Bill Hicks Live - Satirist, Social Critic, Stand-Up Comedian

Love All the People: The Essential Bill Hicks by Bill Hicks and John Lahr

Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution by Kevin Booth and Michael Bertin

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http://www.alchemygoods.com/

Two years ago, Eli Reich was a mechanical engineer consultant for a Seattle wind energy company when his messenger bag was stolen. The environmentally conscious Reich, who rode his bike to work every day, decided that instead of buying a new one, he would simply fashion another bag out of used bicycle-tire inner tubes that were lying around his house. Soon compliments on his sturdy black handmade messenger bag turned into requests. “That was the catalyst,” says Reich, who obtained a business license, gave up his day job, and quickly launched Alchemy Goods in the basement of his apartment building. The company’s motto: “Turning useless into useful.”

http://www.BoomerangBoxes.com

When Marty Metro and his wife added up the number of times each of them had moved over the years, it came out to an astounding 29 times. Metro knew they weren’t alone in using massive amounts of cardboard boxes and was convinced he could help movers, businesses and the environment by creating a solution to the cardboard quandary. For now, BoomerangBoxes.com offers an online exchange for those outside the delivery area to link up and exchange boxes with others for a nominal fee. With annual sales projections exceeding $750,000, the company boasts 75 percent-plus gross margins.

http://www.pickydomains.com/

Eugene Gromov is a domain wizard. Software developer by trade, he has accidentally discovered that software companies are having a hard time finding available domains for their new products and services. But coming up with unique, memorable domain names was his hidden talent. After naming domains for others part-time for three years, he was literally forced into going into domain name business full-time. “When I started getting multiple orders a day, I realized that I can’t do it on my own any longer. I needed help”. So he launched PickyDomains.Com a site that aggregates orders for domain names and shares 50% of the profit with people who name domains for him.

http://www.invisiongolf.com/

While golfing with his brother one day, Andy Yocom saw prime advertising space on the flags on the course. He and his brother Timmy reasoned that any marketing messages would get prominent attention if they were placed on the flags, since golfers focus on them when they take their shots. Today, Invision Golf Group has expanded its advertising and marketing services beyond just flags to include whole golf course sponsorship-from banners in locker rooms to advertising on golf carts. The strategy is working: At press time, the sales were standing at $300,000 a year, and the company now has a presence on 142 golf courses in 26 states.

http://knifethrower.com/

Ten years ago, The Great Throwdini (David Adamovich), now 59, retired as a physiology professor, bought a billiard hall and took up knife throwing. Adamovich now holds six world records and performs about 20 solo shows a year. He has performed on Broadway, at corporate events and weddings and on TV shows such as “Late Show with David Letterman” and ESPN’s “Cold Pizza.” He makes around $100,000 a year for his knife-related ventures, but for $75 an hour Adamovich also offers private lessons at his Long Island, N.Y. home.

http://www.lemonaidcrutches.com/

Leg casts decorated with Sharpie markers are so five years ago. What’s the new must-have item for the injured fashionista? Designer crutches, of course. For Laurie Johnson, founder of LemonAid Crutches, the idea of adding a little pizzazz to the drab world of medical supplies was born out of terrible tragedy. In 2002, a small-plane crash took the lives of her husband and 2-year-old son, and left her with a broken femur that wouldn’t heal. A year later, still in emotional and physical pain, Johnson decided to take life’s lemons and make lemonade. It all started when her sister spray-painted Johnson’s crutches and fabric-trimmed the handles. “I sat there thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, this is so silly, but they make me feel better!’” says Johnson, 46. “I said, ‘If I feel this way, someone else is going to feel this way, too.” And though the designer-crutch business may seem like a small niche, Johnson has big plans for several new projects, such as offering crutches to children’s hospitals. Last year Lemon-Aid brought in just under $150,000.

http://www.recycledseatbelts.com/

Betty Funk’s purses, made from used seatbelts, are so strong you can pull a truck with one, as a customer found out when a tow rope proved too short. The purses are so strong, you could whack a purse snatcher into next Tuesday. The strap won’t rip, either, if you get into a tug-of-war with a pilferer. After all, the purses are made from material designed to save your life. Some people balk at the prices, which range from $40 to $130, depending on the size of the bag, and can rise to $160 for custom-made bags. But the business is booming. The company has sold close to 1,000 bags so far.

