In conjunction with a recent sports injury, I unearthed an old pair of crutches that we still had in storage from an incident many years ago that required walking assistance. They were in good shape with a small exception – here the hand grips had somewhat disintegrated over the long period of time since the last use. Since I cannot drive and as everybody would probably do nowadays, I went on Amazon to look for it – and sure enough for a little less than $8 they were available and showed up two days later. While one has grown very used to being able to buy “everything” on Amazon, I was truly impressed that even such a mundane and by some assessment specialty item was so readily available. A quick search on google reveals that Amazon has over 350 million items for sale – many sold through or on behalf

Reading several books in the field of psychology I noticed that authors regularly address their readership with notes highlighting the method of research and by doing so express their intent to interest readers from all walks of life here, including from a broad political spectrum. Most recently in a book the author demonstrated that his sampling method does not constitute, what apparently in the field of psychology is a common term, a WEIRD sample. The definition offered reads: A WEIRD sample is disproportionally composed of people who are Western, Educated, Individualist, Rich, and Democratic. It gave me pause – in my mind I correlated this sample with the term “weird” in its very sense and in my personal interpretation really wondered how a group of people associated with these attributes could be classified as a weird group of people. This was the trigger for sitting down and writing this note

On our balcony we can regularly observe little birds – turns out they are house finches. The male species have nicely colored red heads. Previously I saw them sitting on the railing hopping around and then taking off again. This time I was observing them from a different angle, and I noticed that they are landing on the railing but later fly up a little higher to slip into a space behind the ventilation grating of our neighboring apartment. This grating is mounted flush into the glass facade of the building. Paying attention and perhaps also given the time of the year I noticed later that they were also carrying grass and other materials in their bills, landing first on our railing and transporting these items also up to that grating. This observation solved one question I wondered about – namely why there is so many of these birds and