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The Website Obesity Crisis
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 29, 2015, at the Web Directions conference in Sydney. [ 53 minute video ].
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 63 posts.
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Nootropics
Notes on nootropics I tried, and my experiments
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Your Life in Weeks
All the weeks in a human life shown on one chart.
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The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans
This is the tale of what for me was a rather remarkable adventure. It was assembled on the basis of my personal recollection and experience, emails, GPS logs and some official documents. It represents solely the perspective and opinions of myself, in my more lucid moments. It is in no way intended to represent th
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Reverse Voxsplaining: Drugs vs. Chairs
[Content note: this is pretty much a rehash of things I’ve said before, and that other people have addressed much more eloquently. My only excuse for wasting your time with it again is that S…
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Beware The Man Of One Study
Aquinas famously said: beware the man of one book. I would add: beware the man of one study. For example, take medical research. Suppose a certain drug is weakly effective against a certain disease…
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HN comments are underrated
HN comments are terrible . On any topic I’m informed about , the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong . Most of the time, there are zero comments from people who know anything about the topic and the top comment is reasonable sounding but totally incorrect. Additionally, many comments are gratuitously…
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Spaced repetition
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.
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Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person
“Universal love,” said the cactus person. “Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat. “Right,” I said. “I’m absolutely in favor of both those things.…
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You Are Still Crying Wolf
Go away, pro-Trump bots [Update 5/30: I originally took this post down because it got picked up by some pro-Trump accounts that I think were bots which would post it several times a day to various …
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A Protocol for Dying
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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Ranto (JBR Anti‐Zamenhofism)
Esperanto: espèce de conlang
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“I have toyota corola”
Modern cars have fancy infotainment setups, big screens and all sorts of computers with networked functionality built-in. Part of that fanciness is increasingly often a curl install. curl is a part of the standard GenIVI and Tizen offers for cars and is used in lots of other independent software installs too. This…
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Book Review: Albion’s Seed
I. Albion’s Seed by David Fischer is a history professor’s nine-hundred-page treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States. It’s not light reading and not…
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Effective learning: Rules of formulating knowledge (1999)
This article will help you overcome one of the greatest difficulties you will face when trying to accelerate learning: formulating knowledge.
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Schizophrenia: No Smoking Gun
[Note: despite how some people are spinning this, tobacco is still really really bad and you should not smoke it] I. Schizophrenics smoke. A lot. Depending on the study, about 60-80% of schizophren…
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So You Want to Learn Physics
Over the past few years, ever since writing “If Susan Can Learn Physics So Can You,” I've been contacted by people from all backgrounds who are inspired and want to learn physics, but don't know where to start, what to learn, what to read, and how to structure their studies...this post is a condense
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“Subject: Urgent Warning”
Back in December I got a desperate email from this person. A woman who said her Instagram had been hacked and since she found my contact info in the app she mailed me and asked for help. I of course replied and said that I have nothing to do with her being hacked but I … Continue reading “Subject: Urgent Warning” →
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Dunning-Kruger and other memes (2015)
It's really common to see claims that some meme is backed by “studies” or “science”. But when I look at the actual studies, it usually turns out that the data are opposed to the claim. Here are the last few instances of this that I've run across.
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Bicycling: The Safest Form of Transportation
Of all the objections I get from people about why they can’t ride a bike to get around, perhaps the most frustrating is the claim that bicycling is too dangerous. According to this line of re…
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The Psychopath Code
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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The internet has made defensive writers of us all
I was struck by this passage in Steven Pinker’s article about why academics’ writing stinks :
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In Defense of Inclusionism
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.
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Farewell, App Academy. Hello, Airbnb – Part 2
(Note: this is the second part of this story. You can read the first part here.) Despite the rejection from 23AndMe, I kept pushing. I applied to all the big hiring websites. Hired rejected me from...
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Confessions of a Necromancer
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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Music theory for nerds
Not music nerds, obviously. I don’t know anything about music. I know there are letters but sometimes the letters have squiggles; I know an octave doubles in pitch; I know you can write a pop song with only four chords. That’s about it. The rest has always seemed completely, utterly arbitrary. Why do we have twelve…
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Happy people don’t leave jobs they love
Resignations happen in a moment, and it’s not when you declare, “I’m resigning.” The moment happened a long time ago when you received a random email from a goo