Tag: Paradox

These days, we have such a hard time defining DevOps because the problem it initially solves is long gone. For some recent companies, the problem never actually existed! They are doing everything correctly, but instead, the software engineering landscape has evolved so fast that the gap has been ...

A legal conundrum unfolds on the American political stage, raising a pivotal question: Can a presidential candidate, facing serious criminal charges, ascend to the nation’s highest office? This query now hangs over former President Donald Trump, setting the stage for an unprecedented col...

The political landscape of America has been significantly shaped by Donald J. Trump’s campaign, marked by a strategy that many perceive as rooted in negativity and complaint. The acronym MAGA, which stands for “Make America Great Again,” has become a rallying cry for Trump’s ...

The paradox of traveling is that, when you don’t have a clear destination in mind, you can end up drowning in decision paralysis. Wandering is a hamster wheel if you don’t even know where you should put your body for the night. The choice of where, physically, to occupy space is a fundam...

Are humans the masters of destiny, or mere conduits for the demands of the times? This age-old question has troubled many great minds throughout history, with a definitive answer troublingly out of sight. But perhaps the benefit lies not in the answer, but in the debate itself. Would I have pu...

Life has an amazing way of showing us the crushing reality, often challenging us of our core beliefs. People who fall in love without letting the societal voices intervene are lucky. People who make that love a commitment even luckier. One has to be strong willed and hopeful to succumb to the fear o...

Are humans the masters of destiny, or mere conduits for the demands of the times? This age-old question has troubled many great minds throughout history, with a definitive answer troublingly out of sight. But perhaps the benefit lies not in the answer, but in the debate itself. Would I have pu...

It’s so strange having to sit and watch people go about their business, while I gaze randomly into the eyes of these strangers. No, I’m not a weirdo or pervert, just one who is ever curious about the complexities of the human mind and the social dynamics of a creature crowned far abov...

There is a famous tale of Picasso in the marketplace. Picasso was walking through the market one day when a woman approached him. She pulled out a piece of paper and said, “Mr. Picasso, I am a fan of your work. Please, could you do a little drawing for me?” Picasso smiled...

Executive functioning challenges and time blindness contribute to poor financial management Basically, Executive function refers to the mental skills that enable people to manage their lives. Think of it as the “command center” of the brain. ADHDers are wired differently and our comma...

There is a famous tale of Picasso in the marketplace. Picasso was walking through the market one day when a woman approached him. She pulled out a piece of paper and said, “Mr. Picasso, I am a fan of your work. Please, could you do a little drawing for me?” Picasso smiled...

As businesses strive to improve efficiency and profitability, they turn to key performance indicators (KPIs) as a way to measure their progress. Nevertheless, as with any tool, the improper application of KPIs can result in unanticipated and often detrimental outcomes. They may become a stumbling bl...

Wong Kar-wai is a Hong Kong film director, screenwriter, and producer, born on July 17, 1958, in Shanghai, China. He is considered a contemporary auteur and ranks third on Sight & Sound’s 2002 poll of the greatest filmmakers of the previous 25 years. Wong’s films are characterized by...

Are they a good green player or not? Why the new coal plants as well as solar? China is IMO likely a good green player and ChatGPT-4’s web research largely agrees. Besides, solar-wind-battery is now cheaper than coal plants and operations. They’d be nuts not to. The ke...

The keyboard, the mouse, the screen. The chair, the table, the lamp. Plastic, plastic, plastic. Everywhere I see, everything I touch: plastic. Appliances, fabrics, packaging. Automobiles, construction, and medical equipment. Plastics are the building blocks of the modern world, at a cost of ...

In fact, neither is your new project — the one you were SO excited about that you worked your butt off, and moved yourself and your (beautiful new) family to the other side of the world, just for the chance to lead. My boss’s attitude put the rain on that parade. And (sigh) rightly so...

Confronted with a nearly limitless universe billions of years old with an almost infinitely vast number of opportunities for life, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, sitting for lunch at Los Alamos with three colleagues in 1950, asked a question that still perplexes everyone who looks up at the nig...

When something falls into a black hole, where does it go, and will it ever come back out again? According to Einstein’s General Relativity, those answers are simple: as soon as anything physical — matter, antimatter, radiation, etc. — crosses over the event horizon, it’s gone...

Black Holes have always been a fascinating topic. First coined by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1796, they were defined as an object which had a gravitational pull greater than that of the speed of light. These massive objects have a unique spacetime metric because their gravitational force is so great th...

In the high-stakes world of healthcare, the introduction of the “Just Culture” model was hailed as a revolutionary step forward. Promising a balance between accountability and a non-punitive approach to errors, it aimed to foster an environment where healthcare professionals could report...

Introduction to the Fermi Paradox Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered if we are alone in the universe? This question has perplexed scientists and thinkers for decades, and it is known as the Fermi Paradox. Named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who famously asked, “Where...

Theoretically, the chances of two people having the same birthday are 1 in 365 (not accounting for leap years and the uneven distribution of birthdays across the year), and so odds are you’ll only meet a handful of people in your life who enjoy the same birthday as you. This leads many people ...

The potato paradox is a very simple paradox, but many people find it quite surprising, and confusing, or might even refuse to believe it. Suppose you buy 100 kg of potatoes. Potatoes contain water, of course, and these particular potatoes contain 99% water. Overnight, some of the wat...

On first reflection, if someone asked you the question: “How long the coastline of Great Britain?” (or any other landmass for that matter) You’d probably give it your best guess and return an integer in miles or kilometres. The true answer however, is that it depends! Determinin...

Simpson’s bias is a statistical paradox first described by Edward H. Simpson in a 1951 paper titled “The Interpretation of Interaction in Contingency Tables.” It demonstrates how aggregated data can mask underlying behaviors within sub-groups. This phenomenon occurs when a relation...

Sometimes, statistics show surprising things that make us question what we see daily. Berkson's Paradox is one example of this. This Paradox is strongly related to the sampling bias problem and occurs when we mistakenly think that two things are related because we don't see the whole picture...

The above is a pretty old question that I recently saw resurface on Twitter. Since I disagree with the answer given there, I figured I’d post my own analysis. The tricky thing with this question is that it is self-referential. Usually, multiple-choice questions look like this: T...

Psychedelic therapy is emerging as a promising new treatment for depression, anxiety, addiction, and other mental health issues [1]. Many proponents are even envisioning a world in which psychedelic therapy, which is administered once or twice over the course of a month would replace the current sta...

In “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less,” Barry Schwartz talks about the complicated truth that having too many choices can make people less happy and satisfied. This blog post goes into detail about the main ideas and themes of the book. It gives a thorough look at how having too ma...