What I Learnt Today

I now realise that I was wrong on August 23rd. I apologise.

Why waste time reading the adventures ot the Poky Little Puppy and travelling the world with Scuppers the sailor dog?

Millie will get quite a surprise when she opens her stocking from Santa this Xmas. I’ve asked the big man to bring some special presents from Nerdy Baby and Think Geek.

Introductory Calculus for Infants is the storybook adventure of two friends as they discover the wonders of calculus. “If I’ve told you n times, I’ve told you n + 1 times… clean your room”. Because life is all arithmetic

I spent way too much time colouring-in pictures of Richie Rich and the Wacky Races. How easy would physiology have been if I had The Coloring Book For Very Young Scientists. Over 60 pages with puzzles and activities like colouring intracellular components, counting subatomic particles, and a simple board game following a little girl as she studies to get her PhD. Can you find the complete circuit? Can you identify different types of cellular life? Or help Darwin’s finches choose their next meal? 

Finally, in a world where elements collide, only you can create order out of chaos. The Peridoic Table Building Blocks allow you to ‘learn while you build’.

I can’t wait to see the look on Millie’s face.

[via Gizmodo]

Why do people behave the way they do? And what is the meaning of ‘happiness’?

These questions have been the life work of Daniel Kahneman.

Prof Kahneman may be the only non-economist to win the Noble Prize for Economics (2002). He is professor emeritus of psychology at Princeton University, and is known as one of the ‘fathers’ of the field of Behavioural Economics for his work on the psychology of judgement and decision making. He has often been included in lists of the world’s great thinkers.

In the TED talk below, from October 2010, Professor Kaheman explains that each of us is made up of two selves – the experiencing self and the remembering self.

The experiencing self lives each of the 600 million ‘psychological moments’ that make up our lives. The remembering self ‘keeps score’, and constructs the stories through which we create memory and meaning.

The remembering self is the one that makes most of our decisions. Kahneman makes the point that we seem to choose our vacations in service of the remembering self, rather than the experiencing self – thinking of our future as anticipated memories. Yet we spend very little time ‘consuming’ these memories. (You can think of this the next time you see someone spending their wedding day creating photos, rather than enjoying the ‘experiencing self’.)

The question of whether one is happy therefore is a ‘cognitive trap’. Whether one is satisfied with one’s life in general has a poor correlation with how one is feeling at the moment.

Just recently, Kahneman released his new book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow‘, which describes the two systems that drive the way we think (Intuitive and emotional, or deliberative and logical). It has been judged as one of the best books of 2011.

I think this is a terrific example of a TED talk. We have mentioned TED previously. Incidentally, last week TED  released a new iPad and iPhone app which allows you to download and save selected talks, and also has a ‘radio’ function that automatically streams talks of interest.

http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html

What I Learnt On 4th December in other years

4th December 2013 Email on your Mac – a brief history. And don’t miss the launch of MailPilot today!

Hey Rocky, Watch Me Pull a Rabbit out of my Hat

But that trick never works.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love learning magic tricks.

Libraries used to be the best place to source new stuff- classic texts such as ‘The Rpyal Road to Card Magic’ and the ‘Tarbell Course in Magic’ haven’t been surpassed.

Magic tricks have always been expensive to buy – most of the cost of a trick is the secret, rather than the equipment itself.  It has also been difficult to access in Australia. When I was growing up, Sydney’s only magic shop was  ‘Weirdo’s’, in the Windsor Arcade – now long gone. Hey Presto (84 Pitt St) has taken its place.

The Internet has completely changed the way magic is sold. DVDs and ‘gimmicks’ can be purchased easily from the USA, or in some cases downloaded ‘instantly’. Even when buying locally, you can preview tricks online, and read reviews by professionals at sites such as The Magic Cafe.

Penguin Magic is to magic as Amazon is to books. It is the big daddy of online magic shops – with thousands of tricks. Most have video previews.

At the moment, Penguin Magic is offering ‘The Greatest Beginner Magic DVD Ever‘ for free! The downloadable DVD features well known magic teacher Oz Pearlman, and runs for fwo hours. All the equipment needed is readily available at home – and you can download it instantly.

That is most definitely good value.

Penguin know that half the fun is the anticipation of waiting for a trick to arrive once you have ordered it. They add to the excitement by providing a link to a video of your own order being packed in their warehouse. This is the video of my recent purchase being packed. Now I really can’t wait for Santa to arrive.

Here’s some more real magic from Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Baz Lurhman had a hit single called ‘Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen‘ in 1999. The lyrics are taken from an essay “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young“, written by columnist Mary Schmich and published in the Chicago Tribune on June 1st 1997. 

PS Noone should watch the John Saffron version, which includes advice like:

Wear sunscreen, but only if its that coconut oil that gives you cancer. Keep your old love letters. If you see an old lover in the street, try to run them over in your car. Don’t mess too much with your hair, otherwise by the time you’re 35, you’ll look like Greg Matthews. 

Learn how to smoke Winnie blues. If you’re underaged, get an older kid to buy them for you.  

Travel as often as you can. Live in New York City once. Live in northern California once. Never live in Adelaide – it’s a hole.