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Category Archives: science

Dispatches from the trenches

I wrote this in the course of my thesis notes just now, and it occurred to me it’s the kind of thing I should post here. And it suggests an even more pivotal role for any strategies or techniques that aid you in making a beginning: if you can only make a beginning, magic will [...]

I guess body issues are over

So would a significant portion of women walk around naked if it were legal to do so? Not just fringe weirdos and people who want a reality show, but, like, 20% of all females between the ages of 16 and 26? I ask because of all the chicks wearing tights in which every nook and [...]

Feeling Good part 2

So now it might seem doubly stupid to ask how you might act differently if the goal was to feel good, but the complicating factor involves direct vs indirect action. If you’re getting a PhD in psychology (to pull a completely random hypothetical out of my ass) then you’re pursuing a high-level goal whose final [...]

Anti-life equation

Please be careful.

Several reasons for cautious optimism

1. Zimmerman, MN, now sports a Dunn Bros., and in fact has done so for a while. The implication one can draw from this fact is that a business selling five dollar coffee has survived, for some years now, in Zimmerman, a “city” whose better-known features are vanity 4x4s, new-style Christian megachurches, and date rape. [...]

Pain pain go away

So things are getting bad again and I’ve started to track my blood glucose with this little glucose monitor thing to see if I can learn anything. What I really want to track is insulin but you can’t track insulin without a lab test so glucose will have to do. You can mostly infer insulin [...]

Grant II

Electric Boogaloo. I got it. Five hundred thousand dollars, bitches. Well, okay. Twenty-one thousand dollars. Even so.

I’ll stop apologizing now

for repeatedly quoting shit from this series of essays. But I read a couple of them every day, for a break, and I keep being struck by them. So here’s another: For instance, the other day I recalled a famous passage from Adam Smith that I wanted to cite: something about an earthquake in China. [...]

How to be awesome at everything

From this article by Jonah Lehrer about some uber-prodigy 13 year old Swedish chess grandmaster: And this is why we shouldn’t be surprised that a chess prodigy raised on chess computer programs would be even more intuitive than traditional grandmasters. The software allows him to play more chess, which allows him to make more mistakes, [...]

Grant

I wrote my first grant proposal the other day, for funding for next year. It would be a pretty big deal to get it, not because it’s super prestigious or anything (it isn’t) but because it would mean that instead of essentially working three jobs, I’d only have to work 1.5 jobs. Here it is, [...]