Today I encountered a clerk becoming annoyed with the behavior of a customer. I shared with him a technique that I have long been using in similar situations. It helps me maintain a pleasant attitude. When someone does something inconsiderate and annoying (e.g., as often happens when driving), it is easy to assume that the […]
A few weeks ago I ran across a post by someone who claimed that he had improved his productivity by installing a CO2 monitor in his office and opening the window when the reading went over 1,000 ppm. There are measured decreases in cognitive function at 1,000 ppm and lower. This made me curious, so […]
I did something which may seem a little crazy right now, but I think a lot more people will be doing it in the future: I published my genome on the web. More correctly, I published the ~1,000,000 SNPs identifiable by 23andMe's v3 array. There are some folks who have also done this before me […]
As I write this, I have been off of caffeine for two years. I had my last caffeinated beverage on August 13, 2015. Here are my experiences with quitting caffeine and what I’ve learned: Why? Almost always, when discussing being caffeine-free, people ask me why. I had a couple of primary reasons. First, I had […]
I have a MacBook Pro (“Retina, 15-inch, Early 2013”). I also have an external SuperDrive, revision 2.00 according to drutil. At some point, the MacBook Pro decided that the SuperDrive is “Unsupported”, according to drutil. Lots of people report similar problems. They advise setting a boot-args parameter, mbasd=1, in the NVRAM (by executing nvram boot-args="mbasd=1"). Unfortunately, […]
I have run almost every day on my treadmill for the last four years. I have an Apple TV set up in front of the treadmill. This has allowed me to watch a lot of movies, television shows, documentaries, and TED talks while getting my run in. One thing I didn’t expect to happen is […]
Every time I read the phrase “meteoric rise”, I think about how it is a dumb metaphor because when we see meteors, they are falling towards the Earth. We should instead use “meteoric descent” as a metaphor for things that dramatically catch fire and plummet to Earth in a violent crash (e.g., Theranos). I wondered when it started […]
This week I had the pleasure of attending Edward Tufte’s one-day course, “Presenting Data and Information” in Miami. I’ve followed Tufte’s work for years. This was the first time I was able to make it to one of his courses, so I jumped at the chance. There were at least 200 people in my session. […]
Baidu Research have published a paper about their work using neural networks to build a better system for converting written text to audible speech. This is really neat. Listen to the samples in the summary. It is trained on audio files of recorded human speech correlated with written text. Today, one has two options for listening […]