Swans on Tea

The Unpersuadables

Don’t confuse them with facts
At this point, Judi forwarded me their correspondence, along with a despairing note. She is probably somewhere drinking right now.
You see, like me, she can remember a time when facts settled arguments. This is back before everything became a partisan shouting match, back before it was permissible to ignore or deride [...]

“A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything”
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Annoy and upset in ten (expensive) moves
Sex
Once you’re having carnal relations with someone it’s a fair assumption that you already approve of each other to a high degree. Don’t let that fool you into believing there is no room left for upset. There is a little known companion volume to the Karma Sutra which lists [...]

Aisle placements affect grocery sales, research shows
Using the cross-category items of chips and soda, the researchers found that stores placing the items facing each other in the same aisle increased weekly sales of those items by more than 9 percent. In contrast, moving the chips and soda one aisle away from each other resulted in [...]

What I Would Do With This: Groceries
I’ve known this for years: the express line isn’t necessarily the fastest lane at the grocery store, or fastest per item, because of the overhead of the transaction (paying, getting change, etc). I knew this even before Apu spilled the beans (Mrs. Simpson, the express line is [...]

Chad’s guest post at the X-Change Files
Talking Incentives
[T]he first thing I want to do is take issue with the question’s phrasing. While it’s commonly believed that scientists lack communication skills, that’s very far from the truth.
It is almost impossible to be a successful scientist without also being a good communicator. Communicating results to other scientists, [...]

Realizations of Rounded Rectangles
Time for an expert: I asked Professor Jürg Nänni, author of the exemplary Visual Perception, a book detailing our best-to-date scientific understanding of the processes involved in visual cognition. “Could rounded rectangles actually take less effort to see?”
Nänni confirmed my theory: “You are absolutely right. A rectangle with sharp edges takes indeed [...]

In an earlier post I eschewed a rant, because I figured I’d go too far afield from the original premise of teaching kids to argue. Chad’s post, The Loud Bigotry of Blog Conversations reminded me that I had this post tucked away on a shelf.
Chad makes an excellent point about blog discussions, which I [...]

Eating al desco
I was recently eating lunch ‘al desco’. While I was eating-working, a student walked in my office to ask me a question, saw I was eating lunch at my desk, and said “Oh, I’m so sorry for interrupting your lunch. I’ll come back later.”
I was stunned. This has never happened to me before.
I’ve [...]

How to Teach a Child to Argue
And let’s face it: Our culture has lost the ability to usefully disagree. Most Americans seem to avoid argument. But this has produced passive aggression and groupthink in the office, red and blue states, and families unable to discuss things as simple as what to watch on television. Rhetoric [...]

Periodic table gets a new element
More than a decade after experiments first produced a single atom of the element, a team of German scientists has been credited with its discovery.
The team, led by Sigurd Hofmann at the Centre for Heavy Ion Research, must propose a name for their find, before it can be formally added [...]