I am wealthy because I am a survivor. I have repeatedly escaped adversity and I’ve repeatedly stumbled into enough lucky situations. These unplanned events add up to an undeniable and compelling form of wealth.
When most people consider how “fortunate” they are, they engage in some form of “accounting.” For starters, they add up their savings and they subtract amounts they owe to others. That gives them a financial base line. There’s more to figuring wealth, of course.
Some people consider their health when they assess their wealth. If their bodies are in tolerable working order, that’s something well worth noting, especially for those over thirty. Among people discussing age, I often assert that after thirty, “age” is mostly about health rather than chronological age. Young adults snicker at this (I used to). But imagine a room full of forty-year olds. Everyone in the room is about forty, but just look how different they are! Some of them look and act like they’re 25 and others are functional 75 year olds, often due to obesity, history of injury or illness, lack of exercise, poor nutrition, lack of sleep or various detrimental addictions. The bottom line is that if you’re body is working even tolerably, that’s a big plus when figuring …
Here's a composite photo of the Earth at night, published by NASA: The brightest lights correlate with the densest populations. No political boundary lines are visible, of course. I once had a framed poster of this sort of image in my office. One of my co-workers asked: "Did they take that…
Those guys who send out spam by the bucket-load are really busy these days. In the past month alone they have tried to sneak more than 9,000 of their fake comments onto this site. These "comments" are attached to links to various sites selling drugs, loans, pornography and you name it. …
We do many inefficient things. Why don’t we simply do those things differently, in a more efficient way? Often, we don’t change things because we’ve done them a certain way for so long that it would take too much time and psychological effort to do them in new ways, even though the new ways would be easier and more inefficient in the long run.
The QWERTY keyboard is a great example. We could rearrange our keyboards, which would cause us to struggle with our new configurations for a few months or years, but then we’d all be better for the change. We don’t do this, however. It would take too much initial effort.
Scientific theories are quite often strained by the discovery of new evidence that doesn’t fit the theory, yet we cling to the old inadequate theories. This is another tendency toward path dependence. For example, until the 17th century, “epicycles” were used to explain the perceived retrograde motion of planets and stars. Epicycles were finally discarded in response to Kepler’s work. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn pointed out that scientific progress does not occur smoothly, but rather in the form of periodic revolutions that that he termed paradigm shifts. The fact that scientists tend to hold onto old unworkable theories longer than they should can be seen as another manifestation of path dependence.
It would make a lot of sense to simplify the spellings of many words used in the English language. We don’t do …