Many define intelligence at least partly as the ability to learn from one’s experiences. If I make a mistake and I’m intelligent I should be able to see what I did wrong, adjust, and avoid the problem in the future. That’s fine, but I have a better definition. I think what’s even more important is the ability to…
Paying Respects to Bruce Lee — The Original Mixed Martial Artist
I’ve always been a Martial Arts enthusiast, and I used to be obsessed with Bruce Lee. I thought he was God. I’ve not thought much about him in the last 10 years or so, however, even as I have become a full-fledged Mixed Martial Arts fan. But I realized yesterday when reading some Bruce Lee quotes that it’s…
The Life or Death of Harry Potter
A guest essay by Jason Powell, I want to start this by acknowledging millions of fans that don’t want to believe Harry could die. I really believe that if he dies, and I think it’s likely, there will be people who cry. People will be angry. People will run through every stage of grief that we normally go…
How I Search For Understanding: An Apology
My favorite thing to do is try and understand how the world works. This is what gives me go, and it’s the purpose of this website. Whenever I have something shown to me, or I “discover” something I add it to my ever increasing body of knowledge that I use to analyze the rest of the world. Ultimately,…
Why Some People Don’t Learn Anything In College
I’m constantly amazed by the number of people who seem to have learned nothing during four years at university. Until recently I’ve wondered how it was possible, but now I think I understand. People who learn a lot in college are the people who had questions floating around in their heads before they got there. They’re curious. They…
Digg and Reddit: Please Learn The Difference Between Original Content and Blogspam
Nothing is worse for systems like Digg and Reddit than repetitive, mediocre content. These networks are designed to magnify the efficiency of the Internet by taking excellent content — regardless of source — and promoting it through impartial democracy. Ultimately, the goal is to minimize the time it takes someone to get up to speed on the most…
No More Clichés
Cliches are like assholes, everyone thinks theirs has a silver lining, but they’re really just full of shit. A while back while in a writing improvement phase a friend of mine gave me some excellent advice. Stop using clichés. The reason clichés are undesired is because they don’t stimulate people the same way “regular language” does. I initially…
My Gaming Idea
A long time ago (a couple of years) I considered going to market with a gaming idea. The idea was fairly simple, and it’s coming to fruition in many ways already today. The idea was to create a generic virtual world that could have modules built on it — modules for various different kinds of gaming interface. Examples…
Self-Control is The Key to Success
I’ve been thinking lately about how I can improve myself, or, more accurately, what the barriers are to my growing at a higher rate. Interestingly enough, all indications point to a single source — self-control. I’ve thought for a while now that this was the case, but this article really laid it down for me. It’s true; it’s…
Roleplaying: D&D and Creativity
I’ve been a role-player since 7th grade and had the good fortune of being indoctrinated into a very elite form of the hobby — custom games. When I say custom I mean anything home-grown vs. store-bought, i.e. someone actually came up with the setting, mechanics and other inner-workings of the game. The Difference What I’ve noticed about those…
Creativity vs. Copyright
If you care about music or DRM, you need to think about a simple thing: Everything is copied. People making music today are taking beats and rythyms and countless other bits of other peoples’ work, and most of the time they don’t even realize it. We need to guard against blatant theft, but creativity comes very commonly from…
Power and Relaxation: A Counterintuitive Combination
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m back playing Table Tennis. The group I’m playing with now is the best I’ve ever been exposed to, and my drive to improve my game has never been stronger (it’s hard to get motivated to excel at technique when no one can even return your serve). With this group I get…
Passive Learning
Many people who read this blog are familiar with what I call passive learning — the phenomenon that causes one to be far better at doing a task after returning from not doing it for a while. Example: I play Table Tennis (not to be confused with ping pong), and when I come back from a layoff of…
Real Hacking
/. is running a story on the upcoming OpenBSD Hackathon, and I thought it important to point out what the term “Hack” means — not only in this case, but in any case where the term is properly used. Here’s a piece of the article text — to give you a hint: “Past OpenBSD hackathons have seen the…
Input Expansion
Well, after watching PBS over the last week I’ve come to realize that my sources of input for key topics such as politics, sociology, and philosophy are far too limited. I essentially discovered that there’s a ton of knowledge out there on these subjects that I was mostly unaware of. I mean, I’ve heard about most of these…
Podcasting + Excercise : A Perfect Match
I think a big part of a person’s strengths is knowing how to properly handle his/her weaknesses. In my case, I hate to be bored. This is particularly devestating to the prospect of getting regular excercise, as the majority of tasks such as running, biking, etc. are all somewhat boring to me when done by themselves. The thing…
The Maturity Dilemma
More and more I’ve run into a particular dilemma in life, and I think it’s worth exploring a bit. As I get older, my friends are becoming increasingly “mature”, which is to say that they are buying houses, having babies, going to bed earlier, etc. I find that there are some major benefits to this sort of development;…
The Hacker Glider
I tend to shy away from groupthink oriented idealogies, but ocassionally I am stricken by a concept that is worth subscribing to. The Hacker Glider is one such concept. The Glider (shown above) was created by Eric S. Raymond, and is the symbol of the hacker culture. The symbol comes from a project called The Game Of Life,…
Academics vs. Wikipedia
It seems many in the academic community are coming out publicly against Wikipedia — which in my opinion is one of the coolest things available on the Internet. The argument seems to be that having information available online, vs. only through higher learning institutions such as universities and libraries, somehow diminishes the education you receive when using the…
A Bigger Boat
Well, I have published another article after over a year without doing so, and this time it has met with some fairly substantial success. The article was about the problems that many experience with Internet Explorer, and my recommendation to download and try Firefox. It’s been carried on dozens of sites and translated into like 6 languages so…
Managing Balances
Intelligence may be seen as a mastery of a series of life’s compromises. One must be versed extensively in the extremes of all spectrums and be comfortable working for short periods of time in them. The key is finding the perfect location between the extremes while maintaining the ability to become the epitome of either end. [ Dec…