Why cold clothes feel damp
Our new apartment has laundry in the building, but in a room that can only be accessed by going outside and then in through a separate entrance. The result in winter is that on its way back, a hamper full of freshly dried clothes will acquire a layer of cold clothing around its warm cozy […]
Multiplying Joy
I do not enjoy public speaking. This may sound odd coming from someone whose chosen profession involves regularly getting up in front of a crowd of students several times a week, but somehow that feels different. When I’m teaching, I’m the expert. By getting up and speaking, I am merely fulfilling the role that everyone […]
More information doesn’t have to make you more certain
FiveThirtyEight recently posted a piece called “The Impeachment Hearings Just Confirmed Voters’ Preexisting Opinions”: the same wave of new information has just made everybody more convinced of what they already thought: One explanation of this phenomenon is “motivated reasoning”: a person finding data more reliable and arguments more convincing if they fit with what the […]
The metric that matters
What’s the best way to measure progress toward long-term goals? For some goals, like “Read 100 novels in 2020,” it’s easy to measure your progress as you go, and you’ll know pretty quickly whether you’re on track to complete your goal. But if your goal is to write a novel, it’s not clear how to […]
Effort spent procrastinating is wasted
I’ve often found great comfort in the idea that work is never wasted: even if a project doesn’t go the way I hoped, I will still have learned something from the attempt, and I’ll carry that knowledge and experience forward with me. However, it recently occurred to me that work done is not the same […]
German tanks and Doomsday
In World War II, allied forces faced an unusual statistical puzzle: to make good strategic decisions, they needed to know roughly how many tanks Germany was building every month, but they had very limited evidence whether that number was small or large. One clue was that captured tanks had serial numbers on some of their […]
10 percent liable
Last month, this New York Times headline caught my eye for three reasons: Netherlands Was 10 Percent Liable in Srebrenica Deaths, Top Dutch Court Finds Reason #1: Having lived in the Netherlands, headlines about Dutch affairs usually stick out to me. Reason #2: I’d just been reading The Themis Files, a fiction series in which […]
Choose Your Own Cliché Classical Music
There are a lot of pieces of classical music that seem to be used over and over as background music, so I made a flowchart to keep track of them. It’s best viewed on a full-size computer screen; on small screens the links might not line up correctly. For a hi-res pdf, click here. Cliché […]
Cognitive Overfitting
It can be kind of fun, in a self-flagellating way, to read about cognitive biases like the availability heuristic or the Dunning-Kruger effect, or just to browse through big lists like this one. If only our brains could take into account all the information they have, process it instantly, and store it forever! But machine learning engineers know that […]
Ted Chiang on unspendable grief
Since I read Ted Chiang’s collection of short stories “Stories of your life and others,” including the marvelous title piece that inspired Arrival, I’ve been looking forward to his newly published collection “Exhalation.” The first story’s main character tells of his experience coping with the loss of his wife, and has this beautiful passage describing […]