A Language Learning Lie

There are a lot of self-defeating and fatalistic statements that quietly pervade our thinking. Some of these get repeated to the point of cliche, and are nearly axiomatic. These things need to be remedied before we go on living our lives never questioning some of the...

Advice (that’s mostly for myself)

I keep on running into folks who say how important the habit of writing and publishing daily has been to them, and I think: “I need to start doing that… tomorrow.” Each and every time, I realize the potential value in adopting the habit, and then...

The Neopets Trajectory

In a weird turn of events, Neopets turned me onto computer programming. Neopets was (and probably still is) essentially Tamagotchi on steroids. Much of my childhood got sunk into Neopets, so I’m glad in retrospect I can see some definite, positive effects out of it,...

Distributed Science

The year is 2026. The time is 8:37 AM. A wall-mounted speaker comes on and a male’s voice announces that you’ve just crossed the border into Oregon. Beyond the window myriad shades of green whizz past at 760 mph blurring into a sort of flickering, moss green paint...