Apophenia is the uniquely human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns or connections in random or unrelated data, events, or objects. Humans are story telling machines. And one thing we do is turn co-incident events into more than coincidences. When we see faces and shapes in clouds, apophenia wastes our time in the form of pareidolia. […]

What if they meant it? What if your return felt special to the people behind the counter? What if they knew, without looking it up, or being told–what if they knew that you were here, again, a vote of trust and confidence. Returning home is one of the oldest human desires. It’s a feeling that […]

The standards have changed a lot in the last few millennia: The big man said it. The book said it. The newspaper said it. I saw a photo. I saw it on TV. I read it on the internet. That’s what the AI said. There has always been room for doubt. But the last century […]

The creators of the Blackberry were sure that customers loved the keyboard. That’s what they heard all day from their users, and it must have been right since they had a huge share of the mobile phone market. When the iPhone came out, it wasn’t seen as a threat because it had no keyboard. Blackberry […]