And What is Even Worse

"Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: video games were invented and popularized before books."

In his book Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Johnson raises many good questions about the way we perceive popular culture and emphasizes just how much more complex our passive existence would be today compared to just 50 years ago.  i.e. Pong never involved outsourcing to China.

For our next thought experiment, try to imagine an alternate world where the corporation was invented and popularized as an icon of tradition and nostalgia before the mom and pop shop.  What would your parents think!?

Car Service and Grammar

Without excessive qualifications, I would like to state that I am a big fan of open borders.  I am also a big fan of grammatical errors (if we would be so harsh to call them by such a derogatory label).

That said, I recently had a general maintenance check up done to my car.  I received this letter in the mail shortly after.

It starts in a very collegiate manner, "Dear Parizek,"  and resolves with my advisor looking forward to "better serve [me] vehicle in the future."  I am particularly fond of the northeastern slant to the entire work and the general disregard for any margins.

The service was excellent.

A Bundle of Instincts

"It was (and is) common to think that other animals are ruled by "instinct" whereas humans lost their instincts and are ruled by "reason", and that this is why we are so much more flexibly intelligent than other animals. William James took the opposite view. He argued that human behavior is more flexibly intelligent than that of other animals because we have more instincts than they do, not fewer."

Leda Cosmides & John Tooby offer more here: Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer.