Early last week on Twitter, some National Security Agency posters showed up, reminding NSA employees to watch what they said. @AnnFinkbeiner: Do NSA people really need that much reminding? They’re not reminded, they run around singing like birds? @father_kipz: To be honest, humans are social animals and easy to hack. The constant reminders probably do […]
Behavior
I used to snicker at people who religiously read their daily horoscopes. Astrology is not science. Not even close. “No one has shown that astrology can be used to predict the future or describe what people are like based on their birth dates,” some exasperated person at NASA wrote in a Tumblr post debunking a […]
This first ran March 1, 2017. I recently had dinner with the woman in this post. I wish I could have dinner with her every week — I can’t, she has too many other friends who also want to have dinner with her — because I want to study her, I want to see how […]
It began with a software engineer in India. The man’s email signature says that he works in “Dreams Sustainment (Offshore).” His note with the subject line “Regarding INC5760131” referred to some technical issue that was virtually incomprehensible to anyone who was not among the email’s intended recipients. And there were a lot of unintended recipients. […]
This first ran May 17, 2013. The running kids are thinking about college now and going to proms. I don’t see them running any more, not in that way that looks like they’re powered by lighter-than-air energy sources. That’s fine, they’re still astonishingly beautiful. And any racing around that needs to be done, the juiced-up […]
Beginning in April, the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine will no longer be able to provide patients with homeopathic remedies funded by the UK’s taxpayers. This is part of a larger UK crackdown on homeopathy that has gotten underway over the past 18 months. Late in 2016, homeopathy was banned in one of the country’s […]
Decision fatigue is real. Decision fatigue is the mental exhaustion and reduced willpower that comes from making many, many micro-calls every day. My modern American lifestyle, with its endless variety of choices, from a hundred kinds of yogurt at the grocery store to the more than 4,000 movies available on Netflix, breeds decision fatigue. But […]
The psychology department is a small, squatty building on the west side of campus. It has a weird exterior, a vaguely geometric set of slats that surround the building, probably to cover up the ailing stucco beneath. You’re five minutes late. With a backpack slung over your back, you hustle down the hall, looking for […]