Tag: General nonsense

It occurred to me recently that I have developed quite a few tricks for engineering my own happiness. Allow me to share a few. Some are more obvious than others. Food – Observe your own mood, and that of others, in the context of how recently they have eaten. If there’s…

I heard a report on NPR about an auto insurance company giving drivers the options of putting GPS tracking devices on their vehicles to lower insurance rates by as much as 30%. The idea is that, for example, the device could confirm to the insurance company that the car wasn’t…

I deleted today’s post. My regular readers have the capacity to deal with this sort of topic but it gained a bit too much attention from outside my normal reading circle. Knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Here’s a list of three things that you are unlikely to do, at least in this order: 1.       Watch a Swedish movie called The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo2.       Read about the Swedish sex charges against Julian Assange3.       Book a vacation to Sweden I am always amused by the strange impact…

Suppose a company offered you a billion dollars in exchange for a portion of your privacy. To make this arrangement palatable, imagine that the company promises that your data will only be used anonymously. You don’t totally trust them, but it’s not as if you rob banks in your spare…

I have a hypothesis that “Crazy Eyes” is a real thing. We know that a person’s eyes can reveal certain types of emotions. For example, your pupils will widen when you look at someone you love.  That’s why attraction is so hard to hide. I’ve spent the past few decades…

In the early eighties I had a neighbor who studied computer programming in college but didn’t pursue it as a career because he believed it had no future. His reasoning was that software coders were the future secretaries of the world, someday doing little more than rearranging the code written…

Let’s say that you and I decide to play pool. We agree to play eight-ball, best of five games. Our perception is that what follows is a contest to see who will do something called winning. But I don’t see it that way. I always imagine the outcome of eight-ball…

I’m thinking of starting my own stock fund. The fund would buy and sell the DOW index according to two simple rules. To be smart, the fund would stay on the sidelines if the market was crashing for some obvious reason. But in normal choppy markets, it would be coming…

One of the biggest problems with the world is that we’re bound by so many legacy systems. For example, it’s hard to deal with global warming because there are so many entrenched interests. It’s problematic to get power from where it can best be generated to where people live. The…

A few of you wondered what I meant by active listening in the context of a conversation. Maybe you want to be a good listener without being bored out of your frickin’ skull. I’ll tell you how. The worst kind of listener is the topic hijacker. Let’s say you enjoy snowboarding and…

Imagine an advanced alien life form that materializes on Earth in the middle of a popular dance club. The alien has a cloak of invisibility and observes the humans dancing. He is here to watch and learn. My question is this: Would the alien ever learn to distinguish good dancers…

I’m sure you’re all following the iPhone 4 story. If you hold the phone a certain way, it drops calls. In a press conference on the subject, Steve Jobs said, “We’re not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy.” Jobs…

Did you notice on the Dilbert.com home page that there’s a new search box above the strip? You can now search the entire Dilbert archive by key word. Once you find the strip you like, you can easily have it put on a mug, t-shirt, mouse pad, or water bottle….