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Superiority of visual notifications
A sound is a terrible way to get my attention. I mostly live in some kind of background noise. So, there is a strong possibility that I will miss a notification through listening to music or podcasts. Worse, even if I do hear it, I have no clue what weird thing is trying to get…
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Terminology
This guy won the Internet for a while. “I love learning the words that their generation comes up with — both the unique ones as well as the ones where they take an existing word and give it a completely different meaning.” One of my favorite web sites is Urban Dictionary because people apply new…
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Explainer
Geeking out for me takes the form of the explainer. I take what someone knows about something and describe how it works and why I find it interesting. My reading takes me all over the place, but I particularly of late enjoy nonfiction on interesting topics. People find my reading about things like quantum mechanics…
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Spoiling others on Facebook
Dear Facebook, it would be awesome if you would create a spoilers option for posts where the poster could say what it contains. You get users feeding you data about engagement with media useful for advertisers. Nice people could contain the damage of spoilers. As it is, I saw several people created a post and…
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TED Talk: The story of ‘Oumuamua, the first visitor from another star system | Karen J. Meech
In October 2017, astrobiologist Karen J. Meech got the call every astronomer waits for: NASA had spotted the very first visitor from another star system. The interstellar comet — a half-mile-long object eventually named `Oumuamua, from the Hawaiian for “scout” or “messenger” — raised intriguing questions: Was it a chunk of rocky debris from a…
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TED Talk: How to take a picture of a black hole | Katie Bouman
A talk on how the process would work presented a couple years ago. Interesting how closely the actual image matches the reconstruction before they did it. At the heart of the Milky Way, there’s a supermassive black hole that feeds off a spinning disk of hot gas, sucking up anything that ventures too close —…
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What I’ve learned over the past year
A friend asked me this last night and my unprepared answer was all over the place, but I think in retrospect there was a theme. I was aware that being a parent changes the brain in the abstract. I was unprepared for the experience for how hard it hits. Think the stepson being only a…
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Shortcuts: Rules
(I should have recognized this in my Shortcuts series of posts. Intro > 1. Illusions > 2. Labeling > 3. Math > 4. Multitasking > 5. Rules) Rules exist to help reduce the friction of society so that we can more easily work with strangers. Without rules, we need to have potentially damaging interactions with individuals, establish a series of data points about them…
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Hot cars and books
Totally flubbed the reading strategy. I have a Kindle Paperwhite for reading in the dark. It is for when lights are out, so I can read for a bit. I have a book or two in the car for reading when I go to lunch alone. October to March, it can be a hardback because…