Humans are storytelling machines. We don’t passively perceive the world – we tell stories about it, translating the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives. This is often a helpful habit, helping us make sense of mistakes, consider counterfactuals and extract a sense of meaning from the randomness of life.

But our love of stories comes with a serious side-effect: like all good narrators, we tend to forsake the facts when they interfere with the plot. We’re so addicted to the anecdote that we let the truth slip away until, eventually, those stories we tell again and again become exercises ...

Another quarter, another fresh set of earnings records for Intel. As has been the case for the past few quarters, the Tuesday release of Intel’s third-quarter earnings shows that revenue is up on both the client and server sides of Intel’s business. As a tech industry bellwether, Intel’s results are always most informative when broken out by vertical, so let’s take a look at what happened this past quarter.

The first take-home from Intel’s quarterly results is that the rumors of the PC’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Intel’s PC Client Group revenue is up 22 percent year-over-year, a hea...