Medieval scholars made surprising progress, despite living in an age in which people routinely judged the truth of statements not according to empirical evidence but by how well they fit into their pr...
Appreciate the absence of bad luck, the absence of events that might have brought us down, and the absence of the disease, war, famine, and accident that have not—or have not yet—befallen us.
Your amicable words mean nothing if your body seems to be saying something different. —JAMES BORG I
We are inclined, that is, to see movie stars as more talented than aspiring movie stars and to think that the richest people in the world must also be the smartest.
The normal distribution describes the manner in which many phenomena vary around a central value that represents their most probable outcome;
Robert Frost wrote in 1914, Why abandon a belief / Merely because it ceases to be true.
One trader even believed that relieving himself in the wrong toilet would bring bad fortune. Actually he was a bond trader who confessed his secret to a CNN reporter in 2003.
Little is known about Boyle’s mother, other than that she was married at seventeen and proceeded to bear fifteen children in the next twenty-three years, then dropped dead of consumption, which by the...
In 1794, Lavoisier was arrested with the rest of the association and quickly sentenced to death. Ever the dedicated scientist, he requested time to complete some of his research so that it would be av...
If someone were to ask about your taste in fine dining and you were to say, I lean toward food served with vivid adjectives, you’d probably get a pretty strange look;
While a jar of ground cinnamon may contain four hundred insect fragments.
In 1904 he applied for a promotion from patent clerk third class to patent clerk second class and was turned down.
Thomas Edison is often said to have advised, To have a great idea, have a lot of them.
The participants gave higher ratings to the studies that confirmed their initial point of view even when the studies on both sides had supposedly been carried out by the same method. And in the end, t...
The modern concept of the unconscious, based on such studies and measurements, is often called the new unconscious, to distinguish it from the idea of the unconscious that was popularized by a neurolo...
The lesson is that, though we expect our best thinking time to be when we are fresh, our elastic thinking capacity may be highest when we feel burnt out. That’s good to know when scheduling your tasks...
The eye that sees is not a mere physical organ but a means of perception conditioned by the tradition in which its possessor has been reared. —RUTH BENEDICT
The appeal of many conspiracy theories depends on the misunderstanding of this logic. That is, it depends on confusing the probability that a series of events would happen if it were the product of a...
The answer lies in a phenomenon called regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinar...
Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing w...