http://www.ustarnovels.com/

Like so many great business ideas Katie Olver’s eureka moment came to her out of a desire to buy something that didn’t exist. She was on the look-out for a personalized novel as a present for a friend, but the only ones she could find were for children. With a little persuasion, she convinced her partner of seven years, Jon Reader, to help her turn the idea into a business, and got to work on setting up U Star Novels, a series of personalized romance novels where the reader is the protagonist. The 2007 revenue is expected to be around $140,000.

http://www.itsyousmall.com/

Ralph Trumbo is neither an athlete nor a celebrity. Nevertheless, he has a bobblehead likeness of himself sitting on his mantel. Bobbleheads, those shaky-headed 3-D caricatures, have jiggled free of their mass-produced roots of an earlier generation. Once merely featureless figures decked out in team colors and handed out on game day, they now depict just about anyone who wants one. Ralph, who graduated from the University of Iowa with a fine arts degree in 2002, has been drawing caricatures since he was a child. He turned that interest into a job making bobbleheads after graduation. He won’t say how many he makes beyond ”quite a few.” Prices range from $150 to $200.

http://www.gaming-lessons.com/

Tom Taylor never expected to be a player in the business world; he just wanted to play video games. But as he got better and better, his passion for competitive gaming–and his desire to share his expertise with others–grew. Last year, Taylor, a top-five rated player in the pro-gaming circuit, started a video game coaching business to help others who wanted to improve their games. “I wanted to offer them a shortcut so they didn’t have to go through what I did to learn,” says Taylor, who started playing video games at age 7. Running his business, Gaming-Lessons, out of his Jupiter, Fla., home, Taylor draws dozens of clients from middle-school kids to middle-aged parents and from college students to celebrities. His fees? A whopping $65 an hour.

Money for Nothing: Real Wealth, Financial Fantasies and the Economy of the Future

Maximum Marketing, Minimum Dollars: The Top 50 Ways to Grow Your Small Business

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur’s Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

More Online Business Ideas

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http://www.pickydomains.com/

PickyDomains.Com is a perfect example of how to turn one’s talent into a profitable business. With ever expanding Internet and tens of millions existing websites, finding an available domain name that’s not already taken by cybersquatters can be a real nightmare.

But one man’s problem is another man’s solution. Rather than to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for a domain name on the aftermarket, an increasing number of web entrepreneurs turn to professional “domain namers”.

While most naming agencies charge a non-refundable fee that can be as high as $1500 for a corporate domain, one service that unites 17 professional domain namers from countries like United States, Russia, Australia and New Zealand, decided to offer a risk-free service that costs only 50 dollars per domain.

After 50 dollars are deposited, clients start getting a list of available domain names via e-mail for a period of 30 days. If they see a domain they like, they register it and notify the service about domain acquired. The individual, who came up with the name, gets $25, the other half going to the service. If no domain is registered, the money is refunded in full.

While the idea is brainlessly simple, it appears that PickyDomains.Com has no competition with its risk-free business model. But that is almost certain to change as more people find out that finding available domain names for other people can be a profitable business.

Domain Names: How to Choose & Protect a Great Name for Your Website

The Domain Game

I’ve Got a Domain Name–Now What???: A Practical Guide to Building a Website and Web Presence

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The film chronicles Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center. It is based on Philippe Petit’s book, To Reach the Clouds, recently released in paperback with the new title Man on Wire. The title of the movie is taken from the police report that led to the arrest (and later release) of Petit, whose performance had lasted for almost one hour. The film is crafted like a heist film, presenting rare footage of the preparations for the event and still photographs of the walk, alongside reenactments (with Paul McGill as the young Petit) and present-day interviews with the participants.

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

10 Examples When Stupid Business Ideas Worked Online

Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison

Your Guide To Underground Economy

Peter Schiff Talks About The Coming Economic Collapse In US (2006 Video In 8 Parts)

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Other cool documentaries:

Tales From The Jungle: Malinowski

Ideas Into Profit

Secrets of the Lost Empire / Pharaoh’s Obelisk

How Much Protein Do You Need to Take For Your Muscle Building Workout

latest twitter news and stories

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Outer space is open for business. From orbits 36,000 km away, satellites run our daily lives. They see and hear everything. But this booming $50 billion dollar a year industry is virtually unregulated. Space has become the exclusive domain of the biggest and strongest with America, Russia and China all developing weapons to take out each other’s satellites. As space becomes increasingly commercialized and militarized, are we allowing the dangers to outweigh the potential benefits?

Who is Brad Pilon? Why Did He Design Eat Stop Eat and Tell the Truth about Fat Loss?

