How many dimensions are there, and what do they do to reality?
Reading this article is the closest I have ever come to understanding what is meant by having more than four dimensions.
Imagine… you are an ant living on a long, very thin length of hose. You could run along the hose backward and forward without ever being aware of the tiny circle-dimension under your feet. Only your ant-physicists with their powerful ant-microscopes can see this tiny dimension.
It’s surprisingly easy to plant false memories
…[T]he way that gentle suggestions about events that didn’t happen can warp our memory of the events should alarm any consumer of news media. It’s one reason so-called “fake news” is so insidious, since it may be creating actual memories that are tough to take back.
Reality has a surprising amount of detail
This fascinating article explains why everything is so much harder than you might think.
Why everything might have taken so long
Why did it take humans until 4000BC to invent the wheel? Or 3000BC to begin writing? Katja Grace has gathered an interesting list of hypotheses that could explain why we were so slow to get going.
An extraordinary piece of writing by Stephen Bush, about bumping into someone who didn’t know he was his father.
I’ve learned to enjoy the upsides of having an absent father. One is that you don’t have flaws like everyone else, merely kinks that the missing parent would have ironed out had he stuck around.
Debunking the myth of the 10,000-hours rule: What it actually takes to reach genius-level excellence
The 10,000 hour rule has obviously always been more complicated than that — not least because you would have to be mad to spend 10,000 hours on something you’re not very good at. This article outlines some of the nuances behind what it takes to become great at what you do.
The single reason why people can’t write, according to a Harvard psychologist
For [Steven] Pinker, the root cause of so much bad writing is what he calls “the Curse of Knowledge”, which he defines as “a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.”
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Please excuse the shakiness here while I experiment with new ways of blogging, and explore different ways of syndicating to other platforms.
