Practice and overfitting
In the ten years or so that I was taking piano lessons, I caused my teachers a lot of frustration by how slow I was to learn new pieces—one even called me the bane of her existence. It wasn’t that I didn’t practice; I was all too happy to practice a piece once I’d figured […]
Vacation in Castle Danger!
This week, Clara and I and two friends of ours went on a two-day trip to Minnesota’s North Shore, on Lake Superior. The town where we stayed is epically named “Castle Danger,” despite its lack of castles or (apparent) danger, and, according to Wikipedia, The exact origin of the name is unknown, although it might have come […]
Broadcasting beliefs
I have the perfect cure for hiccups: chug five or six swallows of water while plugging your ears. (So in addition to the water, you need either someone to hold your ears for you, or a straw to drink through while you hold your own ears.) This technique has never failed me or Clara, and we’ve used […]
Sigmoid perception
Sometimes my mental vocabulary isn’t very rich for extreme situations. Rather than thinking of temperature like this: I have different mental “buckets” for various temperature ranges, depending on what I would need to feel comfortable: Notice how the intervals between different experiences get wider the farther you get from the middle, all the way to […]
We have a piano!
This is not the blog post I planned to write this week, but for a happy reason: our piano came today! This piano is the one I played on when I was taking lessons in high school, and it’s been living with my parents ever since I moved out. Until now! Finally choosing to bring […]
Curating contentment
I remember hearing somewhere about a guy who resolved never to buy a bottle of wine costing more than $10—not because the more expensive wine didn’t taste better, but because he didn’t want his own taste to develop to the point that he had to buy expensive wine if he wanted to enjoy it at all. Clara […]
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 […]