People without progeny have difficulty conceiving of what it would be like to have a child. This is wildly unexpected. It seems their prediction effort should yield something more veracious, more definitive than an ever-receding mirage of uncertainty, especially since the future they’re trying to imagine is, in many ways, simply a reciprocal of the…
In spite of the facetiously cynical opinion, bolstered by empirical truth, that concludes last week’s post, I think most people would prefer to understand what it is they believe than to opt for the ignorant alternative. Besides the contentment afforded those who answer their internal inquiries, introspective individuals are also well-equipped to defend their beliefs…
If you pour a cup of tomato sauce into a 50 lb bag of chili powder and thoroughly mix, the spiciness of the combination will be very nearly equal to the spiciness of chili powder alone. This exemplifies one of three regimes which, together, I believe, account for all action–>effect pairs. I’ll call these regimes…
People can be led to second-guess themselves when information presented to them differs slightly, in conceivable ways, from their expectations or beliefs. It’s straight-forward to state that the likelihood of second-guessing one’s self grows with the region of overlap between what one had held to be true and the new information.* And for anyone doubting…
The process of moving can be likened to an archaeological dig. I’ve uncovered many forgotten artifacts of times long past. Some of these point to interests I had that waxed and waned: basketball cards, skateboarder clothes, drawings of weapons inspired by a sci-fi radio drama, books with addresses and contact numbers for places to send…
On occasion, our eyes will show us things that capture the whole of our attention and render us immobile, fixated. It is possibly an instinctual response to seeing things that we have never seen before and that cannot be classified as belonging to a group of things with which we are already familiar. This latter…
I was thinking back to a conversation I’d had a few days ago at a friend’s house and realized I couldn’t remember much of what had been said. You can think of conversations as being two-way interactions, but the flow of information can never be symmetric from the point of view of one of the…
If I need to remember to do something in the morning, I throw my pants on the floor or displace an object on my desk, anything that will strike me as odd and cannot go unnoticed when I wake up. I’ll know I purposefully moved the object or threw the pants on the floor the…
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