Hey, I'm Nate and this is my spot. I'm currently traveling the world with my wife as we look for somewhere new to call home. This blog is still under cons...
Your brain needs to offload just as badly as your butt does. I know it sounds boring to sit in there, alone, naked from the waist down, staring at the wall. But that's the point. Our hellish attention economy has produced a generation of anxious and overstimulated (and probably constipated) people. Quiet reflection is an "ancient technique" that we pencil into our schedules and even pay money for.…
If I spend more than a few days in a new town, I start to poke around for a breakfast diner. It's a sort of greasy time bubble where everyone sets aside their differences to gorge on eggs and coffee. Eggs, coffee, bacon, pancakes. Notes to a song that we (and our physicians) know by heart. I take comfort in the knowledge that I can walk into almost any diner and order the same exact meal. However…
I finished Fermat's Enigma recently and was surprised how much I enjoyed a book about math. I've always seen myself as a liberal arts guy, but in the last couple years I've been reading a lot of computer history books that each have some flavor of mathematics. I struggled so much with math in school that it's hard to disassociate with that feeling and appreciate numbers as a cool thing. Coming…
Note: This is a rather spicy topic to do my JulyReply on, but there you go. This is just my personal take and nothing more. In reply to this post : I'm relatively new here, but I've been surfing the discover feed for a while now. Both Scholarch's and Absurd Pirate's posts about meta-blogging and repetitive content struck me as refreshingly honest and important. Important because I think any…
I was lucky enough to grow up in a house with a backyard and a pool. To the side of the pool is a guesthouse with white stucco walls and a multicolored tile roof. In my earliest memories, the guesthouse had a bed where aunts and nannies sometimes slept. As a child I cared only for its bathroom, where I kept my arsenal of pool toys in the shower stall. On summer days I would rush in, trailing water…
Two's Complement is a way to represent positive and negative numbers in binary. It's useful because we want a way to represent each number's inverse within a limited number of bits. The sign bit Putting aside two's complement, the "naive" way to represent a negative number is to simply use its highest order bit as a "sign" bit. That is, 0 for positive and 1 for negative. With 4 bits: 5 = 0101 -5 =…
On my way back from a trip last month, I stopped in Baltimore to catch a Conan show. I've been getting into doom metal lately and Conan is a lot of fun. When asked for their favorite Conan album, one redditor responded : "the one with the yelling about battle." That about sums it up. The venue was the Metro Gallery, conveniently located near the train station. It's a small spot with merch tables…
One of my favorite things about small projects is the way their constraints can inspire unexpected solutions. You might expect a simple design to limit the room for creativity, but in my experience the opposite is often true. With this project I had the good fortune to stumble into a solution that 1) taught me something new, and 2) leveraged each puzzle piece's natural features in a way that…