Nov 24 2010: On the other hand, did you know that the enforcement of bike helmets actually made the number of bike/car collisions rise? There's a few guesses why, but as they're guesses you can just look it up yourself. Basically, unintended consequences and all that. My brother got hit by a car twice on his bike and my sister once, but none of us fell off for no reason and hit our head. I actually flipped my bike once, but always managed to land on my side.
Oct 4 2010: I remember a few years ago there was a similar biodegradable styrofoam substitute made from seashells, which worked perfectly well for food applications.
Sep 28 2010: As amazingly complicated as a human connectome is, it's not even the biggest part of understanding our brains. To use his analogy, that a connectime is like that wall of wires between devices, and as long as it would take for you to determine the purpose of every connection, it would take longer for you to determine the exact function of every one of those connected devices. A single neuron is responsible for your recognition of any aspect of a person, for example, and neurons take on more than one job at once, too. That's not even getting into gillial cells, 10x more common and we know even less about them; it was recently discovered that gillial cells can talk to any nearby gillial cells, merge with and split from other gillial cells, crawl to a different part of the brain entirely, and talk with neurons. That's all that's currently known about them, but that's a lot of functionality they have.
Sep 21 2010: I actually don't have any problem meditating in a chaotic environment; I think people mainly have trouble reading or thinking or studying when it's not silent is because they're told they should have a problem with it. Haven't you ever worked so intently on something that you lost sense of your time and surroundings? The whole point of meditation is to find your inner calm, not bask in outer calm.
Sep 19 2010: @murray: He went on to say he didn't care about other's definitions because his definition is what mattered to him, and that we shouldn't care about his definition either, because our definition is what matters to us. ;)
Sep 17 2010: Most of these aren't actually broken things. Broken is like the cab situation at the beginning, it could work better for everyone. "Greedy assholes" isn't a broken thing. You can't go and say "it'll work better for me if you do this different", the whole point is that they're getting what they want, and they don't care how much it sucks to be you. As nice as it is to say "well there should be consequences for this", the fact is until they are, nothing's going to happen. Nothing's going to happen because it's working perfectly, it's just not working in your favor.
Sep 3 2010: Oh yeah, there's studies on that too. In a nutshell, being told you did a good job when you actually did a bad job and seeing someone else being challenged when they do a good job instead of being praised makes people think they, well, did literally unspeakably bad, and that the teacher has given up all hope on them ever doing better.
Aug 21 2010: It's a good idea to make school more gamelike; games are how people are built to learn things. Games are how /mammals/ are built to learn things. I remember a story (probably from here) where a polar bear in full hunting mode was gonna eat a dog, but the dog gave off play signals, and the polar bear, mid-hunt, decided it'd rather play than eat that day.
Jul 31 2010: In America, that's 'soda water'. Also, there's 'tonic water', which is is soda water with quinine in it, hence a 'gin and tonic'. I haven't personally heard of 'whiskey and soda' being popular here, but then again I'm not a big drinker.
Jul 31 2010: Although I can just barely tell the difference between coke and pepsi if they're side by side, I don't have those two choices because America is a grand land of choices, I have them because Pepsi and Coke both want my money in exchange for a particular flavor of sugar water.
Also, while logically having, say, a thousand choices is going to be a bigger pain than having ten, no one is going to want to randomly strike out nine-hundred ninety choices, because we're made to figure out the best thing to do, no matter how much work that actually is.
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A comment on Talk: Kim Gorgens: Protecting the brain against concussion
A reply on Talk: Eben Bayer: Are mushrooms the new plastic?
A comment on Talk: Sebastian Seung: I am my connectome
A reply on Talk: Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from
A reply on Talk: Seth Godin: This is broken
A comment on Talk: Seth Godin: This is broken
A reply on Talk: Derek Sivers: Keep your goals to yourself
A comment on Talk: Seth Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world
A reply on Talk: Sheena Iyengar on the art of choosing
A comment on Talk: Sheena Iyengar on the art of choosing
Also, while logically having, say, a thousand choices is going to be a bigger pain than having ten, no one is going to want to randomly strike out nine-hundred ninety choices, because we're made to figure out the best thing to do, no matter how much work that actually is.