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Life, Learning & Writing
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Rules for Learning Foreign Languages in Record Time
Preface by Tim Ferriss I’ve written about how I learned to speak, read, and write Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish. I’ve also covered my experiments with German, Indonesian, Arabic, Norwegian, Turkish, and perhaps a dozen others. There are only few language learners who dazzle me, and Benny Lewis is one of them. This…
What Dreams May Come
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MMM Receives Legal Threats
Sigh. I suppose this was bound to happen sometime. This blog is approaching its third birthday and has been blessed with over 62 million page views from 5.2 million people and counting. Many people…
How I resurrected my MacBook Pro by putting it in the oven
One late night I opened up my trusty MacBook Pro only to find it turned off. “That’s odd, I never turn it off. Must have ran out of battery or something”. Without a further thought, I pressed the power button and the computer promptly started booting up. Since I had an SSD, this process would only take a few moments……
How to Think
Read this article to discover how chess is used to teach people how to think. "It’s uncomfortable to focus so intensely on what you’re bad at."
Goodbye Academia
I have enjoyed research and teaching for the last twelve years. Yet, I have resigned from my postdoctoral position at MIT a week ago, givin...
Dear Google, am I pregnant?
Here in the UK, we are a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights, which among other things includes an explicit right to privacy (considerably stronger than the implicit privacy rights acknowledged in the US, which are not enumerated directly by the US constitution).
Email (let's drop the hyphen) (2003)
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Ten Years of Coding Horror
In 2007, I was offered $120,000 to buy this blog outright. I was sorely tempted, because that’s a lot of money. I had to think about it for a week. Ultimately I decided that my blog was an integral part of who I was, and who I eventually
Schadenfreude
"Magic the Gathering: Online Exchange" has magically gathered all your online bitcoins and exchanged them for ... something or other. More here . For once, do read the comments —it's hysterically funny, in a sad way, to watch the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Levels of Excellence
Over on Google+, a computer scientist at McGill named Artem Kaznatcheev passed on this great description of what it’s like to learn math, written by someone who calls himself ‘man aft…
Nootropics Survey Results And Analysis
In case you are just joining us: nootropics are substances which purportedly improve mental functioning with relatively few side effects when used responsibility. Caffeine is a good example. It imp…
A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
Your 60 hour work week is not a badge of honour. It is a problem. It means the business design has failed, or there's a breakdown in communication, or worse.