Damn Interesting

I have been reading this site for a while now, because every day or so they post something, well, interesting. Since I don’t have much else to post, I thought I’d link to one of their most recent interesting items, a discussion on how to design a sign to tell people 100,000 years from now that the radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain, Nevada is NOT something they should play around with. It is an interesting dilemma, and one that I think frankly the posters at Damn Interesting nailed better than the so called “experts”.Another very interesting article from Damn Interesting is this one on Hyperbolic Discounting.  Put simply Hyperbolic Discounting is the name for a behavior that humans exhibit that limits how much credence they give to how the action will affect the future.  In other words, we consistently do stupid things because we fail to think about what will happen to us in the future because of it.  The article gives some good reasons why humans have this trait, but we will need to figure out a way to get around it, or as our technological capability increase, the race may not have a future.