My wife and I went to see The Dark Knight this weekend. Great, great movie. Well acted, great story, one heck of a truck explosion…you definitely get your money’s worth and then some. Batman is quite definitely a negative thinker with a (mostly) positive attitude. Let me say this before I get start: I am not advocating vigilantes! But for the sake of Batman, I’ll highlight how his negative thinking has benefited not only him but Gotham City as a whole.

1. Admitting there’s a problem – Batman only came into existence when Gotham started going down the tubes. Bruce Wayne (Spoiler: He’s Batman!) realized the police were either unable to fix the problem or wouldn’t fix the problem for various reasons. Batman saw a place for improvement (Crime) and went to town.
2. Never settling, always improving – Batman is always looking at his costume for flaws, areas of weakness that he can improve on. Can’t move your head, ask Lucius Fox to fix it. Worried about dog bites? Get Lucius to improve the armor. Positive thinking can cause complacency. If you like something, you don’t see a need to make it better. But negative thinking always pushed innovation and improvements.
3. Seeing negative outcomes before they happen – Why wear a mask? To protect the people he cares about. Batman knows that if he were to show his face, everyone he’s ever known and cared about becomes a target. Also, wearing it gives Christian Bale an excuse to use his Clint Eastwood impression.
4. You can’t do it all your self – Batman always has had help. Alfred, Lucius Fox, Commission Gordon, Robin, The Justice League of America. He’s not a one man wreaking crew, he has support. And he needs that support to do what he does.
5. The Bat symbol – Batman has even used our natural negativity bias to give him an edge. Knowing the innate fear many people hold of bats, he uses the imagery to gain a psychological advantage.

We all can’t be multibillionaire playboy vigilantes. It’s not very cost effective and doesn’t seem to be a happy job, but someone has to do it.

If you haven’t seen The Dark Knight yet, do so.

Once again, it’s time to look at what brings random people to my random blog. I’ll even try to be helpful and try to answer your mind-boggling searches.

negative letters to parents from teacher –Don’t see this too often, seems teachers can’t really get too negative in letters to parents anymore. Long ago, a teacher could write a letter to a parent outlining all the social, mental and emotional problems about a troubled student. The parent often looked at this with compassion and understanding, even taking the time out to thank the teacher for pointing out potential problems. Teachers spend more time with the students than the parents do, so it is vital the teacher contact the family and discuss what needs to be done to help the child. Nowadays, this type of critiquing is considered an affront to the parents. How dare they say there’s a problem with my child! Obviously the teacher doesn’t know how to handle students! In rare instances, this may be the case, but my advice is to listen to the teacher and take this opportunity to HELP your child’s development, not hinder it. I wasn’t the greatest student or best behaved kid myself…and my parents listened to my teachers. What can I say? I went to a great school and had great teachers.

pringles small –Its rude to comment on the size of someone’s Pringles. Not everybody’s Pringles are the same size!

“jellyfish brain” meaning – How ironic that you (whoever you may be) are looking for the meaning of this. It means you’re stupid. No, really! I’m not being a jerk, that’s what it means! Don’t be that way, I didn’t mean it personally! Come back! Ahh…forget it.

the power of idiots - Nothing is more powerful than a group of idiots coming together and deciding things. See: Iraq War. Also see: My Home Owners Association. This Demotivator is right on the money:

what kinds of monkeys will not attack you - When it comes to monkeys, assume all monkeys will attack you. Never turn your back on a monkey, unless, of course, he’s trying to scratch your face off.

can you survive on peanut butter – I understand food prices are sky high, but just eating peanut butter alone won’t work. Even Elvis had to eat more than PB&J. He had a PB&J&B (which was either a Peanut butter, Barbiturate and Jelly sandwich with Bananas or a Peanut Butter sandwich with J&B)

positive and negative of volcanoes -
Volcanoes have positive and negative sides, just like all things. On the one side, volcanoes erupt spewing lava that creates islands or enrich soil on existing land masses, but on the bad side, if you live near the spewing lava, fire insurance is very expensive. When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991 it actually cooled the planet by a degree. When Mt. Vesuvius erupted it killed at least 1150 people. Volcanoes can supply us with geothermal energy. Unfortunately many volcanoes are used as the lairs of many an evil Genius.

how to start bad employee review - This one’s tricky. Are you asking how to start a “bad” employee review or how to start a review of a bad employee?

If you want to write a bad review, starting off with profanity is always a good…or in this case bad way to start a review. Getting personal is also a bad tactic. Being specific about the employee’s looks, eating habits and even their spouse is a perfect way to offend. Be as vague as possible so the employee will have no way to improve since they won’t even know what issues you are addressing.

If you want to write a review for a bad employee…well that’s a bit different. First and foremost, be honest. Sugar coating the issue and hoping it goes away won’t fix anything. Don’t just describe the problem, show clear examples of the problems at hand. Try to show some compassion but also let it be known that these problems need to be effectively handled. Not everyone is great at their jobs; many may not even be good at them. Reviews allow you to openly identify weaknesses and allow opportunities for improvement. They also show justification for letting someone go if the problems do not get resolved.