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur’s Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

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1. http://cuddleparty.com/

Runs events at which adults “explore communication, boundaries, and affection” by donning pajamas and getting physical. Ix-nay on the naughty stuff.

2. HappyBalls.com

A million-dollar company that makes a single product: foam balls for car aerials.

3. Barefootlist.com

Members create and track lists of things they want to achieve before they die.

4. http://pickydomains.com/

Get paid for picking domain names for other people

5. http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/15326

Drive-through strip joint.

6. http://www.afterlifetelegrams.com/

Service for contacting the dead. Terminally ill patients memorize messages and deliver them when opportunity permits.

7. http://www.enthem.com/

Writes full-length corporate theme songs. The ultimate in hold music!

8. http://www.fetalgreetings.com/

Creates pregnancy announcements that purportedly come from the womb.

9. http://gaming-lessons.com/

Video-game-coaching services. Offers “world-class instruction” in Halo 2.

10. http://www.heartattackgrill.com/

Menu features a quadruple bypass burger, flatliner fries (”deep fried in PURE LARD!”), and Jolt cola. Also available: unfiltered cigarettes.

[Via - Uncommon Business Blog]

Feel inspired to start your own weird business? These books might help

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Weekend Entrepreneur: 101 Great Ways to Earn Extra Cash

The Perfect Business

eBay 101: Selling on eBay For Part-time or Full-time Income, Beginner to PowerSeller in 90 Days

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In this revealing study of a Southside Chicago neighborhood, sociologist Venkatesh opens a window on how the poor live. Focusing on domestics, entrepreneurs, hustlers, preachers and gangs linked in an underground economy that “manages to touch all households,” the book reveals how residents struggle between “their desires to live a just life and their needs to make ends meet as best they can.” In this milieu, African-American mechanics, painters, hairdressers, musicians and informal security guards are linked to prostitutes, drug dealers, gun dealers and car thieves in illegal enterprises that even police and politicians are involved in, though not all are criminals in the usual sense. Storefront clergy, often dependent “on the underground for their own livelihood,” serve as mediators and brokers between individuals and gang members, who have “insinuated themselves—and their drug money—into the deepest reaches of the community.” Although the book’s academic tenor is occasionally wearying, Venkatesh keeps his work vital and poignant by using the words of his subjects, who are as dependent on this intricate web as they are fearful of its dangers.

2. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Economics is not widely considered to be one of the sexier sciences. The annual Nobel Prize winner in that field never receives as much publicity as his or her compatriots in peace, literature, or physics. But if such slights are based on the notion that economics is dull, or that economists are concerned only with finance itself, Steven D. Levitt will change some minds. In Freakonomics (written with Stephen J. Dubner), Levitt argues that many apparent mysteries of everyday life don’t need to be so mysterious: they could be illuminated and made even more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing connections. For example, Levitt traces the drop in violent crime rates to a drop in violent criminals and, digging further, to the Roe v. Wade decision that preempted the existence of some people who would be born to poverty and hardship. Elsewhere, by analyzing data gathered from inner-city Chicago drug-dealing gangs, Levitt outlines a corporate structure much like McDonald’s, where the top bosses make great money while scores of underlings make something below minimum wage. And in a section that may alarm or relieve worried parents, Levitt argues that parenting methods don’t really matter much and that a backyard swimming pool is much more dangerous than a gun. These enlightening chapters are separated by effusive passages from Dubner’s 2003 profile of Levitt in The New York Times Magazine, which led to the book being written. In a book filled with bold logic, such back-patting veers Freakonomics, however briefly, away from what Levitt actually has to say. Although maybe there’s a good economic reason for that too, and we’re just not getting it yet.

3. Ragnar’s Guide to the Underground Economy

Through detailed case studies Ragnar shows you how carpenters, woodcutters, farmers, housecleaners, computer consultants, mechanics, lawyers, vendors, locksmiths and others are cashing in on today’s booming economy - and keeping what they earn by not paying taxes. From these undergrounders you’ll learn how to locate work, get paid without supplying identifying numbers, prepare a realistic budget, advertise your services or product and finance your project when you can’t go to the bank. You’ll also learn the pitfalls of working off the books and what you can do to prepare for them.

4. How to Survive Without a Salary: Learning How to Live the Conserver Lifestyle

I thought that this book was so funny in places that I haven’t laughed so hard, so much, for a long time. Charles is a skilled writer; the book is very readable, intelligent, thoughtful,and well organized. It contains a copious (even prodigious) amount of tips, for a 200-page book. Very practical, and at the same time touches on abtruse philosophical areas, especially at the end of the book.

