04/02/2025 - Mountain View, CA
Upcoming post on headache; mechanism, prevention, natural remedies, etc. Stay tuned!
09/01/2020 - Grand Marais, MN
There should be no minimum age requirement necessary to run for President. In fact, there should be an age limit. How I yearn for a youthful Teddy Roosevelt or JFK! A return to the physical education emphasis by Teddy Roosevelt, in particular, could do wonders to our country's health - flattening the obesity curve and reducing healthcare costs. Make America Jacked Again!
07/26/2020 - Berkeley, CA
How much is our time worth from an advertising stand point? In 2019, a 30 second Super Bowl ad, which has an audience of ~100 million, costs $5.6 million, giving a $0.056/view or $0.0019/(sec*view). For YouTubers, they typically make between $0.10/view to $0.30/view, which for an average video of ~10 minutes, is ~$0.0002/(sec*view) to $0.0005/(sec*view). Of course, YouTube videos are not ads: if we associate an average video with 2 ads of ~15 seconds then we get $0.0033/(sec*view) to $0.01/(sec*view), more in line with the Super Bowl ad costs. There's definitely a likely scaling cost with audience count. An interesting question is what amount of money would a consumer accept in exchange for watching an ad of x time?
07/02/2020 - White Salmon, WA
As (the delayed and very much dreaded) tax day approaches, it is once again time to complain about the complexity of the gargantuan and byzantine U.S. tax code. Altogether, Americans will spend on the order of 10 billion hours filing taxes with a total cost of $409 billion. There are over 68,000 tax preparer jobs in the USA, not to mention the nearly 1.5 million auditor and accountant jobs. Imagine how much productivity could be harnessed from the time spent doing taxes and the task force assigned to this sector...
06/09/2020 - Laughlin, NV
Negativity sells clicks. This has been attributed to both consumer demand and preference. As such, a capitalist media will likely have positive-negative news asymmetry, but this is not limited to just in the US, as shown in this study. A rich literature on the human nature of negativity bias is available.
04/24/2020 - White Rock, NM
Time is money. How much do you value your own time? The federal government estimates the average value of an American life at $7.4 million dollars. Given an average life expectancy of an American at 78.5 years, this comes out to be around $94k per year salary. Note that employment typically occurrs between ages 18-62 (the average retirement age has been estimated to be around 62 years old), and this comes out to be ~44 years of employment. So a minimum valuation of time should be about $168k per year or ~$84/hr. Keep in mind, that a given salary's hourly wage is not a true valuation. The actual number of hours worked must be accounted for. For a graduate student with a fixed monthly stipend (~$20/hr), under this metric, the true pay rate could vary from under $10/hr to over $100/hr depending on time spent working.
03/16/2020 - Los Angeles, CA
The modern day college dormitory is just a prison. Even bathroom access requires a key card. Privacy is next to nil. The rooms (cells) are tiny, and the students (inmates) are crammed in by the handful. The architecture is drab and the atmosphere dry. Or maybe that's just UCLA's dormitory.
03/07/2020 - Lake Tahoe, CA
Time seems to pass by more quickly as we age. Perhaps it's a symptom of being busy, the effect of striving for new goals, or becoming engrossed in a daily life which was mundane before. This paper suggests that as we age our perception of time changes due to a decrease in the number of unique images received by sensory organs from external stimuli. All I know is that the hours go by with alarming alacrity; time truly flies.
02/20/2020 - Ventura, CA
The most frustrating thing about trying to forget something is that the act of trying makes you more likely to remember instead. This phenomenon is known as ironic process theory. What can you do then? Rely on distractions, or try practicing meditation and mindfulness.
01/23/2020 - Gaithersburg, MD
What are the health benefits of fasting for an entire day, or even longer? There are rumors that it can kickstart your immune system (no citations given here) and according to this article, muscle loss is negligible as well. In my experience, one day fasts do not cause any discernible negative effects or mood dinsinclinations. However, any derived benefits seem too difficult to deconvolute.
01/10/2020 - Berkeley, CA
An interesting bill was proposed in Vermont: perhaps it could be reworded to ban smartphones for those under 18 instead of 21.
01/05/2020 - Berkeley, CA
2020 will either be a great year or a terrible year. Either is better than mediocrity.
12/31/2019 - Hood River, OR
One of humanity's greatest crises, seldom addressed, is the attack upon one of our most valuable assets: our attention. With the rise of the Information Age we have more knowledge than ever at our fingertips, but with it comes a gluttony of bits and bytes that for the most part are completely irrelevant. Our attention is continuously being wrested from us, willingly or not, through a barrage of ads, constant notifications from our email and social media accounts, "important" news updates, etc. With our attention robbed, we become more susceptible to apathy. What is important amongst the deluge of facts and opinions thrown at us? How do we separate the truth from the lies? We are being subtly (and often not subtly) influenced by the information we are forced to process. And behind every notification is an ulterior motive. Original, authentic thought and opinion become irreverent as we regurgitate what is being thrown at us; repeating what we have been bombarbed with, under the belief that we processed it and came to an independent, unbiased thought. Indeed, even this commentary is simply an attack on the reader's attention, an attempt to manipulate and influence. Is there any original thought here? Probably not.