Xamuel.com

Who’ll win, Al Gore or George W. Bush? Let me explain why my statistical model proves Al Gore is gonna be Mr. 43. Oh, wait– the election was a decade ago, argh. So much for my 10,000 word essay! When it comes to politics, the longer you hold off, the better the return you get [...]

Truth, no matter how inconvenient, is more beautiful than fiction. An Echo Chamber is a community based around a subjective set of assumptions, which never questions those assumptions, and twists everything into supporting those assumptions. It can be useful and profitable to spend some time in such a community, because of the unique lens they [...]

One of the things I’ve written a lot about is expanding your interests. One great tool for doing that is StumbleUpon. It’s a toolbar that lets you “stumble” to a random webpage, except it’s not really random, it’s based on ratings of other users. You can in turn rate the pages with a thumbs up [...]

Designed in ancient times, algebra is one of the world’s longest standing sciences. Mankind was doing quadratic equations back when they thought the seasons and the weather were caused by quirks of the gods. Here are some general ways to be better at this arcane discipline. Equations Mean Things You probably already know this, but [...]

Happiness is mysterious and elusive: we like to associate it with things like wealth, status, and success, and yet we see people wealthier than us, higher status than us, and more successful than us, who don’t seem particularly thrilled with their lives. At the same time, people who have nothing are perfectly capable of just [...]

When I suggest people take work and jobs less seriously, a common reaction is: “I need money or else I’ll starve.” With technology continuing to obsolete human labor at a faster and faster pace, more and more jobs are gonna disappear, whether we take them seriously or not. A lot of people are free of [...]

When people ask me, “What math should I study so I can (fill in the blank)”, the answer I give them isn’t quite what they expect. The best answer to this question is: whichever mathematics you think is the most fun and interesting. This answer doesn’t depend at all on what (blank) is. It doesn’t [...]

Blogspot doesn’t provide any way to get a static frontpage. I figured out a way to do it by editing the template. Of course, now that I’ve moved to WordPress where this feature is built-in, I no longer have to use my own trick. But I figure it’ll be useful to anyone who still uses [...]

My biggest problem making conversation was I’d run out of things to say. And then, to make matters worse, I’d consciously try to come up with something. The universal law of conversation is spontaneity: if you think about what you’re gonna say before the words come out of your mouth, they’re guaranteed to sound awkward. [...]

Life seems to slip past, and the only real control we have is when we seize the moment and focus on the very present. All the pivotal, radical changes we make in our lives come in such times of present-moment lucidity. When we ask that very special someone that very special question, time seems to [...]