Understanding the Education Customer

VCs and entrepreneurs tend to be well educated. Well educated people think about education as an investment. You put as many of your resources in to an investment as you can. It may take 20 years to pay off, but if the return-on-investment is high (which it is for education) then you invest. This group of people — if you’re reading this, you fall into this group — generally understand that education is an investment, and as a result are price insensitive and will optimize for quality ...

 Thin Slices of Joy

“Right now, I’m a little thirsty, so I will drink a bit of water. And when I do that, I experience a thin slice of joy both in space and time,” he told CBC News. “It’s not like ‘Yay!”” he notes in Joy on Demand. “It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s kind of nice.’” Usually these events are unremarkable: a bite of food, the sensation of stepping from a hot room to an air-conditioned room, the moment of connection in receiving a text from an old friend. Although they last two or th...

 How Humans Living in Civilization are Like Domesticated A...

The first characteristic is living in an artificial environment. Humans established cities and converted the space we live in, to the utmost degree, into an artificial environment. We carry out our lives surrounded by houses, roads, water and sewer systems, automobiles, trains, and electricity. Waking up early, riding a train to one’s place of employment, and working in an air-conditioned office bears a certain resemblance to a chicken in a livestock factory. [7/8] The second characte...

 The Zoku Jewel

‘Volition is a funny thing,’ Zinda says. ‘The jewels don’t just respond to what we want, but what we would want if we were wiser or smarter or knew more. The zoku as a whole tries to extrapolate what you really need, rather than just what you are asking for, and in line with everybody’s volition. I’ll give you an example. Tell me something you really like. A food, or something.’ Mieli hesitates. ‘This is pointless.’ ‘Come on. Don’t take it so seriously!’ Mieli sighs...

 The Quiet

‘What was it like? Being Quiet?’ I try my food. The zebra is indeed excellent, dark and juicy: she has good taste. Perhaps she picked it up from me. She crumbles a piece of bread on her plate, lost in thought. ‘It’s difficult to explain. It’s very abrupt: when your Time runs out, the transition happens. The Resurrection Men just come to pick your body up, but you are already there. It’s like having a stroke. Suddenly, your brain works differently, in a different body, with differ...

 Human Respiration is Not a Source of Carbon Emissions

That's not a problem. The CO2 that's released by humans (and animals) is produced by metabolising carbon from food, and the food comes from plants that have been grown recently. During their growth, the plants have absorbed an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. Even when eating meat, the animals are typically only a few years old and were fed on recently grown plants. In contrast, the cars run on fossil fuels that are hundreds of million years old.

 Lessons from the Real Paleo Diet

And the answer is, ‘yes.’ I think there’s three main lessons we can learn: First, there’s no one correct diet, but diversity is the key. So, depending on where you live, you can eat very different things, but you need diversity. We lack the ability to synthesize many nutrients that we require for life, nutrients and vitamins, and we are required to get them from our foods. Eating a diet that’s rich in species, has high species diversity is very important. Now unfortunately in Ameri...

 How to Talk Math With Kids

Some simple ways to work numbers into the conversation: Note numbers on signs when you’re walking or driving with children: speed limits and exit numbers, building addresses, sale prices in store windows. Ask children to count how many toys they’re playing with, how many books they’ve pulled out to read, or how many pieces of food are on their plate. Use numbers when you refer to time, dates, and temperatures: how many hours and minutes until bedtime, how many weeks and days until a hol...

 The Importance of Altruism in Human Evolution

In proportion as physical characteristics become of less importance, mental and moral qualities will have an increasing importance to the well-being of the race. Capacity for acting in concert, for protection of food and shelter; sympathy, which leads all in turn to assist each other; the sense of right, which checks depredation upon our fellows ... all qualities that from earliest appearance must have been for the benefit of each community, and would therefore have become objects of natural ...

 Language is Important in Direction

The room is made i.^ up of four curtains, used to create four walls in a rectangle, defined by two types of information: geometric (two short walls and two long walls) and color information (one red wall). Now, think about the corners. If you are using only geometric information, pairs of corners are identical. There are two corners with a short wall on the ft and a long wall on the right, and two corners the other way around. If you are using only color information, there are also two pair...