Money and Finance
- “this Bird Thinks!”
A BIG thanks to Peter for passing this story/excerpt along. From the book Fear of Physics by Lawrence Krauss:No two physicists could have been more different than Dirac and Feynman. As much as Feynman was an extrovert, so much was Dirac and introvert....
- Vaclav Smil’s 2004 Article On Garrett Hardin
In the world fond of simple associations, Garrett Hardin will be remembered above all as the man who made millions familiar with a concept known as "the tragedy of the commons." He wrote an article with that title for Science in 1968, when the first wave...
- The 12 Rules Of Survival – By Laurence Gonzales
Found via Lew Rockwell. As a journalist, I’ve been writing about accidents for more than thirty years. In the last 15 or so years, I’ve concentrated on accidents in outdoor recreation, in an effort to understand who lives, who dies, and why. To my...
- Other Video Clips From Omaha
Here are a few seconds of video footage I took in Omaha not related to Berkshire Hathaway. I visited the zoo on Sunday morning. I'm not sure if this gorilla was playful or angry, but he sure knows how to entertain a crowd. .......................
- Greg Mankiw - How To Write Well
This is directed toward writing about Economics, but the tips relate to writing about any subject, especially when you likely have more knowledge about that subject than the reader. ERP Writing Guidelines Stay focused. Remember the take-away points...
Money and Finance
The Benefits Of Being Bilingual – By Jonah Lehrer
Samuel Beckett, born in a suburb of Dublin in 1906, was a native English speaker. However, in 1946 Beckett decided that he would begin writing exclusively in French. After composing the first draft in his second language, he would then translate these words back into English. This difficult constraint – forcing himself to consciously unpack his own sentences – led to a burst of genius, as many of Beckett’s most famous works (Malloy, Malone Dies, Waiting for Godot, etc.) were written during this period. When asked why he wrote first in French, Beckett said it made it easier for him to “write without style.”
Beckett would later expand on these comments, noting that his use of French prevented him from slipping into his usual writerly habits, those crutches of style that snuck into his English prose. Instead of relying on the first word that leapt into consciousness – that most automatic of associations – he was forced by his second language to reflect on what he actually wanted to express. His diction became more intentional.
There’s now some neat experimental proof of this Beckettian strategy. In a recent paper published in Psychological Science, a team of psychologists led by Boaz Keysar at the University of Chicago found that forcing people to rely on a second language systematically reduced human biases, allowing the subjects to escape from the usual blind spots of cognition. In a sense, they were better able to think without style.
- “this Bird Thinks!”
A BIG thanks to Peter for passing this story/excerpt along. From the book Fear of Physics by Lawrence Krauss:No two physicists could have been more different than Dirac and Feynman. As much as Feynman was an extrovert, so much was Dirac and introvert....
- Vaclav Smil’s 2004 Article On Garrett Hardin
In the world fond of simple associations, Garrett Hardin will be remembered above all as the man who made millions familiar with a concept known as "the tragedy of the commons." He wrote an article with that title for Science in 1968, when the first wave...
- The 12 Rules Of Survival – By Laurence Gonzales
Found via Lew Rockwell. As a journalist, I’ve been writing about accidents for more than thirty years. In the last 15 or so years, I’ve concentrated on accidents in outdoor recreation, in an effort to understand who lives, who dies, and why. To my...
- Other Video Clips From Omaha
Here are a few seconds of video footage I took in Omaha not related to Berkshire Hathaway. I visited the zoo on Sunday morning. I'm not sure if this gorilla was playful or angry, but he sure knows how to entertain a crowd. .......................
- Greg Mankiw - How To Write Well
This is directed toward writing about Economics, but the tips relate to writing about any subject, especially when you likely have more knowledge about that subject than the reader. ERP Writing Guidelines Stay focused. Remember the take-away points...