Updated 04/11/2020 Taylor Swift telling you to follow your dreams is like a lottery winner telling you, ‘Liquidize your assets, buy Powerball tickets, it works!’ Bo Burnham Those were the days! Do you ever reflect wistfully about the music of your youth, or the classic cars or films, and lament: “They just don’t make them…
Updated 28/10/2020 On one of our recently recorded podcasts we discussed our marketing pet peeves. My choice was a new marketing approach called ‘confirm shaming’ in which the user of a website is offered a choice, and if they decline the button option is accompanied by a snarky reply as below: This is an amusing…
Updated 21/10/2020 “Confidence is ignorance. If you’re feeling cocky, it’s because there’s something you don’t know.” -Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl Young children often have an egocentric view of the world. They can believe that there are causal connections between their actions and unrelated events. This can be especially problematic during grief, when the child can…
Updated 14/10/2020 “I never get enough sleep. I stay up late at night, because I’m Night Guy. Night Guy wants to stay up late. ‘What about getting up after five hours sleep?’ Oh, that’s Morning Guy’s problem. That’s not my problem, I’m Night Guy. I stay up as late as I want. So you get…
Updated 07/10/2020 Flat-earthers. Obama ‘Birthers’. Anti-Vaxers and homeopaths. If confronted with one, do you think your unique, implacable calm and logic would convince them? Have you ever had an unsuccessful argument with somebody and left feeling that if you could have been more coherent and logical they would have been swayed? Let me reassure you:…
Updated 30/09/2020 In 2005 a website called ‘Ship of Fools’ held a competition for the best religious joke ever. The winner was this effort from Emo Philips: “Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you…
Updated 23/09/2020 “When I was 5 years old, my mom always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy.” They told me I didn’t understand the assignment and I told them they didn’t…
Updated 16/09/2020 Drake is a celebrity. Drake likes to celebrate success: not only his own but any other sports star/team that he can hitch his applecart to. When a team or athlete does particularly well Drake is there to cheer, backslap and hoover up any reflected glory. Like any good brand he wants to align…
Updated 09/09/2020 Have you ever bought a piece of furniture from IKEA (and subsequently valued it very highly) and decided you could build it without reading the instructions? How did that turn out? If you answered in the affirmative you may be suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect. Aside from everybody’s favourite president, sufferers demonstrate specific…
Updated 02/09/2020 I am a caffeine addict. Yes the multiple health benefits (protection against Parkinson’s, and heart disease etc.) are nice, but I would probably drink it even if it gave me a lobotomy. The neurochemical action of caffeine is fascinating: it blocks a receptor in your brain for adenosine, a molecule that carries phosphate…