My favorite new word: exonumia. Now I just need to figure out a way to slip it into casual conversation.

“From basketball tickets to waterfowl-hunting rights to classic albums, once someone owns something, he places a higher value on it than he did when he acquired it - an observation first called “the endowment effect”. […]

The endowment effect has been seen in hundreds of experiments, the most famous of which found that students were surprisingly reluctant to trade a coffee mug they had been given for a bar of chocolate, even though they did not prefer coffee mugs to chocolate when given a straight choice between the two.”

From It’s mine, I tell you

Mismatched expectations are the source of all drama.

All humans share a basic yearning: to connect with other people who care about the same things that they do.

Perhaps this, more than any other factor, explains the rapid adoption of the internet. It’s a channel for people with unusual interests - interests too diffuse in the general population for them to find each other in fixed geographic area - to meet and congregate.

Or as Megan McArdle more bluntly puts it: “The internet is the Freak Liberation Front.”

Pluto is now classified as neither a planet or an asteroid, but rather a class of object in between the two: a plutoid.
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Health insurance is seriously fucked up in the US. This supposed “free market” system is actually a perverted mockery of everything a true capitalist holds dear. And the link between health insurance and your employer is stupid beyond fathoming.

Normally I show my dissatisfaction with a bad system via a simple, quiet, and effective manner: non-participation. I vote with my feet, as the saying goes. Unfortunately, going without health insurance is a very bad idea, so in this particular case that option is closed.

But there’s an option that, while not a complete panacea, has the potential to go a long way to improve things. That option is called health savings accounts, or HSAs. An HSA is exactly like a normal bank account, except that it’s designated only for use on medical expenses, and the money you put into it is not taxed.
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Keep an eye out for filler phrases in your writing and speech. They dilute your message without adding anything. Here’s a few common ones:

• “so to speak”
• “in a sense”
• “at the end of the day”
• “to be honest”
• “for all intents and purposes”
• “without further ado”
• “at this point in time”
• “if you will”

None of these phrases really mean anything. How can you tell? By cutting them out of a sentence, the meaning of the sentence doesn’t change:

“The garden out back was, in a sense, Jane’s sanctuary from the world.” → “The garden out back was Jane’s sanctuary from the world.”

“Without further ado, I’m pleased to present tonight’s speaker, John Smith.” → “I’m pleased to present tonight’s speaker, John Smith.”

“We don’t have any more tickets to give away at this point in time.” → “We don’t have any more tickets to give away.”

As always, omitting needless words makes your message more forceful.

Now that’s a pleasing graph.

Forty years ago, the US supreme court ruled that a state law to bar interracial marriage was unconstitutional. Today we have a similar ruling, this time for same-sex marriage, from the California supreme court. The case for freedom marches steadily forward; I often wish it moved faster, but I’m just glad that we keep moving in the right direction.

“…if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done — I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul- crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.

Everyone knows that something is wrong. The politicians say, “we need higher standards.” The schools say, “we need more money and equipment.” Educators say one thing, and teachers say another. They are all wrong. The only people who understand what is going on are the ones most often blamed and least often heard: the students. They say, “math class is stupid and boring,” and they are right.”

From A Mathematician’s Lament, by way of BetterExplained