http://www.anthonyology.com A collection of ideas. Mon, 13 Apr 2009 05:14:49 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Happy Easter to everyone! This post also marks the death of this blog, and the resurrection of it here. http://www.anthonyology.com/?p=408 While talking about the growth of VLTs, Nelson says the following: I’m always fascinated when people get addicted to virtual things, which often times seem to boil down to a game that involves risk and intermittent reward — where does this tendency come from? There is a large class of human behaviours ... http://www.anthonyology.com/?p=401 (Also see this post.) What is risk? In investment, the term is often used. "What is your risk tolerance?" is an example. In reality, the chance of something occurring (as in a deterministic universe) might be 0 or 1. Typically, when people are talking about risk, they are talking about an estimation ... http://www.anthonyology.com/?p=397 [Optimism] inhibits lucid thought, it shuts down core reasoning centers and seems to inflict terrible damage on memory. It is optimism that continually causes us to lose our respect for limits and to have unrealistic expectations of what we can achieve, which leads us to set ourselves up for failure ... http://www.anthonyology.com/?p=387 It seems that a lot of time and effort has been put into designing better jet engines for airplanes, for example, but relatively little has been put into designing better customer spaces within those airplanes. Perhaps some of this is itself by design (that is, airplane companies want to differentiate ... http://www.anthonyology.com/?p=384 Why do people tip? I'll restrict this to tipping related to eating. Custom. It is difficult (i.e. impractical) to question many or most things about how things are done, so people just do what the custom is and don't question whether it is beneficial to themselves or not. Status. They believe tipping ... http://www.anthonyology.com/?p=382 One problem with many "conservative" critiques of media messages is that they grapple too much with the content of what is being sent. It is clear that most media messages utilizing sexual imagery, for example, exist simply to sell products, and once understood in this light the idea of trying ... http://www.anthonyology.com/?p=378 Fumbled Mumblings has an interesting post on mutual funds. I know little about them, and have tried to focus investment on areas of which I have some relative understanding. (For example, I have avoided investing in real estate because I don't understand the market forces affecting real estate prices, rental ... http://www.anthonyology.com/?p=370 I noticed that GMail has an Offline feature in their "Labs" (experimental features that may change or not be completed). If you use GMail, you can enable by logging into your GMail account, clicking Settings, Labs, and then select to Enable the Offline feature. You can then click the Offline ... http://www.anthonyology.com/?p=362 I'm now starting a 21 Day No-Complaint Experiment (go 21 days without complaining, start back at 0 if you notice you complain). In discussing his own 21 day experiment, Tim Ferriss offers the following definition: I defined “complaining” for myself as follows: describing an event or person negatively without indicating ... http://www.anthonyology.com/?p=354