Spice Blendoku
Since deciding to renew our lease for a second year, we’ve been trying to improve our apartment in several small ways: getting fabric for curtains, moving the recycling from a paper bag in the coat closet to a bin under the sink, re-gluing sections of doors that have warped apart, etc. One project we’ve had in mind […]
The wisdom of individuals
What’s the optimal strategy to win a count-the-jellybeans-in-the-jar contest? One method is to count the number of jellybeans that would fit along each of the jar’s dimensions, and then multiply to estimate the volume of the jar in jellybeans. But a surprisingly accurate guess is… the average of everyone else’s! Even though everyone will be wrong—some too high, some too low—on average […]
How not to run out of ideas
Last December, I was worrying about the future of this blog. I had a long list of potential post topics, but every week it was a struggle to choose one I liked enough to write about. The meta-blogpost Running out of ideas was round one of my attempt to solve this problem with the scientific method: hypothesizing about the cause […]
Why I throw my iPod on the floor every morning
Since childhood I’ve loved the feeling of waking up earlier than I have to, and getting to drowse until it’s time to get out of bed. It feels both luxurious and virtuous. So the old iPod I use as an alarm goes off twice every morning: first there’s the “wake up” alarm, and then the […]