Freakonomics

I'm still a podcast junkie. My favorites include Radiolab, NPR's Talk of the Nation (which has Science Friday), Harry Shearer's LeShow, a BBC Medical podcast called Medical Matters, a knitting one called Cast On, and a few others.

I was looking around for some new material and found the Freakonomics podcast. I love a show that can hold my attention for an entire hour. Their tagline is "The hidden side of everything". As in you might think you know that A leads to B which leads to C, but you may not have known that this thing affected B, so it very well could have been D, but was C instead.

And I, for one, find that kind of thing endlessly fascinating. I love hearing about the connections between seemingly unrelated things. The first show I listened to had to do with how people rate more expensive wines as tasting better, but if they don't know how much a bottle costs, the vast majority of people can't tell cheaper wine from expensive. Then it had a story of a restaurant where a woman was served a salad, and there was a dead mouse in it, and used that to illustrate how if companies take responsibility for crazy stuff like that, it not only allows the company to examine how it does things (as in there were probably five people who should have seen the mouse on its way to the table), it also makes people more loyal when the company owns up to their mistakes.

So interesting. Their blog has a bit on gas prices. Some folks want to blame the president for high gas prices, but the post today walks through how it's (not surprisingly) more complicated than that.

I'm a Meetup gal this weekend, and otherwise hope to do a bunch of bracelet/button stuff. I worked on getting a packaging card for the buttons yesterday, and it's almost there. Tweak and print, tweak and print. The Meetups include a parent's night out with the single parent group, board games with another group (something almost out of my comfort zone, but sounded fun), and lunch with a social group from my church. I'm blessed and lucky.

Oh, and I got the word yesterday that my contract will be extended for six months. My reaction was sort of "yes!" then "wait a minute". But I'll take it. If they are sure about the six months, it seems that they very well might find the funds to add a second six months. As it is, I'm good until the end of January 2013. I had a good talk with my boss yesterday, and I know he'll do what he can to keep me on. We talked about some future projects, and there's some new stuff in there that sounds really interesting to me.

Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket today.