The Untold Story of the Burpee
If you were involved in military training or any kind of athletics, chances are you were punished by being ordered to drop into a squat…
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Slack made work sound cool. Can it keep up the illusion?
The jokey way Slack talks is one of its most defining features. But what happens when the joke’s on you?
Why I’m No Longer a Russiagate Skeptic
Facts are piling up, and it’s getting harder to deny what’s staring us in the face.
Why I Don't Buy Organic, And Why You Might Not Want To Either
By all rights I should be an enthusiastic advocate of organic. I grew up helping my beloved grandfather in his organic garden in the 1960s. Some of our best friends in the late 1970s were pioneers in the development of the commercial organic industry. I’ve spent a significant proportion of my career developing biological and natural product-based pesticides which are applicable to organic. My problems with institutional organic are not about its founding ideals or organic farmers, but rather ab...
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REST was NEVER about CRUD
A popular myth is that REST-based APIs must be CRUD-based – that couldn’t be further from the truth. It is simply one pattern in our API design toolbox. This article outlines a variety of additional patterns available for REST-based APIs. The intent isn’t to be fully exhaustive, but to open the options for API designers uncertain about …
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Why Our Intuition About Sea-Level Rise Is Wrong - Issue 62: Systems - Nautilus
Jerry Mitrovica has been overturning accepted wisdom for decades. A solid Earth geophysicist at Harvard, he studies the internal structure…
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Education Is Performance Art
Teller, of the entertainment duo Penn & Teller, explains how magic and discomfort made his teaching come alive.
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Sounding the Alarm: Now Is The Time to Be a Cockroach
I build businesses that high-flying tech startup investors generally don’t like. The businesses I build are profitable, focus on cash flow, and sell commoditized services. They’re considered unexciting to tech startup investors, who want to invest in the new hotness. I’ve tried to contort myself into building that type of business, but it’s just not …
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North American vs Japanese zoning
I originally published these notes in April of last year in one of my old blogs. These notes come from reading two blog posts from the wonderful Urban Kchoze blog:Urban kchoze: Japanese zoning (here is the annotated and cached copy)Urban kchoze:...
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Why Japanese whisky is so good and so hard to find
One of Japan’s leading whisky bloggers discusses the shortage of good Japanese single malts, the state of the country’s whisky industry, and how to order a highball.
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Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity
Scientists are finally starting to understand the centuries-old mystery of “ballooning.”
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The Rise and Fall of the Family-Vacation Road Trip
Richard Ratay, the author of "Don’t Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip," discusses the factors that turned road trips from an individual adventurer’s pursuit into a family activity—and those that led to their decline.
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Is This Man the Elon Musk of E-Waste? - Issue 62: Systems - Nautilus
Eric Lundgren, the 33-year-old, fedora-wearing CEO of a major electronic waste recycling plant in Los Angeles, could be called both…
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Hawaiian Style: The Roots of the Aloha Shirt
[caption id="attachment_12608" align="aligncenter" width="364"] An example of a figure-eight hukilau shirt.[/caption]In this interview, author and scholar...
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Unadulterated Joy: An Oral History of ‘Step Brothers’
This is the true story of Adam McKay, Will Ferrell, and John C. Reilly’s side-splittingly twisted exploration of male arrested development, the most fun movie to make ever made
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Seven ways IVF changed the world – from Louise Brown to stem-cell research
Louise Brown, the first child to be born as a result of in vitro fertilisation, at 20 months old in March 1980.Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer 1.…
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The Majestic Monolith
Some patterns are just about the code. If your code looks like this, and you need it to do that, here’s what to do. You’d do well to study…
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How eerie and unsettling it can be when people change their minds
In the wake of the primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, there’s been a dramatic shift in mainstream liberal opinion—in the media, on social media, among politicians, activists, and ci…
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Infinite Negative Utility: Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a classic text that’s had a strong influence on countless people. It’s a venerated…
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The Electric Flight of Spiders
Scientists are finally starting to understand the centuries-old mystery of “ballooning.”
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Nine Things I Learned When I Became a Honeymoon Planner for Billionaires
Summer is here, which means it’s officially wedding season—which means it’s also honeymoon season. Lining up a dream postnuptial vacation can be just as…
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An Isolated Country Runs on Mobile Money
HARGEISA, Somaliland—Hyperinflation and economic isolation have pushed this poor, breakaway republic closer to a virtual milestone than most other countries in…
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Why your brain never runs out of problems to find
It's a psychological quirk that when something becomes rarer, people may spot it in more places than ever. What is the 'concept creep' that lets context change how we categorize the world around us?
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