Hey, I used to think I was cheap. This guy is CHEAP. His anecdotes include waiting for it to rain to take a shower instead of installing indoor plumbing. He had a big hole in the floor of his entryway, or somewhere in his house, into which the kids and a few guests fell. He refused to spend one cent covering the hole, until a neighbor told him about a steel grate they threw away years ago, so he went to the dump and found it.

The point is that you can learn from a top-notch “conserver”; an applied example I would give is to buy two gallons of milk when it’s on sale and freeze one for later use (works well!). This guy probably drinks powdered milk though.

I disagree with his economic analysis; prudence CAN be a vice, as any virtue most certainly is in its extreme, or even overdone. But Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is not just about “McPimple Burger” or keeping up with the Joneses. Any system on a mass scale is going to have gaping faults, and the weaker of us might succumb to our basest impulses. But perhaps Long goes a bit too far the other way…

At any rate, he sounds like an economic anarchist. Very well thought out book, great advice.

5. Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

In Freakonomics, many people were fascinated by a section that described how most crack cocaine dealers lived at home with their mothers. Why? They make less money than minimum wage. The source of that factoid was research conducted on site by Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Gang Leader for a Day, who describes in this book how he did that research and came to make decisions one day for part of the Black Kings gang in Chicago.

In the process of reading this book, you’ll learn more than you ever expected to know about the ways that the poorest people support and protect themselves. You’ll also find how drug-dealing gangs are both a help and a hindrance to the poor.

More powerfully, you’ll be exposed to the great difficulties involved in observing the lives of the poor and the gangs that spring from them. The moral and ethical dilemmas this book presents are almost beyond belief.

6. Under the Table and Into Your Pocket: The How and Why of the Underground Economy

Under The Table And Into Your Pocket: The How And Why Of The Underground Economy by Bill Wilson will provide the non-specialist general reader with a complete education on a facet of the American economy rarely (if ever) covered in school. Beginning with an introduction to just some of the ways governmental regulations strangle business, overtax the little guy, and enable Washington to be the drunken big spender that it is today (if you overpay your taxes by $7,000 and don’t reclaim it within three years you’re out of luck - but underpay it by $7,000 and the IRS can and will come after you no matter how much time has passed!), Under The Table proceeds to demonstrate how the little guy can circumvent taxes by doing business away from Big Brother’s prying eyes. From boarding houses and flea markets to roadside merchants and dominatrix work, Under The Table covers the benefits, disadvantages, tips, tricks, techniques and much more of common underground ways to earn a living. Under The Table is emphatically not a legal guide; neither the author nor the publisher assume any responsibility for the use or misuse of information contained within - but the eye-opening ins and outs of a truly free economy make for quite fascinating and advantageous reading.

7. Deep Inside the Underground Economy: How Millions of Americans are Practising Free Enterprise in an Unfree Economy

Are you fed up with giving so much of your hard earned cash to the government, then watching it get spent on ridiculous pork-barrel special-interest projects? Would you like to hold on to more of your money for your own special-interest boondoggles? The underground economy continues to grow in spite of ever-widening atttempts by the government to regulate and tax everything we do. Millions of Americans are practising fee enterprise in today’s increasingly unfree tax society. This is the most comprehensive how-to book ever written for those entrepreneurial individuals who have decided to end their slavery to a wage and to government taxation as well. Discover how you can keep more of what you earn for yourself. Here you will find complete and up-to-date information on the ins and outs of guerrilla capitalism and the underground economy in this country.

8. Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging.

In December of 2001 Jeff Ferrell quit his job as tenured professor, moved back to his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, and, with a place to live but no real income, began an eight-month odyssey of essentially living off of the street. Empire of Scrounge tells the story of this unusual journey into the often illicit worlds of scrounging, recycling, and second-hand living. Existing as a dumpster diver and trash picker, Ferrell adopted a way of life that was both field research and free-form survival. Riding around on his scrounged BMX bicycle, Ferrell investigated the million-dollar mansions, working-class neighborhoods, middle class suburbs, industrial and commercial strips, and the large downtown area, where he found countless discarded treasures, from unopened presents and new clothes to scrap metal and even food.

9. McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld

In McMafia, Misha Glenny draws the dark map that lies on the other side of Tom Friedman’s bright flat world. That connected globe not only brings software coders and supply-chain outsourcers closer together; it’s also opened the gates to a criminal network of unsettling vastness, complexity, and efficiency that represents a fifth of the earth’s economy, trading in everything from untaxed cigarettes and the usual narcotics to human lives and nuclear material. Glenny’s a Balkans expert, and he begins his story there, with the illicit–but often state-sponsored–underworld that grew out of the post-Soviet chaos, but he soon follows the contraband everywhere from Mumbai and Johannesburg to rural Colombia and the U.S. suburbs. It’s not just a hodgepodge of scare clips, though: Glenny reports from the ground but follows the leads as high as they go, showing how the dark and bright sides of the flat world are more connected than we imagine.

10. Living Well on Practically Nothing

Living Well on Practically Nothing: Revised and Updated Edition is for people who need to live on a lot less money. If you have been fired, demoted, retired, divorced, widowed, bankrupted or swindled - or you just want to quit your job and remain financially self-reliant - this book is for you. In it are hundreds of tips, secrets and necessary skills for living well on little money. Chapters include: Save Up to $37,000 a Year and Live on $12,000 a Year; Low-Cost Computers for Fun, Profit, and Education; Some Ways to Live on No Money at All; A Day of Cheap Living; A New Career or Business for You; Fix Things and Make Them Last; and Protect Your Investments and Make Them Grow. From cover to cover, this book is stocked with proven methods for saving money on shelter, food, clothing, transportation, entertainment, health care and more. The author left the “system” in 1969 and has worked for himself ever since. Let him show you how you, too, can live happily, comfortably and with complete financial freedom.

P.S. If you’d like to know how I make my money (it’s not really “shadow” or illegal at all, but it give me freedom to do anything I want to, while providing steady stream of income), feel free to check out my websites - PickyDomains.com, NicheGeek.Com, StandupKings.com, SoftwareJudge.Com, Best Free Documentaries.

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3. Borat Mankini

4. Deer Rear

5. Gay Man-To-Man Attraction Mist

6. Badonkanonk

7. Wedding Chappel

8. 1500 Life LadyBugs

9. Fart Pen

10. 55,000 celebrity addresses

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Why is it so difficult to sell a plummeting stock or end a doomed relationship? Why do we listen to advice just because it came from someone “important”? Why are we more likely to fall in love when there’s danger involved? In Sway, renowned organizational thinker Ori Brafman and his brother, psychologist Rom Brafman, answer all these questions and more.

Sway introduces us to the Harvard Business School professor who got his students to pay $204 for a $20 bill, the head of airline safety whose disregard for his years of training led to the transformation of an entire industry, and the football coach who turned conventional strategy on its head to lead his team to victory. We also learn the curse of the NBA draft, discover why interviews are a terrible way to gauge future job performance, and go inside a session with the Supreme Court to see how the world’s most powerful justices avoid the dangers of group dynamics.

2. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

What Ariely has done here is shift a lot of the thinking developed by such pioneers as Kahneman & Tversky who worked in behavioural economics, and moved it into the everyday sphere. And he’s done a great, insightful job. Where the behavioural economists are focused on financial decisions (why we buy high and sell low - and confound the assumptions of the classic economists who assume ‘the rational man,) Ariely eschews the technical language and walks us through everyday examples of our often fuzzy and quite irrational decision-making.

3. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

I think “Paradox of Choice” does bring insight into shopping, but its range is actually much wider than that. Schwartz discusses people making difficult decisions about jobs, families, where to live, whether to have children, how to spend recreational time, choosing colleges, etc. He talks about why making these decisions today is much harder than it was 30 years ago, and he offers many practical suggestions for how to address decision-making so that it creates less stress and more happiness. He even discusses how so much additional choice affects children, and how parents can help make childhood (particularly young childhood) less stressful.

4. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

“Buy on apples, sell on cheese” is an old proverb among wine merchants. Taking a bite of an apple before tasting wine makes it easier to detect flaws in the wine, and the buyer who does so will not as easily make the mistake of paying more than the wine is worth. Cheese, on the other hand, pairs well with wine and enhances its flavor, so a seller who offers cheese may command a higher price for the wine (and may even deserve it, if the wine is intended to be drunk with cheese). The proverb captures important psychological nuances of choice. The same product - a bottle of wine or a risky medical procedure - may be perceived differently depending on its context, and it is often possible to arrange the context to influence a choice while still maintaining the decision maker’s autonomy.

