As anyone who has bought anything or even used Amazon knows, they have an active product announcement program. This is where they notify you of new products via email. Sometimes these are extremely popular items with mass appeal (e.g. Harry Potter) but more frequently they use your history to find items that you would probably be interested in. In my experience, this works very well. I can’t say for sure whether I have bought anything based on their emails but I’m usually interested in the product and will browse to find out more information.

With that said, I was really surprised to receive the following from Amazon.ca: “We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Sergio Leone by Christopher Frayling have also purchased Moments Like This by Donna Hill.”

At this point I’m confused. The cover doesn’t look like something I would usually be interested in. At the bottom of the email it indicates that the book is from the Subjects -> Romance category. Now I know I’m not interested. At all.

Then a funny thing happened. No, I didn’t buy the book! But I did start wondering how this could happen.

• Are flocks of huge Sergio Leone fans really buying this book? If so, why? Leone films barely have any female characters let alone actual romance.
• Maybe one person who bought Sergio Leone actually bought the book? It could have been a gift?!
• Could it be a bug with Amazon’s software?

I’m secretly hoping that it is the third option — the other two options are too damaging to my world view.

Categories: Misc, Movies, Tech
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I recently stumbled upon a site that uses visual images to test peoples implicit assumptions. Or in the words of the project, “The IAT measures implicit attitudes and beliefs that people are either unwilling or unable to report”.

Check out the site and take one (or more) of the tests.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/

I’ve taken the tests and the results seemed to be accurate although I’m not sure if they actually are. It seemed to me that when answering a multi-category section that was in conflict with my opinions that I could actually feel the mental effort required. If that doesn’t make sense, then take the test!

Categories: Misc
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Recently Dr. Stephen Hawking posted on Yahoo Answers a question: How can the human race survive the next hundred years? Here is my quick answer. Obviously this short answer can’t address all topics and polemics but it’s a start:

To survive we must use the faculty which is the key to the human race — reason. And in turn we must also embrace its corollaries: science and technology. I admit that it does feel like we are in a chaotic time but from a longer term perspective the overall (or average) life of a human is much improved over the last centuries (you, Dr. Hawking are a perfect specific example). I have confidence that if we apply ourselves to our problems that we can arrive at solutions.

Imagine that 80 years ago we didn’t know about penicillin and 65 years ago we didn’t have any commercial penicillin. Infections we don’t think twice about now could have killed you. A bird flu pandemic is obviously on many peoples minds and this would obviously be very bad. Some people might even blame science for these diseases and “superbugs” but the alternative is to just sit back and accept whatever nature happens to throw at us. And history has shown us over and over again nature can be extremely cruel towards life. e.g. Volcanoes, diseases, floods, tsunamis etc. Perhaps some diseases would not exist today without our use of antibiotics but the alternative is literally just to sit back and whither. That is the true path to destruction.

We must to continue to apply our rational thought to our problems if we are to arrive at solutions, survive and even thrive in the next hundred years.