Magazine Stories

Wired - November 2009

Clive Thompson's Flight of Fancy column:

Clive's piece stresses the fact that a little day dreaming might actually be good for productivity. A 2007 study showed that minds drift away from our tasks one-third of the time. Daydreaming can be useful because when the mind drifts the temporal lobe, which processes long term memories become busy thus when you daydream your brain could be doing data storage work...writing to your hard drive! Also a wandering mind utilizes the prefrontal cortex which is involved in problem solving. Thus allowing your mind to wander from one problem to something else might help to highlight a solution to your original problem(?). In the end Clive stresses the possible importance of allowing this drift for increased productivity...heck considering how I work I do this anyway ;-)

Henri Poincaré once said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people "know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling."

Scientific America

Read some articles on the creation of the universe which made me wonder...

- Could we not be a universe created by someone's particle accelerator?

- If the universe expands and we are looking back into history with more powerful telescopes then why can we still look? doesn't it just disappear?

- And another thing why dinosaurs? In the evolutionary cycle why did we go towards these mammoth creatures?

New Yorker

Cocksure by Malcolm Gladwell

An interesting article about the fall of Bear Stearns (click here to see an even more over the top article in Rolling Stones). Malcolm restates the standard thoughts about the financial crisis that could have either been a structural failure meaning regulations didn't work or incompetence meaning investors had no clue in what they were doing with derivatives. Malcolm reviews his possible third reason which was more psychological.

"As novices, we don't trust our judgement. Then we have some success, and begin to feel a little surer of ourselves. Finally , we get to the top of our game and succumb to the trap of thinking that there's nothing we can't master. As we get older and more experienced, we overestimate the accuracy of our judgements, especially when the task before us is difficult and when we're involved with something of great personal importance."

Wall Streeet is a confidence game. Winners know how to bluff. And who bluffs the best? The person who, instead of pretending to be stronger than he is, actually believes himself to be stronger than he is. Malcolm rounds out his story with the tale of Bridge playing...indicating that although Bridge is similar to Wall Street is not quite the same because it is limited in scope with a definite winner and loser depending on how you play by the rules. Wall Street on the other hand is open ended and overconfidence can only take you so far before others see through the B.S.

Good article although in the big scheme of things it is amazing how confident we all need to be to keep this country's engine churning...how a very few egotistical maniacs control our well being...