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Month: April 2012

There Will Be No Solution to the Energy Crisis Until We Run Out

Here’s a little story for you. Once upon a time, one of the greatest threats to the lives of American children was the common household refrigerator. This was because refrigerators closed with big honking latches that couldn’t be unlatched from the inside. Kids, being creatures with underdeveloped brains as a rule, climbed inside them to pretend to be glazed hams or something, and they couldn’t get out and suffocated.

So people got upset about this, as Americans are wont to do when children die and are American, and the refrigerator manufacturers quickly formed a commission dedicated to informing consumers that a commission had been formed. They did not redesign the refrigerators. They resisted any government attempts to force them to redesign the refrigerators. They used a set of excuses that are so standard they should be sold on Amazon as the Corporate Excuses Starter Kit.

• The problem is not really a problem.
• To the extent that the problem is a problem, the problem is not our problem.
• You know who we blame? The victims. If they weren’t so dumb, they wouldn’t have been victimized.
• The problem cannot be solved.
• To the extent that the problem can be solved, it can’t be solved by us.
• To the extent the problem can be solved by us, it can’t be solved by us without destroying the United States economy and plunging us into a despotic nightmare of government mandates and low-quality products.

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What I learned from two months of living cashlessly.

It all ended a few days ago, when I withdrew $120 from an ATM in the bodega on my corner. Two months of living cashlessly came to a close with that simple act. I plunked a $20 on the counter, bought a $1.50 soda—take that, $5 credit card minimum—and walked away with a sheaf of bills and a couple of quarters jingling in my pocket.

Life has admittedly been easier since then. I ordered without fear at the cash-only German beer hall in my neighborhood. I split a bar tab with friends and, for the first time in a while, didn’t make myself a nuisance.

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Learning Best When You Rest: Sleeping After Processing New Info Most Effective

“Our study confirms that sleeping directly after learning something new is beneficial for memory. What’s novel about this study is that we tried to shine light on sleep’s influence on both types of declarative memory by studying semantically unrelated and related word pairs,” Payne says.

“Since we found that sleeping soon after learning benefited both types of memory, this means that it would be a good thing to rehearse any information you need to remember just prior to going to bed. In some sense, you may be ‘telling’ the sleeping brain what to consolidate.”