Given the way humans work, this episode of You Are Not So Smart probably won’t change the mind of anyone who’s deep into the alternative medicine world, but I think it’s important to listen to and strongly consider if you’re on the fence.

Key quotes to me:

“There’s a name for treatments that are proven to work. It’s called medicine”

Here’s an email I sent to some of my friends based on an piece I heard on The Naked Scientist:

This group did a study and found that women who were lap dancers and not on the pill (ie they had a normal menstrual cycle) go more tips on their fertile days.  (I can’t imagine the grant application process for that study.  “Yeah, we need to study strip clubs…this is important, somehow….”)

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The trinkets I received for becoming a member of the Free Software Foundation.”] [/caption]

I’ve been wondering about a peculiar aspect of human motivation. Why do we require a present of some sort in exchange for a donation? Let’s take NPR for example. During membership drives a donation will net the donator a hat or tote bag or something like that. But why does there have to be a prize for donation? The point of donation is that you realize some organization or cause needs your money. So why waste some of that money to get a mug? And if you wanted a mug emblazoned with the NPR logo, you could just go to the NPR store and buy it. But getting gifts must entice more people to donate or organizations wouldn’t waste money on it when they could be using all the money to cover their costs.

According to the latest issue of IEEE Spectrum, I suffer from completism. Completism is when you have to have all of a collection. It’s true I’m always get annoyed whenever I have only one DVD of a Tv series or if I have 9 of 10 DVDs or something. Feel the same way? Now you know what it’s called!

That’s what the computer told my fiancee. “You have been classified as having the symptoms of being bipolar,” it continued. A friend of mine had recently taken an online diagnosis using the school’s health website. I felt it was bogus and told him so, but to drive the point home my fiancee and I decided to take the test ourselves.

We answered all of the questions from her point of view, but we didn’t do this in a, “let’s mess with the system” sort of way; we genuinely filled out the answers. I knew the diagnosis would be less than perfect when it simply consisted of multiply choice questions like

Yesterday I was doing looking for the website to Wikipedia and came across Wikibooks, which happens to be run by the same group, The Wiki Media Foundation. Since I knew what Wikipedia was, I decided to see what Wikibooks was. Well, the same way that Wikipedia attempts to be an encyclopedia which anyone can contribute to, Wikibooks is like a library written by everyone online. I’m not so sure if I will ever use Wikibooks in the near future, but Wikipedia is a pretty good resource to use.