Along with speedreading, that’s a course I think should be taught in schools. Doing my periodic “follow Amazon’s recommendations down increasingly obscure tangents” dance, I came across a book about how people are surprisingly bad at understanding the practical implications of anything that’s not incredibly simple in math, such as probabilities.

Over on MAKE, they pose an interesting question leading into their article… Say you have two cars, one that gets 18 MPG and one that gets 34 MPG, and you have the money to replace one of the two. All other things being equal (e.g., cost, quality…), would you rather replace the 34MPG with a 50MPG car, or the 18MPG with a 28MPG car?

The answer is counter-intuitive: going from 18 to 28 (+10MPG) saves more gasoline than going from 34 to 50 MPG (+16). This perhaps explains some of what was previously a major pet peeve of mine: hybrid SUVs that moved from, say, 15MPG to 25MPG.

In totally unrelated news, MAKE also has details on a neat project that looks like a goalpost, but has a bunch of misting nozzles on it.