7 Thinking Errors You Probably Make

Common thinking errors explained, each backed by a scientific study. Food for thought!

clipped from www.lifehack.org The brain isn’t a flawless piece of machinery. Although it is powerful and comes in an easy to carry container, it has it’s weaknesses. A field in psychology which studies these errors, known as biases. Although you can’t upgrade your mental hardware, noticing these biases can clue you into possible mistakes The entire domain of the scientific method has largely been an effort to overcome the natural inclination towards bias in reasoning. Common thinking errors 1) Confirmation Bias Tendency to seek information to prove, rather than disprove our theories 2) Hindsight Bias See past results as appearing more probable than they did initially 3) Clustering Illusion See patterns where none actually exist 4) Recency Effect Give more weight to recent data 5) Anchoring Bias A well-known problem with negotiations 6) Overconfidence Effect People tend to grossly overestimate their abilities 7) Fundamental Attribution Error Mistaking personality and character traits for differences caused by situations

Having Sex without Gravity

Only four positions?

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk US and Russian astronauts have had sex in space for separate research programmes on how human beings might survive years in orbit, according to a book published yesterday. Pierre Kohler, a respected French scientific writer, says in The Final Mission: Mir, The Human Adventure that the subject is taboo both at Nasa and at mission control in Moscow, but that cosmic couplings have taken place. "The issue of sex in space is a serious one," he says. "The experiments carried out so far relate to missions planned for married couples on the future International Space Station, the successor to Mir. Scientists need to know how far sexual relations are possible without gravity." He cites a confidential Nasa report on a space shuttle mission in 1996. A project codenamed STS-XX was to explore sexual positions possible in a weightless atmosphere. four positions were found possible without "mechanical assistance" six needed a special elastic belt and inflatable tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag

How to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions

The explosive popularity of Wikipedia shows the wiki concept to be of value. Here is a how-to wiki on everything that you can do that reduces your greenhouse gas emissions.

clipped from www.wikihow.com Wikihow: How to Reduce Your Greenhouse Gas Emissions More and more people are wondering how they can do their part to help reduce the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. While change won't happen overnight, here are steps that you can take against global warming.

Global warming mind-map

Someone has drawn up a pretty good mind-map for the global warming mindful . :::[Breakfast Lunch Dinner]




I don't know about the only having two kids, though. If people want to and have the means to have more children, that's their business. And they can carbon off-set their kids if they so choose, or even calculate them in as carbon sinks when working out their carbon footprints - all carbon based life is a carbon sink. As for eating less meat? I don't know about that either. I eat a little less of it anyway, for health reasons, but I love it. And if a cow we eat is a net carbon-sink, despite being a huge greenhouse contributor, then I figure that I am doing my bit to fight global warming by sinking my teeth into a giant t-bone steak.

UPDATE
June 24, 2007.

That someone has contacted me, a Jane Genovese. It was her and her mum who drew the mind-map, and she runs a company giving students tools to study, called Learning Fundamentals. I am so pleased to be able to credit both of you - it's a great piece of work, and very popular.

Read Jane Genovese bio here (turns out she's Aussie also), and she has some great workshop resources to help young people educate themselves on the most important environmental issue the world is facing (Global Warming: Too Hot to Handle?).


FURTHER UPDATE
From Jane's email:

I have updated the mindmap with some new information.
You can see it at
http://www.learningfundamentals.com.au/global-warming/

[...]

You mentioned that you didn't agree with the 'have only
2 children' part on the mindmap. We decided to put this
in as exponential population growth contributes largely
to global warming.

Keep up the great work,

Jane Genovese

www.learningfundamentals.com.au

Global Warning Climate Change Lifestyle