Remember how I said yesterday that Windows Update occasionally forcibly restarted my laptop when I was doing something important and didn’t notice the countdown timer?

A helpful reader named Akar let me know that I can stop this from happening by opening gpedit.msc and going to Local Computer Policy → Computer Configuration → Admininstrative Templates → Windows Components → Windows Update and disabling Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations.

The best part? It actually works.

Thanks Akar.

*high-five*

What I’m Reading

After a handful of days being too busy to read, I finally managed to finish Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, the sequel to Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

Like Freakonomics, Superfreakonomics presents some interesting questions that only a truly curious economist would ask, and keeps the underlying theme of how people react to incentives.

My favorite selections from Superfreakonomics included the results of a variation of the economics game where you have $10 and you can elect to give none, some, or all of it to another person; how effective cheap and simple solutions can be compared to expensive solutions, and how a cheap and simple solution could effectively reverse global warming; what effect the choice of a doctor’s tie has on patients’ death rates; and how monkeys, if given the chance, will turn to prostitution to satisfy their desires.

If you read and enjoyed Freakonomics, you should definitely read Superfreakonomics. If you recall from a while back, one of the very few complaints I had about Freakonomics was that it went into a little bit too much detail about some of the topics. Superfreakonomics completely avoids that and has just the right amount of data and elaboration on each of the topics it discusses. It also discusses topics that incite more curiosity and have more relevance to things we might experience today.

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Topic #177: What does freedom mean? People talk about freedom all the time, but what does it mean in real life? Is a person who has a job truly free? What about the responsibilities of having a family or a friend? It’s one thing to be free to make a choice, but after a choice is made, are we truly free anymore?

In response to the question “What does freedom mean?”: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=define+freedom

I think anyone who is not strictly controlled by another individual is considered free. An easy way to determine if someone is strictly controlled or not is if they have a free choice to do something. Of course, as the prompt mentioned, someone with a job or a family or a friend might be considered controlled by their responsibilities, but they still have the choice to quit the job, divorce and separate from the family, and split away from the friend. Obviously, doing so might not be the best decision one could make, but it can still be done.

Someone without freedom is under such close supervision and ownership of another individual that he or she is unable to choose to do something. The easiest example of someone without freedom is a slave. Their life consists of serving their master. They could choose to run away and end their life as it exists now and start a new one, but escape would be extremely difficult, and if found, they would most likely be recaptured or killed, effectively making their choice useless even if they wanted to choose.

What I’m Reading

Because it was recommended to me for the past few years as the world’s best economics book, I read and finished Freakonomics yesterday.

Freakonomics takes an unconventional approach at economics and is heavily focused on the fact that one of (if not the) most important components of economics is incentive. You need to have an incentive to do something, and that essentially drives anything related to our economy.

Levitt and Dubner answer some interesting questions by bringing in information from original research. For example, how can a computer find out which teachers are cheating when submitting their students’ national standardized exams? How did a bunch of kids humiliate and damage the Ku Klux Klan? Why do drug dealers still live with their mothers if drug selling yields such great profits? How did the legalization of abortion lower the crime rate? Which is safer for your child, sending him to a house with a concealed gun or a house with a swimming pool? And will naming your child “Winner” really make him a winner?

Although portions of this book went into extremely specific detail that progressed relatively slowly, I was interested in all of the general topics and learned a lot of things that most people would not have expected to be true. Although there is no obvious way the content of this book can be applied to everyday life, I would still recommend this book just for the knowledge it provides.

Click here to purchase Freakonomics on Amazon.com.

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Topic #164: What war is worth fighting?

The answer to this seems like common sense, but I think a war over a valued belief or possession in which we have a proportionately high chance of victory is worth fighting.

More specifically, the amount we value this belief or possession has to be far greater than the lives of the equipment and individuals we will lose during the process of the war. As for the chances of victory, if we know that we are going to lose (or we know that the chances of losing are drastically greater than the chances of winning), then it’s probably better not to attempt to fight, lose equipment and soldiers, and end up losing the war overall as well.

This seems like a blatantly obvious answer that shouldn’t even be a prompt to a blog post. I can’t even begin to imagine what these blog prompts are going to look like in December after they’ve done this for 11 months.

What I’m Reading

Earlier today, I finished reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, a book mainly about economic psy­chology, but also about the general concept of how we decide what to do on a moment-to-moment and day-to-day basis.

