James Somers

I should have loved biology

In biology class, biology wasn't presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing.

Using the wrong dictionary

The way I thought you used a dictionary was that you looked up words you've never heard of, or whose sense you're unsure of. You would never look up an ordinary word -- like example , or sport , or magic -- because all you'll learn is what it means, and that you already know.

A three-page paper that shook philosophy, with lessons for software engineers

In 1963, the philosopher Edmund Gettier published a three-page paper in the journal Analysis that quickly became a classic in the field. Epistemologists going back to the Greeks had debated what it meant to know something, and in the Enlightenment, a definition was settled upon: to know something is to have a…

Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)

The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you'll finish more stuff per unit time. But there's more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you'll be inclined to do more.

The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

I want to tell the story of a beautiful phenomenon in biology. In some sense it’s the prototype of much of the activity of life. The phenomenon is the way in which an individual cell of E. coli forages for nutrients. This process, known as “chemotaxis”—the “chemo-” for chemical and the “taxis” from the Greek τάξις…

“It turns out” (2010)

"It turns out" became a favorite phrase of mine sometime in mid 2006, which, it turns out, was just about the time that I first started tearing through Paul Graham essays . Coincidence?

You’re probably using the wrong dictionary (2014)

The way I thought you used a dictionary was that you looked up words you've never heard of, or whose sense you're unsure of. You would never look up an ordinary word -- like example , or sport , or magic -- because all you'll learn is what it means, and that you already know.

The paper computer

Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could write down a date that would…

Most book clubs are doing it wrong (2017)

The standard way to run a book club is to have everybody finish the book before meeting to talk about it. You have one meeting per book. The discussion goes on for one or two hours before it runs out of gas, and then the group picks the next book, and you agree to meet in another month or six weeks.

The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction

When I first started writing for a real publication, I taught myself “reporting” with a simple self-made curriculum unfolding over six or seven articles. The first two pieces I wrote from my head, with reference to things I already knew or to books I’d read. For the third, I actually got out of the house, but didn’t…

More people should write (2012)

More people should do what I’m doing right now. They should sit at their computers and bat the cursor around — write full sentences about themselves and the things they care about.

Toys

How to be a loser

A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)

In How to Do Philosophy , Paul Graham claims that “judging from their works, most philosophers up to the present have been wasting their time.” His point is that philosophy per se is structurally flawed. How?

"Don't just read it; fight it"

You can sort of let a novel run through you: the language is loose enough that you don't need to chew on sentences—you can swallow them whole, steadily one by one, and still have a perfectly clear picture of who everyone is and what's going on.