Saturday, October 30, 2021

Don't Choose Extinction


The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is bringing Frankie, a ferocious, talking dinosaur, to the United Nations’ headquarters to shine a spotlight on the hundreds of billions of dollars governments spend every year propping up the fossil fuel industry.

"Listen up, people. I know a thing or two about extinction," he says. "Going extinct is a bad thing. And driving yourselves extinct in 70 million years? That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard."

“At least we had an asteroid,” the dinosaur warns, referring to the popular theory explaining dinosaurs’ extinction 70 million years ago. “What’s your excuse?”

“Think of all the other things you could do with that money. Around the world people are living in poverty. Don’t you think that helping them would make more sense than… paying for the demise of your entire species?” the dinosaur says.

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

The Dunning Kruger Effect


The Dunning Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias that makes people believe they are smarter and more capable than they actually are. The effect is related to people’s general inaptitude to recognize their lack of ability. To learn how this comes about and what you can do to avoid it from happening to you, watch this video (you can read the script down below):


SCRIPT

SCENE 1
On April 19, 1995, McArthur Wheeler, robbed a bank with his face glazed with lemon juice, believing the juice would make his face invisible to the surveillance cameras. He thought so because lemon juice works as invisible ink on a piece of paper.

SCENE 2
Police broadcasted the security camera footage on the local eleven o’clock news and just after midnight, Arthur was arrested. Incredulously, he said “But I wore the juice...”.

Monday, October 18, 2021

Daylight Saving Time - Autumn 2021

Daylight saving time (DST)—also summer time in several countries, in British English, and European official terminology—is the practice of advancing clocks so that evenings have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn.

When DST starts in central Europe, clocks advance from 02:00 CET to 03:00 CEST.  

Though mentioned by Benjamin Franklin in 1784, the modern idea of daylight saving was first proposed in 1895 by and it was first implemented during the First World War. Many countries have used it at various times since then.

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