Reality Upgrade

Ever wonder just who your second cousin, twice removed is?

Maybe not, but if you are wondering just how you are related to your Cousin’s Cousin’s Niece’s Grandfather, Wolfram Alpha is your key to success.

Check it out here at the Wolfram Alpha Blog.

Now you can go to Aunt Merideth’s fifth wedding with no fear. Well, except that you might have to dance with Aunt Merideth.

We all like to think that our every decision is based on careful, rational analysis of all sides of a subject. That we weigh opposing facts and opinions, and carefully decide on the best option we can. Our decisions are our own, and they are good decisions.

Not bloody likely.

In fact, your decisions are probably based mostly on years of paying attention to things that reinforce your pre-existing opinions, and ignoring things that challenge what you believe.

This is a phenomenon known as Confirmation Bias, which is what happens when your brain uses its amazing filtering powers to filter out everything that you subconsciously think is unimportant. As soon as you think about something, like a movie for instance, your subconscious filter decides that it must be important, so it stops filtering out that movie.

And then you start seeing the movie EVERYWHERE.

Anyway, it is a fascinating feature of our brains, but it can be very problematic. It tends to falsely reinforce our beliefs, which can be dangerous. Beliefs are fine, just be aware of why you believe what you do, and make sure you understand the affect that confirmation bias can have.

To read a little more about confirmation bias, take a look at this fantastic article about it, from youarenotsosmart.com.

Enjoy!

No, I’m afraid I haven’t come up with a new vampire repellent spell.

Unless by “vampire” you mean “blood-sucking insect” and by “spell” you mean “bugspray”.

The point is, with summer here in full blast everyone is going outside a lot more, and that means a lot more exposure to biting and stinging insects. And that is no fun for anyone.

Luckily, Lifehacker has our collective back. This is a great article about how to keep away the nasty little biters this summer.

Enjoy!

I once had jury duty while running my own electrical contracting business, and I actually had to run to a restaurant and do an emergency repair on their electrical panel during my lunch break. Not fun.

If only I had known that I could have been excused from jury duty simply by explaining that I was the sole proprietor of my business.

If you find yourself in similar situation, here is a great list of ways to get your jury duty moved or rescheduled, from Lifehacker. They got the list from MyTwoDollars.com, but they filtered out the stuff that is somewhat morally questionable.

Enjoy!

Belief is a powerful thing, and it is amazing how subconscious expectations can affect our performance on so many levels. Simply by believing that a given outcome is going to happen drastically improves the likelihood of that outcome. I have talked about this before, in the context of body language.

This article from Bad Science talks about an amazing study on the effects of lucky charms. Test subjects were given a series of tests along the lines of this one: One group was given a golf ball and told that it was the “lucky ball” and the other group was given a ball that “everyone uses”. The test was to get a hole in one at 100 cm, with 10 tries per subject. The group with the “lucky ball” performed more than 35% better on the test, with an average of 6.42 versus an average of 4.75 for the group with the ball “everyone uses”.

The article talks about quite a few more tests, but the results all seem to indicate that our subconscious beliefs really do influence reality.

Cool, huh?

This is a fascinating article from the Washington Post about hoarding. It is the story of a man (Michael S. Rosenwald) who’s extreme hoarding was beginning to ruin his marriage, so he went on a quest to understand why he feels compelled to hoard.

It is a rather long article, and is more of an autobiographical tale than a scientific study, but it is interesting to see the world from the point of view of someone who has a hard time getting rid of stuff. As he mentions in the article, we see people who are buried in their possessions on television, but it is rare to see it from the inside. Enjoy!

Jonas out.

Routines. They are easy to acquire, and hard to change.

Humans are creatures of habit, and there is nothing wrong with that. Habits make doing repetitive things easier, it makes complicated tasks easier to remember, and frees us up to think about other things while we take care of routine tasks.

But habits are only useful when they are good habits. This great article by Lifehacker suggests that you might want to review your habits, and think about whether or not they are serving you well. Could changing some of your routines make you happier?

Probably so.

Most people under the age of thirty have an almost instinctive understanding of how to set up technology. We understand the basic rules of how these devices should work, and we think like the people who wrote the manuals. We grew up with this stuff.

On the other hand, this can make us complacent. This is a great article from Lifehacker about settings that you should change on your wireless router. Some of them you may have already done, but you might have missed some. I did.

I’m not telling which ones though. You would loose all respect for me.

Anyway, check out the article, and then go fix your router.

Cheers!

If you are anything like me, you have never, ever, ever had a vase full of flowers in your house.

On the other hand, not many people are like me…

In any case, if you do on occasion keep cut flowers in a vase, this is a great article from Lifehacker about how to keep the flowers fresh longer.

If you don’t feel like reading it, the gist is this: if you crush a few aspirin tablets up with the back of a spoon and dump the powder in the water with the flowers, the aspirin will keep bacteria from growing in the water, which will keep the flowers fresh longer.

Have fun!

Self control. We exhibit self control all the time, in all sorts of ways.

When I sit down to watch a movie, I really enjoy eating a bowl of ice cream while I watch, even though I know how bad it is for me. Sometimes I know I should go to bed and get some sleep, but I stay up watching TV instead. And sometimes, I just want some french fries.

What is interesting is when I am able to resist the temptation, and when I give in. When I have a long exhausting day at the office, chances are I am going to be busting out the ice cream scoop when I get home. On the other hand, if I have a nice easy day at work, I might cut up an apple instead, or skip the movie completely and go running.

As it turns out, the reason I fail to resist temptations sometimes is because I have used up my self control, or will power.

There have been many studies done on this subject, but in this particular study test subjects are given two plates, one with radishes and one with chocolate chip cookies. One group of subjects is told to eat only the radishes, and solve a complicated (and unsolvable) puzzle. Another group was told to eat the cookies, and solve the puzzle.

On average, it took the cookie-eaters 19 minutes to give up, and it took the radish eaters 8 minutes.

This is because the radish-eaters were using up their willpower on resisting the cookies, and therefor had less to spend on trying to solve the puzzle.

By remembering that willpower/self control is a limited commodity, it is possible to make decisions about where to spend it. If you have a big test tomorrow, maybe tonight you should let the house cleaning go. If you don’t want to drink too much at a party, maybe you should not go window shopping before hand. And whatever you do, don’t go car shopping if you have used up any of your willpower at all.

On the other hand, willpower can be trained, just like muscles.

The idea of exercising willpower is seen in military boot camp, where recruits are trained to overcome one challenge after another. In psychological studies, even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity. People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework. Other forms of willpower training, like money-management classes, work as well.

- NY Times

So start with small changes, something as small as brushing your teeth with your opposite hand, and slowly build up to bigger challenges, and your willpower will increase over all.

I have talked about this before, here, and mentioned another article about it from the NY Times.