Thank you all for coming to today’s seminar on the Zootopia artifact, recovered during our excursion on planet 7X. I’ll be diving a bit deeper into the implications of the recording, especially those clues that might reveal the reason for their civilization’s demise. You should have gotten a copy of the translated recording last night, […]
It’s no secret that I have a love-hate relationship with video games. On the one hand, games whisk you off to enchanted worlds optimized for fun. On the other hand, any sense of accomplishment is illusory at best: congratulations, you’ve learned how to press buttons better than before! However, I’ve found that one particular game, […]
I was talking to friends about Deep Work, a book about doing, well, deep work, when I realized that I had two conflicting models of how to choose what to work on, and how to work on it. The more straightforward approach is sketched by Richard Hamming in You and Your Research, which simply asks […]
I’m replacing my moribund social network presence with an email newsletter. The newsletter is actually three different newsletters, which differ mainly in how often they are sent: Monthly (tinyletter.com/thenoviceoof-monthly) Five times a year (quinquannually[1][2]) (tinyletter.com/thenoviceoof-quinquannually) Twice a year (tinyletter.com/thenoviceoof-semiyearly) The content of the newsletter is currently a grab bag; I’ll talk about notable life events, […]
I’ve had my trusty e-reader for nearly 5 years, but now it’s starting to give up the ghost. The battery is starting to run down, so it isn’t quite free range any longer, and it has started shutting down randomly: waiting for your book to reboot is exactly as annoying as it sounds. After 5 […]
Have you noticed the typography on this blog is terrible, and wanted to let me know without hurting my feelings? Have you realized that I’m smelly, but it’s socially awkward to say so in person? Have you discovered that I’m wrong on the internet and need to go die in a fire, but can’t be […]
Don’t know if you like science fiction? Don’t know if you only like a specific subgenre of science fiction, but don’t want to wade through novels of dreck to find out what it is? As a first step, I recommend reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Yes, an entire novel is a big time sink, but […]
Epistemic status: contains wild speculation I. Plato said “know thyself” 2500 years ago, so why is everyone still trying to sell me on self-awareness? More specifically, many contemporary self-help books seem to focus on some aspect of self-awareness and offer their own spin on it. Even books from fairly different traditions give me pause with […]
I. Today, I’ll be talking about Starship Troopers. Wait, don’t leave yet! I don’t mean the campy film adaptation or the poorly animated TV show, but instead I’ll be talking about the relatively philosophical book. You might still want to leave because the book might be philosophical in, ah, undesirable ways, but I’ll only be […]
Two weeks ago, a friend died, half a world away. When I was young, death lurked over the horizon, the ramparts of an encroaching hurricane. It took distant and ancient relatives, strangers the news decided to take note of. It took the victims of shootings, and then when I knew better, the victims of car […]