Learn about why you might be causing your own peer pressure, and how to get over it; a 1927 experiment to prove that pitch is a liquid, and why it’s still going on; and how to get more done by trading your to-do list for “timeboxing.” In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Teens Don't Really Know What the "Cool Kids" Are Doing, According to Research — https://curiosity.im/2s5ixPW This 1927 Experiment to Prove Pitch Is a Liquid Is Still Going On — https://curiosity.im/2s3W6uz Trade Your To-Do List for "Timeboxing" — https://curiosity.im/2s5IUoR If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about why you might be causing your own peer pressure, and how to get over it; a 1927 experiment to prove that pitch is a liquid, and why it’s still going on; and how to get more done by trading your to-do list for “timeboxing.”
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/get-more-done-with-timeboxing-self-created-peer-pressure-and-the-pitch-drop-experiment
CODY: Hi! We’ve got three stories from curiosity-dot-com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why you might be causing your own peer pressure, and how to get over it; a 1927 experiment to prove that pitch is a liquid, and why it’s still going on; and how to get more done by trading your to-do list for “timeboxing.”
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Teens Don't Really Know What the "Cool Kids" Are Doing, According to Research — https://curiosity.im/2s5ixPW (Republished) (Cody)
New research published in Developmental Psychology suggests teenagers don’t really know what the “cool kids” are doing. That might sound a little silly, but this has big implications for peer pressure and how kids influence each other. Think back to high school. You probably had a pretty good sense of who the cool kids were. Probably thought you knew who was getting high or having sex or who was studying all day long. Or maybe you THOUGHT you knew what was going on… when in reality, you were wrong all along. As reported by The Conversation, a pair of new studies looked at the perceptions of more than 400 high school students at two different schools, over the course of several years. In the first part of the study, the researchers found that teens consistently overestimated the risky behaviors of their peers. Basically, they thought the jocks and popular kids used more substances and had more sexual partners and broke the rules more often, but that was not the case. And those wrong ideas went the other way, too, like students thinking the quote-unquote “nerds” studied a lot more than they did. The big implications came from the second part of the study, which followed high school students until the end of their junior year. They misperceived their classmates, too — but this time, those perceptions had real effects on how those students acted. When a ninth-grader thought that the cool kids engaged in more substance use, the researchers noticed a faster rate of growth in that student’s own substance use over his high school years. It was almost like a kind of indirect pressure to keep up with social norms, even when that pressure was just the perception and not the reality. At the end of the day, more research is needed to figure out how to solve this problem. But existing work does show one clear message: all the cool kids are NOT doing it. Or at least not as often as you might think. Whether you're a high school freshman or an adult surveying your own social landscape, this is probably an important message to keep in mind. Because striving to meet what you think is supposed to be the social norm seems to be a losing battle. I wonder what people think you and I do all day, Ashley. [ad lib]
This 1927 Experiment to Prove Pitch Is a Liquid Is Still Going On — https://curiosity.im/2s3W6uz (Ashley)
ASHLEY: How long would you wait to prove a point? A year? Eight years? 90? Well, there’s an experiment that’s been going on continuously since 1927. And all started just to prove that a certain substance is a liquid.
CODY: You’d think something like that would be kind of… you know. Obvious.
ASHLEY: Well, it’s a REALLY slow-moving liquid. I’m talking about the tar-like substance known as pitch. Pitch doesn’t exactly come up in everyday conversation, but it’s been a part of human history for quite a while. We used to use it to seal up the cracks in sailing ships, and we still use it in roofing and road construction. But back in 1927, an English physicist named Thomas Parnell said that maybe pitch isn’t a solid at all, but it’s a very, very, VERY slow-moving liquid. And thus, the pitch drop experiment began. The first thing Parnell had to do was melt down some pitch into its inarguably liquid state. He poured that into a small cone-shaped beaker and waited for it to settle. And waited. For three years. At that point, he cut off the pointed tip of the beaker to turn the whole thing into a little glass funnel. After eight years, in 1938, he finally got some validation when the first drip of pitch dropped from the funnel to the glass jar underneath. The next drop dropped in 1947. Parnell died about a year later, but the experiment has kept on going. After all that, the experiment was a rousing success that proved that pitch is a liquid — one that's 230 billion times thicker than water. Since the beginning, there have been a total of nine drips, and in the year 2000, researchers set up a live-streaming webcam to ensure that the eighth drop onward would be captured. See, up until that point, nobody had actually SEEN any of the drips drop. And funny enough, the camera ran into technical issues at exactly the wrong time, and the eighth drop was missed. But the 2014 drop was caught on camera during a beaker change. Because of the unusual circumstances of that drip, the next one is a little delayed. The tenth drop is expected to fall sometime around 2028. Keep an eye on the live stream, and until it falls, please excuse the experiment’s resting pitch face.
Trade Your To-Do List for "Timeboxing" — https://curiosity.im/2s5IUoR (Cody)
You can manage your responsibilities WITHOUT a to-do list. Today I’ve got a productivity hack that’ll hopefully help you get more stuff done if you find it hard to stick to a to-do list. [ad lib]
CODY: The concept I’m talking about is called timeboxing. Basically, it involves moving your to-do list to your calendar. With this method, your calendar becomes a place to keep track of your time commitments, whether they’re social or solitary. You still schedule meetings, but you also schedule items on your to-do list as if they were meetings. Need to create a meeting agenda? Block out an hour during the workday. Think of it as a meeting with yourself before the real meeting. This actually solves a lot of the problems with to-do lists. For one, it strips away the paradox of choice — once you've timeboxed your week, you never need to choose between a list of tasks again. Every time slot has an objective; every objective has a time slot. Timeboxing also imposes time constraints on your objectives. How many times have you spent, like, an entire hour messing with the formatting on that ONE SLIDE in your presentation? Timeboxing makes you really think about how much time your tasks deserve. And it also forces you to recognize how busy you actually are. With timeboxing, your calendar becomes a visual representation of your time commitments. This can help you recognize when you have the bandwidth for a new project, and when you simply don't. Now, timeboxing is not completely foolproof. You still have to estimate how long your tasks will take, and you can game this process, too. Try overestimate everything, and you'll seem solidly booked. At the end of the day, timeboxing can boost your productivity, but it'll only work if you truly want to be productive. Try it out and let us know how it goes!
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