I’m too busy to post but figured I should anyway.

Another year, another Miss USA falls on her keister. When it comes to avoiding mishaps, I prefer to learn from other people’s mistakes. Why should I have to burn my hand on the stove if I can watch someone else do? It looked pretty painful when they did it; I feel no need to verify their misery.

Last year, Miss USA fell. That was a learning experience for all future pageant participants. Apparently Miss USA, Crystle Stewart, didn’t feel the same way. But she does now. From MSNBC:

Crystle Stewart has some advice for her successor as Miss USA: Ditch the evening gown.

“I would tell her to put grips on the bottom of her shoes and wear a short dress, not a long gown,” the reigning Miss USA told TODAY’s Matt Lauer and Ann Curry Monday via telephone from the Vietnamese resort of Nha Trang. During the Miss Universe competition on Saturday night, she became the second consecutive Miss USA to do a butt-plant on live television during the evening gown competition.

Stewart, a 26-year-old Texan, handled the tumble with a trouper’s aplomb: She put on a radiant smile as she picked herself up and clapped her hands over her head, as if to say, “I meant to do that.”

She dismissed any idea that there might be a cosmic conspiracy to upend Miss USA candidates. “Maybe somebody dropped marbles or something,” she laughed. “It’s just such a coincidence that two years back-to-back Miss USA falls.”

Curry asked her to replay the embarrassing tumble.

“Oh, man, you know, I walked out and tripped on the step and my dress got caught under my shoe,” she related. “It was almost like I was on roller skates, and I just fell.”

Stewart said she hadn’t been thinking about Miss USA 2007 Rachel Smith’s tumble in last year’s pageant, which was held in Mexico.

“When I was walking out, the last thing on my mind was falling,” Stewart said. “One thing you don’t want to do in an evening gown is trip … and fall on your bottom. The thing is how you handle it. You just pick yourself up — in life in general.”

Of course many people are misapplying this life lesson as an example of “negative thinking working against you”. They say ” I cannot help but thinking that this was a case of negative thinking.   Perhaps it was stuck in her head that Miss U.S.A. fell last year and she couldn’t get it out. ” I call BS. Big time.

If she was really using negative thinking, she would have thought “Gee, last year Miss USA fell on her can. This year, I’ll wear a slightly shorter dress and avoid falling altogether.” Advice she now readily gives!

She was probably “Positive” she wouldn’t make the same mistake and viola…history repeats itself.

BE positive…THINK negative.

From Punkeys comes more bad news regarding humans natural born enemy - Monkeys!

Another so-called “human” ability gone by the wayside. Seems the Punkeys get smarter every day. From New Scientist:

At this rate a monkey might prove the Riemann hypothesis. Rhesus macaques have been shown to possess yet another numerical talent once thought unique to humans – they can simultaneously count audible beeps and dots on a computer screen.

Their ability to comprehend numbers not as just discrete images or sounds, but as abstract representations that can be combined suggests that such math skills aren’t unique to humans, says Kerry Jordan, a psychologist at Utah State University, Logan, US, who led the new study.

This sort of evidence “shows that [animals] have these precursors to math very early on in the evolutionary line and early on in development,” she says.

I think many of these monkeys were involved with mortgages. I bet one runs Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. In fact, I beleive Enron hired a bunch in their Accounting Dept.

Jordan and colleague Elizabeth Brannon, of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, US, trained two eight-year-old female macaques to equate beeps to dots on a computer screen. So if a monkey heard seven beeps, it knew to tap a square on the screen displaying seven dots.

Next, the researchers tested the monkeys’ training in adding dots and beeps together.

The animals were presented dots of different sizes flash onto a screen. At the same time they heard a series of short tones.

To determine if the monkeys could combine the two, Jordan and Brannon showed the animals a screen with two numerical choices, represented as dots – one the correct sum, one incorrect.

Both monkeys did better than 50:50 – one added the sights and sounds correctly 72% of the time, the other 66% of the time.

This may qualify them for “Are you Smarter than a Fifth Grader?”.

Both monkeys tended to make mistakes when the right and wrong answers were numerically similar. For instance, if the choices were one and eight, the animals rarely got it wrong. But they found it harder to choose between, say, five and six.

People make the same kind of errors when making snap numerical judgments, such counting the number of people in a crowd, says Jordan, which is further evidence that our abstract math skills aren’t unique.

The monkey’s ability to add numbers seen and heard together makes sense in the wild, says Jordan.

“If you have an animal trying to make a decision to defend its territory, it’s going to want know how many other animals it has to deal with,” she says. It would do this by combining information on how many animals it could see with how many it could hear.

Irene Pepperberg, a psychologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who trained a parrot named Alex to add small sums, says the paper confirms observations in the wild.

Flycatchers, for instance, seem to communicate their mood to other birds using a numerical combination of song and wing motions. The more wing flicks and songs, the more likely it is to attack another bird, she says.

So it looks like the monkeys are lying in wait until our population is low enough for a full on assault.

It appears our days our numbered…literally.