I was at the park the other day throwing pinecones at my kids when a horrified mother asked, “How can you hit your kids with pinecones!” I said it was pretty easy: you just don’t lead them as much. First, this is important because my brain is almost completely incapable of accessing the proper pop-culture comeback (in this case, Full Metal Jacket) until the middle of the night after it was needed.
Here's how I roll: my wife loves three-dollar bagels from the Sunday farmers' market. And so she says, "let's get a loaf of bread, some flowers, and a flat of strawberries!"When we roll home with only bagels, I feel I've won. No more. I've armed myself with the tools of illogic, thus guaranteeing I win every marital argument from this point forward. You can too.Use the following brain-deflating fallacies to ensure dominance in debate club and/or with unsuspecting significant other.• Appeal to Ignorance: if it isn't proven, it's false—"Did you SEE me bogart the last of the jamocha almond fudge? No? Well, there you go."
Humans are very, very bad at being random. In roshambo, aka rock, paper, scissors, this leads to probabilities and patterns which you can exploit to give your RPS opponent(s) severe and repeated thumpings. There are two ways to go about this: knowing the psychology and creating new psychology.
Your brain is used to trying to win rock, paper, scissors. And so if you happen to see rock coming down, it's much easier to adjust your throw mid-flight to shoot paper than it is to adjust your throw to scissors (both, by the way, are cheating).
Think you're rational? Think again. Here's but one example, gentle reader, of your brain unbound by reason.Blue Devil basketball tickets are a hot commodity: there are far more fans than seats. And so some students enter a ticket lottery. After one of these lotteries, Duke researchers posing as ticket scalpers found that students who lost the raffle were willing to pay $170 for a seat, while students who won tickets would only sell their seats for an average of $2,400.
For many hundreds of years, people in Eastern Europe have treated epileptic seizures with the quick administration of shoe smell. This smell (and specifically this smell) has the power to arrest the seizure, or so says the folk wisdom. Fact or fiction?
Imagine you wanted to predict when sheep would chew. (Don't ask why...just imagine.) Here's how you would do it: attach speakers to the tops of sheep heads to broadcast chewing sounds. Collect chewing sounds and their times in a massive database. Feed these data into a neural net, which would recognize input (times) and output (chewing or not chewing) and eventually learn to predict when one leads to the other. This is what neural nets do: they predict the future by quantifying the past.
Yesterday I posted the highly insightful and scientifically bullet proof (wink-wink, nod-nod) Robin Hood Morality Quiz—you shoulda ranked Robin, Maid Marion, Little John and the good sheriff of Nottingham from most-to-least moral. Check the chart below to see how disturbed you are. Percentages are of total respondents.• RH, LJ, MM, SN: A moralist with conventional ideas. Old fashioned. 5% total. • RH, LJ, SN, MM: Massively puritanical. Women conspire against men. 2% total. • RH, MM, LJ, SN: Your philosophy is a confused mix of romanticism and moralism. 4% total.
Read the following story and then rank Robin, Maid Marion, the sheriff of Nottingham and Little John from most to least moral (I'll post interpretation instructions tomorrow): The sheriff of Nottingham has finally caught Robin Hood and Little John! Instead of killing them immediately, he makes the mistake of all storybook villains in simply stashing them in the dungeon. Despite their track record of heroics, there the two benevolent outlaws rot--until Maid Marion shows up pleading her love for Robin and begging for his release. Sure, says the sheriff, if Marion will sleep with him.
If you're thirsty and you drink, your brain feels pleasure. You feel this same pleasure, borne of satisfying a physical need, when someone you envy is brought low. We call this feeling schadenfreude, but researchers at the National Institute of Radiology in Japan call it dopamine release in the ventral striatum.
I've been a blog slacker and for that I deserve a spanking. My vote is from the capable hands of the UCLA women's volleyball team. But that's another story. Here's the real story: country music kills. I've long known that country music makes me want to grab a lariat and hang myself from the nearest old elm tree. And now I find I'm not alone: social psychologists Steven Stack and Jim Grundlach found that the more a city's radio stations play country music, the higher the white suicide rate(1).Seriously.
According to a 2007 press release by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, every year 33.1 million people are injured by consumer products in the home. No one is safe and constant vigilance is required to avoid maiming and/or death (paraphrased). Here are the prime offenders:1. Magnets: If a child eats your wedding ring, it will pass. If the same child eats both your wedding ring and a magnet, the two might attract through intestinal walls, creating a massive kink and making it very difficult to retrieve your ring.2. Recalled Products: At cspc.gov, you can sign up for e-mail notification of recalled goods. With about 400 recalls a year, you can rest assured that your in-box will be a constant source of terror.
We have ten fingers and ten toes (or, most of us do. Exceptions include the noted alpinist Reinhold Messner, who has only three toes and seven fingers. Luckily, this leaves him with ten total digits and thus Messner presumably has little inherent, morphological difficulties with the decimal system). Because of our built-in base-10 bias and the fascism of our system of mathematics education, we humans have come to view the decimal system as the only logical way to count. We count to nine and then as we raise our second thumb, we stick a placeholder in the next column to the left. But computers don’t conform to the evolution of human bone structure. They can only count to two. (Technically, they can only count to one, starting at zero.) This is binary.
