An interesting hypothesis about what makes people's background seem impressive or not: the short version is, if you're unable to easily picture how someone accomplished something, it seems very impressive, as an orthogonal factor to how hard it actually was.

Here's a little javascript "game" I made (source at https://github.com/jcreedcmu/deconcentration) after reading about deconcentration of attention, a slightly kooky sounding but interesting notion that you can train yourself to "attend" to a large space of things instead of ( Read more... )

I had a Benham top toy when I was a kid. I'm not sure why, but the fact that the illusion also works even through a YouTube video feels weird to me. I would have expected perhaps that you needed the high "framerate of real life" to make it work, but no. Try pausing the video to confirm that the bands are still monochromatic.

Transcript of a lecture by Malcolm Gladwell on the topic of U Chicago economist David Galenson's research about creativityThe claim is that artists cluster well into two groups, one in which an artist creates their greatest work roughly in their mid-20s and doesn't ever match it, and the other in which an artist slowly improves and refines their ( Read more... )

Today is a bad day for productivity. I read a lot of achewood, and went to D's. iole200 and I have apparently agreed on a name for our little joint musical endeavour thing that we do. Like, you might consider it a sort of band. The name is, "There Are Two Wugs". It comes from an old psycholinguistic experiment called "the wug test". It is given to ( Read more... )