Topics about how people think and learn (especially children), and various tricks and techniques for teaching — not just school learning, but *life* learning.
When I was in my late twenties, I ran across a checklist for depression. I was shocked to discover that I had nearly every symptom listed on it, and had for more than twenty years. I got treatment for it and discovered that life was nowhere near as difficult, painful, and pointless as it had …
Science versus superstition. Nothing new, but interesting nonetheless.
You know, there may be a lot of truth to this. But I think there’s more going on there than today’s science alone can explain. I do keep my eyes open around machinery (mechanical, electrical, or electronic), and I tend to understand it very well, by a combination of aptitude, interest, and training. But when …
Continue reading ‘“What Lucky People Do Differently than Unlucky People”’ »
This one‘s fun. I couldn’t figure it out until the guy turns the board sideways to make it obvious.
When you think about it, this makes sense, due to the way the brain works. I would never have thought to try it though.
Comedogenic. Obviously from the same root as comedian and comedy. Presuming you don’t already know what it means, you’d think that it has something to do with generating comedy. Well, I suppose it kind of does. Humans can be pretty cruel at times.
Have I ever mentioned that the late Richard Feynman is one of my heroes? This is a perfect example of why — he could have taken the easy way out and given a BS answer that would have satisfied the interviewer, but instead he tried to explain why he couldn’t explain it properly, while giving …
Continue reading ‘“Why Richard Feynman can’t tell you how magnets work”’ »
It will be interesting to see how this develops over time.
Though a failure on the privacy front, this video is amusing to watch. Does anything strike you as odd about the movements of the curtain? Probably not, because we’re all habituated to computer-based automation and its limitations. But if it were controlled by a human, it would act quite different, anticipating the movements of the …
Continue reading ‘“Robotic privacy curtain moves across window to block snoops”’ »
I found this to be an interesting article, but the essay that it links to fascinates me. Partly for the content, but even more for the erroneous thoughts it contains. For example: […] procrastinators know all too well the allures of the salient present, and they want to resist them. They just don’t. That’s not …
Continue reading ‘“The Many Reasons We Procrastinate, Including the Multiple Selves”’ »