Focus on the interesting. Ignore the uninteresting.
I log all my weightlifting sessions, with pen and paper, and have for years. Doing so greatly increases my level of personal accountability. Specifically, it helps me do what I planned, and stay honest about my progress over time. I think everyone would benefit from logging their workouts and here I document how I do it and why it’s worthwhile. How My primary objective in the gym is hypertrophy,…
Productivity entertainment is a form of procrastination in which you amuse yourself by passively consuming something that you could plausibly use to be productive. For example, today I spent almost an hour browsing Hugo website themes 1 instead of just opening vim and creating a website. “Look at all those cool themes. Sure will be fun to make a website with one. I can even view live demos! Let me…
I’ve noticed while traveling out of Chicago on the L (the elevated train line) that the Willis Sears Tower appears as though it’s shooting upward out of the surrounding skyline. It’s pretty striking when you first see it. For a moment it honestly looks like the Tower is growing taller. Today I learned from the fantastic Futility Closet that this effect is called the Vista paradox . You can see the…
This sentence contains three a’s, three c’s, two d’s, twenty-seven e’s, four f’s, one g, five h’s, eleven i’s, two l’s, sixteen n’s, seven o’s, five r’s, twenty-nine s’s, sixteen t’s, two u’s, six v’s, six w’s, six x’s, and three y’s. What’s an autogram An autogram is a self-referential sentence that writes out a count of its own characters - like the sentence above. You can count the number of…
I thought it would be cool to write a hill climbing algorithm that replicates images by drawing random circles. A hill climbing algorithm proceeds toward a goal through a trial and error process. At each iteration, the algorithm makes a small, random change to its current solution. If the change brings the algorithm closer to its goal, the change is kept. Otherwise the algorithm discards the…