Story on NPR's Marketplace about the fridge vs. iPhone comparison
Adriene Hill of NPR’s marketplace program did a nice job describing the fridge vs. iPhone story today (“No, your phone doesn’t use as much electricity as a refrigerator”). My favorite part of the story was my friend Bruce Nordman’s analogy about the three headed cat:
“If I came up to you and remarked to you that there is a one-headed cat around the corner from your house you would be totally uninterested,” says Bruce Nordman, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory*, “but if I said there was a three-headed cat you’d be amazed that it exists and want to go see it; so these fantastical assertions naturally attract people’s attention, whether or not they are real.”
Now that’s a great analogy. I wish I had thought of that!
For more background and history about the last time people made claims like these, see this recent post.
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