This idea feels vaguely familiar, so I'm probably being redundant, but I made up this list yesterday and I think it's cute, so here you go:

Level 1: You eat a pancake. Delicious! You realize you like pancakes a lot. Perhaps you could get a job making pancakes.

Level 2: You work really, really hard in your own kitchen, and produce one lopsided ( Read more... )

A while ago I realized that I can actually speak as someone who has played this role before. So when I found the above question on Quora, I wrote an answer:

Your best path to an architect position is to work your way up into it.

I say that because to really succeed in the architect position you need to know four things:

1. What works and what doesn ( Read more... )

To invent a novel gene sequence, scientists rearrange the data that codes for collections of enzymes and promoters and other elements, often combining sequences taken from other organisms. As far as I know, no scientist has yet invented a sequence from whole cloth that happens to assemble an enzyme to catalyze a brand new reaction - only discovered ( Read more... )

Version 1.1 ( Read more... )

Friend Doug: We got along well, both had a subversive energy. We would run around and make jokes and wrestle. One day along at my house we wrestled on the tile floor and I knocked his head hard on the tile by accident. "Oh I'm gonna kill you for that!" he shouted. I got up and ran from him and hid. He went looking for me, saying he was going ( Read more... )

Death And The Senator, 1961An overly-long and very heavily dramatic story with the tiniest scrap of science in the fiction. Not at all worth the read. I have just one vaguely interesting comment: The story hinges on the discovery that living in zero-gravity has amazing health benefits, and may even help cure advanced heart disease ... but in the ( Read more... )

In 2014, 3/4 of a billion pain pills were prescribed by doctors in Ohio. That's nearly 65 pills for every man, woman, and child in the state ( Read more... )

I was invited to post this on the Ambient Nights website as a guest mixer, but with the site under construction for the last two years and other work stacking up behind it, it's time to get this out on the internet.


( Read more... )

In physical communications, the level of personal privacy and ease of interception form an inverse relationship, and we all instinctively understand this. A shout is less private than a whisper. A wave in a crowd is less private than a touch on your shoulder. Skywriting is not at all private. An unvoiced thought is the most private of all ( Read more... )

Two very important related factors:
The valuation of privacy, and the devaluation of history.

Example 1:

You're an adult with a career now. You mind your online presence much more closely. Also, it's much much harder to be anonymous on the internet, now that search engines can correlate almost everything you do and show those correlations to ( Read more... )