• Three months of ARX training

    I just completed 3 months of dedicated, weekly workouts on the ARX Alpha with Tony Briese in his studio in Canton, OH. Here are the results. My usual workout is as follows: 6 reps at 10/10 second cadence of leg press, chest press, and row 1:00 to 1:30 of isometric hold (“statics”) of leg press, […]

  • Beginner’s Mind in Engineering

    “We’ve been putting together a team of engineers who, for the most part, are too young to say SpinLaunch couldn’t work,” he says. “They’re full of too much energy and excitement to find out what’s going to happen.” Jonathan Yaney Maybe he doesn’t know it, but Yaney refers to “beginner’s mind,” not youth.

  • Cryogenic sleep logic

    If cryogenic sleep were generally available, why would anyone choose to not be frozen? Go to sleep, wake up in a better world. This offer is too good: if everyone takes it, who will be left to actually build the better world?

  • *Native Son* by Richard Wright

    I read half of this book yesterday and came away with a strong impression that this book is I, Robot before I, Robot was I, Robot (they were published at roughly the same time, with Native Son appearing slightly earlier). At first glance this book looks like a commentary on the oppression of black people […]

  • Designing open standards with the minority rule

    Nassim Taleb has a great anecdote about why all the food in the grocery store is kosher: it costs almost nothing for a company to make their food kosher and thus gain the Jewish customer segment, and for non-Jews it costs nothing to eat kosher food. Over time, companies realize it’s in everyone’s interest to […]

  • Cardinal rule of internet comments:

    The value of an individual comment is inversely proportional to it’s nesting (indentation) within the thread.

  • Lolita (first read)

    I finally read this last December or so at the recommendation of a friend (who is much more widely read than I). I look forward to a second read at some point in the future. Below are my notes from the first read. They are extracted from a message to my friend, forgive the unpolished […]

  • Paul Graham, Wealth, and Skin in the Game

    I was re-reading Paul Graham’s Wealth essay today when I realized that he’s talking about Nassim Taleb’s idea of “skin in the game”: I think everyone who gets rich by their own efforts will be found to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. Everyone I can think of does: CEOs, movie stars, hedge […]

  • Back to the Blog

    From Dan Cohen, “Back to the Blog“: It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on […]

  • How do you respond when told something is impossible?

    From Ryan Holiday’s new book Conspiracy: It is always revealing to see how a person responds to those situations where he’s told: “There’s nothing you can do about it. This is the way of the world.” Peter Thiel’s friend, the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, has a category of individual he defines as a “high-agency […]