There are always gems in the Saturday Age. Ap Dijksterhuis of the University of Amsterdam has discovered that big decisions are best left to the unconscious mind because it can juggle lots of facts and figures better. The conscious mind tends to inflate the importance of some attributes at the expense of others and can handle on a few facts at a time, leading to poor decisions. (The study was based on picking the best of four cars. It seems a narrow base on which to build a theory, and I'm what best meant. The other item of random interest (random is my 12 year old daughters favourite word) were the "skipper dippers" collecting food from bins at the back of garbage bins. It's growing - to the extent that there are skipper dipper swap meets. People say it is more about reducing waste than free goods.