Most of us think that the best decisions are the ones we think through slowly, thoroughly, and carefully. Most of us believe that the more information we have about the elements of a choice we could make, the better our choice becomes. Even great philosophers like Socrates and Decartes believed this as well – that the way someone can live a near-perfect life is to supress impulses and think through every decision completely.

How We Decide argues that rational thought is not actually the best way to think through the decisions we make, and contrary to popular belief, impulses and emotional urges are extremely important when it comes to making some sorts of choices. Lehrer states that some choices are best thought through, like math problems, but other choices, like selecting what type of strawberry jam we want, are best left to our emotional minds. He states that if we think too analytically about things like picking strawberry jam or selecting a piece of artwork that we like, we’ll overanalyze unimportant details and end up making the wrong cohice.

I’ve read a lot about how important our emotions are if we interpret them properly, but How We Decide put together all the important points and supported them with great evidence to illustrate a complete and detailed picture. Lehrer cites what seems like hundreds of different sources of different experiments conducted by psychologists, sociologists, and economists that prove the point Lehrer is making.

I highly recommend everyone to read this book, even if psychology or economics might not be a point of interest. The information covered in this book can be applied to everyone’s life and could potentially help them change the way they make decisions for the better. Even just the vast amount of research and intriguing experiment results presented in this book makes it worth reading.

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Topic #149: Do you believe in life on other planets? Why or why not? Why do you think most alien races in most movies are so dangerous rather than friendly?

I don’t necessarily specifically believe in life on other planets, but I do think that there is life somewhere other than Earth.

Based on specific science only, I think that it’s very possible that we have not yet discovered an area that has an environment fit enough for some sort of life. In addition, this other life could be of a completely different type, which might actually thrive in cold, desolate places rather than vegetative, sunny places like Earth.

From the fourth dimension point of view (which is my scientific alternative to religion), there are different worlds owned by different four-dimensional creators that we have not yet been able to find because of time and dimensional restrictions. This life could be completely different than what we think of as life, but it would still be considered life if the four-dimensional creator chose to call it life.

I think that the media depicts aliens as hostile and dangerous beings because we have the impression that aliens might be intelligent enough to take over our planet. In order to defend ourselves, we see aliens as dangerous and malicious to justify our motivation to protect our land.

Quote of the Day

Garrett Royce: so, here’s a tip for you

Parkzer: Is it more than 15%? I like big tips

Garrett Royce: no

Garrett Royce: if you delete a folder and forget you have a terminal where the CWD is that folder and you try to run a command in that terminal you will get an error from virtually every program

Parkzer: … I have no idea what that means

Parkzer: but I don’t think I will ever have to command a CWD terminal to delete a running folder that forgets errors

What I’m Reading

To expand my knowledge about psychology in general, I decided to read a book by Daniel H. Pink titled Drive. Drive is about what motivates us, and how we can improve that level of motivation. It presents ideas that contrast with what most people believe, explains why the common belief is wrong, and supports the claim with data from research. For example, most people believe that salary and productivity are directly correlated such that an increase in payment will increase the amount and quality of work done. Pink shows that this is actually very false in more than one way. When a task involves creativity and innovation, increasing monetary compensation to an unnecessarily and excessively high amount can actually damage the quality of the final result.

Pink goes on to state that people should change their motivators from extrinsic forces (like money) to intrinsic forces (like a desire to learn). Although extrinsic motivators may boost productivity and results temporarily, in the long run, intrinsic motivators will do much more good. Pink then spends the remainder of the book describing how all different sorts of individuals – students, parents, and corporation owners – can apply this concept of intrinsic motivation to their current environment.

Although this book didn’t hold my undivided attention, it was still worth reading. A large portion of this book seems to be talking about things that can be concluded with common sense, but Drive helps people actually come to these conclusions and realize how important they are to recognize and interlace into their lives. Pink cites some interesting research that presents some surprising and shocking results that will help rid some myths that could be harmful in the long run. Like most other well-written books related to psychology, the topics covered in this book can be used by anyone to apply to their everyday life and improve their overall quality of life.

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Topic #123: Pick a blog or blog post you enjoy and write a post about it. By writing about another blogger, and including a link to their blog, you’ll show up in their pings, and if what you write is interesting, odds are good they’ll check out your blog too. Don’t abuse this, no one likes to feel spammed, but if you want more traffic, genuinely writing about blogs or posts on other blogs you enjoy can only help draw attention your way.

I actually already did this on May 23, 2011 in response to a blog post by my friend Benjamin Chow from May 15, 2011. If you actually want to read my response to his blog post, check out my blog post from May 23.