Month: February 2008

Women prefer taller men. That’s probably a good thing from an evolutionary perspective. If the preference worked in the other direction, eventually our descendants would evolve smaller and smaller until squirrels ate them. The usual explanation for why humans have certain preferences in mates is because the preferred traits signal…

I have a new favorite politician. I have no interest in his policy stance or effectiveness, but somehow that doesn’t matter. My new hero is French President Sarkozy. Recently he was making his way through a crowd for some public event and went to shake the hand of a man…

If you haven’t been following the story of the man who was fired for posting a Dilbert comic at work, here’s a link to Fox News’ coverage. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,331543,00.html [no longer available] The man who got fired is David Steward. I asked him for his resume so I could post it…

In this week’s Dilbert, Wally is fired for posting a comic that calls managers drunken lemurs. There’s some background to that story, in case you missed it yesterday on Good Morning America. http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/WaterCooler/story?id=4323900 And here’s the link to the Dilbert series that continues for a few more days. http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20080220.html [no…

See the latest updates highlighted. The goal is to have a house with the best design for the money, not necessarily the cheapest. But you could easily add or subtract from this design to hit almost any budget. If you aren’t interested in house plan designs, and most of you…

In yesterday’s post I said, “A 71-year old man like McCain is mentally slower and less flexible than a younger person, and more likely to have his job performance impacted by a major illness.” Many of you objected to my agism. It appears that there were three reasons for objecting:…

I’m fascinated by how people make decisions when faced with lots of unknowns, such as when they pick a presidential candidate to support. The usual method, as far as I can tell, is to pick what you think is the most important of the unknowns, take your best guess about…

Before you say “Someone already did your idea,” I should point out that no one has done it quite the way I’m describing it. What I’d like to see is a pen pal web site designed to end war. The idea would be to connect citizens in different countries at…

I wonder if there is one ultimate floor plan that would satisfy 90% of all homeowners. As you know, must houses are laid out inconveniently. You have your “never use” rooms by the front door, your laundry room on a different floor from the bedrooms, and your dining room down…

In the U.S. presidential race, Hillary Clinton is claiming more experience than Obama. I wonder how useful experience is when you are president, given that every situation is completely different from the last. I can see how experience would be useful for just about any other sort of job. If…

I have noticed that the person living in a household who pays the energy bills is the only one interested in turning off the lights when leaving a room. Given human nature, this is unlikely to change. That’s why I have two inventions to close the gap. The first invention…

I know there is something wrong with me because I enjoy reading stories about frozen waste from airplane bathrooms that falls to Earth and almost kills people. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/calgary/story/2008/02/07/ice-roof.html?ref=rss [no longer available] When I think of the ways I could die, almost all of them are better than being killed by…

As I have mentioned before in this blog, I love reading stories about scientific or medical breakthroughs that seem at first promising but are virtually guaranteed to be utter crap in the long run. I find that I can generate enough artificial belief in the here and now that I…

If you took these three people and morphed them together, who would you get? 1. Frank Sinatra (from the skinny Rat Pack years) 2. Sammy Davis Junior 3. Bobby Kennedy