Reading

This blog post is a review of the book "This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends" by Nicole Perlroth. The book tries to shed light on the "ze...

Supercharge your learning and become smarter by using the Feynman Technique. Devised by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, it leverages the power of teaching for better learning.

I was reading the Slate Star Codex review of The Cult of Smart. Part of it discusses charter vs state schools and the allegations of fraud of various kinds undermining charter schools record of better achievement. Reading it, I realized that I took for granted that public schools engage in systematic fraud in a variety of ways. I don't think this is something everyone understands, hence this post. I went to a state school in the UK. State schools are rated on a 1 - 4 scale from unsatisfactory to outstanding. My school was rated good, meaning a 3. A few memories which stand out. During my first week I saw one of the boys in my class who was 11 at the time held up against the wall in a corridor while a 16 year old put a shiv to his throat and robbed him. He handed over his wallet and keys. A year or two later and I remember seeing a small boy who struggled with depression held up by the throat against a locker and slapped in the face by a troublemaker from the same class in front of everyone just before we went in to the classroom. I remember classes which were filled start to finish with people shouting and talking. Neither of the first two events were common but they also weren't uncommon. No one was surprised to witness them. It's worth emphasizing again that my school was above average, in fact quite far above average, and in a middle class area. It's also worth noting that I was mostly in top ability streamed classes, meaning my classroom experience was likely far better than average.

A truth that applies to many fields, which can frustrate some as much as it energizes others, is that the…

I said they were fictional! Stop trying to invest in them!

Speaking with Adam Grant feels like having your brain sandblasted, in a pleasant sort of way.As an author, professor, and psychologist, Grant is...

Extremely Online Architecture. Click to read Johnny Goes To Silicon Valley, by John Bjorn Nelson, a Substack publication with hundreds of readers.

Who to answer to?

Five years ago, official abuses of secrecy were the scandal. Today, the scandal is you

Is mental illness a thing? What kind of thing is it?

Digital design increasingly exploits users.

Why does it take so long to build software? We hear variations of this question frequently: Why is building software so expensive? Why is my team delivering software so slowly? Why am I perpetually behind schedule with my software? There is a good reason we hear these questions over and over. Businesses need more and […]

Nadia Eghbal’s new book, Working In Public: the Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, may not have been on your short list of books to read this year. It’s admittedly a nerdy topic: …

Magic is real. Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There's magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It's what's next after electricity. Student mage Laura Ferno has designs on the future: her mother died trying to reach space using m...

In 1931, a 25-year-old Kurt Gödel wrote a proof that turned mathematics upside down. The implication was so astounding, and his proof so elegant that it was...kind of funny. I wanted to share his d...

Paranormal claims and other pseudoscience often bedevil the study of language

It’s easy to give useless advice that feels profound. For example, one of the pieces of advice I give most often to people is to write more. So a few months ago I suggested to a friend of mine that they should write about the situations in which they started procrastinating and explained that writing forces you to think about what exactly happened and thus would help with their productivity issues. A couple of weeks later I asked them how did it go and they told me that they did this a …