Hypocrisy is useful

From Washington Post: Preach What You Plan to Practice

"The most effective way to get people to change their behavior revolves around the clever use of . . . hypocrisy. When people feel not only that they are failing themselves but also that are failing to live up to what they tell other people to do, they change their behavior -- and stick to it."

Time- how humans construct it vs. time- how nature made it

'The New Republic' book review on Rhythms of Life: The Biological Clocks that Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing by Russell G. Foster and Leon Kreitzman.

"In their wonderful book, Russell G. Foster and Leon Kreitzman tell us that while our ability to measure time has improved over the ages, we have nevertheless "been steadily losing a battle with time. Instead of controlling our modern clocks, they control us." Think about it: when we want to know when it is time to eat, or to go to bed, or to plan a vacation, we look at watches and clocks and calendars. Increasingly, these tools become dictators. But consider nature for a moment: without a Rolex or even a Swatch, the monarch butterfly knows to migrate from North America to Central America at precisely the same time each year. With no calendar and no alarm clock, the cicada emerges from the ground after exactly thirteen or seventeen years for a few fleeting weeks of frenzied mating--and the squirrel knows where and when to return to each and every one of its buried stashes of perishable goodies precisely before they lose their value and must be abandoned like surplus cottage cheese in the grocery. Bears hibernate, swallows rise to catch the early worm, and even plants seem as if they are silently counting the hours. This last fact has been known for some time: Linnaeus suggested back in 1751 that two species of daisy, the hawk's-beard and the hawkbit, be planted in a circle, since each opens and closes within precisely half an hour of the other, creating the hands of a floral clock."