Yes, I’ll write about other things soon.

Each dot is at least one person. If more than one person gave the same answer, the dot is bigger. Click on the graph for a better version, or take a look at the complete dataset.

I don’t know what to do with the graph, but lots of people wrote short comments explaining their choices which I really enjoyed reading. Here are some I liked, each with the age of the author and the age at which he/she expects to be the happiest:

An 18-year-old: 25
Because that’s when i’ll have a stable job, good income and my own house (hopefully).

A 25-year-old: 18
I wish I could stay 18 or ever.

A 33-year-old: 53
Will have met financial freedom and retirement goals.

A 46-year-old: 53
By the time I’m 53, I feel like I will be old enough to truly know myself and young enough to be physically fit.

A 53-year-old: 53
I was diagnosed with cancer around 2.5 years ago, went through the chemo and radiation. I’m finally at a point where I am grateful and happy that it was found in time to do something about it, and not worrying every second that it will come back. Not exactly a near-death experience, but as close as I want to come. Makes you REAL happy to be alive and to try and appreciate even the small things.

A 24-year-old: 40
I have already had a lot of happiness in my life and am very grateful for said happiness but I noticed that as my father ages, he seems to find more and more joy in the smaller things in life. Even in tough times he seems to maintain a more positive attitude - maybe it’s because he’s retired or he’s realized that worrying does’t accomplish much. I hope to achieve his level of wisdom someday and look forward to more happiness and fulfillment later in life.

A 53-year-old: 40
This was the point in my life that I had gotten through college, was married, had children and a career. I spent many hours at my childrens games (football, softball, etc) and and loved every minute if it! Financially, things were getting easier as my husband and I advanced in our careers so we could do more things such as travel and not have to worry so much about being able to afford it. It seemed that the hard work of college and “paying my dues” as I began my career were finally beginning to pay off.

A 21-year-old: 30
At 30, still young but old enough to be really developing my career.

A 30-year-old: 21
Life at my fingertips…

A 26-year-old: 35
I love the family life and independence; by the age mentioned I hope to have less day-to-day worries and more kids, but still be in a really good shape to enjoy it. Plus, I hope to be much more stable professionally.

A 34-year-old: 25
It’s amazing what experience, debt, and growing older can do to your outlook on life. I thought a decade ago I would be happer a decade later, and I am finding out that’s not really the case. I’m not unhappy by any means, but the more responsibilities we accrue in life, the easier it is to rate our happiness by different things.

A 23-year-old: 21
In college - so far it was the best time of my life. Hopefully it won’t be!

A 35-year-old: 21
College years were the best

An 18-year-old: 28
Done with college, can settle down, new job, etc

A 28-year-old: 22
I was a college student then. That were happiest years in my life, because my character shaped and tempered. Though any college assignment felt hard, I can enjoyed the hardship. Sincerely, I dreamed several times about my college years when I slept. I really missed that moment of life.

A 26-year-old: 15
15 was a great year. I was still to young to care and honestly thought the world was at my feet. I spent the school year hanging out with friends and of course school. Summer I spent most of it at my uncles enjoying time with my younger cousins and the cute boy down the street. Ahh… life before a I ever had a job.

Another 26-year-old: 26
As someone who has spent most of her short life daydreaming, I have learned not to waste my time measuring happiness or planning how to create it. I try and make the best of the present time and hope that I continue to do that for the rest of my life. Interesting question!

Yet another 26-year-old: 32
I feel by that time I will have finished grad school and be working in a field that I love. I will be more comfortable with who I am and my place in the world by that time.

A 26-year-old: 30
The day i get married will be the happiest day of my life.

A 41-year-old: 26
I met and married my husband at 26 years old. It was the best time of my life.

A 70-year-old: 30
We had a very happy marriage and two beautiful daughters. Although we are still married, things often got complicated and stressful but never hopeless.

A 23-year-old: 8
Childhood was a time of innocence; no worries, no bills, no thought as to cause and effect… You walk around with your fingers in your nose picking wedgies and thinking about the playground never wondering about world hunger war terrorism or even when companies may go bankrupt and cancel your favorite television show.

A 44-year-old: 25
The age I married my beloved husband and set out on our new life together. We are still together and still very happy. The adventures we share and have shared have brought so much joy to my life.

A 46-year-old: 34
I was happiest when I was single and working at the beginning of my professional career.

A 27-year-old: 45
Having children and watching them grow will give me the greatest joy.

