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?
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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.
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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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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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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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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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[Easy Chair] | Forget About It, by Corey Robin | Harper's Magazine
In the uneasy months following 9/11, the Bush Administration provoked a minor controversy when it announced the name of a new office dedicated to protecting the United States from terrorism and other threats. “Homeland security” had unsavory associations: the Nazis often spoke of Heimat, which was also used in the 1920s and 1930s by an Austrian right-wing paramilitary group, the Heimwehr or Heimatschutz. Even Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s secretary of defense, who had been in discussions about the ter...
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The advantages of an email-driven git workflow
git 2.18.0 has been released, and with it my first contribution to git has shipped! My patch was for a git feature which remains disappointingly obscure: git send-email. I want to introduce my readers to this feature and speak to the benefits of using an email-driven git workflow - the workflow git was originally designed for.
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Why tech’s favorite color is making us all miserable
The cold blue light of modern touchscreens may be aesthetically pleasing, but it poses health problems. Designers and technologists should take cues from military history and embrace the orange.
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How we discovered three poisonous books in our university library
Interdisciplinary research led to the discovery that three historic books were covered in a layer of arsenic.
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Tipping the Scales
If Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement on June 27, is confirmed by the Senate, the Supreme Court will have a stable majority of conservative justices for the first time since before the New Deal. Kennedy’s successor will be Trump’s second Surpreme Court pick and may not be his last. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is eighty-five, clearly wishes to stay on the Court as long as Trump is president. So does Justice Stephen Breyer, who turns eighty...
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Are we stuck with cement?
The cement industry has little reason to improve its material’s enormous environmental impact.
