A few years ago when my daughter Claire was in high school she was procrastinating on starting a school project. We admonished her to get started and warned how bad it would be to wait until the last minute. She replied "nope, not going to start it - I'm going to let...

Dichotomous Thinking Dichotomous thinking is black and white thinking. Also known as all or nothing thinking or either/or thinking. With dichotomous thinking there is no grey area. Actions, people and situations are viewed in a binary manner. People are good or bad,...

I am in Park City, Utah skiing this week. I've been marveling how ski lifts have progressed over they years. Yesterday, I rode a few six person high-speed chair lifts that moved an amazing amount of people. Much different experience than the slow two-person lifts that...

It's a new year! Time to be more productive! Today's IFOD is about a time management technique that is very effective in boosting productivity. A prior IFOD discussed the benefits of oscillating throughout the day; trying to put your head down and work for hours at a...

An important economic concept is that of "externalities" which are effects that are experienced by third parties not subject to an economic activity. Externalities can be positive or negative. Externalities For example, streetlights are installed for convenience and...

I always appreciate the recommendation of a good book and thus I really like year-end book lists. In that spirit, below are my five favorite fiction and non-fiction books I read in 2018. It was incredibly hard to narrow the list down to five of each! Note: these...

Every second each of us are bombarded with thousand trillion neutrinos, a type of subatomic particle. Amazingly, these neutrinos pass right through our bodies, and even the earth itself without hitting anything! What are Neutrinos? They are fundamental subatomic...

I am 48 and have been a runner for decades. When I mention that I run, I get told quite often that it is bad for my knees and I'll end up needing knee replacements. Is this true? Will my running lead to knee pain? It seems as if the pounding your knees take from...

An important concept when comparing groups from a population is that often the variation within the group will be greater than the variation between the groups. What is meant by this? An example of this concept concerns the height of males vs. females. The average...

The Lockheed-Martin Compact Fusion Reactor Imagine a power source that used cheap and plentiful fuel, produced one million times more energy than a chemical reaction such as burning, generated no greenhouse gasses, and no harmful waste. That power source is nuclear...

All the music we've ever heard comes from just 12 musical notes (ignoring octaves). Think of all the thousands of songs you've ever heard. And the millions you've never heard. Each one of them is made from just 12 notes. If you think about it, that is Kinda Bonkers!...

Big changes have occurred over the past few decades with respect to how we consume news. A generation ago we mainly received news from similar sources: the local and national nightly news, local and national newspapers and weekly or monthly periodicals. The rise of...

For population to increase, there must be more than 2.1 children born per woman. If the fertility rate is below 2.1, without immigration, a country's population will decline. The world's fertility rate has dropped precipitously over the last few decades and the U.S....

All energy on Earth comes from the Sun, even the oil, gas and coal buried within the Earth is energy from the Sun. Plants have existed on Earth for billions of years. Plants require three main inputs to grow: sunlight, water and CO2. Plants consume CO2 and excrete...

If you think about it, compared to humans, it is rare for your dog to get sick and your dog never seems to catch your human cold or flu. What's the deal? Germs Tend to be Species Specific First, cold and flu causing germs tend to be species specific - more on that...

This person is "a runner" Relying on willpower is not a good strategy to create lasting change. We only have so much willpower and it is easily used up. Instead, research has found that lasting change occurs when we create positive habits and cease practicing negative...

On Earth we experience three of the four states of matter constantly: solid, liquid and gas. There is a fourth state of matter that is rare on Earth but actually makes up 99.99% of the visible matter in the Universe and was the first state of matter to form after the...

Fear is important. Without it we'd act recklessly and make horrible decisions. We'd drive way too fast, handle poisonous snakes, and hang out in dangerous areas of town. The development of fear provides important survival benefit. Humans and animals who feared...

A human characteristic is that we generally have positive self-perception. This often leads to a self-enhancement bias whereby we think we are better than we really are. Our conscious and subconscious impressions of ourselves tend to be positive. An interesting  study...