A 38-year-old: 45
at that age most of my kids will be grown and hopefully I will be able to quit my job by then and do some of the things i would like to be able to do in my life

A 29-year-old: 16
I desperately miss the imagined knowledge and unknown ignorance of being in high school

Another 29-year-old: 17
Got married at 16 have 4 kids…so life has been challenging, wouldn’t trade them for anything…but would like to go back and have less responsability even for a little while :)

A 29-year-old: 26
This is the age that I came to the realization that I had finally found what I wanted. Everything just seemed to be coming together.

A 50-year-old: 26
At 26 i had my only child…and i was going to college, met a man of my dreams and felt like i could do it all..then i got involved with my child and man everything i wanted went out the window with in the first year..do i regret it sometimes would i change it not on my life

A 54-year-old: 23
I know for sure that as I age I get unhappier. At this point I’m thinking about how much longer I have as compared to having my whole life in front of me.

A 31-year-old: 50
I said 50 is the age I would be the happiest because it seems like the older I get the happier I am. And I hope that when I’m 50 I will continue to get more happy with each passing year and I hope to still be in great health.

A 44-year-old: 32
I finally had my child after trying for 10 years and my life was complete then.

A 43-year-old: 61
My youngest child will be of age and hopefully off to college \u0026 then I will be free to do what I want with my life.

A 39-year-old: 40
We had always known we wanted to adopt 2 special children and our hearts goal was that it would be by the time I am 40 and my husband 45. Our second and final adoption will be finalized in 2009 and I will be 40 years old.

A 46-year-old: 65
I am looking forward to 65, so I can retire, and actually take some time out to enjoy life.

A 65-year-old: 34
I was well on my way with a career wide open, had purchased my first house and had a great social life. Since then I have been up and down, but never so enthusiastic about life as I was then.

A 53-year-old: 22
We don’t appreciate things at a young age, but as we grow older we always wish we knew then what we know now.

A 22-year-old: 22
Two young daughters make my life the happiest! :)

A 30-year-old: 25
I was earning, was healthy, carefree. Looked as if there is enough time in life

A 62-year-old: 19
I was young, gorgeous, full of life and in love

This last one made me stop and stare at the screen for some time, simultaneously not knowing anything about this person and yet so much.

Update: David Sturman did some statistical analysis of the data that is worth reading.

You know the situation. Someone is presenting his research, PowerPoint slides up, room slightly darkened, and what you understand best is what he communicates nonverbally: “I don’t care either. I know that the question my research answers is not the kind of question that keeps me from falling asleep at night, but hey, it’s not as if that’s what I’m living for.” — at the same time, he goes on talking about the effects of auditory priming on the calcium ion concentration in parvocellular neurons of the chimpanzee lateral geniculate nucleus. If you were thinking in words, your thoughts would be along these lines:

“I want to learn about the world, but this does not feel right. It’s not the fact that what’s presented is a minuscule piece of detail — I care about details. But the reason I care about details is because they are necessary to piece together the larger picture. I want to find answers to the big questions. To study, to travel, to get to know people and to exchange ideas sounds perfect, but then I see those who call themselves ’scientists’ and, most of the time, I don’t want to live their lives.”

“I don’t want to spend two years working on a project where the result is a 2% improvement of efficiency in some manufacturing procedure and a journal article. At the same time, I don’t want to deceive myself by pretending to tackle the big questions while all I’m engaged in is philosophical word games. I don’t want to solve puzzles for the sake of puzzle-solving. Enjoyment from puzzle-solving has never been my primary motivation for doing science. It may be part of my motivation, but a necessary condition for me to enjoy what I do is to feel that it is significant. I want to believe in choosing science, but reality always gets in the way.”

So, do you choose an academic career, hoping that things will be different for you, or that, by then, you have changed enough not to notice anymore?

“Academia” is a name for a set of standard solutions to standard problems. You don’t have to accept all of them, or any of them, to do science. It’s just the most convenient way. It appears to me that, if you don’t want to, you do not need to make any choices in life — there is always a most convenient way. Once you start out (and you did not have a say in that decision), there is a default answer to almost every question life poses, conditioned on how well you perform at certain tests and on what you state as your interests.

