November 2010
24 posts
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best thing i read today: Misery as Motivation →
Harvard Business Review suggests entrepreneurship is compensation for personal weakness and inner misery.
the egg theory
When instant baking mixes were introduced in the 1940s, some did well (piecrusts, biscuits) and others did not (cake mixes). Marketers wondered why this was the case.
One theory was that the cake mixes simplified the process so much that women did not feel as though they had actually made anything. A piecrust or a biscuit were just a component of a larger meal, but a cake was its own course. A...
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why is a turkey a turkey
Today I learned how turkey got its name, thanks to the newsletter to which I am newly subscribed, Now I Know. Now I Know was recommended to me by a w.i.l.t. reader who sends out a daily dose of something he finds interesting.
So turkey. It’s actually indigenous to the US and Mexico. The bird, considered a delicacy, was brought to Europe via merchants in the East. It wholesaled out of Turkey...
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“Economic Man makes logical, rational, self-interested decisions that weigh costs...”
– The Marketplace of Perception : Harvard Magazine
(new ambition.. neuroeconomics!)
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best thing i read today: Sorry, But Your Soul Just... →
This was a celebrated essay written by Tom Wolfe, first published in 1996. It was referenced in an article I recently read, and it’s great - especially reading it in retrospect.
It’s describes Wolfe’s fascination with neuroscience, and his fear for the repercussions of the prominent idea of neuroscience at the time that we are all hard-wired.. genetically predispositioned to be...
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You Fix the Budget →
The NYTimes interactive deficit project is great. With just some cuts on spending and a few tax increases (carbon), and some major changes to medicare (capping it in 2013?), I fixed the budget! Easy enough, right?
But apparently, nobody cares about the deficit.
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The Power of FREE
A few weeks ago a club here in New York had an event with free tattoos. (I can’t figure out which, but it mayyy have been this event at 3rd Ward.) Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics, sent a research assistant to observe.
In the 5 hours the researcher was there, from 9pm to 2am, she observed 76 people, ages 18 to 47 with an average age of 26, sign up for a free...
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The Economics of Seinfeld →
Just stumbled upon this site, yadayadayadaecon.com. It is operated by three econ professors who select clips from Seinfeld to illustrate economic concepts like price ceilings, moral hazard, cost-benefit analysis, game theory, arbitrage, etc.
Some examples:
The Bottle Deposit episode, where Newman and Kramer scheme to take bottles from New York, where the deposit is 5 cents, to Michigan, where the...
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“Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that...”
– What we can learn from procrastination : The New Yorker (via Instapaper)
Great article explaining different schools of thought on procrastination. Those described are:
ignorance - if we act against our own interests, it must be because we don’t know what’s right
the planning fallacy - people...
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237 reasons people have sex
A friend of mine is taking a sex class at Harvard. She told me about a study they read that found there are 237 reasons that people have sex. It was written up in the NYTimes a few years back.
Per the abstract of the study, the first part used a nomination procedure to identify “237 expressed reasons for having sex, ranging from the mundane (e.g., ‘I wanted to experience physical...
San Francisco Bans Happy Meal →
An ordinance was just passed in San Francisco that requires meals to meet certain nutritional guidelines if restaurants want to include a toy with purchase.
On a similar note, Yale researchers just released a report on fast food nutrition and marketing. Some interesting findings were
only 12 of 3,039 kids’ meal combinations meet the researchers’ nutrition criteria for preschoolers
...
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but the real question is, would you WANT to live...
I once knew a guy who thought we would live to be 400. I found it endearing, but had figured that, given historical increases in life expectancy over time, that likely would not be the case.
But then I watched this TED Talk by Aubrey de Grey. He’s a British researcher on aging who claims he has drawn a roadmap to defeat biological aging.
He believes we can identify what causes...
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best thing i read today: Inside the Minds of... →
A super interesting article I finally got to today. It provides some examples of the consciousness of animals. Most fascinating anecdote was how Kanzi, a 29 year old male bonobo, knows 384 words, can build thoughts and sentences, and when he tried kale, he named it “slow lettuce” because it takes longer to chew than regular lettuce.
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Slurpee Summit
This is kind of funny. Throughout the midterm election campaign, Obama made a joke about Republicans “standing, watching us, sippin’ on a slurpee” while Democrats did all the work for the country. He later joked in a press-conference about Republicans and Democrats meeting for a “Slurpee Summit,” saying “they’re delicious drinks.”
Now 7-Eleven is...
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on New York
THIS versus THIS