People warned me, but I didn't believe that picking paint colors would be the hardest part of building a home. For the exterior color, we drove around until we found a new home that was exactly the color we wanted. We queried the owner about what paint he [...]

Posted by rayjayca • 1 day ago • View comments

You're probably aware of the Long Tail concept. The idea is that technology makes it economical for companies to sell items for which there are only a handful of buyers in the known universe. The trick is to sell lots of different items to lots of differe [...]

Posted by rayjayca • 2 days ago • View comments

Now that I'm married, one of the questions I fear the most is "Can you look in the X and see if you can find the Y?" Oh, I try. But my wife refuses to learn that I will never succeed. X and Y might represent, for example, the special cheese hiding in the [...]

Posted by rayjayca • 3 days ago • View comments

Shopping is broken. In the fifties, if you wanted to buy a toaster, you only had a few practical choices. Maybe you went to the nearest department store and selected from the three models available. Or maybe you found your toaster in the Sears catalog. In [...]

Posted by rayjayca • 7 days ago • View comments

Suppose a genie appears and gives you two choices. The first option is that he will give you $10 million dollars, but everyone else you know will get $20 million apiece. Choice two: You get $5 million, but no one else gets anything. As a bonus, the geni [...]

Posted by rayjayca • 8 days ago • View comments

I wonder if you could make money by investing in whatever companies make you angriest. For example, when oil prices were climbing to the sky, it was popular to hate oil companies. It also would have been a good time to buy their stock. Before any war, a [...]

Posted by rayjayca • 10 days ago • View comments

I saw in the news today that The United States is going to withdraw most of its military forces from Afghanistan. Okay, the news didn't say that in so many words. But they did say, "The cat is on the roof," which means the same thing. Allow me to explain [...]

Posted by rayjayca • 14 days ago • View comments

Suppose a genie appeared and offered to give you regular access to all the things you desire. Let's say that in your case it includes golfing, exotic traveling, eating ice cream, and having a great career. The genie's only catch is that he gets to control [...]

Posted by rayjayca • 15 days ago • View comments

Yesterday I blogged that beauty is nothing more than our recognition of functions that are related to current or past survival. Many of you chimed in with counterexamples and arguments. I will address them here. Q. Music is beautiful. Where's the surviva [...]

Posted by rayjayca • 16 days ago • View comments

Researchers tell us that we find other humans beautiful when those hotties appear as if they could produce healthy offspring. In other words, our minds translate the perception of species survival utility into the perception of beauty. I wonder if surviva [...]

Posted by rayjayca • 17 days ago • View comments