Category Archives: musings

    There’s a concept in search algorithms that makes a good analogy for life. As analogy, imagine a large forested area with small hills and depressions in it. You have the task of finding the highest point in this area. One popular algorithm for finding a maximum like this is to look around from whereContinue reading “Using Randomness as a Tool”

10,000 hours is famously (and likely wrongly) quoted as the number of hours of deliberate practice one needs to achieve mastery in a skill. I was curious today, so I put together some calculations of how many hours I’ve put into different skills (to be fair, not all of these hours are deliberate practice –Continue reading “Hours to Mastery”

A dot on a graph with no context is often fairly useless unless you have already established a sense of context. A good example from my last job: if I tell someone that they used 200 kWhs last month, for the large percentage of the population, that doesn’t mean anything unless they also know howContinue reading “Drawing Lines, Not Dots”

Dating has long been a subject I’ve avoided on my blog. First, because I tend to want to write things about dating when I’m feeling frustrated with it and I don’t want all that logged in the public record. Second, it’s usually a lot of personal things. I try to write when I feel thatContinue reading “Black Boxes and Filling in the Blanks — Early Dating and Compatibility”

I drew this diagram on my whiteboard several months ago to explain to a friend why eating a Standard American Diet (SAD) and trying to fix it with supplements is foolish. The SAD is the column on the right, achieving, for argument’s sake, 40% of an optimal 100%. The column on the left is somethingContinue reading “Premature Optimization and the 95/40 Rule”

I have often wondered why I don’t feel the same pull towards activities that I’ve noticed in others. Have you ever met someone that you were convinced couldn’t survive without partaking in a hobby of theirs? (be it music, dancing, biking, running, etc.) I have, and I always envied those people. It felt as ifContinue reading “The Cost of Continuation”

As far as I’m concerned, anyone who believes that they have full, conscious control over their decisions is either hopelessly naïve or lacking in self-observation faculties. While we have conscious thought and the ability to make some decisions, research has shown the power of our subconscious in driving us towards certain behaviors and actions. Here’sContinue reading “Harvesting the Unconscious and Hacking Your Brain”