Feb 22, 2011

The revenge of Comic Sans.

History, English and science students performed better in the relevant class assessments when the study materials were printed in Comic Sans Italicized, Haettenschweiler or Monotype Corsiva than did the pupils who learned from the original teachers' fonts.


Feb 21, 2011

Many Consumers Believe 36 Months Is Longer Than 3 Years.

Remember, remember...
...the arbitrary nature of the unit in which information is expressed.

Feb 18, 2011

Brains.

Even cheaper than printer ink.

Feb 17, 2011

Terra incognita.

"A library or a single book can be compared to a virgin land that can be reached by some colonizing organisms that behave like pioneer species on a nude soil."

Feb 16, 2011

Professor Badass by himself:

In 1958, B.F. Skinner and Erich Fromm attended the same California symposium. Skinner found that Fromm “proved to have something to say about almost everything, but with little enlightenment,” and “when he began to argue that people were not pigeons, I decided that something had to be done”:

"On a scrap of paper I wrote ‘Watch Fromm’s left hand. I am going to shape a chopping motion’ and passed it down the table to Halleck Hoffman. Fromm was sitting directly across from the table and speaking mainly to me. I turned my chair slightly so that I could see him out of the corner of my eye. He gesticulated a great deal as he talked, and whenever his left hand came up, I looked straight at him. If he brought the hand down, I nodded and smiled. Within five minutes he was chopping the air so vigorously that his wristwatch kept slipping out over his hand. (...) It was an unfair trick, but Fromm had angered me — first with his unsupported generalizations about human behavior and then with the implication that nothing better could be done if ‘people were regarded as pigeons.’”

From Skinner’s 1983 memoir A Matter of Consequences.

Feb 15, 2011

Mammalian strategies...

..were adopted by the Transformers.