Do you vote in political elections?
Not as religiously as I did in my youth. Counter to the general trend of younger people hollering and protesting but not showing up to the polls, and thus not influencing change because politicians are cued into to the older crowd that tends to show up hell or high water.
When do you feel most productive?
When the internet is down.
After transitioning from tighty-whities, through boxers, and on to the boxer-brief, I think I have finally found the path to downstairs bliss.
What animals make the best/worst pets?
BEST: Dogs (but house-cats if one is of a less energetic / more lazy persuasion.)
WORST: Hippopotamus / Rhinoceros tie
Which aspects do you think makes a person unique?
Genetic code and life story.
If you could have something named after you, what would it be?
Maybe an atomic bomb. It would be nice to get in the last word.
What makes you laugh?
Humor… and video of skater kids busting their nards failing astride a railing.
I suspect that was my early Racecar Driver period (possibly late-Cowboy.) But I can barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday…
I’ve often been surprised how little intuitive grasp people have of basic mathematical or statistical ideas or relationships, even when they have had the education to understand with a little effort.
One example of this is what I call “unilateral mathematics” where people fixate on one term or side of an equation while ignoring that changing a term changes the equation’s other side (or to keep the other side static, something else has to give.) For example, I hear people getting so excited by the new salary they will earn when they move to a new place. Then they get to the new locale only to find that the cost of living is so much higher that even their hefty pay boost supports only a diminished quality of life. One sees this tendency a great deal in people’s policy discussions when someone will say, “just set a maximum (or minimum) price” without understanding that shortages or surpluses will come along for the ride. [The Law of Unintended Consequences is another good answer to this prompt.]
We all saw flaws in statistical thinking during the pandemic when people said things like, “See, she got the vaccine and then she got COVID, so obviously the vaccine doesn’t work!” I’m convinced this is because people don’t have good intuition for statistical thinking and — instead — they want to treat a low probability as an impossibility and a high probability as a certainty.
By the way, you see this from people of all persuasions, including those who are highly educated, conservatives, progressives, believers, atheists, etc. One can see the universality of the flaw most commonly in climate change comments. You’ll hear one person say, “See, it’s the hottest day on record, that’s evidence global warming is real!” Another person will say, “See, it’s the coldest day on record, global warming is obviously hokum!” Somehow, even with diametrically opposed viewpoints, these two manage to both be wrong because one day’s WEATHER is not instructive of what is happening to the CLIMATE. In other words, a sample of one provides no insight into state changes in the population. [Maybe it’s more appropriate to use Wolfgang Pauli’s terms and say the two are “not even wrong.”]
What’s a secret skill or ability you have or wish you had?
This is a trick question that can only logically have one answer. It’s more of a logic / linguistic test than a prompt.
First of all, it can’t be a skill that one has, is secret, and that one blabs about on the internet.
So, the only “secret skill” that one could discuss wishing that one had on the worldwide web must be the ability to keep a secret.
Not really a problem area for me as, being a introvert, I’m pretty tight lipped by nature.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 