If ‘knowledge’ is high on your list of interests, here’s what to do: Finish high school, get a bachelor’s degree and don’t forget to take some jobs at your university (you want experience in teaching!), write your bachelor’s thesis about a topic that’s somewhat familiar to you (even if it’s not the thing you really want to do — after all, it’s only three months of your life) and get a bachelor’s degree. Next step, join a master’s program, internship included, during which you publish a few papers (research experience is crucial!). Your master’s thesis ends up using knowledge you already have from working on your bachelor’s thesis (because there is not enough time to start from scratch) and luckily you manage to suppress any thoughts about how your research is taking more and more directions that are not truly yours, for the sole reason that that’s what you’re an expert in. By the time you are working on your PhD thesis, you’re thinking that you are probably the only person that understands why one would spend years working on the problem you are trying to solve, and sometimes you are close to admitting that you do not understand it yourself, but rationalization goes a long way. By then, a significant portion of the possibility that once lay before you and that you didn’t appreciate at that time is already gone.

You can deviate from the most convenient way, of course, but only a small minority does. The sad thing about the whole situation is that there are people who want to do science but for whom the most convenient way is soul-crushing, while alternative choices are not an option (think money, acceptance, etc.). Therefore, they either don’t end up in science (despite their interest and motivation) or they do choose academia and suffer from the restrictions it imposes, fighting against the windmills of institutionalization that, like Dementors, suck out any sense of purpose until it’s just a job, fight over, next generation please.

(This is a gloomy way of seeing things, but to me it’s a real problem in search of a solution — not necessarily or primarily for personal reasons, but because, for some people, academia does not live up to its promise, the primacy of the pursuit of knowledge. I believe that it could and should, since they tend to be the kinds of people that would make good scientists.)

Jeder Moment stellt die Frage “Was willst du tun?” und die Summe unserer Antworten ist, wer wir sind. Jede Minute, die wir vor uns selbst rechtfertigen, entfremdet uns von uns selbst. Die Welt hat einen unerschöpflichen Vorrat an Zeitfüllern, dringenden Verpflichtungen und ganz wichtigen Dingen und wir suchen uns aus, wie groß der Anteil unserer Zeit ist, den wir ihr überlassen. Jede Antwort ist okay, so lange sie für uns okay ist und so lange wir nicht glauben, wir hätten keine Wahl. Wir erschaffen uns selbst, erfinden die Erzählung unseres Lebens und die Welt passt sich an. Die Welt hat keine Wahl.

So, weiter.

Many people feel that they don’t have important things to care about. People like to feel important, and they like to talk about things that matter. Unfortunately, talking about things that matter tends to bring up a lot of thorny, difficult questions and issues. Often the answers are unpleasant, and people don’t like things that are unpleasant. Thus the subject of sports acts as an empty, meaningless alternative to the real issues that exist in the world.

Wir verschwenden unsere Möglichkeiten auf die denkbar bedeutungsloseste Weise.

RepRap ist ein Do-It-Yourself 3D-Drucker, der unter anderem Teile für die Konstruktion von 3D-Druckern herstellen kann. So soll der Drucker Kopien seiner selbst herstellen, jede der Kopien wiederum Kopien und so soll es weitergehen. Der erste funktionierende derartige Drucker würde demnach den Beginn eines exponenziellen Vervielfältigungsprozesses darstellen.

Auf der Website des Projekts steht:

RepRap achieved self-replication at 14:00 hours UTC on 29 May 2008 at Bath University in the UK.

Das bedeutet: Der Drucker hat vor einer Woche das erste Mal aus Rohmaterialien alle Plastikteile hergestellt, die für den Bau eines solchen Druckers benötigt werden. Für die vollständige Replikation werden zusätzlich Platinen, Motoren, Temperatursensoren, Cat5-Kabel, ein Computer (der den Prozess steuert) und ein Mensch (der die Einzelteile zusammensetzt) benötigt. Das macht die Ankündigung weniger eindrucksvoll.

Allerdings ist es leicht, Projekte in der Anfangsphase als “wenig eindrucksvoll” abzutun und sich trotzdem nicht davon abhalten zu lassen, die tatsächlich folgende, beeindruckende Entwicklung später als “unvermeidbar” zu bezeichnen. Ich würde darauf wetten, dass die Entwicklung von sich selbst replizierenden Maschinen — Katastrophen und ähnlich disruptive Ereignisse bei Seite gelassen — unvermeidbar ist und beeindruckend sein wird. Ein Grund dagegen, alles auf RepRap-ähnliche Makroreplikatoren zu setzen, ist der, den Caledonian hier erklärt:

It’s fundamentally harder to make a large, self-replicating machine than a small one. Individual molecules have far fewer degrees of freedom than macroscale objects do - much greater precision is needed when crafting a gear, even a microscopic one, than a protein.

