Our lives are measured in memorable moments

The reason our childhood years seemed to pass so much more slowly than our adulthood is that they were filled with novelty and excitement, memorable first experiences: learning to ride a bike, entering a new school, making new friends.

Events, experiences, things are memorable not by some inherent quality, but rather become memorable by virtue of being different from our everyday life. What matters is the magnitude, not the sign: both the best and the worst times in your life will stick out in your memory.

Memorable experiences come in all sizes: cooking a new dish, meeting up with old …

Master one skill at a time instead of learning many at once

Every skill has both a cost to maintain and a cost to learn. Take the case of learning a language: You need to spend some time every day rehearsing vocabulary and grammar you already learned so you don't forget (maintain), then you can also study new words and grammar points (learn).

The maintenance is a fixed cost - you need to spend this time just to not forget what you already know. As you get better, this cost goes down. Either because you can integrate the skill in your normal routine - read news in foreign languages - or because it has become …

Breaking the Rules to Improve Society

Recently, I was talking with some friends about the increasing power of technology, and how it is being applied to ever more accurately enforce laws. In just one example, facial recognition is now used in China to [cached]automatically identify and fine jaywalkers.

One common concern is that these technologies are easily abused for more sinister purposes - mass surveillance, identification of political dissidents, etc.

However, I think there's an even more direct danger: Too rigid enforcement of laws stops society from improving. [cached]Until 1967, homosexuality was punishable by imprisonment in the UK. If it had been possible to always …

Tea

Tea has become my favorite beverage, bar none.

With flavors stretching from light and sweet white and yellow teas all the way to dark and earthy pu-erh, no other drink can match its variety of flavor.

Best enjoyed freshly brewed from whole leaves in a small pot, you need very little to start drinking great tea.

1. Some hot water, from a kettle or pot, doesn't matter.
2. A tea pot or infuser with lots of space for your tea to expand, see mine as an example:
3. Loose leaf tea!

Some of my favorite tea includes:

• [cached]Yunnan Dragon Pearl Black Tea …

Work Rules!

Work Rules! is the title of a great book by Laszlo Bock, SVP of People Operations at Google.

It's a pretty accurate portrait of life at Google (at least from what I've seen over the last three years), and at the same time it is a great guidebook for companies that haven't yet come as far along the path of employee empowerment.

If you are in any way involved with work - be it employer or employee - this is a must read, with lots of practical advice on how to improve your organization (and your life!). It may also give you …

Distractions

Reddit, Hacker News, Tumblr, Twitter, Imgur, Netflix, YouTube. The onslaught of pseudo information and conversation is relentless, it's easy to get lost in the comments. Feeling as if you are learning a something new all the time, a little gem in every post.

Somewhere along the way our natural curiosity and joy of learning has been hijacked and we waste away our lives reading and responding to useless chatter that seems useful and educating.

Every spare moment is filled by a quick glance to our smartphones, no time for thought and introspection left at all. Yes, that one post was …

Nutrition Information

Recently, I ran across a very useful website: [cached]Examine.com. They collect and summarize studies about many common nutrients and supplements. If you were wondering whether to take Vitamin D or what to think about creatine, this is the website to check.

Tidy your Life

I just finished Marie Kondo's [cached]The Life-changing Magic of Tidying: A Simple, Effective Way to Banish Clutter Forever, but even before I was halfway through I couldn't stop myself from reorganizing half my room and finally disposing of many clothes I hadn't even looked at in two years.

I had always considered that I could just let things sit at the back of a shelf until the next time I moved flat and then I'd finally get rid of them, but while tidying yesterday I realized that I actually had many nice clothes I'd wanted to wear that I …

Scarcely Credible Stupidity

I just finished another book in the excellent Culture series. It contains this little gem of a speech given by a member of the Culture (a utopian society with very advanced technology, best described by the phrase money is a sign of poverty) on the topic of planet Earth:

'Now, on Earth things are not quite the same. On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited …

Iterative Deepening for Talks

When you give a talk, assume your audience knows nothing.

Start with a one minute summary, then go back to the beginning and give the 5 minute version of your talk. Showing an index slide for your talk does not count, those are a joke.

Only now can you give the full version of the talk since now the audience will have all relevant context in the L2 cache of their brain.