even the menu in restaurants can be engineered

Gregg Rapp, Menu Engineer

Rapp is a menu engineer. He helps restaurants maximize revenue by hacking common flaws in human decision-making. For example, by simply removing “$” signs from prices, people are less intimidated by them. And he advises against listing items from least to most expensive, because that focuses the consumer on price. Instead he mixes up items, making it hard to find their price — thereby encouraging the customer to emotionally commit to something before finding out what it costs. But my favorite strategy of his is that of putting some absurdly expensive item on the menu. Rapp doesn’t expect many consumers to buy it, but having it there makes expensive items appear cheap by comparison. Think about it: How many times have you ordered a bottle of wine in the middle of the price range?

Video via gigaom

at one time or another.

At least that’s what i think. One song that I thought about at the end of the movie is John Mayer’s In Repair.

Doctors fix their patients by putting chemicals into their body to re-establish the kinda balance needed for them to function properly. Carpenters fix broken furnitures by reattaching those broken legs and missing screws. And every tangibles need some form of fix every once in a while. It could be an external blemish or an internal instability.

Movie mainly talks about post traumatic stress disorder after losing the whole family during the 9/11. Guilty are the ones left behind, painfully holding on to every little details left behind. It’s like a painful wound (and in this case, a huge one), it hurts yet you wanna touch it hoping that it hurts less knowing that it wouldn’t. But you do know that wounds don’t heal if you keep touching it. It was a difficult and delicate subject to maneuver, but I think this 2007 movie just managed to pull it off well.

Not because I’m always lost, but because I found good reasons to be always moving.

it’s only a couple of footsteps from 2010. I was reading chapter two of a book I’ve gotten a few weeks ago when I came across a few refreshing views towards travel.

Life is a hospital which every patient is obsessed with changing beds – Charles Baudelaire

He continued, “It always seems to me that I’ll be well where I am not and this question of moving is one that I’m forever entertaining with my soul.”

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads…The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do. – Alain de Botton @ The Art of Travel

More than a month since I last went jogging. i planned for around 10km today but i could hardly breathe after 6km. nevertheless, the cool evening breeze is refreshing..it felt good to sweat it out after all those paper-and-pen warfare. i like jogging cuz it’s one of the few occasions when we don’t multi-task -- just running. Perhaps it’s one of human’s greatest flaw/habit/instinct to be so fond of multi-tasking..

this tune reminds me of the times in sweden. it’s still surreal. did it really happen?