During my 2013 review, I've noticed one habit I've strengthened over the year: a certain curious skepticism.

When people share interesting facts with me, I've moved from responding "wow" or "I didn't know that" etc and filing the fact away to share myself, to something like "how fascinating, I wonder if that's true?" or "huh, I want to know more about that!" followed by taking out my phone and googling (or making a note to research it later.)

This includes wonder the same when I'm the one sharing the fascinating fact - "hang on, I've never checked if that's actually true."

I'm quite proud that to the best of my knowledge I can do this without offending people, or dropping out of the conversation.

On a related note, I've sometimes spent my morning compute write carefully phrased rebuttals to junk my family / friends share on facebook. Asked mum recently if I have been successful in arguing respectfully, learnt that I had, and in fact had caused something to be taken down. "Yeah, I hadn't looked deeply into that."