Brands convey more than just the identity of the manufacturer. Brands can convey a feeling and also status. The "Law of Demand" states that the quantity purchased of an item varies inversely with price (so long as all other factors are constant). Thus, if  Trader...

Met a man on the roadside crying,Without a friend, there's no denyingYou're incomplete, they'll be no findingLooking for what you knew.-Led Zeppelin "Friends" from the (under-rated) album Led Zeppelin III Nearly all of the advice related to living longer and healthier...

The "Three-Body Problem" is one of the oldest problems in physics, dating back to the 1680s, and concerns the movement of three bodies in space under mutual gravitational interaction. The "problem" is that there is no equation or rule which predicts how three...

We almost named our daughter Alwilda instead we went with Audrey. Do names matter? About 12 years ago I unsuccessfully attempted to change my first name from John to Kieffer.  I won’t go into why my attempt was unsuccessful, but I will relay that Kieffer does survive...

A Nike Field Hockey Camp Youth sports is a huge business and growing rapidly. According to Time magazine the U.S. youth-sports-economy is a $15.3 Billion market and has nearly doubled in size over the past decade. In 2016 HBO Real Sports focused on a booming aspect of...

It is easy to take our numbering system for granted. With zero and 1-9, we can write every possible number, we can count, perform math and buy and sell goods and services for intangible assets like money. Numbers haven't always existed - they are a human invention. In...

An amazing fact of modern life is that when you turn on a faucet in your home, fresh, clean water comes out. The water comes out due to water pressure. Where does the water pressure come from? Municipal water systems are pressurized by a combination of gravity, water...

Norms and Regret Imagine this scenario: you are the parent of a 3-month old baby who is sleeping soundly in her crib. You get a call from your other child's preschool that he is sick and you need to come and pick him up. It will take 15-minutes to get to your sick...

Are bananas healthy? Short answer: Yes. Some Banana History Humans have been cultivating bananas for thousands of years - there is evidence bananas were an agricultural crops as far back as 5000 - 8000 BCE. Bananas are indigenous to east Asia but were pretty much...

You shouldn't have . . . . Black Friday is this week and that means that holiday gift shopping season is about to be in full swing. As you think about buying gifts for those on your list, below is helpful guidance from experts about what makes a good gift. So, what...

Rabid Bat What is Rabies? Rabies is a deadly virus that kills by compromising the brain’s ability to regulate breathing, salivation and heartbeat.  Ultimately, victims drown in their own spit or blood, or cannot breathe because of muscle spasms in their diaphragm. ...

Do you ever feel that you are a fraud and will be found out? For example Jodie Foster reflecting on winning an Oscar said she had thought "it must be a fluke" and “I thought everybody would find out, and they’d take it back. They’d come to my house, knocking on the...

Most people (and maybe everyone) have a running dialogue in their heads. It is a constant stream of a voice (or voices) doing a play-by-play of our lives; a narrator. In fact, as you are reading this sentence your inner voice is likely narrating along as you read....

April 10, 2011 - GO! St. Louis Marathon pre-race In early April 2011 I ran the GO! St. Louis Marathon. It was unseasonably hot - over 70 degrees at the start and over 90 degrees at the finish. Brutal. At around mile 20, with runners cramping up and dropping out of the...

Staying with the gravity themes of recent Physics Friday IFODs (Gravitational Waves and General Relativity), today's IFOD is about Escape Velocity. Escape velocity is the minimum speed that an object needs to be traveling to break free of a celestial object's gravity...

"Goodhart's Law" comes from a 1975 paper by economist Charles Goodhart. The usual formulation of Goodhart's Law is “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." What this means is when the measurement of a goal itself becomes a goal, then people...

I recently read the fantastic book Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear. I've read a few books and quite a few articles about habits and behavior change and this book was by far the best I've read. It was...

You chose Door No. 1 originally. Now that door No. 3 has a goat, should you switch? The "Monty Hall Problem" is a mathematical brain teaser. It is called the "Monty Hall Problem" because it sounds like a question that would be on the game show Let's Make a Deal which...

