Planets & Dwarf Planets

In the left column starting at the top they are Orchard Oriole, Red-winged Blackbird, Eastern Towhee, Northern Cardinal, American Robin and Gray Catbird. And in the right column from the top they are Blue Jay, Carolina Chickadee, Song Sparrow, Field Sparrow, Chipping Sparrow and Seaside Sparrow.

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20 Cognitive Biases That Screw Up Your Decisions

Remember that everyone, including you and me, suffers from these biases. If you find that you’re trying to convince yourself that you’re special, that somehow these biases don’t apply to you, then you’re only intensifying their influence. Here are a few choice biases that are hidden around every corner:

Availability Heuristic: People overestimate the importance of information that is available to them. A person might argue that smoking is not unhealthy because they know someone who lived to 100 and smoked three packs a day.

Bandwagon Effect: The probability of one person adopting a belief increases based on the number of people who hold that belief. This is a powerful form of groupthink.

Choice-supportive Bias: When you choose something, you tend to feel positive about it, even that choice has flaws. Like how you think your dog is awesome–even if it bites people once in a while.

Clustering Illusion: This is the tendency to see patterns in random events. It is key to various gambling fallacies, like the idea that red is more or less likely to turn up on a roulette table after a string of reds.

Confirmation Bias: We tend to listen only to information that confirms our preconceptions–one of the many reason it’s so hard to have an intelligent conversation about climate change.

Selective Perception: Allowing our expectations to influence how we perceive the world. An experiment involving a football game between students from two universities shows that one team saw the opposing team commit more infractions.

Stereotyping: Expecting a group or person to have certain qualities without having real information about the person. It allows us to quickly identify strangers as friends or enemies, but people tend to overuse and abuse it.

Egyptological PSA

Please learn the difference between:

Hieroglyphs (Noun): “The text is written using hieroglyphs”

Hieroglyphics (Adjective): “This is a hieroglyphic text”

The Egyptological community thanks you for your time and cooperation.

13.05.17 // Updated my physics window for the first time in ages! Had some thoughts over the past few weeks surrounding a free scalar field universe model so I drew them up as well as some old game theory because I watched a Beautiful Mind and felt nostalgic. I hope you are all having wonderful days / evening / whatever plane of existentialism you currently observe 😉

Someone said "Are you really so stupid to think that Africa has the same technological advances as us? If they did they would probably have clean water and not live in houses made of sticks and mud. Get over yourself and stop being so ignorant."..... Below is a tiny collection of images of the Africa they refuse to show you..

ches

I’m sorry you’ve been made to believe that the whole of Africa is poor, I really am..

Ever wondered about the chemistry behind the colours of bodily fluids? Well, urine luck! Larger image and more info: http://wp.me/p4aPLT-2j2

Bond of Brothers, the winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, by David Lloyd:⠀

“These two adult male lions, probably brothers, greeted each other by rubbing faces for 30 seconds before settling down. Most people never have the opportunity to witness such animal sentience.”

A sand pendulum that creates a beautiful pattern only by its movement.

But  why does the ellipse change shape?

The pattern gets smaller because energy is not conserved (and in fact decreases) in the system. The mass in the pendulum gets smaller and the center of mass lowers as a function of time. Easy as that, an amazing pattern arises through the laws of physics.

Continuing from last week’s bread-making post, here’s a look at what’s behind the smell of fresh-baked bread! http://wp.me/p4aPLT-1Fe