You Know, We Can Just Stop Consuming the News

I’ve been listening to the 80,000 hours podcast a lot recently*. On the podcast they had a discussion of why you should stop reading the news with Brian Caplan, which pointed to Rolf Dobelli’s book Stop Reading the News. I picked up the book, also read it, and promptly stopped reading (and watching or listening) Read More …

The Intersection of Productivity and Joy (over the past months)

Since last we spoke a couple of months ago, I had a hell of a time personally: I moved house, went from one location to another too often, had a major and very stressful financial crisis and had some rough times with friends which rocked the emotional boat. Although there are many things which didn’t Read More …

The Andromeda Galaxy's Globular Cluster System

Globular Clusters (GCs) Globular clusters are groups of roughly spherical, densely packed stars. They are thought to have formed at the same time as most galaxies and the stars which make them up are some of the oldest known–thus GCs are an excellent probe of galaxy formation and evolution. They have a high central stellar Read More …

Quantum Field Theory (QFT), General Relativity (GR), and Other Exciting Diversions (OED)

QFT I’m lucky to have a job in which I can take two weeks of mornings of work to study a nominally tangential subject in greater depth. These past two weeks I attended a series of  lectures at the ETH on physics beyond the standard model, the first week was very technical but exciting to Read More …

Wikileaks Research Project–Final Report: Background and Methods

The Motivation https://twitter.com/#!/corbett_inc/status/11049922849673216 https://twitter.com/#!/corbett_inc/status/11050551278051330 https://twitter.com/#!/ario/status/11053875767279616 Check my Wikileaks Research Project midpoint report out for more details but a bite sized background piece quoting from the blog post is as follows: A week ago I hatched a plan to educate myself in a more structured manner on what exactly Wikileaks stands for, its history, and its Read More …

Book eggs

I’ve been intending on making a full writeup of recently read books, but have not gotten around to it as I tend to start a new book right after I finish the last (one of the many great things about being a Kindle user, more fangirling to come) and think “well… I’ll just wait until Read More …