Stephen Hawking died in March at age 76. He was a brilliant scientist and an author of note. IFOD: Why was Stephen Hawking Famous? Last month his (supposedly) last book was published called Brief Answers to the Big Questions. As the title suggests, this book focuses...

In February I attended the three-day Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute’s Corporate Athlete Program (“HPI”). It was so good that last month our firm brought in a coach from HPI to our Principal Retreat to lead a one-day session on  health, wellness and...

A key aspect of being human is that we can observe, evaluate and reflect upon our own thinking; we can think about our own thinking. This is called "Metacognition" and according to Scientific American it "is an internal tribunal that rules on the soundness of our...

LIGO detector in Hanford, Washington Last week’s Physics Friday was about General Relativity, proposed by Albert Einstein a bit over 100 years ago. General Relativity was theoretical as the technology didn’t exist at the time to experimentally confirm the theory. One...

What is Parkinson's Law? Parkinson's Law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” (Happy St. Crispin’s Day) Writing in The Economist in 1955, former British Civil Servant Cyril Northcote Parkinson opined: IT is a commonplace observation...

A study, published in 2010, by Harvard and Google, examined about 5 million digitized books published between 1800 and 2000 and found: About 8,500 words enter the English language each year in total, there are just over 1 million words in the English Language The...

There are two distinct types of reasoning: deductive and inductive. Deductive Reasoning Deductive reasoning works from general rules and applies such rules to specific instances. Like this: PREMISE: All dogs are mammalsPREMISE: Dylan is a dogCONCLUSION: Therefore,...

Widely considered the greatest scientist in the history of mankind, Albert Einstein is famous for a number of theories, including the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect, for which he won the Nobel Prize. What did Einstein do With His Nobel Prize Money?...

A few weeks ago I read the novel Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway and I've been thinking of the following quote pretty much everyday since I read it: "Where would you hide a tree? In a forest, of course." I think there are two main takeaways: First - the more obvious one -...

Last week I attended the fantastic 4th Annual Olin Business School Family Business Symposium at Washington University. One of the speakers mentioned a few amazing facts about business in America. Here are those facts (#1 and #2 below) and other really interesting...

An interesting paradox exists with respect to eating and weight: a negative correlation exists between the average amount of time a country's population spends eating each day and the proportion of its citizens who are obese. The below graph, from The New York Times,...

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down over 1,000 points over the past two days and the S&P 500 is down 4% from its Monday open. Ouch. (However, the 4% drop in the market this week means that it is still up a bit over 5% year-to-date and 12% over the past 12...

As you may be aware, I work in wealth management and my firm, The St. Louis Trust Company, is a multi-family office and trust company. In my role at our firm, I've spent a lot of time over the past decade plus pondering the nature of wealth. This IFOD is my thoughts...

Three times over the past few months I've canvassed by knocking on doors for various candidates I support. It's been interesting as I've met a lot of people outside my social bubble and seen parts of my city that I have never visited. If you have never canvassed, I'd...

What exactly are viruses? Viruses are a strange form of (probably) life. They are not made of cells, rather they are bits of genetic material (DNA or RNA) packed inside capsules made of protein molecules. All other forms of known life are cellular in nature, so...

Smiling in humans is somewhat akin to dogs wagging their tails as smiling is a key part of human communication. IFOD on why Dogs Have Tails. Below are some very interesting facts about smiling: There Might Be As Many As 19 Types of Smiles While the exact number of...

The Endowment Effect occurs when you own something and you would sell it for a higher price than you would be willing to buy the same or similar item you don't already own. This occurs because we establish a connection with items we possess. The seminal example of the...

Chinese tank in 1945 This weekend I visited the National WWII Museum in New Orleans and was stunned by a few related facts: While estimates of the number of deaths in WWII vary, the National WWII Museum estimates about 65 Million people died in WWII, consisting of...

