It disturbs me when people don't realize how limited their knowledge is.




By the time your hair is that gray you should have a sense of the great mass of how little you know. More commentary at the NYT.

I drove around camping and hiking in Utah last week and went a good distance down some fairly remote dirt roads and it was a pleasant surprise to see how many people would stop and ask if I was alright. (At what point do people start to get concerned? 10 miles on a poopy road and snow on the ground?) John Krakauer said in Eiger Dreams that once you got out far enough in the Icelandic countryside, if you happened to stumble across a home, it wouldn't be surprising to see the woman who lived there running down the driveway towards you with a pitcher of milk.



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A while back I transferred nearly all of my savings from Bank of America to another bank when they started charging me fees to transfer out. I left $13 in the account but I didn't close it down. Somehow they decided to move that money to a money market savings account (without my consent) and charge me $10.00 monthly for the privilege of making 1 cent per month. Yeah.

I can think of no more flimsy basis for a relationship than physical beauty. And women enjoy being noticed for the insanely random multitudes of coinflips that happened at conception (well, men too). I don't know what happened to me because I wasn't like this even 3 years ago, but I cringe a little whenever someone mentions how beautiful his wife is. (The first question you inevitably hear when seeing someone is "Is she pretty?")

If you were God, it would not have been hard to make a more egalitarian world.

(But in sympathy for my fellow human beings, I understand why evolution made physical attraction so powerful. But I don't understand why evolution gave me the ability to countermand that attraction with thought.)

Haha, that awful Nsync song God Must Have Spent a Little More Time On You just came to mind. :)

Or maybe I just need to drink this and become a man again.

Stress and neurodegeneration

Terribly compelling video (unfortunately) on how stress makes glucocorticoids and glucocorticoids destroy your neurons + other nastiness. Seems like a downer until the end. (The takeaway here is take care of your mental/emotional life otherwise bad things happen chemistry-wise in your body.) Interesting throughout.

online dating for all the womens out there

If you're a woman on a dating site (and more of you should be, it's a mistake for your life not to be), please fill out your profile with something I can start a conversation about. I need a hook to start a real conversation and for some reason I really dislike starting out with "Hey, how are you?" or "u r hawt, wut's up?"

Give me little bits of something that may be interesting, never that:
1) you like to laugh,
2) your friend is making you do this (we know you're lonely, just like the rest of the human race)
3) you're laid back,
4) you're happy going out or staying in

And listing 40 bands on your profile is a mistake, it's too much text and I skip it.

Both young women and middle aged men are punished for their sexuality. And conversely, older women and young men are encouraged.