Where’s Waldo with no Waldo?: The Dunning-Kruger Effect

At 5 foot 6 inches and 270 pounds, bank robber McArthur Wheeler, 45, was not difficult to remember.

In 1995, he walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight. He wore no ski mask, no nylon stocking. In fact, he wore nothing over his face and did not disguise his body. Witnesses gave a consistent description of him, and one that made him stand out from faces in the crowd. The surveillance cameras corroborated their description. There he was, plain as day, pointing his gun at a teller.

The police arrested him and when they did he could not believe they found him out. "But I wore the juice," he said. He had rubbed lemon juice over his face, believing it made him invisible to the cameras.

Amputating a Phantom Arm

You have lost your left arm but you still feel your left hand.  You not only feel it,
but every minute of the day you are are nagged by an exhausting need to scratch the hand. But there is nothing there to scratch.

How can this be?  You feel something in the middle of nothing but air. You look down and you see empty space, but you still feel an extremely annoying itch right there where your hand is supposed to be.

You have a problem and it looks like there is no way to solve it. You can't scratch something that does not exist.

Politically as well as Economically Greece is Falling Apart

The mainstream media does its usual job of reporting between commercials.  It tells us that the Greeks are in trouble and that Angela Merkel and the Eurozone are imposing stringent austerity measures before bailing out the nation. "Now, folks," says the media anchor, "Don't touch that remote. We'll be right back."

Truth is, Greece is a far larger cause for concern than the sixty second sound bytes indicate.

Is Your Brain a Meat Computer Without Free Will?

I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.(Robert Frost)

When you come to a fork in the road, take it! (Yogi Berra)

Both quotations have to do with forks in the road. Frost implies he exercised free will and Berra makes nonsense out of the very idea of free choice. The Yankees catcher was good at silly quotes that the press liked to scoop up like fly balls but this one resonates into philosophy and brain science.

We can't start over to discover if we could have done differently because we are creatures of time and perhaps it is merely a construction of our consciousness. Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once, as John Wheeler put it, which is another way of saying we are dimensionally constituted to handle one thing at a time.