I can’t believe we’re all gonna die, I just can’t believe it. What if everything matters? What if nothing matters?
Put Away The Bell Curve: Most Of Us Aren't 'Average'
npr:
For decades, teachers, managers and parents have assumed that the performance of students and employees fits what’s known as the bell curve — in most activities, we expect a few people to be very good, a few people to be very bad and most people to be average.
The bell curve powerfully shapes how we think of human performance: If lots of students or employees happen to show up as extreme outliers — they’re either very good or very bad — we assume they must represent a skewed sample, because only a few people in a truly random sample are supposed to be outliers.
New research suggests, however, that rather than describe how humans perform, the bell curve may actually be constraining how people perform. Minus such constraints, a new paper argues, lots of people are actually outliers. -Shankar Vedantam
At home in a piece of history: Beth Howard stumbled onto the Iowa farmhouse depicted in Grant Wood’s 1930 painting “American Gothic” on a road trip after her husband died three years ago. She pays $250-a-month rent, and a clause in her lease requires her to be nice to the thousands of people a year who come to pose for photos in her front yard.
Photo credit: Alana Semuels / Los Angeles Times
Oh Google…
“It is so hard to leave - until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”
John Green - Paper Towns (via travellinginspiration)
Vatican chastises nuns for questioning church: The Vatican has ordered an overhaul of the most important group of nuns in the United States after an investigation found what Roman Catholic Church officials called “radical feminist themes” that questioned official positions on homosexuality and the ordination of women.
Photo credit: Gregorio Borgia / Associated Press
You know you’ve hit a low point in the semester when you impulsively label a 10-page term paper “Dancing With Myself” because the song was in your head and it also kind of related to the paper topic.
