One of the reasons I love mechanical watches is that I've never tried to fully understand them, and the idea that there's a purely mechanical thing, that does something seemingly so simple yet magically and reliably, gives me a sense of wonder and appreciation for engineering and art.
I'm really on the fence about whether or not I want to read this amazing looking article or just live on in ignorance :)
I think that link will only improve your appreciation for how magical a mechanical watch is. Especially when you consider people have been making them or a few hundred years.
Not the person you were replying to, but I'm a morning workout person (mostly weightlifting but also some cardio-type stuff). Yeah, empty stomach. For weightlifting I may have a protein shake with just enough water and almost always a banana and that's it. Doesn't bother me. I'm not sure if it's optimal (or if I could even tell what is optimal) but weights are still heavy and I still make progress so I'm happy with it.
That's not it. It's just garbled. "availability heuristic" means that recent or related-to-current-situation events are easier to remember than other, so they bias your mental estimate of "average" or "sum".
No, the GP has the right idea. The availability heuristic also causes emotionally-potent events to seem more recent than they were, because they're "available." Because recent events are easier to remember, our brains assume incorrectly that easier-to-remember events must be more recent. When, really, there are other reasons an event can be easier to remember.
This is the logic behind the "climate of fear" the media creates—every time a tragedy is made into a huge news story, it becomes semi-permanently available as an exemplar to your brain of that kind of thing happening; and then, when you try to figure out when the last time that kind of thing happened was (which is, in turn, a heuristic people tend to use for how often something happens) the highly-available exemplar in your mind makes you still feel like it "just happened" even if it was years ago.
(Or, to put that another way: everyone in America who was alive when 9/11 happened, still thinks of terrorist attacks against the US as happening far more often than they do; everyone in America who was born after 9/11 has a better-calibrated estimate. The scope of the tragedy—and especially of the reporting of the tragedy—caused it to be "too available" to people, permanently biasing their time-scale and frequency estimates.)
