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This blog has the following ongoing blog-chains:
Boredom World
An ongoing investigation of boredom, overload, meaning collapse, and related themes.
2022
November 14, 2022 – Boredom World 4: You can't "do anything", so do what you can
In this post, I apply the concept of an orientation to career choices, using a case study from Meg Jay’s book, The Defining Decade.
2020
October 27, 2020 – Boredom World 3: Overcoming the Hastings Limit By Bootstrapping a World-View
The Hastings limit is what you hit when there is simply far too much content for you to ever get to it all. Here we talk about overcoming this problem by bootstrapping a world-view from the bottom up.
August 16, 2020 – Boredom World 2: The Role of Orientation in Overcoming Overload Boredom
Last time we developed a generalized notion of boredom as the inability to make a decision. In this post I focus in on boredom induced my exposure to an ephemeral environment, and propose a model of what solutions to such a problem might look like.
July 23, 2020 – Boredom World 1: Boredom, Overload, and Meaning Collapse
In a couple of my most recent posts, I’ve been gesturing at the notion of ephemerality as a source of overload and anxiety, and trying to determine some strategy for alleviating it. Here I’m going to give this problem a new name: boredom.
2019
December 02, 2019 – Ephemerality and the Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
In Paul Graham’s recent essay, The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius, he posits that disinterested obsession, akin to that possessed by a bus ticket collector, is a key component for doing great work. In this post I try to relate this back to my previous discussion of ephemerality and serendipity when looking at “service anxiety.”
November 21, 2019 – Creativity as a Search Problem: A Speculative Mental Model
In this post I consider a mental model of creative work as a search in a high dimensional space. I try to use the model to explain some common experiences, and to understand some methods to potentially increase creative output.
November 06, 2019 – What if this Web Service Dies? Connecting "Service Anxiety" and Information Overload
Connecting the fear of the loss of access to web services we use – what I call “service anxiety” – with the idea of information overload, and considering how strategies to manage the latter map to the former.
October 23, 2019 – Pinpoint Bugs Based on Data, Not Intuition
Often when debugging a problem, our brains have a strong intuition as to exactly where the bug “must” be. We may even have seemingly valid rational arguments as to why the bugs “must” be located in this particular part of the code. Whenever possible, I think it is best to ignore these impulses and pinpoint bugs based on hard data.
September 24, 2019 – MATLAB:
boxplotandisoutlierdisagree about outliersMATLAB’s
boxplotfunction will explicitly show outliers by default. These outliers are chosen differently than the defaultisoutlierbehaviour.
2018
February 09, 2018 – Abuse of the Equals Sign
I have noticed a certain pattern of misuse of the equals sign amongst my students that, beyond being formally incorrect, makes it harder for the graders to determine if the student is demonstrating understanding or not. In the following post I will try and explain the problem and how to avoid it.
2017
November 01, 2017 – A brainfuck interpreter in C
May 05, 2017 – Lying cat: Bizarre Filesystem Behaviour
2016
June 28, 2016 – PATHMAN -- A Simple Path Manager for MATLAB
2015
November 22, 2015 – Running yst on Windows
June 25, 2015 – A dead simple argument parser for MATLAB