I've "read" 53 books so far in 2018 (find them here: 2018 - books I'm reading). Forty-one of those books I've actually read and 12 I've listened to as an audiobook. Do the 12 audiobooks count as my actually having "read" the book? Until I researched it, I kinda felt...

It's not the way airlines currently do it. The fastest way: Jason Steffen, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University has determined the optimal method of boarding a single-aisle passenger jet is as follows: Board the window seats on one side, but every-other...

How did we live without GPS directions on our phones? I am giving a talk at Washington University today to MBA students. One of the topics is the nature of change and trends. In preparation I researched great products and innovations that affect our lives but didn't...

The steel producing capital of England is a town in North Lincolnshire named Scunthorpe and pronounced 'scun - thorpe.' The residents of Scunthorpe have a problem: their town name often gets blocked by profanity filters designed to weed out obscene words .This problem...

When astronauts are in orbit whether in the International Space Station (ISS) or in some other space vehicle they seem to float and be beyond gravity's effect. Why is this? At about 200 miles above the earth the ISS experiences the gravitational pull of the earth only...

Think Tanks - they are referred to in the news all the time: "The XYZ Policy Institute, a think tank, in a recent research whitepaper has concluded that by 2043 99% of Americans will have diabetes."* What exactly is a think tank? How do they make money? Should we...

Think back. What were the major lessons you learned in school? Through my formal education I learned about all sorts of topics ranging from anthropology to tax law. Looking back, the below three things stick out: 1. JDS! Like all first-year law students at University...

There are two types of tickling:  Knismesis: triggered by a light movement across the skin. Think of a feather across the sole of your foot - that is knismesis. This type of ticklishness is experienced by many types of animals. Knismesis rarely produces laughter and...

The Road Not Taken may be the most well-known poem in America. If you are like me, you probably are totally wrong about its true message. Until yesterday, I used to think that the poem was all about individualism: the benefits of thinking differently, being your own...

Winston Wolf appreciates gourmet coffee! We Americans love our coffee and we are well-caffeinated. Is coffee good for you and related facts here: Coffee is Awesome Part I It seems like we are drinking more coffee than ever in the U.S. and that the quality of the...

What Causes Red Hair? Red hair is produced by mutation of MC1R gene which results in the lack of production of eumelanin. Eumalanin is skin pigmentation which  darkens the skin and protects skin against the sun. Redheads have low production of eumelanin which causes...

Dunbar (from Catch-22) on Boredom One of the main characters in Catch-22, Dunbar, thought being bored made him live longer because time passed slower. From the book: “Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He had...

If you are concerned about climate change you are not alone. A prior IFOD discussed the phenomenon of Eco-Anxiety, which is anxiety about climate change and other environmental issues. Climate change is a legitimate concern as according to Climate Central, The five...

Cars have become much safer over time as the fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled has decreased from 5.04 people to 1.18 in 2016. Related IFOD: Do Safer Cars Lead to Reckless Driving?. Yet, there are about 5.5 million auto accidents a year resulting in...

I love reading about cognitive fallacies because I feel like I've improved as a person after I've learned about the fallacy. On the other hand, my colleague Spencer Burke says "reading about cognitive biases and fallacies makes you feel smarter, but in all likelihood...

Whether you have an iPhone 6, 7, 8 or X, there are useful and cool things your iPhone can do of which you may not be aware. Note that an Android phone can also probably do all these things but this post is about iPhones with iOS 11. 1. Do Not Disturb. This is a very...

Sound is generated by a vibrating object acting on molecules around it and travels as waves.  It is kinetic energy that travels from molecule to molecule. Thus, in order for sound to travel it must be transported through a medium capable of conducting waves, such as a...

As humans we crave certainty; uncertainty makes us uncomfortable. (Related IFOD: Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: The Ellsberg Paradox.)Thus, we love to listen to experts explain what is happening in the unpredictable world we live in and tell us what is likely...

Last weekend at my parent's house my brother's dog, Scout, ran out the door and went straight over to a pile of horse poop and rolled in it. What gives? Why do dogs seem to get such joy from rolling in nasty, smelly stuff? There is actually no definitive answer. There...

