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There’s an old children’s joke that goes like this:

“Did you know the word gullible isn’t in the dictionary?”

Then when the other child goes to look it up, you laugh at them for believing you.

On the face of it, it’s a lesson in not believing everything you hear.

But when it comes down to it, the child who goes to look it up isn’t necessarily being gullible; he or she is doing research to confirm their expectations. Yes, gullible should be in there, but let’s make sure. Once you’ve seen a number of dictionaries that all have gullible in them, you can safely ignore the next person who claims that it’s missing, and insist that they put up their evidence.

That’s science.

The child who says, “Really?” and then goes around repeating it? He’s the one who needs a lesson in skepticism.

So the next time someone sends along a bizarre “fact,” especially one intended to spur you to action…dig a little deeper. Sometimes all it takes is two minutes of fact checking to save your credibility. You don’t want to get known as the guy who really did think gullible wasn’t in the dictionary…over and over and over again.

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San Francisco Food Court Trash Cans

In the old days, trash was trash and as long as it wasn’t cluttering the place up, you didn’t worry so much about where it was going. These days we’re more aware. In the LA/OC area, you can often get residential recycling (and sometimes green waste for compost) along with your trash pickup, and malls and other areas often have bins for aluminum cans and glass/plastic bottles.

San Francisco goes a step further, with not just trash and cans/bottles, but trash, recycling (all), and compost. More importantly, they’re labeling the “plain” trash as landfill. It makes you think about where the trash is going, and a bit more likely to separate it so that things are a bit less messy and wasteful in the long run.

But for the short term, it really takes a while to figure out which bin to put your trash in.