Frank Bures

You Are Not So Smart

Posted in Books, Clips, Science on January 19, 2012 by frankbures

We don’t always know what we think we know. Confirmation bias (your brain’s tendency to cue into, or seek out, information that confirms opinions you already have), the Dunning-Kruger effect (your overestimation of your competence), subjective validation (your tendency to believe vague, positive predictions) – each of these unlocks some quirk of the human mind, some way in which we misperceive the world.

In his entertaining new book, You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself (Gotham, 2011), journalist David McRaney has collected such well-established theories – many of them culled from his blog of the same.

Read the rest here.

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Scam I Am: Travelers Beware

Posted in Clips, Travel on January 4, 2012 by frankbures

Picture, if you will, a tall man walking around Athens. He is staring at the buildings, unable to read the signs. He has only a vague idea of where he is. He has a wild mane of graying hair poking out from under his Gatsby cap, and he would never be mistaken for a Greek.

He’s my father-in-law.

This was some years ago. He told us the story later: A man approached him and introduced himself. He said he’d lived in the United States and wanted to practice his English. My father-in-law said he was in a hurry, but the man insisted on buying him a drink. So he shrugged and went along to a little bar around the corner.

They talked for a few minutes. Then a couple of women joined them, and soon the man disappeared. The women were friendly – very friendly – and started ordering drinks. Then more drinks. “Boy,” my father-in-law thought, “these Greeks sure are friendly.” And then, “I wonder who’s paying for all these drinks?” As he got up to leave, he was presented with a bill for $30.

He got his answer: The sucker was paying.

Read the rest here.

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Long Live Long Form

Posted in Books, Writers, Writing on January 2, 2012 by frankbures

Flying in the face of the ever-shrinking attention span, two new publishers are hard at work pushing long-form narrative nonfiction into new territory. If you’re a writer you’ve probably heard about these. If you haven’t, please check out both Byliner and The Atavist. For a place to start, here are some great stories:

Bill Donahue’s just-released piece The Secret World of Saints, about the world’s first Native American saint.
Matt Power’s Island of Secrets, about one man’s search for an undiscovered kind of tree kangaroo on the island of New Britain.
Dave Wolman’s The Instigators, about the digital activists who started the Arab Spring.
And of course, Jon Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit, about the Greg Mortenson fiasco.

These are perfect for the bus or plane if you have some sort of e-reader. It’s well-worth the $2 or $3 for a great, meaty read. After all, how much did you pay for your last coffee?

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Best Book of the Year, 2011

Posted in Books, Science on January 2, 2012 by frankbures

This book will not be on anyone’s year-end list. It will not be a bestseller. It will be ignored by scientists and New Agers alike. It will not be read by anyone who believes we basically know what we need to know about the world. Trying to ask hard questions about strange things can be a dangerous walk along a narrow path with Richard Dawkins and the materialist fundamentalists wagging their fingers on one side and a pile of Heaven’s Gate corpses on the other.

Yet Steve Volk shows artfully that it can be done, and in Fringe-ology we find a place in the middle for rational, considered exploration of the things we do not yet understand, a space like the one neuroscientist David Eagleman wants to see carved out. Despite its unfortunate title, Fringe-ology is a rational book, a bold book, an honest book, a humble book, and a book that is not afraid to say when things are ludicrous, when they aren’t and–most importantly–when we simply don’t know.

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Lost in Shangri-La

Posted in Books, Clips on December 15, 2011 by frankbures

In May 1945, as World War II neared its end, a U.S. military plane crashed high in the mountains of the island then known as Dutch New Guinea. The 24 servicemen and -women aboard the plane had been on a pleasure jaunt, surveying a huge, unmapped valley that was home to a tribe that had first encountered people from the outside world only in 1938.

Most of the passengers died on impact or shortly after. Of the three who survived, John McCollom was unhurt, while Margaret Hastings and Kenneth Decker were badly injured.

Read the rest here.

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Business Class: Minneapolis

Posted in America, Clips, Travel on December 15, 2011 by frankbures

It was 1996 and the Minnesota winter was just closing in when Christine Fruechte, then a rising star in the advertising world, got a job offer in Honolulu. She jumped at the chance. “When I got there,” Fruechte recalls, “it was 20 below in Minneapolis and 90 degrees in Hawaii. People said, ‘That’s over 100 degrees difference. I can’t even imagine it!’”