It’s time to read this article on procrastination.

Scientific American Mind published a well-written article on procrastination back in December 2008, but I keep putting off writing a little note on that article.    Today, however, I decided to get to it because the stark irony of putting it off anymore was annoying me to no end. I should re-emphasize: I really do suffer from procrastination, and I have really put off writing about this article. The article was written by Tricia Gura, and it is titled "I'll do it tomorrow." What is procrastination? It's not the mere tendency to schedule some tasks for later times. The term more properly applies where someone puts off tasks that have greater urgency than the tasks they are going to do instead. Gura explains that procrastination "carries a financial penalty, endangers health, harms relationship and ends careers." Yet many of us continue to procrastinate-- the article estimates that 15 to 20% of adults "routinely put up activities that would be better accomplished right away." Procrastination can also be seen as a symptom of a deeper problem: "Procrastination is about not having projects in your life that really reflect your goals." [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingIt’s time to read this article on procrastination.

Scary News from the Christian Coalition

I did not opt out of the Christian Coalition newsletter mailing list that someone unknown signed me up for some months ago. It helps to keep an eye on what the other side is up to. The Aug 5, 2011 issue includes the following scary observation:

"Critics and supporters of the Budget Control Act ... agree that the Tea Party now controls the agenda in Washington D.C. As one who attended Glenn Beck's Tea Party event last August -- along with over a half million other Tea Party supporters -- when looking at the hundreds of thousands of families near the Lincoln Memorial on Washington D.C.'s Mall, I realized that those families represent the large majority of the American people, as anyone with any kind of commonsense would.

Why in particular do I find this scary?
  • Open admission that The Tea Party (not even an official political party) controls the actions of our legislature. This group is a powerful vocal minority, arguably smaller but richer than the 1980's "Moral Majority."
  • Lack of fact checking: The attendance of the Glen Beck event is well established by several independent sources. They range from Beck's hopeful "300,000 to 600,000" and Michelle Bachman's "at least a million" to several actual counts from aerial photos between 60,000 and 87,000.
  • The massive innumeracy that equates "thousands of families" with "large majority of the American people." Please divide several thousand by hundreds of millions and show that this is somehow more than half. 87,000 / 330,000,000 = 0.00026 or somewhat less than a majority, however you massage it.
  • The implication that the openly theocratic ideals of the Tea Party are somehow related to common sense. Even Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" argued against a government supported by the church (as is England's).
  • And in totality, the tone that says that the oddball ideals of this group are somehow mainstream. They seem hopeful about Lenin's maxim that a lie told often enough becomes the truth. And the Christian Coalition is all about The Truth.

Continue ReadingScary News from the Christian Coalition

Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam explains how he did his cut-out animations

Have you ever wondered how Monty Python's Terry Gilliam did his cut-out animations? In the following video, he shows exactly how he did his work, and the techniques he used were quite straight-forward. Gilliam's results were nonetheless extraordinary thanks to the creative imagination he employed in his work: Gilliam used thousands of pre-existing images. Watching this video made me wonder whether he was ever sued for copyright violation, given that he created an endless stream of derivative works (I'm assuming that he would invoke fair use).

Continue ReadingMonty Python’s Terry Gilliam explains how he did his cut-out animations

Black Swan moments approaching

Even since my workplace put a television screen in the lunch room, I've gotten a regular dose of the kinds of things that TV offers. I find it incredibly distressing to see that this is the sort of information America relies on. Based on my re-acquaintance with live TV, I know that next week, while the financial markets roil (or not), we will have lots of Black Swan moments by all of the financial "experts." Namely,

The Black Swan Theory or Theory of Black Swan Events is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept that The event is a surprise (to the observer) and has a major impact. After the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight. The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:
-The disproportionate role of high-impact, hard to predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology -The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities) -The psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs.
Truly, I don't know if there's any sort of "expert" that annoys me more than financial markets "experts," especially highly credentialed well-coiffed economists who "explain" things only after they already know that those things have happened. When has any such expert ever had the courage to predict a major development in the market ahead of time?  How many "experts" predicted that they market would lose 7% last week (or even predict that it woudl lose 2%?).  I suspect that I (and I'm not a financial investment expert) could make up lots of "reasons" for anything the market does, as long as you tell me what happened before I need to give my reasons.   If the market went up 1%, I'd say, "You see, the DOW is up 1% because Ben Bernancke stuttered in a press conference and China's 3rd biggest computer factory is 17 days ahead of schedule. And, oh yeah, because a butterfly flapped its wings in Dayton." I could get away with this kind of crap for many years, especially if I were a fast-talking TV "expert" whose pathetic record (i.e., whose lack of meaningful predictions) was (almost) never held up to ridicule. We should make these jokers always videotape their analyses the day prior to the market-day they are analyzing. We should make them record their analyses in that same cock-sure tone of voice they use when they "explain" what has already happened. If we did that, 99% of them would look like idiots. They can't predict short-term markets any more than a historian can predict what will be in tomorrow's newspaper. They lack the honesty to say that they don't know. Or maybe they are so arrogant and dense that Dunning-Kruger runs rampant. Let the silliness begin on Monday.

Continue ReadingBlack Swan moments approaching