Links

What a wonderful, ridiculous thing

brains are weird. This quote in particular fascinated me:

That seems exciting. I’ve long wondered if in 50 years terms like “emotion” or “reason” will be obsolete. Some future genius will have come up with an integrative paradigm that more accurately captures who we are and how we think.

there is an important distinction between “working hard” and “maximising the number of hours during which one works”. In particular, forcing oneself to work even when one is tired, unmotivated, unprepared, or distracted with other tasks can end up being counterproductive to one’s long-term work productivity, and there is a saturation point beyond which pushing oneself to work even longer will actually reduce the total amount of work you get done in the long run (due to the additional fatigue, loss of motivation, or increasingly urgent need to attend to non-work tasks that this can cause). Generally speaking, it is better to try to arrange a few hours of high-quality working time, when one is motivated, energetic, prepared, and free from distraction, than to try to cram into one’s schedule a large number of hours of low-quality working time when one or more of the above four factors are not present.

Good article, and some other good recs in the comments

Gross and too real.

A history of invasions of Afghanistan. Curious how many aspects we similar over time, the persistent impact of geography as that hasn’t changed much over the last 2000years. We describe hundreds of years as some era under the rule of X, but consider that’s more than your entire life! And for mountains no significant amount of time has passed

This post made me feel like an amateur. I have only 3, relatively small book piles.

Animation rendered from photos taken by Cassini spacecraft

The 100+ starting point really put things into perspective for me…

Added to watchlist

I don’t know if I am as blown away as Alex but this is very cool. Like machine pair programming with text.

Most of the content is right there in the title, but I found this one pretty motivating.

Rostam goes through the creation and production of a few songs. Some wonderfully specific parts, like when he included effects in the recording of a sample, or the attempt to find something completely different to an existing sound to add to a song.

When I quit smoking 17 years ago, a wise doctor counselled me that if I was going to resist cravings, I needed a more immediate reason than “I won’t get cancer in 40 years.” My answer: “I spend two laptops per year on a product whose makers want to murder me and my friends.”

Thanks Alexandria \U0001F49C

How different you and your brain behave in times of extreme emotion. Makes people bad at empathising with others (“I would never do that…”), and bad at predicting or understanding their own behaviour.

History of his website redesigns. There was a more recent one since, but this post is more detailed.

Fantastic post, and website generally. Read a few more of his posts, had a bit of an explore around. A lot of good “this is my website, I can do what I want” bits in there.

Very useful set of tips for things to avoid in technical explanations. Pick your audience!

Inspiring example of someone apparently just building all their own tools. The notes on browser as the place thinking happens is good - I mostly keep text notes on things and lists of links. Might look into those tools a bit, or try Memex again.

In general, pornography use trended downward over the pandemic, for both men and women. Problematic pornography use trended downward for men and remained low and unchanged in women. Collectively, these results suggest that many fears about pornography use during pandemic-related lockdowns were largely not supported by available data.

The mysterious and meteoric rise in obesity since the late 70s. Part 2 includes a reference to The Australian Paradox