>> Fear the known, not the unknown. “Most people are pretty terrible at risk assessment. They tend to overstate the risk of dramatic and unlikely events at the expense of more common and boring (if equally devastating) events. A given person might fear a terrorist attack and mad cow disease more than anything in the world, whereas in fact she’d be better off fearing a heart attack (and therefore taking care of herself) or salmonella (and therefore washing her cutting board thoroughly).”
>> In times of great distress, play Tetris. A team of psychologists are using Tetris to treat post-traumatic stress syndrome, the argument being that “Tetris is so engrossing and mentally taxing that geometric shapes replace images of exploding grenades, car crashes and human carnage.”
>> Downgrade your tech to upgrade your lifestyle. Adam Stein broke his web-enabled phone, and so traded it in for a refurbished flip phone — and saw his quality of life improve. “Turns out that when you’re stripped of mobile email and web, your heart rate decreases, you have more serendipitous encounters with puppies and wonder-filled children, and your bursitis goes away. I miss the mapping functionality of my web phone, but I find the survival skills I honed during my pre-mobile-internet years slowly returning.”
>> There’s no free lunch. Okay, that one’s not a new maxim, but transportation researcher Eric A. Morris’ post title’s unexpected: “Why You’ll Love Paying for Roads That Used to Be Free.” Eric argues in favor of congestion pricing and toll lanes: “In the space of a year or two we could have you zipping along the 405 or the LIE at the height of rush hour at a comfortable 55 miles per hour.”
The basic economic theory is that when you give out something valuable — in this case, road space — for less than its true value, shortages result. Ultimately, there’s no free lunch; instead of paying with money, you pay with the effort and time needed to acquire the good.
His practical suggestion is to create toll lanes. “The other lanes would be left free — and congested. Drivers will then have a choice: wait or pay. Granted, neither is ideal. But right now drivers have no choice at all.”
I want the Big Blue Bus for my 3-year old. I live in the City of L.A. and take Metro to work every day!
Thanks.
Comment by Ross Rivas — January 7, 2009 @ 12:20 pm
Thanks for the tetris article! I just sent it to all my colleagues, fellow therapists that work with kiddies at schools that are dealing with lots of trauma
Comment by mel — January 7, 2009 @ 2:25 pm