It's very helpful to teach the concept that if something can't be changed presently, there's not much point getting upset about it. Most children learn this concept most easily with animals. Start with really obvious things, such as pointing out that a rabbit, for example, cannot open the door to its cage and come over to eat the carrot you are holding, no matter how much you might want it to. The rabbit is simply incapable of opening the lock on the cage door. Ever. So there is no point thinking it is a stupid rabbit if you are sitting across the room with a carrot in your hand. It isn't being stupid. It's doing the best it can, and we need to accept it for where it is at in its reasoning abilities. Most children can see this easily. Move on to more complex areas, such as how the rabbit scratches and struggles to get away when someone picks it up and holds it incorrectly. It doesn't know our thoughts and isn't able to think like a human, so it can't understand why it is being held that way and becomes frightened.

Adapting our skills for success in a less-than-perfect world means not only managing the gray, subjective areas around and within us, but it also means doing the very best we can with what we have. In situations with shocking shortfalls - in information, time, materials, manpower, money - leaders cannot shut down or walk away. In a crisis we don't get to fill out an acquisition report or complain to our boss. We throw someone over our shoulder and do what needs to be done without the luxury of all of the information, and in a stressful time crunch. Nobody has enough money. No one has enough time or manpower. But that doesn't have to be a bad thing. As necessity is the mother of invention, so can constraints bring out the best in us. Tightened circumstances force us to rethink, reframe, and do things differently, instead of conducting business as usual.

Some have argued that people have an innate body wisdom that guides them to select healthful foods naturally, thus implying that nutrition education is not needed. Much of this line of thought grew out of the work of Clara Davis, who studied the spontaneous food choices of infants. The infants, ages 6 to 11 months, were weaned by allowing them to self-select their entire diets from a total of 34 foods, without added salt or sugar, which were rotated - a few at a time - at each meal. Davis reported that after several months of such spontaneous food selection, the children's nutritional status and health were excellent. However, one should note that the 34 foods were all simply prepared, minimally processed, and nutritious whole foods, such as steamed vegetables, fruit juice, milk, meat, and oatmeal. There were no poisons, and nothing was allowed to influence the children's food choices except their own appetites. In other words, the food items were offered by caretakers who were trained to provide no encouragements or discouragements while the children ate. It comes as no surprise that the infants' health was superb.

Sports teams are often cohesive groups, not simply because they wear uniforms of the same color, but because they frequently have to work together for the common good against a common opponent. A team that merely practiced, without ever playing against an opponent, would probably not feel so unified. It is quite possible that the deeply rooted human impulse to form social groups was partly stimulated by competition among groups. If a lone person wanted something - the fruit on a particular tree, for example - and a group also wanted it, the group would almost always win. Over evolutionary history, loners would therefore be losers, whereas the people who passed on their genes toward future generations would be the ones who formed groups. Groups promote safety, they find and share food, and they can do tasks that no one individual can do alone.

One way to ensure that our observations remain objective is to quantify them by counting, estimating, or using measuring tools. Small might mean different things to different people: a ladybug is small compared with a dog, but a dog is small compared with an elephant. Adding numbers will help remove interpretation and doubt. Small is subjective; one inch across is not. Measure whenever you can, estimate when you can't, but always use numerical values. Instead of saying there are many lights on the ceiling above the woman in Edward Hopper's Automat, note that there are two rows of seven lights. Rather than stating that there are a few chairs in the scene, be specific: there are three dark, wooden, armless chairs visible. Even phenomena that can't be counted or measured can be quantified. Instead of saying that the dog is smelly, quantify it: On a scale of one to five, five being the worst, the smell emanating from the dog was a four.

Each animal in nature is usually best adapted to one habitat or biome, where their bodies have the nature-provided tools to obtain resources and to avoid hazards. A Bengal tiger would not trade places with a Gobi camel, as neither one has the tools to cope with the swapped habitats. When the season changes, some animals migrate a great distance each year to favored habitats, such as the annual arctic tern flight from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back. The fable of the Hedgehog and the Fox describes two animals with different strategies. The single-minded hedgehog has one big idea to cope with any problem, by rolling up into a ball, but the versatile fox has many small ideas, by studying each situation and arriving at a tailored solution. Humans are the most versatile in adaptations, as the clever fox that can live anywhere.

A refrigerator lowers its internal temperature using the same physics you rely on to cool off a hot cup of coffee by blowing on it - evaporation cooling. Say your morning cup of coffee is too hot to drink. Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of the molecules in the coffee. That is, some molecules will have a kinetic energy below the average, and some will be much more energetic. Those more energetic, eager-beaver molecules form the cloud of steam over your coffee cup and have enough kinetic energy to initiate a phase transition, moving from the liquid state into the vapor phase. When you blow on your coffee, you are pushing these high-kinetic-energy molecules away from the cup, preventing them from returning to the liquid and redepositing their energy into the liquid. With those high-energy molecules no longer part of the coffee liquid- vapor system, the new average kinetic energy of all the molecules is lower than it was before, reflected in a lower temperature for your coffee.

We read an article in the newspaper about a famine that is starving three million children in sub-Saharan Africa. We shake our heads and turn the page. Then we see a TV documentary that explores the life of one such child and his family. Our check is in the mail. Why is it that a matter-of-fact account of the suffering of many stimulates little while a vivid account of the suffering of one immediately gets us to do something? Psychologist Paul Slovic suggests that we are driven in situations like this by our emotional reactions to suffering. An explicitly identified single individual, with a face, a name, and a life story, elicits far more empathy and compassion than a number, no matter how big the number. And it is our empathy and compassion - our emotions - that compel us to act. In many studies, Slovic and his collaborators have shown that people are more willing to volunteer time, or contribute money, when they read, for example, a detailed account of a single flood victim than when they read a less vivid account of hundreds or thousands who have lost their homes.