One of the books I read in 2018 was No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy SEAL, by Mark Owen, a member of SEAL Team Six that killed Osama Bin Laden. No Hero is a series of stories from Mark's training and various missions, each with a worthwhile lesson. One story/lesson in...

New, slender skyscrapers have altered NYC's skyline I was in New York recently and noticed new additions the the skyline: super skinny skyscrapers. They are beautiful and fascinating, but they struck me as making no sense economically. With a bit of research I found...

I went to the grocery store a few days ago to buy produce. The organic strawberries were $6.99 while the regular ones were $5.49. Is it worth $1.50 to get basically the same thing? How about Gala apples? Conventionally grown were $1.29 and organic $1.99. Is buying...

The Seven Deadly Sins are: Pride Envy Gluttony Lust Anger Greed and Sloth Of these sins, theologians and scholars often single out pride as the greatest of the sins, the root of all evil and the beginning of sin. The Bible says that pride comes before the destruction...

There is a massive amount of data that is collected to assist in forecasting the weather: Thousands of trained weather observers worldwide report  the details of the weather at least daily, as do thousands of airplane pilots and ships at sea. 900 weather balloons are...

Years ago I read the book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks. (It was a great book - much better than the movie.) In the book, the front lines were staffed with all the expendable people: the investment bankers, hedge fund managers, lawyers...

There are two interesting trends* with respect to public companies that have been occurring: (1) the number of public companies has shrunk dramatically over the past 20 years, and (2) the average lifespan of a public corporation has shortened over the past 100 years....

I know a lot of people who own a gun for "home protection." That's one option. Another is having a dog. But how good are dogs for home protection? Here are some answers. According to law enforcement, burglars like to (1) quickly enter a house, (2) don't like light and...

Reading books for pleasure has a lot of benefits. Reading can: lead to greater longevity, reduce cognitive decline, increase vocabulary increase your overall happiness reduce stress, and might be a secret weapon. Yet, according to a survey from Pew Research Center,...

Matter has three states: gas, liquid and solid.* A solid "melts" into a liquid and vaporizes into a gas at the boiling point. Gases "condense" back into liquids and "freeze" back into solids. The temperatures at which different molecules change state are quite...

Elon Musk is an eccentric dude and has his hand in many things, including Tesla, SpaceX, Solar City, The Boring Company and Open AI. His biography by Ashlee Vance is a great read: Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fanastic Future. He also might have gotten...

Annie Duke is a top poker player and also has a PhD in language. In an interview with the magazine Nautilus, she talked about a common fallacy that few of us realize exist but which interferes with our ability to learn from our actions: the resulting fallacy....

What does it mean to be intelligent? We often think of people that are good at math and science as intelligent, like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. How about Mozart? Was he a genius? Or a great artist like Picasso? What about great actors like Bette Midler?  I...

The cardboard box is pretty amazing: it's light, strong, versatile and provides cushioning. It consists of flat layers of thick paper with fluted intermediate layers. Cardboard varies in thickness and strength depending on the grade of paper, the design of the flutes...

There are about 7,000 languages currently spoken on our planet. If a language no longer has any speakers it is classified as "extinct" as opposed to a "dead language" which is one that is known but which has no native speakers. At its height, Latin was spoken by about...

The pyramids are amazing. The pyramids at Giza we’re built by three different pharaohs about 4,600 years ago. That is a really long time ago! Humans had yet to domesticate draft animals. There was little use of the wheel and wheeled carts and wagons didn't exist....

A prior IFOD delved into the performance advantage found with strong female leadership: Benefits of Female Corporate Leadership. This IFOD concerns male vs. female investing differences. Note: while generalizations can be made between female and male investing,...

Snoop Dogg is one of the greatest rappers of all-time and a very interesting  guy. His real name is Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. He grew up in Long Beach, CA and at an early age became a member of the Crips (a gang). He was a gifted athlete in high school and was...

