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Tiempo de lluvias. Estas en tu camioneta, aburrido, esperando que toque verde, cuando un hombre en un overol rojo brillante con el logo de Merkabastos^ELZR y una clara leyenda de “servicio de cortesia” se acerca: “Buenas tardes, me permitiria limpiarle su parabrisas? Cortesia de Merkabastos.” Asientes sorprendido y el hombre sonrie, planta enfrente de tu camioneta un tripie que no habias percatado y que sostiene un letrero mediano anunciando que esta noche es la venta nocturna de Merkabastos, con papas y nabos a mitad de precio—y procede a limpiar tu parabrisas religiosamente. El vidrio queda impecable, tu apurado procuras unas monedas y se las ofreces al hombre pero este sonrie: “Gracias, pero este servicio es cortesia de Merkabastos. Que pase usted una buena tarde” te responde—y se marcha.

Let’s share a brief moment of guilty pleasure for proving them wrong, then move on to the longer lasting pleasure of simply sticking to it for our own sake. And have understanding for those conditioned by past disappointments to classify all that is new and ripe with passion to be uninteresting, to be all hype, no calories.

We’re past the point of infatuation, this is love, and love is inclusive. Happy birthday Rails, happy birthday Railers.

Teaching can be done in a much more conditional way.. Children are usually taught “this is a pen,” “this is a rose,” “this is a car.” It is assumed that the pen must be recognized as a pen so that a person can get on with the business of writing. It is also considered useful for the child to form the category “pen.” But consider an alternative: What happens if we instruct the child that “this could be a pen”? This conditional statement, simple as it seems, is a radical departure from telling the child “this is a pen.” What if a number of ordinary household objects were introduced to a child in a conditional way: “This could be a screwdriver, a fork, a sheet, a magnifying glass”? Would that child be more fit for survival on a desert island (when the fork and screwdriver could double as tent pegs for the sheet, near a fire made by the magnifying glass)? Or imagine the impact of a divorce on a child initially taught “a family’ is, a mother, a father, and a child” versus “a family could be…”

A 1999 study of professional soccer players suggests that they owe their success more to training than to talent. In Germany, Brazil, Japan and Australia, the players were much more likely than average to have been born in the first quarter (Q1) after the cutoff date for youth soccer leagues.. Because these players were older than their teammates when they joined the leagues, they would have enjoyed advantages in size and strength, allowing them to handle the ball and score more often. Their success in early years would have motivated them to keep improving, thus explaining their disproportionate representation in the professional leagues.

NOTE: The cutoff dates were August 1 for Germany, Brazil and Australia, and April 1 for Japan.

Don’t believe a word of what you read in this essay on the childhood influences that led me to become a scientist. Don’t believe a word of what you read in the other essays, either. One of the curses of being an experimental psychologist is the habit of scrutinizing one’s own mental processes. Recounting childhood influences is a mental process no less subject to quirks and errors than falling for the visual illusions on the back of a cereal box. Everything I know about the recollection of childhood influences makes me approach this assignment with misgivings..

In a classic 1977 review, the psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson argued that many of the causes of our choices never enter our consciousness. Here is a simple example. If you present people with an array of articles of clothing and ask them to pick one to keep, they tend to pick the rightmost one. But if you then ask them to list the reasons they chose that article, no one says, “Because it was the one on the right.” They cite only the features of the objects themselves. Not having served in experiments in which the same items were presented in different orders, people have no grounds for knowing that a dumb factor like left-to-right position could be a cause of their behavior. And that’s a major problem for memories of what influenced us: None of us has taken part in the experiments that would isolate the causes of our choices in life.

[Ultimately,] chance must play an enormous role in development. We might be shaped by whether an axon zigged or zagged as our brains jelled in the womb, whether we got the top bunk or the bottom bunk, whether we were dropped on our head, whether we inhaled a virus. Needless to say, few people cite factors like these among their childhood influences..

Muhammad Waqar, Avi Wolfman-Arent, Yiran Xia, Victoria Sandoval, Jacqueline Orellana-Flores, Elizabeth Packer, Ramona Singh, Anuja Shah, Mayra Ramos, Emily-Kate Hannapel, Natasha Perez, Samir Paul, Ekta Taneja, Linden Vongsathorn, Michael Tsai, Nardos Teklebrahan, Matiwos Wondwosen…

I went to [my daughter Natalie’s] high school graduation Monday and a United Nations meeting broke out..

..If there is one reason to still be optimistic about America it is represented by the stunning diversity of the Montgomery Blair class of 2006. America is still the world’s greatest human magnet. We are not the only country that embraces diversity, but there is something about our free society and free market that still attracts people like no other. Our greatest asset is our ability to still cream off not only the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world but the low-skilled-high-aspiring ones as well, and that is the main reason that I am not yet ready to cede the 21st century to China. Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese.

This influx of brainy and brawny immigrants is our oil well—one that never runs dry. It is an endless source of renewable human energy and creativity. Congress ought to stop debating gay marriage and finally give us a framework to maintain a free flow of legal immigration..

It is hard to watch a graduation like this and not think about our enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan—the Taliban, Islamo-totalitarians like bin Laden and Zarqawi, and the retrograde regimes that support them. Their whole mind-set is about how to purify their world from “the other,” from diversity, from “infidels.” With enough brutality, they may win in Iraq. I still hope not.

But they will never win the future—because as soon as their oil wells run dry, their societies will be as barren, bland and unproductive as their deserts.

Our oil wells, by contrast, will still be pumping. They’re right there, hiding in plain sight, in the Blair commencement book:

Yueyang Li, Kenia Lopez-Reyes, Lucy Fromyer, Raya Steinberg, Zahra Gordon, Sreva Ghosh, Juan-Jesus Louis, Yendil Furcal, Yenusa Eke, Sofonias Frezghi, Yohanes Dejen, Edra Comegys-Brisbane, Yoel Castillio-Ortiz, Elijah Zuares, Placido Zelaya, Mimi Zou. And Jessica Smith.