Selbstreplikation bringt Gefahren mit sich und ist auf Nanoebene möglicherweise nicht sinnvoll. Brauchen wir einen Preis für den ersten Selbstreplikator, der ohne menschliches Zutun und ohne ungewöhnliches Rohmaterial auskommt, oder ein Verbot desselben?

Stanley Jaki und Stephen Hawking argumentieren, dass Gödels Satz (bzw. eine Analogie dazu) impliziert, dass es niemals eine Theory of Everything (TOE) geben kann, eine vereinheitlichte Theorie, die alle physikalischen Phänomene verknüpft und erklärt.

Torkel Franzen dagegen bezweifelt in [1] die Relevanz der arithmetischen Unvollständigkeit für die Aussagen einer solchen Theorie:

Gödel’s theorem only tells us that there is an incompleteness in the arithmetical component of the theory. The basic equations of physics, whatever they may be, cannot indeed decide every arithmetical statement, but whether or not they are complete considered as a description of the physical world, and what completeness might mean in such a case, is not something that the incompleteness theorem tells us anything about.

Die Gödelsche Unvollständigkeit eines formalen Systems bedeutet, dass das System Sätze enthält, die als Aussagen über die natürlichen Zahlen interpretiert werden können und für die aus den Axiomen weder die Sätze selbst noch deren Negationen abgeleitet werden können. Eine widerspruchsfreie TOE, die gewisse elementare Arithmetik erlaubt, würde damit manche Gleichungen prinzipiell nicht entscheiden können.

Die physikalische Welt an sich kennt keinen Status “unentscheidbar” — könnte eine TOE dann nicht ebenfalls ohne einen solchen auskommen? Das würde bedeuten, dass mindestens eine der beiden Voraussetzungen für Gödels Satz in dieser Theorie nicht erfüllt wäre. Da die physikalische Welt auch den Status “widersprüchlich” nicht kennt, bliebe nur, die Annahme aufzugeben, dass die TOE gewisse elementare Arithmetik enthält. Das heißt: Sie dürfte unter keiner Interpretation eine Theorie der natürlichen Zahlen enthalten.

Was bleibt? Erstaunlich viel. Es gibt beispielsweise ein Axiomensystem für die elementare Arithmetik der reellen Zahlen, das vollständig und widerspruchsfrei ist! Die Axiome dieses Systems ermöglichen es nicht, die natürlichen Zahlen als Untermenge herauszupicken. Aber braucht die Physik die natürlichen Zahlen und deren Mathematik? Anders gefragt: Kennt die wirkliche Welt natürliche Zahlen?

Ursprung der Idee: Diskussion im Seminar Weltbilder der Naturwissenschaft nach Lektüre von [1] Gödel’s Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse.

On the social bookmarking site del.icio.us, you can add other users to your network to see their recent bookmarks aggregated on one page. There are two kinds of people in my network: 1. Friends and 2. Users I don’t know personally, but who regularly post interesting links. People who bookmark the same things that I bookmark are likely to have similar interests and are thus likely to continue bookmarking interesting things in the future. Since the information on who bookmarked what URL is public, the process of finding people with similar interests can be automated.

Urban Hafner brought up this idea three years ago, but I could not find an implementation. Yesterday, I wrote a short Python (2.5) script that implements the following ideas:

1. Look at every link in your bookmarks: Who bookmarked the same page? Add these users to a list of people possibly similar to you.
2. The more bookmarks another user has in common with you, the higher your similarity.
3. The smaller the number of people who bookmarked a page, the more significant the fact that another user has this bookmark in common with you.
4. If a user has lots of bookmarks, common bookmarks are less remarkable. The percentage of common links counts.

Here is what you need to do to find people whose interests are similar to yours:

1. Download delicious_mates.py
2. Run python ./delicious_mates.py
3. Wait — this takes some time.

Then, what you will see will look something like this:

andreas> python ./delicious_mates.py
Your del.icio.us username? andreas.s
Your del.icio.us password?