When we type in a website name, such as  http://www.stlouistrust.com, the Domain Name System ("DNS") translates that name into the IP address of that website, which is 159.135.27.7 in the case of stlouistrust.com. As of end of 1Q 2018 there were 333.8 million domain...

It's watermelon season! We bought a fantastic watermelon this past weekend and eating it was like eating candy. A ripe watermelon can be so delicious. But is it nutritious? Yes! Watermelon is a great food to eat. Watermelon is mostly water - over 90% and a cup of...

Americans love Meat! the average consumer will eat 222.2 pounds of meat this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA): USDA Meat Forecast. Prior to 2002 I also loved meat. Then, in 2002, when I was 32, I was under a lot of stress and for some...

I was recently in the market for a new car and considered four different alternatives before making my choice. Since then, when I see one of the three car models I didn't choose I've noticed that I tell myself how glad I am that I didn't choose that other car and...

This IFOD is going to hit a few related topics: how sweating cools us,  how do fans make us feel cool, why drinking a hot drink can make us feel cooler, how do moisture-wicking clothes work, what is the heat index, how panting helps dogs and other animals cool off,...

In February I attended the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute's Corporate Athlete Program ("HPI"). The corporate athlete program "helps individuals become physically energized, mentally focused and fully engaged in the moments that matter – for real...

Yesterday's IFOD concerned the distribution of height in the U.S. and How Many People are 7-Foot Tall? Today concerns some other aspects of height that are interesting. Height is determined partly by genetics but nutrition and other environmental factors play an...

About 5 years ago we interviewed a guy for a position with our firm who was 7'2" tall (yes, he played college basketball). I had never stood next to someone that tall - it was really shocking. If you know someone really tall, like 6'8" (about 1 in 8,000 males), now...

Glass is extremely important to modern life. Steven Johnson in his fantastic book How We Got to Now - Six Innovations that Made the Modern World lists glass as one of the six innovations most important to how we live. What does glass do for us? The most obvious...

A recent study by two political scientists, Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood, found that half of the American population believes in at least one conspiracy theory.  They define a conspiracy theory as an explanation that makes reference to hidden, malevolent forces seeking...

Which airports are the busiest? Here's data from the Airports Council International for 2017. The airports are ranked by total passenger traffic. Atlanta Hartsfield - 104 million passengers Beijing - 96 million Dubai - 88 million Tokyo - 85 million Los Angeles LAX -...

We Americans love our big houses. In 2015 the Census Bureau reported the average size of a new house built increased to an all-time high of 2,687 square feet and the median was a record 2,467 sq ft. Those figures are about than 1,000 square feet larger than in 1973...

I love the Gateway Arch. Every time I look at it I think it is totally insane that it exists. It is huge and breathtaking. Just one of the many things that makes St. Louis Rocks! This week the grand (re)opening of the museum at the Gateway Arch National Park was...

What happened on July 4th, 1776? Not much. Here's a helpful timeline of the beginning of our nation: April 1775: The Revolutionary War started June 1776: Thomas Jefferson wrote the draft of the Declaration of Independence. Over the course of June, John Adams and...

In 1988 I was given Stephen Hawking's famous book A Brief History of Time which was the catalyst for my unrequited love of physics. The book opens with a curious anecdote: A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on...

A contronym is a word  which can have an opposite meaning depending on context. According to Grammerly, "a contronym is a word with a homonym (another word with the same spelling but different meaning) that is also an antonym (a word with the opposite meaning)."...

Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field that is generated deep down in the Earth's core. This magnetic field is very important to life on Earth as it protects us from dangerous solar and cosmic rays. More on the magnetic field later. Earth has an inner solid core,...

As addressed in a prior IFOD, the cells in our bodies are constantly being replaced. In ten years you'll be an entirely different organism in terms of your cells (other than a few types of cells - notably the cerebral cortex - which are not replaced). So, are we the...

