An exploration of non-falsifiable hypotheses, and other things
You’ve heard of the EGOT, right? That’s the accomplishment of the Grand Slam of American show business: winning all four of an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony award. Twenty-seven people have achieved an EGOT to date. I got to wondering whether anyone had ever pulled off a corresponding feat in the sciences: winning, say, a Nobel Prize plus at least one other award from the class of honors…
That “of” is an endangered species. I don’t know when it began exactly, but in the last handful of years I have seen more and more prose online that drops the preposition in the phrase a couple of . Here are a few examples from professional writers collected within the last few weeks: I was chatting with a couple readers who were a little frustrated that I wasn’t condemning generative-A.I.…
My wife and I both use Mail.app’s Column Layout on our Macs (Air and Pro). She recently started using flagged messages as an organizing tactic — I have been doing so for some time — and I noticed that her flagged messages weren’t showing up as such in the message summary. The Flags column on her display wasn’t visible like it was for me. I went searching for how to customize the columns that…
Many of us like to start the daily Wordle by guessing a word containing the most frequent letters, to maximize the chances of learning some of the letters in the day’s target word. The traditional list of letters in frequency order as they appear in English words goes something like this: [ e t a o i n s h r d l c u m w f g y p b v k j x q z ] The problem with this frequency ordering is that it…
In an earlier post I presented a bookmarklet that regularizes the color scheme of a visited site. The bookmarklet below solves a different, and growing, readability prob­lem: the habit of sites to encroach on the material you came to read — intruding from the bottom, sides, and top of the screen. And to pop up / pop over obscuring cruft that offers a subscription or a coupon or an…