Category: Reading

Driver details strategies to detect deception beyond basic body language.

Interesting tidbits: There are seven universal emotional expressions that are the same across all people, everywhere regardless of culture or upbringing.

Partly an review of the history various theories physics and quantum theories and partly an exploration of the implication of those same theories.

Interesting tidbit: The solar winds leave the sun at approximately 100,000 mph. If there was air in surrounding it, there would be a perpetual sonic boom.

Watts makes a direct attack against the foundation of what we call ‘common sense.’ He backs his assault with a bevy of studies, done by himself and others. It was interesting to note that we are really bad at making predictions… of any kind. Yet we think we are fantastic at it because so many things seem obvious to us, especially in hindsight. This is a common theme of the book.

Interesting tidbit: experts are generally not statistically significantly better than a non-expert crowd at making predictions.

While it is a massive book, The Information is a fantastic read. It summarizes the evolution of information and communication through time. From the early pioneers of long range communication (early African drummers and later the telegraph), standardizing the English language through the publication of dictionaries through to the development of information theory (which had an odd start branching off from math).

Interesting tidbit: Ranchers, in the early days of the telephone, would connect through cattle fences together and run the phone line through the barb wire instead of running new wire.

A book about how we humans can miss the most obvious of things because they are outside the realm of our expected exceptions. The authors give six types of cognitive illusions:

• Illusion of Attention, in which we think we are paying attention when we are not; such as staring straight at a motorcyclist on the road and not recognizing the existence of the vehicle.
• Illusion of Memory, such as being able to accurately recall a very detailed memory, most of which is probably made up by your mind.
• Illusion of Confidence, such as distrusting a doctor who openly consults with reference material, even though such doctors are much better at making accurate diagnoses.
• Illusion of Knowledge, such as thinking you know everything about how a bicycle works but most people cannot draw an accurate, detailed diagram of it.
• Illusion of Causality, in which we falsely attribute some later events to earlier ones simply because they happened in a chronological order.
• Illusion of Brain Capacity, such as playing classical music thinking it will increase our brain power even though it really does not.

Interesting tidbit: talking on the phone leads to driver impairment whether they are hands free or not.