As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.

People who buy annuities, it turns out, live longer than people who don't, and not because the people who buy annuities are healthier to start with. The evidence suggests that an annuity's steady payout provides a little extra incentive to keep chugging along.

I do think that the standard media is controlled by the conventional wisdom about global warming. We've come to believe - from reading a lot of articles and talking to a lot of scientists - that there's another side to be heard.

The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.

The gulf between the information we proclaim & the information we know to be true is vast. In other words: we say one thing & do another.

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.