If you expect me to solve your computer problem, you will have to tell me more than “I tried to go to the website and it didn’t work.”
I’d rather like to know what exactly happened when you tried to go to the website and what error message, if any, you got. Error messages, after all, do have a point: they tell you what went wrong. That can be helpful.
Michael Shermer wrote a book called Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, which I own and have read several times. I always find it fascinating, but recently I’ve been thinking about Shermer’s main point: why, in fact, people do believe weird things.
Shermer’s point can be summed up with a few quotes:
More than any other reason, the reason people believe weird things is because they want to. It feels good. It is comforting.
Immediate gratification. Many weird things offer immediate gratification.
And finally, Shermer lists the last reasons as: simplicity, morality and meaning, and “hope springs eternal.”
I disagree.
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Over on SFN, we’ve been interested in figuring out how to stimulate growth and post volume to allow SFN to expand. It’s an interesting challenge — we have four large competitors (that I know of), and there is no simple “how to get more posts” procedure that we can follow. It’s a seat-of-the-pants venture.
To get a better handle on what we’re dealing with, I’ve compiled a graph and some handy statistics.
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I recently bought Michael Shermer’s latest book, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics.
The book starts off highly interesting: it brings up points about free trade few people have likely considered before, and in general makes interesting observations. Readers of Shermer’s other works, however, will notice a common theme between books — Shermer brings in evolution and intelligent design for yet another battle, and some of his examples from Why People Believe Weird Things are used over again in the new book.
While it is interesting, The Mind of the Market seems to suffer from a catastrophic failure to make a point. Shermer brings in studies and stories and numerous interesting facts, but yet never draws these studies together and offers his own hypothesis or uses them to make a broad point about economics. One can’t help but think that the book is more a compilation of interesting evolutionary economics rather than Shermer’s attempt to advance his theory. There just doesn’t seem to be a common thread between the stories.
So while the book is interesting (like all of Shermer’s work), it seems like it needed some more work and perhaps a strong-willed editor. If you’re looking for an interesting read, get the book — you’ll learn things you’ve never heard before. If you’re looking for a persuasive discourse on evolutionary economics, look elsewhere.
I hear people say they aren’t good at taking tests all the time. “I understand the material, but when I take the test, I fail!”
I can understand this problem for people who get excessively nervous and can’t think when they take the test. But for people who take the test with a sound mind?
I think this is a problem of understanding. I don’t think “not being good at taking tests” is a fair excuse; the problem is far deeper.
Refer to my earlier post for details.
PowerPoint seems to be a popular teaching aid. After all, it saves lots of messy writing on the board or the use of boring overhead projectors. And who doesn’t enjoy bulleted lists swooshing on screen complete with sound effects and little clipart stick figures?
I don’t.
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For those of you interested in how many people visit your blog, go to your blog admin panel and click Plugins. You should see a plugin called FireStats enabled — just activate that and head to Dashboard->FireStats and you should be able to see all the stats you’d ever desire. (It only starts counting when you enable it, so you’ll see 0 hits at first.)
Have fun.
I spend quite a bit of my time helping high school students understand physics and mathematics concepts, so I’ve also spent some time wondering how I can better help them understand things. It’s a tough challenge, because I’ve never been like other people in terms of understanding — I’ve always been such a voracious reader that I can use my prior knowledge to make sense out of things.
I do not, however, see many other people doing the same.
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Some of you might be wondering how we linked SFN and WordPress together. Others are just glad that it does work. For those of you that wonder, here’s the answer.
WordPress and vBulletin don’t integrate easily. (There are plugins for each to make them integrate, but we use WordPress MU — the multi-user edition.) We decided (or rather, dave decided) that the best way to do it would be to hack WordPress to use vBulletin’s user database.
This required writing a WordPress plugin that overrides WordPress’s native login functions using vBulletin’s system. We then disabled WordPress’s own login page and forced it to redirect to vBulletin’s, since WordPress doesn’t know how to create a new session in vB’s system.
From there it was just a matter of beating WordPress with a stick until it worked the way we intended it to.
If you’re interested in being able to integrate WordPress MU and vBulletin yourself, ask and I might be able to help.
Limericks are fun. Science limericks more so.
A woman in liquor production
Owns a still of exquisite construction.
The alcohol boils
Through magnetic coils.
She says that it’s “proof by induction.”
(You’ll want to think about the pun there for a little while.)
- via limerickdb.com
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