Essays

Jason Calacanis, serial entrepreneur, just launched Mahalo, a search engine where users get hand crafted portal like results for common search queries. It's based on the theory that many people are searching for the same things, that search engine spam is making Google less […]

Via John Hawks, a paper entitled Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly . Here's the abstract: Most texts on writing style encourage authors to avoid overly complex words. However, a majority of […]

At the University of Bristol in England, gene chip analysis — the marriage of DNA chemistry and silicon electronics — shows that the same variety of wheat expresses its genes very differently depending on whether it’s grown in conventional or organic conditions. When Science […]

I'm debating whether my blog should be a politics free zone. I'm leaning toward "yes" right now, but if you have a preference feel free to say so in the comments. In the meantime, a little lighter quote of the week by Scott Adams of "Dilbert" fame: It’s important to agree with […]

The content of political ads in the U.S. is very, very loosely regulated. Unlike every other sort of advertisement, political candidates can (at least in most circumstances) make blatantly false or misleading statements with blanket immunity in the name of free speech. And, as […]

CHiLLi.cc, an Austrian youth magazine, is running a short article on Citizendium written by yours truly! You can check it out in its original English form or the German translation. It's a good summary of the differences between Citizendium and Wikipedia and the rationale for […]

From "Scientific Success: What's Love Got to Do With It?" via gnxp.com: Several years ago, Satoshi Kanazawa, then a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, analyzed a biographical database of 280 great scientists mathematicians, physicists, […]

I'm going to make a strong statement I think Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" was probably the most important book written in 2005. If you're at all curious about what sorts of and what degree of technology the future may hold, I suggest you pick it up. I think most […]

Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he adopts an expression that is at once solemn and shifty eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty eyed because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to […]

Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet (via John Hawks): "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, […]