Essay: "Batman, Broken Windows, and the Uncanny Valley: Part One"

I saw Tim Burton’s Batman in theatres when it came out. I was nine years old and it blew my mind. But at that age, the Adam West Batman television show also blew my mind, and so I have learned to take my youthful assessments of artistic representations of the Caped Crusader with a grain of salt. I recently re-watched Batman for the first time since the Chris Nolan movies came out. I think the general consensus on the Internet is that the Nolan movies are much better than Burton’s but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it has held up very well.

Essay: "Haters Gonna Hate"

You know which phone first had iTunes? The Motorola Rokr. I have been the proud owner of this phone since around 2006. It was not great back then, and like most mobile phones, it did not exactly age like a fine wine. And so although I’ve got a Blackberry through my work, it’s time for a new phone, probably.

Essay: "Black Swans and Game of Thrones"

Warning: This essay contains spoilers about the first season of Game of Thrones and the first book in the series A Song of Ice and Fire.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb defined a "Black Swan" event as follows:

"First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.  Second, it carries an extreme impact.  Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable."

What's great about Taleb's book is how it points to a simple phenomenom that most of us (myself included) managed to ignore: how bad we are about predicting the future, and how good we are about forgetting about how bad we are about predicting the future.

Memoir: "The Burden of Control"

Last year, about this time, I went on a trip to Uganda to visit my little sister, who spends a lot of time in Africa doing research for her PhD (she's in AIDS research).  Now Uganda is very, very poor.  The roads are terrible and dangerous, the buildings are all falling down, and there's not much infrastructure.  So there's not a lot of "culture", per se.  The local people eat simple food and have simple hobbies.  Furthermore, unlike, say, Asia or the Middle East, "civilization" is a relatively new thing.  Most of the cities were founded in the late nineteenth century.  So there's not a lot of history you can see.

Essay: "The Solution to Piracy"

Like most people, sometimes I am a pirate.  One thing I don't pirate, however, is video games.  I tend to buy them through Steam.

Essay: "We Don't Need a Left-Wing Tea Party"

When the Tea Party movement first started up (at the time, hilariously referring to themselves as "tea baggers") I remember thinking that it wouldn't last too long.  It was just too stupid.  But I think, in the long run, their stupidity has been an asset to them, and I think this has some alarming implications for the new left-wing "Occupy Wall Street" movement.

Essay: "Humility in the face of randomness"

Most people, it seems to me, are obsessed with talent.  They look at someone successful, assume that person is successful for a reason, and work backwards (identifying the exceptional qualities that person has, or the exceptional things they did, that led to that person becoming exceptionally successful).  But is that initial assumption correct?  Are people really successful for a reason?

I have always believed that the differences between people are not as big as we think they are (click here for a great quote on this) and I have always chocked up my own successes and failures, and the successes and failures of others, to randomness, or to factors that have nothing to do with the matter at hand, rather than my skill and intelligence.