A friend told me an excellent story: When I first started seeing "FTFY" (fixed that for you), I originally thought it meant "fuck that, fuck you." I was *so* confused when people used it because they didn't sound angry at all! If anything they were being helpful. It’s a great illustration of how regularly... [Read More]

I’m a big believer in the power of specialization (thanks in no small part to Russ Roberts and EconTalk.) What I didn’t realize is that specialization has become so endemic to the modern world that you can be far more specialized than you even realize. I spent this past weekend... [Read More]

A new post over on the lab blog about the different options for writing math in digital form. In my opinion, all of them suck. Trying to convey mathematics digitally is the biggest area where using a computer adds more hassle to life rather than reducing it. If you have... [Read More]

The experiment of posting every day has been an awesome, exhausting, challenge. Like everybody I know of who's tried a post a day (except Tyler Cowen) I can't keep it up. There comes a  point where the benefits of keeping it up are outweighed by the costs. I'm going to... [Read More]

Since installing Mac OSX Mavericks yesterday, my computer has crashed more than once per hour - three times while writing this post, clearly trying to keep me from tattling. The problem probably lies in a faulty video card aggravated by a modern, flashy OS, rather than Mavericks itself. Regardless, the... [Read More]