How should BIDA do gender free contra?
BIDA is going to be having it's first gender free dance, Sunday March 17th. Which I'm very excited about, but the details aren't settled yet. Specifically: What should the roles be called? Should...
View ArticleRisks of Genetic Publicy
When you walk around you leave your genetic information everywhere. Right now it's not worth it for anyone to do anything with it, outside of DNA profiling in forensics, but sequencing keeps getting...
View ArticleYour Email Password Is Critical
When you forget a password, what do you do? You click "forgot password", they send a link to your email, and you enter a new password, right? [1] Which means that if someone can get into your email...
View ArticleHow Good Is Earning To Give, Relatively?
Earning to Give, choosing a well-paying career so you have more to donate to the best charities, is a strong contender for being the most effective way of making the world better. [1] It allows you to...
View ArticleWalking along the route
I don't like waiting for the bus; it's cold and boring. Instead I walk along the bus route and get on the bus when it catches up with me. The walking is good for me and is more pleasant than waiting,...
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Happy Outlets
There was a time when th design was on someone's drawing board and this would have been a small tweak. (I see references to this being Philip Labre's 1928 design, but the patent shows a flat ground...
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Snow Refresh
While I love the way new-fallen snow looks, the clean smooth fluff never lasts long against the dirt and traffic of the city. Which is why getting snow like last night's is so nice: with only a small...
View ArticleGive to multiple charities?
The logic that you should donate only to a single top charity is very strong. But when faced with two ways of making the world better there's this urge deny the choice and do both. Is this urge...
View ArticleWhy do blogs need titles?
Blogs tend to have titles, but I don't see the point. Matthew Yglesias writes Moneybox, Kit writes Transneptune, and Scott Alexander writes Slate Star Codex, but I just think of these blogs by the...
View ArticleParsing HTML With Regular Expressions
Perhaps you need to get some information out of HTML. Regular expressions look promising, but you get stuck so you ask for help. A typical response would be: HTML parsing is not possible with regular...
View ArticleShould leaders have expected to lead?
I occasionally hear people advocating monarchy with the idea that this way you end up with someone in charge who has known they were going to be running a country since they were a small child and...
View ArticleScrewing up unsubscription
When I click "unsubscribe" I don't want you to take me to a page where I can "manage my email preferences". [1] I understand that my interaction with you may be complex, and there are some types of...
View ArticleCis by default
Ozy Frantz wonders if perhaps many people maybe "cis by default". That is, our societal default is for you to take on the gender role that matches your sex so people who don't have a strong inner...
View ArticlePhone Port De-fuzzing
Over the last six months I noticed my phone getting harder to charge. The cable would only stay in at the prefect angle, and if it fell out I would wake up in the morning to a phone that wasn't...
View ArticleAbandoning Bottom-Posting
I've alwaysbeentaught it's polite to trim emails and type the reply below the text I'm responding to: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. > Why is top-posting such a...
View ArticleWhen People Don't Shovel
It recently snowed a lot here. Most people have shoveled their sidewalks, but many are still impassible. There are fines for not shoveling, for example, in Medford the law is that if you leave snow...
View ArticleSins of Omission and Commission
In response to yesterday's post some people wanted to know whether I see a difference between doing something bad as opposed to simply failing to do something good? I don't think there is, so someone...
View ArticleSure and Unsure
I have varying amounts of confidence in different aspects of my belief system. From most sure to least sure, this how I think about moral questions. Rough confidence is included, as a percentage....
View ArticleSustained Committment to Giving
Julia wrote this about ten years ago: It's easy for me to buy a milkshake at Bev's if I'm in Carytown. But if I were living in Bolivia and that two or three dollars could help my little sister pay...
View ArticleHappy Neuron Farm
How many neurons does it take to feel pain? Pleasure? Probably not that many. Say we find that it just takes a specific configuration of a hundred neurons to feel joy. We could make giant farms full...
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