Jedi Bathroom Tricks

I’ve passed through Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport a few times in my travels. Unbeknownst to me, I have been experimented on each time…

The flies in the men’s-room urinals of the Amsterdam airport have been enshrined in the academic literature on economics and psychology. The flies — images of flies, actually — were etched in the porcelain near the urinal drains in an experiment in human behavior.
After the flies were added, “spillage” on the men’s-room floor fell by 80 percent. “Men evidently like to aim at targets,” said Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, an irreverent pioneer in the increasingly influential field of behavioral economics.

That’s pretty cool. I never knew this. This is the sort of thinking we need more of in tackling user-facing security problems. The biggest challenges aren’t math- people are the weak point in any system. If we can nudge people into doing the right thing, in any discipline, and amuse them along the way, we’ll have done the world a service.

Headline of the Day

Drug Made In Milk of Altered Goats Is Approved
(Bonus weird humor points, if you’ve seen Altered States)

Rabbits would breed faster and cows would produce more milk, but Newberry said goats offered the largest supply at the quickest pace.

(We milk Rabbits?)

Stephen Fry recently noted how language merely as a communication tool would make life dull and one-dimensional. We’d miss interesting ideas.

We would never notice if the fat and protein rich food with which cows, ewes and nanny goats suckled their young could not be converted to another, firmer foodstuff that went well with crackers and grapes.

(His idea has several features, now including being rather less spooky than milking drugs from goats)