bodner088

In my last post, I made some observations about the nature of intelligence, plasticity, cognition , learning and cognitive enhancement . Toward the end of that post, I left you with a group of simple (what a subjective term that is!) sequences to complete. Here they are again, with the next number (found through pattern recognition ) placed there for you in red . A) 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, ?  21 B) 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ?  21 C) 1000, 0100, 0010, 0001, 1000 ? 0100 D) 1, 4, 9, 16, 25 ? 36 E) 200, 3000, 40000, 500000, ? 6000000 F) 1, 100, 2, 99, 3, 98, 4, ? 97 G) 1.21, 2.32, 3.43, 4.54, ? 5.65 --------------------- I'll let you ponder on those answers for a day or so. If you can't figure out how we arrived at them, don't fret. Some were tough. And I will show you the pattern underlying each of these sequences of numbers. Observation : In verbal communications, we read between the lines. In numeric or alphanumeric pattern recognition, we must read between the items that comprise t...

Regardless of what we are always being told by the venerable Pantheon of pedigreed Economists out of Washington, DC , Wall Street , and academia (as well as by the seemingly cynical grumblings of self-professed "Main Street" economists -- I am one of those myself -- and I have growing misgivings regarding the utility of my undergraduate degree in Economics ) regarding the state of the our sovereign finances , most of us develop a powerful "feel" for how well the machinery of monetary and fiscal policy are working by our own personal finances . If my income is increasing, but at a lower annual rate than my ordinary living expenses (including my repayment of the debts which I incurred to either live beyond my means or to purchase investments that my neighbor (a smart fellow) said were " sure things ") are increasing, I feel a decline in my sense of well-being. My finances are continuously getting tighter. This seems to make sense (except to people who...