Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:

In the 1960s, the English psychologist Peter Wason devised an experiment that would revolutionize his field. This clever puzzle, known as the “Wason selection task,” is often claimed to be “the single most investigated experimental paradigm in the psychology of reasoning,” in the words of one textbook author. Wason was a funny and clever man and an idiosyncratic thinker. His great insight was to treat reasoning as an enigma, something to scrutinize both critically and playfully. He told his colleagues, for instance, that he would familiarize himself with their work only after doing his own experiments, so as not to bias his own mind. He also said that before running experiments, researchers—quixotically—should never really know exactly why they were doing them. “The purpose of his experiments was not usually to test a hypothesis or theory, but rather to explore the nature of thinking,” a pair of his students wrote in Wason’s obituary. (He died in 2003.) “His aim was to reveal a surprising phenomenon—to show that thinking was not what psychologists including himself had taken it to be.”

The groundbreaking nature of Wason’s selection task may have been a result of his unconventional style. In one version of the task, one subject (always one—he spurned testing subjects in groups) is presented with four cards lying flat on a table, each with a single-digit number on one face and one of two colors on the other. Let’s imagine that you’re Wason’s subject. The first and second cards you see are a five and an eight; the third and fourth cards are blue and green, respectively. Wason liked to chat with his subjects, but he probably didn’t tell them that this logical puzzle was “deceptively easy,” which was how he described it in the paper he would later write, in 1968. Wason tells you that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is blue. Which cards must you turn over in order to test the truth of his proposition, without turning over any unnecessary cards? Click on your answer in the interactive video below:

More here.

Spencer Kornhaber in The Atlantic:

In 1949, the legend goes, B.B. King ran into a burning building to save a guitar he loved. The dance hall he’d been playing at in Twist, Arkansas, caught flame when two men knocked over a barrel of fuel while fighting about a woman. The woman’s name was Lucille—and from that point on, King’s guitar was named Lucille, too. Though Gibson would later launch a B.B. King Lucille model, and King indeed favored that company’s instruments, there wasn’t just one Lucille. Most any guitar he’d play would get the name. Much like how the name came to stand in for the instrument, King’s name came to stand, in the public’s imagination, for the kind of music he played. When people today talk about the blues, they’re talking in part about B.B. King; when they talk about B.B. King, they’re talking about the blues. The two concepts are the same.

More here. (Note: I had the honor of hearing him live many times. With his passage, an entire era has ended.)

Brendan O'Connor in The Verge:

Though in life Rube Goldberg was known to the world as a cartoonist, he was first an engineer. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1904 and took a job in San Francisco where he worked on the city’s sewer systems. But he didn’t last long. A naturally talented artist, Goldberg became a sports cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicleearning $8 per week.

He moved to New York in 1907; by 1915, his cartoons were nationally syndicated. This was an era in which a syndicated cartoonist could make a healthy living: according to a short profile published by The New York Times in 1963, Goldberg was earning a salary upwards of $50,000 by 1916 — over $1 million by today’s standards.

Over the course of his decades-long career, Goldberg drew cartoons that were variously political and frivolous. He penned three nationally syndicated, weekly comic strips —”Boob McNutt,” “Mike and Ike: They Look Alike,” and “Lala Palooza” — and wrote a single-frame cartoon called “Foolish Questions.” At the peak of his career, he wrote three editorial page cartoons every week, which appeared in 43 newspapers across the country.

Goldberg’s work made him famous: he was named the first president of the National Cartoonists Society in 1946; in 1948, he won the Pulitzer Prize for a political cartoon satirizing nuclear power. (The conservative Goldberg was invited to the White House by Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon.) Goldberg “has won as many trophies as even his most prolific trophy-inventing machine might devise,” reads a short Times profile on the occasion of his 80th birthday. “He takes them seriously but not too seriously, like nearly everything else in life.”

But Goldberg’s engineering studies were not entirely wasted — no cartoons left as indelible an impact on popular culture as his mechanical chain-reaction illustrations. Goldberg drew his cockamamie inventions intermittently from the beginning of his career — he drew the first, “Automatic Weight Reducing Machine,” in 1914, and in 1921 Marcel Duchamp published some of Goldberg’s designs in New York Dada. But the majority of these cartoons come from a bi-weekly series he drew for the magazine Collier’s Weekly from 1929 to 1931 called “The Inventions of Professor Lucifer G. Butts.” Professor Butts (the “G” stood for “Gorgonzola”) was a parody of a Berkeley engineering professor who had once asked his students to design a machine that could weigh the world. Goldberg, one of those students, found this to be a preposterous task.

More here.

Siddhartha Deb in The New Republic:

More here.