Boring Work Days and Me: 5 Things I've Learned Before 5:00pm - Part V

1) What's in store for 2015?
2) Heterochromia iridum, or having two different color eyes, occurs in approximately six out of 1,000.

3) Heautoscopy is the psychiatric term for the reduplicative hallucination of "seeing one's own body at a distance." It's also considered a possible explanation for doppelgängers.
4) In 1969, President Jimmy Carter reported seeing an unidentified flying object in Leary, Georgia. The event, dubbed the Jimmy Carter UFO Incident, is known for being about as significant to UFO history as Jimmy Carter's presidency has been to traditional history.
5) How good or bad is your intuition? Not that it matters. According to Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, authors of The Invisible Gorilla, when it comes to effective decision making, intuition is about as useful as fairy dust.

Strange Loop

A 2007 study showed that a staggering 88% of people who set New Year's Resolutions fail. That means when you start your diet, commit to stop smoking, or vow to finally organize that closet, inevitably you're just going to wind up back in bed with my ex-boyfriend.

In theory, we would be constantly improving our New Year's Resolution making abilities. Each year's respective successes and failures should build on the proceedings year's experience until we've amassed a giant bank of New Year's Resolution wisdom and insight. Instead, January 1st slinks by like a guilty ex-boyfriend trying to sneak out of my apartment unnoticed, but for the unmistakable sense of déjà vu left behind.

A 12% success rate is a pretty poor showing. To put that in perspective, 12% is the same ranking Batman and Robin received on Rotten Tomatoes. Why do we struggle to maintain our Resolutions each year? And if doing so only sets ourselves up for failure, why do we make them at all? Like the old saying goes: watch Megashark versus Crocosaurus once, shame on Netflix, watch Megashark versus Crocosaurus twice, shame on me.

A strange loop is a phenomenon in which, whenever movement is made upwards or downwards through the levels of some hierarchical system, the system unexpectedly arrives back where it started

Just when it seems like we're all trapped in a fruitless, unending cycle of self-defeat, just when it seems like we're all trapped in a fruitless, unending cycle of self-defeat, just when it seems like we're all trapped in a fruitless, unending cycle of self-defeat—the Greek philosopher Heraclitus reminds us that "you could not step twice into the same river." Because the river is continually flowing, it's no longer the same river you'd stepped into before. Likewise one's self is similarly evolving, so you're no longer the same person who'd previously done the stepping.

As we work our ways through the levels of our respective hierarchical systems each year, it's important to remember that. Despite our failures, despite our setbacks—New Year's and otherwise—none of our attempts at self-improvement, self-reflection, self-understanding, are in vain. That effort alone makes it impossible for any of us to truly find ourselves back where we started.

Boring Work Days and Me: 5 Things I've Learned Before 5:00pm - Part IV

1) Currently unsolved or open problems or conjectures exist in various fields including neuroscience, linguistics and philosophy. We really do have 99 problems. 
2) The raven's paradox arises from the question of what constitutes evidence. The problem was proposed by the logician Carl Gustav Hempel in the 1940s to illustrate a contradiction between inductive logic and intuition. Similar idioms include a "red herring." 
3) Maybe I'm just like my father too bold.
4) In 1941, Danish physicist Niels Bohr and German physicist Werner Heisenberg met in Copenhagen to discuss the emerging role of scientists in the development of atomic weapons. The specifics of the meeting have been the subject of great speculation, notably Michael Frayn's 1998 play Copenhagen.

5) It's not that Japan was asking for all those Godzilla attacks, alls I'm saying is, it just doesn't seem to be that much of a problem for other countries.