5. Quirkology: How We Discover the Big Truths in Small Things

Richard Wiseman is an experimental psychologist and professor of “public understanding of psychology.” In this book, he discusses dozens of experiments performed by himself and other psychologists around the world over the course of the last hundred years. All these experiments have in common is unusual research methodology or amusing results.

Topics include studies of personal ads and pickup lines, determining which are most effective, how to detect liars, manifestations of prejudice and hypocrisy (are religious people or priests more honest or generous than others? it has been tested). Wiseman even ran tests to see which experiments in the book are the most interesting, to help the reader know what would be the best conversation starters at parties.

6. Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things

Clinical psychologist Van Hecke has compiled a list of 10 mental glitches that have infiltrated contemporary society, afflicting even the smartest among us, limiting thought, success and relationships. Van Hecke devotes a chapter to each blind spot, including “Not stopping to think,” “Not noticing,” “Jumping to conclusions” and “Missing the big picture.” Examining each in detail, Van Hecke details the root causes of these unconscious habits (”information overload,” “our tendency to habituate”) and tactics for overcoming them, using humorous anecdotes and other real-life examples to drive her points; the key is remaining open to new ideas and taking a step back from our busy lives in order to process information, situations and people. Filling in “the big picture” herself, Van Hecke demonstrates how embracing and understanding our weaknesses can not only improve personal and professional relationships, but also entire communities; this self-help is a welcome, highly readable first step.

7. Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

In “Kluge,” psychologist Gary Marcus looks to the many and varied foibles, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies of the human mind and concludes that our brains are not, in fact, models of brilliance and efficiency, but are rather cobbled-together systems, designed for one purpose and pressed into action for another - the classic definition of a kluge.

The most famous kluge is probably the case of the carbon scrubbers on the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission. Crunched for time, engineers managed to create a system out of duct tape and socks (seriously) that worked adequately enough to clean the air on the space module- even though none of the materials they used were designed for, or optimal for, the job at hand. The result was ugly and inefficient - but it kept the astronauts alive. Likewise, Marcus argues, evolution has endowed humans with a hodgepodge of genetic material - the DNA equivalent of duct tape - with which to build all the sophisticated systems that supposedly set us apart from other creatures, like language, memory, and reason. The result is, for example in the case of language, “a vocal apparatus more byzantine than a bagpipe made up entirely of pipe cleaners and cardboard dowels.”

8. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

The author writes to the layman, making the language of statistics, probability, randomness a fascinating read. It’s clear that he’s well aware of the fallacies and delusions (and consequent harm) to which most of us are easy prey. But he leaves it to the reader to draw any philosophical-theological inferences about the need for greater humility. His immediate goal is to help the reader understand the distinction between 1. the “common-sense” logic employed by self-serving finite beings coping with problems in the material world and 2. a “scientific method” that takes nothing for granted in a universe of perpetual flux. More miraculous than either the accomplishments of the romantic hero or the intercessions of a supreme being (everyday stuff for most of us) is the rare discovery that two things (or “events” in the spatial-temporal order) suspected of being connected (a hypothesis) in fact cannot be shown “not” to have such a relationship (the proof).

9. Guesstimation: Solving the World’s Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin

Somehow, guessing at numbers is unsettling, even though I’ve done it all my life. John Adam is a professor of applied mathematics, with a degree in physics. Larry Weinstein is a nuclear physicist. Their book is devoted to proving that intelligent guessing is useful and fun. The book lays out some general principles but its great strength lies in the interesting problems, a series of hints to help you solve each problem, and an interesting discussion of the pitfalls and triumphs involved.

10. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Cialdini believes that influence is a science. This idea attracted me. As a rhetorician, I have always thought of persuasion as more of an art. Cialdini, however, makes a first-rate case for the science point of view. But maybe most importantly, he makes his case in a well-written, intelligent, and entertaining manner. Not only is this an important book to read, it is a fun book to read too.

He introduces you to six principles of ethical persuasion: reciprocity, scarcity, liking, authority, social proof, and commitment/consistency. A chapter is devoted to each and you quickly see why Cialdini looks at influence as a science. Each principle is backed by social scientific testing and restesting. Each chapter is also filled with interesting examples that help you see how each principle can be applied. By the end of the book, I had little doubt that these are six important dimensions of human interaction.

Fart Gene Isolated. Now, That’s A Breakthough!

Mariage Annulled, After Bride Turns Out To Be Not A Virgin.

Whoops. Antibacterial Wipes Can Spread Bacteria

Weird $4 Gas Side-Effect

What Do People Do When Their Neighbors Win In Lottery?

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