Jonah Lehrer on Distractions, ADHD and Creativity
For instance, researchers have found a surprising link between daydreaming and creativity—people who daydream more are also better at generating new ideas. Other studies have found that employees are more productive when they're allowed to engage in "Internet leisure browsing" and that people unable to concentrate due to severe brain damage actually score above average on various problem-solving tasks.
Justifies spacing out and/or getting sucked into Wikipedia...
The U.S. Government: An insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army
The budget ends up like the yard of a man who owns only a lawnmower: The grass is trim, but the trees are overgrown and the ivy is everywhere and the gazebo is falling apart. Yet we keep mowing, because that’s what we feel able to do.
Budget "repair" has been beaten to death recently, nationally, within Wisconsin, and within my own mind. The linked article (and this quote specifically) sum up a large part of my confusion regarding the current rhetoric: Why are we choosing to focus on only discretionary, non-military spending? Entitlement obligations are their own can of worms, but why is the military's budget considered near untouchable?
Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code
I swear I’m not the kind of guy who hears voices,” Srivastava says. “But that night, as I passed the station, I heard a little voice coming from the back of my head. I’ll never forget what it said: ‘If you do it that way, if you use that algorithm, there will be a flaw. The game will be flawed. You will be able to crack the ticket. You will be able to plunder the lottery.’
Fascinating article – lottery tickets, because they rely on non-random algorithms, can be cracked given a thorough enough statistical analysis (and a large, presumably expensive, sample set). Mohan Srivastava, a professional statistician, was able to crack Ontario Lottery scratch tickets with less than 45 seconds eyeballing each card.
