I’ve always enjoyed Steven Pinker’s books and essays. He’s a truly thoughtful scientist. This question and answer piece on parlio is a great example of his clear and logical thinking. Even when the questions veer toward unimaginative or ignorant, his responses are still thought provoking and to the point. There’s too many good ideas to quote them all so I’ll leave the core principle here as bait.
That the human condition is improving.
I really enjoyed the Randall Monroe book “What If?" and now I get to look forward to his latest work Thing Explainer. I love his approach to story telling through obscure problem statements. Each “answer” is really just a new problem to unpack. Thing Explainer builds on the xkcd comic/blue print “Up Goer Five”. I like schematics and blue prints so this will certainly provide hours of nose-to-page enjoyment.
For what it’s worth, I also really enjoyed An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments last year.
I’ll tell you a secret that is likely to make me a pariah among the nerds. I don’t like Malcolm Gladwell or Seth Godin or really most of the TED genre of pop culture factoids. I’m sure they are all fine upstanding citizens of the world but their brand of storytelling does not appeal to me. I avoid most science journalism as I avoid life-hack mythology. Hear me out before you condemn me as elitist.
In my opinion, Dr. Oz is disgusting so nothing he does really surprises me. Stuff like this just confirms my opinion that he is a charlatan schilling for investment:
I have been carefully following the wearable device market and am pretty close to consummating a longer term relationship, but just saw the piece below quoting Kaz Hirai [the president and CEO of Sony] and realized that Sony is moving into the space as well," Oz writes in an email.
An interesting essay by Andrew Potter:
From the paleo diet to the “ancestral health” craze to the criminals leading the anti-vaccine movement, we live in neoprimitivist times, in precisely the manner sketched by William Gibson. A disturbingly large segment of society has adopted a highly skeptical and antagonistic relationship to the main tributaries of modernity. But as in The Peripheral, these people are not opting out of modernity, going off the grid or deciding to live in caves.
There’s so much value in this site. I can’t wait until Business Insider starts referencing the data there. Good times ahead.
From GeekDad
…careful observation will reveal a camera cut between Andersen’s firing and the close-up of the arrow supposedly splitting
One advantage of being grotesquely cynical is that I don’t spend much time reading about stuff like this. I did enjoy the GeekDad deconstruction of the bogus narration. Unfortunately this will never be linked as much as the potentially fake original because it has text instead of a video.
Ok, this is kind of cool. It’s a custom keyboard for chemical formulas that makes a lot of sense. I like the quick slide down for subscript. You don’t need to slide all the way over to the sub- or superscript key, just slide up or down to select.
$3 in the App Store. I bought it just to be able to paste proper molecular formulas in emails. The Wikipedia search is cute but not terribly useful.
What a great little video about time. Some might find it depressing but it really gave me quite a bit of joy.
Not much more to say. It’s just sad.
chew-toys for halfwits
