Sf To Berkeley

Domino organisms

Imagine an intricate pattern of dominoes that, in the process of tipping each successive domino over, also somehow managed to upright an equal number of dominos that it eventually connected to and allowed itself to continue going indefinitely.

The Catalog of All Things

When I was in 1st or 2nd grade my family got a World Book Encyclopedia from someone selling them door-to-door.

Living to the Fullest

Micah said:

It’s easy to answer “I would live life to fullest,” but harder to define what “fullest” means.

Living life to the fullest is such a wiggly concept. It brings to mind a day filled with endless ice cream, pizza, wine, nature…

Stock and Flow

From a post by Robin Sloan that he wrote 5 years ago and which I continue to think about frequently:

There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank, or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour, or three…

Are You Smart?

Imagine the set of all things you don’t know. We will call it 1 GigaUnknown.

What do you do with it? How do you get to know it?

The best way to deal with a GigaUnknown is to 1) name it (check), and to then divide it into 10 or so smaller, easier to…

What is Contentedness?

I used to have a problem with contentedness. I used to consider contentedness the opposite of ambitiousness. And I held ambitiousness above all things.

I believed as a youth that my idealism and values would be strongest while young, and slowly slip away as I…

Caring About What Other People are Caring About

What’s worse: one lion being killed by an asshole, or 8 billion suffering chickens a year?

What’s worse: not caring about one lion being killed by an asshole, or not caring about 8 billion suffering chickens a year?

One Possible Alternate Reality

Inspired by this tweet: