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Limitations and Humility

There is a type of humility, an admission of limitations, that is as rare as it's ever been on the internet. But for some reason, I'm finding it standing out to me more and more. It sounds something like, "Here's what I think I know, and here's how I know it, but if that turns out to be wrong, I stand corrected." Here's a real world example: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place. The core argument of the article is thus: InstaHide (a recent method that … (Continued)

Parable of Discovery

Imagine two people meeting for dinner at 6 at a restaurant neither of them has been to before. Harry is a busy man with a calendar full of meetings. Google Maps says it's a 27 minute drive to the restaurant. At 5:31 he gets in his car, starts up the navigation, and gets directions straight to the restaurant. On the way, he listens to his podcasts at 150% speed because he has so many of them to get through. Tom on the other hand knows the general area is about 30 minutes away from his house. He … (Continued)

Quiet to Think

Eric Hoffer insisted that everyone needed time to think while your body was otherwise occupied. He famously wrote The True Believer, published in 1951, while working his job as a longshoreman on the docks of San Francisco. Unloading ships, mowing the lawn, or walking, whatever you do, you need quiet to hear yourself think. Time to digest whatever you've ingested in your intellectual diet, combine it with news from the day, and distill new knowledge or wisdom, concrete ideas that you can use to … (Continued)

Contempt

A moment of contempt is like a cigarette. Each one is a buzz. But it's the accumulation of them that kills you.

Empty Mind

The only way to an empty mind is not to push everything else out and decree silence. It is only by being open to every thought and allowing them to arise until they slow to a trickle. This may take a while, but it is quicker than the other option which is unending.

Good Things In Bad Times

There is a strange irony of difficult times like the current moment, when everyone expects everyone else to be tense and short-tempered. The podcasts, newsletters, and smartphone notifications say the world is coming apart at the seams. People expect bad things to happen. The result is that the slightest moment of friendliness has a magnified effect. A smiling nod, holding the door for someone, a kind word of thanks to a stranger. It's so unexpected that people are warmly surprised by it. It's … (Continued)

Time to produce versus time to consume

One heuristic you can use to decide how to spend your time is by comparing the amount of time that went into making the thing you're contemplating consuming. A livestream often has zero preparation; many podcasts of the regular-cast-riffing-on-each-other variety also are done off the cuff. One step up might be a podcast or a blog post that is a reaction to some current event. A step up from there is a podcast or article that takes a broader view and requires both more time to write and deeper k … (Continued)

Supersonic Baseballs

I'm not sure what you were planning to do with the next 24 minutes (16 if you watch at 1.5 speed like I do with most talking-heavy videos) of your life, but I have a good suggestion: Smarter Every Day's video about building a supersonic baseball cannon. This episode is actually fairly light on explaining the underlying science that is often a part of his other videos. There's more of than in the one-hour making of video. This video just mentions a few things in passing like Schlieren imaging an … (Continued)

The World We Were Promised, Part 2

When I set out to build this blog, it was deliberately a place to tinker. I already have one blog running on WordPress and there wasn't a "cool factor" to starting up another one. Why? Because WordPress is so old-fashioned. It's built in PHP, a programming language that is a few generations out of date and quirky. People who have other options would never choose to start a new project in PHP these days. There are just too many newer languages that are better-designed. Surely, then, someone has … (Continued)

Transitional Moments

I've come to the decision that there is nothing of intellectual substance that can be done in under two minutes, which is the amount of time I am most often looking to fill on my smartphone. At best, I can review things and eliminate the ones that don't need attention: emails I don't need to read, RSS reader posts I'm not interested in, notifications that don't require a response. But even those tasks only take a few seconds when the time comes to read email or RSS. So I haven& … (Continued)

Natural Endings

Meditations 6.1 Nature is pliable, obedient. And the logos that governs it has no reason to do evil. It knows no evil, does none, and causes harm to nothing. It dictates all beginnings and all endings. So long as the ending is natural, it cannot be evil. It is simply the symmetric ending to a beginning set in motion years ago.

Wisdom in crowds

There is wisdom in crowds, but not in mobs. In a one-on-one conversation, ask ten people a question. Note their answers and aggregate them in private. What you have is something approximating wisdom. Now take those same ten people and put them in a room together. Ask them the same question. You'll get a louder contribution from the most outspoken members of the group. The group will likely converge on two different answers to your question and people will pick sides. The second method will pr … (Continued)

Two Bushes

When we moved into our house, there were a number of bushes planted in various places by the builders. We pulled a few out because wanted to put other things there. Another one died on its own which was just fine with us. But the two bushes next to our back porch we actually liked quite a bit. In a few years when they're larger, they'll provide a nice bit of visual screening to the porch. But this spring, when things warmed up, they weren't growing very well. On a hunch, Steph cut a … (Continued)

The World We Were Promised, Part 1

Mozilla Corporation, the commercial arm of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, announced this week that they are laying off 250 people, which is a quarter of the company. The official press release on the Mozilla blog is very upbeat, including bits about "acting more quickly and nimbly" and that they will "experiment more." Piecing together reports from Twitter and elsewhere, however, it looks like the entire team of the Servo browser, an R&D project has been cut. (I guess that's not the kind of … (Continued)

The Volt, Part 3: End of Life

(Part 2 of this story) When I was doing my research to find a used Chevy Volt to buy, the news that the Volt was being discontinued after 2019 crossed my notice. Not a big deal, I thought. I wasn't planning to buy a new one anyway. But after driving this car for six months and really coming to like it quite a lot, I've noticed there's that voice in the back of my head. Enjoy it while it lasts. Nobody really knows why GM discontinued to Volt, and I won't try … (Continued)