Editing as Punctuation in Film Max Tohline

An Ode to David Bowie That Will Remind You Why It’s Good to Be Weird “He was the patron saint of all my favorite fellow travelers: the freaks; the fags; the dykes; the queers; the weirdos of all stripes; and that most dangerous creature of all, the artist. He was the crown prince(ss) of the unusual. He was so marvelously, spectacularly […]

Guns and States 2: Son of a Gun | Slate Star Codex “In yesterday’s post, I suggested that the difference in homicide rates between America and other First World countries were about two-thirds cultural, one-third gun-related. That’s sort of true, but people have reminded me to think of it as an interaction. Without the cultural […]

There is another option for interstellar travel “It’s not that hard to build a vehicle to traverse interstellar distances. The problem isn’t engineering, it’s biology. Human bodies are not set up to endure a cold, dark, multi-millenia trip.  Squishy, watery cells just are not up to the job. If you want to become an interstellar […]

My List of Mental Models “When I see a problem, it’s becoming more and more of a reflex to immediately open my mental toolkit of models (otherwise called frameworks) to both dissect, understand, and solve the problem.”

When does science finally take ‘no’ for an answer? “The improved calculation of Mercury’s orbit was, in fact, a crucial first test of Einstein’s new theory. What moral to draw, then, of the non-existence of Vulcan and the subsequent triumph of general relativity? At the least this: science is unique among human ways of knowing […]