There are millions of islands on earth. Finland alone has nearly 200,000, Canada has about 30,000 and Norway 50,000. It's difficult to get a precise number of how many islands there are on our planet because it depends on what you call an island - is a rock sticking...

The above teardrop shape is commonly how raindrops are represented in the media, weather reports and throughout our culture. That teardrop shape is actually not a possible shape for a raindrop. What is the actual shape? It depends on the size of the raindrop and is a...

A recent IFOD discussed the SCARF model of human social interaction which can be found here: SCARF A Model for Explaining Social Interactions. The "F" in SCARF stands for fairness and posits that humans experience a strong threat response from perceived unfairness. We...

  In an interview in The Atlantic, Stephen King said this about opening lines of books: There are all sorts of theories and ideas about what constitutes a good opening line . . . . But there's one thing I'm sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to...

The ratio of males to females at birth for humans is approximately 105:100 - meaning there are 105 males born for every 100 females. This is known as the "sex ratio." It is thought that it is evolution‘s way of compensating for males’ shorter life expectancy. The...

Our dog Dylan loves to sleep. Often when he sleeps his paws twitch and sometimes he whimpers or barks in his sleep. Is he dreaming about chasing squirrels, chewing a bone, being petted? Does he have bad dreams? Scientists believe that most, if not all, vertebrates...

A recent study by Asurion found that the average American checks their smartphone 80 times a day or about every 12 minutes! Millennials were found to check their phones nearly double that amount! A few weeks ago I came across a technique suggested by a former Google...

Why do humans cry tears? Humans are arguably the only animals that cry (some animals do howl or make other sorrowful noises which may or may not rise to the level of crying) and we are the only mammals ones that cry tears.  For the most part, tears are necessary to...

When confronted with a problem there are only four possible options we have with respect to our response to it. I have found thinking about these four options helpful in reducing stress when encountering a problem. A key in confronting a problem is deciding which of...

The Pew Research Center surveyed over 35,000 American adults in 2014 as to their religious affiliation and compared it to a similar survey it had conducted in 2007. It's key findings included: America is still a predominantly Christian nation with about 70% of the...

Earth's orbit around the sun cycles between nearly circular to slightly elliptical.  This occurs on 405,000 year cycles and is due to the complex interplay of the gravitational pull of bodies in the Solar System on earth, but mainly due to Jupiter and Venus. Jupiter...

The deadliest thing on our planet: the bacteriophage ("phage" for short) which is a virus. They look like something out of a Sci-Fi movie. Here's a diagram of the parts of a phage: There are more phages on Earth than every other organism combined! That's including...

Until about ten years ago I had never even heard of quinoa but it has now become a regular part of my diet. It's popularity has skyrocketed in the west. Quinoa is usually referred to as a grain and is often eaten in the place of rice. It is not actually a grain,...

Much of human social behavior is driven by two things: (1) minimizing threats and (2) maximizing rewards. The SCARF model discussed below is a fascinating framework for understanding these two themes in terms of five ares of human social experience. I really began...

Our firm, The St. Louis Trust Company was started 16 years ago this week. It seems both like yesterday as well as a long time ago. I guess that's how these things go. There were about ten of us at its inception  - mostly from Arthur Andersen - and 14 (brave) original...

Books matter. A study from 2010 titled Family Scholarly Culture and Educational Success: Books and Schooling in 27 Nations concluded that there is a strong the correlation is between a child's academic achievement and the number of books his or her parents own. In...

  Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit but the highest form of intelligence - Oscar Wilde Sarcasm is a form of verbal irony that expresses negative and critical attitudes toward persons or events. It is often a hurtful or biting form of humor. Related IFOD on...

This weekend we decided to buy a new patio umbrella. As we drove down Hanley Rd. in St. Louis we had a few options: Home Depot, Menard's (right across the street) and Lowe's (less than 1/4 mile down the road). This a common phenomenon: competing firms locating their...

What is your favorite color? The most popular favorite color is blue. Here are the results of a survey of people in ten countries about their favorite color: As for gender differences in color preference, here are the results of a survey conducted of American college...

