Book Club People I have a friend who is a very die-hard, old school, book lover. She belongs to a book club and none of them like to use any technology. They only read hardback books, they don’t have smartphones, and they even refuse to read books written after world war II. […]
Poltergeist Origin Story
Drug Dealers There was this drug dealer, a friend of a friend, who started dealing just enough to support his habit. Then he started dealing enough to support his and his friends’ habit. Pretty soon he was making a lot of money, so much he quit his job and became a full time […]
Pythagorean Mysticism
Triangle Cult Pythagoras is credited with discovering the secrets of the right triangle, namely A^2+B^2=C^2, but this is not likely true. Not only was Pythagoras likely a fictional creation of the Pythagorean cult who worshipped numbers, but this same idea was discovered by plenty other ancient cultures. For example, long before the Greeks […]
Telepathic Triangulation
Where Am I? Triangulation is a pretty cool thing to be able to do, both from the inside and the outside. From the inside, like if you were hiking somewhere and you didn’t have a GPS locator, you could triangulate your location. You’d need a map and a compass, but it’s pretty easy. […]
Emergent Soul Theory
Unconscious Influence Cialdini has long studied the forces of influence that exist outside of our conscious awareness. The most common is social proof, but this one is a bit tricky, since everybody knows what social proof is, and every tends to try to leverage social proof in their favor. But all of us […]
Emergent Financial Parasites
Black Jack System Before the advent and widespread use of facial recognition technology, a group of MIT students developed a very lucrative blackjack system. They made a movie about it, but the movie was necessarily altered to make room for good guys and bad guys and back stories and character arcs. But the […]
Invisible Violin Player
Water Boy A few years ago some guy came by selling some water filters. He tried the puppy dog close, which is a pretty good closing technique, as it leverages commitment and consistency, as well as liking. But it does require you present your offer well, and you actually have a product that […]
Doppelganger Apocalypse
Artificial Scarcity A very common and old marketing strategy is to create and manage a level of artificial scarcity just enough to calibrate and maintain the desired purchasing level. For example, a company will be getting ready to release a new product, and advertise like crazy, building up massive demand. Then they purposely […]
Death Cycles
Dog Machine A friend of mine has this automatic dog machine. The dog drops the ball in the machine, the machine waits a random amount of time, and then spits the ball out with a random amount of force. The dog, after dropping the ball in, backs up, gets ready, and catches the […]
Circle Origin Story
Trigonometry is Magic One of the coolest discoveries in mathematics is that of trigonometry. Since cycles are a deep part of the natural world, and trigonometry deals in cycles, its discovery helped humans to understand a lot more than they did previously. It all started by wondering about the mathematical descriptions of the […]
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