This has little to do with willpower or with writing, but it’s worthwhile regardless. Here’s something I read on the site XKCD.com the other day:

"Misconceptions," from the Web comic XKCD.com

Reading it, I was of course intrigued and went straight to the Wikipedia article on “Common Misconceptions,” mainly to see if there could possibly be anything there I didn’t know. Which, uh, there was. A couple of highlights:

• Napoleon wasn’t particularly short
• Pilgrims didn’t wear buckles on their shoes and hats
• Scientists do in fact understand how a bumblebee can fly
• Different flavors are not detected solely on separate areas of the tongue

A couple of these were things I only learned recently (like the lemmings thing, though I had suspected that was made-up for a long time. There’s a gruesome fact in there about Disney, though). One (“People do not use only ten percent of their brains”) is something I’ve blogged about on this site. Highly recommended reading!

On a related subject, in case you don’t already know about it, I’d like to recommend Snopes.com for any time you question an urban legend or get an e-mail that you think might be a hoax. Snopes.com is the one site that I can think of that is so useful that I am willing to go there even though it features a lot of annoying pop-up ads.

Looking for the old LucReid.com site? Wondering why this site isn’t called The Willpower Engine any more? Expected to find yourself? Not quite sure that you’re on the right page? No fear! The merging of my writing site, LucReid.com, and my psychology of habits site, The Willpower Engine, has begun, and you have gotten caught in the middle of it. All the content from both sites is (or should be) available here on the new site, and the search feature should make it easy to find it if the tabs at the top of the page don’t do the trick.

If oxygen masks should drop down from your title bar, please double click on your own oxygen mask before double clicking on those of others. Remember that in case of an emergency, your task bar can be used as a flotation device. Thank you for flying LucReid.com. Or the Willpower Engine. Or whatever it is you clicked on.

Honestly, it will all be sorted out soon.

Photo by patita pirata