As someone who has definitely expended too much of my life on the watching of Gilligan’s Island, this is heartening news. Shirky argues that there has been a cognitive surplus in the developed world and for the past 50 years we have been soaking up that surplus with situation comedies and that now we are [...]

How do you solve a problem?
I had two different concrete experiences of problem solving in the past couple of days. I think these examples are interesting because they are so contained, not because they are hard problems. They illustrate how I tackle a problem and provide some generalizable strategies for problem solving. I’ll cover the [...]

As part of my re-evaluation of my toolkit, I’ve started using MarsEdit.
For those who don’t know, MarsEdit is a Macintosh program to write blog posts.
There are a couple of small features in the way the Mars Edit works that could have been deal breakers for me, so I was going back to the MarsEdit [...]

I was looking around on the web for some of the works of the Japanese printmaker Hokusai. Here is The Great Wave of Kanagawa, from his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. but if you are unfamiliar with his work I urge you to seek out a larger version and study up on the [...]

Heve, via Monoscope is a long-for-the-web documentary about the work of artist Ron Mueck.
This is the look of an expert in action.

How does one become an expert and once you are an expert, what does that mean?
These to be important questions. For reasons I’ll go into below, I think that achieving expert knowledge in at least one field is critical for every thinking person.
As the final paragraph of this Scientific American article has it,
The preponderance [...]

Reasoning, when we do it, is mostly to find justification for what we already believe.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, in here.

From New York Times via Matt.
Our desire to believe in an orderly universe leads us to interpret the uncertainty we feel about the future as nothing but a consequence of our current state of ignorance, to be dispelled by greater knowledge or better analysis. But even a modest amount of randomness can play havoc with [...]

One of the perks that I receive by virtue of being the President of the parent’s organization at my children’s school is that I occasionally get to attend presentations on education and parenting that I might not otherwise.
A couple of months ago, I heard a woman named Madeline Levine speak about her book about teenagers, [...]

Gerald Ford’s policy of healing and moving on, whether it was the right thing to do, or the wrong thing to do, was a failure. Rather than allowing honest conflict of opinion to flourish and consensus to form, Ford attempted to shut down debate and paper over conflict.
The debate addresses whether Ford was right to [...]