the ħive

oligopoly:

A market structure in which a market or industry is dominated by a small number of large sellers or producers.

by Tom Gauld

The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created.

Closely related to “effort justification” which had demonstrated that the more effort someone put into something, the more someone will value it.

Mentioned in this episode of QI, next to the rhyme as reason effect and the frequency illusion.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once said ‘If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.’ As people who’ve never professed to understand quantum mechanics, The Fence find this statement quite presumptuous, but decided we’d ask some of the world’s biggest boffins how much they do or don’t know about their jobs, life and everything else besides.

TF: Can you do long division?
David MacMillan: Yes, anyone can do long division… it’s getting it right that’s the hard bit.

https://www.the-fence.com/issues/issue-11/nobel-endeavours

In 1998, Tom McBride and Ron Nief of Wisconsin’s Beloit College began compiling lists of what had “always” or “never” been true in the lives of each incoming class of students, to remind faculty to be mindful of the references they made in class.

For example, that first class, born in 1980, had been 11 years old when the Soviet Union broke up and did not remember the Cold War. They had never had a polio shot and never owned a record player. Their popcorn had always been cooked in a microwave, and they’d always had cable television. Here are some details of the worldview of the class of 2022:

• Outer space has never been without human habitation.
• The Prius has always been on the road in the U.S.
• They never used a spit bowl in a dentist’s office.
• Mass market books have always been available exclusively as Ebooks.
• There have always been more than a billion people in India.
• Films have always been distributed on the Internet.
• The detachable computer mouse is almost extinct.
• The Mir space station has always been at the bottom of the South Pacific.

Other recent lists are here.

via Futility Closet

“Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort. There must be the will to produce a superior thing.”

— John Ruskin

How much bullshit hides in your text? Discover now at:

http://www.blablameter.com/index.php

(PR-Experts, politicians, ad writers or scientists need to be strong here!)

teleology:

1. (philosophy) The study of the purpose or design of natural occurrences.
2. (by extension) An instance of such a design or purpose, usually in natural phenomena.
3. The use of a purpose or design rather than the laws of nature to explain an occurrence.

[Wiktionary]

Spend a large amount of money on a “rebrand” you could have made yourself in five minutes:

https://www.tomscott.com/helvetica/

(a web joke by Tom Scott)