You've probably heard the term "superfood" and have seen it applied to all sorts of foods.  According to Live Science, "Superfoods are foods — mostly plant-based but also some fish and dairy — thought to be nutritionally dense and thus good for one's health. However,...

It's that time of year - high school and college graduations are upon us. I love good commencement addresses and try to read some of the most highly regarded ones each year.  Here are a few that I have liked the best and which are also widely regarded as some of the...

Zero came on the scene around 200 C.E. and was used merely as a placeholder for other numbers. For example, zero was used in numbering systems to differentiate between 1 and 10 and 22 and 202.  Thus, it was a form of mathematical punctuation. It took hundreds of years...

In 2007 Jennifer Strange, age 28, took part in a on-air radio station water drinking contest. Over the course of three hours she consumed six liters of water (a bit over 1.5 gallons) and a few hours later died of water-intoxication. It is crazy that drinking water can...

Black holes form when a massive star (more than 20x size of the Sun) has used up  it's fuel, is at the end of its life and collapses in upon itself. This collapse also causes the star to explode, a so-called supernova. The gravity due to the extreme mass and density...

Apparently I snore. My snoring has negatively affected my wife's sleep and it likely has led to less restful sleep for me as well. Plus, it has resulted in a number of bruises due to my wife punching me in the middle of the night. Today's IFOD is about what causes...

Here in St. Louis we've basically skipped over spring right into summer. Thus, it's time to dig out the sunscreen. Ever wondered how sunscreen works? It's pretty crazy if you think about it. Go without it and you might be sporting a killer sunburn. Slather on some ...

Robin Dunbar is an anthropologist at Oxford Unversity and in the 1980s while researching primate grooming habits he noted that there seemed to be a relationship between primate brain size and how large their social groups were. That led to work on humans and...

"A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.” - Mark Twain How often do we lie? A lot. And probably more than you think. More on the frequency with which we lie in the 2nd half of this IFOD. In the past six months I've read two books...

The linguist George Zipf discovered something very interesting in 1949: a small number of words are used all the time and most words are used relatively rarely. Further, he found that if words are ranked by their frequency of use the top used word in a language is...

Kissing is weird if you think about it: putting your lips together with another person and exchanging saliva. It's not exactly sanitary: one study estimated that between 10 million and 1 Billion bacteria from nearly 300 different species are exchanged during "active"...

Royal Caribbean "Symphony of the Seas" is the world's largest cruise ship and weighs 230,000 tons. The ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes was the first to figure out when something is going to float or sink. Supposedly, he made this discovery while taking a bath...

According to the American Psychological Association, the term "personality refers to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving." Personality is the set of characteristics that  makes you "you" and sets you apart from everyone...

Have you ever noticed the proliferation of mattress stores over the past 15 years? There are now over 9,000 specialty mattress stores in the U.S. That's more mattress stores than Starbucks stores! Which seems crazy - people buy coffee quite often whereas mattresses...

I was at an event on Friday and one of the speakers mentioned that she moved to St. Louis with the plan of only living in the Lou for a year or two; sixteen years later she is still here. This is a common theme we St. Louisians hear over and over: St. Louis is a great...

Imagine a seed planted a few inches down in moist, dark soil. After a period of time the seed breaks open and sends roots downward and shoots towards the surface.  Similarly, a plant in a pot tips over (like in the picture above) so it changes its growth so the...

The other morning I was driving with my daughter to drop her off at her school about 15 miles away from our house. As we were traveling westbound on I-64 at about 50-60 mph, all of the sudden slowed down to a crawl. After stop and go for a few minutes, speed picked...

Remember back in the 90's when it seemed CRAZY to pay $$$ for water in a bottle? I mean, come on, its free (or nearly free) right out of a tap. Since the early 90s bottled water sales have experienced CRAZY growth and in 2016, for the first time, the volume of bottled...

Galileo famously stated that the universe is written in a "grand book" whose language is "mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which...