Interesting & Relevant Things

He did one of my favorite bits on ideas. Big ideas. Where ideas come from: Now he's back. His first few shows are already fun. I l...

Handy calculators to tell you what "percent" you're in: Nice map-based calculator from the New York Times for the US. Bea...

Jonah Lehrer covers memory in Wired. I can recall vividly the party for my eighth birthday. I can almost taste the Baskin-Robbins ice cre...

Excellent piece in the New York Times. It starts off about how Target (and other retailers) use statistics to predict precisely when you...

The association between physical warmth and emotional warmth is strong, and also mostly subconscious. Room temperature, a warm touch, and ...

Rachel Maddow regularly slams Glenn Beck. So this was cool to hear: Glenn Beck was my favorite person of all time in radio. When he was...

Countless studies ( summarized by Laura Schenck) have shown that people overestimate themselves: Professional Competence : The vast major...

In 1936 Dale Carnegie wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People. One of his six ways to make people like you: Remember that a person...

NPR covered the most recent of many blind test of violins. This time professional musicians tried to tell the difference between two Strad...

The Hunger Games meets my criteria for great literature. Whatever your age. It's totally a commentary on our society: class, povert...

Surviving Progress  explores the social, political and economic mechanisms driving us toward seeming self-annihilation. At one point Simon J...

It can be hard to find the precise visual metaphor for an idea. The hair color one isn't quite there. Sure, hair color is like paint...

Evolutionary biologist Peter Larson filmed a throng of "barefoot" runners in NYC, many wearing those funny-looking Vibram finger s...

...learn to die. Dramatically. Beautifully. With spewing blood and claw hands and death gurgles. Learn from the master of  dramatic deaths :...

Not every profession has them, but coaches apparently rock. You have to work at what you’re not good at. In theory, people can do this the...

Some ascribe to the Kurt Vonnegut theory of drama : “Because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we thin...

Going to a large, diverse university should expand your horizons, right? Size of [friendship] opportunity leads to the ability to fine-tu...

Veteran actor Billy Merritt's the three types of improv performers: "A pirate is happiest when he swings on board a boat ready...

The classic Stanley Milgram experiments  might not actually be all about blind obedience to authority. Any time the experimenter said, ...

Lera Boroditsky, a cognitive psych prof at Stanford, describes how language shapes our very perceptions of time, space, and self. There ar...