Just like it says, Popcorn Shorts is about the kind of things we think are really interesting, but don’t really need a large article to explain them. From the sublime to the ridiculous, check in here for crunchy bits of info you’ll love to munch. By the way, much (but not all) of our delicious Popcorn comes from articles we’ve posted on our Facebook page. If you’re on Facebook, please stop by and “Like” us and we’ll keep a fairly-constant-but-not-frequent-enough-to-be-annoying stream of these coming to your virtual door!
Who are you, really? HA! WRONG!
One of the interesting paradoxes of life is that you are the only person who cares what you’re thinking. To everyone else on the planet “you” are your external actions alone, with no clue to the thoughts or motivations behind them. So how well do you understand what other people see when they see you? Research at Columbia University indicates that the answer is “not very well”. Various studies looked at assertiveness, attractiveness, voting patterns, and charitable giving, and found that in all cases people were pretty accurate on their estimates of others, but way off when it came to themselves. This may be surprising unless you’re familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect, but that’s another story…
Are you accidentally abusing your dog?
We’re a dog shop (in fact we keep a box of treats behind the counter when for when your dog comes in) and most of our employees have dogs waiting for them at home. But when we ran across this list of gripes dogs might have with their people, a lot of them surprised us. So many of the things we do to show affection to our pets make sense to us as people, but dogs have a completely different evolutionary past and completely different way of perceiving the world. When you think of things from their point of view, you can understand why these things may cause problems. Doesn’t matter what the list says, though… we’re still hugging our dogs when we get home.
Benghazi… the little scandal that couldn’t
“The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence [12 Reps and 9 Dems] has concluded that there was no deliberate wrongdoing by the Obama administration related to the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.” This is probably the biggest recent news that no one paid attention to. You’d think a report two years in the making, answering loud and persistent questions about the President’s involvement in an event that killed an ambassador would get the same notice as the baseless accusations, but realize this… as much as you’ve heard in the media about Benghazi over the past two years, right now, you’re reading about it from an auto repair shop. Hmmm.
Where in the world are you? HA! WRONG AGAIN!
We’re interested in education, so every once in a while we have some Popcorn about the deplorable state of education in our country. (Our articles on “Could you pass a US citizenship test” or “Do you have what it takes to vote in 1965 Alabama?” are good examples). This month we ran across a survey in which American participants had to write in country’s names on a blank European map. The results were truly frightening, painfully funny, but probably not surprising. You can see below that we didn’t do much better. You can click here to see the survey results or click the blank map below to try it for yourself. Good luck!
Here’s our attempt at geography. With apologies.
Stop laughing! Here’s a blank map… can you do better?