Fetching list of bookmarks ... (485)

Fetching list of users for each bookmark ...
    1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton's_ant (7)
    2. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/science/13coat.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin&oref=login (0)
    3. http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20080509.2.html (2)
    4. http://www.intercult.su.se/cultaptation/tournament.php (16)
    5. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0801268105v1 (49)
    6. http://atlas-conferences.com/c/a/n/i/15.htm (0)
	[..]
    480. http://lifeboat.com/ex/main (129)
    481. http://prize.hutter1.net/ (137)
    482. http://www.psg.com/~dlamkins/sl/cover.html (194)
    483. http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/ (157)
    484. http://sl4.org/wiki/ShannonInformation (1)
    485. http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/ (13)

Finding 50 candidates from list of 49937 users ...
    rainer (42/9367) ok
    siggiB (36/1006) ok
    fhtagn (35/2471) ok
    anissimov (35/6281) ok
    jbone (41/19982) ok
    invisibleandpink (16/203) ok
    irchans (16/610) ok
    ferrouswheel (14/946) ok
	[..]
    eggywat (14/4290) ok
    Cunya (8/3133) ok
    getpost (13/9787) ok
    hannu (12/3915) ok
    lispmeister (11/2967) ok
    dean.vanniekerk (12/5873) ok
    rgrant (9/1769) ok

Top 50 del.icio.us mates:
username             weight               # common bookmarks   # total bookmarks    % common
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
siggiB               54.92937             36                   1022                 3.52250
invisibleandpink     53.05635             16                   203                  7.88177
fhtagn               20.61878             36                   2474                 1.45513
irchans              15.61606             16                   611                  2.61866
fogeli               12.85109             16                   628                  2.54777
ferrouswheel         7.99177              14                   946                  1.47992
rainer               7.60971              43                   9423                 0.45633
anissimov            6.46154              34                   6309                 0.53891
pdorrell             4.10251              19                   3041                 0.62479
jefallbright         3.87392              12                   1193                 1.00587
ladro                3.76458              12                   1526                 0.78637
miguel1626           3.04347              11                   1039                 1.05871
jbone                2.62672              41                   20039                0.20460
hartmut              2.15612              9                    1316                 0.68389
asciilifeform        2.04304              10                   1581                 0.63251
tmalin               1.89627              12                   2181                 0.55021
herrmann             1.84991              21                   5410                 0.38817
jas0nm               1.82646              20                   3808                 0.52521
[..]

If you look at the script, you will find a few settings you might want to change. For each of these holds: The higher you set them, the more time it takes for the script to finish.

• MAX_MATES

  is the maximum number of similar users the script suggests.

• MAX_BOOKMARKS

  defines how many of your bookmarks the script will look at.

• BOOKMARK_FILTER

  defines which types of bookmarks are analyzed. Remove

  , "no"

  from

  {"shared" : [None, "yes", "no"]}

  to exclude private bookmarks.

• MATE_MIN_BOOKMARKS

  sets a minimum for the number of bookmarks a del.icio.us user needs to have before he can be considered to be similar to you.

• MATE_MIN_COMMON

  sets a minimum to the number of bookmarks a user has to have in common with you to be included in the list of similar users.

The script needs two Python modules, the parser BeautifulSoup and Michael Noll’s del.icio.us Python API. If the script does not find one of the modules, it will download the missing module to the current directory and import it from there. If you don’t like this because you believe this is a security nightmare (which it is), don’t run delicious_mates.py install the two modules beforehand.

Do you know some Javascript and have spare time? I would love to see the script converted into a direc.tor-like bookmarklet. The need to download and run a Python script makes finding similar users more complicated than it chould be.

The feature I like best about the online bookshelf LibraryThing is its Unsuggester: Name a book you have read and it suggests those books that are least likely to be on your bookshelf. I like it because it is a means to counteract the temptation to adjust your sources of information such that whatever you read reinforces your point of view. Seeing how easy it is to give in to this temptation, is a script that makes it easier to surround yourself with like-minded people just one more sign of a general trend towards biased, largely isolated online communities?

The groovi and gyri of your cerebral cortex identify you like your fingerprint.

“If — as some physical theories speculate — there is only one possible initial state of the universe and only one self-consistent set of physical laws, then the initial state required no bits of information to describe.” — Seth Lloyd

Goldbach’s conjecture: Every even number greater or equal to 4 is the sum of two prime numbers.

Doogie mice are mice that have been genetically altered to be smarter. Enrichment of the environment improves the cognitive performance of control animals but not of Doogie mice.

A state of a multiplayer game is Pareto optimal if there is no solution which is better for ALL participants. A state is a Nash equilibrium if NO player can improve his situation by changing only his own strategy.

Subliminal (16ms) unconscious stimuli have a measurable influence on your consumption behavior IF you are thirsty. And you will not be aware of the fact that such stimuli were shown to you.

Thermodynamic depth, a complexity measure for physical systems, relates the entropy of a system to the number of possible historical paths that led to their state.

If the same odor is present during slow-wave sleep that is present during learning new things, this improves performance. Induced slow oscillations by electric stimulation also improve declarative learning.

Distinguish horizontal from vertical explanations. Horizontal explanations correlate events on the same level of detail, they tell us why a certain event happened. Vertical explanations are explanations in terms of the level(s) below. They tell us why a certain generalization holds. If you get a horizontal explanation and still feel the need to ask “why?”, look for vertical explanations.

“We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time.” — discovermagazine.com

Epistemic actions are actions that are intended not to change the world but to minimize the computational load on your brain. For example, walking around a chessboard, reshuffling your cards. Actions that could have taken place in your mind, were your mind not extended into the world.

The majority of the connections from the prefrontal cortex to other brain areas is inhibitory. Is what we perceive as conscious control not so much involved in the creation and execution of plans but mostly in their inhibition?

Is the distinction between autopilot and deep thought not a distinction between planning vs. not planning, but a distinction between attention vs. no attention?

Duality: Map your problem to another space, find a solution there and map it back to get the solution you need. Think Category theory.

Patients with brain damage that prevents REM sleep do not appear to have a memory deficit.

Children below the age of four do not have a concept of what other people know. They believe that their knowledge is equal to other people’s knowledge. As soon as they learn something, they suppose that others know it, too.

Apes seem to understand basic intentions, but not cooperative intentions.

A brain area could respond to a stimulus by not responding while most other areas are active.

Use machine learning to create thousands hypotheses for lots of small patches of a brain in parallel, test the predictive value of each of them and discard all but those that work.

Four challenges to mind reading based on machine learning: The temporal and spatial resolution of current scanners; the potentially “unlimited” number of thoughts vs training on specific patterns; some types of brain activity have stereotypical patterns across people (e.g. lying), others seem not to; individuals change over time.

1 is not a prime number because factorization needs to be unique.

Perfect numbers are numbers that are equal to the sum of their proper divisors. 6 = 3 + 2 +1. Are there any odd perfect numbers?

Goal-directedness means equifinality: Different initial states lead to the same final state. Goal-directedness implies a reduction in entropy.

We know no good reasons why neurons have dendritic trees beyond increasing the surface area for synapses from other neurons.

Four different types of answers to the question why a certain animal behaves in a certain way: Proximate cause; current survival value; ontogeny (development of the individual); phylogeny (development of the species).

Humans were linguistic 100.000 years ago.

All of your mitochondrial DNA is from your mother.

Acheulean hand axes have been produced practically unchanged for over a million years. Many have been found in a state of not having been used at all. Social artefacts?

We are the only species vulnerable to ideas. Think religion. Freedom. Democracy. Justice.

Language digitizes.

In an experiment, children and chimpanzees try to get food out of a box after being shown a technique with an unnecessary additional step. Chimpanzees leave out the unnecessary step. Children copy the whole procedure.

Be precise.

Wie beeinflusst es unser Denken, wenn wir auf mehr unerwartete Informationen stoßen als gewohnt? Angenommen, auf dem Desktop erscheint jede Minute ein anderes, zufällig aus den 2,3 Millionen englischen Wikipedia-Artikeln ausgewähltes Thema und dazu eine kurze Beschreibung. Ist die einzige Auswirkung davon, dass wir uns noch leichter von dem ablenken lassen, was wir erreichen wollen?

Oder gibt es Tätigkeiten, auf die es sich positiv auswirkt, eine Vielzahl unterschiedlicher Erinnerungen kurz zu aktivieren (Priming), so dass mit diesen verbundene Konzepte in der darauf folgenden Zeit für Assoziationen zur Verfügung stehen, bei denen sie sonst möglicherweise nicht aufgerufen worden wären?

Mac-User können das selbst ausprobieren:

1. GeekTool installieren.

2. random_wiki.py herunterladen.

3. python /path/to/random_wiki.py

   als Shell-Kommando zu GeekTool hinzufügen.

4. cat /tmp/random_word

   als Shell-Kommando zu GeekTool hinzufügen.