Category: Misc

Julian Jaynes explores the idea that the “self” is installed via culture, not emergent by default from our minds. In his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, he explores a beautifully complex and wide-ranging theory that suggests that we developed internal monologues as a mechanism of coordination and control.…

Fake Science is a beautiful term. It perfectly captures the art of defining a metric, taking measurements, analysing those data points, and continually generating a complex output before chaining it to other inputs for yet more bullshittery. This is something I see almost on a daily basis, and it gets to the core of what…

When you’re young you’re made of rubber and magic (to quote Chris Williamson). Your body is primed to go full bore into the world and hammer through life at full speed. You’re in absolute health credit – you just don’t know it. But as you age, you effectively spend down that credit and most people…

I love nuanced ideas, conversations, and people. The world exists as a continuous flux and everything is relative. But people buy the simple solution, even if you need to explain the nuance you should lead with the most simple, reductionist argument you possibly can. And in that spirit, that’s the end of the post.

Do you feel like you don’t have the time to accomplish all the things you’d like to? Do you wind up exhausted at the end of a day thinking damn, where did the time go? Perhaps you run down the list of things you’d set out to achieve this month one evening, and lament the…

Nouns are an illusion. A product of our inability (or blatant disregard) to perceive changes in the things around us over a time period that would typically let us categorise them as verbs. Things that move are easy to cast as verbs – to walk, to dance, to sing. States of being can quite happily…

Fresh bruschetta is divine. Tomatoes blushing the deepest of reds. Garlic oil infushing the toasted ciabatta with sharp spikes of flavour. Fresh basil slicing through the rich tastes, elevating each bite. Even better by the sea…the light, warm breeze carrying salty notes and distant musicality of the waves breaking against the shoreline. Cool white wine…

This week Apple announced that they were introducing a handful of new features to iOS and iCloud which were targeted at detecting child pornography in iMessage and Photos. Naturally a cacophony of young, childless, males on Hacker News erupted to claim that all idea privacy was now moot, that end-to-end encryption was now nonsense. Articles…