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Please refer to the Manual of Conversation to label your comments with appropriate indices
The other day at work we were engaging in sections B.1a/B.3c of allowable work conversations (A. Work; B. Commuting; C. Weather; D. The Latest Biggest News Story; E. Daughters): Ratings of Driving Capability of Self & The World at Large/pertaining to Bicycling. Rebel that I am, once the customary round of all participants offering their version of ( Read more... ) -
It gets better with practice, right? Right?
The stranger was, of all things, smiling. Rahid’s jaw tightened, his muscles already tense and breathing quickened. Meeting anyone in the open was cause enough for alarm, but the incredulous fact of the stranger’s apparent lack of equal wariness was disconcerting. Either the man had overtly malicious intentions and some hidden compatriots ( Read more... ) -
This one should probably be formatted differently, think of it as behind the scenes
Ugh, this is ridiculous, Todd thinks as his quadriceps burn and scream after barely three minutes of squatting over the vegetable garden. Surely people around the world, or at least the apocryphal primitive man, spent much of their lives squatting, relentlessly building thigh muscles each day from birth, merely from their day-to-day activities. ( Read more... ) -
I guess I'm doing a thing for May so be gentle with me
The first time out had been the easiest, in retrospect. She hadn’t given as much serious thought to the full implications, all the downsides and negative consequences. Although they did occur to her, and she had fancied to herself she was braced for it, in truth she had been almost entirely focused on extended life, seeing the future, ( Read more... ) -
(Untitled)
Resolutions for a fading persona ( Read more... ) -
A reward for anyone who still reads this
"A conversation between Dirac and Feynman during the twelfth Solvay conference (1961) conveys the mood of the period ( Read more... ) -
If you have no new ideas, just reiterate the old ones
Returning to the issue discussed a few weeks ago about our ability to reason rationally:
I was reading David Eagleman's Incognito, where he's basically just been summarizing everything everybody has been going on and on about for the past several decades about how the brain works, how it tricks you, how what we perceive is not an objective version ( Read more... ) -
I could probably find a way to link this to Dune if I took another minute, but I'll spare you
Started listening to a lecture on the whole phenomenon of how now boys are failing at school are girls are rocketing ahead. Take heart, boys - I'm just as much a failure and a fuckup as you are ( Read more... ) -
It had to happen sooner or later
In this panel(the second half) about disgust and rationality and morality, Jonathan Haidt makes a good point about how truly bad we are at unbiased reasoning. Where I think he goes wrong is lumping the way reasoning works with the way it ought to be, and how the whole time he refers to "reasoning" when he means "human reasoning". Of course it ( Read more... ) -
one thing leads to another...
This is a pretty good summary of some things about cognitive biases and so forth; most of them were not new to me; I feel like a lot of them have been floating around in popular science and media and so forth so even someone who doesn't spend a lot of their time and energy on related topics probably found at least a couple of the little tricks ( Read more... )