December 2011
70 posts
What is it like to have an understanding of very... →
You are often confident that something is true long before you have an airtight proof for it (this happens especially often in geometry). The main reason is that you have a large catalogue of connections between concepts, and you can quickly intuit that if X were to be false, that would create tensions with other things you know to be true, so you are inclined to believe X is probably true...
Dec 30th
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Dec 28th
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Dec 28th
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Dec 28th
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Dec 28th
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Dec 28th
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Dec 26th
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Two Brains Running - "Thinking, Fast and Slow" →
By JIM HOLT  l  NYTimes Nov.25, 2011 In 2002, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in economic science. What made this unusual is that Kahneman is a psychologist. Specifically, he is one-half of a pair of psychologists who, beginning in the early 1970s, set out to dismantle an entity long dear to economic theorists: that arch-rational decision maker known as Homo economicus. The other half of the...
Dec 26th
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Dec 26th
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The blade is the greatest invention →
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, January/February 2012 Edward Carr argues that, as the first tool, the blade opened up a new world bursting with unimagined possibilities … Go into the kitchen and find a chopping board, a tomato—not too ripe—and your favourite knife. To be sure that the knife is sharp, run the tip of your finger down the edge and feel it catch the tiny ridges on your...
Dec 25th
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Dec 25th
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“Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them...”
– Schopenhauer
Dec 25th
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Dec 25th
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Dec 25th
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Dec 25th
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You Better Not Pout. →
By FRANK LESSER This may be tough for you to hear, Billy—but there is no Santa Claus. I should clarify: There was a Santa Claus, and he brought joy to all the children in the world who believed in him, but last Christmas Eve he was murdered during an attempted sleigh-jacking. You’re old enough for the whole truth: Santa didn’t die immediately. Even though the second bullet pierced his lung,...
Dec 25th
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Dec 23rd
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Dec 22nd
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Why You Should Read W. G. Sebald →
By MARK O’CONNELL  Today marks the tenth anniversary of the death of one of contemporary literature’s most transformative figures. On December 14, 2001, the German writer W. G. Sebald suffered a heart attack while driving and was killed instantly in a head-on collision with a truck. He was fifty-seven years old, having lived and worked as a university lecturer in England since his...
Dec 22nd
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A Very Calvin & Hobbes Christmas
Dec 21st
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Dec 20th
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Dec 20th
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ListenShabazz Palaces - Free Press and Curl
Dec 19th
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“Horihata is unwavering in his admiration of Kawakubo, yet admits that his...”
– Rei vs. Yohji
Dec 19th
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Dec 19th
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Dec 19th
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Infinite Stupidity →
A Talk With MARK PAGEL A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and...
Dec 19th
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Dec 18th
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Dec 17th
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The Overjustification Effect →
The Misconception: There is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love. The Truth: Getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will sometimes cause your love for the task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feelings. Money isn’t everything. Money can’t buy happiness. Don’t live someone else’s dream. Figure out...
Dec 16th
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Dec 14th
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Dec 14th
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Dec 14th
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Dec 13th
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The new science of our cross-wired senses →
By COURTNEY HUMPHRIES  l  The Boston Globe Dec. 11, 2011 Yes, your ears can change what you taste. What discoveries about cross-sensory perception are revealing about the brain. The senses have always been our portals into the outer world. We have the classic five that Aristotle talked about — sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch — plus more recently recognized senses of balance, ...
Dec 13th
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Dec 13th
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Dec 12th
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Jumping is an experimental short animation film made by Osamu Tezuka in 1984. The film is notable for its use of moving perspectives in a pre-CGI era (more than 4,000 hand drawings were required) and for adopting an innovative first person point of view. The film starts as an unseen child is skipping down his street, somewhere in a quiet country town. At frst, the jumps are no more than a few...
Dec 12th
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Dec 12th
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Dec 11th
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Dec 11th
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“why motherfucker is a word and fatherfucker isn’t is all I know of woman’s...”
– Mark Leidner, The Angel in The Dream of Our Hangover: Aphorisms
Dec 11th
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Dec 10th
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Image of the Year →
It’s the “of the year” time of the year: a few weeks spent naming the best books or music or music films, or the most significant events or people, of the year. As a reader I enjoy this mini-season, an annual excuse for me to (silently) disagree with everyone else’s lists. As a writer, I tend to avoid it. But this year I’m making an exception, because for months I’ve had a pretty good idea...
Dec 10th
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Dat focus… So relaxed right now.
Dec 8th
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Dec 8th
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Dec 7th
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Dec 7th
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Dec 7th
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“I think humor depends on depth of tension. There is just so little tension in...”
– Mark Leidner
Dec 7th
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