One day I'll stop making new blogs on new platforms. But Bear seems pretty cool. The posts here will probably be less polished than my main blog. {{ po...
Yeah, so a philosophical zombie is somebody who behaves like a normal human, they can walk around and have a conversation and react normally to stuff, but they're not conscious. Which means something like, they don't have subjective experience. What is subjective experience? One way it's defined is being able to experience "qualia". Like, if you look at this brick wall, it's red. From a physical…
I believe in preparing for things, which manifests in ways like making a 150-row spreadsheet of songs I have done or might like to do at karaoke, each notated with their highest note, subjective difficulty, and availability in common karaoke systems. This does not appear to be common practice, but I've gotten a lot of mileage out of it. A few of the commonly available songs on the Pareto frontier…
Laptop companies report the capacity of their laptop batteries, and also like advertising that their laptops have however many hours of battery life. It's easy to derive their (advertised) power usage by combining these two numbers. As examples to study, I picked three laptops that Wirecutter recommended, as well as what seems like a well-regarded high-end gaming laptop. The MacBook Air (13-inch,…
A nugget of wisdom I received early in my research career that I found myself repeating to a mentee recently. Now you can have it too!: Obviously, if you have an idea, and you try it, and it works, that's great. But if your idea clearly, convincingly fails, you get a consolation prize: you can cross the idea off your list and start on the next one, with no regrets. What's worse than either of…
Before we get to that, here are some things I already knew about credit cards but feel it would be kind of irresponsible not to mention I'm not your financial advisor I only know about U.S. credit cards, sorry. And, based on five minutes of research, the U.S. credit card ecosystem is a weird outlier globally. I imagine that if you're not from here, you'll be horrified at this Kafkaesque labyrinth…
Each person has a single number representing how they respond to conflict: their response is the size of the conflict multiplied by their number. If their number is 1, they respond exactly proportionally, tit for tat; if it's less than 1, they tend to deescalate conflicts; if it's greater than 1, they tend to escalate conflicts. Thus, when two people interact and get into a conflict, if the…
I did the 2026 MIT Mystery Hunt with ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈ again. I liked my approach last year of quickly publishing more posts that are shorter and less organized, rather than putting things into a megapost that might just get stuck as a draft forever. (It didn't actually work that well because there are still things stuck as a draft forever from that year. Maybe this time.) things I…
The only puzzlehunt I ever write about publicly is Mystery Hunt, basically as a force of habit and for no other reason, which I've realized is silly. Here's trying to fix that. Caveats for this list: This excludes Mystery Hunt because I already posted about it. They're not in any particular order. I wouldn't even call them my favorite puzzles, period, because I probably forgot some. I'll make a…
The first thing I learned is that "business class" and "first class" are made-up terms. Airlines can sell whatever seats they want under whatever name they want, often depending on whether the flight is domestic or international. The best way to understand what a ticket gets you is to look reviews up for the specific seat on the specific airline. Specifically, then, I flew United Polaris between…
If your shoes have laces, a thing you can do is to buy elastic shoelaces to replace them. The main, practical, reason for doing this is that you can slip your shoes on and off instead of tying them. This is a pretty inconsequential life hack that might save you a few seconds each day. Still, in my case, those are often a somewhat embarrassing few seconds during which somebody is waiting for me to…